Monday Musings: Writing it Longhand

So,at the end of last week I hit one of those walls. Even though I was closing in on the end of my draft, things stopped feeling right. It wasn’t that what I’d written was bad. Some of it showed real promise, but not for this particular journey or this moment in time.

I spent a good day arguing with that little voice in my head.  You know the whiny one that realizes going back, means throwing away about thirty pages. The one that’s afraid that what I’ll write the second time around is even ‘more wrong’ that what is already on the page. She tried to bribe the side of me that knew the truth with chocolate, encouraged her to keep going with the ‘shitty first draft’ ’till we hit those magical words the end, and then reevaluate.  Under normal circumstance I’d do just that, but this was one of those moments when I just knew I’d made a wrong turn. Going forward was only going to get me further lost.

As a safety net, I picked up a yellow legal pad and one of my purple pens and nestled in a cozy chair. If I just experiment with a few ideas, without hitting the magic delete button in my file, I could play with some scenarios without throwing away the old ones. If I didn’t come up with anything really good. I could start just moving forward  today.

But it didn’t take more than about 30 seconds to remember a truth I’d forgotten. Putting a pen to paper (at least for me) opens up something. It’s more intimate than typing at a keyboard. Slower–yes–and maybe it’s that forcing the brain to slow down a bit that helps spark new life. About 90 seconds after that realization, I found the new path. The right path. Today, I hit delete. (Okay, not really. I cut out the old text and paste it into a file labeled cut and save it for awhile, just in case).  Today I move forward on the right path.