Tonight, as the snow falls in a hush of white over the Pacific North West, I feel as if the muse is reminding me about the great equalizer of Winter. Winter is the season of endings, true, but in these dark times it is also the season that invites us to take stock, dig deeper, connect back to our roots and remind ourselves what’s at the heart of this wonderful thing called life.
Every creative idea has a seed of potential, a raw burst of inspiration that comes to us in the gem of an idea, a scene, a sequence, some vibrant banter or a pivotal moment where a character is about to do something extraordinary. And there you have it, Spring has sprung and our story has taken root in our subconscious, urging to be told.
In Summer, we squirrel away on our work in progress tending this beautiful seed into a blossoming, verdant plant which begins to take on a life of its own as we write our first draft.
In Fall, we get the pleasure of enjoying the fruits of our labor as we share it with critique partners and trusted confidants. We also begin to tweak and prune the work, in preparation for the dark times… The edit.
And then, Winter arrives. The edit, much like Winter, is a time of baring our story, and sometimes yes it feels like our very soul, to its naked core. But it is also, perhaps, the time our story has the greatest potential to reach up and off the page to touch a reader. Because in this phase, we are asked to take a journey right back to the heart of what needs to be said. Cutting away the dead useless branches which no longer serve us, we reveal the pulsing, vibrant life at its very roots, waiting, just quietly waiting, to get the go ahead to bloom.
With love,
M.S.
