Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Doings

Went to Borders tonight to do some writing in the cafe area. This is sometimes productive and sometimes not. Tonight it sort of was.

I'm working on revisions of a story which has been through a couple of rounds of criticism at Critters. The readers there have given some good advice and insight. Ah, but how to apply it?

While I always have ideas a-plenty while I'm away from the work, there are a lot of times when I freeze up while I'm actually writing. This time what I did--and yesterday, too--is to disable the wi-fi on my laptop, kept the manuscript displayed in Word as a reference, and hunched over semi-free writing stuff in longhand. This is turning out to be a good way to work, both in producing material and having fun. Does that mean that longhand is a more natural way to write? That might just be me. Despite working with computers and being used to constant Internet access, I'm not really a techie at heart.

2 comments:

susan said...

I agree that continuous internet access is something of a spoiler so far as personal creativity is concerned. After already being very successful as a writer and computer geek, Neil Stephenson chose to write the enormous 'Baroque Cycle' by hand. It was an amazing achievement.

On a personal note I've recognized that the more artwork I look at online the less I paint. There must be a correlation.

Ben said...

In part it could be sensory overload. There are a lot of artists doing a lot of worthwhile things out there. But seeing so much work at a time may distract from what you want to do.

I don't think it's necessary, or even positive, to stop looking. But one needs to pace oneself.