Control the direction of my thoughts.......

Virginia Woolf wrote, "Do not dream of influencing other people....Think of things in themselves." Whenever I sit down to write thinking I can control the direction of my thoughts I am doomed to failure before I even start. The plan I have for someone else as in teaching a lesson, changing their perception or getting them to see my point of view takes the feeling out of my writing and leaves all my words flat and cerebral.

The passion I feel and I give to my characters comes from my trusting in the outcome being whatever it is supposed to be. Any relationship I have with a character thinking I know the outcome before the outcome happens is built on expectation rather than exploration. When I have an expectation I block myself from feeling which means I block my character from feeling. When I am struggling and disappointed in my writing the willingness to let go and let my writing go wherever it wants to take me disappears.

In order for me to feel the freedom that writing brings me I must be free in all areas of my life. This is not to say that life will ever be perfect. What I have learned about myself is that I have the discipline to sit still at the laptop for hours, but if my mind is not free I can't quiet the noise in my head enough to hear just one voice....my inner voice.

Any effort I make to keep my commitment to write daily must always be on my own behalf. I am the only one who truly influences my life. I have choices at every turn. I can be a positive influence on my writing self or a negative one. Whatever influence I choose to have over my writing self is what is reflected in my writing of my characters and story for that day.

I struggle staying in the confines of an outline in a first draft. I write stream of consciousness and fill pages and pages and pages that I sort through to make something worth editing. I let the feelings in me create beginnings and ending that eventually formulate a manuscript that is palatable. It is amazing when I read over my stream of consciousness writing what I learn about myself. My characters become wiser as I write out their lives that they lead me through. I have yet to direct a character into a solution they tell me how they want to resolve their conflict and I support their choices by writing a solution they have decided they can live with. Situations arise and solutions are found and conflict is resolved only to crop up in another place in another character.

What are the "things in themselves" Virginia Woolf writes about? The “things” in my life are my work, what I do for fun, my relationships, my growth as a writer and as a person. Through my writing if I choose to look for it I discover where I haven't been giving my best effort to "things in themselves."  Whatever the genre I write there is a self-discovery factor in the finished product.

With each manuscript I finish I become more and more the writer I want to be. The writer I want to be is disciplined, prolific and free to let the story take me wherever I need to go. I say “wherever I need to go” because when I sit down to write all I have are feelings and a small sense of some sort of direction. In hindsight I recognize that I need to go somewhere in my stories. I learn a lesson about life in every story I write. The best novels are those that have chapters that stand alone as stories............