[jwplayer config=”Internal” playlistid=”1537″]
Welcome to Drafting Your Book, Week Four. Today we are going to talk about the parts of you, the writer, that get your book written!
I call the two parts of me that collaborate, often contentiously, on my writing “the storyteller” and “the brain.” The storyteller is the part of me that dreams. I mean that literally. When you go to sleep, you tell yourself stories for much of the night. Without the brain to tell you that you’ve never been somewhere or met someone or experienced something, your storyteller creates worlds and people and events willy-nilly. You don’t need to make a plan first, do research or keep a “To Dream” list by your bed. You don’t need to be in the mood, to feel inspired, or even to be on a comfortable mattress. You don’t even need to be 100% asleep. Have you ever had that experience where you are halfway asleep and things begin to shift, or you hear dialog that the person with you is not actually producing? As soon as the brain takes a snooze, the storyteller comes out to play.
The brain, on the other hand, likes a plan. The brain likes to be in control and wants things to make sense. Natalie Goldberg and others talk about the editor and the writer, but the brain can write, too, and truthfully, if you’ll let her, the storyteller can edit. They have different strengths and characteristics, rather than different jurisdictions.
With the help of your writing brain, you’ve gathered and organized your notes, built your structure. Now you have to put words onto the page, which requires a different aspect of your writing-self: the storyteller. The storyteller is intuitive, imaginative, inventive. It can be hard to break away from the controlled force of the brain, the important adult life planning and business that we work hard to juggle and manage every day, and give way, instead, to the vivid, dreamy play of the storyteller. Resistance can be strong. The desire to clean your house, check your email, get in touch with an old friend from years ago, will arise as you prepare to sit down and begin. Ignore the dictates of distraction. Ignore the panic, the fear, the strong voice of the critic that tells you you are not ready or that the work cannot be done or done well.
Write. More than where, how or with what you begin, the key is to put words on the page, to move into storyteller thinking, which involves trying things on the page. The athlete concept is useful here, too—you are moving when you put one word in front of the next—and movement is all. You are learning, exploring, and creating questions for the storyteller to answer. Don’t worry about whether what you write will be part of the final product. The first draft is a path toward the later forms of the book, not a creation of its core.
That said, you’ve done your planning, and so you can begin at the beginning: look at the “status quo” of your Aristotle’s incline, the first problem in your problem-solution list, the first notecard or notecards in your index card pile or your computer screen. Use these as a framework, being willing to see what might surprise you, to make unexpected connections and strange discoveries.
Call this your discovery draft. More than anything else, you are building a habit here, a habit of daily writing. Out of that, any number of wonderful books can grow.