The groove
I've been writing little stories to put in the Valentine's day cards I'm sending to some of my friends. I've been failing so far in my "write more" campaign--at least till now--so I'm fascinated at how much more quickly I'm able to pick up writing again than after my last hiatus.
The last one, granted, was at least five years long. And I hadn't done much serious fiction writing, even then. But I thought the process would be similar: a lot of starts and stops, waiting for the right words, constantly editing even though I know I shouldn't. But it's completely different.
I feel...like my thought processes, at least the ones not related to physics, are writerly. So even in terms of social thinking, I tend to "practice" conversations, which is an awful lot like writing a story with real people as characters. And the exercise of writing these little stories for my friends is less like laboring to come up with something that works, and more like becoming aware again that I can capture these fleeting bits of fancy my brain creates all the time. I'll be sitting somewhere, think, "Oh, that would make a nice bit of a story," and there's a beat before I remember that--oh yes! I CAN write it down! And because I'm trying to write now, in a way I haven't had time to for a while, that's more...directed than it was before.
It also feels pleasantly like cleaning out cobwebs from my mind.
The last one, granted, was at least five years long. And I hadn't done much serious fiction writing, even then. But I thought the process would be similar: a lot of starts and stops, waiting for the right words, constantly editing even though I know I shouldn't. But it's completely different.
I feel...like my thought processes, at least the ones not related to physics, are writerly. So even in terms of social thinking, I tend to "practice" conversations, which is an awful lot like writing a story with real people as characters. And the exercise of writing these little stories for my friends is less like laboring to come up with something that works, and more like becoming aware again that I can capture these fleeting bits of fancy my brain creates all the time. I'll be sitting somewhere, think, "Oh, that would make a nice bit of a story," and there's a beat before I remember that--oh yes! I CAN write it down! And because I'm trying to write now, in a way I haven't had time to for a while, that's more...directed than it was before.
It also feels pleasantly like cleaning out cobwebs from my mind.