I Are Ready To Conversate! (1)

Background dump: Something that newbie writers execute very badly, something that average writers do correctly about 50% of the time and that good writers simply Dudley Do-Right.

My background dump: I didn't write throughout my elementary, middle, parochial and high school years, at least not beyond what the minimal requirements were needed to pass a particular class. I also didn't do a lick of writing in my adult years beyond the necessary business correspondence that was required of my job. Which means that I had absolutely no clue on how to do what I was about to do on the incredible journey I was about to take.

I got a very late jump on the bad writing portion of my career, specifically, starting this incredible journey at the ripe old age of 40 (I'm 45 now). The generic reason as to why I started is that I experienced a small cataclysmic event in my life. After recovering from said small cataclysmic event, a tiny seed of a story idea began to grow deep within that atrophied section of the brain called "creativity".

In no time at all, I found a brand new reason to use my refurbished Dell: writing a story. And writing is what I did.

Note: since I had no Internet on that computer, the most I ever did with it was to create a couple of databases for my record collection.

I started writing this bad (literally) boy by sitting down at my dining room table one night after supper, turned on my laptop and began pounding furiously away on it. However, after producing about 4 pages of high quality yecch! material in less than 20 minutes and considering the potential direction that this story was going to take (yes, even back then, I had S-E-X on my mind. boy did I ever have S-E-X on my mind), it would behoove me to move my creativity in action (no, not the unpublished story quiz kids) to other places of the house where I would be able to write without prying eyes spying on me.

Also in no time at all, I managed to develop a writing routine that to this day has not been used since I completed that horrible book. As a matter of record, I still do one item from that list. Betcha can't guess what that one item is.

1} I spent the entire time (about five months) writing angry. Not getting angry for a particular scene, but being angry from beginning of the book {He was sitting there in front of his computer, suffering through a mild (okay, a severe) case of writers block, listening to some real early (and exceptionally bad) music of the latest alternative flavor on the MTV scene, and thinking to himself “this music really sucks”.} to end {And as they went walking off together hand in hand admiring the sunset and discussing their future plans, they literally took an incredibly long walk of an incredibly short pier and finished the day by enjoying a most refreshing bath, together.}. Please note that I kept everything as is for those two sentences.

2} I got up an extra hour early each morning to write before officially starting my day, which meant I got up at 4:30 every morning to write for one hour.

3} I edited before writing new stuff.

4} I wrote small chunks while surrounded by people.

5} I showed my stuff to my co-workers while I was writing it.

Once I got settled into a good routine, I started cranking out words at an ungodly rate, like on the average about 2,500 per day. Let's face it man, I was a lean mean writing machine.

What kind of lean mean writing machine is the subject of part two.

In the meantime, a question to be had is this: have you modified your current writing routine (or any kind of creative routine for that matter) from what you initially started with?