{"id":2890,"date":"2012-05-09T06:00:57","date_gmt":"2012-05-09T11:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=2890"},"modified":"2012-05-09T06:00:57","modified_gmt":"2012-05-09T11:00:57","slug":"the-best-part-of-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=2890","title":{"rendered":"The Best Part of Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
I learned to type on an old typewriter just like this one. Still have it up in a closet. Image credit: Benjamin Chan at Flickr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When the voices chatter in my head, and the words come so fast I can barely capture them with the keyboard\u00a0\u2014\u00a0that\u2019s when I feel good about writing. That\u2019s the \u201cah\u201d moment when I remember why I do this.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not the only time.<\/p>\n

When I\u2019m writing index cards like a woman obsessed, piling them on top of each other and moving to the next fresh card as each new idea or previously unknown fact emerges into consciousness\u00a0\u2014\u00a0that\u2019s when I feel good about writing.<\/p>\n

Then later, hovering over my big white board with cards spread out and held in place with brightly colored magnets, I can see a hole in a plot, an unanswered question, or a character missing from a scene. My hands blur as I shift and slide the cards, remove dead ones, add new ones. That moment when the plot lays straight and true, and the seemingly unrelated scenes and snippets of dialogue on the cards melt together into one coherent story \u2014 yeah. That\u2019s when I feel good about writing.<\/p>\n

When I reach the end of the story, knowing the end is exactly how I imagined it, yet so much more, and my fingers tap out the last word, something it took me so many years of my life to do\u2014that\u2019s when I feel good about it. I beat the fear again. The deep, debilitating fear of sucking. Knowing that I will never again fall prey to that little voice in my head, so prevalent for over three decades, the one that whispered in my ear that if I didn\u2019t finish, I couldn\u2019t fail.<\/p>\n

But most of all, more than any other time, is the moment when someone else reads what I have written, and my words make them happy. Or sad. Or frightened. Or simply entertained.<\/p>\n

When someone else enjoys this thing I\u2019ve made, that\u2019s when I feel best about writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the voices chatter in my head, and the words come so fast I can barely capture them with the keyboard\u00a0\u2014\u00a0that\u2019s when I feel good about writing. That\u2019s the \u201cah\u201d moment when I remember why I do this. But that\u2019s not the only time. When I\u2019m writing index cards like a woman obsessed, piling them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-process"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2890\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}