How to write fiction learning something new

Have you ever left for the next day a mountain of unfolded laundry? I can tell you have. Too tired and vexed to think in your manuscript or script, abandoned in the digital world of your tablet.

Yeah, it is harsh to find time and even more difficult if you have a job, have kids at home, little time for yourself. Me, talking about writing proficiency will just add stress to the already stressful steep of being jobless or snowed under or being inconvenienced by the bosses about going to the office…

I think you snorted after reading the title of this entry. It doesn’t seem like a good idea at all, does it? Nonetheless, learning something new doesn’t have to take all day long. It doesn’t have to be a daily occurrence. Is just like Chuck Wendig says:

«An act of building, and in a way, an act of erosion, too — like a trickle of water licking a canyon into stone over time.»

If I (a lazy bump) could learn a language in ten years of frustrated repetition and relish; why are you so different from me? Theatre, crochet, cooking… All in a steady, slow but still steady, way. It can be something as simple as ten minutes in YouTube. I know, YT is the best place to waste time.. Yet, you can waste time learning ten minutes of something interesting. Such as History myths about women.

Which can after all, become material. No possibility can be oversighted. Cooking is one of those things you can learn like that. A new baking recipe, even if the youtuber is Chinese, can add spice to any likes or dislikes in any character’s bio. Or enrich whatever that reaches your china.

To learn something new can be a salvation board. A board that won’t allow you to listen to or pay attention to panic or any self confidence issue. The salvation of keeping oneself busy living. Plus, there are always free stuff somewhere.

You can always make the kids part of it in a family ritual of sorts and earn fifteen minutes of silence for yourself whilst everyone crochets or fifteen minutes of monstrous cacophony if you and them start singing —equally amused. Sometime I listened in a podcast of «The History Hour»[1], an interview to a woman who lived part of her childhood in a Japanese camp at the WWII. She said children thrive in the regularity of the daily activities. (I think that mostly, it was the unaltered continuity of events since children like to know that 10:30 is lunch time, 11:00 school time again and bed time 10:00 pm.  My nephew spent his first Covid quarantine here, asking every other hour “What’s next?” Whenever he obtained an answer, he would stop asking satisfied).

It might not eliminate the need to research when needed but learning something new, orbits you towards topics you really feel like including in your writing. So…Why not to have fun in the process? Remember, you’re already giving up a bunch of stuff by being a writer/drawer.

Like, subscribe, research, learn. What’s the new thing you feel like learning now?

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[1] No idea which one was it.