The Writing Moment
Scenes hang in my mind, waiting to be unfolded. A line or two or three is written. A pause to contemplate them is embraced. More lines come, get written. The growing new scene is reviewed, lightly edited. More lines come, more gets written.
Sometimes, the pause gets extended. I surf into news articles and others’ posts. Then a muse spears my attention and I jump back to the scene being written. Lines are added. They stack into paragraphs. Paragraphs stack into pages. I review what I wrote and lightly edit.
That scene is eventually done. The next one is considered and plotted in my head. I approach again. A line or two or three is written. So it goes.
Meanwhile, muses ambush me with a new concept. I’m reading a non-fiction article about glaciers. The concept harpoons my mind. I grin with delight and think, oh, wow, that would be fun. An opening scene begins unfolding.
I open up a new doc to capture the first lines. Scenes are written. They turn into chapters and branch into a structure’s glimmerings. I think, this will be my next project. I rummage around my brain for a title. A tentative one is hauled out. Rejected. Another bubbles up. Acceptable. More is realized and written. The working title is modified. The quick, sudden progress surprises me. This will definitely be fun to write. But first, the other novel in progress must be finished.
I close the document. Return to the work in progress. A line or two or three is written. I’m close to the end. Close to tying it all up and saying to myself, finished.
So it goes.
The Writing Moment
I wrote another ending to my novel in progress the other day. I think this one might stick. Man, what a glorious, exciting, invigorating, disturbing, worrying day that once after wrote it. I was so excited as I wrote that I began vibrating inside. I want to believe that it’s a good ending — hey, I do believe it is — but until others read it and judge it, I won’t know. Or rather, it’ll always be good to me, but may not be good to others. That’s how reading goes.
The novel isn’t done. I’d become semi-paralyzed by thinking over the ending. I kept rolling it through my head, coming up with possibilities, and then shooting them down for different, valid reasons. The one that finally landed was a surprise but feels right. I hope it holds together through the editing, revising, publishing process.
Meanwhile, to finish the novel, I need to go back and write the climax. Sounds funny but that’s how it worked in the case of this book. Several different arcs need pulled together; in writing the ending, I saw how the arcs should be handled. Now to wrangle the words and make it work.
Okay, back to writing like crazy.
Michael Seidel, writer 