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.

Can Dreams Help Writers?

To sleep, to dream...

Can dreams be an inspiration for writers? I know they can as probably the best poem I ever wrote was inspired by a dream. The dream was so vivid that when I woke up, I could still see the people, the setting, hear the noise and more. Two lines kept popping into my head, so I headed straight to my laptop and typed them. passengers on a train, gypsies going nowhere. I used no caps, just wrote the words. They seemed to flow from my subconscious. Later. I left the poem with no caps as it seemed to work.

I typed a third line and a fourth and kept going until I had quite a lengthy poem that turned out to be about aging. I know why I started writing immediately upon waking. Only a week or so earlier I had been to a writer's conference where one of the presenters was a poet from New York. She tossed out so many ideas that it was hard to absorb all of them, but one thing stayed with me. She said that, if you dream something that is still with you in the morning, something you want to write about, do it immediately. Wait until you showered, had breakfast, drank your coffee and the best parts will have floated back into dreamland never to be seen again. 

Many writers keep pad and pencil on their bedside table so that, if they wake in the night after a dream that seems meaningful, they can write down the basics to use the next day. It's possible that writers have more vivid dreams than non-writers. How that would be proven is a mystery. I would venture to say that I believe writers are creative and so are their dreams.

We all have projects that we're working on that give us trouble spots. Can you put it aside and later dream the answer? I think it's possible, but it's not a given. 

I know people who say they never remember their dreams. I remember mine when I wake up and even think about them occasionally later in the day. I think our dreams tell us something, but it's up to us to figure out the key. We don't necessarily dream of our exact situation but something that could be interpreted as what our situation is, or perhaps compared to.

The answers to your trouble spots aren't always going to be answered in a dream, but it can happen. It's why we need to pay attention to the content of our dreams. If you have an urge to write after having a dream, follow it. Don't wave it aside.

As for my poem, it has been published more than once and was the basis for an abstract art painting. The large painting was exhibited along with many others of this particular artist. Each painting had been done with inspiration from a group of poems she selected. I did tweak it a bit after that initial writing but only a little.

I had one other experience that led to a personal essay prompted by a dream. I had a wonderful teacher in the 5th and 6th grades. I dreamed of him one night, and the urge to write woke me up. I got up in the middle of the night and wrote the first draft of that later-published essay.

Writing from a dream may only happen to you a handful of times, or perhaps never. Still, it is something to ponder. Put that pad and pencil on your bedside table just in case.