Author: JennyDetroit (Page 4 of 52)

Goal Update: October 2025

October 12, 2025 /

It’s been awhile. I’m going to try and be as upbeat as possible, but the results speak for themselves: I haven’t achieved most of my goals.

And yet! I’ve achieved some, and that ain’t nothing. Failing to success, right? Would I have achieved even these small things if I hadn’t set myself the goals?

Some may argue that yes, I would still have achieved these few things. And perhaps that’s true. Doing small actions every day does tend to add up to bigger things. My students who are writing for five minutes at the beginning of every class are seeing that happen in real-time. Their notebooks are filling up and they can’t quite believe it.

But there’s a part of me that thinks the simple act of articulating the goals helps me understand what my small actions are in service to. For my students, the daily writing added up to a class party (which we just had last week). For me, the daily/regular actions have added up to the completion of a couple of goals and slight progress on a few more. Again: that ain’t nothing.

What This All Means is precisely that it’s good to have some end goals, but it’s also good (better?) to keep plugging away. Achieving the goals isn’t the measurement; doing the small actions is. And not giving up. That’s important too.

Which is all to say that I’m writing this to self-assess, yes, but even more so, I’m writing this to remind myself that I must keep going. Even in a year’s time, I’ve accomplished things. Not much, but some.

And some is better than none.

  • Finish writing Norse City Limits (urban fantasy novel): I must admit that I’ve dropped the ball on this. I’m in that messy middle part in which I loathe every choice I’ve made thus far and feel utterly unsuited to the task of writing a novel.

I’ve taken a pause, honestly. Partly because I need to go back and reread and take better notes on what’s happened, but also partly because I think I need to do more reading/research. The Idea Well has run a bit dry. Problems of output are problems of input, and my Norse mythology/film noir input has been anemic these days (months?). I need to get back in touch with that part of myself.

The difficulty? I’ve started a few new projects and those are vying for my time. I feel the heat to work on them, whereas NCL has grown a bit cold.

I was worried about this, especially over the summer, when the novel was really stalled, but I’ve since made peace with it. This feels like how I work. I’m a multi-book reader, and I’m seeing how I’m really a multi-book writer too. It’s not the most efficient way of doing things, and maybe I need to retrain myself to write with white-lightning heat to finish a novel in a month or two or something, but for now, it seems that my process is more meandering.

It’s not like I haven’t been writing.

Maybe not as many words per week as I’d like, but I’m still writing. I’m finishing stories, I’m starting new stories, I’m writing Substack posts, and blog posts. I’m writing almost every day. Maybe not consumable words, but words that could turn into something later (I use my notebook/morning pages writing for ideas all the time).

I’m trying really hard to stop making demands on my Creative Voice. Instead of saying, “I must write this next chapter of __________,” I sit down at the computer, open a few documents (again, intuitively without deliberate thought), and I start cycling back through a story or start with a fresh page and new words, and I let the Creative Voice do its thing.

In fact, that’s precisely how I started this blog post. I let myself start writing what I felt like I needed to start writing, and an update on my writing goals is where Creative Voice led me.

It takes a great deal of trust in this process to operate like this, but I’m trying to trust it.

A bit like my insight on “inventing the process”: I need to stop prescribing the word count (or the work that “must” be done) and simply do what my Creative Voice wants to do. A story doesn’t have to be x-number of words long. I need to stop even thinking about stories as being “short,” “novella,” “novel,” etc. before I start writing them.

Maybe that’s the trouble with NCL? Maybe I committed to “a novel,” before I really had any idea what my Creative Voice wanted to do with this particular character in this particular world.

Well, anyway, I’m almost 50,000 words into the thing, so it must be something longer than a short story. What that thing is, though, I’m not sure yet. Maybe my idea that it must be 100,000 words long or whatever is getting in my way. Or maybe it’s shaping up to be 200k words or more… I certainly have enough story threads going and no idea how to weave them to a satisfying conclusion… It could end up being a door-stopper!

I’m somewhat tempted to throw a bunch of words out. Partly because I feel like certain choices bug me and I don’t like where they led me, but at the time, I didn’t have the courage to go back and redraft from those (seeming?) missteps. Do I have the courage now? Or is this just a way to avoid finishing?

