Catalyst

I was thinking over the last few days about the catalyst, about how I got my writing back.

I've written more in the last year than I have in my entire previous life. I'd estimate that I clocked in a good hundred thousand words. For other writers, that's nothing--certainly, for the pros, it's less than nothing--but for me, trying to fight my way back to the dream, it's a lot. It is, in fact, around 275 words a day, and if it had been all on one project, I'd have a novel.

But come on, I'm 38 years old (37 when I started this, last year). After all this time, and more commitments in my life now than ever before, what made this effort work? So many times I've started the process and ended up failing, abandoning my writing again. I may fail yet, this time, but I've gotten a lot farther than I ever have before. What happened to make this time be THE time that things started coming together? In going back over it in my head I realized that it was a snowball of experiences, serendipity, and small decisions that I made. I'm going to write them down here, just in case it might help someone else, someday, uncover the hope in their own creative situation.

First off, I made a commitment to my journaling. When I was in high school, for godssakes, I remember reading articles that said that every writer should keep a journal. And I tried. For years and years, for decades I tried! But something always made it taper off, got in the way, I got busy or distracted or it wasn't as important as it should have been, and then I got down on myself and the writing would fade for a bit again. Sometimes for months. Other times for a year or two.

But this time, I started my journaling in the middle of personal turmoil: an opportunity that I thought I had, the next direction I'd been driving toward in my life, had just closed up right in front of me after over a year of work and obsession. When I'm on a track to learn something, I'm ultra-focused; I devour everything I can find, internalize it like crazy, live and breathe it until I can feel the foundation of it in me like an instinct. Having done all this and then having that foundation shatter like it had been hit by an earthquake--that's something I'll never recommend, but it was sure a wake-up call. For an evening I wandered around our house, utterly vacant in my mind, adrift. Even thinking about my old direction made me feel ill. I came over to my bookshelf, finally, to take my mind off of things. And the first book I reached out and picked up was Ray Bradbury's Zen and the Art of Writing.

At that moment, in late July of 2009, I made a conscious decision to re-direct all my energies into the writing. Here I'd been distracting myself with this other direction; I'd put years previous into becoming a professional freelance artist, after figuring out that the corporate life just wasn't for me. What could it hurt, to take all this energy and make a serious run at the dream again? With the writing, the only person who could disappoint or stop my progress would be me.

After Bradbury I read Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg, and re-started my journal. Every time I felt the urge to log onto the discussion boards I'd been frequenting, I consciously forced myself to go to a writing discussion board instead. That slowly switched my focus onto the writing instead of the other stuff. From there, I went away from discussion boards, and now the choice when I walked up to my laptop was to close the browser and open my Writing folder instead, or my journal.

In a note on the bottom of a journal page around that time, I wrote: "When I first started truly writing again I thought, "How odd, I'm not rusty." then I realized that of course I wasn't rusty; I had been writing volumes every day, spending the time on discussion boards [and emails] instead of stories."

Up until that point I would have pegged myself as a novelist. I write long. I've never been good at shorts; I live for the long-term character development and story. I read novels; I never read short stories. But there's been a particular story in my mind for about twenty years, the first real short story idea I got, back in college. And one night in early August I sat down and, after twenty years, I started to write it.

It was rough. It was bumpy. It was full of little segues where I just chatted on the paper about stuff I was thinking about. But once it started to come out, it was like all these stories I'd forgotten or given up on or that were stuck up in the rafters in my head, all moldy and gathering dust, came tumbling down in a cacophony of sneezes.

And I started writing them down. And started working on the old novel again, and then embraced National Novel Writing Month (something I had failed at for the previous two years) and made a success of it with a brand-new urban fantasy novel. I found Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, a book that has been slowly changing my outlook on my art over the last several months.

For a while I'd been meeting my friends, Jarrad and Eric, once a week at a pub to write--the only bone I'd tossed my writing for a couple years. In 2009 Eric got accepted to the Viable Paradise Writer's Workshop out in Martha's Vineyard. When he came back, he generously shared his notes with us, and I began to think: this would be more valuable if I went myself. And then the thought: COULD I go myself? Could I make it in? And I started really working, then, on finishing that story, the twenty-year-old story that started the avalanche.

In March of this year I finished it. I submitted it on Saint Patrick's Day, three and a half months before deadline (this is notable, as I'd been a horrible procrastinator for most of my life). And?

I received my acceptance letter earlier this month. I'm in. I'm going, this October. Someone out there--several someones, apparently--thought I was worth teaching. And on the "about me" survey, they asked "Do you have a blog?" and I thought, "Well, why not?"

So now you're stuck with me, and with my observations and ramblings; and maybe these will do someone some good, someday. Or maybe they're just a way for me to be accountable for my progress, or lack thereof. Either way, I'm here.