A progress report

I've been home for about a week now, and I'm still not back into the swing of things as far as my writing goes. Vacation always alters my life's "schedule," and even after it's over, I find myself feeling sort of off-kilter. Before we left for our trip, I had been working on my novel during the hours before the kids woke up, but since we got back, I've been using that time to catch up on laundry and all the other household tasks I had neglected to do before we left, and work on my WIP has been put on a back burner. As far as my novel goes, then, I'm giving myself a C for effort--and that's only because I'm grading on a curve! ;) Maybe next week I'll feel less tired and stressed and more inspired. Here's hoping!

I have been managing to keep up with my 100-word exercises, however. I enjoy them. They usually don't take long, which has been a bonus lately, and they allow me to get other thoughts out of my mind in order to make room for reflection about my projects. (Even though I haven't been writing my WIP, I have been thinking about it.) The exercises are also a good way for me to banish some of the doubts I have about myself as a writer. Through them, I let my inner critic speak. When she's done having her say, I feel like I can ignore her for the rest of the day, which helps my creative mind immensely. I generally don't post these 100-word "talks" with my inner critic, but maybe someday I'll share some of them here.

Enough about me: I feel like I'm so behind on all of your projects. How are they going? How would you grade your progress?

My ongoing battle with time

One of the things I'm still struggling with as a writer is finding the time to work on my bigger projects. As a mom, I realize that the moments I can carve out among cooking and cleaning and playing with the kids are precious, yet at the same time, I have difficulty utilizing those ten- or twenty-minute writing sessions effectively. Although they're perfect for writing things like blog posts and drabbles and my 100-word exercises, when I attempt work on anything larger, like my novel, I find that I can't concentrate, and before I'm even able to begin, the moment is gone and something else calls me away from the computer.

Getting up a couple of hours before the kids do used to ensure productive writing time, but I'm finding now that I'm often too exhausted to write, as I generally get only four or five hours of sleep a night. Going to bed earlier might solve that problem--and that's something I'm working on--but I have trouble unwinding after a long day with the kids and find that one of the only things that relaxes me is reading. Unfortunately, I just don't know when to quit, and I often stay up until one or two in the morning, going to sleep only when I can't keep my eyes open one second longer. These marathon reading sessions are creating a new problem: I often oversleep, something I wrote about in my 100-words entry this morning:

I overslept this morning, which has been happening more and more frequently lately. I had one of those heart-stopping moments where something woke me up (thankfully), and I sat up quickly, pulse racing as I realized that the clock said 7 a.m. and not the 6 a.m. it needed to say. My daughter's two-year checkup was scheduled for 9:30, which made my getting up late all the more difficult to deal with. Before I had kids, I never imagined how hard it would be to leave the house on time.

Now I know.

Anyway, regarding my larger writing projects, I'm at a loss. I don't believe it's an issue of finding time as much as it's an issue of learning to use the time I have more effectively. I'd be interested in hearing how you utilize the small bits of time you carve out during the day. How do you make the best use of those precious few moments?

Staying drunk on writing

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." ~Ray Bradbury

It occurred to me today that, although I've mentioned my other writing projects in passing, I haven't described them with any detail. Lately my mind has been completely wrapped up in my stalled fiction WIP, a contemporary story about love and infidelity, but even though I'm having trouble with that novel, I am staying drunk on writing by working on a couple of other projects in the meantime.

The first project, my father's memoir, is close to my heart, a story that I want to tell both because I think it's important to record family history and because I think that my dad's career as a logger in Upper Michigan is something that would interest the locals. My dad grew up as the oldest of ten children, with about twenty-five years between him and his youngest brother, Jeffrey, who passed away last summer. Uncle Jeff was actually several months younger than my dad's own son, my brother--definitely an interesting dynamic. Dad has so many stories about growing up among all those kids and about logging with his father, from the early days when horses, rather than semis, were still used in the woods until he retired several years ago. He's recorded many of his stories for me, and I'm in the process of transcribing them--a long, painstaking job--and deciding on the focus and direction I need to take as I write his story.

My other project is also a memoir--my own. I was a NaNoWriMo rebel last November; instead of writing a novel, as the rules require, I wrote about memories from my own life--my childhood, school years, first loves, my marriages, the births of my children... I ended up "winning" NaNo, exceeding the required 50,000-word count by more than 20,000 words, which just shows that I can blather on about myself with the best of them! I've had this project on hold since November. I need to think about a unifying theme, that one thing that my memoir is about, which, since doing so involves stepping back and looking objectively at my own life--at moments I lived--is proving to be difficult. I'll go back to it one day, though, if for no other reason than to ensure that my kids will know what my life was like and how it shaped the person I am today.

In addition to these projects, I work on several smaller pieces each day, from vignettes to short stories to other writing that defies easy classification. I'm always working on something. I have to write. It's the only thing that keeps me sane.

I'd love to hear about your projects. What have you been working on lately?

What I'm trying not to do

When I plan a story, I tend to get bogged down in the details. I panic if I don't know things like the names and ages of all the characters, their hair and eye colors, their backgrounds, their jobs, the kinds of cars they drive, where they live, whether they like Chinese food or Italian, if they favor their right or left hands... You get the picture. Often, by the time I've sorted out the details and sat down to write the story, I discover that I'm frustrated or bored or no longer interested in pursuing the idea. I've set aside quite a few projects because I'd allowed myself to get so wrapped up in the small things that I completely lost my desire to write the story; my inner perfectionist had taken all the fun out of the process, egged on by my inner critic and my inner procrastinator, both of whom tend to work hand in hand to keep me from writing.

Now, details are important, there's no doubt about that, but I don't feel they're as important in a first draft--despite what my nefarious inner mob would have me believe. So with my current project, my plan is not to plan. I mentioned in a previous post that I have the beginning of my story, know what happens through much of the middle, and have an idea where I want it to end. That's it--and that's considerably less than what I usually have at this point in the process. I'm not even entirely sure right now what my main character's name will be. I have an idea of course, and also a vague notion of what she'll look like, but I've decided not to let myself stress about having every little detail set in stone before I begin writing. I'm not even going to outline this time, which is something I normally do. This project will be an experiment in which I attempt to free my mind and write organically, to just let the story spill out as it wants to rather than force it into being what it's not. It's the first draft, and first drafts can always be fixed; telling the story is the most important part at this stage in the process. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.

What's your writing process? How do you handle the details?