Tuning in the Muse

Here are a couple of tips for tuning past the mental static that can drown out a writer’s soft-spoken Muse. First, write in a staging area that’s separate from your working draft. Second, before you revise older text, save it to an outtakes file. Let’s detail the staging tip first.

Staging 

Add these two headings to the document containing your working draft: Working Draft, and Notes or Staging. Working Draft obviously holds the prose an editor will eventually see.

Notes or Staging, completely separate from Working Draft, is the virtual garage where your not-ready-for-prime-time prose rehearses. I think of Notes as a place where anything goes: streams of consciousness, brainstorming, laundry lists, sketches, etc. All these untamed things are free from the domestication that a presentable draft requires.

With the Notes heading in place, start writing in the Working Draft heading. When you hear your inner critic begin to whine, stop writing in Working Draft and start writing in Notes. Pretend you’re talking to the best listener you know — God, your Labrador or some other entity who accepts you completely. When you speak to this entity, you can take on the voice of Don Corleone, Oprah, or any other effective communicator or chat guru. Do this aloud or just in your head.

Outtakes

Here’s tip two for getting the digital ink to flow: reassure your inner squirrel — you know, the part that’s afraid to delete something for fear you might need it later. Do this by making a separate outtakes file for your article or story. For example, HistoryOfFlight.doc holds the working draft and OutsHistoryOfFlight.doc holds its outtakes.

Before you change any text in your working draft, whether it’s a sentence or several paragraphs, copy that text to the outtakes file. This assures your squirreling impulse that you’re not actually deleting anything, but keeping it safe for later use. Now you’re free to hack the original text to pieces.

Copyright © 2008 Darrin Koltow