The Writing Life: Let It Go! Let It Go!
Writing is like trying to escape quicksand. The harder you try the faster you sink. This is the wonderful secret about writing. It feels effortless when the author’s mind is left to speak freely. The best writers draw on their creative energy without applying a filter, successfully turning off the voice in their head that insists on organizing words into something meaningful or big. They know that the art of storytelling comes from somewhere unconscious, a place so deep inside that they don’t know it’s there. Sometimes the best way to tap into it is to let it have its way with you, fire away as your fingers fly over the keyboard without even looking at the screen. Scenes unfold in your mind’s eye while your creative brain dumps its core onto the page. You don’t have to do anything except stay out of the way!
Or course gibberish is just gibberish, you must have a measure of talent, a knowledge of craft, and a stock of ideas that provide the interesting flaws and twitches for your characters. But don’t worry! You have a storehouse of ideas that has been built up over years of reading books and watching them unfold on the screen. You have accumulated thousands of stories since you heard your first nursery tale. You instinctively know more about storytelling than could ever be taught in a class. All you have to do is release your innate creativity by giving it free rein. You can’t choke it back with rational thinking and worry about whether you’ve dotted your i’s or properly placed your modifiers. Leave that for the editing cycle. You want your story to sing with passion and plumb the unexpected. If you hold on too tight, it’s bound to get stale and boring, and if it’s boring to you, imagine how your reader feels!
In a scene from my fourth book in the Legends of Orkney series, my characters were floating down a river. Boooring! So bam I added some mud sprites with sharp little teeth and pointed spears that swarmed all over them. Problem solved! But if you don’t write fantasy, your characters can still be uniquely human and do the unexpected if you’ll just get out of their way. Your creative spirit lives deep inside you and it’s afraid to come out if its going to be strangled by logic and reason, and criticized for poor grammar and sentence structure. So keep your inner critic at bay until the creative mind has done its job. Then bring out the big guns and get the editing brain in place. No one lieks typose.
Keep writing!
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