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Having Nice Things Means Giving Myself Permission

While I'm awaiting a reply from the writer's colony, I realized that committing to membership in effect gave me permission to have a nice thing that spawns other nice things. It's as if a blindfold fell from my eyes: the idea that I have to wait to solve all my getting-along-with-the-world problems firstly and finally to earn the right to write.

Well, like that's gonna happen!

I realized, quite abruptly, that:
  • I can now imagine going off to Colony House some weekend in the future--or even midweek--especially during the bad weather months.
  • I realized--do'h!--I don't have to start from a blank page. I can imagine the room: probably a plain dorm room, maybe shared? Negotiating things like putting up butcher block paper for a day's brainstorming exercise with crayons, but also taking with me my finished stories, half-baked ideas, problems, and anything I'm chewing over. Reading them a week before I go, putting them on the psychic back-burner, and giving myself a day to adjust to the idea that OMG I did this, I really did, now what? And having an option about what to do, such that anything I do serves my purpose.
  • I see that it's OK not to be able to write effectively at home, because of the pressure to focus on the getting-along-with-the-world problems and the interrupts; there isn't enough quiet, and if both husband and I are simultaneously unemployed, the atmosphere will be...tense. I might not even get to Colony House for months and months. That's still not a failure.
  • I can hold some writers as a model: wasn't it Dylan Thomas who worked in insurance by day, and wrote at night? Have to wonder if he was married, too. Hard to write without, not just a room of one's own, but a time of one's own, in fact, being "out" of the accounting for time that just happens because I'm living with someone else.
  • I can even spend the time looking at how my most-loved readings are put together. How do Scandinavian writers succeed at making the weather a character without anthropomorphizing it? How does the best crime fiction create full characters in the grip of their problems, not just cardboard cutouts of a DSM diagnosis? How does a writer I admire, but don't really like--Joyce Carol Oates--create interesting novels without relying on crime? What's the difference between an essayist and a short story writer, and how much does it matter to me being one or the other?
Perhaps the most important idea I need to remember is that the experience does not have to result in finished work; that I'm not limited to the idea of staying at the house, but can just go to events or conferences. That my pastels teacher from long ago was right about so many things when she said, "The desire to create art is also development."

Why does the obvious amaze me so?

The very best thing I can do for that is to create the discipline to set myself up to create art, and the permission to screw it up, over and over, on the way to collecting rejection slips, over and over, until I learn something. Forswear being "good" for being productive, because ultimately, deliberate practice will make me good, if I trust my own wings. Let my ideas limp around like gimpy old dogs, until they recall that once they were wolves, and can be wolves again.

What normally happens now is that having written all these hopeful words, I'll have a crash in about 38-72 hours and my inner demons will mock these fine sentiments. The challenge then will be to turn that conversation into something useful by using what I now know about Deathcake to start building a character, or two. Tease a character out of the ghosts of my thoughts, and set him or her into motion along a narrative path.

And read the best I can find, until the language soaks in and editorial review has something to work with. Which means finding a writing group to read to. That challenge I failed once, but I think I could handle it better now.

Or at least learn something new.

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Aspergirl4hire
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