Just because I’ve been away from the blog…

…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