Bare bones journaling again with just flat-out open thoughts and no self-censoring.
On The Voice, watching Luke Wade prep for his performance said some things that hit me in a way I finally got, even if I should've gotten it a while ago. He stopped to think about it and that was when he couldn't make the notes. (Total sidenote: I find I can hit all kinds of notes if I sing all out at high volume and don't overthink it that I can't even dream of hitting otherwise, so makes sense.) It made me realize I need to stop trying to write and just try to write it down.
There's this moment where Pharell told Ryan Sill to find where no one else can do what he does and do that. There's stuff I do with blending my poetic sensibilities and worldbuilding and prose with character studies that is what I do. I can write other stuff, but that's what I do and where I stand out as the one who does that stuff. It only happens when I'm not trying to do it.
The Vardin story, "Portrait of a Butterfly," balanced a huge amount of Vardin mindset and vocabulary and yet it worked for my super-picky (and I like her that way) beta because it did all that. When I try to do that, I can't. I wasn't trying when I wrote Portrait.
I look at Dowse and Bleed. I was trying there, but do you see how incredibly long it took me and it was built around a core of stuff I didn't try to write; I just tried to write it down. My work people love most I just wrote down. The comment fics I can write when longer work is driving me batty and not happening is stuff I just wrote down. I usually call it scribbling, but I'm making a point to myself here.
Don't try to write. Just try to write it down.
