Missing Pieces

Once upon a time, the writing process was about telling a story for me, something crazy and wild plucked from my imagination or from roleplaying games I played with my brothers.  I mentioned this before.  But then my baby died, and I discovered those hundreds of pages I had written before meant nothing.  Those pages provided practice for my real writing to come.

Then I turned to LDS/Christian writing, writing wherein I could explore explicitly meaningful and often spiritual ideas.  I wrote my first novel for publication, one in which I could explore aspects of my spiritual and emotional journey after my loss in the code of someone else's story.  I had the safe distance of fiction but yet could deal with very real emotions.

Now, I'm almost 50,000 words into my next manuscript and I'm finding one big hole that needs to be filled: spiritual meaning.  I've been writing from my head, not from my Spirit.  I write daily, and there are days in which I don't feel very in tune with the Spirit and days in which I write to fulfill my goal of daily writing and don't have time to deal with deeper meaning.

I think it's time I took a step back from just writing and pray for guidance about what meanings need to be here.  It's a little more challenging because this time, the story is even farther removed from my experience.  It's about difficulties, but they're in no way my struggles.  I have never had fibromyalgia or Hashimoto's as Robin has or ADD like Connor has.  But I want to give voice to all kinds of struggles, not just those I know best.  I know people with these issues and can talk to them.  But it's a little harder to make connections and meaning when I'm not as connected to the subject matter.

Still, I know this is the story I need to tell now.  So I know I can receive guidance, both from my associates and from the Lord, to make sure the themes and layers of meaning resonate.  I'm wrapping up the fun part of writing.  Now, it's time to get to the real business of telling the story as the Lord wants me to tell it.