i finally started one

I finally started a short story yesterday. I've been telling myself for the past several days that I want to try doing short stories for a while. It's amazing how much a change can set you on edge and make you want to procrastinate. Yesterday, I chose to sit down and write a while first thing. That tends to work well for me when I am letting writer's block kick me around. If I don't conquer the writing, I don't get to get to the other stuff on my to-do list that I want to do. I am essentially bribing my inner child - if you write a while, then you can do the other stuff you had plotted today. And it's not that I don't want to to write so much as I get myself worked up about it and how I want to do it perfectly. I forget that I have to get a draft down before I can fiddle with it and revise it into what I want it to be. So I sat down and brainstormed a while first - throwing down some ideas and toying with them until one struck me. Then I scribbled about that one for a while, and wrote out a rough draft longhand. When I finished it, I typed it up and brought it to the writer's club meeting at the local library. There were good suggestions about ways to improve it, but also a lot of compliments. That was reassuring. I think I want to keep going with writing short stories, maybe write a collection of them or something like that. I don't know. If nothing else, I feel like I am exercising my writing muscles by practicing more planning and structure as I write. That will help me when I do feel like it is time to go back to the novel. This kind of feels like I am making my writing rather like the patchwork afghan I am making. I am knitting eighty squares that are ten by twelve inches, then I am going to crochet them together into a queen-sized afghan. I work on it little by little when i have the time. It isn't as intimidating to knit a square as it is to knit a whole blanket, and it fits better in the time I have available. So I am going to practice my writing skills in smaller blocks for now and see what I can come up with. After I finish writing this post, I am going to go back and do the revisions I decided on in the writer's club meeting yesterday, and maybe I will start planning and plotting out another short story. It will be fun! =)

change in direction

After talking to J some, I am thinking about changing directions as far as my writing endeavors go. I am thinking I will leave the novel on the back burner for a little while and try my hand at writing some short stories. The main thing I struggle with when I am working on the novel is keeping everything straight in my head as far as the personalities of the characters and the main points of the story line go. I tend to go off on tangents and fill stuff in as best I can when I don't remember for sure. So now I am thinking it might work better to build my strength up a bit before I try to attempt something as massive as a novel. I am going to try writing some short stories and while I do so, I am going to practice my prewriting skills. J and I have been talking about some techniques specifically - things for me to try in order to get ideas down and sure before I start taking a pen to the rough draft. I have been resistant to this for quite a while - I always jumped into a rough draft head first before my memory got messed up. I could get it all down and not worry about getting things confused, even if I had to get up and do something else mid-draft. Now I am recognizing that I need more structure to keep me going the right way. I need a street with signs rather than a dirt path through the woods. I am going to try the brainstorming and prewriting techniques J and I talked about and see what works for me and what I need to try differently. If I can get things to work on a small scale - writing short stories - then maybe after some practice and honing, I can get those techniques to work for me when I return to writing the novel. We'll see what I can figure out. (And yes, honey, this is the part where you get to say, "I told you so." You are cute enough that I will let you get away with saying it!)