I've had a real struggle this month, and haven't come out of top a lot of times.
Moods
I've had some bleak moods this month. Other times I've been pretty happy. It seems neither a positive nor a negative mental attitude need help or hinder your writing. When depressed, the quality of my writing and the effort it takes definitely makes me feel miserable - but I've discovered that feeling bad it isn't really a valid excuse for not writing. If anything, a good mood is more likely to encourage you to play hooky or get caught up in distractions than a bad one.
Which leads us to...
Other Interests
I've discovered this month that just one other interest - in my case, trying to finish this fucking short film - can wreak havoc on your writing hours and output.
This seems especially true if this other interest is time-consuming in a more rigid and structural way than the free-f0r-all of writing - the fact that, after a certain amount of time you will have achieved x (as opposed to writing, where after a certain amount of time you might have achieved dick) can easily nudge out all the other concerns, and swallow up your day, night, and early morning.
In this situation, I've just have to sit down and decide what's more important to me. Over the last couple of weeks it's been the short film - because it cost me money, because it was a lot of effort, because I'd like to see one of my projects properly finished - but nonetheless, it cost me the targets that I desperately wanted to achieve by the end of the month.
This month I didn't make 100 hours, I didn't write 50,000 words, I didn't finish my second screenplay. Because I got distracted with finishing this film.
And so now I come into March with the feeling that I've fallen far, far behind.
Forced Writing
This month I've learned that, until I'm consciously and subconsciously ready to start writing - when I know that I don't have to bullshit my characters' responses or muddle through a scene not knowing what i want to say or where to go next - then I shouldn't start writing at all.
Writing without a solid plan of where I'm going is miserable. I don't mean that to me, writing is an uninspired painting by numbers. If I don't have a clear map of where I'm going, I don't know how the characters are going to react, I don't know what I'm looking out for, and what's worse: I quickly get bored and depressed - because I don't have that map, I can't improvise a new route on the fly, because I already have no idea where I am.
With my crusaders script, I've created so many problems for myself that I've tailed off at page 66, unable to continue due to the huge numbers of inconsistencies in character, plot and pacing that are in the first half preclude any way of creating a believable, interesting and entertaining second half. The only way I'll finish it off satisfactorily will be to start again - go back to the plan, flesh it out, and get its proportions right (I'm only a third of the way through the movie's plot, but nearly 70 pages into the script) - then use what I can of what I've written so far and hopefully, find a way to finish it from that.
So my absolute dedication to forcing myself to write this script too early didn't help me at all - in fact, it set me back. And that's something that I'm going to make sure I don't do next time.
Keeping Track
Because I was working on the short so hard, and have not made my hours or word-count at all in the last few days, I totted the totals up on my blog but didn't feed them into the spreadsheet I use each day to chart my progress.
This was a big mistake. If I saw how close I was to making 100 hours a couple of days earlier, I would have made sure I made that target.
Something like a spreadsheet is pretty dorky, but it concentrates my mind on what I want to do each day. It's become part of my writing process and helps me focus. By avoiding it, I have been avoiding one of the main tools that has been encouraging me to write.
Anyway, that's more that enough pondering for this month. Let's hope the next one is a little more successful.
month summary:
words written: 40,256
total hours writing: 91.25
average words a day: 1,437
average hours writing: 3.25
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