When You’re in the Midst of it…

You just had a novel published. You should be all in on all things A Life of Dreams. But there’s a problem. You find yourself fully immersed in your latest effort, the one you’ve been writing off and on since the end of last summer. The story won’t leave your head. It lives there rent free. Even when you’re not writing, you’re thinking about it. There was an entire month that went by without a single line. Then it hit you while you were doing pushups one morning and suddenly it was off to the races for a couple weeks.

Now you find yourself at a devilishly tricky scene. It’s crucial to the story, it will determine how the story’s arc turns out. This is the scene that will determine what kind of story this ends up being, and you are fully aware of the stakes. The writing starts to feel like labor. You stand up and walk around the room while looking at the computer screen from different angles, as if this new perspective will conjure the right words out of the atmosphere. You feel the breeze of an inspiration, sit back down and pound out two sentences, then one more. Yes. That was good, you think to yourself. I’m getting closer, you say aloud. Then it’s off to the kitchen for something to drink. 

You feel a twitch coming on in each extremity. There’s energy pulsing through you. The story is percolating. You can almost feel it in your fingertips. But, you can’t bring yourself to sit back down at your desk. Instead, you take a break by walking upstairs to the recliner in your room where you check on the day’s box scores. This takes your mind off the story. Suddenly there’s just too many possibilities flying around in your head, so many different ways for the scene to go. Your brain has reached capacity overload. So you shut the laptop and think about Maine for a while.

After a while you open it and start writing this post. Maybe if I try to describe what’s going on in my head, greater clarity will be found.

Nope.

You go back to the story and read the 2100 words you’ve written in chapter 19. You like it. You really like it. But you always like the stories when you are in the midst of writing them. Whether anyone else will is another thing altogether. But at this point you’re not writing something with the goal of having strangers like or dislike it. You’re writing because you’ve got this story in your head and there’s absolutely nothing you can do to make it go away…except sit down and write. It is while writing, during that confounding, magical time when you think that maybe writers are a little bit nuts. The whole process reminds me of one of our candidates for President…its like having a worm inside your head.