Dreams vs. Goals
Dec. 7th, 2013 02:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missroserose(Hey, for once the Picard icon is doubly appropriate. Merry Christmas - here's a plan and a deadline! Heh.)
Writing has been getting slightly easier. Making it into a daily habit (much like yoga and guitar) has been notably beneficial - I haven't been perfect about it (especially this past week, which has been monstrously busy with out-of-town friends visiting and Brian's work Christmas party), but I've done it enough to get over the initial hump of self-loathing, and I'm getting better at just turning my forebrain down and letting the words come. ("You can't go meet your friend until you've done your writing", less than an hour before I have to leave, is surprisingly good motivation.) It's still not great stuff, but I'm finally realizing - to quote one of those oft-repeated writing-advice nuggets that I've read dozens of times but only seem, for some reason, to just now be absorbing - first drafts are always crap. Even people who've done this for years - theirs might be better than mine, but it's still crap. That's the whole point of editing and revising.
I don't know why it's taken me so long to get past this. I suspect part of it is my two main forms of writing up to now being blogging and paper-writing. Blogging is ridiculously easy for me - I jot my thoughts down and click "post". If I'm feeling particularly ambitious I give it a once-over (often after the fact) for misspellings or confusing sentence structure, but mostly I can get a passable (if not particularly organized) post out with minimal effort. (Only occasionally, on contentious topics, will I set out to properly research, cite, and structure a post in order to form an argument, and those posts tend to take several hours.) Paper-writing, similarly, has a set format that requires little imagination, and while it would take me a bit of time to do the research, I could usually churn out a rough draft that only needed a little bit of polishing to make the transition to final-draft status. Which means that consistently, for a decade and a half, I haven't had to deal with crappy first drafts, or even really do much work when it came to writing. So probably it's a classic case of "talented person finds something they aren't good at and decides it can't be done because it doesn't come easy to them".
Back when we moved to Arizona (which was the last time I thought seriously about writing, though I ended up just kind of BSing around for six months), Brian got me a magnet with a great quote on it: "A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline." I had kind of an ambivalent reaction at the time, because while I recognized the truth of it, I've always had a panic reaction to the concept of actually putting together a proper plan for anything I've wanted to do.* (Never quite been certain why. It's not that I can't put together a plan - quite the opposite, really. But for music or writing or acting or anything I really wanted, the thought has always made my heart pound and eyes go wide.) Frankly, I still do have that reaction, but I'm kind of sick of it - or maybe just sick enough of office jobs where I'm finally motivated to get past it. Or at least a little more motivated than I have been in the past. I hope.
To that end, I've not only been writing, I've given myself a deadline - June 30th, a little more than six months away - to start earning some cash via art, be it from busking, story sales, coffeeshop gigs, what have you. It doesn't have to be a livable wage - I'm thinking a $100/month minimum sounds reasonable enough, as it's what I made in my best month busking/gigging in Bisbee - but I need to motivate myself, and that seems a good bar to set. Plus I'll feel like a lot less of a wealthy dilettante when people ask what I do and I say "I'm a musician."***
I've got a few ideas on how to get there; the quickest cash is likely going to come from setting up an Amazon self-publishing account and selling the various porn stories I've written over the years.** There's a huge market for erotica on the Kindle, and it'd be a good way to get familiar with the ins and outs of self-publishing. And I've got a halfway-decent plan already sketched out for it, much of which will transfer over to "serious" writing - starting (and posting regularly in) a writing blog, finding other writing blogs/message boards I like and interacting with people there, editing the stories themselves, learning the ins and outs of formatting and pricing and all that jazz, etc., etc.
People say getting started is the hardest part, but honestly, I think it's consistency. All of this is going to be a pretty big time sink, and there's going to be a good-sized chunk of investment required before I start seeing returns. So that's what I'm crossing my fingers for now - that the fear of the continual minor-level frustration of another office job will help me both get started and stay consistently motivated.
Here's to building foundations under those castles in the air.
*If this were a romantic comedy, I'd make some quip about how "I'm more of a 'seat-of-your-pants' kinda gal," and it would be charming and adorable and also reinforcing negative gender stereotypes - woo!
**You can add "porn" to the list of "types of writing I can churn out a decent rough draft of in not much time". Possibly because the climax - literally - is set from the beginning, so it's just a matter of winding my characters up and watching them get there.
***Right now, I usually follow it up with "...which is a nice way of saying I'm unemployed." Funny how getting people to give you money for something makes you feel much less like you're playing at it, no matter how serious you actually are.
