Confronting stagnation and suddenly it’s March!

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.