Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Over the past three days, I’ve been struck with the creative writing bug in the biggest way and have written over fifty pages in my various manuscripts! For those of you who are unaware of how many typed pages an average writer generates per day, the number is about six. So, as you can see, I’ve been on a roll. I love it when this happens.

I’m one of those writers who logs a minimum of three handwritten pages of my thoughts and doings in a daily journal. I’ve never been much for fancy ones, so mine are simple college-ruled spiral notebooks, and I manage to fill one, cover-to-cover, every two months or less.

I’m often asked what I log I my journals. And that’s a hard question for me to answer, for what I pen varies from day-to-day and depends largely on how I’m feeling, what I’m experiencing or snippets of brainstorm ideas I get for future writing. Basically, the best way I can describe what I scribe in my journals is to say that I purge all the thoughts left banging and clashing their way around my head at the end of each day onto those pages.

Not being a morning person, and having an overabundance of energy, especially at night, I’ve found that when I pen in my journal in the evening, it’s a release of sorts that allows me to not have to carry those thoughts with me any longer. And I don’t. Once they’ve been written down, there they stay, safely tucked in my journal.

Do I ever go back and read through my journals. Hell yes! On a regular basis. Take, for example what I wrote in Saturday’s journal entry. I was so inspired to write, that words poured out of me onto the page and before I knew it, my hand was terribly cramped and I’d generated an eighteen-page journal entry—for Saturday alone!

So what was so urgent that I had to write it down? Two complete short story ideas for a new series of mine that will be debuting in 2011. And those pages were part of the overall fifty that I’ve written over the past three days.

Now, my mind is still spinning on crazy hyper speed with writing ideas, but my body has gotten to the point that it needs to go back to its normal breakneck speed of generating about ten written pages per day.

So what will happen to the ideas cluttering my head? Well, there they’ll remain until I have a chance to write them down, either in my journal or in my manuscripts. And this is how I write.