Any writer knows how it feels to finish a brand new piece: The excitement is intense. This one, we tell ourselves, is the best we’ve ever written. Quick! Let’s submit it! Hold it right there, Shakespeare. Not so fast.
One of the biggest favors you can do for your work is allow it to rest. Put it out of sight and out of mind for a while, and then come back to it with fresh sight and a sense of objectivity. Let the bright gleam of novelty age into the patina of reason, and then assess this “masterpiece” you’ve created.
Experts have termed this practice of waiting “creative gestation,” and much like the shaping of a child in the womb, producing quality work requires a degree of time, no matter what genre. By coming back to your writing later on, you’ll find that certain word choices can be improved, images can be sharpened, and other enhancements can refine your work even further. Rather than sending an immature, embryotic creation to editors, you’re handing over “your baby,” fully developed, delivered, and ready.
Some poets like Philip Levine and Billy Collins have advocated putting a piece away for a year or more, while other artists and writers say a week or so is better than adequate. My own writing, I’ve found, undergoes a “gestation” of about two to three months – this allows many eyes to see it, and plenty of time to elapse between re-readings and revisions before I’m ready to submit. And of course, like that of all artists, my work is constantly in flux, even after acceptance and publication.
Even short breaks from the screen, page, or canvas can help, however. Getting up, stretching, walking short distances at a brisk pace, or grabbing a light snack and beverage can create cognitive distance from your work, allowing for new perspectives upon returning to it. Also, by allowing oxygen to circulate to the brain via the bloodstream, creators can ensure that their grey matter is functioning at optimum levels consistently, research indicates. Classroom educators have known this trick for a while, incorporating “brain breaks” into everyday cooperative learning structures so that students stay focused and alert. The same research applies to adults and artists: get off your backside and your brain won’t backslide.
Every writer has different practices and habits, and for some, creative gestation may take more or less time to be truly effective. No matter how many days or weeks it takes, however, one thing is for certain: Creative gestation allows for better decisions, improved insights, and real maturity of one’s work.
John Davis Jr. is a Florida poet whose work has been published in literary venues internationally. His poems have recently appeared in Deep South magazine, Saw Palm magazine, and Touch: The Journal of Healing, and he has forthcoming poetry in The Wayfarer. His book, Growing Moon, Growing Soil: Poems of my Native Land, is available through Amazon and other fine retailers. His website is: http://www.poetjohndavisjr.com/
This blog post is Copyright John Davis Jnr 2013. All rights are reserved Internationally. You may not reproduce it in any form, in part of whole, without the author’s prior written permission. That includes usage in forms such as print, audio and digital imaging including pdf, jpg, png etc. A fee may be requested for re-use.
Sandra was raised in Montreal, Québec, and graduated from McGill University. As a young girl, she loved reading the Nancy Drew mystery series and was determined to write her own stories one day. Her career choices didn’t exactly lead her along the “yellow brick road” to writing mystery novels—though working in a bank and experiencing a string of armed robberies did ingrain terrifying memories worthy of a story!
This is indeed not what the 
When I was fourteen, I wanted to sit at a battered Olivetti, with my fedora perched on the back of my head, and rattle off gritty sci-fi novels of intergalactic adventure. Instead I would rattle off essays on the meaning of life, and novels based on the imagined future lives of my friends.
My break came when I was told to go out and meet people. I joined a Theatre Club and they were looking for a play to enter in a performance competition. They had heard I was a writer, and asked me to write a play for them. I had never written a play before, though I had spent some time in amateur dramatics in my youth. Since I was a writer having trouble getting a novel finished, I wrote a play about a writer having trouble getting a novel finished. We took the play on to the competition and won an award.
I am a writer now. Despite the half-dozen odd jobs I’ve taken on since those early days, writing is what I do. I don’t make the money of a JK Rowling, or an E.L. James. Although I believe that quality is vital, that you should strive to produce the very best work you can, there are other factors that influence success. One is chance, which you can’t manipulate. You can’t ensure that your manuscript is picked up by the right person on the day they’re ready for a story like yours. But you CAN do things to increase that likelihood : You can polish your manuscript until it’s as near perfect as possible. Check the submission guidelines to avoid falling at the first fence. Look for an agent to give your submission more appeal. Be open to other forms of writing: you don’t HAVE to be a novelist, you know!
In the whirlwind of writing advice, one can always find opposing viewpoints. There are many writers who counsel writing every day, and just as many who find such strictures confining and harmful to creativity. I am one who needs to write every day; even if what I write does nothing to advance the work, it keeps me limber and creative.
