WFMAD Day 4 – It’s in the details

How’s it going? Have you written every day this month? Fallen off the wagon yet?

If you have, do not despair. All is forgiven as long as you write for fifteen minutes today.

Where are you writing? Is it the same place every day? Is is a spot where other things – besides writing – happen?

Check out the creative spaces of these fantasy and science fiction authors.

Ready….

Today’s advice:
When you carve out a physical place for your writing or art, it validates the space you are trying to carve out in your mind. When you treat your work with respect, other people will, too.

Set…

Today’s prompt: Describe your writing space. Focus on the smallest details possible, not the big ones. Don’t say there is a chair in the room; give details about the wear patterns of the rug under the chair, or the paint chips, or the dog hair in the cushion. Go small to tell big.

If you don’t have a writing space yet, describe your dream space.

Scribble…Scribble….Scribble!

18 Replies to “WFMAD Day 4 – It’s in the details”

  1. Thanks for sharing the link to the authors’ work spaces. Now I can point to them and tell my wife, see, I’m not the only clutter bug. It’s a writer thing.

    Not that it’ll help, really.

  2. The wagon left me behind…

    …on Sunday. But I do have swine flu. Is this a good enough excuse? Or is there NO excuse good enough for WFMAD?

  3. Re: The wagon left me behind…

    I’m on it!
    By the way, I usually write on my sofa, ideally with a cat next to me. I find it helps the creative process, until one of them gets on my keyboard and then aaaaaaaaaaawlikhfiealihqwqlhqqqqqqqqqqqqqq all hell breaks loose.

  4. I finished a chapter today!! (Tomorrow will be the crappy day, though, when I have to figure out how to begin the next one.)

    Shelley

  5. My Imaginary Writing Space

    I LOVE to write. It helps me deal with life’s little surprises. As much as I’d like to have a writing space,though,I can never find the ideal oasis from which everything that helps breathe life into my work comes from. So, my mind has taken the liberty to come up with a solution: an imaginary place that is strictly limited to my characters and I. It’s outdoors, somewhere far off, with hundreds of trees that whisper ideas to me every time the wind blows. There’s this one tree, a big oak, I guess, with a wooden swing attached to it. Thousands of wild flowers exist there, too. They make the air smell sweet. I want to make this place a reality someday, but for now I guess I’ll have to deal with my third floor, two bedroom, city apartment. Ugh.

  6. I’ve been writing everyday and it feels nice! I just created my writer’s space this summer and I love it! It’s no where near as cluttered as the spaces on the website, which is a surprise for me. Thanks for sharing!

  7. On Saturday and Monday nights, I worked on a novel I’ve been writing, but since they were nights I had scheduled as “writing nights” (nights when my husband takes over the toddler and I escape the house with my laptop) before I even signed on to WFMAD, I don’t feel like they count. I completely forgot about writing on Sunday. So, tonight, when I finish here, I’m going to spend fifteen minutes answering today’s prompt. I think I’ll try to limit myself to only fifteen minutes so it will be sort of like a game, like filling up a tweet can be. Is that too geeky? Ok then–I’m going to get my writer geek on!

  8. Still on the wagon, with a nice 3600 words I didn’t have four days ago. Which is not that much, but it’s more that I’ve written in a depressingly long time (university papers not included).

    I mostly write with my computer on my bed. This isn’t ideal, but it’s a necessity. I have fibromyalgia (a chronic pain condition) and chronic fatigue, so I spend more time than most in/on bed. I just recently got a netbook, though, and it has actually been good for my productivity. I still use it to browse online somewhat, but I don’t have a cd/dvd drive, so there goes that distraction, nothing interesting on my harddrive, and it’s not the swiftest on the ‘net either. I think the two of us (I named it espresso because a. coffee is awesome, b. espresso is like express, so I was hoping it would motivate my netbook to go quickly, and c. as my throther pointed out, an espresso is smaller than a regular coffee /tangent).

    Anyway, rambling done now, and back to write a little more.

  9. Day four – great writing prompt. Exactly how organized does this writing have to be? It’s very challenging for me to turn off that internal English major! I want to edit as I go along, which defeats the purpose of WFMAD. This also made me want to clean my office, REALLY clean it out and set it up to be a haven for writing or whatever I need in my life at the moment. No matter what, there WILL be at least one kitty there 🙂

    My question to those of you who write for a living, or at least write creatively more than I do – do you just WRITE and turn off that internal editor, then let the draft sit for a bit before you edit? And if so, HOW? The perfectionist in me is pretty powerful (and LOUD!).

  10. Okay, the time stamp will post this on the fifth. But I’m counting it on the fourth. Because that’s when I started doggone it! Mark me happy.

  11. freakfest:

    I edit children’s books for a living, and it’s definitely hard to turn off the editor within! I find it gets easier the more I write, and the more excited I am about what I’m writing. I also find that my writing tends to be better when I manage to do this! Good luck!

  12. how I turned off my editor

    FreakFest,
    I *just now* by serendipitous (redundant) accident learned that if I write while looking at the screen, I slow down and edit and make sure of things and go back and read the beginning of the sentence and and and…
    But if I look at the keyboard instead, and don’t look up, the stream-of-consciousness goes far further, and is interrupted less and less. **hurrah!**
    When the 15 minutes were up, THEN I went back and fixed the typing errors that I noticed with a skim.
    Good luck!
    Mrs. B

  13. Oops… forgot to post

    Here’s Aug 4th’s offering. So far so good.

    The prompt was to write about my writing space. Since my MC of one thing I’m working on is a writer, I chose to write about HER writing space.

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