Another reason family, and kids can focus your mind.
By Alex Kessinger on
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Last year I wrote a post about how having two kids in two years focused my work. I still think this is true, and today I read a post by Aaron Mahnke about almost the same topic.
My 60-90 minutes of write time needs to be the most productive, most efficient time I can manage. But because it comes at the end of the day, my ability to retain fine details is rapidly deteriorating. Add in a finger or two of whiskey, and it’s a miracle that I get anything written at all.
Wireframing My Fiction is about how Aaron focuses the small amount of time he has each day to focus on personal projects. I feel like we both have the same idea with slightly different frames.
So I have developed a technique over time that I like to call wireframing. If you are familiar with the process most web developers use for the creation of websites, then my process will feel familiar. Wireframing is all about putting the bare essentials on paper to gain a complete picture of the website, but without all the decorative and functional elements. It’s the skeleton that will be built upon, like that wire figure in your college art class that you would have to mash clay onto in some vain attempt to build a human body.
I don’t write fiction. I write blog posts, and make websites. My ideas usually come to me in the weirdest places, so I write them down in simplenote the best I can, and then I put the idea like on the wall in my head. I will then continue to think about it until I can’t think about it anymore. Then it others spews into a post, or into some code, and I’m done. Keeping the notes is key. Without them I would forget some of the finer points of my thoughts.