It’s Monday and Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp are down. So what’s an author to do?
She writes a blog post!
Just kidding. The truth: she adds more words to her current work-in-progress.
So far, I’ve got 4k words and they’re all good words. No need to delete them later, not this time. But that only happened because I spent so much time thinking about the scenes, the characters, and the situation the heroine finds herself in, all while I was washing dishes, folding laundry… breathing. About 2 – 3 weeks worth of thinking and mulling and kinda-procrastinating-but-not-really because I was lost in their world most of the time.
And it’s a good thing because I feel like I’m back home again, back where I should be as a writer of my books.
Turns out, I don’t do well outlining my stories and writing every detail down on paper. I don’t do well when I have to log my word count on a community spreadsheet. I suck at analyzing my characters’ wounds, motivations, and fears on the page or the screen. It kills whatever mystery and excitement I feel when I’m discovering the same things as I write the story.
Instead, I think them all. No writing, no dictating my ideas either because I never listen to them anyway.
That’s because I’m a discovery writer, or that’s what they say that kind of writer is. But however my kind of writer is called, I’m back to feeling my characters again, slipping under skin and seeing what they see, hearing what they hear, as if I’m them for the time they let me put their stories down on the page.
It’s made writing so much fun again. It’s made me feel alive again.
And as a storyteller, that’s a good thing.
Who knows? I may just actually finish this book on time!
Liz Durano 