Getting Re-Started—M. G. Sondraal
Five days a week I open a zoom meeting for any member of my writing group to join. This is an admittedly strange thing to do.
We briefly discuss our writing goals for the day, then mute and write in 55-minute bursts with short problem-solving chats between to help focus. Sometimes we read our works to one another but mostly not.
It all started to help a member write daily during NaNoWriMo (RIP) when travelling and opened to the wider group after that small success. I feel an accountability to the group. I write most days anyway, and this merely determines the start time. Not liking a schedule, I have silently strained against the tyranny of the regimen that I offer to the group because I’m committed to pushing out all my story ideas before I croak and will write irrespective of zoom sessions. Still, it does make writing less solitary which can be beneficial.
We’ve taken the summer off. Within the group, there has been job-searching, overwhelming work demands, house-hunting and moving, and more travel. No one has missed the zoom writing sessions. We were all barely keeping ourselves on track for life itself.
I wrote in the afternoon and gardened early each morning, avoiding the worst of the heat, accomplishing everything on my own terms.
This worked for July.
August, however, proved to be a nightmare for me beginning with an unexpected death of a friend and ending with a road trip. My daily writing practice was completely de-railed. I was focused on real-life needs and couldn’t settle on the imagined ones of my characters.
But now it’s September and the zoom sessions have not resumed. They will, with a new schedule by the end of the month, after harvest, vacations, and unpacking are finished.
What has been instructive to me, who railed against the rigid start times, is how difficult it’s been to resume my own daily writing after the chaos of August and enforced hiatus. It is so easy to not write, to let those stories roll around aimlessly in my imagination, never to be fixed on the page. I needn’t decide about themes or motivations, just modify the plot the next time that story tumbleweed skips past on its infinite loop. It’s like my stories are all lucid dreams that I tweak and reset repeatedly to get them just right.
Although I always think about my stories for a long time before I begin, I have learned to write the story start to finish before I unleash my dreaded internal editor that wants to wordsmith and reconsider endlessly. With six weeks of inactivity, I now must wrestle her into submission again to let the flawed, pitiful tales escape onto the page, let them rest a bit, and then let her editorial ideas guide the rewrite. It’s the only way for me to be productive.
It took me many years to understand I must have a complete written story to edit if I ever wanted to finish. This time, I’ll let my cherished DeadLies group help me recapture consistent daily writing…even if it means a schedule and a hard start time with faces on a screen expecting the session to begin. I guess some structure is a good thing even for those of us who would prefer none.