When Your Muse Has a Mind of its Own

I have several projects, some completed in need of a final edit, some half written begging to be finished, and still others in my head demanding to come to life on paper.

No sooner do I take a serious look at these and work out a plan of attack, than another story literally pops into my head, insisting I write it NOW!

The ideas start to gush from me, and I must write them down quick, before they are lost to me in a stream of unending scenes and dialogue.

I'll be half way into that novel when yet another idea insists I set the novel aside and work on it.

Yes, that sounds crazy, and unorganized, and even undisciplined, but that is how creativity works, at least it does for me. For me, creativity is not something I call up on demand. Oh sure, I can sit down any time and write, I am never lost for ideas and words, but what I am talking about is a state of mind like no other.

You find yourself caught up in a zone of intense creative flow. The kind where you sit down the moment you get up, and go without food, drink, and water, writing until you are too tired to sit up or think anymore. And the next day it starts all over. You can't wait to get to it, and don't want it to stop. It's like Christmas morning when I was a kid, only this doesn't last only a morning. While in this zone, I like to call it, a 120K novel can be written in four weeks, an 85K novel in nineteen days, or 50K in twelve days, a short story in one day.

There is never a loss for ideas, and it seems at times it's the ideas in control of what will be written next.

I never know when this creative urge will hit, or how long it may last, but it's at those times that it flows so easily and quickly that it almost feels effortless.