I don’t think it’s a way to avoid finishing. I think it’s my intuition telling me that maybe I need to trust my gut and not keep putting lipstick on a pig.

Maybe I need to do that process reassessment after all and write with lightning heat…

What would that look like?

  • New Goal: Write an epic fantasy for middle grade readers/my kids (a novel about dragons): This came about because I wanted something for my kids to enjoy that went a little deeper than the dragon books they were bringing home from the library/Scholastic book fair.

I wanted them to have something like I had as a kid, a fantasy series that was epic and archetypal that also didn’t feel watered down. I’m a bit inspired by Katherine Rundell’s thoughts on children’s books and her novel The Explorer in particular, which we listened to as a family on audiobook.

This new dragon fantasy is partly why NCL is on hold.

As I’m typing all this out, I’m thinking I need to heed my own insights about writing one thing with lightning heat… I started this novel (working title: Shards of Stolen Breath) over the summer, and now it’s October and I’m only on Chapter 5. Maybe I need to write with white-heat and finish it as quickly as possible. My boy Thoreau always said, “Write while the heat’s in you.” Don’t let the fire die (hello, dragon pun, I see you).

What does it look like, for me, to write with white-heat?

Does it look like finishing a chapter a day? Write for thirty days, you got yourself thirty chapters. But what if Creative Voice doesn’t want to write a chapter a day? What if she wants to work on that other story that’s been brewing over here for a bit?

Okay, well, I just got done saying I wouldn’t boss my Creative Voice around, but I also wonder if Creative Voice would want to work on Shards every day if I actually, you know, thought about Shards every day. If I wrote about it in my morning pages, and took notes on it throughout the day, and dreamed about it at night.

I have a problem with daydreaming. I’m not doing it enough. I’m crowding out my thoughts with worries and a million other things. I need to schedule some daydream time.

Like, deliberately sit down (or go for a walk) and think about the story. Think about Shards.

I’ll admit that I’ve always been intrigued by guys like Moorcock (and Sanderson too) who can write something in a few days/months. Sanderson has spoken about this before. Write the novel as fast as you can, before the fire dies.

I like systems. I’m tempted to make this system for myself. The daydream about something, write it as quickly as possible, don’t let the fire die. Keep daydreaming so the fire stays stoked. (I swear I’m not writing all these dragon/fire puns on purpose.)

Isn’t it funny how writing all this out has led to insights? I hope they’re insights.

