Day 980 - I don’t like stopping in the middle of a scene

I kept up my dictation streak yesterday, but it reminded me of why I dislike stopping in the middle of a scene and picking up the next day. It always takes me several minutes to read what I’d written before, and then read my blocking notes to remember or figure out what I need to write next. I’m always slow to start dictation, but I think it’s harder when I start in the middle of a scene. It’s quite a bit easier to start dictation when I’m also starting a fresh scene.

In hindsight, what I should have done instead of writing prose is to use dictation for blocking a future scene. I think that might be easier for me to stop and start in the middle of a scene, although I’d probably need to test it out to see.

The nice thing about it, though, is that on days when I’m doing only the bare minimum, I can dictate for 5 or 10 minutes and get a significant number of words written, and the editing for that only takes a few minutes. I tend to work for about 20 minutes rather than only 5. When I write via typing, I’ll usually stop after only 100 words, my bare minimum for typing. So on bare minimum days, when I use dictation, I tend to spend longer on writing and write more words than I would have if I’d written via typing.

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I wrote a little less than 15,000 words last week, which is over my goal of 10,000 but less than my stretch goal of 20,000, so I can’t order my gluten-free pastry box reward. :( It’s mostly because I had to do a lot of editing last week since I found that plot hole in my story, and I wanted to fix the last few scenes so that everything would be correct in my head and in the manuscript. It also helped that I did the editing now, rather than leaving it for later, because it has been a lot of work and if I’d had to do it on top of my normal self-editing pass on the manuscript, it would have been a bit overwhelming, and made the self-editing pass more difficult, which might have decreased my attention to detail.

I have 3 more scenes to edit, but aside from the opening for one of them, the rest should only be light editing since there wasn’t anything happening in them that would have been affected by the changes I had to make to the plot. Then I can get back to writing prose.

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I finished editing those three scenes! I wanted to also start work on blocking the next new scene I have to write, but I was so exhausted that I decided to just go to bed early. I also ended up not doing any dictation today, so I broke my dictation streak.

I’ll get started on writing via dictation tomorrow!

Writing streak: 459 days

My takeaway for today: On bare minimum days, try using dictation for blocking a future scene rather than writing prose so that you don’t have to start and stop writing in the middle of a scene. See if you have the same difficulty with blocking.