Realized this week that I’ve been overcontrolling my story, and I have vowed to knock it off. Fiction is a tricky balance between order and chaos. You need structure. Without it you have a giant sprawling formless mess. But too much structure becomes…rigid. Lifeless. Writing is not the time to be a control freak. That happens in editing.

So, you set up structure and then let the chaos spill into it. Once the form’s built, that’s okay. It can pour and splash in and it’ll set up properly contained with everything flowing in the right direction. I’ve built the form, so it’s time to let go. Stop overthinking, overplanning, overcontrolling. Trust that my form is a good one and the chaos will produce good stuff. The lively, surprising stuff that keeps the form from making the story staid and predictable and dull.

The music really helps with this. It switches the brain to feeling the story instead of thinking it to death. Not that I can listen while I write (too distracting), but I listen before I write and in between session to keep it alive in my head, and it helps.

In other news, I volunteered to teach a workshop this year, subject TBA. Since there are multiple topics I could cover, I thought I’d toss it out there; if you were going to attend a workshop by me, what would you want me to cover? Epublishing vs. NY, erotic writing, business of writing, story techniques, other?