A customer wrote us recently about trouble "getting words down before I forget them." She explained that she finds writing slow and difficult, and that when sentences do begin to come, they fly too quickly to be recorded. So her best thoughts are often forgotten.
I'm certain that many of us have felt the same way. It's as if those phrases are stray birds leaping into the sky, glimpsed once and then gone. The fact is, however, that stray thoughts can always be recaptured. Even birds have to land sometime. The trick to catching them is to use a net.
That is to say, the early stages of a writing project are messy. Feathers should fly. Snatch a bird and stuff it in your sack and move on to the next. Later, you can decide how to arrange what you've captured - which ones to put together in which cages, which ones to let go because they don't belong, what order you want to display the cages themselves.
Usually when people can't get started with a writing project, and then can't keep up once the ideas start coming, it's because they're subconsciously hoping to do it all in one draft. Often, they've come to think of writing as so difficult that they just want to get it over with. But again, even birds have to land sometime. A migration of a thousand miles isn't accomplished in one long swoop but as a series of shorter trips, each growing nearer to the final goal.
That's my best advice in this case, but what ideas would you offer? Have you experienced a similar situation in your own writing, and if so, how did you overcome it? We'd love to hear your comments.
- Lester Smith
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