How to Eat an Elephant?

Please excuse me for getting a little personal here- I'm working on some posts about flashbacks and pacing and a brilliant post about how I got my agent...I'll let you know as soon as I work out the details on that one! But for now, a bit about writing and how being a Sunday school teacher gave me a little push.

I started writing a few years ago as a result of being a teacher in the Young Women's organization at church. The girls, 12-17 years old, all participate in "Personal Progress," a program with hundreds of activities designed to develop different virtues. These activities could be anything from reading the scriptures daily and recording what they learn to learning a new skill.

In addition, the girls are required to complete a ten-hour project for each of these virtues, and I'd often ask the girls about their progress. As a teacher, I was encouraged to work on my personal progress alongside the girls, and that was why, when an idea flashed through my brain, I picked up a pen and wrote it down. I already had the goal in place and the time had come to act on it.

Two years after beginning to write in earnest, and four years from that first sketch, I realize that my little idea has taken slightly more than ten hours to develop!

It can be done, and here are some things that have helped me.

• Track your progress. Whether you use a star chart or a marker on your bathroom mirror, write down your goals and what you do each day to meet that goal. It doesn't have to be number of words- that only worked for me for the first draft, but perhaps an amount of focused time? Perhaps it will be to mark up so many pages a day with tiny scribbles that seem perfectly legible until you try to decipher them a week later.
• You can write a paragraph in five minutes, and eventually you'll fill a book. It adds up. So don't waste your spare moments. Sometimes they're all we get.
• Eliminate the junk. I don't mean that you can't allow yourself to enjoy some leisure time- even TV can can be a nice break- but if you want to write, you have to give yourself the gift of time to write.
• Don't get upset if you mess up. Start again. Say it with me: Today is the first day of the rest of my life!

How do you stay focused on your goals, whether writing-related or not?

I hope that you all have had a wonderful 2010, that this coming year will find you well and happy. Enjoy this video--it got me a little pumped!


Glutton for Punishment?

The Plan and an Impromptu Contest

Here's my philosophy about planning: Dream Big. Bigger than that. BIG, I say.

This picture came up in the fotosearch under 'thoughts'. Any ideas on what he's thinking? I think I'll mail a dollar to the person who comes up with the best caption. Yes. Let's do it. Impromptu contest, starting now. You have until Sunday midnight, eastern time zone to enter. Winner gets a dollar.

I over-schedule, run run run until I drop, then rest and do nothing but read for a few days, then run run run all over again. It might sound a little manic, but I like having busy times and slow times much more than having all medium times.

When I write, this means I write in spurts, though I write some almost every day. My goals are always impossible, though they sound reasonable to me when I set them, but they don't account for this circadian rhythm in my energy levels. So, keep that in mind and recognize that behind these grand ideas lurks a procrasinating bum.

My plan is to write a thousand words a day for the next 80-90 days and get my rough draft for book 2 knocked out by the end of October, or thereabouts. Next phase- brainstorming and the outline for book 3 Nov/Dec with some editing of book 2 mixed in. Then maybe a rough draft for book 3 in Jan-Mar, another edit on book 2, some brainstorming for book 4... repeated to infinity. I'd like to get two book written by the end of 2011 and have another in the works.

Don't forget, I am still a procrasinating bum.

That's why it's lucky that it doesn't bother me at all to miss my own deadlines. I've got three kiddoes in elementary school and one in preschool, and I'm a fairly laidback person anyway, so I go with the flow. I mainly use schedules to motivate myself- as a reminder of what might be accomplished if I were to be totally gung ho. I'm usually quite happy to hit my goal in twice the alloted time. It's still progress.

Some people use goals as absolute measures of success, and I can see how that would be motivating, if you were able to accomplish your goals. But then you have to have reasonable goals, and where's the fun in that?

When (note the positive self-talk!) I get an agent, I don't think this self-deception will be a problem because I like to work under pressure. I've never had a problem getting papers in on time, so I think my brain files other people's deadlines are in a different, inviolable category.

I also set my clocks ahead an undetermined number of minutes ahead, so I'm constantly having to add subtract minutes to figure out when we really have to leave, and we'll still late quite a bit.

Which reminds me- I got the kids to school on time today for their first day back. I miss those noisy kids, but their teachers seem fantastic and they have gotten tired of hanging out with each other all the time.

And my son kind of embarrassed me at the meet-your-teacher event earlier in the week. He intro'd me to his teacher and told her I was a writer, and she promptly invited me to come teach the kids about where to get ideas and how to write. I told her I wasn't published, but she was extremely enthusiastic anyway. I could be a total hack!

I went to bed thinking about what basics fourth graders can use to improve their writing. I'm not even sure if Teacher was serious, but I think it would be so fun to brainstorm with a group of kids and write an outline on the board, talk to them about how to choose words to reveal character, etc. I was thinking about how many different forms of 'walked' there are, and what skulked would say vs pranced. Anyone have any great ideas?

Okay, done rambling. Back to the point-
Do you get crazy with your goals, or are you ever-so-realistic?
Glutton for Punishment?