Luminosity
As you might have guessed from Friday’s post, I’m most definitely a process writer and open to new methods. I’m not normally an advocate of heavy binge writing (unless in the throes of a novel…I need rehab perhaps). However, there are serious benefits to a personality like mine in marathon writing. Even the censor gives up and wanders off.
The best way, sometimes, for me to shrug off the demands of my life long enough to write the deep and vulnerable stuff is to enter the cave of my mind with no thought of return. This is where a session of marathon writing can and has helped me. I can write the surface stuff for hours, it seems, before I get deep enough to discover the gems and truths hidden away. Perhaps it is because I’m a process writer and process all aspects of life with pen and paper that this is so. Perhaps I am so distracted waiting for the next interruption to jar me out of my thought process that I don’t let myself get deep.
Committing four plus hours to simply writing can lock me so deep that interruptions become mere echos of my surface life…easily dealt with by the surface brain without pulling me back. What a luxury! It is also a good way to dig the groove deep enough that I’m not so easily nudged out of it.
The results of these marathons (two this year) are sometimes nothing more than skimming off accumulated dross. Often, however, I can detect themes or interests that strike an as-yet-unplucked chord, or bits that work me past the unresolved issues of works in progress or preplanning glitches.
The best benefits to a long stretch of writing is to uncover and discard the false starts, the passing ideas, the curiosities and the angst I feel about what happens to my writing when I’m done with it. It peels the flesh from the bones of what I am meant to write, perhaps even put on this earth to write. If I can get deep enough into that cave that my light burns out, I will glimpse the luminosity and glow of things I would otherwise miss. And I never fail to learn something about myself in the process or continue the healing of hurts dealt long in the past.
That luminosity of my native themes and secrets is worth the effort and the cramped hands, all the more precious for not being part of my general writing routine.
Thank-you for sharing your process to luminosity! We all have different ways of getting there. What works for each of us is what is right for each of us. Sounds like a great process, although it is very different than my own.
I love those uninterupted stretches! Too bad they’re so uncommon.
@Mark Yes indeed, and I’m usually the first to say the only method that works is the method that works for you.
@Amber The more chaotic my life gets, the more I seem to need to skim off the dross, I think.