Just beyond the next breath

Do you ever wonder what keeps drawing you 

back to the page each morning--day after day, 

month after month, year after year?

Or why you return like a lost soul not knowing 

who you are or where you're going, the only certainty 

the pen you hold in your hand (as long as the ink lasts),

and the blank page waiting for you to fill it with words?

Maybe it's because the moment your hand touches the page, 

you feel like you've come home, no longer lost or blind, and

the world you couldn't see moments ago suddenly becomes clear

waiting for you to enter.

Maybe it's because you feel like you set off on a journey 

each morning, like stepping into a boat and pushing off from shore

to see what is waiting for you just around the bend, just past the curve 

in the bank, just beyond the next breath.

Maybe it's because you live for these moments, for the chance 

to swim into your imagination, to return to the place where you know

you can be yourself without pretense, without a mask, the place

where you can remember who you are and why you pick up a pen 

and open your journal and fill a blank page with words each morning.

Working on revisions

How do you know when you're finished revising your manuscript?

After the second or third pass, it's easy to believe that you're done. 

You've revised verb tenses and word choices. You've caught typos. You've polished each sentence until it shines like polished silver. 

But are you really done?

If you're working with an editor who you can trust, you can share the manuscript and listen to feedback. 

It's the same with a writing group. If you trust the other writers in the group--and why would you be in a writing group you don't trust?--you listen to their feedback.

If you prefer to work on your own, though, you have a slightly different challenge, which is, ultimately, the same challenge that every writer must face.

You need to listen to your inner voice, which can be deceptive at times.

You need to keep digging, keep asking yourself what's missing. 

What am I forgetting? What does the reader need in this moment? What does my character want, and what's keeping him or her from getting it? And what does he or she do to reach his or her goal?

To answer these questions, you may have to put your manuscript in a drawer for a while. 

A day, a week, or more. 

That's how you can gain distance and change your perspective.

That's how you can return to it with a clearer eye and see gaps or missing pieces that you couldn't have seen when you were so close to it, working on it from the inside, so to speak.

Each time you revise your manuscript, you need to see it the way a reader will see it. 

How might your words strike a reader? What images and scenes will make the greatest impact?  Why does the plot unfold the way it does?

Working on revisions in this way becomes a process of listening more carefully and looking more closely so that you (and ultimately your reader) are able to slip inside your characters and can feel what they're feeling. 

As you keep reviewing the manuscript, you're listening for inconsistencies, for the gaps that you couldn't see on the previous pass, for the issues that you can expand or delete.

The secret is patience. 

Give yourself time.

As many writers have discovered: "Time is the best editor." 

Learning to trust the process

One of the things you need to learn about writing is how to trust the process, to trust yourself, your imagination, to accept whatever images your imagination gives you, to receive without judgment whatever words appear in your mind, to open the gate and let anything that wants to come onto the page come onto the page. 

You have to learn not to resist, not to judge, not to second-guess, to simply allow whatever words need to come to come, and to write them down as quickly as you can before they disappear and go back into hiding and you can't see them again. 

You have to accept the mystery, the inability to explain how or why it works, and simply let your pen move over the page, like taking dictation, only the voice is sometimes barely audible--sometimes not audible at all--and you have to make sense of the whisper of the wind or the sound of silence, and somehow it's like a dream and somehow you find the words, and somehow you breathe the words onto the page.

And you open your eyes to find what you needed to write only after you put your pen down, take a breath, and look down at the page that, only moments ago, was blank.

And now--behold!-- it is filled with words that somehow came from some hidden source, perhaps from thin air, perhaps from your pen, perhaps from your heart. 

Sitting and Waiting

Are you willing to sit and wait for a while?

Are you prepared to sit and wait for more than a few hours a day, more than a few days a week, more than a few weeks a month, more than a few months a year?

Are you capable of sitting and waiting for more than a year?

If you’re not willing to sit and wait for your characters to reveal themselves to you—however long it might take—then how can you expect to write about their world?

One of my teachers told me long ago that she rarely wrote fewer than thirty drafts of a novel or short story. Thirty drafts! 

Sometimes that's just how long it takes.

So, when you finish one draft, or two, or even three, perhaps you’re only starting the process, and there’s more sitting and waiting ahead.

