Setbacks

lizshine74by lizshine74

In A Room Of Your Own, On writing.

Setbacks

This week I encountered a major setback in the progress of my novel after several days of sweet flow. I set a goal of eight pages per day Monday through Friday for the five weeks I will be teaching summer school. By the end of five weeks, I mused, I would be back in the practice I’d fallen out of during a challenging school year. I arranged my life so that I could be successful, including informing my family of my plan, setting up a space to do the writing, and writing myself a letter setting my intentions. Three days passed and the world was rainbows and hearts and flowers because holy cow I was writing again and that felt better than ________  (fill in the blank with your simile of choice).

Then Monday happened and I thought at first that I must be asleep having a freaky-scary nightmare. I  opened the document containing the 30,000 or so words I had so far of my novel and what did I see?

and therefoswimmin’wimminerefore couladded, twisting

Figure 1

It looked like someone took the letters of all the words and tossed them in the air to see where they’d land!

In the hours that followed I felt pretty certain that I’d reached the point where Liz gives up and my internal editor rose to the occasion, beating me down in that way only she can. You’re wasting your time. Think of all the books you will be able to read, how many seasons of TV you will consume. You’re life will be less stressful and you suck at writing anyway. It’s just a delusion you came up with as a little girl and why the hell do you keep pretending you are a writer? You’re a writer about as much as you are the most popular girl in school or a spy with special powers to read minds, also things you used to think you wanted.

I cried. I went to the gym and upped the weight on all the nautilus machines to make it even harder on myself, the loop of all the reasons I should just stop the madness playing on repeat.

When I came home I opened the document again thinking maybe it would be magically fixed. It t wasn’t. I didn’t write that day, but I did print out as many versions of the garbled prose I could find, vowing to make a plan tomorrow.

My plan? Retype the entire novel one chapter at a time and that is going to take some rewriting and some deciphering of nonsense. It is forcing me to consider every line and I’m cutting and adding too. I am saving a new draft every time I sit down to write in three locations: Drive, Dropbox, and the hard disk of my computer. I’m pretty sure the problem happened in the first place because I was working on a Macbook and an iPad. My iPad makes a nice ebook reader and has a nice yoga app on it, but I’m done with trying to write on it.

I wish that I could say, lesson learned, I never again have to encounter the self-doubt that accompanies setbacks in writing. Not only am I certain that sometime in the future I will have to resist the urge to delete everything I’ve ever written and take up crossword puzzles. I am also fairly certain that these setbacks make me a stronger writer and remind me why I go to all this trouble in the first place. In order to come back I had to remember that I write because I love it and that’s reason enough to carry on.

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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

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. 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 is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.

One comment

  1. Carol says:

    It is part of the process. No? To strive to write is what it is all about. Not the outcome

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