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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Vlog returns





[I gave up with a flawed take after...I dunno twelve tries?]



Hi everyone,



Today seems as good a time as any to reintroduce Vlogs here at Writing About Writing. We got a little side tracked there for a while because of the move and stuff, but life is getting back to normal and some of our old regular bits here are returning.

Now this one here is just a filler vlog, to kind of remind folks that this is something I will be doing, and that I always intended to get back to it as my life came back together and stopped looking so much like a post apocalypse movie.



We’ll probably only do about one a month.



I know some of you don’t like vlogs, preferring to just read. I’m the same way, so I’m going to put my write up in text at the bottom. It may not have every tangent I go on, every change I make extemporaneously, and my speaking rhythm is much different than my writing one, but for those of you who hate vlogs, it will at least have the basic information.



I also have a video editing program that came with my MacBook, so over the next few months, depending on the learning curve for that, I may be able to make videos that I don’t have to do all in one take.



The reason I’m posting this TODAY is because of Writing About Writing’s meta mission to bring you the “behind the scenes” of writing–to demystify the impression some people have that writers do very little work they don’t like, simply get hit by inspiration, and then birth a work of genius.



So let me tell you about yesterday….



Yesterday I sat down to work, because that’s what working writers do, and I stared at the same paragraph for 14 hours. The words just did not come. And I sat there and sat there, and I pecked at that paragraph and I finally got it done. But it took all day.



And some days are like that. You just have to sit down and have shitty productivity because that discipline and habit is the price you pay for the twelve and sixteen hour productivity days the next day or the next week.  Now today, I’ve managed to do a couple of hours of solid writing already but if I’d just given up yesterday, it would be that much harder today.


So I just want people to know… if you think that just because I have an audience and make money writing doesn’t mean I don’t have shitty days…it doesn’t.

1 comment:

  1. Good on you Chris for diversifying. I'm in the process of a vlog series myself to break from the monotony of text.

    You mentioned the learning curve on your default video editing software. On a Mac, I believe that is iMovie. You'll be happy to know that making basic cuts and putting things together doesn't take more than an hour to figure out on your own.

    Just get in there, it's very intuitive. Every video software has an import command to get your clips in, and then a timeline where you can drag and drop your clips to put them together.

    You'll also be able to split a clip, so you can use that to take out fluff. Then export your final video. That's it.

    Of course, editing, like writing, is a labor of love and the more time you give it, the better the product will be. But basic cuts are very easy to figure out.

    Good luck!

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