I’m not writing to promote a shoe brand but in favour of acting on intuition, instinct, gut feeling. Whatever you want to call it.
After my aged writing-laptop finally gave up I needed a replacement, and looked on the unusual site for a used one too old for anything other than as a word-processor. I spent hours perusing the welter of apparent bargains, eventually buying one compatible with my charger. It switched on with some effort but I hoped replacing the dead battery would help, and it seemed to for a few days until the screen gave out. I bought another identical even cheaper laptop for spare parts. This time I knew I’d wasted money when I should have cut my losses. A case of the sunk cost fallacy. And yet I hadn’t rushed into any of these purchases, carefully weighing up the pros and cons, basing my choice on experience.
In desperation I searched again, and chanced upon an 11yr old Vaio netbook on auction ending in less than a minute. Hardly time for careful consideration I nonetheless put in my bid, winning as the only bidder. I soon worried I’d made a mistake, something that wouldn’t fit my criteria. Yet it turned out to be a bargain, in pristine condition on which I’m writing this post.
Just doing it seems to have worked in my creative writing. Including those aliens in stasis pods in a hollowed out asteroid had no obvious purpose beyond increasing the word count, until about right near the end where it suddenly came to me. Of course! The elements tied up in a way I couldn’t have planned.
Indeed, I’m rarely a planner. That said, I prefer to feel there is some careful cogitation behind a story element even for the first draft. But sometimes it’s best to just dive in, whether it’s for progressing the plot or just building up that wordcount … and surely for many other things.
Links to my published fiction: Worlds Beyond Time (UK) Worlds Beyond Time (US)
The Trials of Writing & Publishing 