Clarity is not that common a feeling in a writer’s life, which makes it even more precious. It might happen…
When you construct your first and last sentence of a story or a novel. When that happens, grab them and never let them go and throw a party because they’re that importan.
When you’re so afraid you’ll fuck a scene up due to your lack of skill and/or experience in writing, but you don’t have enough time left to care, and you just keep writing. (The answer is always ‘just keep writing’.) Don’t sweat the small stuff, write.
When a reader’s feedback kicks in and you know how to use it for the first time in your life. If you’re lucky enough to have already had a few readers, though. They don’t always make sense, but when they do, it’s very exhilarating.
When you think of the fourth synonym for a common word in a single day. (No comment necessary.)
When writing seems to make sense for the moment. Luckily, this installment of clarity is rare and it passes quickly, otherwise we might get lazy.
When you can trace an idea you’ve been playing around with in your novel all the way back to a book you read in primary school, and you figure out you didn’t plagiarize it—you’ve rewritten it into something truly yours. It does one well to remember whence one comes from.
When you force yourself to write today, too, and you look back after a while and realize an hour has gone by already, and you’re not even done yet with all the things you have to say today, and you keep on writing.
When your brain (which is sometimes really a separate entity from yourself) supplies you with a scary and thrilling new idea to solve a plot-related problem you’ve been having and you just have to dare to use that exact solution on page (because said solution is odd and/or unconoventional, duh, hence the ‘scary’ part).
When you let yourself go while writing a character-focused scene and they do something wonderful and you realize you’ve fallen for your own character. (Well, tough. You still have to make them suferrr.)
When you get to the end of a scene which was particularly hard to write, and you realize it didn’t turn out all that bad, after all. (Lucky you!)
When you go to work after a day (or a few days) of working exclusively on your novel and you feel like you’ve almost got a secret compared to the rest of the world around you because writing makes you feel so good you never want to stop and you’re gonan be writing so many werewolf series and alright, bye.
When you’re just about to finish the novel and you get to those four seconds in the day when you don’t think the novel would be better off scrubbed down to the bone and/or burned at the stake.
When you’re about to start something new, and you realize you’re actually ready for it, no matter what. (You just might have to adjust your self-perception to include the fact that you are, let’s say, a writer, a genre writer, a newbie writer, or whatever the hell you feel like right now, at the end of November.)
When you realize there are three days left of NaNo 2019 – hell, you could save the world in three days, if you only tried hard enough (and if you starred in a movie with The Rock and/or Linda Hamilton). Compared to that, what’s a little something called finishing a novel?
And, after all, when you find a subject for a new post on writing at five thirty in the morning and you just go with the flow and knock yourself out—well, that’s some serious clarity.
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Vesna Kurilic 