Writing Without a Parachute by Barbara Turner-Vesselago

Author:Barbara Turner-Vesselago
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2016-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

1.A road trip

2.Royal beatings

3.Bad doll

4.Unfair!

5.Running away

6.Lost treasure

7.A trade

8.Scarred for life

Writing Tip: Include as much dialogue in these scenes as possible.

Chapter Eight

The Dragons at the Gate

And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.

- Isaiah 35:7

By now, you’ve begun the serious business of writing regularly. And whatever superego figures kept you safe in the past by not allowing you to write very much – or perhaps at all – may very well be redoubling their efforts to save you, now that you are writing. Those efforts usually manifest in messages from your Inner Critic, beamed at you more or less regularly as you work. The fact that writing in this way is often enjoyable and absorbing helps enormously in distracting you from those messages, but at some point it’s also a good idea to turn toward them – to get to know those criticisms better, lest at any point you mistake them for the truth. In order to help you do that, this section will take a closer look at those Dragons at the Gate – the voices that seek to bar you from risking yourself in the light of the real world, so that you may rest forever in the safety of the shadows of what might have been.

The Dragon of Bad Writing

But as he scratched out as many lines as he wrote in, the sum of them was often, at the end of the year, rather less than at the beginning, and it looked as if in the process of writing the poem would be completely unwritten.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Your very best help in dealing with the pervasive and persuasive shape-shifter who warns you about your “bad writing” is, of course, the second precept: “Don’t change anything”. But even if you’re managing not to give in to the temptation to “unwrite” what you’ve written, chances are you are telling yourself some unflattering things about your writing. Now is the time to pay a little closer attention to those negative comments and decide what, if anything, you need to do about them.

I’ve found that for myself, one important decision has been to pay no attention to them whatsoever on the day of the writing. One of the most surprising discoveries I’ve made in writing daily is how regularly the despair I may feel about what I’ve written on any particular day gives way, often by the very next day, to modest approval, and a sort of bewilderment as to why it looked so bad to me at the time I wrote it. “It’s fine,” I realise, “It’s the next thing.” Or I may even find myself thinking, “That’s not bad. I like that!”

So what happened on the day I wrote it? What I’ve come to see is that on that first day, when what I’ve written down on the page is still surrounded by all the directions I didn’t

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