Write every day

Vox blog.
Tomorrow? I’ll think about it tomorrow. Right now, I’m being called to go play Barbies…

I stay off 43t in the morning (yeah right, how long will that last?) I can actually focus on writing a little. Tried to get back to the 500 words like Emelle. It was blather, just a blurb in relation to a writing prompt but still something…

I’ve been managing this. Two short little segments a day. They’re almost completely unproductive but that’s how you start back up: little blurbs of crap. I can fit in a little journal exercise in the morning and maybe start something or fiddle around with something in the afternoon. The hard part is keeping this up with all the other demands I place on myself like learning some Japanese and, you know, the other stuff like laundry and feeding and clothing children (they’re only half-clothed right now) and also having a drink in the evening…plus, we watch too much tv.

I’ve always had a problem separating process and product. I’m too eager to finish something (when I write a story, I usually dash the whole thing off in one sitting and come back later to look over and rewrite) and when the something can’t be finished in one sitting, I give up…thus all the little half-written stories and ideas stuffed in drawers and stacked on desks… not to mention the stacks of photographs that need arranged in albums and the toast crumbs on the kitchen floor, the half-finished painting under the books, boxes and photographs behind me…

But I have a feeling if I can really establish this routine every day, then I’ll get used to the just writing, the just doing it…this is one of the things that I hope will get easier once Sophie starts school…
that could be another pipe dream, too…

(after drinking rum all night) sketch out the story of this incident at the grocery store. Can’t seem to make it end as funny as it actually happened…
that’s not writing. That’s drunk-writing.
But I had been thinking of putting that story down for a long time…it’s just that the inspiration struck as I was trying to go to sleep…

was right. But, you never tell Jodi that. Well, not unless absolutely necessary. If you want to do something, you’ll just do it.
The real problem isn’t in having the time it is in blocking out, or finding the right CHUNK of time. It is easy to write one of those really really really short stories and fine-tune, stretch it out here, chop it off there. It is like a little poem. They require maybe 15 minutes of good concentration (which is about right before 2 children come toddling in wanting juice or snacks or diapers; or the phone rings or it is lunch time or time-for-you-to-get-off-your-butt-and-DO-SOMETHING-with-your-kids) and then you can read them-quickly-the next day. You can rewrite and play with it every day for a week. The problem is finding the time to write, say, the next Harry Potter series. Yes, isn’t that neat that she sat at the coffee shop and wrote the books while her baby was sleeping. Lucky her.
The fact remains, I make too many excuses and goof off too much on the computer…

it’s just that I don’t have ideas. No. I really believe that if I was disciplined and wrote meaningfully every day, there wouldn’t be a question of ideas. I’ve always hated reading author interviews where they ask the writer, “Where do you get your inspiration?” Duh. He’s a writer. He writes. You tell stories, don’t you? Where do you get your inspiration? Put that story in your head or on your tongue onto paper. Except some people don’t have that desire. Or they do but they really shouldn’t. Anyone ever read James Patterson? I made the mistake once, never do it again. The man’s a millionaire b/c he’s a bestselling author but I’ve never read anything so awful in my life. Pulitzer prize-winning books don’t stick with me as much as that book I read by JP b/c it was so AWFUL! What I really wonder about such awful writers is how they got published in the first place? Who read that first manuscript and said, “We’ll take it!”? Anyway, back to the inspiration thing. I don’t want to know where writers get their inspiration… what, am I going to get mine there, too?

I used to try to make myself sit down and write a journal entry at least every morning. A paragraph, a letter, an e-mail. But I didn’t. Then I’d wonder why I’d sit in front of that blank page in the afternoon and stare at it, the words not coming, no story popping out of thin air to pour itself into the notebook. It does happen that way sometimes but more often than not, you have to work at it…everyday. I’m better when I have a deadline, a purpose, an idea. If there’s one thing 43things has done, it is give me a narrowed topic to focus on even if that focus only lasts one paragraph of an entry or reply or comment. Maybe I am a poet after all! Maybe that’s all I’ll be able to stick to b/c I have to get up and take a break every 5 minutes when one child or another has a new-found need—Sophie had lost her plastic Easter egg (it’s not even Easter yet!) and I had to get up and find her another one (from my stash for Easter morning…) Who has time to really write anything when she has 2 children at her heels all the time?