  • Finish writing Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess (second book in Merlin series): Similar to NCL, this one is on hold. Perhaps it’ll be faster to redraft from word one on this as well. I’m tempted, mightily tempted to redraft from word one both NCL and Ysbaddaden.Do I have the courage to try it? Enough of a fool?
  • Finish a short story set in my sword and sorcery world: Not yet.
  • Finish a short story about a mother who learns a terrible secret about her son: Not yet.
  • Finish a short story set in my Children of Valesh universe: Not yet.
  • New Goal: Finish a short story set in my magical music academy world: Not yet, but almost! I started a story called “Bronwyn Harper” a little while back and I’m getting close to finishing it. Between this story and Shards, I’ve been writing steadily. I also finished a random short story about a dragon egg and submitted that to Writers of the Future, so I need to remember that I haven’t been idle simply because I haven’t finished one of my big novels.
  • Finish a novella in my City of Ashes series: Not yet. Maybe never? This was a thing my Creative Writing students challenged me to do, but I’m not loving it. Time will tell.
  • Blog every day: I am not blogging every day, but I am still blogging. I like that this is a place I can continue to return to. I still aspire to blog every day, but it’s okay if I don’t.
  • Send out Substack newsletter every two weeks: Not yet, but I’m getting better. I’m prioritizing it a bit more. I’m looking through my notebook each week with an eye toward what can go on the Substack, and I’m loosening up my internal “rules” for what I should write about. The topics and essays are a little more wide-ranging, and I find this suits my personality and writing goals better.
  • Play more role-playing games with my kids, my husband, family, and friends: This is happening and I couldn’t be happier! I just played a one-on-one session of Caverns of Thracia with my eight-year-old son the other day, and it was glorious. And now that my Dolmenwood stuff has arrived, I’m ready to start up campaigns with family and friends. As a family, we’ve been playing Mausritter, Hero Kids, and DnD 5e. I’m also playing in a regular Shadowdark game, and I’m running Thracia as an open table at a FLGS This has been an unqualified success.
  • Create some RPG modules for Norse City Limits and Merlin’s Last Magic: Not yet.
  • Make a “Saturday Morning” zine series and publish an issue every month: Not yet.
  • Make other zines: Not yet.
  • Read more books with my kids (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Half-Magic, James and the Giant Peach, the Hobbit, the Silver Chair, Horse and His Boy, Magician’s Nephew, Last Battle, more Little House books, How to Train Your Dragon series, Harry Potter): I was doing this, and then we stalled, and now I’m ready to make this a priority again. I think we need to force our kids a bit on these. They are sometimes reluctant to listen to these older books, but we think it’ll be good for them. First up, NIMH and A Horse and His Boy, then a retry with The Hobbit.
  • Start naalbinding again (finish the hat I started for my son and make another one for my other son): Ugh, not yet. I want to prioritize this. My son’s head will be too big if I don’t finish soon!
  • Practice my cartooning/comics drawing (for the zines): Hmm… a bit? Not much, though. Need to do more daily drawing.
  • Start a podcast: This is a new goal, but I have an idea I’m excited about and which I think my readers will really like. New goal for 2026 is to actually record the episodes and maybe even launch.
  • Write essays, poems, and fiction that will serve as models for my students next school year: Not much, and I’m wondering if I want to keep this as a goal. I’m not saying I never do this, but I don’t think I need to set it as a goal for myself. I can write things as needed and dictated by the students I have each year. But making it a personal goal feels like an unnecessary step. I’ll do the work if I need to as part of my day job; no need to “focus” on it here.
  • Bonus achievement: The dragon egg story I wrote on a whim and submitted to WotF. I was using a writing prompt, thinking it would just be an exercise, and then it turned into a whole story. Just goes to show that “practice” for writers can turn into real work (as is true for nearly all artists). Who knows if it’s any good, but I had fun writing it.

Shifting Season

October 9, 2025 /

I love fall, and I hate it.

I love the weather, but I hate that I can’t always enjoy it.

Fall is busy. It’s the new school year, it’s making lunches again, it’s three birthdays in our family, it’s letters of recommendation and summer homework that needs grading. It’s always getting started on the wrong foot. It’s crisp mornings and warm afternoons, and evenings that start earlier. My walks shift from mornings to after dinner.

Fall is a shifting season.

I like the idea of fall. I hate the reality of it.

I wish my falls could be like what we see in commercials. The cozy apple orchard, pumpkins, sweateriness, the hot tea and reading under blankets, the hay rides and bonfires. I literally went to a hay ride and bonfire a week ago, and still, I cannot enjoy it. I cannot let go of all the ways my summer life has been upended, and how I haven’t yet adjusted.

Fall shifts us from summer to winter, and on some level, I love that shift. I really like winter! I really like summer too, but most of all, I like how I get to enjoy both, and I like the shift from one to the next. I adore seasons.

But the other shift in fall–the harder shift–is the shift into all this busy-ness. It should be the opposite–shifting from summer to winter should be a shift FROM busy TO restful. Instead, the shift is seismic. I lose my balance. I falter.

Spring shifts us too, but that’s a springboard shift. A leap into summer. A welcome shift where the end of the school year is in sight.

I love fall, but I also hate it. I resent it, I suppose. I resent that what I wish it could be is not what it is.

The shift is happening TO me, not the other way around. If I could do the shifting, if I could be in control, then the turn from summer to winter would be beautiful.

But I’m not in control. The shift is happening TO me. I am buffeted about and pulled in a thousand directions. I am the leaf that falls and gets blown hither and yon.

Just as I was thinking all this, an email from Cal Newport hit my inbox in which he mentions the Gen Z trend to “lock in” for the remainder of 2025. This “locking in” is about focusing hard for the next three months to finish 2025 strong and get something done that doesn’t involve doomscrolling or wasting time on TikTok.

