The Guinea Pig Report: Busting Through
After one has been at this daily writing thing for awhile, Brande says, one develops a feel for how much one can comfortably write at a time. After a certain predictable amount of words or minutes spent writing, the beginning writer reaches a point beyond which she or he feels tired, ready to stop, out of ideas perhaps.
Once you know where that natural limit lies, your next assignment is to push yourself past that limit “by a few sentences, then by a paragraph or two.”
A little later try to double it before you stop the morning’s work. Within a very short time you will find that the exercise has begun to bear fruit. The actual labor of writing no longer seems arduous or dull.
(Becoming A Writer, Chapter Five, p. 74) And after a time that natural limit will no longer seem such a compulsion. It becomes just one more resistance, like the unconscious’s resistance to keeping faithful to your scheduled writing engagements–and you are becoming adept at pushing past resistances.
Natalie Goldberg also hit upon the need to stretch:
Push yourself beyond when you think you are done with what you have to say. Go a little further. Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of the beginning. Probably that’s why we decide we’re done. It’s getting too scary.
(Writing Down The Bones,“Go Further,” p. 103) The benefits are twofold. First, by pushing on, you prove to yourself that you can push on–next time, the memory of having stretched past your limits will encourage you to stretch even further. And second, just past those limits is where all of your truths are hiding. Where the things that scare you, and will scare your readers, lurk. Where your simple love story about a teenage boy and the vampire girl next door acquires all the power and rage of your secret resentments against the metaphorical blood-suckers in your life.
I, too, have been guilty of just writing until I feel done, or until the current assignment is over. Tomorrow, which begins week 2 of the Rest Of My Writing Life (ah, the drama of turning over a new leaf!), I’ll try pushing past that “done” feeling and see where I end up.
Where do you end up when you refuse to just stop?