I'm Scheduling Art!

As mentioned on my partner-in-pipe dream's blog (which is fantastically more well-written than mine), I'm reading (and working through) Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide From New York's Acclaimed Creative Writing School, by the faculty of the Gotham Writers' Workshop. Sprinkled throughout are nifty exercises, called "Your Turn". One of the first "assignments": create a schedule for writing over 7 days. At least an hour per session, at least 5 hours over seven days, working on the same fiction project. Simple! To make a schedule, that is; any monkey can write a schedule. Keeping a schedule, now that's a monkey of a different color (and a metaphor of a totally nonsensical variety--this book came in the nick of time).

Anyways, here's how it's going:

Day One: Wednesday, May 4th.
Scheduled to write from 8PM-9PM. I don't feel my most creative in the evening, thanks to outside forces like my paying gig as an accountant, but the schedule itself seems to be the assignment, not the creativity I can/can't display. So clock in at 8 I do, and I'm suddenly a writer. Not working on a story yet, only the pieces of the story: rough idea of plot, lists of characters I'll probably need. Running critiques, all there sharing space with my non-story.

This was a struggle, and I kept looking at the onscreen clock. But I did write for an hour. If I'd produced something readable, I'd post it. Maybe the world will see something this week.


Day Two: Thursday, May 4th.
Again, I've only got time to write in the evening, but this evening's a good one to get some free time, 'cause the wife's engrossed in Survivor, a show I think is the sign of the apocalypse just before 'rivers of blood'. So I can work undisturbed.

Get a ton more done--actually wrote the first paragraph. Hard to believe for a cynic like me, but it actually is getting easier, and this is just the second day. And no, you still can't see what I'm doing. It's not remotely anything resembling a coherent story.

The "Friday" update should be more exciting. It's Friday night and I can stay up late. Yippee. I'm trying to avoid the drinking and writing thing, though. I've come to understand after many embarrassing e-mails and bulletin board postings that while I have no trouble firing off 1,000 words while tipsy, I really should find a way to have trouble putting out. Because that stuff was by and large kee-rap.