A Room Of Your Own: Commit To One Work

lizshine74by lizshine74

In A Room Of Your Own.

After I’d told yet another story of my struggle to decide just what I should be working on, Carrie (friend; colleague; fellow writer) put it simply:

“Everything’s back on the table.”

The truth of her words struck me hard enough to probe further.

For months now, I have been taking projects on and off the table pretty much every time I sit down to write.

Last August I graduated with my MFA in fiction. During the three years I spent working on that degree, I remained entirely dedicated to one project: an autobiographical novel titled Hallelujah.
Taking work on and off the table has long impeded the realization of my writing goals because I don’t stick with one project long enough to “finish” it. Shaken by the truth of Carrie’s words, I see now what I haven’t seen since I left the program last August. Those three years constitute an exception to my writing life since I began penning my first poems as a freshman in high school.

I often proclaim proudly: “I’ve never had writer’s block.”

It’s true! And I see now why. When the writing gets truly hard, on the third, fourth or fifth read-through–even when I’m stuck mid-story– I switch projects.

Carrie and I spoke in the afternoon. Both high school English teachers, we encourage each other on a near daily basis to make time for writing after the work day is done. It’s hard to do. We have families. School days are long. Dinner needs to be made. Dogs need to be walked. We have other hobbies too. She said, “Everything’s back on the table” in the same way she typically makes such comments, commiserating. So much of our friendship is based on reminding each other that the struggles we face daily as writers, as mothers, as women, as teachers, as lovers are entirely shared. We are not alone. As is often the case, she made the comment as much to herself as she did to me.

The comment sent me reeling and hours later when I sat down with my weekly fiction critique group, a writer I respect offered a simple

solution to the my dilemma. He told me to take all the files I wasn’t currently working on off my computer. He said put them on a disc or flash drive. He advised that if necessary I should even give the files to someone I could trust not to give them back until I finished what I had committed to work on.

Eureka!

All these years I have been buying flash drives and uploading my entire library of documents to my cloud (as that inter-space is now called). A few months ago I bought an iphone and as I searched for apps to download, I thought how cool would it be to be able to access all my Google Docs from my phone.

The fact that I had hundreds of poems, dozens of short stories, and several novel drafts at my fingertips at any given moment, comforted me.

Like some other comforts, I see now how having all that work right in front of me every time I sat down to write moored me in indecision, kept me from staying long enough in any one work. This makes sense when I think about it. Staying too long means experiencing pain (such as doubt and fear of failure) and probably writer’s block.

This morning, I deleted all but the start of one story from my Gmail Drive. I took all the other folders and files and saved them in two locations. Until I finish the first draft of novel I started about Travis (a 24 year old stuck-in-neutral romantic who pumps gas at his parents gas station in Southeastern Oregon for a living when he should be moving on to his own life journey), when I sit down to write, I have exactly one choice of files to open, the work I have committed to finish.

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

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lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA in the USA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She has published in Shark Reef, Dual Coast, and Blue Crow Magazine. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.