Dear Friend, I Can’t Write Past the First Page

11/2/2023 | Miro Tea, Seattle

Dear Friend,

Super Phoenix green tea is buttery inside my mouth and I’m victorious! I’ve transformed another page of reality into fantasy. I realized I was stuck on the first scene of the story. I was writing and rewriting the same scene over and and over until madness overcame me. I felt cursed by this project, doomed to dwell on the opening scene forever. Then a miraculous idea bonked me in the head yesterday. I’m not surprised I had a simple breakthrough. I spent the entire day lounging on the floor with cozy blankets and reading someone else’s fiction. A day off is the best solution for most problems. I was tempted multiple times to write but I resisted and trusted my brain to do its processing behind the scenes. Without fail, rest serves me. I awoke this morning with energy to write and a brand new idea that is painfully obvious now that its before me.

I decided to jump forward to the next scene. I was getting hung up on a desire to write from the beginning to end without skipping around. I was so stuck on doing it this one way that my tires started spinning and time was flying out the back like mud, wasted. By jumping forward one scene, I got to work on a fresh part of the project that I hadn’t touched in a long time. Suddenly, the heavy muddy slog was gone! I actually had fun writing this morning because I felt light and playful.

In this scene, my main character is in a classroom and the other main character is distracting her through the window. In reality this classroom was a yoga studio. In the fantasy realm I created a witch’s tower. I transformed a square orange painted drywall yoga studio in the city of Seattle into a circular stone tower up in the clouds in some mystical far away never land realm. It didn’t take much. I just change a few adjectives and the imagination runs with it.

I am continually amazed by the power of my imagination. I change one word and it creates a completely new picture. The new picture leads me to completely new emotions and the characters start to behave in new ways. Where do the ideas come from? Where do the songs come from? Wherever they come from, the way they get here is through a portal that is opened when I enter flow state.

Enough writing for today (or at least this morning). I’m going to go back to Elizabeth’s house for lunch and then soon I’ll skip to the airport and hop down to Los Angeles with my music making parts at the ready!

Love & Rainbows,
Cha Wilde