So, I don’t want to jinx ourselves, but I think we’re finally on the road to success with potty training E3.0. How did we accomplish this miracle of refuse disposal? We did exactly what the experts say not to do. Yep. Worked like a charm… sort of. We tried everything they suggested first, of course. Now, you might think that we should have already known what to do, given that E3.0 has an older sister. But J5.9 was cake. She wanted to be potty trained. With her it was a no-brainer – just basically letting her go. Not so with E3.0. Gah!!!!
Finally, we put her in time-out every time she didn’t go on the potty. She spent more of some days in time-out than out of it. Or at least it seemed that way. She sat in a chair, in the hallway, facing away from all of us and we made J5.9 have lots of loud fun while she was stuck in time-out. It took 2 weeks, but we seem to be on track.
What does this have to do with writing? The experts have lots of advice for new writers. But you can’t follow all of it all the time. Lynn Viehl has these Writing Crash Test Dummies (John and Marcia) that she uses to illustrate certain lessons. She had a great excerpt using these two to address this very issue. At first it might be a bit confusing, but keep reading and it’ll make sense. Check it out here.
When it looked like E3.0 might actually be getting potty trained after we rebelled against The Man, this was the first thing I thought of. If you spend all your writing time making sure that you’re not using passive voice or too many adverbs, you could very well be moving out of that mind-space that nurtures your most creative work. JUST WRITE and worry about that nit-picky stuff while you’re editing. After a while, you’ll notice your trends (via editing), and you can modify your writing to deal with a few issues at a time that make the most sense for you.
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