First off, if you haven’t read The Window Cleaner, go now and do that. I’ll wait.
As I said in the intro to The Window Cleaner, the story wrote itself. What I mean by that is a bit complicated, but I’ll try to explain. As a side note, I was also going to drone on about how it’s a perfect example of what I’m trying to accomplish with the challenge and blah blah blah, but I’ll include that in another more expansive post about the Weekly Challenge at a later time.
Usually when I’m writing, I’m thinking about what’s happening, what could come next, and whether it’s appropriate for the story and leads naturally to the ending (I usually know what the ending will be in most stories I write – not to say it can’t change). I often have moments or events that I’ve already thought up that I slot in at the appropriate time, and they tend to help me write the story by being sort of stepping stones that help me shape the story as I want it to be.
But sometimes – as in this case, for The Window Cleaner – it doesn’t work like that. The moment the story hit me, it just flowed. I wasn’t consciously coming up with the story, I was just transcribing what my brain was telling me. I can’t really explain it any better than that. It’s a really weird feeling, but in the past I’ve found that in general it results in better stories, plus they end up getting written much faster.
That’s it, really. I just wanted to talk about this strange phenomenon. I’ll probably do a more in depth explanation of my writing process at some point, where I’ll cover this a bit more, and I’ll definitely do a proper look at the Weekly Challenge so far, but in the meantime, you just keep on… keeping on.