Stephen King recommends stepping away from your first draft for at least six weeks. And in the meantime, go write something else. At least until you forget about the first thing. So that when you come back to it, it is an alien thing, and something to whose parts you have little emotional attachment, should you need to alter or remove them.
Would this be the best route for me?
I worry that if I step away,
“Brain. I need a word to describe darkness.”
“What quality would you like to modify?”
“It’s night, and there are no stars, so how about just ‘really dark?’ So, intensity.”
“Would you like a modifier of the same category of contextually-determined primary-quality as ‘darkness?’ Or would you rather something of a different primary quality?”
I find myself wanting to know where I’m going before I write. But, “You do know. Your right side is doing its thing. You just can’t tell what it’s doing until you write it.”
Just keep writing. Trust whatever comes to mind at the time (MAKE SURE MY RIGHT SIDE HAS BEEN ENLIVENED?). Distrust looking too far ahead—coming up with specifics or links (?) before actually getting to those points (contra intuits/feelings that encompass potential links without involving specifics). That’s utilizing the left too early, I imagine.
I am super eager to wrap up the first draft, to conclude all things, and it dawned on me that perhaps things aren’t ready to conclude. And perhaps me trying to do so is premature. Is there some merit to “letting the story dictate when it ends?” I know that sometime boundaries benefit creation. But at the same time, I went over the page limit a whole bunch when I wrote for class. I cut it back during editing. But it was fairly common to write over until I got to that point where it just felt finished.
Schol! Whatever that means.
Is it a joy to write?
Joy joy joy joy.
Yoj.
Yooooj. Yojoy. Joyoj. Joyoi. Oi oi oi!
I have forgotten the reason, or reasons, to write. I have forgotten them, or they have been displaced.
I now seek to win the tournament. Snap kick him in the neck. Go for the cut eyelid. Drive yourself until you bleed sweat.
The scoreboard drives you: How are you doing now? What about now? Not good enough… Still not good enough… What about now? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with this game?
I need to nuance my understanding of the purpose of clustering. We learned it for random vignettes, but this is not its only usage. This was merely a tool to learn the process and to practice it.
Because the right brain does not order or sequence or define, because it seeks to explore, to make new connections—to join numerous sprigs into some unknown end, it seems to work best without any agenda in place—any known end. Else, you are sequencing, defining, ordering things to fit an agenda,
I wonder if, perhaps, my vision should not be one of writing so much as of creating. That is, I write to create. I could do other things that are creative as well. The creating is the thing, and the creating makes writing so much more wholesome to the reader.
What’s more, what if I focus all of my creation on a single point, a single secondary world and all of the laws and guidelines and mythologies therein. Wouldn’t that world be the richer for it? Wouldn’t it be more worthwhile,
I have kept myself from internet access for my past few writing sessions, and I am finding that in my off time I am still thinking of writing. In fact, it doesn’t seem as difficult to get into the writing mindset at all—when I have sat down to write-or-else. I am wondering if there is a connection, and it seems like there might be. Dr. Glahn mentioned how letting our attentions be drawn to other things constantly keeps us from really delving into things. Before, I would go to Facebook or to Netflix or to YouTube, and sometimes these would just be short trips, but I wonder if even these little distractions had serious repercussions.
You are not constrained to write anything other than what’s natural to you.
And what’s natural to you can be described as “what you want to write apart from external constraints.”
It’s the same idea as “be yourself.” You don’t want to act like someone else or like some standard or “what you should be.” You want to be authentic.