Writing Thoughts from the Passenger's Seat
The first thing I need to say is that I'm writing this here because it doesn't really fit with my main website's focus. Which is perhaps a problem in and of itself, but I'll worry about that another day. As you'll see if you read to the end of this post, I've given up worrying. Well, at least not about this, anyway...
What I wanted to share here was that I am writing again. Not the kind of spiritual self-development, reflective writing that I've been doing much of this year, although I am continuing to produce my Bloom by Moon content (goddess story, moon e-guide, visualization plus prompts, and creative exercise). The kind of writing that I've started again is my fiction. Now, the reason why this doesn't quite fit on my site is that my fiction is quite dark, and the part of myself that I portray online is quite light. So, I suppose what I'm saying is that my fiction doesn't fit my virtual persona - that digital face that I choose to show the world.
My solution is to share thoughts, excerpts, news etc. about my fiction writing here, because I do feel a need to share, just in a very low pressure kind of a way. I realize too, as I write this, that I seem to be quite non-committal about sharing this 'dark half', but that's not strictly true. My fiction writing still feels like a magical gift - I'm hoping it'll always feel that way - and I still feel quite precious of it. I'm scared that if I put too much pressure on it, it'll shatter into a hundred thousand little pieces that I won't be able to reassemble. Humpty-Dumpty like.
Completely irrational, I know, but that doesn't make the fear any less present.
Anyway, starting off in the low pressure way that I mean to continue, I wanted to tell you about an experience I had yesterday. To give you a little background, I am currently working on a story that I'm not quite ready to share the details yet, but which I am absolutely loving writing. Honestly, this kind of writing flow is the stuff dreams are made of. That's not to say any of it is any good - perish the thought! But it feels delicious to write.
So yesterday morning, I chose my OSHO Zen card of the day, like always, and this time the card was Control.
It's all about trying to ensure that everything remains locked down and carefully confined. It's about determining limits and boundaries and it's about dividing and defining.
Now, if I'm being perfectly honest, I tend to feel a bit miffed when I get a card I perceive to be a negative judgment on myself. The superficial butterfly in me would much rather a card like Flowering or Sharing or Awareness. Anyway, I got Control yesterday, and within a few minutes of hopping onto Twitter and sharing how well the words had been flowing in my story writing the day before, Katie John, who tweets under @KnightTrilogy, asked me if I plotted out my stories, whether it was 'all mapped out, or did I go with the flow'? I responded by saying it was a bit of both. That I kind of had the general idea of my destination, but left it up to imagination how to get there.
I then spent the morning writing a bit more of the story, and then getting myself into one of those terribly annoying mind fucks which started with a consideration of how I was going to promote the story when it was done. Should I start a new website? Should I tweet under a different username? Did I need a FaceBook page? Maybe what I needed was a pseudonym to differentiate my fiction writing from my spiritual writing...
And then I started to worry about the story itself. Where was I going with what I had already written? Was my protagonist convincing enough? Was any of what I had written so far a congruent narrative? And what was my mid-point mini climax going to be? I'd only thought of the big one at the end - maybe that wasn't big enough to go at the end... Maybe that was the mini one and I didn't really know the destination of this story at all!
Aren't you glad you don't live inside my head?
The outcome of this cyclone of self-doubt and future-focussed planning was that I didn't write another word of the story. So to say that my afternoon visit to the Edinburgh Book Festival to see Neil Gaiman talk about his books, his writing practice, his relationship to his creative process, was well-timed, would be putting it mildly.
What I learned from listening to Neil was this...
- A bit of both - free flow and moderate planning - is a fine approach. The very first question he was asked, was the same question Katie had asked me on Twitter just that morning - do you plot & outline before you write. And his answer was that he always knows something before he starts. Sometimes it's the beginning, sometimes it's the middle and sometimes it's the end. If it's the end, he'll write towards that imagined conclusion, but often finds that when he gets there, the destination was not where he'd anticipated. He lets the story do its own thing.
- Allowing the story to shape itself is the best way forward. Sometimes a short story will grow legs - or should that be chapters? - and end up a novel. Sometimes a story intended to end after 15000 words finishes at exactly that amount. The trick is to let it be what it wants to be, not what you wish it would be.
- As authors we are our stories' first readers. And that is an extremely privileged position to be in. Not only is it a privilege, but if we can take that position as writers, then we no longer drive the story - the story drives itself while we sit happily in the passenger seat, the tattered road atlas cast aside on the backseat while we loosely hold the route map in our minds, making general direction suggestions along the way. It goes without saying in this metaphorical scenario, the batteries have run out of the satnav.
- Sometimes story magic happens. Neil spoke specifically about a moment in the first chapter of The Graveyard Book where he includes a rhyme that he made up because, as he said, it was a fun way to use up a couple of pages of narrative. When he got to the stage of writing the last chapter, the rhyme recurs with a subtle alteration which encapsulates the themes of the whole story. Now, he had no idea that was going to happen, until it appeared on the page. When we seek to pin down our stories, the chances for story magic to happen are extinguished.
- The most enjoyable writing to read is that which has been written joyously. Neil said that his favourite books were written by authors who were clearly enjoying themselves as they were writing their stories. The importance of fun, in writing as in life, should never ever be under-rated.
I'm sure I probably have a whole heap of other takeaway points from the hour I spent listening to this man who lives by his imagination, but I think what it all amounts to is the call to create freely - to relinquish control over my story seedlings and let them grow, unhindered and unlimited, into whatever they want to be.
And so I'm taking my message from yesterday and disposing of my controlling inner critic - well, at least for the meantime til I get this story written. I'm sure she'll put in an appearance at some point - she always does eventually. I'm letting go of any fears about where the hell this story is going, or how I'm going to market it when it's finished. Instead, I'm just going to take my place in the passenger seat and enjoy the ride.
Are you with me?
