Writing Momentum

At this stage in my life, I have little desire to be a full-time writer.  It’s more than a hobby, and I aim to be published and sell stories with a modicum of success, but unlike many of my peers, my goal is not to achieve a point when I can quit my “real” job and dedicate all my time to writing.  That is not only because I enjoy (mostly) my “real” job working with advancing space technologies – I actually think my writing would suffer if I tried to do it unadulterated by other occupations.  While I would have more time to dedicate to writing, the lack of stimulus from entirely non-writing related activity would, I think, reduce my creativity and result in a lower quality of writing and less interesting stories.

Every now and then, though, I do wish that I could have fewer interruptions to my writing process, and that almost always come down to considerations of writing momentum.  Stories have a momentum to them, and just like a story can have the momentum to carry a reader through it, so t0o can it have momentum to carry me through the writing process.  Whether that the momentum of a single chapter, a particular sequence, or an entire novella, having that momentum can see me produce thousands of words in the time I might otherwise only produce hundreds.

This is separate from excitement over a story.  Yes, it’s easier to sit down and start a new piece, because the idea is fresh and exciting, and I’ll usually have a clearer vision of the beginning than I do have the end at that stage.  Momentum, though, is more about the sense of the story coming together, coalescing into a presentable product that will allow me to share with others the peculiar imaginings rattling around in my head.  It’s the momentum of creation, of bringing something that begins as an idea into a physical reality.  Excitement might prompt a scene; momentum can power a writer through an entire piece.

When that momentum is interrupted, it can be difficult to recapture or recreate.  Working on the golem story I mentioned in my previous post, I had that momentum for the first ten thousand words, and I might have preserved it to write all the way through to the end…but the exigencies of life would not permit this, and I had to pause the writing to attend to other, more important matters.  That is not something about which I would complain, but it did, in this instance, interrupt my writing momentum, and I struggled to regain it while I worked through the remaining five thousand words.  Sure, five thousand words is not so much when I consider that a typical Impressions chapter is nearly that long, but squeezing it out a hundred words at a time is a tedious process.

Writing momentum is a tricky thing, not predictable in the way that physical momentum is.  Sometimes, it can endure myriad interruptions and only grow stronger, as if the delay is somehow making the story more eager to escape onto the page.  That happened with Archmage and the Unicorn Queen, which felt as I was writing it as if I could not type the words fast enough to give the story the form that it needed.  Other times, the slightest interruption, for even a quick conversation, can entirely abort it.  It might return when I sit down to write again after a week’s hiatus, or it might be absent after an hour.

When a story’s initial momentum is gone, regardless of the timeframe or conditions, it is usually possible for me to recapture it…but possible is not always viable.  The main technique I have found for regaining my momentum in a story is to reread what I already wrote and to have sufficient headspace for the story to occupy without being interrupted by something else.  In other words, the same things that can extinguish the momentum in the first place can also interfere with regaining it (which makes sense).  Really, that’s true of writing in general, which is a bit of a conundrum for me: if I’m preoccupied with my “real” job or with other things in life, then I have diminished headspace for writing, but if I could dedicate more headspace to writing, that writing would not be of the stories I want to tell.

All of this does not lead to some grand conclusion or insight for you as a fellow writer.  No, this is just me ruminating upon my writing process.  Reflection of this nature helps me improve and better understand my own processes, which will, in the long run, give me greater control of them, and writing about them in posts like this forces me to express these thoughts more clearly (with questionable success).  That being said, if you are a fellow writer and have related thoughts, please share in the comments below.  I, at least, think that learning about this sort of “behind-the-scenes” from other writers is informative.  Hence why I can justify this post.