An Autodidact's Summer Writing Course

When I went on vacation at the end of April, I took a vacation from writing.  Although I have been back from vacation for over a month, I still haven’t resumed work on my work-in-progress.  I suppose I should call it my work-in-limbo.  It's funny that it has gone from a WIP, which makes me think of a whip cracking me into action, to a WIL, whereby I am trying to passively will my story to completion. 

The worst part of all this wasted time is that my children will be out of school for summer in less than two weeks.  Summertime is a ten-and-a-half week stretch of non-writing for me.  You can imagine how impossible it is to work with two children under the age of ten bubbling with excitement over their freedom from school drudgery, pulling and tugging me every day, ALL day long.  I have come to accept summer as a forced hiatus, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t do something that will further my writing progress.  In order to make the best use of my arrested creativity, I have decided to do a summer creative writing course. 

I know what you’re thinking, but, no, I won’t actually be going to a creative writing class with other adults, where we can happily workshop our latest bits of inspiration.  Summertime is a time for me to enjoy my kids, and I won’t be taking them to day camp or shipping them to grandma’s.  There will never be an Iowa Creative Writing Workshop for me, nor a Gotham Writers’ Workshop, nor even the closer-to-my-geographical-range Wildacres Writers' Workshop.  I accept this with no regrets.  As a middle-aged mom, I have come to terms with the fact that I have to be, well, “creative” about my creative writing aspirations.  Therefore, my creative writing workshop will be of my own making.  This summer, I will be an autodidact.

A Room of My Own

As promised, I am posting pictures of my renovated Junk Room.  It is now my office/writing/reading space.  Remember this ghastly photo?

Before

After

Big improvement, n'est pas?  My desk is now auspiciously placed diagonally from the entrance.  I have a new, more comfy chair with cushioning, and I can spin in it until I'm dizzy.  The Hub built a bulletin board and tons of shelves.  I am surrounded by literary goodness: books, book posters, photos of readers, and writing tools galore.  

Writers' Rooms - Paul Green Cabin

I've been reading the book American Writers at Home by J.D. McClatchy with photos by Erica Lennard.  It looks like a coffee-table book, but McClatchy's writing is so readable that I find myself with this huge folio across my lap for stretches at a time reading about the likes of Emily Dickinson, Washington Irving, and Ernest Hemingway.  Inspired by this reading, the Book Phantom took a field trip to the writing space of dramatist Paul Green, who won the 1927 Pulitzer for Drama for In Abraham's Bosom (he also wrote the outdoor drama The Lost Colony which still runs in Manteo, NC).  I got to spend a sunny day in the Botanical Gardens in beautiful Chapel Hill where Green's cabin has been relocated.

March Reading List - Defining Your Space

While February’s reading list was about finding one’s direction, March’s reading list is about defining one’s space.  This selection of topic was inspired by my inability to knuckle down and work on my manuscript.  My energy was stagnant from constantly reworking my story in my head.  To get the energy moving again, I looked thoughtfully toward my home office, which is my creative space.

Here is a picture of my home office, and what I perceive to be wrong with it.  (I’m a bit of an amateur Feng Shui enthusiast, and I applied principles of this art to the space.)

The primary problem was that the office was in the bedroom in the first place.  Although my bedroom is large enough to easily accommodate my desk, it is not the ideal place for it.  Every morning when I wake up, the desk taunts me, telling me to get to work (not always a bad thing).  Every night when I put my head to the pillow, I worry that my word counts weren’t enough to get me through twenty more chapters by summer.  The pressure just shut me down completely.  It is no longer an inviting place to sit and create.

Writer’s Map Fraught with Peril

Inspired by my reading list this month, I made a map to illustrate my writing angst.  (Click on it to enlarge):



Anybody been here?

As you can see, the most direct path to the Shangri-la of Creative Genius is through the Hardwork Hills and the mountainous (or should I say monotonous?) Revision Range.  This path is rigorous and challenging – one needs a lot of stamina to stay on the trail. 

            Most writers, I would guess, take alternate routes due to responsibilities, diversions, and frustrations from false starts.  Such scenic routes eventually intersect with the Road to Revision, a crossroads where we choose to stay on the current well-worn path of our lives or turn back onto the bumpy, dirty road of our creativity. 

What to Read? Part 3: How to Make a Reading List

Last post, I introduced the Reader’s Formula for Selecting Books.  It looked like this:

Values ((Assets + x) – (Desires + y) – Liabilities – Requirements) = Optimal Reading List

This post, I am going to give an example from my reading life to demonstrate how to use this formula.  The first part of the formula is “values”, which I said are variable.  They determine what experiences we deem important or not, and influence our judgment and behaviors.  For simplicity, and to avoid sounding like a Sociology 101 text, I call this “life acting upon us”, because essentially, our life circumstances give rise to our values.

            So, what do I value these days?  What filter is life applying to me to influence which experiences I let in and which ones I release?  Lately, I have been feeling adrift, directionless.  After two years of working regularly to revise my manuscript, I find myself ready to give up on the project.  My mind resists quitting, but my behaviors tell me I already have.  I can’t make myself work on it anymore, yet nothing has replaced this piece of work in my mind.  No new ideas.  No desire to do anything else.  I am adrift on a plain of apathy.  How to find my way?

            I decide to read to take my mind off my failure.  I browse the stacks in the library, hoping to be inspired by something.  My eye lands upon the cover of a book, featured by the library staff.  It is called The Selected Works by T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen.  I have seen this book many times, and although intrigued by it, I never took it home.  This particular day, feeling lost and in need of a map to navigate my professional aspirations, I thought, “What better way to reorient myself than to read a book about a boy cartographer?”  If being lost was what life was giving me, then finding my way was what I valued.  Therefore, in my reader’s formula, v = Finding my way.