Writing has been getting slightly easier. Making it into a daily habit (much like yoga and guitar) has been notably beneficial - I haven't been perfect about it (especially this past week, which has been monstrously busy with out-of-town friends visiting and Brian's work Christmas party), but I've done it enough to get over the initial hump of self-loathing, and I'm getting better at just turning my forebrain down and letting the words come. ("You can't go meet your friend until you've done your writing", less than an hour before I have to leave, is surprisingly good motivation.) It's still not great stuff, but I'm finally realizing - to quote one of those oft-repeated writing-advice nuggets that I've read dozens of times but only seem, for some reason, to just now be absorbing - first drafts are always crap. Even people who've done this for years - theirs might be better than mine, but it's still crap. That's the whole point of editing and revising.
I don't know why it's taken me so long to get past this. I suspect part of it is my two main forms of writing up to now being blogging and paper-writing. Blogging is ridiculously easy for me - I jot my thoughts down and click "post". If I'm feeling particularly ambitious I give it a once-over (often after the fact) for misspellings or confusing sentence structure, but mostly I can get a passable (if not particularly organized) post out with minimal effort. (Only occasionally, on contentious topics, will I set out to properly research, cite, and structure a post in order to form an argument, and those posts tend to take several hours.) Paper-writing, similarly, has a set format that requires little imagination, and while it would take me a bit of time to do the research, I could usually churn out a rough draft that only needed a little bit of polishing to make the transition to final-draft status. Which means that consistently, for a decade and a half, I haven't had to deal with crappy first drafts, or even really do much work when it came to writing. So probably it's a classic case of "talented person finds something they aren't good at and decides it can't be done because it doesn't come easy to them".
Back when we moved to Arizona (which was the last time I thought seriously about writing, though I ended up just kind of BSing around for six months), Brian got me a magnet with a great quote on it: "A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline." I had kind of an ambivalent reaction at the time, because while I recognized the truth of it, I've always had a panic reaction to the concept of actually putting together a proper plan for anything I've wanted to do.* (Never quite been certain why. It's not that I can't put together a plan - quite the opposite, really. But for music or writing or acting or anything I really wanted, the thought has always made my heart pound and eyes go wide.) Frankly, I still do have that reaction, but I'm kind of sick of it - or maybe just sick enough of office jobs where I'm finally motivated to get past it. Or at least a little more motivated than I have been in the past. I hope.
To that end, I've not only been writing, I've given myself a deadline - June 30th, a little more than six months away - to start earning some cash via art, be it from busking, story sales, coffeeshop gigs, what have you. It doesn't have to be a livable wage - I'm thinking a $100/month minimum sounds reasonable enough, as it's what I made in my best month busking/gigging in Bisbee - but I need to motivate myself, and that seems a good bar to set. Plus I'll feel like a lot less of a wealthy dilettante when people ask what I do and I say "I'm a musician."***
I've got a few ideas on how to get there; the quickest cash is likely going to come from setting up an Amazon self-publishing account and selling the various porn stories I've written over the years.** There's a huge market for erotica on the Kindle, and it'd be a good way to get familiar with the ins and outs of self-publishing. And I've got a halfway-decent plan already sketched out for it, much of which will transfer over to "serious" writing - starting (and posting regularly in) a writing blog, finding other writing blogs/message boards I like and interacting with people there, editing the stories themselves, learning the ins and outs of formatting and pricing and all that jazz, etc., etc.
People say getting started is the hardest part, but honestly, I think it's consistency. All of this is going to be a pretty big time sink, and there's going to be a good-sized chunk of investment required before I start seeing returns. So that's what I'm crossing my fingers for now - that the fear of the continual minor-level frustration of another office job will help me both get started and stay consistently motivated.
Here's to building foundations under those castles in the air.
*If this were a romantic comedy, I'd make some quip about how "I'm more of a 'seat-of-your-pants' kinda gal," and it would be charming and adorable and also reinforcing negative gender stereotypes - woo!
**You can add "porn" to the list of "types of writing I can churn out a decent rough draft of in not much time". Possibly because the climax - literally - is set from the beginning, so it's just a matter of winding my characters up and watching them get there.
***Right now, I usually follow it up with "...which is a nice way of saying I'm unemployed." Funny how getting people to give you money for something makes you feel much less like you're playing at it, no matter how serious you actually are.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-07 04:07 pm (UTC)You're going to be awesome, if you let yourself.