Sitting in my apartment's lobby (The week in writing, August 3-9)

Monday & Tuesday, August 3-4, 2025

I was travelling again on Monday and Tuesday, so it wasn't quite possible to attempt my new experiment: brewing coffee at home and bringing it to the complex lobby for writing. I knew that I'd be home soon, but my temporary absence was why I set the time constraint for two weeks, rather than one. In the future, I'd like to dial these experiments up to a month and thereby give myself a longer commitment to grapple with. But not yet. I first want to firmly establish the morning habit.

On Tuesday, I did find my way to a coffee shop, and my session proceeded much like some from last week. That wasn't possible, but I found an hour to write in the evening. It cost me some amount of willpower, focusing that late in the day, but I'm sure no one will cry for me. I spent the bulk of that time rewriting and editing last week's post. This is a new challenge I'm dealing with – how and when do I make time for blog posts without significantly detracting from my fiction practice? I've been happy to find, so far, that the little sessions I take to reflect on my writing day and build the eventual post do not really subtract from my energy for novels or screenplays. I spend twenty minutes or less, and it feels like engaging a different muscle in my brain.

I do have an issue with editing and revising. When I imagine sending something out in the world – something written by me that very clearly says I'm a writer – I'd like the final product to polished and interesting, and I often suspect it isn't. I fight the instinct to step back and say, "Okay, this is the source material. But what's the bigger piece here? Why don't I rewrite the whole thing from scratch?"

It's an instinct I can and should embrace when it comes to work that warrants multiple drafts (short story, novel, screenplay, or maybe even an essay). Here, I have to weigh the tradeoffs. Doing so might result in a better post, but it would cut more deeply from my fiction time, and I have to keep my priorities in order. So whatever you read here is, for the most part, a lightly edited version of what I originally wrote.

Wednesday, August 5, 2025:

Wednesday's work was a little strange. I successfully completed the morning routine and ended up in my apartment's lobby with a homemade cup of coffee. Score for me. But the experience of writing was stop-and-start, distracted and wandering. It's not so much that I didn't want to write, or that I didn't get any writing done. In total, I wrote a fair bit. But I did it in a number of chunks broken by drifting attention, and that felt mildly frustrating.

I'm working on a screenplay that's giving me some trouble. Honestly, I feel like everything I've ever written has given me trouble at some point or other. And when I experience enough trouble, I flip to a new project, which is a big part of why I so rarely finish. But there are occasional honeymoon periods in which I'm having fun and the work hasn't gotten hard yet. I had a little bit of fun with this project, and now it's slowed down. I think I just need to grow in my patience. Show up and put in time, even if I don't quite get what I want. I won't always have the answers, and I can't always expect them.

I wonder if writers like Brandon Sanderson or Stephen King ever feel like that. How do they crank out so much material? Yes, they keep a routine and hit a word count, but geez... In my experience, if I'm absolutely stuck in the mud, and I have no clue what happens next, hitting a word count can seem impossible.

Time, I can manage.

Thursday, August 6, 2025:

Thursday's session was best described as an inverse of Wednesday. I woke up early and short on time, because (certified saint that I am) I'd volunteered to pick up my cousin from the Metro station and drive him to the edge of town, where he'd booked a job. No, he doesn't have a car. Yes, he lives in Los Angeles. Why do you ask?

I arrived at a coffee shop near the station about thirty minutes early and tried to squeeze in my writing session. It went surprisingly well! I spat out the first draft of a scene without thinking about it too much. I know it will need editing later, but sometimes it feels good to just imagine something and let it flow, rather than sitting and pulling teeth for an hour.

Friday, August 7, 2025:

Here's something I'm working on: TEDA. Or DEAP. Or TEDAP.

The letters stand for Transcription, Editing, Drafting, Analysis, and Personal, but I'm not sure about the order yet. I'm also not sure if Rewriting should go in there separately from Editing. Should Transcription count as part of Analysis? REDAP. Yeah, that's better.

Why the acronyms? It's part of an effort to quantify how I spend my time at the writing desk, and thereby be more intentional about it. I have a spread sheet with various project titles where I track their progress. But it doesn't account for everything I do!

I know many writers tend to focus on one "mode" of writing at a time – they'll work only on drafting new material, and they'll go back for rewriting and editing after the completion of a draft. I've tried that, but I have a hard time with it. I keep looking at what I've written and wishing that it were different or better, not just so it was nicer to read, but so I could have different, better information ahead of the next scene.

Think of it this way. I can write a scene in which two characters talk about the state of the kingdom in the comfort of a nondescript room, their personal stakes and motivations hazy at best. Or I can write a scene in which two characters have a similar conversation, but one of them is in the dungeon, and the other has arrived in the guise of a guard. Now there's a lot on the line. Whatever the characters end up saying, it's clear they have skin in the game, and there's dramatic tension driving the conversation. It's better than the first scene.

I would love for that to always be the first scene that pops out, but it can take a lot of effort to arrive at a better idea for a second scene. When I'm drafting new material (especially if I'm doing it without an outline; let's not get into that right now), it can take all my creative focus and energy to supply lines of dialogue and descriptions for the characters and their surroundings. Doing more than that – stepping outside my current frame of mind and asking, "What does this scene need?" – requires not just coming back at a different time and reviewing the material, but also an awareness of what other possibilities exist that make for good scenes.

That last reason is why I spend so much time looking over other writers' material. Sometimes I transcribe scenes, as a way of forcing myself to pay close attention; other times, I look at a scene and write observations about it. Either way, my goal is to build the sort of brain that will go, "Oh yes, I know what this scene needs."

All of this, I could theoretically accomplish one step at a time. Three months on the draft, three months on the edit. But my concern is that radically altering a scene for the better – say, putting one of the characters in prison – can radically alter the plot, and therefore require significant changes to the many scenes that proceed after. I'd prefer to craft the best scene early on, and dodge all that work.

Typing this out, though, I'm reminded that I'm a young, inexperienced writer, and I may be worried about the wrong things. It's likely impossible to avoid significant overhauls on a first draft, and maybe it would be better to let the shitty draft have its day.

I just want to be better than I am, all the time.

Saturday, August 9, 2025:

I sat for two writing sessions on Friday. Looking back on the whole week, I may not have made the sort of progress I hoped for, in terms of my screenplay; but as far as the habit – the "experiment" – I think I did a good job. It's even possible I pushed too hard on Wednesday. Part of me rebels against that sentiment. Three hours of work? That's nothing! You should be able to crank out four hours every day, easy. But there's a lot of life going on around my writing. I shouldn't neglect the rest of my day, because if I do, I run the risk of burn out. The important thing here is my long term motivation and health.

If I want to be an excellent writer – and I think I do – then this will require sustained effort over decades. Not months or years. I have to be okay with the possibility, the high probability, that the goals I want to achieve are not hiding behind the next corner. They might be much further down the road. As long as I pace myself, that's okay.

I set a two week time span on this experiment, so it's the same routine next week. Wake up, eat breakfast, take my coffee and laptop to the complex lobby. I feel like I made reasonable exceptions to the rhythm this past week, and I still managed to write every day. But I'll try and see if I can be a little more consistent with my time and space in this coming week.