I sat down to work on my fiction this morning, but I ended up doing a lot of writing in my notebook instead. Some fragments/thoughts about the morning walk with my daughter (something that’s becoming our daily ritual), some thoughts about plot structures (and the manuscript I am editing for a client), some thoughts about my own works in progress and what plot structures they follow, and then I took a bunch of notes on the Michael Moorcock system for writing a novel in three days.

I’d read about Moorcock’s system before, but today I felt like copying it down into my writer’s notebook so I could internalize it. Not that I’m planning to write a novel in three days, but I appreciate the way Moorcock breaks down how to structure and think about narrative. I especially love his idea of generating a list of fantastical images that employ paradox as a way to make something memorable and interesting (ex. “The City of Screaming Statues”).

Anyway, I didn’t work on my fiction at all during my morning “writing time.” There’s a part of me that says, “Wasted time!” and beats myself up for not adding words to my manuscript. But there’s the other part of me — the idler and reveler — who thinks mucking about in the notebook is both fun and necessary to my creative life. All the things I wrote in the notebook will help me later on — whether it’s later today or tomorrow or next week — giving me food for thought regarding my fiction work. Not “productive” in the strictest sense, but productive nevertheless. Sometimes I need to approach my writing “sideways” — not head-on but through the alleyways of my writer’s notebook. These alleys and byways set the stage for my later productivity in the manuscript. So it feels like I’m slacking, but really, I’m turning over the compost heap and making the fertilizer.