After finishing the draft and passing it off to the Final Three, I granted myself a two week writing vacation; it ends Friday. Until then, only blogging and reading–no new material or revisiting older manuscripts. My self imposed exile has a precedent.
\nA few years ago I finished a draft of one novel and immediately dove face first into another. Maybe it was more like fist first into face. Two months into the new manuscript I became so frustrated, I almost stopped writing for good. Not sure if I would have stayed that course forever–likely not, I think–but the thought of quitting was very tempting and seemed absolutely reasonable in the moment. My mind wanted to wander a little bit, explore other areas, tackle issues beside those conflicts my characters devised. Racing ahead without pause proved a disaster, though this presumptive crusade served up a great lesson: Let the batteries discharge completely before fueling them back up for another big project. The manuscript that I almost quit writing over due to frustration, by the way, is the very one in the hands of the Final Three. Lesson learned.
\nStill, the respite begs the question: what’s next? Well, something different, thanks to the idea hopper. A focusing technique, the hopper a mechanism for capturing the spirit of ideas as they arrive without derailing a project in hand. Each time an interesting–and oh so unrelated–seed takes root, intriguing enough that it threatens to divert my attention away from the story in progress, I draft a synopsis and save it for later reference. Right now there’s twelve ideas in the idea hopper.<\/p>\n
Now I just need to pick one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After finishing the draft and passing it off to the Final Three, I granted myself a two week writing vacation; it ends Friday. Until then, only blogging and reading–no new material or revisiting older manuscripts. My self imposed exile has a precedent. A few years ago I finished a draft of one novel and immediately […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10754\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}