What is Productivity?
Is it spilling a massive amount of random ideas onto the page, or is it planning and outlining? Is it jumping around through chapters and ages to write random snippets, or writing slowly, carefully, in order? I wish I knew the answer, but there’s one thing I know for certain right now–productivity is NOT doing homework.
It’s History, and we’re reviewing World War I. I love military history–it provides the most parallels to what I’m working on in Vallyra. But the textbook, somehow, makes it incredibly, impossibly boring. I’m supposed to slog through 20 pages of densely written text to get the main ideas of a war that lasted for years, involving nations all across the world? Sometimes–well, actually, more than sometimes–I think that we’ve got education all wrong. Still, I’ll go through with it. After all, the end-year test is the ultimate purpose of the class, and that’s what all this is for. To test out of it in college.
But then again, why would I want to do that?
Sure, it seems boring now, but what if I make it into my ideal college? What if classes were small enough to actually have discussions, to see how history applies today instead of just reviewing their impacts at the exact moment that they occurred? What if we explored instead of memorized? What if we were able to think?
But anyway, I’ve gone too far with that. My original purpose was to actually discuss what the hell I should be doing on this blog.
On one hand, I could have raw thought. I could put down everything that even vaguely relates to Vallyra, scraps of history or individual stories that I could one day weave into the fabric that is the world. I could describe systems and races, magic and customs, everything that has the slightest impact on the contours of the story. On the other hand, I could progress more thoroughly, outlining and planning with structure and intention, mapping out what exactly I want to write, and then filling in the world around it.
It’s a hard decision to make. On one hand, I’m horrible at being consistent in outlines–I keep it up for three chapters and then I’m done, and my story goes of on wild tangents that never seem to connect to the main arc. Okay, maybe that’s not entirely true, but it’s only a small exaggeration. My stories take on a life of their own. But then there’s the alternative, which is complete disorganization, but a massive volume of ideas. I can let myself run free across the pages, but have no way to pull it into coherent form.
I think a synthesis is the best choice, as I often find that it is in other cases. I should pour out all I have–all my thoughts, my ideas, everything that has even the slightest impact. But when I am satisfied that I have disgorged myself, I should shape an outline to put it all together.
Then I face another dilemma though admittedly it is farther off: how do I actually write?
Sure, it seems simple enough–write the story. But I have two choices. The first is to skip through chapters and ages and write each segment individually, retaining the feel of different people and different viewpoints that I originally wanted to preserve. But if I do that, I could also lose any sense of cohesion, the kind of unity that I would gain by writing in order. True, there’s only one real storyline through the ages, but even so, writing out of order might damage that.
But on the other hand, writing in the order that I choose allows me to put out ideas as they come, making sure that they’re as good as I can possibly make them instead of forcing myself to write them later. That’s what it comes down to–a choice between quality and organization of my plot. At least as I see it.
This time there’s no place for compromise–it’s one or the other. I can shift parts around, alter them, tweak them to fit into the main story, but that’s still not going to measure up to what would come out of slogging through it in linear order.
I’ll decide this later, but I have to decide by the time my outline is done.
