Something happens, when I’m writing. I didn’t understand it, for many years, but now I know that this is because a different, more creative part of my brain is driving the process than the one I need for more drudging tasks, like editing.
In order to activate that creative part of my brain, (I wish I had a better name for it. I’m sure it has one.) I have to let go and trust the process. If I start to worry about details or try to be too controlling with it, it doesn’t work. But if I let go and trust, the thing seems to write itself. My fingers feel to be channeling something from deeper in my brain, that my fully conscious, work-a-day brain didn’t know was there.
When I’m writing like that – or like this! – I can’t think about details such as formatting, spelling and grammar. It comes out how it comes out and if I don’t edit it, it’s in the format and style you’re currently reading: quite chatty and informal.
Then, I have to make editing rules for myself and edit the thing, using the less fun part of my brain. I don’t bother to do this for blog posts, but I do for anything more important. Sorry, blog reader, but blog posts simply aren’t all that important! Books are. Serious articles are. Blog posts are my streams of consciousness, and sometimes, subconsciousness.
Come to think of it, I probably give far too much of myself away in them and always have.
I remember first becoming aware of blogs, around 2003, and thinking, “Wow. I can publish my words, without having to go through a publishing company or paying a fortune to print copies privately?” It was so liberating and, luckily for us writers, it was soon to be followed by Amazon, Kindle, e-books. I like doing the whole process by myself: the editing, cover designs, even the legal stuff.
It means I can do it in my own time and my own way and really know that everything about the work I have produced is mine. Not commissioned by anyone else, not edited by anyone else, not designed or enhanced by anyone else. It keeps the creativity flowing, fast and strong.
As writers, we need to be able to turn that on like a tap, whenever we work and a major element of that internal, neurological plumbing, is trust. Trust in the process. Trust in our freedom to be able to channel whatever happens to come out and that we will honour that and change only what absolutely must be changed, in the editing process.
Right now, I’m blogging and editing. Edit a chapter, write a blog post, one of each, every day. The editing is quite fraught and feels like hard work, but the blogging is so much more fun.