July 19, 2010, Did You Write?

July 19, 2010, Did You Write?

Developing the habit of writing regularly is important in writing. Many here write every day. While we do want to hear from you, that is not the people this note is for.
There are those who write a few weeks a year, getting out of the habit of writing. The goal of this note is to get you to write every week. the way it works is that you are requested to report how much you wrote each week, even if you do not write, and if you wish, tell about what is going on in your life. Knowing the note is coming up, the hope is that you will not want the week to end without reporting that you wrote, so you will open some work, new or in progress, and apply yourself to it, so you can announce you did something.

How much you wrote, and what you wrote is not important. That you wrote is. I happen to be shrinking the word count (editing) of a story in progress so my word count is gong backwards. This shows that how many words you actually report is unimportant.

I have suggested in previous notes what is writing, so I won't bother listing them here. The answer is always, "if you have to ask if it is writing, the answer is yes.

I am trying to remove ten thousand words from my work in progress. I thought I was doing well. I just did a spell check and am deflated. All the work I did this week, I removed two thousand words, about two pages.
I see part of my problem is I have made several passes of the beginning and have barely touched the last half of the story. I would be editing along and see a change that would effect the beginning and go back and correct that, then work my way back up to where I was before. It is also an easier part of the story to work with. I see now I am doing a lot of polishing, not hacking. I do see scene themes I can remove once I tackle the last part of the story.
Now that I have spent a week of hard writing, I feel I wasted the week with the lack of results I got.

One way I have gotten extra time to write, is I have devastated my story idea writing time. I have cut back how much I have written in the story ideas. Instead of commonly going onto page three, I am now barely going onto page two. I have stopped showing the story and gone back to simply telling what the idea is about, telling the example of how it could be used. I am also not posting every single day, staying off the boards on some days to get more time writing. Being a board addict, this is tough.
Now I just have to use my new found time more productively.

As to the question of the day,

I can say YES, I DID WRITE.

DID YOU WRITE?