I fell short on almost all of my goals for the month of February, but oddly, I don’t feel that upset about it. I’ve sort of realized that this past several months have been hard because, really, I’m in a transitional period in my life: the transition from being an MFA student, who is allowed – hell, even expected – to care more about her creative writing than, say, her teaching, to being a person with an MFA, who teaches adjunct for a pittance, who has to wallow at the bottom for a few years before she might actually be able to land a decent full time job, and who has to be the best goddamned teacher she can in the hopes of one day procuring said decent full time job.
But I can’t let the transition period get the better of me. See, this is what I’d heard so much about when I was in grad school – recent grads who just stopped writing altogether after they finished – and I always swore that it would never be me. Switching my goals (for the meantime) from time based to project based has helped a little, but I think I also need to make a go at the fabled get-up-early-and-write-before-work idea.
Right now on the days that I actually have to go to campus, I get up half an hour early so I can sip my coffee and read and let myself slowly enter into the day. I don’t really want to give that up because I think it sets a good tone for my day, but I could certainly add another half hour so that I can read for half an hour, then write for half an hour, then get ready for work. It may be difficult to adjust to at first, but I really would rather spend that time writing than sleeping. I love sleep, make no mistake, but I love writing more.
So part of my goal for the month of March is just to see if I can always get up a half hour earlier on the days that I teach so I can get some writing done before I go in. Now I don’t really think that half an hour of writing time will be the most productive writing time – I do my best work when I have a stretch of two or three hours to really have at it – but I think that writing for a little bit in the morning will encourage me to write later in the day, too, and it will encourage me to write on the days when I don’t have to go in, when I can shift my schedule around and write for a few hours straight without interruption. I also think, just on a psychological level, it will set a good tone for my day, remind me what life is all about, let me feel like I’m still able to do the things that matter to me even though teaching takes up so much of my time.
In addition, I think that I need to stop spreading myself thin between different projects. I’ve been working on a new novel, revisions of a children’s book, and revisions of short stories for a short story collection (though that last one I haven’t been as interested in of late). Usually I like having several projects to choose from, but lately I’ve found that when I sit down to write, I sit and ponder which of the many options I should work on and end up feeling detached from all of them. I’ve heard it argued that writer’s block is just a fancy way of saying you have too many ideas and can’t decide which one to work on, and I think, at least in my case, that it’s definitely true. Since I’m almost done with the current draft of my children’s book, and since I’ve actually been working on this book for about ten years now and feel that this current draft may actually be, if not the final draft, at least damn close, I’m going to first try to get this draft finished. Then, and only then, I’ll return to the second draft of my current novel.
March goals:
- Finish children’s book
- Submit to 10 journals
- Query 5 agents
