Stay Close to Fiction

I understand my problem with this piece I’ve been working on: I spend too much time away from it.

I read an article in Poets and Writers recently, the one with Joan Didion on the cover. Ellen Sussman wrote about how hard it is for fiction writers to get back into a piece when they’ve walked away for too long.

Sharon M. Draper told me something similar once about her own process:

"A writing day does me no good at all because I have to immerse myself into what I’m doing. I can’t write on Monday, then go to DC on Tuesday, and come back and write on Wednesday. I have to be in that world; I have to live in that world. It’s almost like jumping in the deep water: I have to swim there."

I didn’t get it. I remember thinking why can’t you just reread what you wrote and jump back in.

That’s what I do when I write nonfiction. Now I see that with fiction it isn’t that easy to do.

What about you? How do you get in and out of fiction with ease? 

Sharon M. Draper qtd. in