I haven't posted anything since January, but the writing is still going strong. Earlier this month I did a little retrospective about the writing I've done so far (writing about writing, what a navel-gazer I am). Here it is:
I started this year with a goal of 200,000 words. I was so excited to start. I had no plan for what I was going to write; just trusted myself to writing, that it would come to me.
I am over a quarter of the way toward my goal, and I could not be happier with the transformation that has taken over my life. I feel like writing a thank you note to whoever put me up to this. I'm not sure if I should address it to my past self or to God. I am too modest for the former and not devout enough for the latter.
I spent January writing things for myself, sort of getting into the groove of things with prompts. I ended up writing my first allegory. I hadn't finished a story in years, but I finished that one, and I felt so proud of myself. I felt a newfound confidence in myself. I felt that the 200,000 word goal was doable.
February, I tried my hand at short stories. I started several. I wrote what my sister later told me was called “microfiction.” I wrote scenes. I found that writing fiction was much harder than responding to prompts. It takes more time, more heart, more dedication. More pushing.
March got difficult. My stories, it seemed, had run their course. Pushing plotlines any further seemed futile. I cast about for material and came up short a lot of the time. But I pushed through, and wrote even when I didn't have anything to write about, and milked stories. Fortunately I had my story lottery to lean on, seven randomly picked prompts as seminal points for thousand-word-minimum stories. I got some wonderful material from those, and am still working on them.
Now it is April. Looking back on the past three months and seeing how much I've written (over 50,000 words), I'm in awe of my own abilities. But even more amazing than the word count is how I feel about myself, and what I've learned.
I'm reading The Right to Write by Julia Cameron, and her take on writing really speaks to me. She sees it as a spiritual thing, something you need to do every day just like eating, something that helps you make sense of your life. What I feel about writing does touch upon the spiritual. It has radically changed my life. I want to write through everything. I want to write as therapy. I want to write to understand myself better, my life better. And I am doing that. It has given me more confidence, made me more open and honest about everything. I feel like I added a dimension to myself. Or found a dimension of myself that was lost for a while.
Before I started this writing project, I felt flat, like something was missing from my life. I felt two-dimensional, like a lifeless drawing on a forgotten pad of paper. Writing has helped me jump off the page and live fully.
I'm still in the learning process, of course. I'm still just three months in. I'm learning to craft characters, I'm learning how to follow plots, I'm learning how to tackle fatigue and lack of ideas and my own personal blocks. I'm learning to fight lapses in self esteem.
Most of all I still haven't tackled dealing with an audience. I can swallow my pride and send bits and pieces of my work to my husband and my sister, but letting people read my work is very difficult for me. I'm so afraid of getting shot down. I know my fledgling writing-ego is very fragile yet. I'm working toward it. I know one of these days I'll just have to dive in and let real writers read my stuff. I'm just not ready yet.
On that note, I do plan to post some of my writings (like, real writings) soon. I've got a few pieces of short fiction that have gotten the stamp of approval from Anthony and Aimee, and I feel comfortable putting them out in the world.
I feel awesome.
That is all.
