Writing with Feeling

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Writing process

Recently I was in a session with a Calyco healer (healing through energy).  As we were talking, she related an interesting story.  She has a friend that has a beautiful voice and recorded a CD professionally.  The healer had bought the CD and started to listen to it, but couldn’t get through half of it because she felt anxious.  This happened every time she plugged in the CD, so she threw it away.  Later she asked her friend, “What was going on when you made that CD?”  The healer’s friend related a tale of being rushed through production, always feeling behind, and overall… anxious.

Since then I’ve noticed writers saying things like, “I just got my manuscript back from the editors, and the only chapters they disliked were the ones I didn’t like.”  Coincidence?  I’ve also talked to another author who said her bestselling book is the one she really loved as she wrote it.  Interesting.

My thought is, pay attention to how you’re feeling as you write.  We can’t help life going on around us – sometimes it’s ideal and sometimes it’s not.  Authors are human!  Imagine!  However, you don’t have to let life affect you “in the zone.”  If it’s true you can mass produce feelings, you don’t want to produce something people are going to act adversely to.

Now there’s a plot.  Someone writes a book that mass produces _________ and makes ____________ happen.  That could be a cool story!

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Vertigo

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Writing process

ver·ti·go

1. 1. The sensation of dizziness.
   2. An instance of such a sensation.
2. A confused, disoriented state of mind

Whenever I try to take on all the things my life demands at once, I find myself in that state of vertigo.  The world seems to swim right before my eyes with the overwhelming amount of work that needs to be done.  What seems to work for me is taking action and spending a short amount of time on it daily until the task is done.   I can’t tell you how many people, including my husband, refuse to learn this principle.  They think if a little is good, a lot is better, but that’s not true.

Working on my manuscript a little at a time, consistently the same amount of time everyday, does more for me than emersing myself for a full day.  Why?  Because while I’m busy creating a world for characters, the world I physically live in spins out of control.  I may delegate some things, but mother’s attention is still needed.  The days I have allowed myself to focus like that, I find myself spending more time away from my work fixing the damage done by neglect in other life areas.  Compare that to a constant maintenance that *magically* yields extra pockets of time to use the way I need to – more time for plot, more time for character development, more time for beefing up dialogue and descriptions.

In essence, more time for writing.  =)

I also believe there are times when you just have to let everything go and get something over with.  That’s what I did this past week.  It had nothing to do with writing, or homeschooling, or even home maintenance (until the weekend anyway).   Life was purely about my husband’s new job, getting his blood pressure down (he’s now on a small dosage of meds), and helping the kids adjust to the fact that Dad wasn’t going to be there every single day.  Happily, he came home this weekend before leaving for a month, so they could see that even after long spells away from home, Daddy still comes back.  But now that the job thing is settling down, I am able to go back to reestablishing our family rhythms – which includes exercise for me.  More exercise means more oxygen to the brain….  and we all know what better brain power does for our typing fingers!

I think that’s what it all boils down to – the more balanced our lives are, the less we’re distracted by it.  Less distractions, more focus.  Better writing.  It’s the small things that enable the big things.  Here’s to saying no to vertigo!

The Idea Gestation Period

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Writing process

When I was first married, I had a short fuse with a long grudge.  My husband would start out, “Patience is a virtue,” to which I’d finish, “that I don’t have.”

However, the more I hang around writers, the more I realize the patience and tenacity it takes to see the idea through to completion.  I used to be one of those readers who scoffed at people whose writing content seemed substandard compared to others.  Shame on me.  Now when I hear folks slight a writer, I flinch, and often speak up.  It may not be high on the classics list, but anyone who has taken an idea and FINISHED the story, let alone found an editor who helped them get it to publication, is worthy of some amount of respect in my book.  Regardless of how I feel about the content.

Sitting under Dave Wolverton’s tutelage this past week, I got to hear all sorts of fascinating stories on how bestsellers have come to be.  For instance, J.R.R. Tolkien had a part of the saga unwritten for over a yr. (Sorry – I have a lot of stories in my head and can’t remember which part – I think Mordor but I could be wrong.)  Then he had an experience that gave him what he needed to finish the part.  I had never thought of Tolkien’s writing process and decided to look it up – do you realize the man took 10 years to write LOTR?  And then the fights with the publishers that ensued afterward.  Wow.

When Dave told us that story, I was amazed.  Sometimes I get frustrated with myself because it seems to take so long to get what lives  in my head written.  I begin to doubt I’m the right person to tell this story.  Maybe I don’t have what it takes.  Maybe I’m not good enough.

Which is ridiculous.  If I wasn’t the right girl to tell the story, it wouldn’t have come to me in the first place.

My sister mE commented last week on my own gestation period.  I was telling her the back story that was finally shaping up in my mind.  She said she couldn’t believe how much the story had changed from its original conception.  It went from a simple ghost story to now no ghosts, but a rather large (some might call it epic – not sure about that.  Define epic?) contemporary fantasy. The more I change it and “discover” the back story, the more excited I get.  I have had ideas that came from really weird places, but as I do the research, I begin to see how it all fits together.  Maybe the stories do write themselves.  Maybe writers are simply vessels to help the public know they’re there.  Kinda like Michelangelo uncovering David.

All I know is, I don’t get frustrated when I’m stuck on an idea anymore.  Instead, I go work on another part of the novel.  Invariably, how to get unstuck comes.  With patience, and a little tenacity.  😉