Today. I’m going to start setting up my notebook and writing Rini & Butler (that’s the name I’ve chosen for now). With this piece, I have a few professional/personal development aims that I want to achieve that are outside submitting a good assignment.

Current Aims

Start Changing Writing Stylistics

This is so much harder than I thought it would be. Going back to re-do all the quotation marks is such a long and tedious task. Old habits die hard, I guess. I just need to work hard on forming my new habits.

I have a manual of the generally accepted Australian stylistics and will probably have to go through it several times before it all starts to neatly click into my writing rhythm. There’s a lot of little things that I didn’t realise came under a ‘stylistic set’ but I think working hard to learn all of them and employ them into my writing will be good for when I’m editing other people’s works to a guide.

Learn to Write Short Pieces of an Extended Piece

I have difficulty writing short pieces of larger work because I still try to cram all of the knowledge of the whole manuscript into the small scene. I need to get past the whole wanting to make people understand the entire plot and work on making them want to read the rest of the work by that one scene.

For this project, I want to be able to write the piece at the length it is meant to be and then cut a piece out of it appropriately without trying to force too much into one portion of 6,000 words.

I’m starting the piece with the scene that I roughly outlined when I first started thinking about but I’m not sure what I’ll submit will end up looking like. Today, I spent some time fleshing out the scene and thinking about the overall plot of the project and tomorrow I’ll be doing some more in-depth writing about the characters that will be included and maybe a little on the setting. So far today, I’ve written 3,146 words, that’s a pretty good start compared to what how much/often I’ve been writing recently, which just shows how much better engaged I am in this story compared to the other ones I presented as possibilities for the project.