“You’ll never ‘get a grip’ until you learn to ‘let go.’” I have no idea who said this, but it must have been someone who knew a lot about life. IT might even have been a writer.
How often are we “gripping” too tightly when it comes to our work? We want a story we’re penning to go down a certain path. We have certain plans for a character we’ve created. We have an essay rumbling around in our head that we believe should make a certain point.
We all crave certainty, don’t we? We want to know how things turn out. We want to know that if we put in a certain amount of effort, we’ll get a desired result. We want our coffee one way and our pancakes another.
But so often, holding on too tightly can squeeze the creativity and surprise out of a project. It can rob us of the wonder when feel when a story we’re writing takes an unpredictable turn or a character does something that’s uncharacteristic of them. How exciting this can be!
Freedom lies, not in “gripping” the vision we have of something too tightly — in trying to make our idea into an ideal, but it giving something life, creating momentum and then letting it take us someplace we never imagined.
Water flows freely and softly. It doesn’t seek anything but to find its own level. If we let our words flow with the same freedom, the same sense of abandon, the results can surprise both us and our readers.
Write on!
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