Flash Writing: Digital Plays

I'm a fan of all this "you don't have to do all the things" support being posted during this time. It's been hard to push myself to even read at night; after working so hard during the day (at my job and "teaching"/parenting), I just want to zone out before I fall to sleep at 1am.

But also, I am a person who thrives with deadlines. I am the person who had a few weeks to write an outline for her book, and did it in a couple of days. I had almost a year to write the book, but just worked on it here and there until it was down to the wire. I pulled all-nighters before college papers and presentations were due. It's just how I work best, so I'm excited that Playhouse on the Square is doing Flash Writing: A Digital Play Festival. This is a weekly themed writing contest with very brief requirements and very short deadlines, aka right up my alley. At the end of the week, submissions are read by actors on video posted to the Playhouse Facebook page. Then it starts all over again.

Week One's theme was "I dreamed that I..." Click below to view my submission, read (a million times better than I heard it in my head when I wrote it) by Eileen Peterson.

First Camp Nano in the Books!

July was my first time participating in Camp Nanowrimo, though I've tried to participate in Nanowrimo every year since 2007.  I always love having a push to write, which has been my favorite thing about Nanowrimo, even when I didn't win. But participating in Camp always felt like too much - I don't know if it was the timing or just my mindset.

Summer is actually a great time for me to write, because work is a little slower and my kid is up playing longer, since the sun's out later, so that gives me time to explore my ideas. Since I started pushing myself to write daily this year, and have actually been writing daily since June, this seemed like a good way to continue my streak.

Spoiler alert: I won!

I put a little more at stake for Camp Nanowrimo, though. I challenged myself to a 20,000 word short story... but really, I wanted write about 1,000 words of fiction most days. One day I knew I'd be off work, so I set a goal for 1,500 (and didn't reach it - that'll teach me!), and one day I knew I'd be meeting my overall goal of 20,000 words, so I relaxed to 500 words. Since my 20,000 goal would be reached before the end of the month, my more informal goal was to complete that one short story, and at least start two more. I want to aim towards finishing more so I can start submitting like I did in college (and have hardly done since then, whoops).

Here are some stats for my month of Camp

• I wrote 31/31 days!
• I wrote 25,956 words total.
• I reached my 20,000 word goal on July 19th.
• I wrote an average of 837 words a day.
• My biggest writing day was 1630 words.
• My smallest writing day was 76 words. (Let's be honest - I barely tried that day. It was a big day and I was drifting off to sleep before I remembered I hadn't written, and I didn't want to break the streak. But I'll allow it.)
• I wrote 11 fiction pieces - four are complete. I have ideas on how to finish 3 others. The rest... who knows! I'll have to look them back over after some time away.

Ten Years After

Ten years ago I was winding down my life as a graphic designer, packing up my belongings, and moving just outside Washington, DC to study fiction writing as an MFA candidate. I can think back to that time and feel everything so clearly, honestly from January 2009 until August, to include the anticipation of the MFA acceptances or rejections. I applied to ten or eleven schools, and was accepted to two - one with no financial package, one with a full ride and TA position. I picked the school that offered me the most, of course, and was grateful for it.

I had wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, scribbling in marble notebooks and keeping them in a "real" leather briefcase. (Yes, I was that kid.) I never stopped writing stories, even though I never really finished one until my first creative writing workshop in undergrad. I ended up there after thinking I should major in journalism, because it was writing. I didn't know creative writing was a thing you could study, take classes in, get graded on. Once I discovered that, I was gone. I was so sure I was going to grow up and become an author. It seemed real to me, just by having a concentration in the college catalog.

I stuck with my MFA program for one year out of three. I didn't like how certain workshop professors pushed us to write in a specific style first, and once we mastered that, we would be allowed to experiment. I couldn't handle having to read three short story collections a week for one class. I loved my classmates. I loved the other tutors I worked with in the Writing Center, and I loved the Writing Center itself. I loved working with other students. I loved editing papers and helping them find their focus while writing.

