On
Writing
Thursday, December 6, 2007
I have always had mixed feelings
about reading books or essays on the subject of writing. On the
one hand, some of the most luminous writing I have ever read has been
written by writers contemplating the subject of their greatest
passion. On the other hand, I was haunted by the fact
that "they" could write and I couldn't, or wouldn't or just
didn't.
Until
now,
I had never felt
compelled to chime in. For one thing, I had never written enough to
feel I had much to say on the subject. Writing was something I
wanted to do or, occasionally, something I dabbled in when I
had the time. It was never something to which I devoted my attention
in any serious way. I had opinions about writing, but I did not have enough practical
experience to feel as though I was justified in expressing those opinions. In the last year
couple of years, all that changed. I have devoted virtually every waking moment when
I was not at work to writing or thinking about what
I was going to write as soon as I got back to my
computer.
While I am taking a little break from
the frenzy of fiction writing, it seems appropriate to stop and consider the
process. At the end of the year, I tend to take stock of what
is going on with me. This year, what has gone on with me has produced hundreds of
thousands of words pouring out into millions of bits and bytes on my computer.
It feels as though it is time to think about my history as a
writer [why is that word so hard for me to use???] for a little
while.
I started writing when I was in elementary school:
short stories, essays, poetry, long, chatty
letters to my relatives
(back in the days when they were written in pencil on
lined notebook paper). I started keeping a journal shortly after
I graduated from college. Somewhere in my twenties, I started a "writing notebook"
where I kept odd bits of ideas, stories I had started
(but hardly ever finished). Over the years, I started several novels, and gave up
on all of them after only a few pages. At some point, I
gave up writing short stories, because I read somewhere you should write the
kind of stuff you like to read. I hate to read
short stories; they typically leave me frustrated and wanting more. I only wrote
short stories because they seemed somehow "easier" than making the sustained effort to
flesh out a whole novel. [I know now that isn't true. It
is much harder to write a short piece than a long
piece.]
Regardless of the difficulty of the process,
I wanted to write novels, however, because I love to read
novels.
Between about 1989 and 1992, while I was a
stay-at-home mom, I drafted three novels. Even I will
admit that, while I love them because they were born out of
my love for the subjects and the process of writing, they were pretty awful. The
quality of the result notwithstanding, the process of writing those stories was the most wonderful experience imaginable. After
I went back to work in 1992, I stopped writing. I was just too
busy with a family, community work and a job.
After we moved to Florida in 1997, I started
keeping a journal and I wrote long email letters to my
friends about the amazing changes that had taken place in my life. The need
to write about my experiences began to bubble up again, but in no
organized way. My journal and letters were all over the place and my
"writing folder" filled up with all kinds of odd bits of stuff. Nevertheless, I was expressing
myself in written form again for the first time in several
years. I was rusty as hell, and needed the practice.
I discovered the blogosphere sometime in 2005. In early 2006, I could
no longer resist joining in. Most (but not all) of what I posted in the
two blogs I started then are in the Archives of this website.
The stuff was sort of a hodgepodge, but the real point was that I was
writing almost every day, and since I was posting the stuff online, I was
more careful than I would have been with ordinary journal entries. I took
the time to try to write well, as opposed to my tendency in journals
and letters of just spilling a lot of raw emotion.
By the middle of 2006, I began to focus closely on
the act of writing itself. I started reading blogs and books on
writing. I began to focus on improving my writing. The series on
Lesser Feasts was sort of a writing assignment I gave myself. I had such
fun with that! [Someday, I hope to finish that cycle of
reflections.] One of the articles I read about writing at
that time said something to the effect that would-be writers write when
they are inspired to do so, but "real" writers write every day. I
decided to do that. I made up my mind at that moment that I
would sit down and write at least something every
day.
The commitment to that discipline turned
out
to be the key to unleashing my Muse! Almost immediately, I came
up with an idea for a story. In only a few weeks, I had drafted
a whole novel, albeit a fairly short one. I thought it was the best thing
I had ever written!
Story ideas blossomed one after another. At
one point I had six or seven preliminary ideas for novels saved
in my writing folder. I started rising at impossibly early hours
on the weekends in order to get in several hours of writing before my
family got up. I drafted on the weekends and then edited in the
evenings during the week.
Story after story after story bubbled up and demanded to be told. Some of
it must have been stuff my soul had been holding onto for years,
waiting for me to pay attention. Between midsummer 2006 and now, with
only a short break for our vacation in June of this
year, I worked on one novel or another every
single day. I tried various perspectives, voices, points of view
and even several different genres.
I experimented with different writing techniques. I wrote
one story with no outline or end in mind.
I wrote one story following a detailed outline. I wrote one where I had the end in
mind when I started but no specific idea of how to get there;
I let the story unfold, and it ended up surprising me in amazing ways.
Two of the stories involve deeply personal experiences; they gave me the chance
to explore my experiences by assigning those experiences to a character
and then watching what the character did with them. Three are reflections
on the question of "what happens when things fall
apart at mid-life?" One is an unabashed attempt to write
something purely commercial.
Are they any good? I don't know. It's too soon to go back and look at them objectively. I have put
them aside for a while, to mellow and rest. I do know that I love
them. I love them like children, each one different, each with its own unique strengths
and weaknesses. In a way, I love myself more now,
too. After all these years, I finally sat down and acted on the
desire I have had since elementary school. It is hard for me to call
myself a "writer" because to me a "writer" is someone who is published. I'll save
for another day my tale of woe about the slings and arrows of
trying to get something published. The important thing for now
is that I finally found the discipline to do the work of getting the stories
on paper (or at least onto the computer). Whether I can ever
persuade a legitimate publisher to publish any of it is sort
of beside the point right now. The first hurdle was such a huge obstacle
for me. I am so pleased and proud to have got this
far!
Right now I am pausing to rest and catch my breath.
I blazed out almost
100,000 words between the first of October and the end of November on
a Florida-fiction genre novel that turned out to be a bit of
a mystery. (I actually wrote more than the 50,000 words required by the write-a-novel-in-a-month
competition. Unfortunately for me, I started it the last week
in October so it didn't qualify for
the competition.)
I know I need a break and I have a lot of other
things to do between now and the end of the
year, but I find myself thinking every spare minute about what
could be the subject of my next story.
God, it's fun!
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