Year of Words: July — Consciously Incompetent

In the grand scheme of things, I suppose a year is not a terribly long time. But having broken it down into monthly reports and daily totals tallied on a spreadsheet, it truly feels very, very long. All that to say, we are over halfway through my Year of Words!

In many ways, this challenge has been much easier than I anticipated. Even though some days I’ve only been able to manage a single sentence, (I’m looking directly at you, H on 4th May, who wrote an almighty 15 words), most of the time I’ve managed to dedicate at least half an hour a day to my projects. I’m gradually finding that the time it takes for my Writer Brain to kick into gear is getting shorter and shorter. Top tip: noise-cancelling headphones are the greatest purchase I ever made, and some orchestral soundtracks blaring through them gets my brain going in no time. There’s been some highs and lows, sure, but I have tens of thousands of words that I didn’t have last year, which I'm really proud of.

Let’s cut to the numbers: there’s 8630 words on the board for July, making a running total of 62,883. I ended up turning my attention back to Project Rook, and I’m really enjoying writing a second draft. I think editing is my favourite part of the writing process: allowing myself to acknowledge my mess of ideas, and seeking a way to adapt, to polish, to express an idea in the clearest and most beautiful way that I can.

I read somewhere this month about the four stages of learning a new skill. The first is Unconscious Incompetence: you’re rubbish at it because you don’t know what you’re doing, and barely know what success looks like. The second part is Conscious Incompetence, where you know enough about the subject to know that you suck, but still lack the experience and the craft to do well. This is the sticking point. You can see when you’re making mistakes, but don’t yet have the skill to avoid or fix them properly. Now that I’m actively honing my craft, I’m slowly — hopefully — making my way from the second step towards the third, Conscious Competence. Although it requires lots of time and effort, your results are starting to show some proficiency. I’m reading and writing as much as I can, but that means I’m acutely aware of both the mastery in the things I consume and my glaring lack of such skill in the things I produce.

One day, if I keep this up, I might be able to reach the mastery of the fourth stage, Unconscious Competence — being able to use the skill with ease, without thinking, and be able to teach it to others. But I’m not sure that’s even possible for something as vast and as fiddly as storytelling. I have some thoughts about the extent to which you can be taught to write creatively, (she says, glancing nervously at her degree), but that’s a story for another time.

Looking forward, I have high hopes for August. Working beneath an academic calendar grants me the luxury of school holidays, so I have a free month stretching out before me. I would absolutely love to get really stuck into things, perhaps return to Project Pine soon, but we’ll see what happens.

Until then, fare well, wherever you fare,

— H