Like, yes, this is relative, and some writers I know can write an excellent short story in a day – in fact, my collection April Showers, which contains some of my favourite ever short stories, was drafted in ten days IIRC, so I can definitely write a short story in two days.
But.
I’ve decided recently that I want to improve my art skills enough to be able to draw my characters for book art and for RGPing purposes and suchlike, so I’ve committed to doing one figure drawing a day for a year. I’m talking like, the bare minimum counts. So far they’ve all been 100-second sketches with my finger on the trackpad, because that’s what I’ve had with me when I needed to do them. And, frustratingly, I seem to be improving after only five days.
Day 1 –
Day 5 –
Would I improve by writing five short stories? Absolutely. But it would still take me a lot more than the <5 mins it takes to do my quick sketch of the day, and that makes me cranky, because there’s no real writer equivalent to ‘a quick 100-second sketch’. Even the worst and sloppiest draft will still take a few hours. My ADHD brain does not WANT progress and improvement to be slow, I want it to be quick and gratifying, like the apparent fast improvement in my sketching.
I have no conclusion, I’m just here to be grumpy about the fact that my heart’s chosen art form is a slow one đŸ˜€
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