Tuesday, November 11, 2008

When the Words Won't Wait for My Fingers

Sometimes, I get on a roll with a story. The words, sentences, scenes seem to come from my fingers at an amazing pace. They seem to by-pass my brain so that it hardly seems like I am writing the story so much as reading it while some magic puts the words on the computer screen.

These are some of the greatest moments as a writer. They are always too short. And almost always interrupted by something that disrupts the flow. And then it takes a while for me to get the flow back.

The one thing that seems to flow easily from my fingers the most often is descriptions. Often of people, but sometimes of scenery. Once I start, I can go several paragraphs describing the view.

But as a hyper-vigilant-- and hyper-critical-- writer, I always get squeemish about passages of description. I know description is important to a story, but I'm not confident enough in my own writing to know when I've put it in the right spot, or if it's enough, too much, or whatever else can go wrong with descriptions.

Sometimes, and this is my most favorite time, a piece of action, usually with dialogue, will come tumbling from my brain at high speed. The scene will unfold as words on a page, always with snappy lines and great dialogue and I sit back and go "WOW!"

These times don't happen nearly enough, as far as I'm concerned. But I love them.

Any ideas on how to get those scenes to come forth like water? Preferably when I don't need to be doing something else.

3 comments:

pattinase (abbott) said...

Exactly my topic tomorrow. I can't trust myself to write them because there were the scenes I cut in the shorts.

sandra seamans said...

I love those moments too! And the best part is sitting back afterwards and re-reading the piece thinking, my God, I can't believe I wrote that.

sandra seamans said...

And you're right. They don't come often enough and why does someone always need something when you're in the middle of that flow?