starting with an ending
My brain is full and my writing practice is not.
In the bookish thing I’m writing, I have an opening scene. Actually, I have multiple options for opening scenes, worked and reworked. I have character introductions. I have a handful of “aha moments” or grand reveals, some of which can come early or midway through a story. I also have a story summary (in varying lengths), a smattering of future historical timelines sketched out, and a magpie’s hoard of screenshots, article links, maps, and what-ifs tucked away in notebooks, folders, brain cells, under the mattress.
This Lithub article by Steve Edwards helped me name the thing that I’m missing: a destination—or heck, even a direction, a scene, a feeling—to build my writing towards.
An ending.
Of course, there’s no one right way to write a thing. Some writers may know an ending where they start, and many may not. I’m in the latter camp. I hook onto threads of a scene, characters, situations and worlds. I knit up these threads into something tangible and hopefully interesting, and sometimes I’m successful and sometimes I’m not. My process feels similar to the way Helen Phillips described her process of writing Hum—like a magpie gathering a bunch of pieces of a possible whole. (This is a great interview piece with Helen, by the way!)
When I tell my non-writing friends that I’m working on a book, or I think I’m working on a book, I imagine that they imagine that I have all my characters lined up in a row. A killer plot that wakes me up every morning, hungering to write. The work is to just consistently pour it out onto the page, 1000 words a day, until I have a novel’s length of something that can be edited, polished, shipped.
Instead, most of my writing sessions are spent researching, workshopping a scene to see where it goes, and, frankly, staring into space. The flow state is an infrequent, unpredictable visitor.
Not having written a very long bookish thing before, I know that part of my challenge, at this early stage of drafting, is making some hard choices. Not every little scrap belongs in this story, and a lot of those bits may become stories of their own or never see readers beyond myself. The bookish thing does not need to do the work of carrying every thought or hope or opinion I have about what I think about the world.
I refuse to say I’m stuck, because I don’t think that’s actually the case. I think I’m learning to do a thing and that takes a tremendous amount of time to do well. I’m also too busy with work and life, my nervous system is fried, and I’m trying to be generous with myself. (My dear friends all know this, especially if I haven’t seen them or texted them back in weeks. Pfft.)
So, I’ll go for a walk this weekend and think about endings instead of next steps, and see where that leads.
What I’m writing
Hopefully 1000 words a day! Starting today, a day “late,” since I had a packed work week in NYC and just got home last night.
What I’m reading
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson and A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas. I started listening to Robert Sapolsky’s Stress and Your Body lectures from The Great Courses, available on Audible.
Jami’s words about stuckness, about consumption, about the heat of summer and making space for fall hit just right.
A helpful thing
I’ve been thinking a lot about nervous system support lately. Ann Friedman’s reader-sourced list of 75 nice things to do for yourself, that don’t cost a thing, is a delight.