Newport then links to his Youtube video where he lays out a plan for using the last four months of the year to “reinvent your life.”

Shifts.

Gen Z’s locking in, Newport’s reinvention plan–these are ways of shifting, of taking control of fall and using the season to move into something better. The shift of fall means change, but Newport’s idea is that this change can be positive.

Would it be possible for me to use fall for my own shift? To stop the winds of autumn from blowing me about like a stray brown?

I am not sure.

I like the idea of taking charge, of shifting things in the right direction instead of being shifted into chaos. But how does one take control of the shift when so much is outside my control?

Perhaps this is just September. Perhaps no matter who controls the shift–me or the world–there will be discomfort. There will be chaos.

It is a shift after all. And I can’t help that it’s a shift into more–more responsibilities, more work, more things on my plate. I can fight the shift, cry about the shift, accept the shift, or ride the shift. I can take more control, but I can’t stop the onrush of birthdays and lunches and grading and earlier mornings. Some things are inevitable. The seasons change.

And I do like the changing of seasons.

I like fall.

There’s a certain glow to the sunlight in September, in early October. There’s a lovely dryness right now, where it’s warm but I can still wear a long-sleeved shirt, and the sun is bright but not intense. There’s a gentleness to the weather. A mildness.

A strange contrast to the hectic day-to-day of tasks and responsibilities.

Maybe I don’t have to like all the chaos and busyness of fall, but I can still enjoy the crisp mornings and the fresh apples and the hay rides. Maybe I can reinvent myself too. Maybe Newport and the Gen Zers are on to something. Fall may be busy, and it may be an uncomfortable shift, but perhaps it doesn’t have to be a meaningless one. Perhaps I can wrest back a little control, shift things in subtle ways.

Maybe fall is just the shift I need to reaffirm my desires and my goals.

If everything is in tumult these days, why not use that unsettling to unsettle some of my complacency, some of my resignation?

What meaning can I find in all this?

Perhaps I need to reaffirm my desires. Perhaps all this shifting (which I find so uncomfortable) is a sign that I’m not in the right place, that something is off. Perhaps I need to recommit to a writing career; perhaps I need to remember what’s important and what’s peripheral; perhaps I need to dream a bit bigger and not give in to despair.

Maybe that’s the challenge of fall. As the weather cools and the days darken, as work piles up and up and up, the challenge is to not let it overwhelm you. The shift is happening beneath your feet and in the air and on your To Do list, but that shift doesn’t have to bury you.

Instead, weathering the shift is a kind of victory. Winter may be a time for rest and healing, but we feel that rest more deeply when we’ve gone through the wringer. The shifting of fall may be troublesome at times, but it can shake loose old ways of thinking; it can challenge us deeply, but facing those challenges can make us stronger.

I’m still annoyed by all the busyness of fall, but now I can sense that there’s an invitation happening too. I am invited to see the tumult as a crucible, as a shaking loose. I can shed old ways and discover new ones. I can let old frameworks die and resurrect deeper desires. I can also stumble and fall. That will happen too.

But it’s right there in the name. Fall.

In some ways it’s inevitable that this season will challenge me.

And yet, despite the challenges, I always manage to make it through.

Go Slow

August 16, 2025 /

I know it is not efficient or even very “productive” to write my notes by hand or write comments on student papers by hand, but every time I sit down to do my teaching work, I find myself drawn to writing things out with pen and paper.

Right now I’m reading through beginning-of-the-semester student surveys, and instead of recording the data on a Google doc or whatever, I find myself writing the notes on yellow legal pads, my trusty Pilot G-2 pen in my hand.

It’s definitely slower, doing it by hand. I’ll eventually type up some of this info and share the results with the class, so why waste my time handwriting it out first?

I asked myself the same question as I sat down to work, and I don’t know why, but I simply felt compelled to do it by hand. For some reason, this first go-round with the surveys feels like it should be done in analog. Read the surveys, write the answers on my legal pad, put the words down with my own pen strokes, hold the survey notecards in my hands, draw boxes and lines and asterisks on the paper.

When I think about doing the work straight onto the computer, something in me recoils. The work seems less pleasant. More drudgery.

