Writing – Divine Ready

What to do? One doesn’t force creativity. Oh sure, there are exercises like playing scales or stretching before a workout, scenes to draw, characters to begin fleshing out, research to do, but lately, nothing puts you in the groove.

Ideas are lined up like frenemies, none willing to come out to play. They tease, and then they are wary and sometimes even mean. They aren’t sure you are worthy, and you feel the same about them. Several scenarios are thrown around, but like tossing paper airplanes in a crowded room, they land lifeless at your feet. And now you all stand crowded into the same space, twiddling thumbs, frustrated, waiting for the water to flow, worried none will step forward and start the dance again. The onus is on the idea. The onus is on you. Is there a difference? Yes. No. Maybe.

What about that idea about secrets and confessions, shame and guilt that seemed to have heft and to traverse easily between the holy and the profane? It strutted around all puffed up, but it didn’t get liftoff. Why? It accuses you, demands an explanation. It presented when others stood back. You tried to follow its lead. It wasn’t a rejection, you plead, you simply couldn’t do it justice. Of course, you have what it takes but not right now! Please be patient, you beg. I will get to you.

You try not to measure your process or productivity against others. You need a break but don’t dare take one in case the ideas lay down to rest, or worse, disappear entirely, and there is no longer so much as a drip to be seen or heard. You know better. They always come back.

Sometimes creativity needs a wide berth. Rest, give in, go fallow, a nap in winter with the cats feeds the spirit whence the ideas spring. The right one will come at the right time. It might make a slow entry, the courtship long and unpredictable. Are we on, or are we off? Or it may come at once, a thunderous announcement that silences the others. I’m here! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go! And the rain will pour again creating the rushing stream on the side of the cliff with a lively noise that at once quells and excites.

Writer nerd struggling with a plot on a hot Saturday afternoon, watching YouTube videos on plotting and discovering I am not the only one out there who attempts to write a novel without a fully formed plot. I learn that there is a term for this: pantser, as in flying by the seat of your pants.

I once heard an interview with author Joyce Carol Oates who said writing a novel without a plot was like driving a car without having any idea of where you’re going. On the other hand, writer Elizabeth Strout never writes a book from start to finish, instead writing scenes and letting the connections emerge as she goes. There’s something to be said for both plotting and following what’s emerging with only a glimpse of a plan. But in both life and fiction, the unexpected occurs, shifting the course no matter how much we would like to direct it.

If you’re a pantser in your chosen art form, are you also in life? In college I thought I would marry a lawyer, have three children, host fabulous dinner parties and write greeting cards for Hallmark. Alas… My life turned out about as 180 from that as it gets. I cannot reorder and reshuffle the scenes of my life. Perhaps that is the draw to fiction where I can pretend to have divine rule.

Plot or not, I might show up ready to write one scene for my character, and he or she walks stage right, and says, no, s/he would like to do something else entirely. I don’t have to heed. I mean this is fiction, right, and I’m the one in control, right? This rogue move could yield threads of gold; however, it could also lead nowhere. You don’t always know until you go there.

So, to plot or not? Is there a right or wrong choice? No, of course not. That would defy creativity, and fidelity and surrender to creativity is a big YES to whatever you believe, to whatever you might be plotting… or not.

Category: Writing

The Faucet Drips but Will Not Flow

To Plot or Not