Day 5
5 days in now, and it’s starting to occur to me that I may be experiencing some universal emotions that maybe other writers feel. My wife put me onto “The Book of Alchemy”, by Suleika Jaouad a few months ago, and I’ve been making my way through it. It seems that the object of this book was the basis for the 100 Day Challenge that the friends of Good Postage are sharing in. We started on the 9th.
For me, I wanted to dabble in Sci-Fi, having been an avid reader for a couple of decades, there have been several ideas for scenarios itching that other stories could never seem to scratch. So, for this challenge it seemed right to give it a go.
I’m trying to stay in the moment and allow the story to evolve naturally, but the sensation that it’s unpolished and not perfect keeps drawing my eye back to things that could be improved. I know that it’s a super-rough draft right now, and I feel the sensation of wanting to hide it from site or else be judged. I keep wanting to think long into the future of not only the characters but of the existence of the story in real life, and how me exposing it could somehow harm me? I feel a sense of fear of loss-aversion even though there’s nothing to lose. It’s just art, and I’m just starting. Anyway, Other people that are participating in this collective challenge are expressing some difficulty making the daily creative process a habit, and I can feel myself wanting to help them. But I am discovering also, and have a habit of trying to fix someone else’s problem as a way to avoid my own.
It makes me wonder if these obstacles and feels of inadequacy at starting something new are a natural and necessary part of the discovery.
In the story that I’m working on, it already feels like a false start, but I’m trying to remind myself that it can’t be a false start if the objective is to simply write every day. I do however notice that when I remove the burden of trying to dictate the outcome or somehow achieve a goal: when I stay in the moment and just let my thoughts and feels flow, that the words come much easier, almost unsolicited, and I find a few pages have spilled out before I quite know what I’ve written. Not to say any of it is any good, but it is helping my typing speed, and forcing me to stay in an imaginative space. When I think about syntax or context or grammar, it pulls me out of that playfully minded space and I stall.
During one scene where Blackwell interrupts Felix’s workout, I put in my earbuds and played the song that was written into the story as a way to feel the mood of the scene. I don’t even remember writing that scene, and that’s the first time I’ve danced as I was writing.