But when I think about sitting at my desk, pen in hand, moving it quickly (or sometimes slowly) across the page, I feel good. I feel excited, energized, drawn to the materials. I want to begin my work.

I’m sure this is crazy. But it’s how I feel. And sitting down to do my teaching work can often be a struggle. I face a lot of internal resistance. Often, the only way I can overcome that resistance is to do the work by hand and tell myself there is no rush.

Of course, the volume of paperwork, of essays and reading journals and the like, means that taking things slowly means I spend hours at my desk. It means I don’t have time for other things.

This rankles me, of course, because I don’t want to spend all my time doing job-related work, but I also find that it’s the only way I can compel myself to do the work in the first place. The computer promises speed, but I rebel against the experience of using it. On some level, it unmoors me. And thus a conundrum arises: do the work “faster” but less pleasurably on the computer, feel more resistance and spend more time procrastinating OR do the work slower by hand, feel less resistance (even eagerness) and spend more time actually doing the work.

Either way, I probably spend more time than I’d like doing work for my job.

I’m simply a slow worker. Slow thinker, slow worker. But this slowness is a benefit. My work is better, and even more importantly, more pleasurable.

For now, I’m going to take it slowly. I’m going to record these survey answers by hand. I’m going to use this time to connect to my students’ answers, and when I type up some to share with the whole class, I’ll have a chance to re-encounter the data by going through it a second time. Maybe I’ll have new insights. Maybe the information will sink in more deeply. Maybe this typing up phase will give me another chance to contemplate my students’ answers.

It’s madness, but it’s the only way of working that makes sense to me.

Go slow. Write by hand. Mull it over. Spend time with it. No rush.

It’s the method that gets me to the desk to work. And that’s what counts.

Input Update 7/23/2025

July 23, 2025 /

Reading: More Than Words by John Warner

Also reading: Fantasy: A Short History by Adam Roberts

Also, also reading: The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill

Listening to: When We Were Wizards podcast

Watching: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (with the kiddos)

I am also in the midst of reading a lot more books but they’ve somewhat cycled out of the daily rotation, whereas the three listed above are the current “in-progress” reads.

My backburner books are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (a book I’m planning to teach this Fall semester), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (see the Alice parenthetical), The House of Mirth (also a work book), and the Collected Fantasies Vol. 2 of Clark Ashton Smith (NOT a work book).

Sometimes I worry that I’m reading books for the sake of marking them off my list, reading as quickly and as relentlessly as I can. So far this summer I’ve finished twelve books. I enjoyed them all, but I can’t shake the nagging feeling that I didn’t absorb them as well as I could have.

I’m not sure of the remedy. I read so quickly because I have so many books I want to read. I try to “read at whim” as Alan Jacobs suggests, but sometimes that “whim” is dictated by what I need to read for work, or what feels like it could be useful for work. Or what the book club wants to read. Or what I feel I “need” to read because it’s been on the shelf for so long.

So maybe I don’t read at whim at all. Which might be why I feel that pressure. I am reading less at whim and more haphazardly, I guess. Whatever falls in my lap, whatever I need to read for work, whatever attracts me like a shiny object attracting a cat. And then the books I REALLY want to read (so I tell myself), end up going unread.

Lo, these many years, I have searched in vain…

July 6, 2025 /

…until now. At long last, I think I’ve found it. The book I read as a kid and could never remember its title.

At first I thought it was The Sleeping Dragon.

Then Quag Keep.

Then The Twilight Realm.

Then Demons Don’t Dream.

But none were right. I remembered the book was about a group of young people sucked into a role-playing game, but with each foray into these old 1970s/80s paperbacks, I grew less and less confident that I would find the right book, the one from my faded and unreliable memories.

I knew it had a blue cover.

I knew it had people from our world transported into a fantasy game.*

I knew it had to be from the late eighties or early nineties because I read it when I was roughly ten or eleven.

And I knew that it had seemed a bit too “old” for me at the time. Like, I remember the choices of the characters and the conflicts making me feel somewhat uncomfortable at times. I don’t know if it was relationship/sex-type stuff, or just moral grayness, but I remember keeping my reading on the QT. Or maybe I was embarrassed by the role-playing aspect, something I wasn’t sure my parents would approve of…

But over the years, as I’ve Googled what I could remember and crawled through message boards and blog posts, I simply couldn’t find the right book.

