Clear Thinking
I’ve just done a bit of looking ahead. Planning. Writing out what’s to come. It’s important every now and then to give yourself some thinking space to work out what the status of things is, where you’re going (almost always nowhere fast, or somewhere excruciatingly slow, for me) and where you want to be.
What a Day for a Daydream
A break in the clouds, courtesy of Satish Krishnamurthy on Flickr
It is a kind of day-dreaming – a visualisation exercise. But day-dreaming isn’t focussed enough, and this needs to be focussed. If done well, you are focussing your life, after all. I always find the best way of getting that focus is, you guessed it, writing. I write out my thoughts as they come to me. It feels much more focussed than staring out the window, and I’ve got something written down at the end of it.
Try this – think of a topic involved with your future. It is probably helpful if it’s in the form of a question (something clichéd but useful like, “where do I want to be this time next year,” or “what do I want to have achieved by this time next year”). Write that topic or question at the top of your page and then just write and see where it gets you. I’m willing to bet money that you will feel more focussed afterwards, and you will have thought of some ideas to help you on your way that had not occurred to you before.
Guided (by the topic/question), restricted (by the medium of writing) thinking tends to draw connections that otherwise remain undiscovered, and allows you to formulate plans and ideas around them. At least, that’s what I think.
NaNoWriMo – More than Just a Month
I’ve just been mulling over NaNoWriMo and the fact that I won’t be able to participate again this year. I was writing my thoughts out. This was not a deliberate, guided, focussed thinking exercise, but I’ll often just write when I’m trying to think up new blog posts (and here we are). This led me to thinking about how I was going to make sure I would be able to participate next year. Practical things like booking time off work in November well in advance came up, but also less obvious things like what I would have to have prepared in advance, and where I would like to be with my other writing by the time it starts.
I will go further another time and properly plan out my year based around getting to this point. At the moment I’m still not sure whether it’s practical to take time off then (in any case I won’t be able to take the whole of that month off, and I doubt it will leave me with enough time to complete a first draft. But that’s not the point – it’s an event I will use to get the most done that I possibly can).
The point is though, that this bit of impromptu planning came almost unbidden, and I’m now a little clearer about one aspect of my writing career. But enough about me – I want to know what you do to help look at the bigger picture. How do you do your planning? Is it a conscious effort, or does it go on subconsciously in the background? Do you use any freewriting techniques like this, or mindmapping? Whack me with some comments. In my FACE.