Writing requires patience. Not just the patience to sit and wait for words to come, but the patience to wait until a character is forthcoming and willing to open himself or herself up to you.

Your characters need to trust you, and they can sense your impatience, your doubts, your discomfort sitting and waiting. They can sense when you are afraid of their story, fearful of the truths that may emerge from their lives, reluctant to face the events they want to share with you, unwilling—or unable—to confront the challenges in their day-to-day existence.

If they sense the slightest hint of fear, uncertainty, or doubt, they will remain silent.

They may show you the surface of their lives, but they will withhold the deeper issues, hide the fissures that cause them pain, and conceal the cracks that reveal their need for love and acceptance.

If you can sit and wait, though, they may grant you a gift.

They may tell you who they truly are and how they live their lives and what they want and what they fear and what they’re willing to do for love.

They may give you the gift of a story.

Sometimes writing isn’t just about getting words on paper.

It’s about trusting and doubting, and about being afraid and being able to love, and about hoping and believing in a story that you can't yet see and in characters who you can't yet hear.

It’s about sitting.

And waiting.

Looking Between The Lines

I started a new project in February, and I found myself surprised -- the way I'm always surprised when an idea pops into my head -- that suddenly I was writing with eagerness every morning to see where this new idea might lead, curious to discover the story that might be hidden somewhere inside it.

Since then I've written many pages, and I've forced myself to go back to the beginning again and again, and to revise the manuscript's pages with an eye toward discovering what might be missing and what might be added to get the full story on the page.

Each time I begin revising again, it's like starting anew, like climbing up a ladder again, except there are words on the page, unlike when I started out in February and the pages were all blank. This evidence of having written provides some comfort and reassurance, even if the words aren't quite right.

There's still so much that's not yet on the page--even after three months of work--and which needs to be brought into the light.

Much of the revision process, I've learned over time, is trying to figure out what's not on the page but needs to be there. That's often the most frustrating part of the process, too, because although I may know that something feels like it's missing, I don't always know what might be missing or how to find what's missing (except to keep writing).

So, I've learned to work slowly, to go back to the beginning after finishing each draft, to return to the first page and try to see between the lines, to find in that empty space not only words but images and scenes and dialogue.

I try to understand the characters who are making their appearance (often shyly) on the page and who seem reluctant to let themselves be seen, as if they're worried (in the same way that I might worry) about what might happen to them if they reveal themselves fully. On some days I'll find myself with a flood of pages, while on other days, only silence.

Here's something that I don't admit to many people: I worry about making a mistake in the way I am approaching the project. I'm afraid it'll all come crumbling down or the words will turn into a mush of spaghetti before I can finish the story. I worry about not making enough mistakes. And I worry about making too many mistakes and that I'll need to ditch the entire project months from now, a total failure. Sometimes, on days when words won't come, I think revision is just another word for worry.

It helps, I've found, to sit down at the same time every day to start work, whether I have any ideas about where the day's work may take me or not. Just sitting down, opening my laptop, and beginning to type somehow loosens the words and frees my imagination so that I can re-enter the world that I've discovered on the page.

After years of working on different projects, I've learned not to be fooled into thinking that I've finished the revisions just because I happened to finish another draft. Just because words are on the page, just because I've created something that feels finished, doesn't mean it's finished.

I've had to learn how to be patient and to take a long-range view. Not weeks or months but sometimes years. And I've come to enjoy the process of beginning again... and again, even though it isn't easy on some days to be patient and enjoy the process.

What I've found, though, is that patience is often rewarded with new discoveries and new ways of understanding the story, and with these discoveries comes a greater depth and greater clarity to the story.

Layers appear as if by magic, and with each pass another layer appears that I might not have discovered if I hadn't kept working on the manuscript.

Each revision brings a new way of understanding the story, of seeing the story.

Revisions are an integral part of the writing process, a kind of miracle that lets a story unfold in unexpected ways, but only if the writer is patient and willing to return--sometimes against all odds--to begin again, and yet again, to see where the words might lead.

Swimming in the Dark

For years I’ve held an image in my head of a plant growing toward the light as a way of understanding the writing process.

It was an image that a beloved writing teacher shared with me years ago, and the image of my work growing toward the light--drawn to the light--helped me through some dark passages in my life as I tried to sort out which direction to follow in terms of what I wanted to write.

