Do I have any technical Writing Workshop teaching credentials that make me specifically 'qualified' to dole out advice? Not so much, no. But what I do have, for whatever it's worth to the faceless blogging and blog-trolling crowd, is 15 years of trial and error in working towards writing for a living. So, for anyone who's desperate enough to pay any attention to this random internet blogger (are you really that desperate?...really?...my condolences), "Writing Tips" will be an oft-updated series of short segments of helpful little things I've learned for myself that just might do the trick for someone else as well. So, here goes - and if anyone has any luck with these, or has any of their own they'd like to share, feel free to drop in on the comment section below!
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We've all been there before, many, many times: you have that moment, that burst of pure, electrifying inspiration, and you make a lunge for your pen-and-paper/laptop/pen-and-nearest-bare-wall because you're going to map out your goals, and you'll stick to them, and you'll write and write and write, and finish that fantastic project you've been trying to finish since forever...
...then by the next afternoon - Day 2 of your Master Strategy (very emphatically capitalized), or maybe by Day 6 or 7 if you're especially determined - the unshakable faith in said Master Strategy has mysteriously dwindled and you forestall filling that poor blank page/screen/wall any further in favor of ordering a pizza and watching reruns of How I Met Your Mother in your pajamas.
That last part may be a bit more personally specific, but the principal's basically the same: plans may work for a lot of people, but for many others, it seems making out a writing schedule or a cast-iron story outline is like making a New Years resolution to get a gym pass and use it every day or a few days out of every week - it has a tendency to get neglected before you can actually get anywhere with it.
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So, Tip #1 In a Nutshell: don't prescribe your writing. Whatever your project, whether poetry, essay or fiction (short or long), just set aside enough time to write exactly one sentence/line of poetry every single day to start with. It doesn't matter what it is - a line of dialogue, a random tidbit about a character or back-story, or an idea for a plot twist or something that you haven't even decided where it'll fit in yet. Get that one sentence out every day at minimum (certainly more, if the inspiration strikes), and keep it all collected together. And at the end of every week or two weeks, peruse everything you've written, and put in a little time on organizing what you've got to date to see where you stand. And then keep on adding to it as you go. You'd be amazed at how quickly your thoughts and ideas stack up into a bigger picture!
'Writing'. What a wonderfully ambiguous and mysterious profession. I remember reading my first real novel as a child and thinking, "This is it - this is what I want to do. I want to spend my life putting great words to paper and making stories out of them." At the time, it seemed that was all I needed: to decide that that was the direction I was heading in and, like an aspiring policeman or dentist or teacher or accountant, go off to get whatever prescribed training I needed before launching myself into a career.
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As it turns out, it's not quite as simple as that. Instead, following that absolute certainty of purpose, my road to my dream job thus far has been filled with years of writing stalemates, dead-in-the-water short and long stories, hair-pulling plot frustrations, and plugging away at a degree towards a day-job that'll hopefully pay the bills and put food in the fridge. And after all this, here I am at 23 years old, practically living off of mac 'n cheese, sporting 1.5 post-secondary degrees and until recently, still without a glimmer of any sort of publishing credit to my name. To say the least, not at all what I used to imagine whenever I'd drift off on an idealist's daydreams, imagining life as a Lee Harper or a Mark Twain or a Jules Verne (discounting, of course, the mac 'n cheese, which remains delicious in any circumstance).
Do I wish then that the whole process would speed the heck up, and stop being so unbelievably frustrating and drawn-out and full of false-starts?... Not for a second.
Uh-oh. I feel a paradox coming on.
Strange indeed, but true. If this mess were easy, I get the impression this would feel more like a rainy-day hobby than a life's dream... though I might also have dodged getting my first few premature grey hairs. But that's besides the point.
Today, I received my very first acceptance letter for a short piece of creative non-fiction, which informed me of its impending publication in the online January 2014 issue of TWJ Magazine. And in the middle of feeling so light that I half expect to lift out of my desk chair and float away at any moment, I'm reminded of a quote by C.S Lewis:
"With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere."
So here's to that beginning, which I've decided to salute with this blog - a place to rant about and happily plow through the endlessly torturous and fantastically rewarding mess known as the creative process. Here goes nothing - let's see where we end up.
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