do you ever write something and it feels so good and it's going along swimmingly when suddenly a new thought enters your head? and you can't get rid of it because it begins to repeat itself saying "don't forget me. don't forget me. i'm that good." but you try and stay on course, wondering if doing so was a mistake that you'll regret later, when suddenly you realize you have no idea where what you're writing is going? that you're not sure how to sustain it or where to lead it that will make it interesting enough to keep someone's interest for its entire duration? well, that's how i'm living my life right now. instead of writing my story as it comes to me, i keep trying to figure out where it's going, what i'm trying to say, and if it really - at all - has a point. unfortunately, like many writers, i - as the "liver" - have a hard time realizing that if you don't just keep writing, as if to exhaust that muscle, nothing good will ever come out and your story won't go anywhere because you're sitting there at your computer / typewriter / notebook cracking your knuckles and ending each sentence with a reread of everything you've written up until that point - changing a few words here and there, correcting spelling and tweaking punctuation. in the end, you'll probably have a perfectly clean story that ended after two chapters because you spent too much time thinking and not enough time writing. where is my protagonist going?
but what if you keep writing? and you keep writing and writing and nothing interesting comes? what if no interesting characters appear after you've killed the last one off in a bizarre hula-hooping accident, and your plot goes in a very small circle, if it goes anywhere at all? while the fear should inspire you to continue writing, it will, instead, most likely cripple you into a slow crawl forward -- burdened by trepidation, calculation, and an inability to take a risk, lest you make a mistake. lest your heart break.
after all, why do we have this propensity to play with fire? we burn our bras. we burn our bridges. we even, on occasion, burn calories. so maybe here i am trying to play with something less threatening -- a champion for water.
so let us play with water. where the safety is in such abundance, you could drown.
but what if you keep writing? and you keep writing and writing and nothing interesting comes? what if no interesting characters appear after you've killed the last one off in a bizarre hula-hooping accident, and your plot goes in a very small circle, if it goes anywhere at all? while the fear should inspire you to continue writing, it will, instead, most likely cripple you into a slow crawl forward -- burdened by trepidation, calculation, and an inability to take a risk, lest you make a mistake. lest your heart break.
after all, why do we have this propensity to play with fire? we burn our bras. we burn our bridges. we even, on occasion, burn calories. so maybe here i am trying to play with something less threatening -- a champion for water.
so let us play with water. where the safety is in such abundance, you could drown.
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