Writing – How to keep on

While I’m doing parent care, I have come to give up on finding time blocks for writing fiction. You no sooner get in and there’s a crisis. I’ve tried doing the early morning thing and the late at night thing, but exhaustion rules. Also, you’d be surprised at the crises that can occur at 2,3,4 in the morning.

Good Fishing: Egret at Case Wetlands, with Geese

Still, truth is, some days I just feel like writing. I mean, there’s this actual feeling, like you might have when thinking of “cotton candy” or “geese on Case Watershed.” And so my latest idea in the “keep on writing” toolbox is to write poetry. Sometimes amid the mental exhaustion, I can just barely pull out a tiny capture of intense emotion. The quick snapshot of one facet of a large, submerged prism.

I know poets will hear nails on the chalk board when I say, “if you don’t have time for fiction, write poetry.” Actually, I’m calling it “poetry notes” if that makes y’all feel any better. I so know I’m not a poet. Sometimes I think it was my real calling, never developed, but I know that after I work forever on a poem, it is still not what anyone would call “fresh,” or it’s overly clever and abstract, deliberately abstruse, or a bunch of other problems that result from, simply, the way I go at things. I can’t see around those tendencies to “fresh.”

That said, poetry gives me the opportunity to work with words and capture those feelings – the “cotton candy” or “Geese on the Watershed” feelings – in the moment. And like journaling, poetry gives me raw material. I can’t seem to journal like I used to, being under so much “who cares” energy. But since poetry for me is about beauty and marrow, it comes with its own imperatives. I’m working for it. This is the positioning I seem to need to go to art places these days.

Once the poem notes are down and I do have a block of time, I figure, I can always go back to these notes and revise, revise. Or who knows, maybe the stuff makes its way into a piece of fiction.

As to the NaNoWriMo book I started (see January post) I am happy to say, I brought the NaNoWriMo bit around to where it will join a chunk of about 80 pages I wrote before, not knowing where it belonged. So I really need that block of time to see what I’ve got and start stitching it together. I’m fairly positive about this. So I’m not rating myself for not getting to it – yet. The rest of the book should all be pretty climactic (and then I’ll go back and chop a bunch of the beginning on 1st revision).

If I get the sac, I might post some of those notes here – remains to be seen.