Day 6
Back in the saddle. Clip-clop.
Week-ends I don't work (if I can help it) so let's call this Day 6 and the bread is rising again. We is happy.
Now I'm talking on here as if all this stuff is being consciously sifted and analysed as I go but it's important to remember that a lot of is a post-rationalisation after the event of writing, trying to look back at issues as they arose. Writing is an act - or it is for me at any rate - that is a species of thinking but which does not proceed entirely from the front brain. It's a level of focus somewhere between concentration and dreaming. You do have to "lose yourself" for the origination of material. In the later drafts the work gets surfaced and corrected more and more by the front brain, but in these first-draft stages I'm trying to reach my hand down a bit below the surface of consciousness to bring up some rather more chaotic material.
There might be plenty of writers who have everything figured out before they go to it, but I'm not one of them. I have my very thin and misty narrative line and I don't know until I work at spinning silk from that mist exactly what scenes or characters or language it might generate.
Or to use a different silk metaphor, there's a parachute and it's only the act of writing that makes it drop through the air; and it as it does the details and character of the parachute and its load become clearer and clearer.
So everything I say here is a post-rationalisation of some moment when I've sensed a block, a doubt, a reflex, a quickening, an issue that needs muddling through. I'm not saying take it with a pinch of salt: I am trying to be completely transparent about this process and I understand that most writers hate to do that. But the point is that a lot of it happens in the dark, and I'm making guesses about what's happening, based on the experience of writing several novels and even more short stories.
The interesting thing about this dark source is what I characterised as RAFW in one of these blogs. Why do we run away from writing? It's because of an unconscious hatred of the game. The conscious mind does not like us to dwell in this space between concentrating and dreaming. It's a dangerous place to be; or was in the psyche-forming days when a sabre-toothed tiger might have been creeping up on you. And as any fule nos, writing is as much about what is going on behind you as in front of you.
Today my whizzing abacus reveals a cheeky 2151 words.
