Writer Wednesday: THINKING Days.

"Some days are TYPING days, and some days are THINKING days, but both days are WRITING days."

-V.E. Schwab

It’s #writerwednesday again & I am thinking about this quote I recently saw on the author V.E. Schwab’s instagram. I have had to realize that as a #writermom with three kids age 3 and under (!!!), writing will come in fits & starts for me. There will be slow seasons and more productive ones. But all the while, I am still "writing" because I can’t not have part of my brain in my story, unraveling knots and sifting through details that have been milling about my brain but haven’t landed on a page yet. Even if my fingers aren’t typing, I’m still incubating. My ideas are still marinating and getting better. 

(I recently watched -THIS- TED Talk about that very thing—how many creative people work best when they begin something, and then have what appears to be a period of procrastination but which is in fact a period of useful creative incubation. I also hear the author Adrienne Young talk a lot about letting ideas marinate and grow, and I think this idea has really begun to speak to me and help me put aside some unnecessary guilt over not feeling like I’m working on my story when I actually am.) 

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So. While this establishes that I’m still working on my story even while I’m not writing in a forward-motion fashion, there is still this vein of guilt that runs through me for not actually writing-writing in the tiny stolen moments I sometimes manage to find. I’m just not someone who can produce good or consistent forward motion through a manuscript in the slim margins between the long hours with my kids. I can deliberate and think through details while giving a bath or changing a diaper or pushing a swing. No problem. I can even piece together a blog post a bit at a time while feeding my kiddos lunch. But I can’t get into the right frame of mind to work on actually writing my stories in those tiny moments I can snatch. It’s like baking a cake. If all you get is a second to throw in an egg, and then you don’t get to come back to it for another couple days...well, that’s not going to be conducive to making a good cake. Maybe you can plan a menu in your head, or even think through a recipe of your own creation during those in-between moments, but you can’t actually bake the cake itself without a solid chunk of time to do it in. I know this, and yet I still feel bad for not writing fifty words here or there in those tiny margins of time. But that’s why it’s so important for me to remind myself that the thinking and incubating and marinating that I DO manage are important and useful.