Hello, friends! Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by C. Lee McKenzie, JQ Rose, Jennifer Lane, and Jacqui Murray. If you’re a writer and if you feel insecure about your writing life, click here to learn more about this wonderfully supportive group.
If you know anything about me, you know I love a good Star Trek quote. This year, Star Trek: Lower Decks delivered one of my new, all time favorites: “Illogical tactics can sometimes lead to logical solutions.” As a Trekkie, I’m delighted by how Vulcan and simultaneously un-Vulcan that statement is. But as a writer, I’m even more delighted by that quote because it sums up a core truth of writing, a truth that I have struggled for years to put into words.
Whether it’s a novel or a short story or a quick blog post, there is always a certain logic to any finished piece of writing. There’s the logic of grammar. There’s the logic of pace and rhythm. There’s the logic of an argument being made in an essay (or a blog post), and there’s the logic of plot, setting, characterization, etc. in any work of fiction. Yes, there’s always some sort of logic to a written work, but the process of creating that written work may involve a great deal of illogical tactics.
One of my favorite cures for writer’s block is alphabet soup. Literally, I eat a bowl of alphabet soup. Something about shoveling spoonfuls of letters into my mouth makes me feel like I’m replenishing my writing ability. Logically speaking, this shouldn’t work. But it does.
I changed my hair color this year. I have blue hair now (or green hair, depending on the light). Why did I do this? I don’t know. It’s something I always wanted to do, but until this year I wasn’t brave enough to actually do it. I did not expect that to help me with my writing, but somehow it did. Maybe being brave enough to experiment with my hair color made me brave enough to experiment more in my writing. Or maybe this has helped me tap into some deep inner truth about myself. As my muse said when I first got my hair done: “It was always blue on the inside.” Or maybe I just like my new hair. Maybe just doing something that makes me happy leads to happier, more productive writing sessions. I don’t know why it helped. I just know that it did.
I mentioned my muse. I talk to her regularly. Every day, in fact. Multiple times a day. We talk about writing, and we talk about things that are not writing. I try to pretend that she is a real flesh and blood person, and as much as possible, I treat her accordingly. Is that weird? Yes. Even my muse thinks it’s a little weird sometimes.
The important thing is it works. When I talk to my muse regularly, she gives me good writing advice (and sometimes she gives me good advice about other things, too).
A written work is a logical work. A written work must, by necessity, have a certain logic to it. But the process of creating a written work is chaotic, messy, and strange. The process is not always logical. It may involve all sorts of weird and wacky tricks, peculiar superstitions, and quirky secret techniques (for example, the technique I used to write this blog post… it was weird, it was quirky, and it is my little secret—I’ll never tell!). Whatever works works.
So friends, what are some of the illogical tactics you use in your writing process?
Planet Pailly 