Building a new practice

 October 20, 2020

 

I’ve been trying desperately to resurrect a serious writing practice, and revive one of my manuscripts — the one I feel very passionately about. Neither is going very well. 

 

Forming of the writing habit is being resisted forcefully. Any plan, schedule, structure I build up is sucked away daily like a spider-web by a vacuum cleaner. Things I think would take an hour take twice as much, and I wonder if I have slowed down so much or lost the ability to estimate times for projects. Besides that, phone calls, other emergency tasks, noisy renovations in the flat above, the haze that clogs my nostrils, and the news that just needs to be heard… basically anything, tears down any timetable I build. Last week I had to, just had to, empty, clean and re-organise two of the bookshelves I mainly keep my books on. Though if I am honest, I have to admit that my books have occupied all the bookshelves in the apartment. I don’t know if this is why the spouse only reads ebooks now… hmm…

 

As for the manuscript — like anything one has worked on for a while, three years on and off in this case (ya, a lot of interruption — two deaths in the family, rescuing a feral cat, daughters marriage, ill-health, and surgery) is hard to revise. I just can’t get into a beginner’s mind state, or simply a new reader’s state, and dispassionately look at the work. What exists, the way it exists, has too strong an impression in my body and mind. Other eyes are definitely needed here. Sometimes I almost want to give up and move on to another piece of writing, which would be easier, fresher etc. etc. etc. Yet the pull to complete and put this one out into the world is an obstacle to new thought. Or so it is with me and this book. 

 

I worked longer over my first books. A fantasy with a 35-year-old female protagonist. I have a completed book 1 and a draft for book 2. It was the series I learnt how to write with. It taught me how to create multi-dimensional characters, build plot, conflict, dialogue, write immersive description etc. Each time I got stuck with one of these aspects of novel writing I took a course or read a craft book. So I wrote those books over five years. But when book 1 was rejected about 21 times, often for having a protagonist older than 16 or 18, I was able to move one. The current book, about the devastating impact of therapeutic abuse is more important to me. It is an issue that is not yet being discussed much, and I really want to get the book out. I hope it starts conversations around this problem. Oh Universe, are you listening?

 

I so want to do Nanowrimo and churn out a new draft this year. Despite how my book on therapeutic abuse occupies my mind I have two ideas I might want to explore. Both are about relationship — one explores a manipulative relationship too, but between equals, and the other friends seeking spiritual wholeness but following very different paths, and the clashes between them. Both set within the current political climate of India. Neither seems to be a book length idea though, so I don’t know. I am running out of time to finish the prep to start nano. 

 

I had a conversation with a writing coach and talked about these two pulls — to keep working on the current manuscript till it finds a way out and pottering with new ideas. She suggested I do both and I liked that. I decided to start my writing day (two days a week right now) with the revision and in the afternoon have fun with new ideas. Somehow it hasn’t worked. I seem to like binging on one thing, but also feel guilty just faffing with new ideas unless I have some ‘actual work’ done first, and sometimes I struggle to find ways to work on the revision. So I do nothing. 

 

The coach also suggested I tie my practice with my already present, fairly disciplined, karate training. She thought that an existing, focused and regular, practice would help built the new. Well, all it has done so far is mess up my karate practice. 

 

A week or two ago a friend posted a stairway on FB. Each step had a person with a different level of determination, or lack of, for a task. I was on step 3. I want to do it but… New habits are hard to form, I guess. I need to keep going one step up at a time — though my personality is more the kind to speed up the stairs, yet age related slowing makes me the tortoise in this race with myself.