2017 Live Writing Marathon 4 – Under the Surface
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Sometimes it’s easy to take a superficial view and get fed up! No words being written becomes seen as a lack of activity. Not true!
No words have been added to “A Journey of Wonder” since Friday. And that feels uncomfortable. Overnight I’ve been wondering what’s going on. Then this morning – in the shower (of course) – I realised that I had been working on this book overnight even if no words are making it onto the page. Things are going on under the surface.
The basic problem I have been working on is the way that the writing was somewhat hijacked on Friday by an outpouring of appreciation, passion and of course, Wonder, for the musical influences that have shaped me. As I said yesterday, that left me wondering what I should do about the other influences – writers, poets, thinkers etc. It’s not solved yet – but the revelation this morning was to realise that maybe there are two book ideas here creating tension within the one manuscript. As soon as I had the thought, I felt a releasing of tension. Now, a few hours later – I am not sure what to do next. So, here I am blogging to resolve it. I could:
- carry on regardless – keep writing each of the sections that I intend to and work out later what to do about the fact that there are two books.
- start to pull apart the two books – and decide which one to work on.
I do need to figure out whether and how these two book ideas differ. ‘A Journey of Wonder’ was intended to be a book about people who inspire me and many of those are musicians. The writing I did on Friday (which covered John Peel, Kate Bush, Robert Fripp and Neil Young) has left me wondering whether those sections still fit into a book about other influences like Carl Jung, Seamus Heaney, Margaret Wheatley and James Hillman. As I am writing these sentences – working out loud – it feels like I should carry on with option one. Churn out the sections and worry about the overall structure and whether there are two competing ideas, later at the editing stage.
Blogging – a solution generating process. This is how working out loud works!
Also published on Medium.