I managed to fit in a little bit of writing yesterday. This is going to be a very busy time for me, what with directing the musical at the school, work, FAT Jazz, Earth to Doris and family stuff. I’ve blocked aside chunks of time, and hopefully I will be able to focus well enough to be productive in those times.
It’s funny the things that occur to me. I was mucking away on a particular scene that has been plaguing me for several weeks. I left it to simmer over Christmas, and sat down to get some things moving, did a little, wrote a few lines, puzzled and puzzed til my puzzler was sore, left it, came back a while later, mucked about a bit, wrote a few lines, puzzled and puzzed… You see where this is going, right? I didn’t get back to it for a week or ten days or so, meaning yesterday. I was supposed to write on Monday, but this whole week has just been a “shmoz” as my mother would call it (find your own definition of that… I know what it means to me) and I didn’t get any writing in. So there I was working on it yesterday, Thursday.
What came to my mind was this, “I like what I’m coming up with here, and the way the scene is progressing. Now, if I’d sat down on Monday to write, would it have come out the same way? Would I have written the same words? If they were different, I wonder if they’d have been better words, better lines, a better way of carrying on with the scene?”
I like to think that there’s a reason I don’t write on a certain day. I like to think that if I can’t write on that day [ok, sorry, I’m getting distracted by the radio: they’ve just begun a documentary on teaching safe sex to seniors]. If I can’t write on that day, then if I had I’d have produced nothing but shite. What I wrote yesterday was the best thing I could have written. If I’d waited until today, it would have turned out differently again. I kind of wonder what the scene would look like if I’d written it on a different day. Would the mood of the scene be more cheerful? or less? Would my word retrieval have been more effective so that the colour of the scene would be brighter, more intense? Or maybe it would have been yucky and boring. Maybe the only word I’d be able to produce is “sandwich” or “little.” Or “the.”
Thank goodness I wasn’t able to write on Monday.