It’s the last day of school. By the time I post this I will be on my way to pick up my kids up after the final bell, and that will mark the end of my first year of “full time” writing.
As I reflect back on the school year, my first thought is to wonder where the time went. I look at what I have written and I think, “Is this really all I have to show for nine months of work?” Certainly this year has not shaken out the way I imagined it would, and the ferociously ambitious side of me is sorely disappointed in myself for not making the best use of my time.
Fortunately, that impossible-to-please beast within is tempered by a kinder voice, the part of me that excels at identifying and celebrating the smaller victories in life.
So what do I have to show for my time this year?
When it comes to the actual writing itself, there have been two main accomplishments. To start, I finished the first draft of an as-yet-untitled story that I began last spring. When the school year began I already had about 45K words under my belt, and when November rolled around I decided to declare it as my NaNoWriMo project, hoping to write 50K more and end the month with a complete first draft. While I didn’t reach either of those (probably unrealistic) goals, I did still write over 25K that month, and by April I finally decided to call the thing done when, despite it being a bit of a mess, I knew that I had enough raw material to consider the narrative arc complete. I’ve been letting it marinade these past couple of months, but I’m thinking it will be my summer project to reread and re-outline it so that when the kids return to school next fall I can be ready to dive into rewriting.
Next I began work on a new project that for now I’m calling Leviathan. I came up with the idea for the story back in September and jotted down a few notes on my phone so I could return to it later. Over the next several months I would add to my collection of notes as new thoughts struck me, and every time I heard a song that really nailed the vibe of a certain character or scene, I would add it to my playlist for that project. By the time I began writing it, I felt like I already had a pretty idea of where the story would start and where it was going. I’ll close out this year with about 10K words and a working outline for the rest.
But this was also an important year for reasons unrelated to word count.
It was about seven years ago that I realized I wanted to be a writer, and in the years since then I’ve felt often like I’ve been tripping over myself as I stumble clumsily toward the ultimate goal of publication. It’s been a real struggle to establish a writing routine as I juggle my personal ambitions alongside motherhood, marriage, and all the many wonderful responsibilities of adulthood, not to mention the challenge of working out my personal writing style and determining the kind of stories I want to tell.
I used to feel like I couldn’t make any progress if I didn’t have several uninterrupted hours to work at a time. But this year I found that, while those long stretches where the words just seem to flow effortlessly are magical when they happen, most of the time I work best in short spurts, jotting down a paragraph or two between other tasks.
Because of this, I also discovered the joy of writing on my phone. I have always used my phone for keeping notes, but the actual drafting was always done on my computer. This latest project, however, has been written almost entirely on my phone, copied and pasted every few days into the master document on my laptop. It’s been kind of exciting to see how much I can write in stolen moments - waiting in line at the grocery store, leaning against the counter while dinner simmers on the stove, perched on the edge of the tub while my kids brush their teeth, or sitting in the car during my daughter’s ukulele lessons. Even on days when I’ve had a good chunk of time to devote to writing I’ve often found it hard to focus for long stretches of time. So I would go on a lot of long walks, pausing to draft a scene on my phone in the moment it became clear to me, sitting on a bench or on the edge of the jetty leading out to the lighthouse, my feet dangling above the waves, the gulls screeching overhead.
But arguably the most important takeaway for me from this past year is the importance of honesty in writing, by which I mean writing without self-censorship. I think previously I was afraid to write anything too dark or painful or explicit because I worried what people would think if they ever read it. Would they think it was weird? Off-putting? Even immoral? But the more I thought about the kind of books I enjoy the most, the stories I find most moving, the more I realized that what drew me to those stories was the brutal truth of the human experience I found in them, in all of it’s pain and glory. Those are the kind of books I want to write. Stories in which people can see and recognize themselves and walk away feeling like they have been changed somehow, even in some small, hard to articulate way. So I finally said fuck it and started writing what I honestly wanted to write. And it is, in fact, darker and sadder and realer than anything I’ve written before. But most importantly I’m proud of it, regardless of the word count at the final bell.
So bring on the beach days and the water balloons and the campfires. Maybe I’ll sneak in some words while the kids are riding their bikes or playing in the treehouse. Or maybe I won’t, because I’ll be too busy joining them swimming in the lake, running barefoot in the grass, or reading a good book in the shade on the porch. Either way, it will be time well spent.
Photo by Kindel Media