In Efficient Creativity: The Six-Week Audio Series Julianna Baggott talks about a creative practice called “musing” as a way of developing scenes. You give your imagination a task (e.g. A man is trying to put a toddler in a child seat while the kid throws a fit) and then you let the scene play like a movie in your mind while you watch what happens. (Speaking of movies: You know the trope where the sheriff lets the bloodhound sniff the missing kid’s sock, and then the bloodhound is pulling on the leash, hot on the trail, and the sheriff can barely keep up? Musing is kind of like that.)

Why muse? Baggott gives several compelling reasons. If you want to hear all of them, you should listen to the audio series. The first episode — AS IF by Magic — is available for free at SoundCloud.

I’ll give you one reason here. It’s the one that really appealed to me: Musing is a way to revise really quickly.

Some of us (read: me) figure out a scene by actually writing it. I almost never get it quite right the first time, so I end up re-writing it. And re-writing it. And re-

You get the idea. This takes a long time, as you can imagine. But musing allows you to play the scene like a movie in your mind, and then re-wind it and play it again differently, and to do that over and over until it feels right—which is a hell of a lot faster than writing the whole thing five or seven or thirteen times.

Who wouldn’t want to fast-forward through their bad ideas to get to the good stuff? I was ready to muse. I thought I would be good at it right away, a natural. After all, daydreaming is my jam.

It didn’t work. I tried and tried . . . but the bloodhound of my imagination would go about three steps, freeze up, and start glitching. Maybe the sheriff had him on a choke chain, I don’t know.

I think I was afraid. Afraid that my imagination might dream up something good that I would forget before I could get it down on the page.

So I adapted. I compromised, meeting halfway between musing and drafting. I gave my imagination the task, cut it loose, and ran behind it taking shorthand notes on its steps.

Then I re-wound it to the beginning, set my imagination loose again, and took notes on its new path. And then again and again until it felt right. Here’s what the first two paths looked like:

It’s illegible, Bryan. I know. I get the feeling that even if I could read your shitty handwriting, I wouldn’t understand anything about this scene. That’s because those notes aren’t for you. They’re for me—the future me who will reconstruct that daydream into an actual draft. My goal was to be as scant as possible so as not to lose the bloodhound or slow it down.

And now I offer these approaches up to you. Try musing. If that doesn’t work, try my method of directed daydreaming + shorthand notes. And if that doesn’t work, mutate a different variation on this theme. Whatever you try, let me know how it goes, all right? I’m deeply interested in this stuff.