Kinetic Writer

I was relaxing this afternoon, resting my eyes from too much time on the computer, when I suddenly had an idea for a character and a story. Sometimes ideas that suddenly come to me also disappear quickly, but I was relaxed and decided to chance losing it rather than jumping up right away to write it down.

I laid my head back, closed my eyes, and focused on the initial spark of the story. Nothing else was distracting me, which made it easier for a stream of ideas to take shape in my head. Key elements of a very interesting character came to me as if I were a passive observer. Potential plot points and secondary characters formed themselves around the main character with little effort. I was partially aware of my surprise with this process, but the majority of my thoughts were focused on shaping the ideas.

This idea-powered meditation probably only lasted 5-7 minutes, but when I returned to my desk I was able to write down quite a cohesive story line in about a half hour. Normally I write little ideas on notecards (a step up from the scraps of paper I used for most of my life) or more detailed ideas in a Word document. I had turned my computer off when I took a break, though, and was itching to start writing immediately… so I grabbed a memo pad and my favorite pen and filled six pages. When I came to a tiny bump in the story, I didn’t second-guess myself or let my Inner Editor wake up. I just put a little question mark in parentheses and kept going.

The thing that I found most interesting about this experience was not that I wrote several pages of notes on a possible story line. It was the process that interested me.

Normally I’m quite distracted with a messy desk, several applications open on my computer, and the lure of Internet access (not to mention pop-up notifications for email and Twitter). I’d turned off my computer because it hadn’t been restarted in a while and I thought that we could both use a little break from each other… which somehow led to a meditation that became fertile ground for ideas.

The focus that I half allowed, half forced upon myself, really made the difference. I want to try that more often.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 11:12 pm and is filed under brainstorms & ideas, good habits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.