Flying by the Seat of Your Pencil

It’s amazing how amply jazzed you can get if you allow yourself to remember some especially resonant event and then let it expand onto the page. This process elicits written wonders you could never have thought up. Seriously. I call it “flying by the seat of your pencil.” The key is being willing to jump off the Cliff of Your Own Imagination, with nothing whatever but your pencil beneath you á la Harry Potter on his Nimbus 2000, and go whisking through the skies of your psyche, dodging dragons while in hot pursuit of whatever shiny things (images, characters, or finding out what happens next) make you want to keep flying.

You write as if streaking through the sky––not in that 70s way, but rather keeping your clothes on––toward an uncertain destination. Only once you have reached it will you know, where you are headed. You will have landed, of course, in the dangerous heart of the imagination. Its pulse steady, reassuring, almost obvious. And yet now and then it wanders, slightly offbeat, and you remember its unpredictability. Later you will revise and craft a bit so that the piece holds its own, if not calmly or with readily perceptible order, as a whole.

For now, while you fly by the seat of your pencil, your only desire is to report whatever is whizzing through the mind's intrepid weather: a mocking branch, the crackle of leaves suggesting footfall, the color and movement of a phantom in the mist about to reveal itself. Keep flying, and you’ll meet it face to face! This, dear friends, is writing. And the culmination of many such journeys, interwoven in a way that deeply satisfies, sometimes earns the name of Book.

A Writing Exercise
To do this you must be willing to engage in the physical act of writing – with a pencil, on a piece of paper. Antiquarian, I know, but bear with me. Start by describing anything at all: a hairpin, a soggy sock plastered to the sidewalk, or (if your taste runs to the cheery) a bowl of vivid berries with their dainty green leaves still attached. Keep writing until the cherries or the hairpin or the sock are not themselves, but have begun morphing into some wildly tenuous Other.

At this point you are now Flying By the Seat of Your Pencil! Keep flying. If the soggy sock has acquired a foot, let it run with abandon– keep laying down those rows and rows of graphite. Do not allow the sock to stop running -- kersplatch! kasquish! kasplotch! -- until it has arrived somewhere entirely astonishing. Alternatively, if the cherries in your bowl have begun emitting the sounds of bees, permit the insects to explode into harmonics, or swarm into kaleidoscopic formations. Give them all names like "Hootch" and "Tigerbomb". But wherever the ride takes you, Keep Your Seat Firmly Attached to Your Pencil. It’s your anchor. The only rule is: Everything onto the page! Thundercats are go! . . . Let each image/sound/event unfold, and write it down.

Above all, don't think.

But how will I know when to stop?? you ask (beads of sweat forming on your upper lip).
Just stop when you’re done.


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Ceci Miller is an author, book editor, and owner of CeciBooks editorial and book publishing consultancy for authors and indie publishers. See books here.