Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

I made a hard decision the other day. I've decided that in the interests of productivity, I have to try and abandon my old practice of writing my first drafts in longhand. At least, for my "major" works -- the novels, mostly. I may keep doing short fiction by hand, just to switch things up and keep things fresh. But I've decided that I need to start striving toward a daily word count, and doing it longhand just takes me too long.

My current goal is a thousand words a day on The Finest Deed. In longhand, that would take several hours which I just don't have, between all the other things I'm trying to get done.

The problem, therefore, lies in surmounting the original reason I switched to writing longhand in the first place: I literally couldn't think as fast as I could type, which resulted in long passages of, well, rambling crap. Using the fountain pen allowed me to slow myself down and let the words come as they should, and it made me feel like writing was more of a "physical" process than it seems when I'm typing away on the computer. (Writing longhand also was appealing when I was working my telesales job, because quite frankly it's hard to work up the desire to sit down in front of a computer after eight hours of sitting in front of a computer during the day, even if the writing is pleasurable. Which it always is.)

So, I'm forcing myself to write at the computer now. How am I coping with the old problem of a sluggish brain? Well, there's the old standby of coffee and lots of it (and I applied for a job at Starbucks this morning, so that might spike even higher!). I'm also keeping browser windows open so I can switch back-and-forth between web-surfing and writing. Yeah, that's unorthodox; all the books say to concentrate on writing, avoid distraction, et cetera. I've pretty much concluded, though, that distraction is a constant in my life, and instead of working on shutting out the distractions (and likely getting annoyed at the lack of success thereof), I figure I'm better served by simply incorporating the distractions. No, that's not for everyone. But it might be for me. We'll see.