Have New Headphones, Will Write!

Now that the kids are finally getting better, I have been able to start enjoying the new headphones that my husband bought for me. Right now I'm listening to the sounds of the Amazon rainforest while I type this entry. So technically, I'm also researching while I write this. I started writing a short story for the shared world that I am participating in with a group of other writers, and it takes place in the rainforest, which is why I need to familiarize myself with its natural sounds. Of course, trying to describe some of them might be a different matter altogether...

Eh, I'll muddle my way through that when I edit. For now, it's all about the crappy rough draft with lots of bracketing.

What's that, you say? Bracketing?

Bracketing is something I started doing in college, when I was writing a lot of theology papers. I didn't always have the precise words for the thoughts I wanted to formulate while I was working on the rough draft, so I would write some approximation of it in a little set of brackets, so I knew to go back and fix it later, and that way I could keep going before I lost my train of thought.

Bracketing served me especially well when transitioning into the madness that is NaNoWriMo. It satisfied my inner editor enough to keep going instead of getting bogged down in searching for the precise words I wanted to use, and thus making it much easier to make word count. I get to be compulsive, but not so anally compulsive that my brain shuts down and doesn't get much accomplished.

(Dang, this is a long Youtube clip!)

Speaking of getting things accomplished, it's time to work on that short story and then see if I can write any more of that article I alluded to in my last post. Especially since my husband keeps looking back at me and the laptop from the PS3 game he is playing. I have quickly learned that this means he is thinking about stealing the computer from me to look up a gaming hint. *sigh* Need to fix the other computer!

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The Immortality of Writing

A thought occurred to me as I played with my four month old daughter today. Being a writer is a lot like being a child sometimes. There are days that frustrate you and nothing seems to make sense or go your way, and there are days where the sheer exploration of life, of learning and discovering as you go, is simply exhilirating. I have recently experienced both types of days in the short story I am currently writing. On the bad days, I often feel as if some piece of a puzzle is missing, and it confuses me. I keep staring at a sentence or a paragraph, trying to figure out a way to make it work, and worrying why there's just something about it that seems so out of place that I can't go on. It's almost like an instinct--I know something about it isn't working, but I have to unravel what it is.

Sometimes solving that problem is as simple as rewording the sentence, or crossing it out to write a new one. Other times, I have to delete the offending sentence or paragraph entirely before my writing brain turns on again, so to speak, and the wheels in my mind start churning the story toward my next goal.

As a writer, I know I will have many "bad" days. I have even gone through blocks of time, sometimes months, where I felt myself in stasis, unable to move with a project no matter how I tried. Sometimes even working on another project didn't help, because I was simply in a very ugly slump for varying reasons.

But on the good days, it's like the words are curling straight out of my pen's ink onto the page, or like they're printing themselves on the computer screen. Words, imagery, dialogue...they're all a jungle gym or a slide that I can build, explore, and play on. And it only takes one good day to make up for a lifetime of bad ones. That's why I keep writing; I know that eventually a good day will come again.

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