I was setting up to write my 1,000 word essay when something happened. I was doing the routine established over many years: set the font and size of type, orient the title in the center of the page. Not a doubt in my mind that this could be made template simple, but I like the small tasks before I pause and launch myself into writing.
Today was different.
I was about to press Lucida Bright. Finger poised over the selection, I heard Hoefler Text.
NaNoWriMo-hardened to going with what comes to me in the moment, I chose Hoefler Text. Through this month of precipitous writing, I’ve learned it is easier, faster, better to go with what I hear and feel than what I think is right.
So I pressed Hoefler. Looking at that repressed, tight font, I elected to blow it up to 14 points. That way I can read what I wrote easily even though I never go back and read these morning essays unless they are studded with wisdom for blog posts.
About to complete the first draft of my story, I could write further about closing a draft. I could write about the niggling ideas that remain when the story is finished, things that are not easily put into words, but need to be. I could also write about “Worse Than You Thought; Better Than You Think” about the first reading of your feverish draft.
Choosing Hoefler Text allowed a different story
Last night, I dreamed about a couple that I’ve known for years. We don’t know one another well, don’t think of ourselves as friends, but we’re friendly enough, sharing snippets about house, home, and family when we run into each other in our small town.
He is a young version of a blowhard, a throwback to the time of strutting masters of the universe. Soft, wifty, pretty, manipulative, she is not someone I like or understand, but that changed in my dream. They helped me in my dream quest. Without them, I never would have succeeded and found my way back home.
I woke up happy that I made it home and baffled that this couple made it possible. Over tea, I recognized how my refusing to take them seriously or respectfully meant that I missed seeing anything true about them. They are a perfect pair, strangely compatible in an aggressive, codependent way. I wondered how they met and agreed to their life.
Extra cinnamon on the oatmeal, I saw how I learn from everything that I allow myself to see. Being defensive is a terrible thing for a writer. Not taking risks is even worse — and being defensive is a subset of that particular hell.
Playing small and not taking risks, you’re afraid of everything. You think to protect yourself by playing small in the stifling, squashed places you know. You crunch yourself small and every now and then you send out a tender, wobbling tendril only to have it hurt and mashed. You withdraw further into that blasted small space, having learned a false lesson that taking a risk, taking a chance means that you get hurt. Later on, mashed tendril still throbbing, you would decide that following the rules, doing less keeps you safer.
I followed the Hoefler Text story to see where it was going
Doing more makes you stronger. Stronger makes you safer, better capable of sustaining a blow, of taking a disappointment in stride. Taking that unexpected trail made for a magnificent journey.
I know this territory well. It feels like a core theme of the story that I am writing. Suddenly I see how the story arc is simpler and also more passionately terrific. I can see ways to include ideas about who left and what it meant to them, about what it means to leave and what it means to be left, how it all feels and then what comes next. The protagonist can emphatically consider and reject what others think, advise, and urge. She finds her own way through loss, redemption, and claiming her own life. The climax is surprising, logical, glowing.
The draft that I have written this month does not come anywhere close to that. But I could not have seen it, grown toward it like a flower holding its face to the sun, had I not done that terrible, broken draft with strange walk-ons and dogs and buildings and hints of mystery when I had no idea that mystery interested me, never considered writing one, never felt smart and clever enough to write a decent one.
Going With a Different Font Yielded Story Gold
Here, now I feel like I have my blog post for the day. I had a smarter, stronger draft of a thing going, but this one feels truer, even in its slammed-on-the-page haste.
I wonder what else I can do differently, what else I might hear if I pause for a moment. I wonder how can I play large and learn and enjoy and make something wonderful that I would not have been capable of doing before today.
Go big into whatever you write. Take pleasure in the fledgling. While it may not be the ultimate story, it is the story that you wrote on the way to the story.
I started with deciding to listen to the small voice inside, went for Hoefler Text, thought about that strange couple in my dream, and then veered deep and emphatic into the genuine core of my story. Everything that I have realized changes everything that I already wrote. I accept that, not happily or with big-smiled delight, but it’s part of the journey.
It started with an inconsequential choice to listen.
For any and all participants in NaNoWriMo 2017, no matter what your ultimate word count, celebrate playing big and writing larger than you ever have. You are changed, expanded by playing big and enriched by taking the risk.
Louise Foerster 