After thirty days of writing poetry in April and thirty-one day of writing short stories in May, I find myself feeling thematically hooked on doing a late-night exercise of some sort and posting it to a blog. I don't want to self-promote this writing, particularly, but I do want to do it and I do want to share it. I'm not sure why, beyond the fact that there's something very powerful and self-affirming about putting your writing out into the world.
I learned a few lessons about the writing I did in April and in May, especially in May. To summarize:
1. Nightly check-ins with a set questionnaire are a pain in the neck. I disliked doing them, and dropped that piece of the May project after about two days. I realized that a check-in wasn't helping me write better. Instead, it was making me feel anxious and was taking up a lot of time. That experience tells me something about how self-assessments might feel for the students that I teach. Perhaps a check-in every three or four weeks makes sense. Every night or every week definitely does not.
2. Sticking to a single theme for an entire month also didn't work for me. I started off writing scenes related to my book-in-progress, then began to feel uncomfortable sharing these scenes publicly because they really were not stories in and of themselves but scenes that were meant to fit together in a larger work. I think I wrote some good scenes that will work well in the larger work, but I realized that I couldn't complete them in a single "throw-down-some-words" hour or two with the page.
After I dropped the idea of writing scenes related to my book project, I tried concentrating on themes that I think I would like to generate into books eventually such as the joys and challenges of teaching historical events live from the event itself and the adventures of my husband and myself in backyard gardening. The latter theme particularly resulted in several successful stories, but even that was a theme I couldn't sustain for more than a few days at a time. This experience also was quite instructive in how I teach writing and storytelling to students. Students in one of my classes -- Digital Storytelling -- maintain a story blog for a full semester. They're supposed to decide and then announce to the rest of the class early in the term what the blog is going is to be about. Many of them struggle with the assignment and lose their enthusiasm for blogging after making one or two posts. One thought is that one cannot really know what a blog is going to be about until one gets deep into the process of blogging itself. To that end, I was thrilled to find a different kind of challenge to take on for June. Developed by bloggers at Wordpress, it's called "Post Every Day", and includes a prompt for one to follow if you have no inspiration of your own. Since April 1, I have managed to write a minimum of 750 words each day, and to create a work of writing on 60 of the 61 days in April and May. So I figured that perhaps it might be time to see if I can blog every day, either on this site or on the Moving Your Body site. If it works, I might continue it through July, August, and beyond.
I might invite my Digital Storytelling students to try out the idea, as well.
3. The third insight that I gained from the April and May daily challenges is perhaps the most significant. I would articulate it as learning to trust my voice and giving myself permission to let some writing that is rough around the edges be made available via blog posts and Facebook status updates to a universe greater than me, my notebook, and my laptop. Most of the writing that I did for the challenges was done between 10 p.m. and midnight, at the end of my day. I simply couldn't make the space to do it any earlier in the day. As the weeks advanced, I also found myself realizing that I did not want to do it earlier. I liked the nightly ritual of settling down with a cup of tea or a glass of seltzer water and letting a story pour out. I felt as if the end-of-the-day routine liberated me from demands to polish, check facts, or ground assertions I was making in research. These habits, of course, are good and important habits, and they are ones that I practice diligently as I am working on more polished drafts. But they can stifle and inhibit a writer's voice from coming out, if they are allowed precedence over the quick-and-dirty, no-holds-barred first draft expression of the voice.
I hope to revise many of the writings I created in April and May, and already have submitted some of the poems I created for a possible reading this summer. It may take several years before all of this work is either revised or discarded, but that's the beauty of giving yourself freedom to create really bad first drafts. The drafts often aren't as bad as the writer thinks they are, and undoubtedly, they're also not as good. But it really helps to put them down, share them with a public, and receive feedback.
This is where I will conclude for now. Today's prompt from The Daily Post was to write about something ugly while also finding beauty or hope in one's thoughts. The ugly and the beauty, and, of course, the hope lie in the freedom to write first drafts.
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