When It's Time for a Writer to Walk Away

Don't you love it when the advice you've given others coincides with that of a great mind like Albert Einstein? Many times on this blog, I have told writers that, if they reach a trouble spot, leave the area where you've been writing. Go for a walk, or clean the kitchen, or read a book. 

When you're having difficulty with a chapter in a fiction story or making something clear in an article or not being able to bring enough emotion into a personal essay, it's far better to leave it alone than to sit and stew, get angry or dissolve into a muddled mess. 

For some reason, when we leave the scene of our misery and stop thinking about the problem, the answer floats through the atmosphere and drops right into our lap. It can happen at strange times. You might be in the shower when the solution hits. You could be sitting at an outdoor cafe having coffee with a friend when her conversation seems to move to the background as your mind is concentrating on the idea that arrived a moment ago. You could be doing laundry or taking the dog for a walk. It's when you're doing the everyday things that the way to fix your writing problem is apt to come to you.

As Professor Einstein says in today's quote, we should '...stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.' I love the phrase 'swim in silence.' Just forget about it and suddenly the answer comes.

Many years ago, I sewed a lot, and inevitably the directions on the pattern would look like a foreign language to me as I could not figure out what they were telling me to do next. It wasn't a matter of being able to skip over to the next step because they built upon one another. I learned to walk away and come back hours later or even the next day, and suddenly those directions were clear. It's the same with our writing, except there is no step by step directions. It's up to us to figure out the how-to. What I learned in my sewing life, I carried over to my writing journey. 

I find that so many of the quotes we see pertaining to our writing are merely several words, but they contain strong advice. When a quote is particularly good, it's worthwhile to read it multiple times. The more you go over the words, the better the advice becomes. With the one for today, if it's good enough for Einstein, it should be worth something for us, as well.