Sometimes writing is hard—very hard. The words don’t flow with ease and pages pile up and are trashed with each false start. And then there are times when the words leap out of me and land neatly arranged in paragraphs.
Writing is writing—whether it’s my freelance work or my fiction, the actual process of writing, of pouring the words from one container (my head) into another container (the page) is the same.
There’s one phenomenon that I experience, but have never tried to talk about or blog about before, and that’s the sensation of words burning a hole in my head.
This usually occurs when I’m letting an idea stew. Maybe I’m waiting to hear back from a client with more information for a project so I can have a clearer idea of what they need written; or maybe I’m just not sure which point-of-view will best serve a particular story; or I’m working on a novel and can’t figure out how to get from one point of the narrative to the next… The ideas are rolling around, but they have not settled into any kind of usable order.
It’s a muddle.
And then, all of a sudden, I feel the words burning and they all there ready to spill out onto the page. I can’t force this, or summon it, or speed it up, but it happens and it works!
I was driving myself crazy searching for the right vocabulary to express the client’s business persona. Every time I sat down at the keyboard it came out as blather. I took a walk. I made some coffee. I talked to my cat. Still, it was not happening.
And then… it did!
The words were burning a hole in my head and they made the leap onto the page and into a great first draft!
Writers, is this something you experience?
Sometimes my cat helps me write.
