…but if you try sometimes you just might find…you get what you need…
Be glad I’m not really singing my Rolling Stone-pilfered lyrics. It sounds prettier in your head, trust me.
Two weeks ago, sitting at my desk while my middle school darlings watched the movie version of the book they’d just finished, I practically drooled with anticipation over the upcoming Christmas break. For two whole weeks, I’d not have to cram all my writing time into that glorious 4:30-6:15 am time slot. Instead, I’d have the chance to write–much more–at a more leisurely pace. Never mind the fact that I’d finishes Nano in November and managed an average of 1500 a day, the majority of those in the morning. I had an idea playing in my brain for a new writing project, one that I’d been thinking about for upwards of two years since the seed had been planted in my creativity during graduate school in 2006.
I had everything ready to go: notebooks, pen, laptop, coffee. Nothing could stop me.
Except the lack of words. For the first few days, I struggled to write at all. Struggled to even get myself into my chair in the mornings. I felt nothing where words should be bubbling, an emptiness where ideas had excited me before. After a few days, I forced myself into my seat and began writing not on my sparkly new project but on the reasons that I wasn’t writing.
Lo and behold, a new, more refined idea came out of this journaling. Nothing publishable but, after a few days, a real, solid, pink-bubbled outline to guide me through the project. At the end of the first week, I was pretty down about not having cranked out 3k words a day (that I’d planned) but very excited by the way the outline of the project had come together.
I wrote on that project for a few days, then realized something I’d forgotten in my push to win Nano: I work best when I have more than one project in the fire at a time. Again, I faced the empty page begging my muse for a spark of inspiration, another shimmery idea to immerse myself in while I worked on project #1. Nothing came out, so I did what I’d done before: journaled.
At first it seemed futile, that I don’t just get an idea on a whim and it just turns into something viable. But the more I typed, the more I started seeing the repetition of an idea that I have more than adequate background on (and so do you, but it’s my little secret 
) and can probably write numerous books on. I thought..this was too easy…this idea was too simple, it can’t work. Through more writing/brainstorming on the page, I discovered this is, in fact, the PERFECT project for me at this point in my writing and in the year. My lament was that I didn’t think of it sooner to excite myself to the page over break.
So, as I wrap up 2009 and another Christmas break as well, I realize I didn’t get what I wanted for Christmas from my muse. She seriously failed to deliver on that promise of 3k/day in my work. But what she gave me instead–the knowledge that I could write my way through my block to discover what I needed at the time my creativity needed it was a much better present. I might not go back to school with 45K under my belt but I have the road maps for the next several months to get me way past that simplistic notion of success.
When has your muse failed to give you something you wanted but instead given you a gift of what you needed–even if you didn’t know you needed at the time?
Comments on this entry are closed.