Hello again! It’s been a while. And rather than blog my list of excuses for not blogging, let me just say, it’s nice to be back.
After a not-so-restful night of sleep, a morning of exercise and errands followed by an afternoon at the soup kitchen, I predicted that not much writing was going to happen today. But guess what. I was wrong. Because I sat down with my very early morning tea, opened my documents and just did it. I polished my latest picture book and made some significant progress in the restructuring of my novel.
“Write When You Least Expect To” continues to be my best writing advice to myself.
Even sitting down to write this blog post is a case in point.
So for my first post of the new year, I thought it a perfect time to dig up an old gem from 2011.
Hmmm. Maybe it will be my New Year’s Resolution! Maybe it will be yours!
Write When You Least Expect To
by Jean Reidy 2/18/2011
I do very few things well under pressure. So when I sit down to work on a book, especially a novel, I usually make sure I’ve set aside a large block of time, giving myself a chance to get back into the story, set up achievable goals for words on the page and then actually write those words.
But lately, those blocks of time have become smaller and smaller. I won’t bore you with the details of my busy life – we’re all wishing for 40-hour days these days, right? – but I do know that my time will free up a bit later this year. And I’ve been tempted to say “Well that’s when I’ll work on this novel.”
But I grew impatient. I was anxious to get back into this exciting project.
So for the past two days, I’ve been squeezing in some unexpected writing time. I’ll admit, I was set up pretty well for this experiment with ten pages of my own handwritten revision notes and a marked up manuscript.
One might expect that with a wee bit of time, I’d opt for wee revisions. But honestly, by the time I open up my 150-page manuscript and jump around finding just the right spots for those adjustments, and skip from revision note to revision note, I could have written an entire scene.
So that’s just what I did.
And there was something terribly freeing about opening up a brand new document labeled with a scene title and jumping right in.
I had no sense of foreboding about the task at hand because my expectations were low – I’ll just jot down some thoughts related to this scene. After all, I only have a few minutes. But then my fingers were flying across the keyboard as dialog and setting and metaphors (some were quite dastardly, I’ll admit) flowed with ease. And the delight of getting some work done when I expected to get none, actually inspired me to go beyond the stale scribbles of pressured revisions and take risks with the story. I wrote an entire scene. And just like with my golf game – when my expectations are low I play my best – the writing was surprisingly good.
So try it sometime. Write when you least expect to. The quantity and quality of what hits the page might pleasantly surprise you.
Have you had random writing moments? Tell me about them.
