So I was knitting a sock (one of my obsessions) and listening to an audio book (don’t rumple your face: words were meant to be spoken), and it occurred to me that I finished my M. F. A. six years ago, and yet again, the Nobel Prize committee hadn’t bothered the AT&T operator for my phone number.
The main reason is that committee members don’t have access to my hard drive. The second and third are laziness and lack of motivation—from my end, of course.
The drive does have lots for the interested: a novel, a novella, a collection of stories, a collection of poems, and a couple of essays. A few of the poems have made it to print, about half in respectable journals. Still, I haven’t worked much on my writing until recently, and the process feels unfamiliar.
What I’ve done with my six years away from school … nothing for the first three or four years. The thought of reading another book that didn’t include the word smoldering or homicidal maniac or of having another pretentious conversation made me twitch. Eventually, I came back to reading again, and later still, to writing. Now I work in spurts, accomplishing a lot in short periods, with vacant voids of idleness in between.
Lately, I’ve decided to be more serious, and I’ve decided to approach the business of writing in a whole new way. Rediscovering a craft after absence isn’t a bad thing. Bad habits are lost. Good habits are nurtured. I came back to knitting after a fifteen-year break, and I’m a much better knitter than I ever dreamed I could be.
The first thing I’ll do is adopt some of the habits of a writer. I’ll write, research, or plan at least two or three days a week. I’ll work from ideas and material to encourage the muse, rather than wait around for it to come to me. I’ll post to this blog at least once a week to keep myself accountable.
My pet project–the one I’ll work on with small interruptions for poems, stories, and longer pieces–is a formula romance, not the novel of my official oeuvre. I started it before I thought of writing as something one can major in. It taught me a lot about developing characters, managing a plot line, and doing background work, but it’s about three chapters away from being finished, and it’s at an intermediate draft stage.
This is my pledge, and this is my beginning.