As long as I lived or worked in the city, surrounded by tall buildings which often cast their shadows in my path, I found it comforting to think of the writing process as a process of growth, and to believe, as my teacher reassured me, that if I kept writing, I would grow like a plant toward the light.

But after living in sun-drenched Florida for more than a decade, where the light is so intense that often I’ll draw the curtains to block out the light from my office, I’ve come to think of the writing process less like a plant growing toward the light and more like a sea turtle trying to lay her eggs in the dark.

If you’ve ever spent time on the coast of Florida, you may have noticed nests of sea turtles protected by orange or yellow police tape tied to the top of wooden stakes that volunteers have planted around the nests to protect the eggs buried in the sand.

And you’ll find signs like the one that greeted us in our hotel room in Sanibel last summer: 

Keep lights near the beaches off or shielded from May through October. Artificial lighting from buildings or flashlights confuses nesting females and hatchlings. Disoriented by light, baby turtles wander away from the water and die.

After reading that sign, I began to wonder: what if darkness, rather than light, was needed for the creative process?

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.

What if writing required that we mimic nesting sea turtles and swim in the dark? And what if light—any light at all—has the power to distract us from our purpose?

Just like the sea turtles, if we can’t find a nesting site because of the distracting lights, we'll wander away from our true purpose and die.

Since then I’ve asked myself what it means to truly swim in the dark.

It's an image that suggests we need to rely on our internal compass in order to know which direction to go in rather than relying on an external light source.

No matter what we write, the process of writing requires this kind of internal vision. To write, we need to cultivate an ability to look inside ourselves. We need to be curious about the world inside us, but even more we need to be compelled to discover that world in the same way that sea turtles are compelled to find a place in the darkness to lay their eggs.

Plants do grow toward the light, as my teacher assured me years ago. 

Sometimes that’s an important image to hold in my head as I start out on an unknown path. 

It’s comforting to know there is light beyond the darkness, and that the sun does shine and warm the earth, and that its light and warmth will nurture growth.

But sometimes it’s just as important for me to remember not to trust an external source to dictate a direction that I can know only from swimming in darkness.

It’s the process of swimming in darkness, after all, that gives me a way of learning to trust my own instincts.

Trust your instinct

Each stroke that you take in the water propels you forward into the unknown, and all you have to guide you is your instinct, a sense of where you’re going, a sense of where you might want to go, or maybe where you need to go.

How do you develop that oh-so-elusive instinct which serves as a guide?

How do you learn not only to notice when your instinct is guiding you but when to trust–and follow–it?

For some writers, the ability to trust their instinct takes years. For others, it’s immediate, a kind of inner recognition that they’re born knowing.

Still others are born with it, only to lose it over time, and then spend years struggling to regain that trust in it and in themselves.

It may seem that knowing which way a story should unfold--which words to use, how long to craft a sentence, the amount of space to leave between paragraphs, the development of plot lines or characterizations--is innate, something that's part of a writer's DNA.

And maybe that’s true.

But only partly.

Maybe instinct is partially innate, but there's a part that can be honed and refined through the writing process itself, as well as through reading the stories of other writers and the craft books on writing in which writers share their insights and tips on writing.

Every writer at some point has to figure out how to trust the instinctual part of the writing process.

The question is: how do you develop that kind of trust?

How do you learn to recognize your instinct, then trust your instinct to take you where you need to go?

One way is to write day after day, year after year, even on the days when it’s not at all clear where your instincts are leading you.

Another way is to read stories, interviews with other writers, books on the craft of writing, anything, really, that piques your interest and curiosity about life.

Sometimes it’s helpful to read books that other writers have found worthwhile in their own efforts to put words on paper.

And sometimes it’s helpful to check out books that other writers have written about their own writing process... so you can better understand your own writing process.

Here are a few lists that you might find worth exploring:

http://www.secretschool.com/bookfront.htm
http://www.vibrantnation.com/love-it-lists/2009/02/20/a-writers-favorite-books-about-writing/
http://www.theparisreview.com/literature.php
http://creativewriting.umf.maine.edu/readinglist.php
http://www.slate.com/id/2130198/

Do you have a list of books--or interviews on writing--that you’d like to share with others at Wordswimmer? Why not take a moment to share your discoveries? You never know which book or interview may lead you (and others) to new insights into writing.

Thanks in advance for you contributions.