Been discussing with my penpal why I can never finish a short story. He and I agree that we approach writing in two phases. First we free-write to explore the idea of the story then we scoped-write to turn it all into a readable piece.
I admitted that I don't allow myself enough time to free-write, because as soon as I feel like I'm onto something I become allured by the excitement of having a finished piece and jump into trying to materialize it right away. But this is what I call showing up to the scoped-writing phase too early. Arriving without enough raw material to actually polish.
I admitted that I don't allow myself enough time to free-write, because as soon as I feel like I'm onto something I become allured by the excitement of having a finished piece and jump into trying to materialize it right away. But this is what I call showing up to the scoped-writing phase too early. Arriving without enough raw material to actually polish.
I expect the story to just come to me as I write but then that always hits a dead end. It's not a writer's block dead end, it's more of a 'this has gone stale' dead end...
-- My Penpal
I'm going to unpack more the difference between free-writing and scoped-writing in my next posts.
I'm going to unpack more the difference between free-writing and scoped-writing in my next posts.
in a different way than non fiction ever could. I've found both to be indispensible in my lfie. But you're not alone. I know that Jason Fried of Basecamp doesn't read fiction -- > or at least didn't read at one point in his life. His exact argument was that there was too much interesting stuff in 'real' life
You know how people still call email "e"mail and often use an an envelope as their icon?