Sitting in our favorite little coffee shop, ostensibly doing homework (or in my case grading), my girls and I silently sipped and stared at our respective screens…or at least I thought so. After a time, I noticed my daughter staring at the rows of mugs lined up hanging from pegs on the wall. I didn’t say anything to her for a moment but then I couldn’t stand it anymore…and I nudged her and my eyes asked the obvious question. “Oh,” she said, smiling in sort of a self mocking way, “I can’t get over that one cup…see it?” Well, she does have a slight touch of OCD when it comes to things out of place, and when I looked at the wall I could see what was bothering her—one cup. Turned. Out of place. Wrong. I laughed, shook my head, and said in my best motherly voice…”get back to work.” But, she isn’t the only one who has that problem, is she? Not OCD, per se, and to be fair, she doesn’t really suffer from that affliction. But, she is a perfectionist. She wants things to go in order, to fall into place, and if they don’t she gets a little tripped up and fixated. The same thing happened to a student of mine last week. She is a smart, talented, hard-working girl. She certainly isn’t one to try to get out of work…but she came to me several times after school because she was trying to write a large paper that I had assigned her, but she couldn’t figure out how to work through one paragraph, and because of that her entire thought process had come to a grinding halt. She couldn’t move past it and she couldn’t figure out a way through it, and so her writing was effectively holding her hostage. She was stuck…essentially staring at her own ‘cup on the wall.’
How often do we as writers get tripped up like that? How often does some little bit of plot or imagery or characterization stall us in our tracks and keep us from moving forward in our work? This can be frustrating, even scary perhaps, not knowing exactly what to do with a certain part of the work, but it doesn’t mean the writing has to stop. Work on something else. Start a different chapter. Flesh out the lines and vague edges of another character. Work out the dialogue of a different scene. Whatever it takes, push through, work around, and set the problem aside to be tackled later. It isn’t avoidance. It is coming in the back door. Often when we clear our minds and let our creativity run its course in another area, part of our brains will still be tackling the problem and out of nowhere a solution will present itself. It sounds like magic, or perhaps wishful thinking, but it isn’t. It is just the writer’s life. So…get back to work.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Wendy Picard GorhamWendy lives and works in the midst of words everyday--English teacher by profession, and writer by passion! Archives
April 2020
Categories
All
Follow us on Facebook and be alerted of each new post!Go to our Amazon page... |