Writing on Writing

Process is a weird place.

It is that space where you have a thought that is floating just above your head and you are trying to catch it. Half sentences floating. Wordlets - fragments with mediocre meaning - buzz around with the usual suspects, the ones I use all the time. I used to flick those away. You know the ones. It’s different yet the same for every writer. They are the words the Instagram literary crowd tells us not to use. Soul, mind, heart, feel, crimson. They are so hard to avoid. Especially crimson. It feels cruncy in my mouth and in my brain. It paints the most vivid, vibrant, velvety shade of red that tingles, and I just need to use it. So I do.

Because that is part of the [pro]cess.

That's the part they leave out.

The first phase of the [pro]cess is laying it all down. Stream of consciousness. Just go, go, go, - fall into the arms of the muse. Let those favorite colors spill out onto the page.

Then comes the second phase of the [pro]cess. You become the excited editor. You flip the switch, and boom, as the excited editor, you are easily impressed by your genius.

You are like Parker (Alec Baldwin) from that episode of Friends, “The One in Massapequa”. Parker finds the “joy” in the mundane. He is fully connected, totally smitten, and jubilant like a kid on a swing.

As the “excited editor,” you are riding the residual high from your creative outburst. You start to play. Twisting phrases. Pulling on sensations. Seeing how words look as they stretch and shift.

In my writing, I tend to use the word “soul” when I want to express some sort of connection. These days, it is more of a placeholder. A permission slip that lets me pause and dig for the truth of the moment. To question “Why am I using this word. What am I trying to say?”

Then, a little creaking door, deep down in the hippocampus, joyfully swings open, and that’s where your metaphors begin to form. That is where you copy everything you just wrote, paste it either above or below the original with a line separating the two. Then go wild.

Expand lines, change words, dig deeper into a whisper of a thought. Wring out the last drops of curiosity.

Then read it.

Read it out loud.

Read it in a whisper.

Read with all the emotions.

How does it roll off your tongue?

How does it land in your ear?

How does it make you feel in your heart?

This is you becoming a believer in your work. Becoming one with it.

Then step away.

Does it continue to hum in your mind while you eat or while you talk to your friends?

Do flashes of your masterpiece reveal themselves randomly as the day fades to night?

How long does it take you to forget it?

Five minutes, hours, or never?

That space, that distance, allows this little creature to develop.

Then come back

Now you’re editor-in-chief.

You might tweak a breath here, shift a sentence there. Maybe change a single letter.

But how does it make you feel?

Read it out loud, again, and again.

Close your eyes and listen.

How do you feel?

Sometimes the muse returns and sprinkles more dust to open your eyes again.

But this is the time when the editor-in-chief knows when they have sealed a deal and might shout out “This is it!”

So yeah, the process is weird.

What’s your process?

Well, thanks for not listening.