What Do You Do To Keep Your Hand In?
A.P. Fuchs of Coscom Entertainment had an interesting post on how to keep up the momentum in your writing. He was writing specifically about keeping up the writing energy in the month between finishing your book and then picking it up again for editing after it’s “cooked” or “aged” a little. But it got me thinking. There are other times when the momentum needs to be kept up, when we need to somehow keep our creative or writing hand in “between” things. Things disappear “tween,” whether they be dragons or slips of time or children crossing galaxies using thousand league boots. “Between” is a dangerous place indeed. Stories get lost “between.” “Between” books or short stories or editing, what do you do to “keep your hand in” so you don’t go “between”?
I freelance part-time for the company I work for so whenever I am out of writing projects or out of inspiration and am only thinking in “concrete mode” I see about getting assignments. They aren’t fun and they aren’t creative so why do I do this?
- They pay me. Much as I love my fiction writing, it’s all on spec and I have yet to get a paycheck more than $10 for any of my stories or poetry.
- They keep me writing and working on my craft. Academic prose is not the same as narrative fiction or lyrical poetry, but it’s still practice writing (hopefully) grammatically correct sentences in a (semi)logical manner. I make it a challenge to see how interesting I can make the dullest paper I’m working on (in a purely academic way of course) by varying sentence length, use of active sentences versus passive sentences, and ways to bring in interesting examples. In short, even though it’s not creative, it is, in a way, and keeps me writing.
- I never know where inspiration will hit next, so my best bet is to keep going with life. If doing a paper on how water filters work sparks an idea for a story or a poem, who am I to argue?
What else do I do? Probably the same as other people. I watch movies and read books. Some are old favorites and some are new to me. Go listen to music (not as much as I used to, I confess). Live music is a good muse. Go to a fair or festival or a different part of town. Go to a conference or writers group. It’s good to be around fellow writers.
And I take notes. Not everyone does this, I know, but one of the best books I read on writing was Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. Two things she said stuck with me. One is to jot things down as soon as you can after they come to you. Not everything I jot down will be worth anything, but how do I know unless I jot it down to examine it later? Otherwise, it may just disappear “in between.” The other thing she said was to Be Kind. Be kind, be kind, be kind. Be kind to yourself, to your fellow writers, to the waitress who pours infinite amounts of coffee while you take up her table writing, to the librarian who lets you use her conference room for your meetings, to everyone who in some way helps contribute to the writer’s life you are trying to live.
Another thing to remember, is that even when writing is done in a rush of words, it’s not really a rush of words. It’s word by word. Step by Step. Bird by Bird.
So, what are you doing, today, to keep your hand in?
