Detritus

#pomodorojerk part 2 - further instructions

First I will just say that my non-compulsory little writing experiment produced some fairly lulzy brain explosions on Twitter for some reason. Just let me emphasise that none of this is compulsory. Do it, don’t do it, no skin off my nose. It’s working for me, it seems to be working for some other people. That’s great. 

Some people will have been doing this for more than a week now. So a few additional instructions. 

1. Make sure you do weekly totals. A bad day or two might be discouraging, but if you look at what you have achieved over a week, the good days should have smoothed out the bad, and you should have a few thousand words to your name that you didn’t have before. It’s also good in terms of thinking about your goals, hopes, dreams etc and how you are working towards them. 

2. Remember that whatever you have now will be useful; there are lots of words and creative ideas there that weren’t there before. After a bit over a week for me, I now have a chunk of my project done. (It’s a book in my case, and I have written a chunk that will be a chapter, but much shorter projects are fine too obviously.) The material written in daily sessions may seem rough when you read it back over. That’s okay. There is material there to work with, and you might like to think of what comes out after editing as your first draft. What you have produced is a lot of words and, if what the research tells us is true, you’ll have produced more creative ideas per page than you would have with other writing methods. 

3. Editing time is separate from writing time. As you go on to edit this, do not, under any circumstances, stop writing new words every day. Instead, start devoting a separate block of time (maybe another 25 minutes, longer if you want as long as it’s consistent) to licking what you have into shape. That shape will be, effectively, a first draft. If you have to prioritise one of these two tasks, make it the new words. I try to keep editing and writing separated - I don’t like to edit something I’ve produced less than a week ago, so I can approach it dispassionately. 

So, from today on, I’ll still be doing and tweeting my new words. But I’ll also be pulling stuff I did in the first week into a draft of my introductory chapter. Maybe you could do all this too if it’s working for you so far. 

Lastly, I’m thinking about starting a private Facebook group where people can chat about this, and we can talk about how we’re going. Would there be any takers?