What if your current work-in-process died part way through? And you had only seven chances to rewrite it. What direction would your story go?
I’m sure there would be stages. Shock. Denial. Grief. Anger. Joy. Freedom.
But what if on the fourth day, you decided what the heck? And you lost all your inhibitions and fears.
Not all your choices might be smart but some of them might be brilliant.
What if you approached your writing, your story, your characters like that – every day? Every time you sat down at the keyboard. No inhibitions. You let your mind go. Be bold. Be brave.
What if you wrote your story and didn’t think about trends and rules? Especially the rules. (Okay, first learn the rules and then you can break them.)
What if you let your story out of the box? And didn’t press the delete key because you thought something was too stupid, too risky, too silly, too sexy.
What if you didn’t think about the books you love or hate? What if you stopped trying to emulate your favorite author? What if you stopped trying to nail down exactly what your future readers might like or not like?
What if you didn’t care about peer pressure or what other writers or people might think?
I wonder. What if?