Category: Writing

When I was in high school, even though I knew I wanted to be an author, I didn’t take creative writing. By that point, I had already been writing fiction on my own for almost a decade. I wasn’t an arrogant person– I didn’t think I was pretty or smart, and I knew I wasn’t athletic or popular–but when it came to writing, I thought I had all the answers. I figured those classes were for wannabes and kids looking for an easy A. A few of my friends wrote too, and I assumed we were the only serious writers in that school. I took journalism instead.

In college I was a little bit more humble. I had a few rejections under my belt by then and I figured okay, maybe an intermediate class would help me polish my skills. I actually went to the professor with writing samples to ask if I could skip the intro class (a difficult thing to do as incredibly shy person who was terrified of authority figures). He explained that the spots in the 200-level class were reserved for people who did well in the intro class, so I accepted that I would have to play by the rules and enrolled in the intro class. I ended up making friends with another writer there, and two of the stories I wrote in that class went on to be my first real writing successes, so at the time I decided it had been worthwhile after all.

But that class did a few more things for me as well, things that it took me a few (okay, more than a few) years to really grasp. First, it introduced me to real, honest-to-goodness critiques. Up to that point, my friends had read my stories and had told me they liked them and maybe given me a suggestion or two, but nothing like this. The scenes and stories I wrote were cut to pieces, sometimes with a scalpel, sometimes with a machete, depending on how badly they needed to be reworked. It was nerve-wracking and painful, but I grew more in that class and the novel writing class I took the next semester than I had in all my years of working on my own.

The other thing that intro class introduced me to was the idea of a community of writers. In The Hour I First Believed, Wally Lamb’s narrator, high school English teacher Caelum Quirk, talks about the unpopular kids in the school where he teaches, the “non-jocks, the readers, the gay kids, the ones starting to stew about social injustice.” He describes how high school is for these kids, trying to find their way in the world while being bullied and dismissed. One line in particular caught my eye: “The freaks know where there’s refuge: in the library, the theater program, art class, creative-writing.” The freaks in his novel may have known this, but I didn’t. It never occurred to me that the people in those high school creative writing classes might have been exactly like me. My friends and I didn’t have the market cornered on wanting to be writers. Just because I didn’t know these people, that didn’t mean they weren’t as passionate and sincere in their desire to make their voices heard.

In college I was willing to see my fellow writers as my peers, but there my shyness did me in. I was able to see the community, press my face up against the glass and watch them, but I never felt I belonged to it. I was awkward and uncomfortable and felt like no one cared what I had to say about anything, or, even worse, that they actively disliked me or thought what I had to say was stupid. I wanted my writing to be my voice, but my writing wasn’t there to speak for me when we went out to a bar after a reading, and I was terrified by the idea of reading my writing out loud, which would have connected me to more people than the handful in my classes. So I remained cut off from the world I was only just realizing existed.

In those classes the professor talked about “missed opportunities,” places in our fiction where something unexpected or profound could have happened but didn’t because we, as writers, were lazy, or safe, or not paying close enough attention. It’s taken me this long to realize that this can apply to real life too. I’ve always thought of my life in terms of opportunities I didn’t get–I didn’t get to go to my prom, or spend a semester abroad, or any of a number of other things–as opposed to opportunities I missed because I was lazy, or safe, or not paying close enough attention. Arrogance prevented me from discovering a writing community in high school. Shyness prevented me from putting myself out there and joining the writing community in college. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, another opportunity comes along.

A story in Salon.com a while back led me to an online community of women writers called She Writes, which led me to a writer who in turn led me to a Twitter “twibe” based around the hashtag #MyWANA, which grew out of Kristen’s Lamb’s book We Are Not Alone. I’m almost as awkward and shy online as I am in real life, and I still battle the nagging feeling that no one cares what I have to say, but what tentative steps I have taken to put myself out there in these arenas have been amply rewarded. I try to remember that these are communities of people working towards the same goal, people who have come together to support each other. It’s time for me to stop letting these opportunities pass me by and to take the plunge and join these communities of writers. I encourage you to do the same. Whatever your passion is, there are people out there you can share it with.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I am a master To Do list creator. I make them on scrap pieces of paper, in Excel, on Cozi, on a mini-whiteboard. I litter the house with them until “consolidate To Do lists” becomes another task on my current list. What I’m not good at is crossing things off of those lists. Sometimes I’ll find a list from a month–or a year–ago, and I won’t be able to cross a single thing off of it. All I end up with is a bunch of things I forgot I had to do. My lists are full of things that are high-priority but boring, or complicated, or time-consuming (or all three), and things that are more fun but low-priority. I can’t possibly do everything, at least not in one day, so I procrastinate doing the awful high-priority things because if I do them I won’t have time to do the fun things, but then I feel too guilty to do the fun things instead. I freeze, unable to do anything, and end up wasting whatever time I have reading lolcats and playing online games. I manage to get the bills paid on time and the laundry done, but anything that doesn’t have a deadline can sit for days or weeks, or longer.

As you can probably tell from my recent posts, lately this has been most frustrating when it comes to my writing. I make To Do lists that include writing and editing both fiction and blog posts on them. I make “unschedules” that include writing time and then don’t write in those blocks of time. Part of my problem right now is that I need to finish what will hopefully be the final edit of my short story “Me & Marie” so I can send it out into the world and see if anyone will publish it. I don’t know if I’m just burned out on the story because I’ve been working on it for so long, or if I’m afraid of rejection, or if I’m bored by the idea of a close proofreading at this time, but it’s become a bottleneck. I feel like I can’t move on to focusing on my novel until I get this story taken care of, and it’s just not happening.

