Reflections on Week One

[Read the finished play here!]

That was the first work of creative fiction I've started and finished since December 2009 (a little over two years).

Leaving myself to my own devices clearly wasn't working. I think I needed a create a public challenge like this for myself so that I would feel accountable and make writing a priority. 

I've read Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird probably 5-6 times, and though I've believed with all my heart that the only way to get the work done is to give yourself permission to (in her words) "write shitty first drafts," I have actually never allowed myself to do that. Stephen King (in his memoir/how-to book On Writing) also recommends writing to see where the story goes. He doesn't outline first -- he just writes and writes. I like to think of myself as a fairly easygoing guy, but the thought of writing without any thought as to what I'm writing makes my left eyelid twitch uncontrollably. 

(Whatever my writerly output these past years, the discerning reader will have no doubt noticed that I've spent lots and lots of time at least reading about the act of writing...)

In any case, probably because I assigned myself a lot of work and a near-impossible amount of time in which to do it, for Week One's challenge I was able to suppress the inner critic and just write to see what would happen next. I didn't really intend to write a play, but that's what came out. And by the way, whenever I read that an author was completely surprised by the form their story took, I would always cry bullshit. I mean, really. You had no control? Who's driving here? But I am here to tell you that it's real. It could even happen to you.

Lastly, how the play was written is also significant. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was starting to write it longhand in a small notebook during my commute to my second job. Saturday afternoon I carved out for myself a few hours to finish the story, which involved first transcribing everything I had written longhand into a blank Word document. This sounds rote and uncreative, but I found myself tweaking small things as I typed them out. I think it woke up the creative brain enough that, once everything I'd already written was in place, I had no trouble continuing where I had left off. 

What writer has not experienced the terror of the blank Word document? Here, my friends, is a possible cure: start your story longhand, give yourself small assignments in short amounts of time, and don't take it to your computer until you've built up some steam.

And then immediately start your next story.