Writing Update Tuesday. Spending the last few days in a cabin in the woods sent my friends and me down a myriad of rabbit hole topics. As one of these friends, Lin, is also my writing accountability partner we also talked a lot about writing, our writing, others’ writing, publishing — the works.
We set a timer on Sunday to write for 30 minutes and then spent an hour the next day writing outside on the porch or picnic table. We jump-started that first writing session talking about the necessity of shitty first drafts – just getting words on the page – and Lin blew me away by banging out 1500 words – shitty or not, I don’t know – in that half hour block. I still get stuck on sentences and plot.
I also got a chance to interrogate Lin about their writing software, Scrivener. I’ve been using Google Docs and treating it as a graduation from Microsoft Word because at least it’s backed up on the cloud. But I’ve heard a few too many horror stories about google docs and long manuscripts and plenty of awesome ones about writer’s loving Scrivener. They gave me a brief tutorial and this afternoon I took the leap and downloaded it myself. I’m working through the tutorial with the hopes of tranferring my writing over this week. The brief: Scrivener allows you to better organize your story, research, and notes without keeping track of different documents.
Writing is far from having the fanciest tools, but I do think having the right tools will clear the way for the actual writing.
I’ve also kept up with my minimum of a sentence a day and continue to find that it makes me write more. Here are the last sentences I’ve written each day for the past week:
- 3/26: “I can’t see in the dark,” he says as if that settles the whole thing.
- 3/27: Easy.
- 3/28: “What’s he doing here?”
- 3/29: It’s Katie Halsman, marching out of the locker room with a dent in her half-done ponytail and rage on her face.
- 3/30: Do I have to apologize to this whole fucking town?
- 3/31: I’m brushing my teeth when I hear a knock.
- 4/1: I catch up with him.
With Love,
Natalie