Whimsical.nu

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Hi, I'm Angela, a girl with a blog on five different psyches:
girl, geek, reader, writer, gamer
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Morning writing

Since the start of NaNoWriMo, I’ve been building the habit of writing for thirty minutes in the morning. I’d wake up, and sit in front of the computer and either type away, or hem and haw and be annoyed at not being able to write. I stick with it, though, to “train” myself to “expect” that I will write for thirty minutes when I wake up.

Wake upThe nice thing about writing in the morning is that my inner editor is still half-asleep too. So I just pound out crappy words and typographical errors and I don’t really care: I’m just writing and getting the story (or whatever it is I’m writing) out. Editing can come later.

The result? More words. (Cough.)

It’s not without its challenges, though. Sometimes, I wake up late and I just need to rush! Sometimes, I wake up to a text message and get distracted and everything else just goes down the drain. And even more often: sometimes, I just really need to pee.

There are a couple of things that help with the habit-forming, though:

  1. I open my writing application (Scrivener) and leave the computer open as I go to bed. In the morning, I just get up, sit on my desk, type in my screensaver password, and start writing directly.
  2. I think about what I want to write about before I go to sleep and repeat it to myself a couple of times. This way, the chances are good that I will write about it in the morning!
  3. I type with my eyes closed. (This obviously won’t work if you’re not very comfortable with typing without looking at the keyboard!) I type worse when I’m not looking at the screen, but it actually helps! (Of course, I’m also half-asleep, so it’s just easier to let my eyes just close up of their own accord…) Once I’m fully awake, or sometime during the day, I do go over what I’ve written to correct the typos–if I leave it for too long, I won’t remember! (This has happened to me before with my morning freewriting.)
  4. I usually do well to write emotional, vivid, and/or “dreamy” and evocative scenes while in this half-asleep state, and not action-oriented, “exciting” scenes. This is pretty much an observation of my writing style while I’m in my half-asleep state, so your mileage may vary, but to make use of this, I try to plan to write appropriate scenes in the morning.

This is something I’ll definitely continue to do moving forward, and maybe improve on it by actually giving myself a word count target for this morning writing, even outside the bounds of NaNoWriMo.

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5:30 AM Writing

I’ve started a new habit: I wake up at 5:30 AM to write.

The alarm goes off at 5:25 AM, and then I drag myself out of the bed to fire up my computer, open StoryMill, hit Command-Shift-F for full-screen, and start typing away. I haven’t gone through the ones I’ve written yet, but they’re usually just a couple of paragraphs each, with typos all over the place (I hear Typinator going off about once every other minute, correcting my typos). That’s what happens when I type with sluggish hands and with my eyes closed.

Why am I doing this? Basically for two things:

  1. to train my body to write creatively again, and
  2. to find out which kind of writing I instinctively fall back on when most of myself is still not functioning properly.

I got this activity from Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. I seem to remember talking about this a long while ago, but as I can’t find that entry, I must be dreaming (I swear I’m fully awake now though). In chapter 5 of the book, she tells us that we “must teach the unconscious to flow into the channel of writing”.

So if you are to have the full benefit of the richness of the unconscious you must learn to write easily and smoothly when the unconscious is in the ascendant.

The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can–and without talking, without reading the morning’s paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before–begin to write. Write anything that comes into your head: last night’s dream, if you are able to remember it; the activities of the day before; a conversation, real or imaginary; an examination of conscience. Write any sort of morning reverie, rapidly and uncritically. The excellence or ultimate worth of what you write is of no importance yet…your primary purpose now is not to bring forth deathless words, but to write any words at all which are not pure nonsense.

And so I write. I’ve actually “cheated”, and I think I know the answer to #2 (what writing type I fall back on) but we’ll see how this goes. In any case, I don’t see any pattern yet in my morning writing; it should come out in a month or so, I’m gauging.

The good thing? As early as now, I feel like I’m finding what my writing voice is. I already know, in a way, but I’ve written in the same “voice” at least thrice already (and I only started this week). Writing while my brain’s still muddled with sleep has its rewards, for all it’s difficult to get words in order sometimes. :D

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