The Rite of the Right Way to Write

So okay, here’s the thing – I’m a huge slacker I guess.

Me: Hello. My name is Jill. And I’m a slacker.
Chorus: Hello Jill.

Sigh.

I don’t mean to be. I don’t want to be. But I guess I am. I have been writing for ten months now, after taking “time off” for fifteen months before that. So it’s been twenty-five months since I was gainfully employed. For a chunk of that I was on severance, so I was technically gainful, but not exactly what I’d call employed – although if I’m going by that kind of definition, I don’t know that you could, in good conscience, say I was gainfully employed for the better part of a year before I actually left. Teehee…

But I digress. As usual. It’s part of the slacker thing.

Anyway, as I was saying, blah blah blah over two years since I had regular work with deadlines (albeit usually self-imposed and/or soft). Over two years since I proudly proclaimed that I was walking away from corporate America and its attendant crap to Write My Book. And what do I have to show for it?

Not a book.

I have a bunch of short stories – way more than I’d have ever imagined I would write. I have the makings of a couple of promising (I think so anyway) novels (including a sequel!), and a couple more promising novellas/very long stories. I have nine months of blog posts, nearly thirty book reviews, and a slew of top ten lists. And I have learned a few things.

I have learned that there is a way that I like to write. No, scratch that. There is a way that I have to write. I have learned that I am even more anal-retentive and Maureen O’Hara “my things about me” –ish (Quiet Man reference, for those who don’t know – it’s the only John Wayne film I like, check it out if you haven’t seen it, you won’t be sorry) than even I realized. And I have learned that if it is possible to find a distraction, I will – anytime, anyplace, anywhere.

Sigh, she said. (Yes, I’ve also learned that I like to refer to myself in the third person, rather pretentiously. Deal with it. I had to learn to.)

I fled “regular” jobs for a number of reasons – corporate bureaucrazy (teehee, I mean bureaucracy – a typo so funny and true that I had to keep it in), redundancy, inanity, boredom, irritation, a lack of meaning… (I could go on but won’t bore you) But it turns out in fleeing those things I also walked away from a thing or two that I apparently needed (and no, I am not referring to the paycheck/benefits, although those never hurt): namely, structure and accountability.

True, corporate America was full of lame, half-hearted, oft-pointless and artificial structures and “accountability” mechanisms that usually lay responsibility at the wrong feet (i.e., the feet of underlings when things went wrong and the feet of upperlings when they went right – regardless of whose fault/doing said things actually were). But there were still semblances of structure and accountability, and those semblances made it possible for me to establish my own versions of those all-important elements of work. I assumed that I would develop my own meaningful goals and mile markers without those semblances to serve as false measures. Well, we all know what happens when you assume… Yup, you guessed it, I made an ass out of me – and you, if you believed me, I guess. Sorry, didn’t meant to drag you into this…

So how have I tried dealing with this new level of irritating self-awareness? Well, I’ve tried to develop a writing environment that forces me to a distraction-less (or at least –lesser; not sure I’ll ever be able to be completely distraction-free) state of mind. That means sitting down at the desktop computer in the study, surrounded by other people’s books and personally meaningful artifacts and idols from my life, in the quiet. This helped for a while, it really did. I wrote quite a lot for a few months, meeting and exceeding my word goals with gleeful abandon.

Then things got busier and holidays started and we moved. And along the way I lost the opportunity to sit in my distraction-lesser environment – either because of other things that “had” to get done or because the physical environment was transformed from a room in “my” house dedicated to me/my writing into a room in “our” house dedicated to holding all the boxes of things we can’t put in their proper places until the basement is refinished. And so no new fiction writing has been done in quite some time.

Boo, hiss, she said. (Her voice echoed – if not preceded by – those of a couple of others’.)

You’d think I’d learn. Life isn’t going to let me sit quietly in my own perfect little environment, my things (and my things alone) about me and all distractions politely asked to remain behind that white line over there, please, because now it is time for me to work. It never has. Or I’d have written my book three times over in the fifteen months before I actually started writing – fifteen months in which I had no distractions, no obligations, no other people in my life. But then I wasn’t “in the right head space,” I “needed time to relax,” I “had to decompress” – any number of excuses.

In short, writing for me obviously wasn’t ever about having my own perfect little environment with my things and no distractions – because when I had those things I still didn’t do it. Apparently I’m a slacker and writing for me is going to have to be about embracing that fact and figuring out how to use it to my advantage.

There has to be a way.

When I actually sit down and write I feel good; trouble is, when I sit down to read or play on the computer or do any of a zillion other things I enjoy, I also feel good. I’m not a “WRITE OR DIE!” kind of writer. If I don’t write in a day (week, month, whatever), I don’t feel depressed or anxious or wrong. I feel fine, same as every other day. That doesn’t mean I don’t have stories to tell or that I don’t enjoy writing or that I’m not a “real” writer – at least I don’t think it does. It just means I have to continue to figure out what motivates me and use that to spur myself to at least finish one writing project. If, at the end of that, I decide that this was a nice exercise but not for me, well, then I guess I’ll have to figure out what else to do with myself. I don’t think that’ll be the case, but who knows.

I’m always going to have distractions, and if I really want to be a writer, I’m going to have to learn how to deal with them, if not actively incorporate them into what I do. I need, in short, to find the rite of my own personal right way to write. Who knows, maybe the secret is homonyms… 😉