Distraction remains a problem. I keep coming up with new
ideas to try to get myself to 1)settle down, 2) start writing, 3) keep
writing. Over the years I've been
writing, I've come up with a dozen ideas to get myself to sit down and
concentrate. But no technique works for
long.
In that way, my mind is kind of like the Borg. I think up
one way to avoid distractions, and it works for a while. But soon, the brain
develops resistance, and then suddenly starships are exploding and I'm back to watching
YouTube videos of baby birds.
That's a form a flightiness, but for me, it's usually stubbornness that gets in the way of the creative process.
For one, I can get very, very attached to particular words or phrases. You know, the ones that appear late at night
when I've had several cups of tea* and too little sleep. They can be very lovely words, but when I
catch myself wanting to keep a scene in because of one or two great sentences, it's
time to let go.
And then there are those scenes that just don’t work. I do undergo several stages of outlining, and
can get very used to the way a certain scene fits in the story, and am thus reluctant to let it go, even if it's not working outt. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to
realize that if I have trouble writing a scene, it generally means the scene is
boring, and that there is room for improvement.
If I'm not excited to write a scene, why should it even be in there? But sometimes I've been working on the scene
long enough that I can't envision any other way for the story to progress. In those cases, I make myself list the goals
of the scene. Usually, there's only one
or two, and with a little brainstorming, I'm awash in new ideas for how the
scene could change and improve.
Despite those solutions, I still have problems with stubbornness. I can be especially slow to adopt new ideas
and techniques, no matter how rational they might seem on paper. But eventually, I do get it. So what's taking so long?
Sometimes I visualize my subconscious as being made up of
complex steampunk-style machinery. When that
excellent new idea is rejected by my stubborn conscious brain, it gets tossed behind the hamsters on wheels
running my daily thoughts and goes into a little bucket. The bucket slowly disappears up into that
complex machinery. There, I can only
assume that it has to progress through some lengthy path filled with lots of
bells and whistles and gears and pulleys. And possibly more hamsters on wheels.
Finally, out of nowhere, the idea will reappear, and
suddenly it will seem the most fantastic thing ever. And then I'll start exclaiming about this
idea, and my friends will be all, yeah we told you about that six months ago.
There's probably a lot of ideas rattling around up there
right now, making their way slowly through my subconscious, and taking up the
important brain machinery that would otherwise allow me to recall where I put
my keys.
Not that stubbornness
is an entirely bad thing. It keeps me
going when I'm down, and when I want to give up because a deadline is only 18
days away. Nope, my stubborn brain
says. Can't give up now. You want this too much.
Maybe it's not such a bad thing after all.
*Tea is definitely my writing brew of
choice. I discovered long ago that anything
over one glass of wine = terrible writing and zero ideas. It was rather comforting to know that I
wasn't going to end up like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, writing my most famous work only after a drug binge**.
**Not actually comparing self or writing skills to Coleridge
