I posted a few weeks ago about reaching the three-month mark of writing daily, so here is a throwback to when I was about to reach the two-month mark (and while I was in the middle of a weeklong writing/outlining challenge). It should also be noted that, due to the strike in Hollywood, I have paused using the entertainment mentioned in this post. I am currently watching Mr. Queen daily during my writing sessions and will continue with other Asian dramas until the end of the strike.
I have been writing daily for almost two months at the time this post was originally written. When I had started my writing practice (along with filming said practice for TikTok), I wrote for 45 minutes occasionally, but most days were for 30 minutes. I had meant to switch off and do a little of both time frames, but 30 minutes took over.
I’m not complaining because it was nice not to have to write for super long and still get the practice done. With every writing session, I either had a tv show episode, a portion of a movie, or a randomly selected playlist of songs playing. But recently, as in today is day 4, I changed to writing for an hour on Mondays through Thursdays.
Why I changed my Monday-Thursday schedule
Why did I change the time amount? Simply because of MASH. With 11 seasons worth of episodes, I wanted to get through the show, but I also wanted to have other tv shows playing. I did a rough calculation of how many days it would take me to get through the show, and when I realized (kind of obvious) that it would take over a year to get through this show, I knew I needed to make a change.
With only four days for “Tv show watching” at only one episode a day, I decided to switch to an hour so that I could get through 2 episodes a session. If my math is right (ha), I’ll be finished right before or around the New Year with M*A*S*H, and then I can start a new show. I already have a waiting list of some of my favorite (and wholly owned) shows.
As a fun side note, here are some of the shows I’d like to use as entertainment for my daily writing sessions:
- Murder She Wrote (12 seasons)
- I Love Lucy (144? episodes)
- Jane Eyre (4 episodes)
- Sense and Sensibility (3 episodes)
- Pride and Prejudice (6 episodes)
- Leverage (5 seasons)
- Psych (8 seasons)
- Castle (8 seasons)
- Doctor Who (12 seasons and counting)
I won’t necessarily be watching them in that order, but that might be the order it ends up being. There are a few other shows that I would like to collect, more for my own entertainment than to accompany my writing. I have also debated on whether or not to use shows on streaming platforms. I actually had started off with Cheers, but when it got pulled from Peacock and moved to Paramount+, I decided to switch to M*A*S*H, since I have access to it on both Hulu and DVD. If I were to do so, The Dick Van Dyke show would definitely be added to the list.
The two-episodes-a-day option might not work with some of the shows I’ve listed above, as MAS*H makes it easy since the episodes are only 30 minutes long, but several of the shows listed above are 45 minutes to an hour or even longer.
How has it gone so far
As I mentioned earlier, today is only the 4th day of me doing this. I started on Wednesday (June 7), did another hour session on Thursday (June 8), and then went back to 30 minute sessions over the weekend. Yesterday (Monday, June 12), I picked it up again yesterday (Monday, June 12) and now I’m caught up. It was important that I started the time change when I did, because it would allow me to finish season one on the first day and then start season 2 the next, keeping everything even.
Not that it was surprisingly easy to switch to an hour, but it was easier than I thought. Not that it won’t have it’s troubles. My drive to finish the show faster really helps keep the motivation going in not just doing this, and it also buffer my tiredness, especially when I am writing late.
Does it affect the rest of the current lineup?
So far, not at all. It’s nice having the option to do only 30 minutes over the weekend, and at least from what I experienced over the weekend, gave me a break from the hour-long stretch and also made me look forward to getting back into the hour-long stretch.
The balance helps, since I’m still building up the discipline to write daily. It’s become relatively easy for me to sit down for 30 minutes, but writing for a full hour still pushes it a bit. That’s a good thing, since it means I’m growing as a writer. But having the switch to 30 minutes for three days a week is so far still great.
What will I change moving forward
I like my system so far, though I do want to be better about writing at an earlier time of the day. I haven’t missed a day yet, and I love seeing a newly added video join the remainder on my TikTok page. But there has been more than one day when I wrote quite late into the evening, only finishing and posting anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour before midnight.
As a side note, from the video-taking side, I do want to keep improving of how I do my videos. Specifically for recording and editing the clips so that I can get enough in each video. With recording during two episodes, at times, I can focus too much on one episode and not leave enough space for the other episode. I want to improve on that.
Would I lengthen the time again
In the future, when I have the opportunity to spend more time on content creation, I would like to extend the time I spend writing to even longer. While I do have my videos to consider, because I often try to film snippets throughout the session, I think I will keep the videos to the 30-minute (or hour mark). That way, I can still get decent clips for the video and for social media, but the time can extend beyond. Considering how long tv episodes can get, especially for some of the future shows I want to include, that would be quite useful.
So far, it has been successful in switching to a longer time. I seem to be able to make it work with the time amount, but it’s still too soon to tell what the outcome will be. Worth mentioning is the fact that this decision to increase the time coincides with the decision to outline my content. I’m doing a trial of it this week, with the posts being scheduled for sometime in August as a 7-part series.
Leave a Reply