Sunday, April 20th, 2008
Ninja Script
A lot of writing pundits suggest setting aside time to write. I agree, it’s really handy to have a specific block of time each week/day/whatever to work. That’s great if you’re a pro, and writing is the only job you have. Sadly I started out my working life in a slightly different path, and now I’m working towards the professional writing gig. So… a lot of the time I have to sneak writing into my work day.
When I worked in an office, it was easy. I’m sitting at my computer typing anyways, I just got really fast with alt-tab, and could shift in between my work and my writing easily. Hell, my job was so simple that I often could just blatantly be writing and nobody would say anything. I could do 5 hours of writing in a given day and have no qualms.
Now I work in a bikeshop. And while it’s my brothers, and he’s fine with me writing during down time, there isn’t a lot of down time to be had. Now my window for writing at work is a lot smaller. Sometimes it may be a few minutes, sometimes a single minute. So I ninja in some of my work during the day, slipping into my gdocs and dropping little word-shuriken whenever I can. It would be great to write as my day job, so I could have the time to seriously work on a topic or project, or storyline. But I may suck at this, the determination has yet to be made.
So if there’s any advice I could ever give about transitioning from Dog Catcher to Writer, it’s to cherish the small times you have to write. If you do have the opportunity to set aside a block of time, do it, it goes a long way. If you don’t, well, that can be even better sometimes. When you have 5 hours to write something amazing, you spend 4hrs 34mins trying to work it out.
When you have a single minute, procrastination has no foothold. You become like a revengeful ghost.
“If a samurai’s head were to be suddenly cut off, he should still be able to perform one more action, with certainty. If one becomes like a revengeful ghost, and shows great determination, though his head is cut off, he will not die” - Hagakure
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