I am not much for asking for help, so when I wrote the post yesterday about Bobby I got to thinking about his method and his ability to pull together so much material in a day. It reminded me of the graduate school days when I wrote all morning, went away from it for a spell and came back to it later that night. I think that is my method. I’m doing that as we speak, writing a draft of a piece with the idea of coming back to it later when I know I don’t have the mind to create but I do have the mind to revise. It seems like those are two separate mental functions. Creation takes a lot more out of me than revision, and requires that I haven’t been sullied by the cries and demands of a quarter-dozen screaming kids. That kind of thing eats away at my patience and ability to think clearly. Still, once they’ve trickled off to sleep I can revise. I can reach inside a story and understand what I was trying to accomplish and see if it worked/how to make it work…
Self awareness is important to me. I think it is the key to any writer’s ability to access the part of themselves that is real and vulnerable and slap it on the page for the world to analyze. More writers should think about these things and plan their writing times around the way their brains work. Not everyone can sit down and write till you hit ten pages. Not everyone can write for 4 hour bursts. The key is discovering the method that accesses your abilities when they are peaking. For me that could mean splitting the daily words into stages. It also must mean committing to daily words at a very high level. The words muct come first if you intend to be a writer for very long.