I found ways to work around my writer’s block, and in so doing realized that I did not have writer’s block but unreasonable expectations. Still I yearned for time, space, and order. It took me a while, but I realized that I did have time to write, tucked away in the corners of my day job, during the early morning hours when everyone but the dogs were asleep. I did not need hours of time to write a work in a single sitting, but could draft, improve, refine, and tweak, in small pieces of time and space. I did not have to write in linear fashion, but could choose a part of the work that called to me; I could delve into a character’s thoughts and history in a way that might not add words to the page but added depth to the character; I could explore a personal injury in order to find the words to express a character’s pain, grief, loss, or fear; I could write to vent, complain, whine, protest, or endeavor to understand.
I used to correspond with a published author. Her writing advice was the best I have ever been given: “Every scene, every sentence, every word, must drive the plot forward. If it doesn’t move the plot or reveal something important about the characters, cut it. If you can cut it without impacting your novel, it’s just dead weight, dragging your story down.” It is not easy to do. Even with that advice in mind, there were “dead weight” scenes in my manuscript I didn’t want to cut. I tried to make excuses for them, but in the end, I had to admit they served no real purpose, no matter how much I liked them. This one of the things a good editor does for you: gently, but firmly forces you to see where you’ve gone off-track.
Some of these lessons I learned only in retrospect, but writing is a lifelong journey. I can’t regret my mistakes, because they were valuable lessons. “We’re all apprentices in a craft where none is truly a master,” as the saying goes. I cannot wait to see what I will learn next.
Michael W. Roberts just finished the rough draft of his first novel and was surprised by how emotional he got over it. He works extensively in web media, and he blogs about writing, creativity, and communication on his site 
At 49 I felt compelled to write a book. Not something I’d always wanted to do. I figured maybe it was just time to finally record all those stories about my ancestors who had been in South Africa since the 1800s, as well as my own stories about growing up in a small Zambian copper mining town; plus a two-year stint on a sisal plantation in Zimbabwe. This was before the two countries were independent, when colonial power held sway, when the bush was full of animals. And then there were all those road trips my family took to the Congo, Malawi, Kenya and Tanzania. The time an elephant chased our car for over five miles, forcing my dad to reverse down an excuse for a dirt road before the elephant gave up. The time we spent in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro with a crazy Belgian who kept wild animals for film-makers’ use; as well as that episode in Kenya when the 
I immersed myself in the past and all those feelings I had suppressed. The white girl became more vulnerable, a little less reactive and rebellious; her mother more loving and sympathetic than my own distant mother had ever been; the father more fallible than I’d always believed my own father to be. Overall every character grew, including Africa, a country with which I’ve always had a love-hate relationship. In the end, what I managed to produce was a fully realized coming-of-age story. Both for the protagonists, but especially for me. Through the power of words, I had set down roots in time and explored my own personal myths, uncovered their purpose and grounded myself in a way I might not have been able to do otherwise.
For the past three years, I have been writing my memoir. It’s actually been more like going to graduate school – learning the craft, practicing, toughening my skin for critique and rejection. Not all a walk in the park.
I see stories everywhere. 
In her book, Recovering, May Sarton chronicles her battles with depression and cancer. Anais Nin used her journals to write to her deranged father who left the family when she was young. In Nin’s case, her journal entries became a springboard for a four-volume collection of her journals. The memoirist, Mimi Schwartz is another writer who used her journals as a springboard. I’ve heard Mimi speak at a number of writing conferences and she shares her story of having written an essay for Lear’s Magazine about her experience with breast cancer. “Journal writing,” she says, “and the process of turning it into a public account—made all the difference for me in recovering quickly, emotionally and physically. It gave me a double set of survival goals: health and telling the story.” As a matter of fact, her journal notes inspired her to go from being an English professor to being a narrative writer.
Some years ago, at an Associated Writing Conference, Dr. James Pennebaker, the author of Writing to Heal said, “Writing dissolves some of the barriers between you and others. If you write, it’s easier to communicate with others.” Pennebaker believes that there’s a certain type of writing that erupts when we’re faced with loss, death, abuse, depression and trauma. He does have one rule that he calls, “the flip out rule,” which proclaims that if you get too upset when writing, then simply stop.
Some journaling tips
Since childhood, Diana has been fascinated with the written word. As an only child of working parents, she spent lots of time alone, which she filled with reading a great deal of books and filling the pages of many journals. That’s how she liked to keep busy. She always expressed herself better on the page. Today, Diana is a poet, memoirist and essayist and teaches at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. She frequently writes and lectures on the healing powers journaling and poetry.
