Writing Day

My previous post was a selection of something I wrote in the notepad of my cell phone around March or April. I wrote those seven sentences as I lay in bed, trying to fall asleep at some ungodly hour, after determinedly ripping through pages and pages of the first act of my screenplay. I was experiencing the classic signs of being completely in the flow, the zone, the writer’s tunnel, however you think of that feeling that you can’t stop writing, even for sleep, for fear of losing “it.” The only reason I went to bed at all was because I knew that I was losing steam. Four pages per hour was turning into two pages per hour. My conscious mind could no longer keep up with the subconscious.

But then, of course, as I lay there trying to relax enough to sleep, all I could think about were the dozens of new ideas for the next scenes of the screenplay. Over and over again I resisted sitting up and reopening my computer. I knew that the instant I put my fingers to the keyboard, my ideas would fly out the window. I needed to sleep on them–if you’ll pardon the cliched term.

What I did allow myself to do, however, was to record exactly how I was feeling at that moment. Some of my favorite insights and most focused descriptions come from my laying in the darkness, close to sleep but not quite there, and punching the letters that spell out my feelings on my phone, without my ever even sitting up. What I love about my description of “The Flow” in that moment is that it is an objectively perfect description of what I was feeling, while it also exemplifies both the pearls and the errors that occur when you are just writing, without second-guessing.

I decided to make that post because I found it highly pertinent to the theme of my recent posts, and I thought that it would provide me with some inspiration as I continue trying to fulfill my writing goals for the summer and taking my blog very seriously. Today I have the entire afternoon open–shocking, in and of itself–and I am going to search to resurrect that feeling of a writing fever.