For several months, I was focused on revising my novel. Then I participated in NaNoWriMo, which was exhilarating and empowering and exhausting. I let myself take a little break from creative writing in December, with the goal of revisiting my NaNoWriMo novel in the new year. But now that January is here, I’m not sure I want to. I reread it, and underlined some good, funny stuff, but the overall plot… I’m just not inspired by it right now. So I’ve spent the last few weeks avoiding creative writing and feeling like a failure because of it.
Pity party’s over. I’m making an effort to get back into my writing routine. (Which means writing for a few hours in the morning—no going online “just for a minute” first because that never works!) This week I cracked open a book I got for Christmas, called Room to Write
by Bonni Goldberg. Back in August, I claimed I was going to read all of the writing books on my shelf but in reality I only got partway through Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write
before that resolve went out the window. Lots of people love Cameron’s methods and she does have some great advice, but the book was too New Agey for me. I worried Room to Write would be similar, since Julia Cameron is quoted on the cover, but am finding it to be a wonderfully practical book full of exercises to stimulate the good ol’ creativity.
In the book’s introduction, Goldberg writes:
Writing, like any spiritual undertaking, has many paths, but only one direction—deeper. Whichever path you follow, a few fundamental rules apply:
- The most important action you can take is to show up on the page;
- The more you can give up control over what you write, the more genuine your writing will be;
- Making room in your life to write generates even more room for your writing;
- The only true obstacle to writing creatively is a lack of faith that appears as fear and self-judgment.
This all makes perfect sense to me, especially that last point. It’s strange that even after finishing a novel, and having work published, and spending over a decade participating in creative writing workshops, and taking the ballsy move of quitting my day job to devote myself to writing, I still allow myself to slip into that “I don’t know what I’m doing” mentality. But I do, and “a lack of faith that appears as fear and self-judgment” is exactly the way to describe it.
One issue I’m having right now (or maybe it’s more like an excuse I’m making) is that my novel, on which I’ve spent nearly seven years, is finished. The characters I know so well aren’t around to play with anymore. The story I’ve been telling, with its beginning, middle, and end already figured out, is complete. Now I need to come up with new characters, new settings, new stories. Clearly I’m capable of doing this—I did 50,000 words’ worth of it in November—but the idea of sitting down and coming up with something out of thin air is daunting. I know the only real failure is not writing at all, yet I avoid writing, in order to avoid failure. It’s a pretty lame paradox.
So I’ve been flipping through the exercises in the book, and this morning I tried a great one that I thought I’d share. Not because I think a truly amazing masterpiece came out of it, but because it was such a simple task that tricked me into writing. And not just writing, but also inventing, creating, conjuring. Three characters, a setting, a situation—they flowed out onto the page. I didn’t think about them beforehand. I don’t know where they came from, but there they are—described in my handwriting, so I must have had something to do with it.
The exercise is called “Chain – Chain – Chain,” and the idea is to make a list of random words, and then write a short piece that includes all of them. “Sometimes the only way through the gate of creativity is trickery,” Goldberg writes. No kidding.
Today, try a trick. Write one of the following words at the top of the page: fence, road, boil, or fall. Now without thinking or stopping, write whatever other words come to mind down the middle of the page until you reach the bottom. Write a piece in which each line uses one of these words in the order in which they appear.
Room to Write, page 41
My output (with the listed words highlighted) is posted below, if you’re curious. I’m under no illusion that this is stellar writing. At the moment I’m just happy to have made it exist. These people might have a story waiting to be discovered, and I never would have known…
Continue reading
Emily is a freelance writer, miniaturist, and adventure game enthusiast.
