Writer-In-Progress

I love all the seasons equally, each for their own special qualities. Spring delivers fresh air, sunshine, and soft ground for planting new flowers and reintroduces me to my favorite plants after a long, dark winter. Summer’s sunrises give me the perfect backdrop for morning walks with my dog and the full-blown beauty of nature. Winter, despite her sharp winds and dull grey days, is full of moments to slow down, snuggle in and let the body and mind lie dormant for a period.

And autumn…well, where to begin? I don’t know that autumn is my favorite season other than the fact that we’re in it now and it’s most pertinent. In terms of nature, autumn brings football which brings leaves changing which brings a certain type of sadness at the close of the summer. Summer’s final chapter, you might say.

But autumn brings something different to my writing. Just as I tromped over piles of crisp, colorful leaves this morning on my walk with the dog, I realize that autumn is signaling to my subconscious that like the tree that sheds the leaves each year, this is the time for me to shed some of the lofty projects and hopeful pieces of writing I’ve been clinging to since spring–and possibly longer–that are holding me back.

As a creative mind, I think every single idea I have is a golden gem. Thinking up new ideas, new plots, new essay topics is what gets me going. I love ideas. But the downside of that is that some ideas are obviously wrong for me, wrong for my writing–yet I cling to them with some type of hope that they’ll spring to life on their own. This energy I waste on these projects that go nowhere do nothing to further my writing, my creativity, my mental state–instead they keep me stagnant, afraid to branch out and mentally unable to spend more time on a project that’s working or on trying something new. If you’re a writer, or creative in the least, you know the feeling of a project that’s continued to call your name that you keep putting aside, or worse, you’ve started and just can’t finish despite your efforts. Not only do these projects suck away your energy, they can get you procrastinating on all types of creative work and can effectively block your creative flow. Not good.

Take a cue from autumn and set aside some time in the next couple of weeks to seriously evaluate the state of your projects. If what you’re working on does not infuse your writing time with passion of some sort, consider whether it’s time to move on to a new work or, if it’s a long piece, move ahead to a more interesting part of the story. Some of you might even find you’ve let your writing slip into oblivion over the course of the last few weeks (or months, or even years) and are pressuring yourself to write what you THINK you must write. Try this: instead of sludging through what your conscious mind tells you you should be working on, take some quiet time to reflect on what your subconscious, your soul, FEELS like writing. Maybe it’s nothing more complicated than going back to journaling or letter-writing to a friend or something equally simple. Maybe the manuscript you’ve spend a few years writing is bringing you to tears each time you face it. Maybe you find yourself dreading writing another mystery novel because you’re bursting to try a chick lit.

Whatever your case, whatever your state of writing, taking a little time to reflect on where you are and how you could make things better is an excellent practice toward becoming the writer you dream about. So as the trees drop their colorful–yet dead–leaves in anticipation of saving their energy through winter with the promise of a new, fresh spring on the way–think long and hard about saying goodbye to the parts of your writing that aren’t working for you so that you can spend your precious, limited energy on projects that fulfill you.

What do the autumn leaves tell you about your writing?

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…doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing. (so get ready for a round-about post! You know it )

The fine line between summer and the start of a new school year seems barely visible from either side. On lazy summer mornings, I can hardly recall the constant chatter in the hallways and the regulation of 8 hours of my daily life by the ringing of a bell, and once the school day cycle starts, summer as I know it fades into the rearview of my memory.

It’s a tough transition in terms of daily activity as well as writing time. I often find that those first three weeks are both physically and mentally draining. Spending all day buzzing around from student to student making sure they understand and have questions answered is a far cry from my usual lazing by the pool until noon as the sun warms my shoulders and my notebook fills with inky prose. Lesson planning takes the creative part of my brain hostage until I feel a comfortable padding of at least two weeks between what I need to teach and my today.

Most years in the past, I use the increased activity as an excuse, a public procrastination of sorts, to stop writing dead in its tracks. It isn’t that I don’t want to write–almost every day of school, I’m struck by a new idea, an essay topic, a funny anecdote I can connect to my own school past that I’d love to put into a short memoir piece–it’s more that I need mental vegetation time after school which turns into vegetation night. Night after night.

This summer, I changed my focus a bit. I started with the bones of a novel–this was my last attempt at finishing a long piece of fiction. I’ve finished six novels over the years but as I’ve written, I’ve found my ability to focus and continue momentum on one piece of writing past about 40,000 words is a struggle. I went through all the events of grief once this realization struck me, which ended with the last hurrah of trying one more novel.

It didn’t work. I was disappointed but not disillusioned. I still had to write. Thinking through things, I realized how much I’ve loved writing essays. Starting back in junior high, I was the oddball in the class who actually liked writing essays when assigned. I picked up a pen and started toying with this new genre to discover that I liked it.

I really liked it. I could write ten, twenty, thirty pages without losing a beat. Not worrying what my characters would do, where the plot was going, how to make the stakes worse was liberating. I could just write and not freak out. I did lots of these essays, short memoirs, this summer. The more I wrote, the more a new book idea came into my mind that compelled me forward toward a big goal. So I wrote.

Til school started. Then the brain needed a break, a week or two to regroup, to figure out how this new way of writing fit into my schedule, into my day, into my mind. Amazingly, it’s much better than when I wrote fiction. When writing time comes now (not daily like I hoped, but I may get there in another few weeks…for now, just five or so days a week), I pick up my pen and write. I don’t procrastinate, I write. I don’t use some lame internal excuse about not knowing my story to stop me, I write. I finish an essay or a short piece once a week or so, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. I never would have finished anything had I still been writing fiction. It just didn’t work with me.

Now, that’s a big lie, too. In the last week, I’ve written two short stories (1K words each) for a specific market, but that never would have happened had I not honed my short writing skills through essay. It was a tough transition with a lot of deep thought (and tears, I admit), but it was worth it for me. I’m writing now, writing in September when I usually wait until December to get restarted.

If your writing (output or routine) is not where you want it to be, what can you do to work toward your goal? Are there hard choices, tough changes you need to think about? Or is it more a matter of just getting in there to do it? I’d love to hear about how you improve your process. We can all learn from each other

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