Craft Your Content - Writers, spring forward!

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Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

“What dreams lie dormant hidden in the womb of your soul, quietly waiting, incubating seeking opportunity to come forth?”—Stella Payton

Elisa’s Thought for the Week

This week heralds a shift of season, pulling us from the doldrums of winter into the expectation of spring.

Transitions happen around us every day, but we aren’t always aware of the work that goes into them.

Take, for example, the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly.

When you learn how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it’s a fascinating study of how ideation and writing work.

Huh?! Hear me out…

You’ve likely seen a version of this process at some point:

This picture would lead us to believe that this is a perfect circle of even stages, that the caterpillar-butterfly swiftly moves through to get to its majestic final form.

But that isn’t how it works at all.

Specifically, the butterfly spends most of its life in the caterpillar and chrysalis stages.

See, a caterpillar is really just a juvenile butterfly. It hasn’t grown into its winged adult form. But it does have those adult cells in its body from the moment it hatches!

The adult cells present as something called imaginal discs.

(Yes, there’s a reason you immediately think of imagination here … both words come from the same Latin root word imāgō (which translates as image or imitation (and very occasionally as thought or conception.))

These imaginal discs do not grow at the same rate as the rest of the caterpillars cells and guts and features, as they are suppressed by a juvenile hormone. Essentially, a caterpillar is the larval stage of a butterfly, and it is doing an important job in its few weeks of existence.

It is eating. Voraciously. To build a molting hormone called ecdysone, which allows it to shed its skin and grow bigger.

The caterpillar sheds its skin about five times before those imaginal discs can’t stay in their dormant state any longer.

The juvenile hormones cut back, and the discs begin to develop, creating folds that envelop the caterpillar's final form, becoming the chrysalis (or pupa.)

What happens next is a bit gross, but what can I say … it’s nature.

Inside this cozy sock, the caterpillar’s larval state breaks down, and it turns into a soup of dense nutrients, perfect for feeding and nurturing the imaginal discs.

This incubation stage of the metamorphosis can take weeks, if not months!

It is as long as, if not longer than, the larval life of the caterpillar.

We know the rest of the story. Eventually the butterfly fully forms and breaks its way out of its happy little cocoon—emerging to grace the world with its breathtaking beauty.

Elisa, what in the actual heck does this have to do with writing?!

There’s a reason that I pointed out the connection between imaginal discs and imagination.

When you are working on a piece, you usually start with these little seeds of imagination.

They’re not fully formed, and you need to voraciously consume to grow your idea. That includes research and adjacent topics and supporting (or challenging) information.

Even in this stage, your idea is going to molt multiple times. It will grow antennae and hair in weird places; it will get bigger and bigger.

Until those imaginal discs can’t stay in this consumption stage any longer.

They need to become something.

Your idea goes into its cocoon, and breaks down into a goopy nutrient soup, with a primary purpose of developing the imagination into something solid. Using all those nutrients it has collected.

Finally, when it is ready, it breaks free from the tight wrapping, and flies away.

So if you are feeling like your writing isn’t a butterfly, stop to consider you may just be in the dense goopy nutrient soup phase!

And your dazzling butterfly is just getting ready to show itself off to the world.

What You Missed on Craft Your Content …

Our articles have the same mission we do—to help you to make your own words even better!

• (From the Archives - June 2017)—There’s something to be said for incubating periods to produce something beautiful. It’s part of my own writing process, when I crawl into “my mind palace” to sit down and knock out thousands of words an hour.​

In Other Reading This Week …

Need more insights and inspiration for your writing and mindset?

• We’re told to write for our readers, but what if we don’t know who our readers are? Meera Kothand has a thorough plan for profiling your perfect reader with (perfectly legal!) surveillance over on SmartBlogger.​
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• It’s easy to think that we can just give our writing a quick once over before we hit Publish, but that might not be the best idea. Scientifically, it is nearly impossible to catch all your typos.​
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• Looking for some ways to get those imaginal discs juicing? Dana Nicole shares 10 ten-minute writing exercises to do just that on ConvertKit’s blog.
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• I’m not always as good at email as I want to be (or used to be), but I like this email rule from Alexis Haselberger for working through your inbox quickly (it’s what I aspire to with my own!)
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• ​There’s a problem with standard content marketing and online writing goals, and it affects the quality of the writing. Fortunately Mateusz Makosiewicz at ahrefs knows what that problem is and ways that you can fix it.

Weekly Writing Tip …

A quick chance to learn from the masters.

“Every dream like an eagle’s egg has three phases; incubation (brooding) period where all the facts about the dream are collected and carefully analyzed; a nurturing period where much is invested initially and very little may be realized immediately; and a flying period where the dream has broken loose and it becomes a reality to the dreamer”―Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

Untranslatable …

Exquisite words from other languages.

Mít kliku [mIEt KUH-lik-oo] (v.) – From the Czech language, mít kliku literally translates as “to have a [door] handle.” It means you are lucky or have luck on your side. You have the “handle” to your next venture right in your “hand.” Sorta synonyms: lucked out, stumbled on, having good karma, charmed.

This Week’s Writing Prompt …

We often do our best thinking when we write.

What is your writing process? Do you allow any time for letting your thoughts and research incubate? Or do you get an idea and immediately have to sit down and blast out the whole piece? Try writing something this week in the opposite process to see what you get.

This Week’s Writing Resource …

Why not use the tools at your disposal?

​Google Keep - This is my “save this idea before I forget it” go-to, as it can sync to most of the devices I use. It’s a note-taking tool that allows you to write, draw, or record snippets of thought, and I can then transfer these fledglings to my Trello board to research and ideate more. Bonus, it is available on both Android and iOS systems (as well as web.)

For the Upcoming Week …

Because we all need a good chuckle to start things off right!

But as a writer, it's kind of our job...

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Till next time! ~ Elisa

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