A timely thing from Uncle Warren:

A thing we don’t talk about enough, as writers: the myth that we write a thing by starting at the beginning and just progressing through to the end in purely linear fashion.  Very few writers do that.  The rest of us jump around in the story, write sections out of order and go to the piece we feel capable of that day.

In writing fiction, we are wearing the clothes of multiple characters every day, standing in different places every day, inhabiting different moods and minds.  You’d be a fool to think you can be any of those things on any given day.  Some days, you just don’t feel funny. Some days, you can’t summon up the bleak, or the loving, or the vicious, or the kind.  So, it’s completely fine to jump to the piece you can do that day.

He mentions further down that he had to learn this for himself, presumably through trial and error in the face of the relentless deadlines of the comics world; I’m pretty sure I didn’t have to learn it that way—and, further, that Warren may even have been one of the sources of that learning—but I know damned well I have to relearn it every time I write something longer than a blogpost.

Much of the work of the week just gone, in fact, was made possible by exactly that re-learning, combined with the re-learning that it’s OK to graft other methods and modes onto the one you came up with originally for the project. It’s also OK to let the thing sprawl out like a pot-bound houseplant, because you can always trim it back when you’ve let it run wild, and the final topiary may thus end up taking a shape it never could have taken had you stuck doggedly to your initial notion of what you were doing and how you were intending to do it.

(“No plan survives contact with the enemy,” as the old aphorism goes… though I’m now trying to figure out who the enemy is in this particular application of the metaphor, and what the war is over or about, and I’m not sure I like any of the easy answers, so maybe I’ll avoid using that one in future.)

---

A thin layer of snow appeared overnight in Malmö, which is perhaps not totally uncharacteristic for the time of year, but nonetheless feels pretty weird given that this time last week we were still at 10 degrees C for overnight temperatures. Enjoying the clear blue skies and the bright, brittle sunshine through my living-room window is one way of not thinking too hard about the systemic implications: focus on the weather, rather than the climate.

Of course, one might well argue that it’s our focussing on the weather rather than the climate that has made such a mess of the latter… but it’s the weather that we have to walk through while we’re doing the work. Being glad of the moment’s mercies is very human, and very necessary.