{"id":11058,"date":"2017-05-31T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-31T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=11058"},"modified":"2017-05-30T00:17:48","modified_gmt":"2017-05-30T05:17:48","slug":"what-its-like-to-write-after-a-life-interruption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/what-its-like-to-write-after-a-life-interruption\/","title":{"rendered":"What it&#8217;s like to write after a life interruption"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3>Stage 0: Procrastination<\/h3>\n<p>I guess I should write\u2026 but first, I should check my email. Also, there&#8217;s\u00a0a couple of publishing tasks I need to do. I&#8217;m also kind of hungry, come to think of it.<\/p>\n<p>Wow, those publishing tasks took a lot longer than I thought they would. I could start writing now, but I&#8217;d only have half an hour, and what can I possibly get done in that time?\u00a0Maybe I should just relax for a bit and play this addictive online game\u2026<\/p>\n<h3>Stage 1: BIC HOC<\/h3>\n<p>All right, no more excuses. It&#8217;s butt in chair, hands on keyboard time!<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s wrong with my chair? Did someone put a magnet in it? It seems like my butt gets repulsed every time I try to sit down in it. I can knock off a couple of paragraphs, but then I have to get up and pace for a while. Or do some chores. Or\u2014<\/p>\n<p>No! I&#8217;ve got to focus. But man, it feels like I&#8217;m pulling teeth. The words just aren&#8217;t coming. It&#8217;s been more than an hour, and how much have I written? Holy crap, that&#8217;s pathetic.<\/p>\n<p>Well, it&#8217;s the end of the day, and I only managed a few hundred words, but that&#8217;s better than nothing I guess.<\/p>\n<h3>Stage 2: Progress<\/h3>\n<p>Is something different? It still feels like I&#8217;m pulling teeth, but my writing time is only half over and I&#8217;ve already passed a thousand words. Also, that last scene was kind of awesome. I could probably improve it\u00a0in the next pass, but it turned out better than I thought it would.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m still way behind from where I need to be, and I have no idea if I&#8217;ll ever make my deadline, but I&#8217;m slowly making progress. Not bad.\u00a0Let&#8217;s lie down for a while or go for a long walk and think about what happens next. This is actually turning out to be a pretty good story.<\/p>\n<h3>Stage 3: Acceleration<\/h3>\n<p>It&#8217;s getting late and I really should be doing other things, but\u00a0I&#8217;ve got a great idea for this next scene and I just have to write it.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s that? My emails are piling up, and my to do list of publishing tasks has been neglected? Yeah, yeah, I&#8217;ll get around to that, but first I really have to knock out this scene. And what if I changed this one three chapters ago to foreshadow it? Then I would also have to change how that one character reacted when the big reveal happened on page 128, and\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Wow, that was incredibly invigorating! I feel like I&#8217;m\u00a0reading this story for the first time. The words are really flying, but that actually doesn&#8217;t matter because this next chapter is the big one\u00a0and I&#8217;ve got to focus on that. No time to count how many words I&#8217;ve written!<\/p>\n<h3>Stage 4: Peak Creativity<\/h3>\n<p>I can&#8217;t wait to wake up in the morning because\u00a0the next chapter is going to be totally awesome. I spent my whole shift\u00a0at the day job thinking about it, and it&#8217;s really going to tie the plot\u00a0and thematic elements together.<\/p>\n<p>What is this character thinking right now? What is it like to be in her shoes? Does this other character have any idea what she&#8217;s feeling right now? Is he too caught up in his own concerns? Where did those concerns come from? Obviously,\u00a0they came from the difficulties in his childhood. Let&#8217;s take a\u00a0few moments to work that out. What&#8217;s the story behind how this character came to be who he is today, and how does that impact everything else in the book?<\/p>\n<p>All right, time to take a quick break and refill the creative well. What&#8217;s this? A mountainous stack of emails and publishing tasks? Let&#8217;s chip away at it for a while, and maybe write a blog post while we&#8217;re at it.<\/p>\n<p>Enough for now. Back to writing!<\/p>\n<h3>Life Interruption<\/h3>\n<p>Oh crap.\u00a0Time to go back to stage 0 again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stage 0: Procrastination I guess I should write\u2026 but first, I should check my email. Also, there&#8217;s\u00a0a couple of publishing tasks I need to do. I&#8217;m also kind of hungry, come to think of it. Wow, those publishing tasks took a lot longer than I thought they would. I could start writing now, but I&#8217;d&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/what-its-like-to-write-after-a-life-interruption\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">What it&#8217;s like to write after a life interruption<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[371,8,232,197],"class_list":["post-11058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-creative-process","tag-writing-in-general","tag-why-we-write","tag-writing-lifestyle","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2Sm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11058"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11060,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11058\/revisions\/11060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}