I’m learning this lesson in spades this summer. I’m in the midst of working on a handful of stories that have been churning in the depths of my mind for years. I’ve worked on them in fits and starts, stopping short when I would hit a roadblock that I couldn’t figure out how to remove. And so they’ve sat, unexplored and never shared.
“I’ll think of something eventually. I’ll meditate on it. I’ll just leave it alone and somehow it will fix itself.” I would try to make myself feel better with these affirmations. Really, they are just excuses.
The thinking doesn’t help. The meditating doesn’t help. The leaving it alone doesn’t help. The only thing that fixes writing is more writing. Yes, you have to lean into your writing, especially when you don’t know what to do.
You have to say to hell with the fear of writing garbage. All writers write garbage. It’s part of the process. It gets edited out later. Ditch the fear of being a screw up, of being wrong, fear of putting crap on the page and having it stare back at you. Write anything and everything that comes into your mind. The devil, and the answers to my roadblocks, are in the details and those details only step into the light through writing.
Once I committed to take action, I stopped being a writer and transformed into an observer. I follow my characters around as they tip-toe, stomp, saunter, skip, hop, and run through my imagination and the world they create in it. Rather than writing a story, I decided to trust my characters; those highly flawed, beautiful, totally irrational beings create something much more authentic and poignant for themselves than I can build for them. I set them free and let them act the way they want to act and do the things they want to do. They mess up. They hurt each other, and themselves. My instinct is to protect them like I protect my friends and my family, but that doesn’t serve anyone and it’s not my place.
So I let them be exactly who they are, and I love them all the more for it. To honor them, I play the scribe, getting it all down as accurately as I can. I take a page from Anna Quindlen’s advice on how to live life: “I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.”
