We Interrupt This Blog To Bring You Some Earth-shattering News!

I, Laura Best, have mastered the art of folding a fitted sheet!

Yup, you read that right. Exciting times in the Best household.

Look a tad bit familiar?

Remembering a blog post a year or so ago, on Tricia Sutton’s blog, where many of us so called “intelligent” people openly admitted to not being able to fold the frigging things, let me tell you, today I feel like a freaking genius!

Didn’t see it on a TV show. Didn’t get any nifty pointers from Martha Steward.
Didn’t even look it up online. I figured it out all on my own. I looked at the freshly laundered sheet and just knew I could do it!

Want to know my secret?

Sure you do!

The last time cracked open a package of new sheets I unfolded them with care. I paid attention. I looked at the way they were so meticulously folded up into that little package and I thought to myself, “I can do that!” And you know what? I could. No more balled up fitted sheets for me.

That same feeling sometimes happens when I’m writing. A scene or chapter seems to evade me, something isn’t quite right. I’m not sure why, can’t quite put my finger on it. It could go on like that for some time until I feel like balling it up and tossing it in the corner, until in a sudden flash of sheer brilliance (okay, maybe not quite brilliance, but you get the picture) it comes to me.

I love those moments, usually when I’m in the middle of something totally unrelated when I’m presented with some wonderfully new epiphany about my main character, something I didn’t already know. It happened the other evening while we were driving home from town. A few sentences stuck in my mind. They were dark, and caught me totally off guard. I wasn’t expecting it. I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t sure I liked it or even how it would fit into my MC’s present predicament. But there it was.

But then came the dawning of a new day, where I quickly worked with the sentences that had popped into my head the night before. Like that folded sheet, I knew exactly what to do with them. While it didn’t make me feel like a genius the way I felt when I saw that fitted sheet folded up so small and nice and sitting on the shelf, it did make me feel pretty darn good. Once I got down to work, everything else seemed to fall into place. Best of all it fit in perfectly with the rest of the story. Turns out it wasn’t nearly as dark as I originally thought, but that happens often when we write.

So, call me a genius if you want, but only if you struggle with those fitted sheets yourself, otherwise just call me totally and utterly ridiculous for this entire post.

Do you ever get those moments when, in a suddenly flash of brilliance, a new scene comes to you right out of the blue, something you weren’t expecting, something that left you feeling like a complete genius?

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Posted by Laura Best on November 1, 2010

https://lauraabest.wordpress.com/2010/11/01/we-interrupt-this-blog-to-bring-you-some-earth-shattering-news/