This has been the year of writing.* And as a result, the year of learning about how to write.
What? you say.
What writing? You can barely manage a few posts a month.Or maybe that's not you. Maybe that's the little editor voice in my head.
But you see, it's not just about the blog. More to the point, it's not only about the blog. And blogging, or not blogging.
Let me back up. Here's the scenario, one year ago. I'm talking to a friend and I discover that this person secretly writes screenplays. (Of course, the phrase "secretly writes" is a bit of an oxymoron, isn't it? More on that later.) Or, more accurately, intends to, wants to, means to write screenplays. So I commiserate about the fiction I mean to, intend to, want to do and somehow never ... do. That's when the inspiration hit me. January was coming up. Why not make it a New Year's resolution, a mutual pact?
And so Write Club was born. Each week, by Sunday at midnight, 250 words, sent to each other — and here's the key: no commenting of any kind. No criticism, no praise. So no fear of rejection.
So you know what I was saying about secretly writing? There are so many people out there who write, not as full time professional authors, but as a sideline extension part of who they are, and unless they also get published, they rarely ever show their work to anyone else. That was the other part of Write Club. I wanted to read my friend's stuff, and I wanted to share my stuff, and we needed a safe, non-scary way to do it.
It's now Week 48, and I've managed to complete 48 chunks of 250 words. Sometimes it was on time, sometimes it was late, and sometimes I combined 2 weeks into a 500-word submission. I wrote fiction, I wrote memoir, I wrote a poem, I wrote a children's story, and I wrote stuff I don't know how to classify. But always I had to just do something.
Writing Lesson #1: Go!So this is my first lesson of writing, also known as the Nike Axiom: Just do it. Do it as a thing to do. Give yourself a deadline if you have to. And go.
Writing Lesson #2: Don't Stop!
And while you're at it: don't overthink it. Don't try to rewrite as you go. Just put the words on the page (or the screen, or written on your hand in ballpoint ink; doesn't matter). That's the second lesson. As much as you're afraid of having others read your writing, the biggest critic and roadblock is yourself.
These seem really obvious, right? I'm sure there a million books on writing out there that say the same thing, in several chapters. I don't know; I haven't read them. But it really doesn't matter. For me, I had to do it to learn it. Kinda Zen, huh?
Writing Lesson #3: It's All Writing
But the biggest, most "a ha!" (yet maybe most obvious) lesson of all didn't come to me at first. In fact, I had to read it elsewhere. And the first light bulb led to another.
You see, despite a whole year of writing without fear of criticism and in an environment where I rarely gave myself enough time to write and self-edit, over on the blogging side, I was roadblocking the crap out of myself. I had ideas for blog posts all the time, and often constructed really good ones in my head as I ran errands, rode the train to work, did laundry, whatever. Then I'd sit down with the intention of posting something and I got stuck on all the typical writer self-doubt "bullroar" (as John Hodgman calls it): How can these possibly be the right words? Someone else has better words. I'll never write as well as they do, so why should I even try?
And then I read a post by Havi Brooks on her Fluent Self blog from a series called "Blogging Therapy," in which she tackled it all head on:
"Why Even Bother When Other People Are Doing It Better?"Um. Light bulb! Read my mind much? (Look closely in the comments and you'll see my initial reaction.)
So I started letting it go, and posting anyway. In other words, applying Lessons 1 and 2 of Write Club to blogging. Hey, that wasn't so hard.
So the second "a ha"? She wrote another post in the series where she coached people on starting to blog, and helped them overcome their fear by suggesting they even write a separate set of "private blog posts" just for themselves, because if they knew no-one would read them, they could write more freely. That's what clicked for me. Because what is a "private blog," anyway? It's a ... journal.
Hmmm. Write Club. Blog. Journal. What do these things have in common?
What I couldn't see, until that moment, was even as I was slowly, one week at a time, reclaiming my self-image as a "writer," I was already writing. Had been for a while. Sure, my fiction-spinning brain cells had been dormant for longer than I cared to admit, but I'd never stopped writing. I just hadn't mentally categorized it that way. But for nearly 8 years, I've been blogging. Intermittent maybe, but continuously. And for years and years -- almost as long as I've been writing stories -- I've been keeping a journal.
But all these forms of writing produced internal conflict because they were fighting for my time. If I took the time to blog, then I didn't have that time to write in my journal. If I took the time to complete a Write Club entry, then I didn't have time to blog; and in fact, had started doing what I thought of as "doubling up" -- writing a 250-word blog entry and counting it as my writing assignment.
When I stopped to consider journaling as another form of (perhaps the original form of) blogging, it hit me: It's all the same thing. "Real" writing, journaling, blogging = thoughts into words = writing.
That's all there is.
So I'm keeping my same resolution for 2009. Every week I will write something. At least one thing. Maybe it will be a story. Maybe it will all connect into a novel (OK, maybe that's a bit ambitious!). Maybe it will show up as a blog post. Maybe it will be all of those things. Like this one.**
*(Yeah, I know technically the year isn't over yet, but it's close enough and I've got a bunch of thoughts about writing that have been bouncing around in my head, and this feels like a good time to let them out.)
**Write Club #48-49 of 2008
