Acrobatics with Time

When my commitment to writing was reignited a few months ago, I had no idea where it was taking me. Apparently to over 40,000 words in a romance novel, to start, which would have been unimaginable to me five years ago. But now I crave that HEA, and when I didn’t see the story I wanted to read, I decided to write it.

Two things I’ve learned so far: first, I am very inefficient at writing sex scenes. Mostly because I’ll write a sentence and then cry, “ah, my characters, they’re so happy, they love each other, I’ll make sure they enjoy each other!” When the scene is written, all I can remember is how much I struggled to write it, though when I reread it, I don’t see any signs of my difficulties. In fact, it might look, maybe, easy? Did I wrestle for a week with a scene that now flows so well nobody will ever know how I bit my nails and looked for something to clean to distract me from writing it?

This brings us to the second thing I’ve learned. I never thought I could write a novel. Part of what makes me excited about this WIP is that it’s what I want to read, and part of actually getting it done is taking the time to sit in my chair and actually physically type it out. But the way I write it out is by tricking myself into thinking I already wrote it, and as I sit at the computer typing away, I tell myself I’m reading it, not writing it. That way, I always know what to type, because I already read it.

I don’t know how else to describe it, except that it’s very similar to the way I feel about burpees: the only way I can do them is by thinking in grammatical acrobatics. I tell myself the entire time, “I love that these will have been done.” I put my mindset into the future when the hard part is over and use it as an anchor for getting the hard part done in real time.

I’m sure that self-help books have a term for this. I’ve always just called it a shift, or a translation. Not anything profound, I think, though probably strange.

Brains are so weird.