The Tortoise or the Hare?

Are you living life as the tortoise or the hare? I am constantly challenged by this, especially in my writing life. I like to think of myself as being more like the tortoise, having a quiet, uneventful routine and structure to my days. But when I get flashes of creative insight, I have to admit I'm off like the hare. I have a vision in mind and and I see the finish line beckoning me. Sometimes these creative stints can leave me exhausted and depleted.

Here are some examples. When I'm working on smaller pieces like this blog or my instagram stories, I think about them during the day or the week and write a little each day. This is easy to fit into my daily schedule without creating too many wrinkles for myself or others.

When I am preparing to write a book, I can be like the tortoise. I do a lot of reading, research and thinking. As I let all of that information just sit and percolate, somehow it reorganizes itself in a myriad of ways. I know I have to take time and process everything I've been learning before I start writing. If I try to push it into a structure prematurely, I'll end up frustrated and stuck. When I wait, I start to get new insights about how the setting, my characters and the plot events will contribute to the themes of the book and the story starts to take shape.

Then suddenly I'm ready to write and I'm off like the hare. Writing the first draft is an intense and all encompassing experience. The ideas, the characters and plot are burning to come to life on the page. They nudge and push at me. I write feverishly trying to get it all down. During this phase of the writing, I often get sudden flashes of ideas to take the story in a new direction. Usually these are productive. Sometimes they're not. I can't put this writing into my regular routine. It just doesn't work for me. During this time, it is hard to focus on anything else.

Once the story is down in some form, I can finally relax and resume working as the tortoise. Little by little and day by day I work and rework the material, sometimes making minor changes and sometimes deleting or adding whole scenes or chapters. Then I rework it again and again. It usually takes several revisions.

I'm almost at the end of my research for book three in my children's historical fiction series. I'm really getting ready to take off like the hare, but I'm feeling held back by a number of other responsibilities and practical considerations. Is there some way I can learn to write the first draft more like a tortoise? I'm not sure... If you don't hear anything from me for a while, you know the hare is off on a writing spree!