Honestly, I figured it must have been one of the aforementioned books and my memories were just faulty or making shit up.

And yet… the niggling feeling in the back of brain wouldn’t go away. I still wanted to know… still wanted to find the book…

Reader, I think I’ve found it.

I’m not sure why my morning scroll through Pinterest looking for old Dragon Magazine covers and fairy tale fantasy illustrations made me think of this book again, or my quest to find it, but I decided to do another round of Google searches and see what might come up.

The keywords were the usual: “portal fantasy,” “role-playing game,” “dice magic,” “1980s,” and yet, for whatever reason, this time, I lighted upon an rpg message board where someone had asked a similar question: Looking for a book… kids transported into a game… can’t remember the title… etc.

I scrolled through the thread. Same old, same old. Quag Keep. The Sleeping Dragon.

And then. Could it be this series by Kevin J. Anderson? Gamearth series? Gamearth, Game Play, Game’s End?

As soon as I saw the title, Game Play, it was like a little chink in my stone wall plunked out, and then the whole edifice crumbled.

Game Play.

I looked it up.

Blue cover.

An RPG that comes to life.

Kids from our world.

Came out in 1989. I would’ve been eight. Maybe nine when I encountered it.

And that cover. It gave me the shivers. Familiar and strange. Like deja vu or a memory or a dream.

*Apparently, my memory is a little faulty because I’m not sure the kids from our world go INTO the game, but instead, the game comes to life. But everything else from the book description sounds bang on. Even the names–Melanie, David, Hexworld–sound right.

A memory conjured from a darkened abyss. Hexworld. Game Play. The blue cover.

I have to find a copy now and read it. Anderson has republished the series but with revisions, so I don’t want to read the newer version. I want the old 1989 one. The one from my childhood.

I am almost 100% certain it will not live up to my memory of it. I don’t even think I liked it as a kid, only that it captivated and intrigued me. It felt weirdly forbidden when I was ten (eight? nine?). I know it will not seem so forbidden or “adult” now to the real-adult me, but I don’t care. I have to find a copy and read it.

I think, at long last, I have found the forgotten book. My quest is nearly complete.

Just goes to show what a fantasy novel, even a probably so-so fantasy novel, can mean to a kid.

Inventing the Process

June 28, 2025 /

“Part of the work is figuring out how to work.”

(Kevin Nguyen, from Counter Craft interview, April 8, 2025)

I’m abandoning old ways of thinking and doing. For too long I’ve clung to “identities” (think: Plotter versus Discovery Writer) and methods (“Writing into the Dark”) that are gumming up the works of my actual, functioning brain and the way I process and express my ideas.

I’m not abandoning certain aspects of these methods and identities, but I am abandoning the framework that makes me think in these terms. That framework often works as an inner monologue as I sit down to write, telling me how I should be doing things before I’ve actually started doing them.

Inner Monologue: “If I’m a discovery writer, then I shouldn’t ever make any kind of outline before I start writing. If I follow a writing into the dark methodology, then I shouldn’t ever plan ahead before I start writing.”

And also, the inner monologue has some things to say about speed and word count quotas and all the rest: “To be a real writer, I need to hit a certain word count each day/week/month/year. I need to be more disciplined. I need to apply Butt to Chair.”

On the whole, these inner voices DO reflect something important about my process. I do tend to get bored if I’m writing from an outline, so I prefer to discover as I go. I do tend to write by “cycling” instead of burping shitty words onto the page with the promise that I’ll “go back and fix them” later. I hate “revision” in the traditional way we mean it. It’s tedious, I get confused and frustrated, and in the end, I don’t think the writing is any better. So I like to “revise as I go,” i.e.: cycle through the previous sessions words and tweak or change things.

It’s not that I’m abandoning these techniques and methods.

But I need to abandon the thinking behind them. That I must adhere to a “method” at all. It’s almost like I’ve created an ideology for myself and must fit everything into that ideology. That’s what I need to abandon.

