Start something, anything - you might finish it

　
I have three writing gigs going, and a house with six bedrooms, of which we use only one. Then there are five rooms downstairs, a laundry room and two big bathrooms. Not to mention the wrap-around porch. Oh, and the whole house is standing by a toothpick.

I know why the house is always in such a state of disarray, because sometimes it’s just too much. My husband helps where he can, but the lion’s share of keeping our lives together falls to me. Sometimes I decide I don’t feel like writing so I go to sort the wash. Then I realize I have nowhere to put all the fresh laundry because I still haven’t weeded out all the clothes that don’t fit or are out of style, because they might fit or come back into style one day. So I give up and decide to dust.

Big mistake. This house creates dust so fast that if I don’t dust every day, which I don’t, it gets out of control. Looking at this overwhelming task, even in just one room, I am immediately defeated and go look for something else to accomplish. I start to think about doing laundry, then remember the previous laundry dilemma and give up on that, too. And the vicious cycle continues.

I end up back at the computer to write, but my muse is nowhere to be found. Then I remember seeing a tweet the day before that said, “Write just one page, one paragraph, one sentence, one word…” So I dust off an old idea and try. It’s slow going. Very slow going. After 20 minutes I’ve written three sentences. They are three good sentences though. Pretty soon I realize that I’ve written that one word, that one sentence, that one paragraph and then some. I’m still not enthused about writing, but I keep going, thinking that now I can stop any time and not feel guilty.

Before I know it I’ve got a good start to my story and decide to keep at it. And I finish. It only needed to be two pages, but those two pages were nowhere to be found the last time I sat down to write. If only I could apply this theory to housecleaning - well, then I’d get no writing done because I’d be cleaning all the time.

So the house is going to stay in disarray. I still get paralyzed by writing sometimes, the way I get paralyzed when trying to figure out where to start the rest of my life, but at least each piece has a defined finish. Which makes it easier to start writing that first word. If only the house would stay clean after I finish, maybe I’d try folding that first t-shirt and then actually find a place to put it.

Writing Fiction - It's Hard

My writing group has met faithfully once or twice a month for two years, ever since we were all rejected for the same fiction writing workshop and decided instead to get together ourselves. From that rejection, we ended up with a group that long outlasted the 3-month workshop, and we were lucky enough to develop great relationships with each other.

It can be hard to find a group that’s as copacetic as ours. It can also be hard to take criticism from people you don’t even know. But it’s quite rewarding to have them all agree that a particular piece of yours is good stuff, and better than the last piece you wrote. Reading a piece by another group member that is that much better than his or her last one also brings a sense of accomplishment. I like to think we’re rooting for each other.

Since the group’s inception, some of us have applied for workshops similar to the one that first brought us together. Some have been accepted, some rejected and some have opted not to bother applying at all. Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I keep applying. I just received my third workshop rejection last week. My first reaction was that I was never going to write fiction again. I was starting to think that it would be easier to become a rock star than a novelist. Upon reflection, I gave myself some slack, remembering that only 10 out of 40 applicants were accepted, which means that 75 percent of us got the heave-ho.

I am a journalist by trade. I quickly found out that fiction writing is a completely different animal, and much harder to grasp than I first expected. While I can write a good solid news article with my eyes closed, I’ve been writing fiction consistently for two years now and still don’t feel I have the hang of it. Granted, I’ve been into journalism since grade school, which was much more than two years ago, and I have formal training in news writing. I just feel that, having the basics of writing pretty much down, that I should be able to wrap my head around fiction writing without too much difficulty. Not so.

The experts say that you should write what you know. That works, to a point, but I find myself getting too close to the characters, or becoming the characters themselves. Before I know it, the words “I” and “myself” start creeping into the piece, and I’m trying to cram exactly what I know happened into a story that doesn’t play out well on paper. So I’ve decided to try bucking the system by making up every single thing I write, fiction-wise, and hoping that maybe therein lies a better path for me.