Tuesday, February 2, 2016

My So-Called Writing Life ~ @oddlynn3 #LynnCrain #amwriting #amediting




I had a migraine yesterday and my head felt like it was going to explode. It’s been years since I’ve had my last one but since I’ve been extra stressed these last few weeks, I guess it all caught up with me. Add to that a whole slew of hot flashes, which I haven’t had in a long time either, and my body was just done.

So I decided right in the middle of all my head throbbing that I needed to concentrate on all the good things going on. Yes, there are stressful things happening in my life but none of them are bad. I’ve been stressed for coordinating a cross-country trip from Washington DC to home. Now, this is something that I’ve been waiting for a long time and it shouldn’t stress me out at all.

No, it should make me happy that I’m going to see relatives that I haven’t seen in years. We need those times to bond with family and that is nothing to stress about. Sure, it’s hard to pin down my husband and get him to make decisions. But I can try to make some preliminary decisions and present the package to him. And while I don’t like to be in charge of everything, I can handle it for a little while before I throw in the towel. If nothing else, I will know that things have been done correctly and not haphazardly thrown together just to get them done.

I see my writing like that. I write fast and sometimes, I wish I wrote slow, really slow. I’ll be honest, I have slowed down from what I used to do. I try to put it down on the screen correctly just once. But sometimes my head and my hands get ahead of what I have planned and it is more like a data dump yet better formed. On my very best day ever, I wrote over 13k words and then I couldn’t do much for a while.

Yeah, I used to be the data dump queen, at least in my mind, and I couldn’t understand why things weren’t flowing like they should. So I do know that I’ve become better over the years. And to be honest, I love writing fast. I mean if I didn’t, I would not have completed 50k in January and that’s what I did. Sure, like I’ve said before, I know that a whole lot of editing will be going on but at least it’s down and on the page.

I really am a big believer of the Nora Roberts’ philosophy of ‘I can’t fix a blank page.’ It is the one motto that every writer needs to take to heart. None of us can fix it if it isn’t down to fix. None of us can get better if we don’t try again and again and again. And it doesn’t matter what you are trying. It could be life, it could be baseball or rugby or it can be writing. Doing makes perfect and putting it on the page is doing.

I guess my thought for this week is that one needs to do, no matter in what, in order to accomplish what one wants. And believe me, I’ve waited a long, long time for my writing career to take off.

This year, it will be all about me and my writing. See you all next week. Until then…


Lynn 

1 comment:

  1. sorry to hear about your headache, hard to do anything with them, hope you are feeling much better

    ReplyDelete