One piece of writing advice that has stuck with me over the years was this from Cornelia Nixon: resist the temptation to hoard your gems. Resist the fear that if you use those gems up in the piece you’re working on now, you’ll run out after that. If you can work them into a piece you’re working on now, if they make sense there, use them. Don’t ration them. There will always be new ideas, new details, new gems.
That doesn’t mean you should squeeze three metaphors into a single little paragraph, of course. The idea isn’t that you should glue everything you own to one story until that story becomes so heavy and awkward that it can’t take a single step. The idea is to let go of any fears you might have about a scarcity of ideas and inspiration. Ideas and inspiration are all around you all the time, there for the taking. All you have to do is pay attention.
I’ve not personally struggled much with this kind of hoarding of ideas. I usually have far more ideas and scraps than I can possibly use. Even when the well does feel a little dry, I trust that it will soon refill. But I do have a proclivity for a different kind of creative hoarding.
Sometimes I hold off on writing the very scene or moment that sparked my idea for a story—that is, the thing I’m most excited to write. I save it for later while I fumble around with scenes and vignettes that I’m less excited about, that I’m not sure have any place in the story.
Of course, there is plenty to be gained from writing outside a story. Sometimes I interview my characters. Sometimes I pick some random situation unrelated to my story, put my character in that situation and write to see what happens. A lot of times bits of these writing-outside-the-story exercises make their way into the story. But even if they don’t, they’re never a waste. Writing outside the story is useful when I have written all I know of the story and have hit a roadblock. Writing outside the story is being pro-active.
But when I hoard the parts I want to write and write random nonsense instead, this is an act of avoidance.
Fear of failure drives avoidance to some extent. I think here of a writer letting her novel idea become crushed beneath a pile of research. She holds off on writing the story because she wants to do adequate research to get the historical details or science details or what have you correct. The risk is that the story idea may wilt if she doesn’t write it now. She might find that after all that research, the story has no more momentum.
But fear of scarcity plays a part in avoidance, too. That is, sometimes there’s a part of me that worries the initial scrap of an idea is all I have in way of a story and all there will ever be. Once I write it, what then? Don’t I need to come up with the story to go around the scrap before I begin writing? Won’t the idea just crumble apart if I write it now, just as it is?
There are situations in which holding off on writing something makes sense, whether because the project is big or because I’m productively working through the story or structure in my head before I begin or because I’m working on multiple projects and I can only do so much at once. But in other cases, I need to work out the idea through the writing, and I need to tackle it head on, and I need to do it now or else risk losing that spark of energy altogether.
If I stop fearing scarcity and trust in the little gem of an idea, and write it, the process of writing might just lead me to where the story wants to go next.
Exercises:
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