Writing’s Blue Sky Period
Your story can be about anything, that is until you start writing it. Once you put words on the page, you start to impose limits. With each word, you are drawing the lines of a box which will eventually contain all you have to say. Or, as Beckett put it, ‘Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.’
Assuming you don’t want to write nothing, and considering you can’t write everything, your only choice is to choose the most compelling something you can find. The creative act isn’t a matter of making something out of nothing, but rather choosing something out of everything. In the editing and rewriting stage we make those choices more specific.
One way to do this without taking on the astronomical burden of everything and nothing is to work with a ‘blue sky period.’ This is a chunk of time, with a deadline, in which you can say anything but ‘no.’ All ideas are considered with equal seriousness. Under blue skies you can say nothing wrong.
I have found it helps to set this work aside not only in terms of time but space. I keep all my blue sky notes in a seperate notebook. A very messy one.
