Hmmm… the day after Easter has arrived and I’m looking back on my Lent discipline to stay offline and be more productive, spiritual and creative.
It was not easy.
Cutting out hours of online time to refocus that time on my creative and spiritual goals by staying offline was somewhat effective but probably not as dramatic life changing as I optimistically hoped it would be.
But it was a learning experience. I gained more understanding of my mental focus, writing limits and daily variations, and how to nudge the creative sessions a bit further with better self-talk, mental rehearsal and a “just draft it without perfecting it right now” that allowed the skeletal framework of the scene to come into being without a fully fleshed out production.
I’ve been tracking my daily word counts on an excel sheet for several months. And learned that while this creates an understanding of the ebb and flow of the process, it should not be treated as a benchmark that creates pressure.
There were days when 2500+ words flowed easily with an easy mental movie to finger typing, story writing flow. And then the struggling days when 600 words felt like pushing a rock up a hill.
So, I’ve had to learn not to expect the high days every day. And spend my evenings trying to figure out how to make it easier.
One important learning was that it’s more difficult to ease off the pressure and let it flow than to push harder to meet the day’s goals.
Sometimes, I need to stop and change focus to something else. Maybe just retire a struggling scene for the day and pick up a more interesting part to flesh out from one of the other chapter outlines.
This disrupts the expectations of a linear flow and some days feel less like a clear river flowing and more like a giant tree fell across the river blocking the flow and making a muddy pool.
But switching to a different scene allows the blocked space to clear naturally.
On those days when it feels difficult, I remind myself of my years as a marketing copywriter for an IT company. That type of writing demanded a machine-like logic without much room for creativity. It was like forcing the part of my brain that wanted to create a magical world to build a boxy structure instead.
I was grateful to have a seat in front of a glass wall with a view of the trees outside which was better than an open office plan or cubicles with no view. But there was a feeling of being chained to that laptop and dreaming of escaping that daily mental marathon of churning out IT marketing copy on a hamster wheel.
I could literally feel the creative juice in my brain drying up writing things like “improve after sales customer satisfaction levels by delivering… proactively predict redundancies… leverage resources…”
The morning to evening hours felt like a progressively wilting plant in a cubicle. Every evening, I’d spend the commute home eagerly drenching my dried up brain looking at the sunset and green trees to bring back some of that life again and restore the balance.
Today, I wrote about a world that existed almost two centuries ago and my readers love it. I’m thankful to be able to create my own worlds, write my stories in my own space, with my cat on my desk, trees outside my window and no more icky IT writing.
What I accomplished during the days of Lent this year…
- Finished a historical fiction story of 25k words.
- Restarted a shelved historical fiction story that I’ve been stuck on for months. Made new chapter outlines and wrote a few more chapters. I’m on track to finish it this month if I stay and progressively improve on the offline discipline I built over my Lent days. I really want to publish it this month and give this the main focus. These are written under a pen name.
- Created more dialog snippets, scene ideas, character prototypes and lyrics for my cat Biscuitus’ fantasy series under my real name. This is a passion project and I’ve decided to give this only an hour a day.
Each year’s Lent discipline teaches me new things. I’m going to continue practicing this year’s daily disciplines and apply the lessons to my daily creative practice. Focus on taking care of the process so the results flow from it.
The dreams of one finished story every month are calling out to me like the dryads and tree spirits in Narnia :D
#writinglife #creativeprocess
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