Home » Posts tagged 'writing' (Page 11)
One reason I rarely write to a word count is that I tend to edit, especially an earlier day’s material. It’s still productivity, but it doesn’t lend itself to a challenge like this.
Take today, for example. I wrote for over an hour, adding and revising, but I also deleted a lot of what I’d dictated a few weeks ago because what I was writing today was clearer and worked better. By the time I excised all the crap that needed to go, I ended up with a net loss of 70 words.
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Today’s 1,000 words was originally meant to be a blog post about the latest family drama surrounding my father’s upcoming memorial service. By the time I reached the end, though, I no longer felt the need to share it. Writing it out—venting on the screen—proved to be sufficient, and I do not need to dwell on it any longer.
The late great Laurie Colwin wrote in her final novel about the difference between family by chance—the one you’re born into—and family by choice. Some people are close to their families by chance. When there has been a loss or other major event, they find comfort in drawing together. I, however, have found the most comfort in communications with my friends a/k/a my chosen family. I have received beautiful email condolences, thoughtful messages and posts, and several phone calls. I’ve been offered dinner by a couple people, wine by several, and prayer support by many. More than a few have invited me to contact them 24/7 if I should need to talk or vent. Notwithstanding the family drama, I feel supported and cared for as I approach what I expect will be one of the hardest days of my life.
Thank you, my dear friends, my family by choice.
Another day of working on my novel. I started with some dictated material, but the scene went off in a different direction than I’d originally anticipated, laying the groundwork for complications I hadn’t seen coming.
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Did it again today. This time, I did add words to my novel, although I cheated slightly because I used material I’d dictated on the Friday evening of Memorial Day weekend while I planted my window boxes.
Dictating has plusses and minuses. The plus side is that you get to record the thoughts as you’re having them. The minus is that sometimes when you go back over that material, you find very little worth keeping, and you wind up editing the crap out of it until it’s practically new anyway. Granted, it’s not as if I found nothing at all when I went back to my dictated material, but I feel fairly confident I’d have come up with something very similar if I’d simply sat down with the computer now instead of telling my story (and remembering to dictate “paragraph” and such) several days ago while mixing potting soil with vermiculite.
In any case, that’s Day Two. Twelve to go. Wish me luck.
It’s been a crazy few weeks, to put it mildly. Work pressures (including an unusually complicated appellate brief and a client preparing for trial), holidays, out-of-town relatives in town, and rehearsal for this weekend’s performance of Haydn’s The Creation. When I was finally able to take a day off last week—my first in nearly three weeks—I spent it cleaning the house and finally putting down most of the rugs I’d picked up from the cleaners a month earlier.
Unsurprisingly, writing has been sidelined during this period. Although my mind has never stopped trying to resolve various plot problems in my novel-in-progress, it’s been a struggle to find time, inclination, and energy all that the same time so that I can commit any of it to the page and see whether these notions actually work.
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“You’ve inspired me today.”
The person who said this to me is an aspiring fashion designer I’ll call “Jon.” We have never met in person. I have never seen his work. Our sole contact to date has been one telephone conversation that started out in the context of both of our day jobs. And yet. . . .
“You’ve inspired me today.”
It all began when I called the appellate clerks’ office to find out whether an appeal has been filed. In the course of the conversation, Jon asked me to spell the name of the potential appellant. I did so, and he reported that no appeal had been filed.
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I have a calendar in my office where I make a note each time I do non-day-job writing. Whether it’s a blog post, a cat bio, my novel-in-progress, or something else, I jot it on the calendar.
I’m writing this blog post on March 13. “Blog” will be the second entry on the calendar this month.
The second one.
The first was a cat bio on March 4.
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Don’t get me wrong: I know plenty of things.
The problem is that I used most of them in my first book.
When I wrote State v. Claus, I sort of took the easy way out. After all, writing a novel was daunting business—no reason to make it harder. So the main character was a lawyer because I know how to be a lawyer. After decades of appearing in court and reading reams of trial transcripts, the courtroom scenes were a snap to write. Deciding what crimes Ralph would be charged with and what the elements were required nothing more than the legal database I use on a daily basis. The dynamics of law firm life were second nature. Even researching details of criminal procedure was easy: I talked to a lawyer I knew whose practice consisted primarily of representing individuals accused of crimes.
I wish the research for the sequel to State v. Claus was a fraction as easy.
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“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” ~ Flannery O’Connor
From the time I was twenty until I was forty-six, I barely wrote a word of fiction.
God, what a waste.
A devastating college workshop experience left me convinced I had nothing to say and didn’t know how to say it anyway. On that dark February evening, I sat in stunned silence at a conference table as a handful of seniors mocked my story mercilessly. No one else spoke up (although one student told me later, “I didn’t think it was that bad.”). The professor did nothing to stop the train of ridicule, nor did he ever say anything to suggest that my writing wasn’t hopeless. He gave me an A in the class, but I’ve never believed it.
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Several years ago, David Handler gave a talk to aspiring writers at the inaugural Writers Weekend at the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. David is a successful author who has been writing for decades. Inevitably in such a setting, someone asked about his writing life. David replied that he spent the morning writing and the afternoon working on his small business.
“What’s your small business?” someone else asked.
“Being an author,” he replied. He explained that in the afternoon, he routinely dealt with the business end of writing, including communications with his agent and his editor, correspondence with readers, and planning talks just like this one.
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