The Three in my Head, and Deadlines

A new session started this week of our creative writing course, and besides the usual high rate of students continuing from the previous session, there's always some fresh faces in the room. I think that's exciting: they're coming to writing after time away ("I wrote in school") or life events ("I want to capture stories of my family") or just a surplus of time. I enjoy watching their journeys from hesitant to confident, tapping in to their respective muses and development of what's I consider the most challenging tool, producing on demand. It's  one thing to plan and plot a short story or novella or novel, to mentally see the whole picture and its intricacies, but another to actually squeeze out the words. Despite our lifetimes of talking and reading (hopefully!), the act of getting the words down into that shape is absolutely not easy. Doing this on a fifteen-minute timer with a room full of strangers is worse.

So, this week's lesson: writing under pressure, or, the clarifying focus of a deadline. 

It might be a leftover effect of NaNoWriMo, but I tend to get more actually done if there's a clock ticking somewhere. Not a literal clock, but a sense of "you have limited time to get this done." NaNo was artificial daily deadlines of words, and preparing for class or for our regular online feedback sessions is more compelling to me than simply "I have an idea, and I need to get my daily writing in." Promising myself to write something every day is nice. Being forced to write it is better (for me, always "for me." Any advice I toss out is one hundred percent effective for me and me alone.)

So, that class timer starts, we have a prompt and... I write. It's a muscle that's taken development, but the best tool I can offer for this is learning how to fraction your writing mind up into roles: there's the Creator Part, and the Reviser Part, and the Copyeditor Part, and they are not allowed to sit together. There's only room for one at a time in my mental writing desk, and they each have their quirks. Creator is shy and doesn't have a rich vocabulary, but he's a sprinter and can move in short, productive bursts. Reviser has a rich vocabulary, and is a bit of a plodder in terms of pace, and Copyeditor is the tyrant with absolute veto powers. They may communicate only through the work. When someone is busy with the piece, the other two sides need to go find something else to do in my mental backwater. Their time will come.

Under pressure, it's all Creator's time to shine. Yes, his verb choices are often lame, and yes, he's fond of his waffle-adverbs ("she almost felt this," "he nearly did that") but his motion is always forward, not back. And I think that's the secret to an activity like a word sprint, or a timed prompt, or even a daily deadline. Develop the mental barriers between the writer's roles and then enforce that within yourself. The new students often preface their first readings with apologies, explanations, and the need to provide full context, but the veteran students know that this is the Creator realm, and we're all listening with our Creator ears. Now is not Revision, now is not Copyediting. I feel that a lot of sense of slowness and lack of a feeling of progress comes from all three roles trying to have a say at the same time, yanking the mental pencil out of one another's fingers.

This is one of the reasons I like analog drafting so much, by hand or by typewriter. There's no device reminding me that I spelled something wrong or scolding me about "its" versus "it's" as I type. That sort of criticism startles the Creator and makes him shy away, hesitant to type any more in case the angry box gets angrier. Pens and manual typewriters don't get angry, ever. They're Creator's tools. I think truly productive writers—I'm not going to say "successful"—are those that master this skills triathlon. I'm not among them yet, and I'm still very much in training, but I feel I've learned to hand over the desk to the inner Creator when it's necessary and keep the other two at bay.

🧩🦏