Lately I’ve been contemplating this post on instincts by Julie Cohen–who, incidentally, used to beg me for Doogie Howser sex stories years ago, long before Neil Patrick Harris was the King of Hotness that he is today. I mention this because I want you to see what she means by instincts and how they can be right-on even when at first it seems like they’re way off the mark. If I had listened to Julie back then, I could have cornered the market on NPH porn by now. Instead, all I have to show for myself is an incontinent cat named Barney Stinson.

HERE ENDETH THE LESSON.

I’ve been paying more attention that usual documenting how I spend my time. It seems as though the more time I have to write, the less time I actually spend writing. Like I’ll spend two hours sitting in front of a Word document rewriting the same paragraph I just spent the past week rewriting. If you’ve ever started researching a book but never started writing it, you know exactly how fruitless and empty this particular hamster wheel of doom really is.

I don’t really know why I do this. Dawdle, I mean. Worry about perfecting a sentence when I don’t even know of the freaking scene is going to stay in the book at the end of the day. But I do it, even though I know I shouldn’t, even though I know it’s using up precious writing time.

Because as it turns out, 99% of the scenes I use (and by use I don’t mean they come out perfect; I mean they had something I could work with in editing) were the bullshit scenes. The crap scenes. The scenes I wrote the first fifteen minutes of my writing time, when I’m just clearing my throat, so to speak.

The scenes that come out on pure instinct.

I think a lot of time, we as writers give away our power. We reach success and say it’s luck and perseverance, not talent and practice. We get something right, and we say we don’t know how it happened, when really, we know exactly how it happened. We know because we were there. We know because we thought about it and thought about it and thought about it until we had something to work with. And then we worked it until it as pliable and started to take shape.

Maybe the shape was there all along. Maybe it was there and we just found it.

But if that’s the case, if it’s as easy as, “Oops! I just tripped over an idea! Good thing I saw it else I might’ve broken my neck!” then why doesn’t every person who has an idea do something with it?

Talent exists. It exists in writing the same way it exists in everything else.