Writing: Be Like the Squirrel
Take all your problems
And rip em apart
Carry them off In a shopping cart
And another thing you
Should’ve known from the start
The problems in hand
Are lighter than at heart
Be like the Squirrel, girl
Be like the squirrel
…
From “Little Acorns” by The White Stripes
I was writing this morning. That’s exciting in and of itself. I’ve had the ideas for a story floating around in my head for the past few weeks, and I put most of the opening scene to paper this morning. And then I stopped.
I’ve gotten into the habit recently of writing in bursts (often on weekend mornings) and completing a very short story. I’ve returned to these shorts to expand and edit them, but for the most part I’ve written full stories in a sitting. The problem with this is that it doesn’t even vaguely scale.
This morning’s writing session felt particularly good, because I was writing a piece of a story, set in a world that is still growing in my head, and by ending where I did I feel very much like I have a place to start when I sit down to work on it again. This isn’t a new idea. I like how Cory Doctorow put it:
Leave yourself a rough edge
When you hit your daily word-goal, stop. Stop even if you’re in the middle of a sentence. Especially if you’re in the middle of a sentence. That way, when you sit down at the keyboard the next day, your first five or ten words are already ordained, so that you get a little push before you begin your work. Knitters leave a bit of yarn sticking out of the day’s knitting so they know where to pick up the next day — they call it the “hint.” Potters leave a rough edge on the wet clay before they wrap it in plastic for the night — it’s hard to build on a smooth edge.
[update:20090725] After blogging about how cool it is to find a stopping point in your WIP … one really should eventually pick it back up.
