The Writer's Progression

When I first started writing I used to wonder where I would get my ideas: they never seemed to come at the proper time. I would site at the kitchen table at 4am in the morning and wait for inspiration to strike.

Needless to say I was sorely disappointed.

It wasn't until I began just letting go that the ideas began coming to me. Those early days were fun and exciting: sending out manuscripts by (gasp!) the United States Postal Service, waiting in anticipation for the mailman to bring that return envelope...hoping against hope that I would be published.

It didn't happen often, but it did happen.

In those days I wrote primarily in a journal each and every day, jotting down bits and pieces of scenes, dialogue, etc. In those days I had no internal censor; if it came into my mind it found its way onto the page.

There's something extremely liberating in this; leaving your fears behind and boldly striking out in new directions, allowing yourself the freedom to write as you saw fit...even if what you wrote was not fit for public consumption.

This is something I've needed to return to time and again in the current season of my writing life. Then I was a young man, no responsibilities, no-one who really relied on me or looked to me for moral guidance; now I'm in my late 40's with a wonderful wife and six beautiful children. What I write (or do not write) passes through an internal censor that simply was not active in my earlier years.

I think it's important that writers allow themselves the freedom to express their creativity in a way that moves them forward; this writer's progression, as I've called it, is an important part of who we are as authors and individuals; sometimes it's a progression forward, sometimes backwards, but it must always be motion. Do not ever allow yourself to remain still, to grow stagnant in the application of your craft.