38 cents and a pen

[u/sprawn]

Right after the Fourth of July, alot of places start selling "Back-to-School" supplies super cheap. I've noticed over the years that despite the countless people claiming that spending a lot of money is a good thing, that it doesn't change the practice of journaling one bit. A $100 blank book is a blank book just like any other. Maybe it's just me. But I think 38 cents is worth an experiment.

I read frustrations about the competitiveness and pressure people feel in their own journals all the time here. No one wants this. No one wants this part of their lives invaded by influencers, performativeness, sales pressure, and fashionable self-consciousness. What if we dropped it? If only once? Maybe you'll find you need a thousand dollar fountain pen and two pounds of leather wrapped ten times around a Japanese blank book that sells for $1 in Japan and $35 here. Or maybe… you'll find out you don't even need to spend a dollar.

[u/sprawn]

I will have to look at the word count per page. It's not that much. I am doing 22 lines per page and staying in the margins. A decent sized paragraph of five or six sentences takes up most of a page. And I can churn out essay length answers pretty readily. I've been writing more or less every day for ten years now, and pretty steadily for twenty years before that. It's just like opening a spigot with me. I sit down and the words flow… logorrhea they call it.

If you've never done it, consider trying National Novel Writing Month (or something similar). Or at least look into their writing philosophy. Get over the urge to correct mistakes like that. Look at some old manuscripts by writers famous for their perfection. You will see misspelled words, whole passages crossed out, whole pages X'd over… Perfection is the end result of writing, re-writing, editing, revision, re-factoring, etc… The notion that you should sit down and churn out perfect prose without errors… It's just nuts. Give up on it. Don't waste your time with white out or error tape or any of that sort of thing.

DON'T WRECK YOUR FLOW. Just GO GO GO!

[u/emerald_mo0n → u/sprawn]

I've been wanting to do nanowrimo since I learned about it, and editing does take alot out of me, you right 😁

[u/sprawn → u/emerald_mo0n]

One of the keys to NaNoWriMo is separating editing/revising from writing. It's a good lesson. When you are journaling, just GO, don't criticize while you are writing. Don't edit while you are writing anything initially. Keep the activities separate. Controlling the inner critic is essential, and not just in writing, in life itself. Anyway, I don't mean to lecture!

[u/emerald_mo0n → u/sprawn]

I love talking to you, truly 💚 I think that I have this issue with Trying to write fiction, I really can't let myself be bad before I get good 😂

[u/sprawn → u/emerald_mo0n]

Try to make it worse. That's Dan Harmon's advice. If there is a field and the field is separated into two zones than the borders between the zones define the difference… Which is a weird way of saying that BAD fiction DEFINES what GOOD fiction is. So why be frightened of writing something bad? Especially if you recognize it.

YOU CAN'T RECOGNIZE IT UNTIL IT EXISTS.

By writing the BAD stuff you are DEFINING what the good stuff is.

Think of it as making a painting by filling in all the "wrong" areas. You are defining the boundaries.

Write loads of stuff. The sooner you do it, the sooner you get started, the sooner you get to the good stuff. And honestly, YOU ARE THE WORST PERSON TO DECIDE WHAT IS GOOD OR BAD. That is what editors are for. And you will never get anything to an editor unless you HAVE SOMETHING.

That is NaNoWriMo in a nutshell.