This is one of our stand-bys in the Book Writing World. I assign it to my Mentoring Group each quarter, and each quarter people learn something new about the old ways they work and how to support them and turn them into dynamite strategies for accomplishing everything you dream of accomplishing.
These life-changing strategies are a mix of my big sister’s brilliant advice, Julia Morgenstern’s philosophy in Organizing from the Inside Out, my own teaching experience and my hard-earned lessons through trial and error as a writer myself. Enjoy!
[jwplayer mediaid=”5860″]
I seem to begin with deep emotional experiences from my past and riff off them, spin the emotions into characters, develop plot from the characters and then make many drafts, such that the original writing has almost no resemblance to the final draft other than a character with the main emotion that began the whole thing.
Part of the process, for me is totally metacognitive. It’s looking at a video like this and remembering that it’s ok that, for this week, that the main task has been for me to read, read, read (research) and write only a very little bit, along with some structural planning ideas. It’s scary to trust your own process because it’s going into the unknown, inventing something brand new (a watershed) and trying to trust that the work wil be better for it. I don’t know what will happen. And the process just involves not giving myself any project deadline (right now) and just enjoying this evolution. In the end, I’m trying to maintain the courage to assert my hunch about what the work actually needs, as opposed to what I think another writer would do to accomplish something. I have an idea. I feel like I’m taking a leap to see if I can put it into words. It could take weeks, months or years. I just don’t know. I want to let those possibilities exist while maintaining my will to continue.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when you talked about money spent to figure out how to write! But maybe the conferences and MFA are part of my necessary detours. My not finishing a book comes after having four published–though each one has been more difficult. I”m not sure if it’s because I keep setting a higher bar–more challenging subjects and settings, more complexity–or because I’m becoming more fearful or too self-conscious or some combination of all that. Or maybe none of it. Meanwhile, I’ve grown as a writing teacher, my students are happy, but I feel separated from the part of me that used to let stories spool out fairly effortlessly, that felt driven to put those stories into words. It was work to reshape those messy first drafts, but the first drafts came easily, and the reshaping was doable and satisfying once I figured out what to focus on. Now, I feel like I’m pulling teeth–from an elephant. Or a tiger–and maybe I’m too scared even to get close. I have trouble finding my focus. What does my main character want? What do my secondary characters want? Somehow, I never used to ask this question, but some part of me knew and put it into my stories. Now, I either don’t know–consciously or unconsciously–or I can’t connect with the part of me that knows. I have a 3rd draft that lacks cohesiveness–it’s flat; nothing really happens–and a new draft of another novel that I’m scared to move forward with, because it, too, feels unfocused.