Sleep on Your Writing

Photo by sbaker via Flickr 

"Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially."

~A. Bronson Alcott

It happens every time. You're standing at the sink, scrubbing the cat, and you get this awesome idea for the perfect story, beginning to end. You know you have to seize the moment, because your muse doesn't come around very often anymore. You think it's because she's afraid of the clutter in your writing room, but it might just be because you keep ignoring her. Not this time, though. You drop the wet cat, rush to your laptop, and begin furiously hammering out the great American murder mystery.

You're so excited about your idea that, halfway through the first paragraph when you get stuck on whether the main character should be from Belfast or or Brooklyn and you have to Google baby names to come up with a clever moniker for the sidekick's one-legged Airdale Terrier, you decided to take a break and call your closest writer friend to share your plotline, because you know she'll be thrilled for you and will think it's the most brilliant thing she's ever heard. She answers the phone, asks why you're calling at three o'clock in the blessed eh em., and snores through the last sentence before jolting awake at the obnoxious sound of your persistent throat-clearing. "Yeah, that's great," she says groggily. "Keep working on it."

But you don't, do you? You hang up the phone, run over the laptop with your lawnmower, and go back to torturing your tabby, never to present the world with the greatest American murder mystery. Your muse throws her hands in the air and goes to live with Ted Dekker. He has a cleaner writing space anyway. 

Sharing your writing with someone before it's completely finished, even if the listener is awake and the feedback is good, can take the steam out of your story. If this is true for you (and it is for me), use it to your advantage. Dangle a carrot in front of your feedback-hungry writer self. Fold your arms over your chest and say, "Nope. You're not allowed to show the story, or even speak of it, to a solitary human being, blog-reader, or pet ferret until it's completely done." And then watch her get to work.

Only then can you seek the reward of input, which will be so much sweeter, because you'll have a whole story to tell, and you won't feel the need to explain the character's inexplicable love of persimmons, the evil antelope's heartbreaking backstory or that one spot in the plot that you know doesn't make sense but you haven't quite figured out a way to make a sawed-off gun transmogrify in any believable manner just yet. 

Stuck mid-story? Walking away from a scene will help you come back to it with a new, more objective perspective (I solve many of my plot holes in the shower. Washing my hair stimulates my brain cells. Or maybe it's knowing that my thoughts won't [likely] be interrupted by anyone needing my amazing insight, stunning wisdom, objective judgment or cold, hard cash in this happy houseful of people and pets). In the words of songwriter David Wilcox, get some sleep, eat some broccoli, run a mile, take a shower. Get outside of yourself and your story for a bit, and then, when you come back to it, you'll see it with fresh eyes, and you might even stumble on some amazing new plot twist in the process of ordering a chocolate-mango smoothie behind a man who keeps talking about how he just developed a way to transmogrify a sawed-off shotgun. You might even come back to your piece and say, "Wait. This is good. Who wrote this, anyway?"

So get to work. And then, stop working. And then, after a while, get back to work. I know it seems counter-intuitive, but give it a shot. Not with the shotgun, though. That would cause some serious damage to both your story and your laptop. 

Trust me. All the cool story-crafters are doing it.