Trust informed instinct
Since I’m the one who used to live in Brooklyn, I was the guide on a recent trip to NYC with my husband. When it was time for dinner, I led us by subway to Union Square and then meandered toward the East Village. I had no idea what to eat, but was just meandering.
“Where are we going?” My husband asked.
I said I just wanted to show him the street of Indian restaurants, and sure enough, soon found one Indian restaurant after another. He asked if I wanted Indian food.
“Not exactly,” I said, although I supposed it would do.
Then suddenly I had a whim, a hankering for Ethiopian food. “I wonder where an Ethiopian restaurant is,” I said.We walked, I kid you not, a few feet, and my husband chuckled.
“Right here,” he said. “How did you know that?”
And right there, was Awash, an Ethiopian restaurant where we had a delicious dinner (red honey wine is very sweet).
Back home and back at work I’ve struggled desperately to impose control on a novel I’m revising. It’s not the first novel I’ve written, but you’d think I’d never even read a novel from how befuddled I’d become. I felt lost and went to all the rules you read about and the checklists people suggest and the “must-haves” from teachers and workshops – in other words, I applied all the logic I could think of. In the process I became more and more confused and overwhelmed and it showed in my revision.
Finally, I had to let go of all those helpful hints and tips and tools and remember my story, trust the story, and trust someplace deep inside me, where, after all, the story came from to begin with. And I remembered the shape of my story.
I say trust your instinct when writing.
With a caveat: Trust informed instinct. Something in me knew to where head for Indian food.
Tags: advice instinct on writing Stanley the writing life