My Creative Mojo

Today I replied to a blog post from John Vorhaus, titled “Decide to Do Things Now“.

It was written stream of consciousness which has been my writing M.O. lately. After posting it, I realized how long it had become for a blog comment & panicked for a moment, thinking that my comment might have been longer than his actual blog post. I quickly scanned up to his post and was relieved to see that my lengthy comment was “only” 50% the size of his post.

And then I thought — this is a good description of what I have been going through as a writer, and I’m sure many others can relate. This is just as suitable as a post on Creative Mojo and certainly worth sharing. Who knows, perhaps John will post a lengthy comment in return.

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When I write, there’s certainly a tendency to plot, ponder, and obsess about every detail and a desire for perfectionism that leads to a common writer past time of “not getting anything done.” How can I write something good without a killer outline?

Last fall I discovered NaNoWriMo, a challenge to write a 50,000 word first draft of a novel during the month of November.
30 days.
50,000 words.
Average output needs to be 1666.66/words per day. And sometimes that .66 word is the most interesting!

I learned to shut off the critic and the thinking brain and wrote stream of consciousness. I was no longer afraid of writing something bad or going many pages in the wrong direction.

I now have more than 100,000 words. Portions need to be completely thrown out. Much of it needs some serious editing. And through this process I discovered my story and learned a ton about my characters.

More importantly, I realized that my previous efforts were focused on trying to perfect an outline before diving into the writing and in doing so, I was considering and rejecting an initial idea that wasn’t fully explored. The idea for a story beat might not have been good, and by rejecting it, I wasn’t allowing myself to explore the idea. Not allowing myself to dig deeper and mine it. Not allowing the idea the opportunity to transform into something great, or lead to something completely different that is much better.

And then I’d wonder why writing is so difficult. It turned out all I needed to do was slip some GHB into my inner critic’s drink to silence it long enough to crank out the words.

So now my current process is to take whatever idea or imperfect-not-fully-outlined-story and write it “no holds barred”. Let the vivid details come out. Let inanimate objects speak. Switch from first to third person. Let the characters do things that surprise me. And out of all that comes clarity, the outline gets reworked based on what I learned from the long form writing, which then allows for editing and refining of the story to match. The process certainly isn’t pretty, but it allows for momentum and gets me somewhere. It’s “The circle of writing.”