I making this a conscious thing because I’ve started to notice that my creative voice often has A LOT to say, a lot to express, but instead of just letting the words fly upon the page, I start my writing sessions by doing my “method.” I follow the cycling procedure like a ritual at church. And sometimes that cycling procedure IS what my voice wants.

But sometimes it isn’t.

Sometimes I have a line or an image that’s sticking in my brain, and I need to write that first. I need to follow that thread. It might connect to what I wrote yesterday, it might not, it might take me some time to see the connection, it might never connect (meaning it might be for a different story).

I am really good at putting words on the page. I really love putting words on the page. I can write in my notebook and fill three pages often in less than twenty minutes. I can write a paragraph or two in minutes. When I stop worrying or don’t “care” if the words are “important,” then I can write at the drop of a hat. No block whatsoever.

So if I’m good at it and love doing it, why is it so hard for me to put words on the page when it’s time to “write my fiction”?

It’s because I’m trying too hard to follow a method, to fit an identity. I’m looking at what works for others and trying on their shoes, almost in the way a child tries on her parent’s shoes and walks around comically with giant clown feet. I can walk, but it’s awkward. It works until it doesn’t, until I trip on the cat’s tail and fall.

Writing is easy for me. It’s only when I say, “Alright, time to stop fiddling around and write that FICTION,” does my hand freeze up. Because now I’m caught in the methods, in the process I’ve prescribed for myself.

But what if each new time I sit to write I acknowledge that it IS a new time, that what worked yesterday might not work today, and that trying to adhere to something that worked yesterday might be more of a fly trap than a way forward?

The only way forward is, well, forward. To do the work that is in front of me at this moment in time, not the work of yesterday or last week. What worked yesterday might not work today. Part of the work is seeing where my Creative Voice wants to go today. But that means letting go of systems or ideologies about how to do the work.

I’m not arguing against discipline. Or methods or procedures. There’s a great section in Bayles and Orland’s Art and Fear where they talk about Chopin and his Mazurkas as the way he gets his work done. Something about the Mazurka as a form allows Chopin to do his work. It’s an entry-point, a doorway that allows him to enter into his work and get things done. So having those doorways is good. I’ve got a few of them (my writer’s notebook and morning pages, for instance), and they often take me into my work. Cycling does too. Sometimes.

But sometimes the morning pages don’t take me into my work. Sometimes the cycling system fails. And what I’ve been trying to do is conform myself to the system in order to create, instead of saying, “Okay, today the system failed. Now what? Well, I want to write this line about a woman jumping down a manhole to chase a giant worm.”

Instead of pushing that woman and her giant worm to the side, maybe I should roll with it. Ride that worm. Who cares if it’s not part of my “normal” process? Who cares if it’s not part of my current work-in-progress? Maybe it will be. I don’t know. But I’ve been trying to tell my Creative Voice, “No, don’t play over there. Play over here. With these toys,” and that’s looking like a pretty destructive thing to do. Creative Voice sulks and doesn’t play at all.

So which is worse, following a random tangent but still getting words written or trying to follow the system and getting nothing written?

And yet, in saying all this to myself, am I just creating another system?

Yes.

Which means, there may be times when I will force myself to cycle and write the next line, even if the heat isn’t in me at the moment, even if I have visions of subterranean worms riding the sewer waves, even then, I will cycle through and push those words out and tell Creative Voice to be patient, it will get fun again.

Because there is no system. There are many systems and none.

There is each new day at the desk, each new embodiment of myself at that desk, each new moment where maybe I’m a bit hungrier today than I was yesterday, or I’d just read something that stuck in my craw last night, or I had a funky dream, or something came out in my morning pages and I like it and I’m gonna follow its thread, or I don’t feel like typing so I’m going to handwrite a few lines of dialogue, or I’m going to skeleton-scene something that just popped into my head even though I’m not sure I’ll use it in the story…

Each new day means figuring out how to work. Yes, there are systems and Mazurkas to help us, but sometimes they don’t help us and we have to figure out something else. Sometimes we don’t have to “figure” at all; we just have to do. The old Bradburian saying about jumping off the cliff and building one’s wings on the way down.

Each day is a new invention of the self and the work and the process. One system, many systems, no system.

Whatever gets the art out.

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