Writing synopses (and pretty bunnies)

First, an update on the weather. We had about an hour of extreme sun on Tuesday! I.e. the sun shone in a steady beam unhampered by clouds. Following this, we had a bit of extreme rain, then some extreme hail and some extreme thunder and lightning. Interesting day for weather.

In other news, I have been writing a synopsis. I followed some advice given by Nicola Morgan (she has an excellent writing blog, by the way, and also writes very good books) and left all my notes at home with my laptop and iPad and sat in town (45min away, or that particular day, 2 hours of defective tube train away) with nothing but a blank sheet of paper and a pen.

The idea here is that you write what you can remember of your story, and hopefully these will be the most important bits. You don't get hung up on trying to condense each chapter into fifty-seven words, and you get into the flow of writing rather than thinking about how to fit everything in.

It was an interesting experience. I write so much on my laptop or my iPad that it took me a bit to get back into writing by hand. Once over the initial hurdle, though, I got right down to it and got some good stuff out (I think).

I did notice an interesting thing while I was doing it. My procrastination was a lot more noticeable. When you're on a connected device, it's very easy to convince yourself that Wikipedia research is very necessary and needed right at this moment, so you don't really notice that you are procrastinating. When it's only you, a pen and a piece of paper, though, the difference between work and not-work is much easier to define. At one point I found myself staring at my pen and thinking 'ooh, pretty bunnies', which I immediately knew was not work (it was a new pen. With bunnies on it).

I guess it's good to switch modes of writing every so often, to give yourself a change and see if anything new and more productive comes out of it. I know I wouldn't have done as much if I'd been on my laptop. I would have been too busy checking things and changing things and believing it was all work.