Caught Up – The Climb #658

Friday 11^th December 2020

It’s a little ironic that just as I catch up with myself, I find it’s Friday with a busy gaming weekend ahead. Saturday is the end of the year Community Day in Pokemon Go and Sunday is my first raid in World of Warcraft. Whilst neither will take up the entire day, they will dominate it, which will mean little further progress before Monday.

But I found myself getting into a great writing rhythm today. I did a bunch of work on this new draft, interspersed with bits of gaming.

The plan is to adopt something a bit like the Pomodoro technique. This is where you work for 20 minutes on one thing and then switch to something else before you lose natural concentration and focus. Writing up all those back issues of The Climb got me used to writing in 15-20 minute spurts, and I’ve burnt myself out on Warcraft just enough that I find myself not wanting to play for hours at a time but rather dip and out.

It’s not perfect. 20 minutes of writing is then followed by about 40 minutes of Warcraft. But it’s the end result that matters and I ended up with around 2000 new words on the novel. It’s something I can build on next week.

Interestingly I’ve found that my fiction writing rate seems to be slower than my non-fiction rate. I seem to be able to do an edition of something like The Climb at around 2000 words an hour (working in 20 minute spurts). With fiction it’s closer to 1600. I’ve also found that as I’m tiring for the day, that rate starts to drop off. I’m using that as a way to try and work out what my natural writing capacity is for any day. I also want to see if I can increase it over time with continued use of this process.

I have myself a nice little set up now. I’m sat at my desk, with Pokemon Go open to spin the nearby Pokestop for balls for tomorrow. I write the start time and end time on the piece I’m working on. Once written, that gets entered into a database I’ve created in Notion to track my writing productivity. If I get stuck mid-sentence and need to look away, there’s that Pokestop to spin, which takes a split second but it a great way is disrupt me without impacting me. It gives my brain a little jolt out so that I don’t come out of what I’m doing, but I still take a step back. I can spin it and jump back into what I was stuck on with a slightly clearer focus.

In all honesty, I’m really glad with how things went today. Whilst I haven’t played Warcraft for months just to help my writing, the fact it is at the optimal stage to be the perfect sidekick to my writing productivity makes me feel accomplished in a way that even getting a new piece of gear doesn’t.

I’m hoping I can continue this into next week. I’d like to ramp up to closer 5000 words a day but I’m not sure if that’s possible. When my word count starts dropping I have to assume that quality is going to take a hit as well, and I’d rather have 2000 fixable words of a first draft than 5000 where the last 3000 need so much work that I might as well not have bothered.