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I have spent the past month revising several of my short stories and sending them out to a new round of markets. The waiting game has now begun. This is satisfying work for me (I love revision work), but I had been neglecting my work-in-progress novel. Yes, the novel I had announced to the world way back in July that I was writing. And, I know that the minute you say that you’re writing a novel, that’s when you hit writer’s block and stop writing. Or that was what happened to me anyway.
I spend my days as a freelance editor reading, rereading, and reading manuscripts over and over again. I comb through the copy, detangling the text and rooting out every error that I can find. We’re all human, of course, and no matter how many passes we make on a piece of text, there will inevitably be a slick little mistake that has managed to elude our eyes. It’s this fear that I have developed, the fear of letting any mistakes slip through, that has severely hampered my novel’s progress.
And, it’s not just that fear of the imperfect that is holding me back; it’s the feeling that I have to have my plot, my characters, and my scenes fully developed before I can move forward. My current story is a murder mystery (a theme that is still evolving even as I write), and I was setting it in a real place. As I did that and as I started to plot out separate scenes, I kept getting stymied because I would stop myself and go online to Google a public building to see if I was describing it accurately. I would look up what it is that university alumni faculty would actually do in their day-to-day jobs. I would search for the type of food a local family-run joint would serve during its Wednesday happy hours.
I was getting caught up in the perfection of a scene before I had even written anything down.
And so, I let my manuscript sit for months. Gathering dust. But, I get into these can-do modes every month, where I will finally get the energy to sit down and just write. I told myself this time, just write for 10 minutes. Just write without stopping and looking up any particular details. I set the timer on my Apple watch for 10 minutes and just started typing.
And I ended up finally wrapping up a scene that had been annoying me! As I was writing, I stopped worrying about how factual or real something was. I was purely getting into a particular character and just letting her dialogue flow. Some of the sentences, OK, I’ll be real here, a lot of the sentences I wrote, were crappy. But, miracle of miracles, some of them were actually OK, and some of them even led me to think about changing plot points that got me past a point that had seemed particularly troublesome.
The other magical thing that happened when I just started writing was that I was starting to inhabit these fictional character creations. I wasn’t getting bogged down in realistic details, I was just writing and seeing these characters start to have a life of their own. My main character was starting to develop particular habits and traits that just came out from that short writing flow that I hadn’t planned out in my detailed character sheet. I had spent so much time planning out this character (I’m a planner; I just couldn’t help myself) that I had forgotten to let her breathe. I had forgotten to let her live.
And as she started to come to life, she started to move the plot forward in ways that I hadn’t previously imagined. And this amazing spark of life was the beauty of writing. I had finally captured it because I had stood on the precipice of perfection, looked over the edge, and jumped.
And, because I had set a time limit of 10 minutes, that jump came fast. I didn’t have time to overthink anything. It was liberating and motivating.
Tonight, I have 10 minutes of time bookmarked to start writing. Even if I’m tired, and I can feel my eyeballs rolling around in sand because I’ve been staring at my computer screen all day wrangling words into some semblance of perfection, I will sit down and jump.
I’m excited to see where these 10-minute jumps will eventually lead me.
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