Oh, yeah, it's 31P31D time again
Jul. 31st, 2018 07:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
breakinglight11My life has been making my movie, the Mrs. Hawking proof of concept film, which has been the most demanding and challenging thing I've ever done. We just wrapped filming yesterday, which hopefully means my life, schedule, and brainspace will open up a little. But the drain it's been on my resources— of every conceivable kind —has meant I haven't been attending to much else. Especially this blog, but also it's put me behind on drafting Mrs. Hawking part V, of which I only have two-thirds of version one done, where I had a complete version one of part IV at this time last year.
Which brings us to my yearly ritual since 2012, 31 Plays in 31 Days. It's a writing challenge where you write a play of at least one page in length every day for the month of August. It was a really good for me to get into because it got me generating work, and I got a lot of momentum and solid short pieces of it. Eventually, however, as I found myself needing to draft specific pieces for specific purposes, I moved away from the "one-page play" model and started using it as motivation to write discrete scenes for larger pieces. This proved to be even more useful, as structure really helps me get writing done.
Last year I wanted to get Gilded Cages done before August— wish I'd had that presence of mind this year —so I kind of applied the structure. a month early, then just posted what I could for the official challenge period. Some of it was subbed out for things written at other times, however, since there was a lot of Gilded Cages I didn't want to spoil before the debut.
I think this time around I'll be reverting to my old strategy of using the challenge structure to draft, rather than just faking it with a posting schedule for August. But again, there's likely going to be a lot I don't want to show this early for fear of spoiling the story of part V. I get a lot of pleasure and motivation out of posting something every day, though, so I'll also incorporate last year's tactic of substituting other pieces written at other times to fill out the posting schedule. It screws up the little statistical analyses I like to do at the end of the month about what I wrote and which characters I wrote about because the data's not accurate, but whatever, I mostly do that for my own amusement.
So tomorrow I'll be starting. Hopefully with a few tantalizing bits from the next Mrs. Hawking play! Wish me luck!
Which brings us to my yearly ritual since 2012, 31 Plays in 31 Days. It's a writing challenge where you write a play of at least one page in length every day for the month of August. It was a really good for me to get into because it got me generating work, and I got a lot of momentum and solid short pieces of it. Eventually, however, as I found myself needing to draft specific pieces for specific purposes, I moved away from the "one-page play" model and started using it as motivation to write discrete scenes for larger pieces. This proved to be even more useful, as structure really helps me get writing done.
Last year I wanted to get Gilded Cages done before August— wish I'd had that presence of mind this year —so I kind of applied the structure. a month early, then just posted what I could for the official challenge period. Some of it was subbed out for things written at other times, however, since there was a lot of Gilded Cages I didn't want to spoil before the debut.
I think this time around I'll be reverting to my old strategy of using the challenge structure to draft, rather than just faking it with a posting schedule for August. But again, there's likely going to be a lot I don't want to show this early for fear of spoiling the story of part V. I get a lot of pleasure and motivation out of posting something every day, though, so I'll also incorporate last year's tactic of substituting other pieces written at other times to fill out the posting schedule. It screws up the little statistical analyses I like to do at the end of the month about what I wrote and which characters I wrote about because the data's not accurate, but whatever, I mostly do that for my own amusement.
So tomorrow I'll be starting. Hopefully with a few tantalizing bits from the next Mrs. Hawking play! Wish me luck!
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