Everyone works differently.  I’m going to focus on writing, here.  Not that it’s what I do best (that would be eating cookies while singing in the shower), but because it’s something I put a lot of thought and thinking time into.  As a note, it would be better if I used that time for actual writing, but that’s hard and I’m tired and stop telling me what to do.

One thing most writers do is talk to other writers.  We discuss the craft, the process, the joys and the pains.  Well, just the pains.  There are no joys.  No, there are, but they’re not really joys.  They’re just the absence of pain.  Important thing to keep in mind.

Lots of discussions dissolve into breakdowns of the best writing process.  For some, it’s to buckle down on a single subject, a piece, a story, a chapter, a paragraph, the space between two letters which seems to be calling for attention, and never relent on that one thing until it has been hammered and molded and shaped into exactly what you’ve always dreamed it would be.  And then, and only then, can you move on.

Writers get hung up a lot on things.  There’s that old quote from Oscar Wilde…

“I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.”

(look at me, I’m Oscar Wilde!  I have entire days to mess around with a comma.  Clearly, I don’t do my own grocery shopping.)

… and there is definitely something to be said for this.  What is usually said is: Why are you obsessing over this?  Get your butt in gear, lazy.  It’s just a damn comma!  Also, do you have any tea?  Maybe some biscuits.  I’m hungry.

This was my method for over a decade of writing – choose a project, sit down, thump-thump-thump my fingers against the keys like an automaton, and eventually a novel will appear.  And this worked great… until it didn’t.  Until the eventual rise of the dreaded and feared:

Writer’s Block.

And then, after several days or weeks of storming up to my keyboard, frowning at it, angrily putting in words and taking them out, some occasional shouting, I would walk away.  For another week.  Or a month.  Or half a year.  My project would go untouched, no progress made, and my creative energies would churn within me as a feeling of impotence overtook my mind and drove my mood to the most foul sides of my emotional landscape.

But it was MY method, and I wasn’t going to change it.

Until I did.

My partner is also a writer, but a writer of science (random note, I encourage all writers to read scientific papers) and is expected to put out papers on a regular basis.  She, like me, would buckle down on a single project and work on it, unrelentingly, until it was done.  Between us, there was much snarling and gnashing of teeth.

After returning from a conference a couple of years back, she told me about an encounter with a well established, senior scientist in her field.  This person had a long history of putting out paper after paper, and seemed to produce data at an incredible rate.  My partner, of course, picked their brain.  How were they able to do so much?  How did they not get bogged down?  Their answer?

Follow the path of least resistance.

… what?

That was it.  Simple, concise, incredibly easy (sounding, anyway).  This expert had, over the years, found themselves to be more efficient when they focused their energies on whatever project was speaking to them the most at any given moment.  They followed wherever their interests led them, while always keeping an eye on what was sitting on the back burner.  But by engaging themselves on a subject which currently held not only their attention, but they found fascinating and enjoyable, they were able to bring those feelings out through their work.  Their papers (and these are scientific papers, mind you) felt fun, alive, they sparked with energy and enticed readers – all the qualities creative writers long for in their own works.

At that point, I had been stuck on a single paragraph for… well… an embarrassingly long time.  All of my usual ogre-like techniques of banging sticks on the ground and scratching trees with my claws as a sign of dominance had done nothing to sway this paragraph into submission.  So, I decided to follow the path of least resistance.

Well, follow is a strong word.  I kind of looked at it from the entrance and thought about it.  But there were lots of things down there, like low hanging branches and stones sticking out of the ground like teenagers hanging out in the convenience store parking lot.  I know they’re not going to cause real trouble, but I kind of try to avoid them anyway because you never know and…

… no.  No, I decided I wasn’t going to be afraid.  I was going to break from the norm, do something which I had never done before.

I started a short story.  I got halfway through.  I started another.  I wrote a three page bit of literary prose.  I tooled, and fooled, and messed around with whatever made me happy at the moment.  I jotted down dreams that were thick and visceral.  Some of them became stories.  Others didn’t.  And that was okay.  Because I could always come back.

And that paragraph?  The one which had been hanging so heavy on my shoulders, weighing down my fingers and keeping them from typing?  Months later I came back and deleted the whole thing.  I realized, after jumping and leaping about, that I was mired into something which had no place in the world I was creating.  That paragraph was the representation of my own loss of love for the project, and I had done nothing but feed it.  So, when that story came back to me, floating into my brain, I followed it, drove down a road I had never been down, forgot to track my way and instead began to enjoy the journey itself.

Did it make me a better writer?  No idea.  Did it make me more productive?  Not sure.

Did it make me happy?

Very much so.

Follow your path, the one that works for you.  But don’t forget to sometimes meander along the way.