Writing has been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about writing more
than actually writing, so my blog sites are pitifully and woefully ignored as
of late. But sometimes you have to
reflect on stories, events, daydreams and night dreams to get the well primed,
so to speak. I also have spent a
lot of time reading what others have written in my Prose Workshop and in my
personal reading time, and sometimes trying on a new style to see how it
fits. The Cinderella slipper is
out there for each new piece of work I produce. And while I’m not traveling literally, I’ve been traveling
in two important ways recently:
1) Thinking about moving gracefully through mid-life. Dear God, if you exist, and whoever or
wherever you may be, don’t let me become a cliché. Don’t let me get too comfortable. Don’t let me get bored. Don’t let me get lazy; rest is OK, lazy is not. Don’t let me stop learning. Don’t let me stop trying. Don’t let me get too far off-track--I
have a few goals this fall, such as learning to knit and finishing a rough
draft of my mother’s biography.
Don’t let my health fail, my eyesight fade, my sanity depart. Don’t let my family get away with not
appreciating what I do for them.
Don’t let me complain too much without taking action. Don’t let me forget who I once was, who
I am, and who I want to be. Don’t
let me wallow for grey days on end without making that light appear at the end
of the tunnel.
2) Traveling with my mother through the past to try to
recreate her life on the page. She
went to a lot of places, that woman.
And lived some pretty exciting stuff. Actually, what’s most exciting is not the stuff, but the
enthusiasm she showed for the things she experienced, some of which many think
are mundane. I’m hoping she’ll be
alive for the readers. Through her
photographs, her letters (written and received), interviews with my aunt, and
my memories of lectures she gave when I was in grade school, I’ve been jumping
from southern Illinois to Japan, to Panama, to Europe, to Egypt, and back
again. I’m exhausted. My mental passport is in tatters.
My next stop is NaNoWriMo, a website set up for writers to
network and enter raw word counts during November, National Novel Writing Month. The idea is
that if you can average 1667 words per day for 3o days, you’ll have 50,000
words—the average length of a full-length novel—by the end of November. In theory, December is for revision,
and in January of the new year you can start looking for a way to publish. I tried halfheartedly to do this last
year, but only got a few days in.
The election happened, and 4th grade homework, Christmas
shopping, Thanksgiving meal planning, and situations at work conspired to shut
my efforts down after only 10 days.
Oh, and I wasn’t getting much sleep either. Sleep is vastly underrated. Sleep is necessary to fuel imagination. So this year, I’m shelving last year’s
unfinished project, and bravely starting the new project I’ve been talking
about for years. It’s time. Even if I have to ditch it after a
couple of weeks, that’s OK. I will
have tried.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being in my Prose
Writing Workshop, it’s that the writer’s archenemy is a blank page; so my first goal is to fill it up. How
can you do 1667 words a day, you ask?
Well, right now this blog
entry has 612 words. That’s over a
third of the way. And I’m a chatty
person most of the time, so if I write as much as I would chat, the other 1000
words will come spilling out in no time.
It doesn’t have to be beautiful, poetic, descriptive, unified, or
witty. That will come out later,
hopefully. It just has to be
volume. Then the magic happens;
once you have lots of volume, you realize that you’ve been sort
of…well….beautiful, poetic, descriptive, unified, witty. In a few places, at least. And the rest is just work.
 |
| The computer version of a blank page |
So…off I go.
Into uncharted territory, murky waters, snowy peaks and rocky valleys…use
whichever metaphor you like. Wish
me luck. I’ll try to send you a
postcard once I arrive.
You can do it, Joy. Just consider the word count in our emails this past year - those alone are certainly novel-length, if perhaps not novel-worthy (unless only to the two of us)! I am so looking forward to reading about your mother's amazing life, told in your beautiful voice!
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