The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack M. Bickham [41]
Given this bicameral brain of yours, consider what goes on when you write. Ideas, pictures, characters and plots drift out of the right hemisphere. They have no shape and no linearity. So you turn on your left side and analyze, logicalize, form, plan. Then you sit down to write your first draft, which is to say, to dream a patterned dream; and the right hemisphere is called on to do that.
The left hemisphere, however, is not entirely decommissioned while the first-draft dreaming is going on. The left has to process the language, and it has to stand by in the wings, watching the performance, auditing it to make sure that the dream doesn't suddenly lose all form and direction. Then, later, during revisions, the left-side critic may come much more to the fore, seeing logical problems, examining story pattern, character motives, the purity of the grammar and spelling, and so on.
So writing fiction becomes a most strange and wonderful product of an alliance between the hemispheres of your brain, in which first one, then the other, hemisphere is dominant.
Note: during the dream stage of the writing, as you are actually producing copy, it is the creative right hemisphere that is in charge, with the leftside critic only passively watching most of the time. But any thought such as "This is dumb!" or "People are going to think this scene is dumb!" are obviously messages from the left side of the brain—critical messages that you don't need at this time, while the right side is rolling.
To put this another way, I think most "this is dumb" fear messages are destructive for two reasons: 1. They get the wrong side of the brain in charge and thwart the creative process, and 2. They signal a revolt inside your head that can only lead to fear and further slowing of your story's progress.
There is a time for the left-side critic. But during the writing of a draft is not that time. You use your left side to make your plans, draw your outlines, lay out your characters. But once you start down the creative highway of writing a draft, you keep that logical roadmap on the seat beside you; you don't keep reading it while you're driving.
Once you have made your plans and started writing, it's part of your writer's discipline to recognize the negative, destructive nature of all "this is dumb" fears. We all have our writing tied closely to our ego, and we're all scared. But we can't let the fear slow us down, and we can't let that old villainous left-hemisphere critic mess things up. Once under way, you have to trust yourself—that partly logical creative roadmap of an outline or synopsis you planned earlier—and follow it with enthusiasm and imagination and joy.
At this point I can almost hear you the reader of these words wailing, "But sometimes what I write really is dumb!"
Well, sure. Even Shakespeare wrote some dumb stuff. So what? If you write something really dumb, the world isn't going to end. And please note: if you're writing, your first job is to press on and follow the imagination, located in your right hemisphere. If what you're putting down is really dumb, you can fix it later, during revision.
How will you know later if it's really dumb? Sometimes you can never be entirely sure and have to make an arbitrary decision, almost a coin toss—"It really is dumb, so I'll change it," or "I don't think it really is dumb, so I'll leave it alone." Most of the time, however, if you write through the original yammering of the left-side critic, when you come back to the questioned segment later you will have a clearer head and see at once whether it really is dumb or not. It's the impulsive fear during