My last post on A Real Thing was written 6 months ago today, which is nuts; I'd been planning on at least getting one post in, in today, but once again I'm so tired I barely want to finish this post here. Maybe on the 3rd of next month, seeing as how I wrote on July 2 that I'd be posting a new A Real Thing post the next day but didn't get to that either, and so maybe I could do 6 months from that instead?
I don't know why I make it so hard for myself; I am most certainly though not a pantser, not that I haven't gotten interesting places from that...
This post itself is an interesting example of the writing process; I've been sitting here for the past few hours knowing the logical progression past the first paragraph, with only writing out that progression just now because I knew I had to probably have more than one paragraph, and I did have more to write... the one truly universal human experience is being annoyed at people trying to justify why they aren't getting around to write their book yet, so I tried to forbear, but there you go: "I am most certainly not a pantser."
I'm really not? Not with fiction (maybe I should try it out more often); but apparently paths present themselves and it's up to us (using the first-person inclusive plural, and though I'm far from suggesting that all creativity process structures are the same, this seems universal enough) to follow them, along their natural progression, as far along as they go (and I'm also not suggesting that we should go for the obvious solution, just the natural one; reaching for some fruit that hangs higher than the lowest ones are also part of the natural progression, but we need to be just as brave in reaching for it as we were continuing down the path that we set out on in the first place... I could have settled at one paragraph here, forborn the conflict against the "universal human experience," and that would have been fine...)
Like Vulnerability, the post of exactly two weeks ago, where I could have just let it sit a jumbled whatever, before staying up hours past midnight to forge the thoughts together into a cohesive soulbaring. I feel myself winding down; I don't think I'll need to backdate this post to be posted while it's still today, but that winding-down feeling itself seems to suggest that there is a natural path to an observation, the natural capture, into a linear chain of thought, of an initial stroke of insight.
It's an old improv trick- step up and say "here's what I think," if your well is dry, and there'll be something there for you to latch onto. You just can't filter yourself, otherwise you'll still be stuck.
No comments:
Post a Comment