Ok, I checked in with my Intuition and I will continue this month-long challenge to the end. What I’ve learned about Life and following intuition is that there’s a bigger picture and often I start something for one reason and it ends up being helpful or necessary for another.
Now that I have decided to finish this it opens up what to write about, knowing that I will.
As I wrote recently, I have been reading Journal of A Wife by Anais Nin , and in it she is just 21 and not a confident writer yet. John Erskine, a successful American writer they befriend, gives Anais the advice to not read over her work but let it flow.
This is how I write too.
When I started writing Wonderlust in Lucerne, from the shared apartment that my boyfriend moved me into, I committed to an hour a day, five days a week and would do it as soon as I woke.
I’d make coffee and go back to bed to write from there.
Then I’d go off and enjoy my day, go to German class and/or watch reality TV (just like Sarah in Wonderlust of course).
To this day, fourteen years later, I still do it first thing.
There was a long period where I’d meditate and write in my journal before I got down to the writing.
But not that long ago I realised again that I prefer just rolling out of bed, making coffee and coming to my desk to write while I am still in a semi-conscious state.
Actually I’m a morning person and so my brain starts firing quite quickly.
I am usually writing already by 7am and finish by 9am.
This is when I’m not pushing myself.
Sometimes I can write for three or five hours at a time when the end is near a book and I want to finish asap.
In such a case, I’ll have a nap and then do more from 3-5pm.
So five hours is probably the maximum I’d do in a day.
Three hours in the morning and two in the late afternoon.
Some years into writing Wonderlust, I read, or didn’t quite read but got the basics of, Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield and decided to turn pro.
A pro does the work no matter what.
So that is what I have been doing.
Writing memoir is actually very easy for me, whereas writing fiction was much harder.
It’s trying to disguise non-fiction as fiction.
Though the story is not real in Wonderlust and neither were the characters but, like most fiction writers, I took from reality.
It felt like dreaming.
You take a bit from yesterday, then a memory from five years ago appears on the page mixed with make-believe.
I don’t read over anything till I have finished a whole draft.
So three months later, I’ll have a break and then a month later, begin again.
The subconscious mind is a marvellous worker friend.
I find this with blogging or writing books.
Day one is the hardest but then the subconscious mind takes over and half the work is already done when you come back to it.
It just flows.
Don’t stress.
Allow it.
I love the creation process.
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Do let me know in the comments below if you have any questions or more to add on the writing process. Do you have a daily creative practice? Would you like to?
I love you,
Mireille xx