I don't regret my year in the MFA program. I don't regret quitting after a year.

I have friends with MFAs who are writing and publishing and working as professors and love it. I have friends without MFAs who are writing as publishing and working as [fill in the blank] and love it. And I always felt like I was somewhere in between. That by being enrolled in a program and quitting meant I had failed. But I didn't fail - I made a choice. And I need to be kind and honest with myself and realize that I am one of those without an MFA who is writing and publishing and working... period. I am doing so many things I never thought I would be doing ten years ago.

When I started that chapter of my life, ten years ago, I couldn't really picture the future. I could see myself writing at all hours of the night, because I could hardly sleep if the sun wasn't out. I couldn't picture myself as a professor. I couldn't picture myself as a partner or a mother or anything beyond that hazy image of a person huddled over the table writing... something.

And here I am. I am a mother with a wonderful child. I read in all my spare time, and I share books with him every day. I completed a Masters degree in Library Science. I'm an elementary librarian sharing books with students and their parents. I wrote and published a book. I have been writing nearly daily for over six months. I have been completing stories even without a deadline in my face. I am gearing up to teach an elementary creative writing club in the fall. It might not be what I dreamily thought would come, but, ten years after, I think I'm in a good place - maybe just a logical evolution from what I thought I wanted back then.

My Writing Life

It's been seven and a half months since I challenged myself to write every day.

In January, the goal was to write two pages a day. I wrote one short story, started two others, and wrote really bad, long poetry. I wrote 28 out of 31 days.

In February, I wanted to wake up a little earlier every morning to write, in hopes of not missing those three days. I did wake up earlier, but I still missed three days, writing 25 out of 28 days.

March got off to a strange start, because I somehow missed the first day. Then I wrote every day of my Spring Break vacation (literally out-of-town vacation, and I still wrote), but then stopped once I returned home. Go figure! I only wrote 16 out of 31 days.

April was the A to Z Blogging Challenge, so I had 26 posts to write for Allison and Her Camera, plus my weekly Sunday posts - so I blogged every day that month...  But I only wrote 24 out of 31 days.

May was my game-changer. I started reading The Artist's Way, which recommended using morning pages as a brain dump. You wake up and write three pages of anything that's on your mind. I recapped the day before, wrote down strange dreams, plotted out the hours the stretched before me - anything and everything. I wrote 29 out of 31 days!

Which ramps up nicely to June - I wrote every day! I wrote morning pages of brain dump and then spent evenings starting short stories and scheduling blog posts. I thought writing every day would monopolize my time, but it actually made me feel even more ready to write other productive things. 30 out of 30 days!

That means for the first six months of writing daily, I wrote 152 out of 182 days. Not too shabby!

For July, I decided to participate in Camp Nanowrimo for the first time. I try to compete in National Novel Writing Month every year (to varying degrees of success), but with my writing finally getting on track to a daily habit, I wanted a new challenge. My Camp goal was to write a 20,000 word short story - one that's been kicking around in my brain for awhile. I started it, and I've been doing a lot of work on it, but some days I just could not handle working on that. My brain melted just thinking about it. So I'd start something new. Then something else. Then something else. Until I had five short stories making up my Camp word count.

That's fine with me. I know pushing myself to work on something I'm not feeling just means I'll make the choice to not write instead. So my "secret" goal was to write 1,000 words a day (which, if you can math, adds up to more than 20,000 words). I wanted to complete the story I've been thinking about for so long, but also start another. I want to start the submission process again soon, so I need to have some work for that. So far, only one of the five stories is finished, and it's not the one I really wanted to finish, but there's still time! And now that I've stuck with this habit for two months, I'm hoping it will only get more ingrained.

What have you been writing lately?

