Great success!

Yesterday I wrote about finding writing very draining. Today I wrote for an hour without this problem.

I think that what I was doing wrong was trying to keep everything about the story I was writing in my head at the same time - straining to keep everything in focus at once. In a way this is possible but it takes a lot of energy and is not really necessary. Today I refused to let myself enter that state but was still able to write and achieved plenty. I found myself using verbal, logical thinking to establish the scope of the passage I was working on at any given time rather than attempting to hold onto a spatial grasp of the entire story at once.

The concept of scope in computer programming seems relevant here: a complex piece of software will thousands of variables, each of which can contain one of a set of values. The human brain can typically hold seven pieces of information at any one time. Attempting to contemplate the interaction of a thousand variables is beyond most humans. Therefore most programming languages will let the programmer split things up in such a way that she only has to deal with a limited number of variables at any one time: the rest of them are not visible, they are out of scope.

When working on a story there are a lot of things to consider. A lot of decisions to make. A lot of variables. Too much to hold in my tiny little mind at once.

So (I tell myself) chill out. Let the unnecessary stuff fall out of scope - it'll still be there when you return - concentrate on the passage, the moment.