Immersion

1.

I’m a write-every-day kind of writer.

It took me three years to earn that kind of discipline, and I’ll be damned if I let it disintegrate now.

2.

But I think it’s not really about writing-every-day.

It’s about Thinking About The Work every day, because it’s what keeps you ‘plugged into your work’. Sort of, if your novel’s a ‘flow,’ then it’s just easier to tap into it if you do it every day.

Pretty sure some people can do it without writing every day, but I’m also pretty sure it’s easier just to write every day – barring time constraints, of course.

3.

I started one of my old blogs to keep my hand in, so to speak. Just to make sure that I wrote something every day.

It kind of worked. I wrote every day, though I didn’t post usually post what I wrote the same day – it got to a point where I was writing my posts up to a week or more in advance because I just blogged, blogged, blogged.

On the other hand, it was the perfect procrastination-from-fiction tool*, because I could tell myself ‘I’m still writing.’

But I wasn’t.

4.

If there’s anything similar to blogging, it might be writing vignettes and other types of short-form fiction. They are like doing the hundred meter dash every day, just on different athletic tracks – somebody will probably want to smack me for this analogy, but I don’t write short-form at all so forgive me.

Novels are marathons. Plod plod plod.

5.

Actually, strike that.

Novels are more like obstacle courses. Sometimes you run into a wall, a mud pit, something you have to climb over, or crawl under…

You need to deal with them, and you need to deal with each of them intelligently. You don’t want to expend more effort than necessary, but sometimes, you gotta bring out the bulldozers.

But here’s the thing. Books are organic objects, whether you’re a plotter or not.

If you dig up something to dump it and you dig it up by the roots? It’ll jostle the foundations of the rest of your constructions.

I think only if you’re truly immersed in your book can you see the rough edges, sand them off, and put the pieces back together to form a new pattern.

6.

So breathe your work. Dream of it. Wallow in it. Hold it deep within your heart.

Immerse yourself.