Daisy Jones and the Six

I don't remember how I heard about this book - everyone's buzzing about it, so maybe I saw a friend was reading it via Goodreads, or saw it on #bookstagram. Either way, I put it on hold at the library and didn't have to wait too long to start it. I was so excited to crack open the cover, which felt amazing in itself, because I haven't been reading much lately.

Then I started the story. WOW. Not only do I love classic rock and band drama from the '70s, but it's so well-written, and presented in an interesting way of the author compiling a narrative from all parties involved.

Also, it's totally the book I've been trying to write for decades.

I'm not saying the author stole my work or my idea or anything like that! I'm just feeling validated that this idea I had as a thirteen year old Aerosmith fanatic might actually have literary merit! I thought the story I was writing was glorified fan fiction, but  Daisy Jones and the Six has me rethinking that, and revisiting my story.

There are so many quotes about how you can't be a writer without being a reader, and I've always been a reader. And I've always loved music. And falling in love with Aerosmith as a young teenager gave me a way to connect music and writing. I worked on my fan fiction novel off and on for several years. I'm not exaggerating when I say I think of it often, even as an adult. I think of the title (which I still think is pretty perfect), and the main character, and what really should happen in the end. Because of course I haven't finished it!

But now, on the cusp of finishing Daisy Jones and the Six and honestly having no clue what will happen, I'm intrigued about my own story again. I want to re-read what I wrote so long ago, and see how my age and wisdom (ha!) might influence how the story will pan out. It's so refreshing to find a book that has not only made me fall in love with reading again, but has also made me fall back in love with writing, imagining, and all that comes along with that type of creating.

Writing Habits

My January writing stats - I got a sticker for every day I wrote 2 pages.

In undergrad and grad school, I studied creative writing and wrote all the time. I'd get writer's block for sure, but often it was not being able to finish a story as opposed to not being able to start anything.

I wrote a lot the years I freelanced and traveled; I kept detailed journals but was also inspired to write fiction. Once I settled down, I woke up early every morning to walk three miles and then come home to write three pages before work.

All of that changed when I had a baby. I still wrote, but it was sporadic. Of course it didn't make things easier that I started my Masters of Library Science a week before my son was born! Most of my writing was book reviews and research papers - still enjoyable, but not too creative and not on a routine, like I used to have.

Even as my son grew older and more independent, I still struggled to write. I struggled to find the time and the energy. The silence the let my own thoughts have a voice. Not that I had any ideas to explore. My brain seemed incapable of doing anything more than writing To Do lists and budgeting money. Great qualities when you're head of the household, but not much fun, creatively.

I tried so hard to find the right creative outlet, because I was sure there were still stories inside me, somewhere. I turned back to photography, which I've always loved and has always inspired me. I tried making miniatures out of clay. I tried to launch podcasts with different formats, none of which felt right. I tried to lessen the creative pressure on myself by coloring in coloring books. Nothing helped the stories come back to me.

Last spring I pushed myself to write a poem a day. It didn't last too long, because I started with haikus just to "get it over with", and then didn't hold myself to the routine. But it still sparked something inside me. When I was making New Years Resolutions for 2019, I knew writing had to take priority. I set the goal of completing one writing prompt a week, then started mining my brain for words, phrases, concepts, ANYTHING that could be used as a writing prompt.

I have a list of prompts in a notebook. I completed one, the first week of the new year. I started another the second week, but haven't yet finished it. It turned out to be more of a novella than a short story, so I wanted to dedicate time to it. What I found, though, was that the routine benefits me more than the goal of writing some-finished-thing.

My resolution has since informally morphed to "write two pages a day". I would still like to finish a handful of short stories this year, but I'm currently more focused on establishing the routine than creating something quality every week.

In January, I wrote 28 days out of 31. I've noticed that waking up earlier helps with my creativity (I woke up early every day I wrote my first short story of 2019) and doesn't give me a chance to put off writing for the day. My goal for February is to wake up early every weekday and write, so I can't use the "I'm tired" excuse when I get home from work.