The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them).

After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all.

Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here).

MY CHECK-IN

What am I working on this week?

My goal for the coming week is to have a short story about spirit photography finished by Christmas and the next instalment of What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard ready for the New Year, but they are very low-key target. Mostly, I plan on using the coming week to refill the well a little when it comes to creative work. I’ve got a small stack of books to read, and a small pile of movies to watch, and a notebook just waiting for the annotations to begin.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve been reading Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love and its an incredible primer on how to build a career based in on creative industries, without overtly being focused on it. It may well be added to the list of recommended reading I suggest every writer do before the start out.

I’ll admit there’s nothing revolutionary going on in the book, but it gives language and a framework to what can be a hard thing to explain to newer writers: the acquisition of career capital through diligent, good work that can eventually be transformed into the kind of career freedom that draws people to the arts. Teaching writing frequently means people are trying to skip to the latter, dreaming of the first book becoming a best-seller, and Newport traces case-study after case-study through various industries that shows why this isn’t a viable approach.

What part of my project an I avoiding?

It’s been eighteen months since the last Die Hard instalment here on the blog, so I’ve been avoiding that post like the plague for a very long time. Trying to remember that I don’t have to write all of it at the same time, and it’s perfectly viable to just take one bite of the elephant, but slow progress is not my jam when it comes to blogging.

It doesn’t help that the second half of the second act, which is where we’re up to, is probably the least interesting part of story structure and there’s not a lot of good resources for fleshing out how I talk about it.