Following my ponderings about whether reading “books about writing” can be useful or not, here’s a short article on Ezine: Are Writing Exercises Effective?.

There’s really a middle-ground to be found here.

On the one hand, one cannot spend their time on such exercises, nor focus continuously on writing tips and “doing it like the Masters did”: when it comes to fiction, to novels, to imagination, creativity must remain on the foreground no matter what, else we may simply end up losing ourselves in too many attempts to reach perfection. We need to retain some spontaneity, as well as develop a “voice”.

On the other hand, I’m standing my ground here: it’s not true that if we don’t produce THE perfect novel on the first attempt, then we’re failure as writers and should never touch a pen (a keyboard…) ever again.

That’s where I place “writing exercises”—both reading and practicing them.

I must be psychic somehow. I had been toying with this revelation for most of the day, slowly putting it into words, when, guess what, my RSS aggregator picked this post at To-Done. Well, it doesn’t matter: I still feel the need to write down all of this.

Although it’s not as sudden an illumination as it could seem, when I started reading No Plot? No Problem! during what was left of my “lunch break”, I immediately felt in harmony with what the author, Christ Baty, was describing: the sheer need for deadlines, and, opposed to it, the tendency to procrastinate when we don’t have any. (Sidenote: the book is about writing a novel in one month—see NaNoWriMo for more details. The theory is that the busiest we are, the easiest it is to write like mad, because compared to the rest, writing time then feels like a treat. We’re more prone to just do it, instead of procrastinating.)

That’s right, I’m of these people who need deadlines. I never perform my job as well as when I have a limited amount of time to do it. As stressing as they are, deadlines are what make me efficient, in most areas of my life. I don’t like them—to be honest, I hate them, they stress me to no end and even send me into panic fits at times when they’re made of a hundred little tasks rather than one or two big ones. However, the facts speak for themselves. I need them. I need my day to be compartimented. I need to get up in the morning and be able to tell myself “today, at work, I must do this, this, and that”. When I can’t have these thoughts, the day goes to waste almost immediately.

I’m thus considering trying a little something: completely scheduling my day, from work itself to puny housework tasks, even though there aren’t any external circumstances that demand me to do so. It may seem weird, it may seem stupid, but I definitely need to focus more on my works as a writer, and if I keep on playing with my dog or cleaning the toilet instead of setting myself to write, I can’t have much done. Delaying is easy. Taking years to complete a novel is easy. The more time I have, the less I do. Setting myself to work with clear, timed goals: now this is harder, but also something that can and will work better for me.

Weird, how easy and evident it all seems to me, now that it’s written here on my screen…

Y Tags: deadline | writing

[Part 2 out of 4. Read Part 1.]

They should have listened to MARA, when she had warned them of the hard times to come, of the military coup in Varsa, of the declining Senate of the Llenane Confederation, too big and loose to keep a whole continent under its guidance any longer. They should have paid more attention to the alarming signs of the previous years, to the escalation of political incidents, when governments had begun to worry and slowly admit to themselves that the situation was getting out of hand, on the diplomatic level as well as on the economic one. They should have listened to her, indeed, when she had told the Council of Nations that they had to step in as moderators between Mornen and Llenan, before it was too late.

The negotiations had lamentably backfired, the two other continents taking offense at Ewell’s repeated ingerence in their foreign affairs, and in the end, war had taken its claim on them all.

In his office of the highest tower of the Core Research Center, Vall’Eran was replaying for the tenth time the latest holo-display he had received on the secured Ministry channel. Obeying the new orders would only send them spiralling even more quickly on the road to destruction. A nano-virus! Using the units to assist the medics wasn’t enough anymore. He had consecrated his life and work to this research in the hopes of helping medicine progress, of bettering life conditions for the Ewelli and for the rest of the world, once it could be adapted to the human race, and now they wanted him to turn his precious nano-bots into a weapon of mass destruction against Mornen and Llenan.

“Eran, we need to talk.”

I used to believe that when I couldn’t write, I should just give up and go do something else. After a few years of working as a technical writer, I’ve however come to realize quickly that this is all well and good when you don’t write professionnally, or at least when you don’t have deadlines, but not in other circumstances. When a manual is due on a certain day, my boss doesn’t want to hear “I have writer’s block, I can’t write” (technical documents are never inspiring to me anyway, so this is a constant problem). What boss, come to think of it, would accept to hear an employee say “I’m not inspired today, I can’t answer the phone/type your letters/repair this database”?

Answer: not even one.

Since then, I’ve understood that the writer’s block, when it happens, is something I just need to swallow and do with. There are moments when doing something else for half a hour or a few minutes only will indeed trigger “inspiration” again, and some others when all of this is vain. In the latter case, I now try to force myself to write. Not necessarily on the problematic text, not necessarily aiming at perfect writing… just doing it. In a way, it’s like sports: I’ll moan that it’s hard and that I can’t make the effort, but after ten minutes lifting weights or running, things flow by themselves (well, for me, at least!).

Here’s the second installment of my Tips on Starting a New Blog post.

Design

There aren’t many people who like to look at an ugly site, this is a fact—and it’s perhaps worth for blogs even more than for regular pages, as visitors will regularly come to check the new posts! Try to get at least a clear, readable and pleasant template here. Blog services as well as most standalone platforms will provide you with a handful of templates to choose from: Blogger does have a good twenty of them, while platforms such as WordPress can gather an even wider amount, developed freely by other users. After a while, it can be a good idea to set a test blog and learn and tweak templates a little, in order to come up with “your” own design, easily recognizable by your readers; for non-professional blogs, I however don’t consider it an absolute must-do from the start, and contents will here be more important to build a readership.

For business blogs, things are a little different: better get someone to work on the design before launching the blog. Templates in this case are more important.

Note: If testing new templates, do that on a test blog. At some point, your templates will contain wrong code, styles that display oddly, etc… With a test blog, your readers won’t stumble upon a broken, unreadable page.