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• Various question on writing... (Score:2, Interesting)

  by arhuman (1672)

  I'm very interested by this subject,
  I'm not talking about knowledge but rather "social" aspect...
  
  Do you tend to be more productive when everything is ok, are you better when you feel insecure ?
  or is it totally unrelated ?
  
  I'd also like to know when you did know that you should write ?
  When did you feel you was able to do it ?
  What was the initial cause that made you act ?
  
  I'v also a lot of other questions :
  What factors improved/decreased your ability so write quickly ?
  Is writing a pleasant task for
  • Re:Various question on writing... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gnat (29) on 2002.01.24 5:04 (#3601) Journal

    I don't have specific memories in mind, but my gut feeling is that I turn to jelly when my life isn't going well, and writing suffers. I remember freaking out about work stuff at my last job, and became a totally dysfunctional wreck for a week or two. I've since learned the importance of blood sugar levels and that doesn't happen nearly so often now :-) I'm putting off questions about the work I'll do after this book, in case the answer is "straight into another with no rest for you!", because I don't want to get bummed out about that and be unable to finish this book. So I guess, yes, mood does affect writing.

    I knew it was time to write when I looked at the production deadline and saw the work I needed to do on the chapters I had. If you're talking in the wider sense of "how did you get the balls to write a book?", it was more just that I've always been a wordy bastard and didn't stop long enough to think about what I was doing until the book was done.

    A quiet house improved my ability to write. During the daytime, with kids and noise and distraction, I run at maybe 40% of peak. During the night, though (so long as I can keep myself off use.perl and other web distractions) I'm a lean mean writing machine. Hence the 3:30am and 4:30am bedtimes I've had this and last week.

    Writing's fun, but I don't get caught up in the chase the way I do with programming. Editing, I sometimes do--what's the best order for these concepts, what's the key that will unravel this contorted sentence, .... I like programming, but I hate it when I have to deal with things that aren't my program--I've recompiled PHP more times than man should ever have to, mostly because of messed up libraries on my system. Recompiling and trying to work out whether the bug is in the larger environment or in my own code ... that's not fun.

    Ah, I must be putting off work, I'm prattling about myself :-)

    --Nat

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