(Jane’s World is the brainchild of the awesomely talented Paige Braddock)
I can daydream all day, chewing on pencils, playing endless games of Winter Whirl,* while my characters dance through my head, conceptualizing their feelings and events and shootings and smooches.
But that doesn’t get stuff written down. Eventually, if I want to have a novel written, I will have to make new marks on paper or throw new pixels up on a screen.**
That’s a pretty basic concept right there, and it’s amazing how many excuses I can counter-conceptualize for not actually doing this.
The only cure is to get something down—even a single sentence about what I want to happen next. And then another sentence, expanding on the idea a little . . . and another so it’s a full paragraph (according to Janie’s teacher, three sentences make a paragraph, and who am I to argue?) . . . and a fourth that makes the adverbs in the second moot . . . and then the clock strikes eleven and there are four pages here that didn’t exist before that one small sentence was written.
I’m not knocking daydreaming—it’s not a waste of time, until it is, and without conceptualizing, you get alphabet soup in three-sentence groups. But there comes a time when the only way to call yourself a writer . . . is to write something.
Ideas are only as valuable as their execution.
Suck it up and get it down.
Butt in seat. Hands on keyboard.
Poing!
_____
*You shoot colored snowflake balls at a great whirling structure of colored snowflake balls, trying to match at least three so they’ll fall off. It’s like structured transcendental meditation with poingy sounds.
** Supplying, one can safely assume, my own poingy sounds.
Jane’s World is the brainchild of the awesomely talented Paige Braddock
Earful of Cider 