All in all I was pretty productive today; that doesn't mean that I was 100% optimally productive, but given that I was rewriting the first chapter, that's perhaps to be expected. For starters, I hate first chapters, and even though I had a pretty good start, it had to be completely changed to reflect the changes that I'm making to Ferguson's character. Since the duke is now dead and Ferguson has inherited (congrats, Fergie!), the old duke obviously couldn't be part of Madeleine and Ferguson's first meeting, and he also couldn't send Ferguson to the playhouse to discover Madeleine, which meant that he had to have a new reason to go to the theatre. So now, Ferguson has not only inherited, but he now suddenly has more siblings, including a younger brother who is mysteriously setting out to ruin himself -- and it's in search of him that Ferguson ends up at the theatre.
Working out all the plot threads in my head to make sure they work and don't overcomplicate things is fun, though -- despite all my avarice and my desire to be a major bestseller with enough money to employ the eight or ten friends who all want me to support them someday (Hi Chandlord!), the core of my desire to be a writer is my fascination with telling stories. This was all reinforced by this test that I took last night (which I would have told you about last night, had I not been falling asleep). It's called StrengthsFinder 2.0, and it's something that a lot of people at work have taken in various trainings. I haven't had a chance to take it at work, so I finally broke down and ordered the book, which gave me an access code to take the diagnostic test online.
The premise is that too many people focus on improving their weaknesses, when they should be playing to their strengths. So, the system attempts to determine your top five strengths so that you can then focus on growing them and making them even better. Based on my answers, my five strengths are:
Ideation: fascinated by ideas and able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena
Strategic: create alternative ways to proceed; faced with any given scenario, can quickly spot relative patterns and issues
Context: enjoy thinking about the past; understand the present by researching its history
Learner: great desire to learn and continuously improve; the process of learning, rather than the outcome, is what excites them
Input: craving to know more; they like to collect and archive all kinds of information
Is it just me, or are many of these kind of the same? Even after getting past my pet peeve that the various types are not the same kind of word ('Context' does not describe a person, unlike 'Learner'), I was struck and almost disappointed by how interrelated my strengths were. Theoretically this is a good thing, because if I built upon a very strong foundation of learning a lot of stuff and seeking the patterns, I could be really great at...something.
But what is that something? History professor seems perfect, but for the fact that it takes ten years of studying and I'm too old to put myself through that for the dubious rewards at the end of it. I think I would probably also be a pretty good consultant -- able to research, grasp connections, and propose creative solutions to problems. These skills also seem well-suited to being a novelist, particularly a historical novelist -- there is a lot of ideation and problem-solving going on with each scene and arc, and I love the research that goes into historical works.
Unfortunately, it would have been nice if I had any strengths around discipline, reliability, etc. -- those are things I force myself to do, not things that I'm naturally inclined towards. So I'm just going to have to get better at discipline, even if I hate it. I downloaded some software that I know some other writers use (RescueTime), which tells me how much time I spend on productive (Scrivener/writing, Excel, Word, etc.) vs neutral (email) vs unproductive (twitter, news sites, shopping) tasks every day. And in the interest of accountability, I'm going to start posting my totals here every day, even when they're unflattering -- if I'm going to finish my book by October, I have to be ruthless about getting shit done.
And now I'm going to go to bed so that I can get up tomorrow and be ruthless. Goodnight!
Daily word count: 2136 (106.8% of goal)
Productive time: -- (not tracking the whole day)
RescueTime productivity rating: 1.1 (global average: 0.32)
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