After an unpromising start to 2022 I’ve been busy busy busy.
Early in January I felt a bit stagnant about my WiP novel. I’d given myself Christmas off and expected to be all refreshed and raring to go but I wasn’t. I still hadn’t resolved questions raised in December and wondered whether to revisit an old novel and everything seemed like a lot of work that I would probably fail at.
So I searched around for motivation in my Facebook groups, on here and in my own 'toolbox'. Here are a few of the ideas I collected:
have lots of things on the go so if you stagnate on one, move onto another
don’t just enter competitions where you’re competing with everyone else - look for submission opportunities where your work might be exactly what they need to fill that half page
write what you want to write
don’t get bogged down in planning
don’t get bogged down in perfection
be playful
Firstly, I looked at the writing prompts supplied by a writers’ Facebook group I’m on and wrote a piece for ‘Thirty Words Thursday’ on the subject of ‘Twelve Night’. I promised myself half-an-hour and got a few ‘likes’ on the words I shared. The same group suggested a ‘12 stories in 12 months’ pledge and I decided to develop my Thirty Words to produce a 2,000 word piece that has received favourable feedback and might (despite my point above) be submitted for a competition.
I also joined Globe Soup who do a free competition a bit like NYC Midnight (which I also did) as well as attempting a sonnet for a magazine submission.
The sonnet was an amazing process that brought together a lot of what I'd learned in my Masters degree. First, I played around with words and imagery in free form. Then I re-read about sonnet form and thought about construction. My first draft had some good bits but, as my first reader pointed out, there were too many big words. I sulked a bit and then replaced them with imagery. This was better but, I realised, I‘d ended up misrepresenting what I wanted to say so continued to work until it stayed on message. It wasn’t perfect but I had spent four weeks working on fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, using Evernote to facilitate work on phone, tablet or laptop whenever the whim took me, and I could no longer see the wood for the trees; it would have to do. In the end, I enjoyed the process so much that I almost don’t care if it gets accepted by the magazine (yes I do!).
Now I’m working on other submission ideas for short stories. In theory I’m also looking at the old novel to see what needs doing but I’m enjoying the short story/poem work so much it seems perverse not to follow through!
And I feel like a writer because I'm working at writing. Not because I'm published or performed and not because I have an A4 piece of paper that says I worked hard for two-and-a-half years but because I'm writing and crafting my words to be the best I can make them.
So, get out there and write - Thirty Words Thursday might be all you can get done, but do it anyway.