A Writer's Notebook, Day Five-Hundred-And-Thirteen

I have once more made it to my office to do my work today, and am hopeful about being back on schedule.  At the same time, I will admit that I procrastinated quite a bit this evening and could easily have finished work far earlier, but that is not the same issue, so long as I don't allow it to become an excuse not to work, and, at this point, not to get to my office for at least some of that work.  I certainly am not disdaining writing on my phone, as I still believe it has provided me a valuable, albeit different, mode of work.  I am more meticulous on the phone, as it is a bit more arduous of a process for me, and I am also more prone to mistakes while typing, so I tend to be slower.  This results in my doing quite a bit more thinking before I write.  While I am comfortable just letting loose on a keyboard, on the phone, I tend to chunk sentences or lines in my head first.  I compose a whole phrase before I set a word of it down.  This results in a very different process and in different poems, and that is not something to be discarded.  It is a different perspective on writing, and provides me a way to break up what I am doing.  In working that way, I am forced to think differently, and that allows me to move in different directions.  I think much of the work I am writing now is a clear result of the focal shifts that resulted from working in that way for so long, and that is an amazing gift.  I am very proud of the way my poetry has been changing.  It has been developing in ways I didn't expect, and which I doubt would have manifested, at least not in the ways they did, if I hadn't been working in a new way.  What is amazing, though, is now that I am working on my computer, those ideas and ways of working are transforming again, mingling with the process I am most comfortable with.  The freedom I have on the computer is allowing me to incorporate what I have learned but also providing the capacity to do more with it, to utilize more of my natural instincts as a poet.  I am integrating ideas that I do not think I would have stumbled upon without shaking up my routine so much.

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