Running with an Idea

Have you allowed yourself to run with an idea lately? I mean, truly run with it with no expectations or goals or anything attached to it? After a few days of hitting a wall, today I decided not to have any expectations at all, to allow myself to run with an idea. I picked up some little jots and notes from Saturday, when I did a bit of "empathetic questioning" following Carol Bly's technique in Beyond the Writer's Workshop. This morning I grabbed onto the core idea that came up while I was doing that and decided to run with it. La, la, la...it has born some fruit (not in abundance, but there is some new growth and it is worth chewing on).

The great thing about empathetic questioning is that its only objective is to get deeper into the heart of the piece. Carol Bly really makes me feel better because she says that a first draft inevitably feels flat (oh yes, how I know this to be true!). But that is not where it needs to stay. By asking yourself some questions about whether you are managing to say what you really want to say, trying to get to the "truth," you can push the piece deeper. Since right now I have a very shallow draft the various bits and pieces of which are connected together with a thread that is hardly visible even to myself and would certainly be invisible to anyone else, including my most attentive advisor, empathetic questioning and running with its findings was all that it took to break free from the disjointed surface of this story. It has allowed me to "look forward and plan ahead free-spiritedly." How liberating. Instead of feeling stuck, I feel released.