Writing Week: The Coral Reef Theory

I studied acting way back when in my college days. Early on in our  training all of us students came into rehearsals for a new role burning up with a thousand different ideas that we wanted to try all at once. We would identify all the key moments in each scene and then bring all our new skills to bear to make sure we hit each and every beat just so.

This went on until Don, our revered acting teacher,  told us to cut it the hell out already.

What Don told us was that it was not our responsibility to get everything right every night of rehearsal. Our only responsibility, he said, was to find one new moment each night. Just one. That's all. 

Maybe on Monday we find an unexpectedly tender moment in scene 3, then on Tuesday we realize how much better it is if we sit instead of stand throughout the big confrontation in scene 10. On Wednesday we finally manage to get through the entirety of scene 8 without forgetting all of our lines. 

Don told us that a performance is built from the accumulation of all these small discoveries, like how a coral reef is built from the bones of millions of tiny creatures laid down in layer after layer over a very long time.

Kind of a relief, right? You don't have to get everything right all the time. You don't have to worry about making the entirety of a chapter work each time you sit down with it. 


Sure, you try to do as much as you can, but if you get to the end of your writing day on Monday and find that for 2 hours work you've only managed to craft one revealing character moment in chapter 2, that's a win. It's a win because on Tuesday you're going to write a particularly nice bit of dialog in chapter 3. Then maybe a few weeks later you'll come back to chapter 2 and have another little moment of insight, and then another and  another and until one day all these small daily moments of insight turn into a book.

What do you all think? How do you decide if you've had a productive day of writing?