Time to get serious

I like writing. Really, I do. You might not think so, because I do it so very rarely, but it gives me joy to look at a story and say to myself, "I wrote that. I made it happen. I'm awesome."

Which brings me back to me writing so very rarely. This is not how I want things. I want to have more stories that I can look at and say, "I wrote that." And I think I've narrowed down why that doesn't happen.

I get bored. Writing is so slow! Scenes fly through my head at an amazing rate. The action, emotions, character motivations, and circumstances surrounding a scene all fly through my head so quickly that the scene plays out faster than a movie. My fingers can't keep up with it. I'd try dictation software, but often my mouth can't even keep up. And so I don't write.

But the stories still happen. In my head, all the time. While I'm listening to music, in the shower, even while watching TV. Any time I get bored, and my mind has time to wander, a story will start bouncing around inside my skull and they all want out! I've got novels worth of story stacked up in my mind just waiting to be unleashed. They've been mentally written, revised, edited, retconned, revised again, and re-written. Twice. If I had been physically writing all that, they would be ready to submit to publishers.

I have one character who has gone through a dozen development stages, just because his is a story I like to daydream about when my mind wanders. He's had nearly a hundred fantastic adventures in my mind and not a single word has been written about him!

Clearly, I need to get serious about writing. Yesterday I did an experiment. I sat down and I wrote a scene. Just one scene, and a short one at that. Only 1,024 words, which the computer scientist in me appreciated. And I discovered that I was enjoying myself while writing.

In the past I have always started out to write a novel. A whole story. Before me stood a colossal mountain of words waiting to be written, and they would weigh on my while I wrote. Each word I put on the page would be a drop in the bucket, barely making an impact on the whole of the unwritten wordcount.

But yesterday I found that things don't have to work that way. When I take a section of the story, a single scene, a small discrete chunk... I can have fun while writing it out! I don't have to be bored by the process of writing! Weee!

So that's my goal, for now. Every day, take some time out. An hour or two. Doesn't have to be all at once. Just sit down and by the end of the day have a nice scene written out. A few thousand words at most, not even a chapter.

Before I know it, I'll have a story written out on actual pages.