Not-Writing

School has just started here in Virginia, and like many teachers, I’ve been asking my students what they did this summer. So it seemed appropriate to write about my summer, and how I learned the value of Not-Writing.

My summer has been framed by two Highlights workshops with the fabulous Patti Gauch: one in May, the other this October. Between May and October, I was supposed to write the entire first draft of a new story. 

No worries, right? 

I'm a huge proponent of the Butt in Chair school of writing: You write whether you feel like it or not. You hope the muse shows up, but if she doesn't, you don't sit at your desk, weeping softly and consuming large amounts of ice cream. You write. Finally, the muse feels so left out that she actually shows up. 

Imagine my surprise when I discovered how well I wrote when… I didn’t write. Here's what happened:

I was anxious to start- and just plain anxious. Like Winnie the Pooh, I thought, thought, thought about my story, a retelling of The Brave Little Tailor. I found a lovely plotting guide on Tess Hilmo's blog that forced me to ask the big questions about my WIP. For me, those were about reversals: what goes wrong and why?

In late March, I sat outside at a café, sipped a drink, and stared at the Blue Ridge Mountains. I worked through the plot guide, scribbling questions and what-ifs. I kept at it the next few weeks. I thought about my WIP as I drove to work. I played with different characters. I even looked organized, pulling out that dogeared paper and jotting down new notes. (My organized self has since lost that paper.)

Little by little, pieces of the story came together. After about two weeks, several scenes were so vivid that I had to write them; they just wouldn’t leave me alone. By the time I attended the May workshop, I knew the major points of the whole story.

I loved Not-Writing. 

It worked so well that I used it all summer. Before I wrote a new scene, I'd jot down notes: snatches of dialog, highlights, images I could already see. After 5-10 minutes, I had the bones of the scene down. I could hear conversations. I could see my story's landscape. 

Here was the awesome part: I could tell right away whether that section was going to bore me. You know that awful feeling when you've written 1,500 words and you don't care anymore? And then you have to figure out why? 

Those few minutes of Not-Writing prevented most of that. If my notes bored me, I'd play with them till they didn't. Even if it took a while. It wasn't outlining. There were no bullet points, no Roman numerals. Not-Writing used the fuel that works best for me: questions. 

I really hate it when folks talk about Process-with-a-capital-P, because it sounds pretentious (with a capital P). It makes it sound like there’s a magic bullet, like you don't have to Butt in Chair your way through a manuscript. 

Yet the flip side of writing is that we figure out what works for us. We discover those rituals that allow us to get words on the page with courage and strength. We find methods that prevent us from giving our WIP a title like, I'm Really, Really Sorry I Couldn't Write a Better Book.

Not-Writing is what worked for me. I wrote a 79,000 word manuscript and mailed it to Patti two weeks ago. I survived. Even my one remaining houseplant survived. 

Was my story pretty? No. Did I have a small breakdown while driving it to the Post Office? Oh, yes. 

But I didn’t write, "I'm Sorry" on the first page. So it was a victory.

I'd love to hear from you. What do you do to get that first draft down? What rituals or methods keep you sane?