I spuddle.

This my writerly wisdom for the day:  The first part of writing a book is just a bunch of throwing words at the page and hoping they sprout.   Mostly it’s bad prose and overwrought phrasing and trying on different voices and sometimes it can make you twitch with anxiety because the story is THERE but you can’t get there from where you’ve begun.   Sometimes of course you get it right the very first time and other times it’s version seven — produced after weeks of writing and rewriting — that sings and you can get so excited about it that you immediately reserve fourteen new books at the library, fill and empty your imaginary shopping cart at JCrew twelve times, do the same at anthro, re-imagine the colour scheme of your house’s interior, upload your pictures from the last few days, and write a blog post about writing books because although what you really WANT to be doing is writing your book which is now ready to SING, somehow are stopping yourself by writing some other thing first because you are, at heart, someone who stops themselves for a minute before doing the thing you want most to do.

Mix a bunch of metaphors.   Rinse.   Lather.   Repeat.

Some pictures, which I’m uploading now as I take them instead of just waiting until I’ve edited them to my version of as-good-as-they-can-be, are metaphors for the start or the restart of the book of the moment, and bad metaphors at that.   Here’s the first one:  New beginning!   Get it?

And another one.   Let’s call this one FLOW:

And finally, this one.   I call it Work-In-Progress, even though that makes no sense, because it stretches this metaphor that I’ve been abusing throughout this post to the breaking point.   Snap.

OK, fine, it’s just a fish.    We were at the aquarium yesterday.   It wasn’t really a metaphor, it was just a good way to keep the kids amused and play with the camera at the same time.   Back to work, peeps.

Filed under: writing