Monday, April 26, 2010

Proposal Update 5

Okay. The section on manufacturing consent is done. I’m realizing that a key motivational technique is not to lose heart when solution to the organizational challenge of a given paragraph isn’t immediately forthcoming. It’s okay to have a few days where you have no visible forward progress. But I should journal and think about the problem actively for a little while each day and not feel like a failure because the paragraph didn’t emerge on demand. Organized complex paragraphs requiring large amounts of synthesis are simply not available on demand anymore. While this is an annoying and offensive problem, it is important to bear in mind that it is not an insuperable problem.

Time to stick the new section into the paragraph rewrite worksheet. Once that’s cleaned up, we’re in the first draft’s endgame. I have to organize the cases and the logistics. Wheeee!

UPDATE: I've just gotten through the fifth paragraph of the sequence using the paragraph rewrite worksheet. I'm already exhausted. I get it now. MS gives me lesions. The brain needs to shunt ideas the long way around. Re-routing is exhausting. I get tired, so I stop. Then I forget to go back. I get nowhere, then I get depressed. The trick is to learn (1) to do this in small bits and pieces (2) while remembering to keep going back and working on it consistently, (3) despite the fact that there's very little that's rewarding about each piece and (4) not to get depressed that what I used to do quickly in my head, I now have to do piecemeal over weeks. Yeah it sucks, but this is doable! I can't forget that.

No comments: