i'm still working my way through the artist's way. this week, our main assignment is reading deprivation. (my cyberfriend msafropolitan mentioned that this was where she called it quits, or some such.) though i've contemplated ignoring this assignment, i am dutifully NOT reading as much as possible given that i remember how useful this was at hedgebrook, allowing me to access a deeper level of my inner thoughts.

and since i can't read other people's work--books, newspapers, blogs--i'm taking the opportunity to read my own, which brings me to the title of this blog. since there's not much else to do (no facebook status updates, no twitter, no cnn news crack), i am finally going over something like six years' worth of writing, which also involves organizing six years' worth of writing.

i am outing myself as completely disorganized (and i have it on good authority that i'm not the only writer out there who is). i've been wanting to get my shit together for some time now, so i suppose that this seems like a very natural progression. but it is entirely unnatural for me to be mining my literary archives for whatever gems lie buried there. to sit and read and assess with care. to try to figure out what i meant when i wrote this or that, where i was in my head, in my life, whether there is some usefulness to it or it belongs rightly in the scrap heap.

i think i've struggled to feel good about my writing my entire life. i've actually hidden most of it away from inquiring eyes. julia cameron, of the artist's way, calls it the internal censor--the inner monster who says This is no good, get rid of it and start over. mine has been rather overactive, but i am shutting him up now.

there are entire lives and families and mini-universes buried in my laptop. it's quite astonishing. at least maybe some of them, by grace, will have a life outside the notebook. i pulled some words from the pile above:

everyday i wish to
know and
stimulate
the ancient miracle of flow,
inviting the
lost muse
home.

--AL.

"I'm struck by how, except when you're young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don't get that sort of system set by a certain age, you'll lack focus and your life will be out of balance. I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing, not associating with all the people around me. I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not a specific person, but with an unspecified number of readers. As long as I got my day-to-day life set so that each work was an improvement over the last, then many of my readers would welcome whatever life I chose for myself. Shouldn't this be my duty as a novelist, and my top priority?"

--From What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
by Haruki Murakami

(Thanks to Waffarian for recommending!)

Snowed in today, home from work and writing. Which means, of course, staring out the window at the endless snow blanketing cars, rooftops, trees. I have not found much time to write lately, so I am grateful. I met with my writers' group again last Sunday, submitted a sample chapter from the book that they critiqued. It was like open heart surgery. I'm not sure I was/am ready, should probably have considered the possibility that it was a terrible idea, although I think the input will prove helpful in the long run.

I have considered sharing some novel excerpts on my blog, but I figure the writing is much too young, and I would much rather talk about my writing than share the actual writing itself. Furthermore, it's really important to establish a safe space within which to share. The internet is kind of like a bus station and I would never write in public. (Funny story, I once rented a room from a writer who did an art installation in which he lived/wrote a novel in a gallery for a month before an audience. Interesting.)

I can scarcely believe that I was capable of writing 50,000 words in one month, let alone at all, for NaNoWriMo. It requires an almost Machiavellian determination that I previously did not know I had. Along the way, I have learned that there is definitely a difference between the "process" of writing -- the showing up every day, no matter your mood or the weather -- and the "product" of writing -- a blog, article, novel, play, screenplay etc.

So much emphasis is always placed on the product that many creative folks feel there is something wrong when they are not churning out literary gems every second they sit down to pen and paper (or laptop). Boy did film school totally mess with me in that regard. From my recollection, it was all about getting something onscreen, and very little about the convoluted process of arriving there, which is 95% the battle. Granted, I only did a year, but I don't think I learned anything tangible about the process of writing and telling a story that I couldn't have found out on my own.

One of my Hedgebrook sisters hipped me to a theory, proposed by Claudia Johnson, that the rising and falling action theory of dramatic writing is entirely phallocentric. Johnson suggests, from a more feminine perspective, that narrative storytelling is really a series of connections, disconnections, and reconnections. After going through my story outline, I found that this was a better way of describing what was happening organically in my writing than anything I read in Aristotle's Poetics.

Maybe this whole focus on the end goal is phallocentric too.

I find that every day I am negotiating either a connection or disconnection to my writing, and so this "novel" product becomes a vaguer goal than the immediate one of managing my own interest in the subject matter, authenticity in the storytelling, and personal commitment to finishing. Just some food for thought.

And for any folks looking to churn out more product, NaNoWriMo posted a handful of other competitions from poetry to screenplay writing on their site (scroll down to the bottom of the page).