fountain pen – Page 6 – Deborah Makarios

Strange how memories forgotten for years can suddenly return with such intensity. This week I have been remembering a newspaper cutting I had on my wall as a girl, which was on the subject of setting and achieving goals.

I remember the paragraph which said to list What’s In It For Me – taking the pragmatic if somewhat un-altruistic view that you couldn’t set goals which only benefited others.
I remember the remarkably bad posture [straightens back] of the young people in the illustrations, who appeared to have been genetically modified with turtle DNA (and not the ninja sort, either).

But before either of these I remembered the feeling of order, perhaps even control, which the cutting gave me. I could set goals, break them down into steps, and then achieve them, at least in theory. I could accomplish things.

For some reason (early exposure to the classics?) I always wanted to be accomplished. To my chagrin, I live in a modern society which does not really go in for accomplishments, and therefore gives me nothing to measure myself against (rather like modern manners).

There is of course always Miss Bingley’s definition: “no one can be really esteemed accomplished, who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved.”

I have a smattering of modern languages, and my posture is at least better than the teenage turtle-mutants in the clipping. Let us draw the curtain of charity over my abilities as to the rest. I might do slightly better in Mr Darcy’s estimation (“to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading”) were it not that he expected all the rest as well. An accomplished lady of the Regency, then, I shall clearly never be.

Well, never mind. Mr Darcy isn’t a patch on the Caped Gooseberry anyway.

The resurfaced memories did make me think again about motivation and goals. While working toward a larger goal, it can sometimes be necessary to motivate oneself in the short term. Never mind what’s in it for me next year, I want to sleep now!

Sometimes it pays to use the carrot instead of the stick, to provide yourself with a few extra incentives. For example, if I manage to write 4,000 words tomorrow, I can go and buy a new exercise book.

To be fair, I’m making a virtue of necessity in this case, as if I write 4,000 words there won’t be room in my current book for another Monday’s worth of words. But buying a new one will be enjoyable just the same.

When I finally finish the first draft of my WIP, I might buy myself one of these to celebrate.
Do you detect a certain stationery orientation in my incentives?

I admit it – I love stationery. As a child of six, I kept an envelope full of blank strips of paper in my room. They weren’t even cut straight, but there was something indefinably pleasing about them. I used to take them out and fan them through my fingers. (Weird kid? Yes. Point?)

Pens, paper, ink – I love them. And if that love can spur me on to keep writing when The End seems unimaginably far away, then even better.

What are your goals? And what are your favourite incentives? All correspondence welcomed.

Sometimes progress is slow.
Sometimes it is very slow.
Sometimes it is so slow you don’t actually want to admit to yourself just how slow it is.

Imagine these:

stampeding through this:

and you get the idea.

But sooner or later you have to be brutally honest with yourself. The WIP isn’t going to write itself.
If things do write themselves at your place, you’ve got problems.

I have, over the *cough* years since I started working on Tsifira, accumulated about 18,734 words. (Including some of the excerpts I’ve removed for now, and some of the notes, but not all of them. Basically, I’m counting anything that was worth typing up.)

A novel is, of course, as long as a novel is long, but taking geographical distance as an indicator of word count (it’s a road story) I’m about a quarter to a third of the way there. Not knowing, of course, how many detours might occur.

Say 80,000 as a guess.

In the just-over-two months since I started keeping a word count, I’ve written 1,651 words for Tsifira.*

80,000 – 18,734 = 61,266 words to go.

1,651 words ÷ 69 days recorded = 24 words per day (average, obviously).

61,266 words ÷ 24 words per day = 2,553 (to the nearest day).

So at this rate, I will finish the first draft in just under seven years.^

There are only two alternatives.
One: give up.
Two: speed up.

I’m going to go with Two.

It is far easier to write that than to execute it (rather like Rasputin in that respect, although probably not in many others). How do you change gears in your mind and in your life? Is there a human equivalent of a clutch pedal?

I found an interesting exercise on A Cat of Impossible Colour – she got it from The Relaxed Writer.

Basically, you take ten minutes to write down one side of a piece of paper everything you don’t want your writing life to be like.
Then you write the opposite of each thing down the other side, and you figure out how you’re going to make that happen.

She recommends it as a beginning-of-the-year exercise, but I think we can all agree I shouldn’t wait that long, so I did it today.

I wrote the first column out by hand on folded paper, as instructed, but then I went off-road a bit, ending up with three columns instead of two, all typed up in a spreadsheet.
Column A: I Don’t Want
Column B: I Want
Column C: I Will

It was a bit disturbing to get such an insight into my own mind and misgivings. Apparently I struggle with self-doubt and fear the waste of time. I also fear guilt from doing/not doing, don’t take myself seriously enough as a writer, and tend to defer hope til tomorrow.

That’s rather a lot of personal insight to arrive at in ten minutes.

So, what will I do?
I will increase my writing time, guard it from erosion, and focus on my new-hatched target: finishing the first draft of Tsifira by the end of 2013.

By my calculations, I’ll need to write approximately ten thousand words each month. Two and a half thousand each week.
Half a thousand each working day.

I can write over four hundred words in an uninterrupted morning half hour. Increase that to twice a week: eight hundred. Two hours, one evening a week: sixteen hundred. Total of 2,400, and the other hundred can be dashed off almost any time a moment presents itself.

It will require discipline and dedication. But it can be done.
I can do it.

And keep up a blog on the side 🙂

* I know this is pretty pitiful for a Work In (supposed) Progress, but over the same period I have also written roughly 6,000 words in Morning Pages, 8,000 words of blog post (not counting this one), 1,187 in a journal, 1,114 in letters and over 5,000 of Other. A total of nearly 23,000 words (that’s equivalent to 332 words a day, 7 days a week).

^ By which time publishing technology will have leapt beyond my comprehension and Neil Gaiman will be the only one who knows that the thing in my hand is called a fountain pen.

Tag: fountain pen

Goals and Incentives

Number Crunching