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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
-
How being a writer helped me rewrite a sexist trope...for real. [Edit 3 (7/25/13): I speak to some of the more common comments, questions,... -
Well....it finally happened. My "can't even" about the comments on my Facebook page went from figurative to literal. At o... -
So if you've been on Facebook sometime in the last fifty years or so, you've probably run across this little turd of a meme. I... -
My suspicion is we're going to hear a lot about mental illness in the next few days. A lot. And my prediction is that it's going to... -
Come see the full comic at: http://jensorensen.com/2016/11/15/donald-trump-election-win-reactions-cartoon/ If you are still trying to ... -
Image description: A fountain pen writing on lined paper. These are the brass tacks. The bare bones. The pulsing core of effective writi... -
Ready to do some things for your craft that will terrify you even more than a sewer-dwelling clown? Oh what I wouldn't give for a si... -
I don't normally mess with author gossip here on Writing About Writing . Our incestual little industry has enough tricky-to-navigate g... -
This might be a personal question, but I saw that you once used to be Muslim on one of your other posts. Why did you leave? It's fun... -
1. Great writing involves great risk–the risk of terrible writing. Writing that involves no risk is merely forgettable–utterly. 2. When yo...
Good on you Chris for diversifying. I'm in the process of a vlog series myself to break from the monotony of text.
ReplyDeleteYou 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!