Write and Move, Write and Move
What happened this week? A few things!
I took a week off work because I was spiraling. My plan was to lock myself in my office and crank out as much as I could and yet this plan went sideways immediately. Through the whole week I only wrote about 1,000 words and edited four or five stories. This is the amount of work I should likely be doing every single day if I was serious enough about it, let alone seven full days.
So why is the writing taking me so long?
I guess one of the things that I’m struggling with on this project is the sheer size of it. It’s too easy to get lost, too easy to be unproductive and unfocused when there’s so many chapters and sections and unwritten bits that I need to think through. It can get overwhelming fast, like how the end of this book right now is a hot mess and it’s difficult to focus on any one part of it when all of it is bad.
Yes yes yes, I know, I know. I need stop thinking of this book as a book and try to make it smaller in my head. I have to focus on this one tiny graf here, lock it down, and move onto the next one.
Write and move, write and move.
On an unrelated note, this week I picked up The Anarchy by William Dalrymple, of the esteemed Empire podcast. It’s a fantastic book that I can’t put down and it hit me in the same way that a great film ruins the lives of film students or a Taylor Swift album disrupts the world for weeks on end. It’s so well researched, and so expertly written, that my little project looks silly in comparison. Childish, even. Not to be too mean here, but I’m reading this book and hoping that with enough churning and movement that I could one day write something this grand, something this complete.
Thankfully, last night there was a bit of progress. I had a bump in productivity which sort of made up for this week of mostly faff. I decided to make another prototype and refocus my efforts on the size and format. So after a bit of back and forth I’ve decided to cut down the size of this book considerably, from 5 x 8 inches (a regular paperback size) to 4.37 x 7 inches. That’s just 1.63 inches of difference! But when it comes to a book and something that you hold in your hand for hours at a time, that tiny amount of space really matters.
The rest of the week I’ll get back to the writing but in the mean time I can’t wait to get prototype 002 in my hands and see if these tiny differences I’m messing with are pushing me in the right direction.