What Next?
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Today I am sitting and thinking: What next? I have broken a cardinal rule of writing, which is, Do not leave the work at a chapter's end; always give yourself a thread to pull tomorrow. So that I wake to a blank page 63, the beginning of a chapter, and because I am moving across time with this book, because there are multiple voices, because I have given myself freedom, I have choices. Choices are either liberating (and wasn't it only yesterday that I was celebrating choices?) or confounding. Today I feel confounded.
After two hours of circling, two hours of opening lines backspaced over, I move to another room, open an old book, and look at photographs, read anecdotes, statistics. I feel myself settling in toward something, but need the day, perhaps two days, perhaps a week, for the scene to ripen.
I'll keep the thoughts tucked in my head. Address the work of my corporate clients. Read the media's accounts of the inauguration of my city's fabulously wonky new mayor. Return to the page when I'm ready.
2 comments:
Thank you for acknowledging this down time, which really is creative time in a way that lots of people don't quite understand. I am fully supportive of letting things sit until they're ready for picking.
I have learned, after so many books (and so many failed books), that the time spent in between is as key as the time spent inside the big mix of writing it all down.
It's hard, when you are so obsessed with making something of each day, to consider a day that produces no actual page of writing a success.
But sometimes those thinking days are the most important days of all.
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