Work

The short story I’ll be working on this week is skating two different edges. It first begins to resemble the myth of Prometheus, being tied to a mountain. Then it switches to the story of Elijah, when the protagonist is kept alive by birds. At least, as much of a synopsis as I have right now: today is brainstorming day, so all sorts of plot details are yet to be worked out.

I gotta say, I’m really enjoying this process I’ve developed. I like the day – right after my day off – to not worry about writing words, but just figure out what to write the rest of the week. It allowed me fairly easily to bang out 1,000 words a day after that. Now, the story ended just shy of 3,000 words, so I don’t know if it was enough to carry me through to Saturday, but I can’t see why it wouldn’t.

I’ve gotten behind with Writer’s Digest, the magazine that consistently makes me wonder why I stopped reading once I start picking it up again. I keep them stacked now in my bathroom, for whenever I might be in there hands-free for more than a minute or two. A lot of the articles recently have talked about the process of writing – and it really makes a lot of sense. Writing is the easiest thing to not do, sometimes: look at me, I’m not writing right now. Well, I’m blogging, which should hopefully indirectly affect my writing, but who really knows. One article was hilarious, instructing the reader how to not write a novel. If your goal is to not write a novel, here’s how to do it. Fabulous. One of the ideas was to sit and wait for inspiration before writing. I used to do that – and perhaps, in the beginning, that’s actually what’s best. I know when I tried to force writing, it read like I was trying to force it. Ten years down the road, having written hundreds of thousands of words – maybe even over a million – and having found my voice, it’s a lot easier to sit and systematically think of a plot, and the writing part comes rather naturally. And has been suggested by authors far better and more experienced than I, the gift of writing only goes so far. It’s kind of like getting a treadmill for Christmas: the treadmill is a gift, and it can do more for you than a couch if you want to get fit – but you still have to work to see anything change in any way other than a more cluttered house.

So, I’m still working. Correspondence writer’s course? Not enough: let’s take some writing classes – writing, rhetoric, advanced composition, editing. And write. Write, write, write. I will too.

See you tomorrow.