As my quirky three-seasons-a-year writing season kicks off, Quicker than Blood is back in motion.
I am managing to stick to drafting more days than not, though it is an uphill struggle at the moment. I will admit, though, it looks like I’m doing great if we count the material I’m recycling back in from previous drafts. (Currently it’s 50% new material, 50% old material – but I’m going to run out of material I can cut back in soon.)
It’s been a rough month – I think the roughness of my month is why things have been a struggle, rather than my month being rough because of the writing struggles.
As part of my seasonal switchover I try to examine my past goals and aspirations, compare them to progress made, and set some new ones, and, let me tell you, there were an absolute ton of things I wanted to do this past season I either didn’t get around to or just couldn’t find the room for.
Having to face up to that? It hurt.
So, while I have set fewer and less ambitious goals for the next four months, I haven’t stopped. Because those places I missed what I wanted? Well, after picking myself back up, they are all great ways to explore why I’m not getting what I want out of all this writing stuff.
The weirdest discovery is one I came to through a mix of chatting with friends and therapy – I think I am way, way, way too focussed on the actual writing of prose.
It’s like if my writing career is a tree, I am so absolutely fixated on one individual leaf at the end of a branch – the smacking of keyboards to make words – that I am completely ignoring the rest of that branch, and the other branches, and the trees.
An example: I have collected a small selection of books on rhetorics, essay-writing, and general use-of-english dating back to around the 1920s. One of them is even a week-by-week course (‘Exercises in thinking and expressing’) which I have been yearning to try for years.
I haven’t touched it in years. In fact, it’s been years since I made time to deliberately work on my writing craft skills outside of looking for solutions to specific problems I’ve been having with projects.
Another example: It’s been five years since I made the time to read that year’s winner of the Hugo award for best novel. (I am currently working on the latest one – Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh)
What have I been doing?
I’ve been circling around trying to get words on the page, and anything that wasn’t ‘get words on the page’ or a step towards ‘get words on the page’ is something I’ve been bitterly chastising myself for.
And as a result? The other branches on my tree, they’re looking pretty neglected. A lot more neglected than I ever wanted them to be.
Something I only recognized because of the hurt feeling from missing my goals and ambitions.
So, we’ll see if trying to cultivate an overall healthier tree does me some good. I’m hoping it will.
When I think ‘the life of a writer’, it includes things like reading the latest award winners and hammering on craft and maybe just a little bit of work on things like trying to figure out how to sell books.
Crushing it all into a single-minded pursuit of words on page… that feels kind of tragic.
I need the words on page, don’t get me wrong, I hunger for them, but I need to stop letting that hunger make all the decisions for me.
I need more than one leaf.
Do you need more than one leaf at the end of one branch, in your life? You might.
In the meanwhile, I am going to carry on with the drafting – the math is pretty shaky, given how early things are, but the math implies a total wordcount for Quicker than Blood of around 90 000 words (which is what I wanted in the first place – at one stage, before the re-plotting, it was looking like it’d be 180 000 words), and it looks like I might be as much as 25% through my first draft. Maybe. Depending on how we cut the math.
I’m going to try and ignore the math and see about trying to spend the month in a way that gives me two leaves, at least, maybe spend some more time talking to my therapist about all this, and as ever, thank you so much for your interest and support.
