I’m not writing enough.
There, I said it. Admitting that you aren’t writing enough when you’d like to honestly be able to call yourself “a writer” is a bit embarrassing for as my friend Sal once told me “It doesn’t matter if you get paid. Writers write. Period.” I try not to argue with Sal when she explicitly vocalizes punctuation. I like having all my fingers and toes.
Point is, I’ve been trying to find ways to write more, to take Julia Cameron’s advice and not make writing such a big deal. It’s a hard thing to do when you function well (OK, when you function highly efficiently…could someone please throw some hand grenades at me for the rest of my life? Thanks.) under deadline pressure. It’s one of the reasons why I find the structure of NaNoWriMo so comforting: there’s a schedule and a deadline and it’s clear and measurable.
And since my problem is finding time – this is what happens when you get involved in community politics – and since Cameron’s advice is to fit the writing in where it fits, I’ve started with a book called Fast Fiction: Creating Fiction In Five Minutes.
If I can’t find five minutes a day to write I figure I’m not a writer.
I’d started posting some of those exercises here but the more I thought about it the more I thought that my fiction, both the limited number of recent examples and pieces from my library, deserved a home of its own. So, I gave it one at Fiction That Comes Unbidden. Check it out; let me know what you think.