Thursday, August 22, 2019

A note for writers and other creative folk

This morning I walked out the back door and spied this:


It’s an egg sac left by the sweet writing spider I posted about a few weeks back. 

My impulse was first to post this to Facebook, with a little blurb about the symbolism. Then I thought about putting something here. It was only upon reflection that it occurred to me that my thinking after seeing this egg sac lent itself to an essay. 

I turned off the impulses to post on Facebook or blog, instead opening a new file in Scrivener and began to write. What I now have is a first draft of something I’ll submit for publication. Had I posted the photo on Facebook, I’d be checking to see how many “likes” it got, and comments. Had I blogged about it here, I would have written something satisfying and in a small way akin to what I ended up writing, but the path to deeper thought would have stopped there.

By postponing the impulses and instead giving myself the time and space to really dive into my thoughts and imagination, I ended up with much more. 

Of course, now I’m blogging about it, but in a different way, and not one that will take the place of the essay I wrote. 

This is the key to increasing our productivity in terms of writing we can submit, query, or turn into longer-form work. Instead of throw-away social media moments, we go deeper. 

A good reminder for me, and I’m happy I got the chance to practice this today! 

1 comment:

Matthew said...

Leveraging the spider’s creation to make your own. Perfect!