On Writing
The story flows from my mind like pouring out a glass of water, but my fingers can’t type fast enough to keep up. This is the best kind of writing, the 30,000 words in ten days kind of flow. During these times, the story consumes me, and the monotony of daily life falls to the background. Even when I work and go out for walks, the characters are talking away in the back of my mind, creating scenes, speaking dialogue. One time I was so into a story that I left my stove and bathroom tap on, only coming out of my trance when I heard the repetitive sound of the water running down the drain.
On the worst writing days, the glass is dry, and writing is like trying to pull a sliver stuck in swollen skin. It takes a bit to work it loose, and it’s not always pleasant. I’ll wander over to scroll social media feeds or watch videos, and the characters are silent. During these times, I’m lucky to get a paragraph a day.
The difference in completion of a novel between these two flows is three months to years. Sometimes the flow comes, then runs out. Then I’ll set the story aside, work on other projects, and wait until I decide where things are going, or how to get to where I want my characters to go. Sometimes the story of crafted; sometimes it unfurls like a scroll.
Once in while, I’ll run into an abrupt end to the flow and find myself procrastinating. My best tactic for dealing with these moments is to go back in the scene to the last place I did have the flow, and start writing there again. Usually this gets things started again. Sometimes the characters just need to go somewhere else. The place I took them wasn’t the right place.
I’m a dialogue gal. When I’m alone, I’ll speak aloud like I’m acting out a movie, getting just the right inflection to the words. This helps me to visualize how the characters are looking and what they’re doing when they’re speaking.
I’d perhaps be better at writing scripts, because the most difficult things to write for me are descriptions and movements. I try to be as realistic as possible—there’s no lip-biting in my stories. (Have you ever seen an actual person bite their lip in your life?) Then I wonder if I’m being too repetitive. Is there too much sighing? Eye-rolling? Have I used “said” too much? I’m a big fan of “snapped” but try not to use it too much. Snapped, snipped, snarled, raged, barked, shouted. When you put them all together like that, we just sound like a pack of dogs and maybe it’s better to use “said” after all.
It’s better to get it all out and then go back and rewrite it. Some stories I’ve rewritten top to bottom six times over. When the story is truly finished, I’ll feel a happy, glowing joy in my heart, the feeling that it’s perfect. Then it’s time to go back and edit it.
Editing my own work is difficult. The sentences are familiar, so I have a great deal of trouble spotting mistakes. I also start getting into the story, which makes it harder to analyze sentence structure from an objective point of view. Luckily, I have pretty good sentence structure to begin with, so I’ve got that going for me.
Lately it seems that all I’m doing is writing. In addition to this website and my self-publishing plans, I still want to pursue real publishing. I have another blog that needs its monthly post and I haven’t started it yet. I also have another website that requires a weekly article. I’m unemployed. So I’m writing. Writing stories, blog posts, articles, query letters, cover letters. Doing research. I’m not formatting my novels for self-publishing yet, but I should be doing that, too.
I’m worried that I’ll die of old age before my books make their way into the hands of any readers. That thought should give me the kick in the pants I need to work on the formatting, but in the moment…I’d rather be writing.
