“Feature image courtesy of victuallers2 via Creative Commons”
Life runs us ragged, it makes us forget what’s going on around us. We forget ourselves in this chaos and then suddenly we’re thrown a curveball in the form of some surprise from a friend or one of our characters.
These surprises can lead us to change our story or make things darker or lighter. We find ourselves surrounded by this surprise and wonder how it happened.
In our daily lives surprises happen somewhat irregularly, or maybe not as often as the twists in mystery novels, but still not like the things we wish for. Life is confusing, writing can make it more confusing.
When we lack surprises in our writing and our lives we must continue to search for them. It’s finding the surprises that can give us the confidence to spread our wings and ignore the critics in our heads and outside our heads. Each surprise can lead to another, which in turn could lead on to something greater.
When we look at our writing oftentimes we see greatness, other times not so great. When we have that surprise day, the one where everything is clicking, all the words are coming out in the proper order and we look at it the next day and understand we wrote something great, that is one of the best surprises of writing.
Writing for most writers is catharsis. It is a purge of our daily frustrations of the desires we’ve had throughout the day and may be more like meditation.
Those words separate those who call themselves writers from those who think they are, but aren’t willing to take the step and say the words, “I’m a writer.” Saying those words to ourselves is a surprise in itself, because deep down we know we’re writers, we’ve had family tell us so, but we just can’t say the words without the fear of rejection.
Finding the surprises in our writing makes us want to keep writing. When we find that surprise moment it keeps us on track and makes the writing worth doing.
What has been your biggest surprise as a writer? Answer in the comments.
