Now is not the time!
Stories have a funny habit of creeping up and ambushing you when you’re least expecting them. At times their insistence on being heard is almost pernicious in nature, and it seems as though some of the best ones wait until you’re smack-bang-in-the-middle of your current work in progress before they reveal themselves, jumping up and down and waving their arms and saying, ‘Look at me, I’m much more interesting than that old thing you’re working on!’
I’ve blogged about this before, but when it happens it leaves a writer in a bit of a quandary. Because stories need to ferment inside your head if they’re ever going to become anything substantial. You need to give them time and attention. They’re not like one of those robot vacuum cleaners that you turn on and let trundle around your room, doing their own thing until you come back later to check what has turned up in the dust compartment. They take up brain space, and they take up the part of your brain used for ‘making stuff up’. And if you’re in the middle of another story, that can get in the way.
I twittered something about this the other day, and a friend of mine agreed, saying that there should be a holding pen for these stories, where they can be corralled and left for a while.
I’ve had two big ‘Pick Me, Pick Me!’ ideas in the last few months, and the first one couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time. The one I think is a sure-fire winner came out of the blue when I was in the most difficult stage in the writing process – trying to fix a broken narrative. I was already struggling to get my latest manuscript back on track, after I’d lost control of at least two story strands, when this new, super-duper, worldwide-bestseller, sure-to be-a-hit story idea came to me like a bolt of lightning. Now I know that it’s a good thing to have these ideas (it’s when they dry up you’re in BIG trouble), but come on… timing people, timing!
What I wanted to do was stop everything I was doing with my WIP, and start work on this Ay Carumba! interloper. I knew how the new story would start and how exciting the opening chapter would be. I knew how my protagonist would be both sensitive and fearless in the face of the enormous conflicts he would face, and I knew how I could weave in that all important love interest in such a way that it would seem natural and heartfelt.
What I did was shelve it.
I have pushed into a quiet corner of the ‘making stuff up’ part of my brain, and told it to sit there and not disturb the rest of the class.
It’s sulking, but, thank goodness, it has not picked up its coat and walked out. I keep catching sight of it while I’m writing on the blackboard, and I know it waits for these moments. It shuffles its feet and coughs loudly, but I refuse to give in.
For me, this is one of the main differences between being a writer and being a professional writer. A writer would jump on the shiny new idea. He or she would scrap the work in progress, telling themselves that they’ll come back to it, and start on the sure-fire hit. The WIP would end up in a box under the bed, or a forgotten folder somewhere on the hard drive. As a professional writer, you can’t allow that to happen. You have to push ahead with the story you are working on, the one you have pitched to your agent or your publisher and have been commissioned to write. Even if it’s not as bright and shiny and exciting as the next-big-thing story that has come knocking at your door, you have to write it and write it to the best of your ability. Because that’s your job.
