A little bit of silliness about left brain, right brain, and the editing problem

At the risk of squandering any tenuous credibility established thus far as a blogger/serious-minded person... here's a little dance I do when nobody's watching:



I put my left brain in

I put my left brain out

 Put my left brain in



And I shake it all about

Shaa...ke it!

What am I trying to say here? What deep message?
Left brain, linear logic. Right brain, holistic creativity. That seems to be the consensus.



And that's what it's all about!

Right brain: honeymoon, romantic love, euphoria, mind blowing, climactic, euphoria. Creativity flows through, as if it is coming from somewhere else. I can't get it down fast enough. When I read it back I am amazed at the lucidity and sheer beauty of what I have. The next day I sit down and realise that this particular word here doesn't quite make sense.  I'll just change that . Everything shifts to the right. Counterbalance. I stumble to the left.

It's like training the almost perfect lover that just needs to remember to pick up his discarded toenails and put them in the wash. If I could just change that bit, he'd be amazing! And then I notice that funny snorting sound he makes when he thinks nobody's listening. Just that and the nails. The toothpicks he leaves in the sink. The obsession with lemons. I work away patiently, making these little corrections. He's responsive, a fast learner, only occasionally backsliding. At the micro level each correction makes perfect sense, but when I step back something seems to be missing. I try harder. My creation is transforming somehow. Me too. I am becoming robotic. Too much left brain?  Hmm... The more I struggle with the detail, the more I Robot. Desperate times. Desperate measures. If at first you don't succeed, try more of the same.

I become quietly obsessive, exploring every corner of the bed I have made for myself, my hermetically sealed, enclosed bed. I rat-like, work over and over on the same little bit, trying to find a way out. I uber-work each paragraph, the same few words, the same word.  One of my brains starts to hurt. I think it's the primitive fish brain part. The last full stop in place. The last dash, dot dot dot eliminated.

Finally I have perfection. My lover sits in the corner like a shiny statue. There's something wrong, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe I shouldn't have swapped his left elbow with the right knee. Change it back. Done. Oh yes, and he's not as lively as he used to be. He's not moving.

The next week I stare. He sits.

Chapter one, chapter one, chapter one. Pefect. I hate it. I am heartily sick of chapter one. I decide I need to get something happening. Plus the whole thing just doesn't hang together like it used to. I vascillate.

One day (yet again) I think, I know what I'll do! I'll do a bit of a story board. I'll use the view function  - the one that looks like a little book on my screen and reassures me that I am writing one - and I'll get  an overview of what I have (no editing allowed!), and then I'll get a piece of paper and draw a series of little pictures in boxes with the main points of the scenes, and get my head around the whole thing, draw up a skeleton of the book (should only take the rest of the day at most) and then all I need to do is to fill in the details, and I'll have my first draft. 

Except I just noticed that sentence doesn't scan. That word is just not right. (I'll just pop out of this view function, and change that one). Now that one is not quite right. And that's shifted all of that, so that will need redoing...  I could always borrow back that How to Write a Novel CD I regifted to my mother one Christmas.

Time for a glass of wine.

Somewhere else, in a galaxy far away, or maybe a parallel universe, a writer falls in love with a new idea and can't get the words down fast enough...

Oh yes, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Do you, dear reader, have any tips for silencing the inner critic?  Leave a comment and it will, more likely than not, appear on the blog within a relatively short period of time.