So, out of desperation, I decided to go back to the procrastination book I stumbled on almost two years ago. I figured I would re-read the chapters on the one week experiment and unschedules and see if there was something I was forgetting. But when I opened the book on my Kindle, I decided almost on a whim to take a look at the table of contents and there was the title for the very next chapter, the one I’d never gotten around to reading: “Learning to say yes and no.” I’ve just started reading it, but already I can see it deals directly with my To Do list issue. The first line says

Procrastination can be an indirect way to say no when we are unable to say no directly; it can also represent “stealing” time to spend on things we can’t openly say yes to.

I have been doing both of these things. While the chapters on setting a short-term goal and scheduling time to accomplish that goal were useful and I definitely need to revisit them, it’s clear that I stopped reading a little too early. Guess my next goal should be reading a couple chapters in this book!

There must be something in the air. I started drafting this post two weeks ago as part of the 250 words a day challenge and then, on April 12, Iain Broome put up this blog post on Write For Your Life. In it he encourages writers to look at their writing patterns. Do they write for long periods of time, or in short bursts of creativity? He doesn’t push one scenario over another, but rather asks writers to figure out what works for them. Be aware of your patterns, he says, and make the proper adjustments so that you are working to your full potential.

It’s good advice. I’ve been writing for almost thirty years now, and I’ve never stopped to figure out what the best way for me to write is. I’ve always been a full-tilt kind of person, either sitting still or running full speed, usually with a deadline looming. I don’t know if that’s genetics or environment, nature or nurture, and I guess it doesn’t really matter. I am what I am. But just because in the past I’ve tended to write big chunks of stories by staying up until two in the morning, usually during finals week, does that mean it’s the best strategy for me? Maybe my overall creativity would increase if I kept up a steady trickle of writing. Maybe I wouldn’t waste so much time at the beginning of a writing session trying to get in gear if I was already rolling from whatever small amount I of writing I did the day before.

This isn’t to say that I forget about my story when I’m not writing. I’m usually thinking about it all the time. But the difference between thinking about and writing about is the difference between standing on a track and jumping the hurdles. There is nothing like getting in the flow and losing yourself in a world, your fingers flying to keep up with the scenes unspooling in your mind. I haven’t been able to that feeling from fifteen minutes of writing, but maybe that’s because I haven’t tried hard enough. In his book One Minute Meditation, Martin Boroson claims you can get the benefits of meditating in, you guessed it, one minute. He doesn’t say that meditating for an hour or longer is bad or wrong or not worthwhile. He just puts forth the argument that meditation is a good thing and you should do it for as much time as you can, even if all you have is a minute, because maybe that’s all you need to get to that place that you are seeking. It might take some practice, but it can be done. So should I sit around waiting to have five uninterrupted hours to write, or keep myself up until 2:00 a.m., or should I practice writing 250 words a day, and see if maybe I can find a way to go for a quick dip in that creative flow? If nothing else, writing a little bit a day might get all the gunk out of my system so that when I do have a large chunk of time on my hands, I’ll be primed to create something worth keeping.

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, earlier this year I took a big step towards turning my writing into something more than a hobby by transitioning from full-time to part-time work. I did this for practical and psychological reasons. In practical terms, I felt that I didn’t have the time or the energy I needed to really focus on my writing. Working five days a week, with an hour and a half round trip commute three days a week, and more days than not working into the evening, left me mentally and physically exhausted. I felt like I was always chasing my tail. My To Do list never seemed to get any shorter, and in fact was growing at an alarming rate. But I also did it to show myself and the people around me that I was serious about my writing. I wanted to do something that said writing was important to me, that it was something I wanted to pursue as a career.

The only problem is, I may have told the world that I’m serious about being writer, but apparently I didn’t tell myself. Every writing day I wake up full of good intentions and every writing day I end up doing the dishes, or the laundry, or the finances. Writing has been a hobby, a feel-good, reward activity for so long, that I feel guilty sitting down to write if there are other things that need to be done. I need to find a way to convince myself that writing is my job now, and that I need to sit down at my laptop and work. To be honest, I’m not really sure how to do this. Simply scheduling the time hasn’t worked. I tend to hit the snooze button a few too many times on writing days, and by the time I work out and take a shower, and do all the distracting little things that get in the way, I’m lucky if it’s still morning. I need accountability. I need concrete goals, something I can look at and say, “I’ve accomplished that,” or, “I have this far to go.” I’ve always been one to work better with deadlines. Will they work if I set them myself?

For my first goal/deadline, I’ve started working on Inky Girl’s self-explanatory 250 words a day challenge. My current work schedule is every other day: most weeks, I work on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, leaving me Tuesdays and Thursdays to concentrate on my writing. While I tend to get most of my writing done in big chunks of time, I think it will be helpful to me to try and keep the creative pump primed. The challenge is generously open-minded about what kind of writing can count towards the 250 word goal, but for myself I’ve decided to limit it to creative writing and writing about writing. I need to be either working on a story or writing for my website or for this blog. If I’m desperate, I might count Twitter too, if it’s writing-related. I’m hoping that a steady flow of words, even if it’s a trickle, will make it easier for me to open the floodgates on the days where I have hours at my disposal. So far, it’s going pretty well. I’ve written six out of the last seven days (the rule is 250 words a day, six days a week). Most of this blog post was actually written over a couple of days as part of the challenge. I need to do a better job scheduling it, though. So far I’ve done all my writing around 11:00 at night. I’m still falling into the same pattern of putting writing last, but at least I’m writing. Maybe I need to go back to that procrastination book and look at unscheduling again.

If I figure out what I need to do to get myself to take advantage of this time I have carved out for writing, I’ll let you know. And if you have any tips or tricks for self-motivation and self-discipline, please share them in the comments. I’d love to hear them.