I have been drafting into Scrivener -- which is very efficient, but not a lot of fun. I didn't realize how its utilitarian background and the very edit-forward feel was keeping me from writing first drafts. The process -- staring at the screen every few words, looking for the perfect word ...
I attended a writing workshop/guided exercise over Zoom, led by Debbi Voisey, and it was a set of guided free-writing exercises, the type where you put pen to paper and then write. We worked through exercises on scenes, senses, and descriptions, and then we free-wrote.
It felt marvelous! It helped me put together a scene I was struggling with for the past two weeks. Moreover, writing felt fun again!
I believe the reason this works is because our internal editors get in the way of our creativity. There's time to edit, and that's after getting words on pages. I found that the words I was putting on the pages needed editing, but not while I was writing them.
I think I will use this free-writing. The way I can use it with Scrivener and with the "Save the Cat" framework is to take each chapter's prompt (the tag on the chapter that says what goes there) and write that in my notebook, then start free-writing in earnest. Then I can enter it in Scrivener and edit.
I hope I'm onto something, because I have been working quite fruitlessly these last several weeks. (Not that I've been doing nothing; I reorganized my classes, recorded several lectures, taken a grad level class, revised my query letters for two books, set up my pitches for SFFpit ... I just haven't been writing.)
Ok, deep breath. I think I could get to liking writing again.
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