During last month of heads down writing, a few ideas bubbled up from wherever stories come. These bits had no connection to the manuscript so I jotted them in text files and set them aside. Call them distractions perhaps, and very unwelcome in the moment. Essentially they were raw, rough, half formed seeds. Tiny ideas so undeveloped that when reviewing the sentence fragments weeks afterwards, I questioned why I bothered. Yet something caught my eye.

At the time, leaving the files be was difficult, one more so than the others. It interested me and on several occasions my thoughts strayed from the manuscript. That was bad enough, but the most interesting bit of the lot made the least sense. Late nights, I popped open the file and tried to decipher what it meant. What had I meant? Considering the note was a single brief phrase: 7PM confession, a chalice unless the keyboard banged out its own answer, I was at a loss. I considered deletion and went to bed.

On Tuesday, I tried a new writing exercise. Focus on an idea for five minutes, crank an egg timer to sixty, and let it rip at the keyboard. When the timer dings, stop. The object of my focus: the nonsensical sentence fragment. The approach worked. An hour later, I had three pages and a nice ending to…well…maybe a novel. I slept on the pages for two days and returned to them Thursday. If the ending still strikes me the same way next Monday – as an ending – I’ll allocate sixty minutes a day for a week and see what can be done about a beginning.