What is Productive?

[queenoftheskies]

I'm asking myself that this morning. Trying to decide.

Does productive have anything to do with quality?

Or does it just relate to what a person has accomplished in quantity, whether it is quality work or not?

I mean, I'm pleased at the quantity of what I produced yesterday. I can't complain about that. I got 26 pages written...and 7 done the day before...for a total of 33 pages so far this weekend. I'll definitely hit my 50 page goal by the end of today. The editing portion of it, too.

So, why have I suddenly decided that it must come out better the first time around?

Just because I managed that with my first two assignments doesn't mean it's going to happen every time.

What happened to my EVERYTHING CAN BE FIXED LATER mantra? I still believe that just as much as I believed it before.

Theoretically.

Is it that I know people are going to read this right away?

Maybe.

Is it that I know the instructor is going to be hard on it? (And that's the way it should be.) Maybe.

Or maybe it's the fact that the mid section of a screenplay is the hardest section to write.

Maybe I'm wondering if I'm giving out too much information about the aliens.

Or not enough.

Maybe I'm wondering if anyone can even follow what I'm writing.

Maybe it's that I've been cranking along, crunching those words, and have just lost touch of the momentum I'm struggling to build.

Maybe I'll feel differently when I sit down, read, and go back to edit.

However, I am still pleased that I'm getting it down.

I'd better go finish the rest.

Only then can I adequately judge the material.

Comments

[kmkibble75.livejournal.com]

I think any time you look at a piece and say, "I've moved forward," it's a good progress thing. Whether it be by lots of words or just a few high-quality ones, you've moved the story forward (even if they all wind up being rewritten, you've thought ahead and saw what didn't work).

[mmarques.livejournal.com]

Sometimes you just need quantity to feel that you've achieved a milestone (or reached a self-imposed deadline), and are then ready to go back and fix it.

I needed to feel that I had finished a stage of revising Mysterious Paris last weekend, but the last few chapters really needed additional work. Now I'm working on finishing that part up. But if I couldn't reach my deadline, I might have become discouraged, and not worked on it so much.

I still write first and fix later.........

[dracschick.livejournal.com]

Usually, if I'm writing a lot, then, that means I'm in a pretty creative mood.