Breakthrough!
Oh, Lordy…I finally had a good breakthrough day today. Finally! Finally.
I had a one-on-one about a month ago with an author far more advanced than I, and one of my takeaways from that conversation was that there should be a separation between editing/outlining/brainstorming and actual writing. Based on my own assessment of my creative habits, I decided that I should try a schedule where my writing happened in the evenings, and my outlining/brainstorming happened in the morning.
That was backwards.
I need to write in the morning, and outline/brainstorm at night. At night is when I’m my most free-form creative. Big ideas. Flashes of scenes. Images. Music. Smells. That happens for me at night. High energy thinking. No boundaries or goal posts. Just pure creation.
Writing, for me, is much more about the flow, about switching my brain OFF and just letting the words come out, pouring them into a pre-designed form. It’s a low-energy activity at its best, believe it or not. I know that sounds weird, and it’s definitely not an iron-clad theory…but it worked tonight like gang busters.
I’m going to try it again tomorrow.
But…I had my breakthrough on this particular hangup. I have a feeling it’s not the LAST breakthrough I’ll need to find with this book…but man, it is teaching me A LOT about how I write.
I have to be very loose and forgiving with my outlines, because I’m learning that they will change. It’s realizing that they will change because that is a NORMAL part of my writing process (at least right now), and not because there is something inherently wrong with the story I’ve chosen to tell.
I’m also learning that any time I hit a roadblock and find it impossible to move forward, it’s because I’m working with a place-holder idea. A place-holder idea is an idea waiting to be replaced by a better idea, or ultimately the RIGHT idea. The best idea takes me a few iterations sometimes, and sometimes when I’m sketching out my stories, I gloss over details that have to fleshed out more. Sometimes I can just make that stuff up on the fly. Sometimes I can’t, and when I can’t, I have to stop and grind through it. That is starting to seem NORMAL. Finally.
I’m not broken…I’m just learning my process.
I’m seeing this second book much differently tonight than I have the past couple nights: tonight I don’t see a steaming pile of impossible…I see a piece of work that is teaching me a lot about my self; the kinds of things that only experience can teach me, and man…I am fucking grateful for that.
Night.