Why Creative Writing Shouldn't be Timed
The Problem
I could be writing a short story about a talking dress and I’d still have to make the dress have a complicatedly constructed character. Or I can spend hours searching for the perfect word to use in my poem on nature. Why is that? Well, we humans are emotional beings whether we admit it or not. Therefore, everything we do has aspects of our personality in it. Which is why most writers and authors struggle with writer’s block and or timing… we are trying to perfect an art that indirectly reveals who we are to our reader. Creative writing, for short stories especially, is usually the most difficult to write. Usually it includes thinking about topics or issues you want to cover, cleverly and artfully hidden behind diction and syntax forms, but the problem often stems from timing primarily as opposed to passion and ideas.
Alas! The Solution
The creative writing process would be much easier if we would use our psyche as a muse over time. Wait what? Did she really just say take as long as I want? Why yes, I did. Reflecting on who you are as a person and how your experiences have shaped the person you are can often be the easiest way to choose what idea you want to portray in your writing and how you want to do it. How fast and well you do it depends on our ever-present enemy the Brick-wall, doesn’t it? Well in order to avoid the Brick-wall, our continually existing worry for time constraint, we must simply forget that it is there. When you worry about time when writing, usually it is hard to produce great ideas that make sense. It becomes increasingly hard to formulate writing on to paper because of how stressed you end up. So, forget about that Brick-wall, all it does is hold you back. And remember your own story, so that you have most of it already written for you.
© 2017 Anne K Hommes