Have you ever surfed? No, well have you ever baked a cake? It’s a little bit like writing in that there is a yin and yang of completing the task. You’re going to need to get comfortable with long bouts of quiet broken up with sudden and intense bursts of action.
When you’re surfing, you paddle out into the ocean and wait for the right wave. Once you see it, you have to time it right, which means paddling like hell to greet the wave at the perfect moment. When you’re baking a cake, there are periods of waiting: waiting for the oven to heat up, waiting for your eggs and butter to get to room temperature, waiting for your cake to set in the refrigerator. But there’s also go-time, when you need the exact right number of minutes of mixing the batter or kneading the dough or watching the double broiler melt your white chocolate, where you don’t have a second to waste.
Writing will always have this ebb and flow. Some days you need to sit with it, wrestle with the words, let the ideas tickle your toes like fish swimming beneath your surfboard. Other days you have no other choice but to hop on the back of the three-headed dog and wrestle it to the ground. Every waking moment you’ll be planning, dreaming, thinking about it, and for weeks that’s all that matters.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve woken up to the fact that for weeks, months, I’d been working on the same piece of fiction. I felt thrilled and alive, and a little bit ashamed. Was I doing something wrong? Was obsessing about my writing bad? All the years I’ve spent editing Dance With Me, I’ve had people looking at me with eyebrows raised, eyes questioning. What could I possibly still be working on? Shouldn’t enough be enough? Was I editing the piece to death?
Don’t let the world get to you. And definitely don’t overthink it. You’re literally building worlds, so yes, it will be your entire world.
I also can feel the residual anguish in my body for every time I’ve sat down to write…and grabbed my phone instead. Or spent all day at work daydreaming about my WIP, about the connections I wanted to bridge for my reader, about finding better ways to tell my characters’ stories, and then I’d get home to want to absolutely nothing to do with writing. All the creativity was gone. It was on the other side looking greener. I had the inspiration but not the zip in my fingers.
To be a writer is to understand the obsessiveness as well as the stillness. To accept the calm before the storm and be willing to step into its eye. To know that the world will shake its head and wonder why you care so much and to know that you won’t ever be able to explain that you don’t understand any other way to live.
Elegance Press 