Fresh Thinking
It constantly amazes me how easy it is to fall back on old thinking. I’ll plan out a story, say, and then, as soon as it’s on paper, it hardens. Suddenly the paper is a security blanket. Every time I’m trying to figure out or remember what needs to happen in the story, I’m all nervous and I have to find my paper to find the real way the story goes, because it’s no longer an idea, a scribble, a brainstorm. Somehow it’s taken on this severe level of authority, and I feel lowly in its presence. It is the revelation, the work of the master. Any new ideas I develop feel iffy, like I’m trying to remember the real one but not quite getting it.
Which is weird, you know? I wrote it in the first place. It was just an idea. Why does it suddenly hold such sway? I trace it to two things:
1. I’m always — usually — amazed by what comes out when I actually sit down and start producing sentences.
2. It’s hard to sit down and produce sentences.
So reading the old stuff becomes incredibly easy, and the stuff is so good, so good it almost feels like fairies must have written it, so good I can’t imagine where it ever came from, that it reinforces my instinct that this must be the real one, and anything I sit down and laboriously scratch out now will be a pale comparison.
So I have to break that kind of thinking. One, realize that when I work good things happen, and my old ideas do not hold this weird authority over me just because they exist now. If I work more, my new ideas will exist, too, and I’ll be all surprised and delighted all over again. Two, work hard. Write sentences. Suck it frikkin’ up.
After all, this is what I love.
