Tuesday, October 25, 2011

The trouble with home...

Is that it's too easy to settle into the same old routines and to never look forward. Home is backward-looking, reminiscing about the past and reliving experiences day after day. As a writer, I feel like this is not a good thing, which is why I hope to move on as soon as possible.

It also doesn't help just being me. I'm a creature of habit, and once I settle into a habit, time goes by without me noticing. It's been a few months since I was laid off from my job as a news reporter/photographer at my local paper, but it feels like barely any time has gone by at all. And what have I done with that time? Nothing. Well, not much. I wrote a little, but mostly wandered around the house in a daze punctuated occasionally by Giada de Laurentiis saying "mozzarella" sexily from my TV and my mom asking what I want for dinner.

Don't get me wrong. Getting laid off from that job was probably one of the best things to happen recently. Again, it comes back to the habit thing. I was miserable there, but it was a good-paying, steady job. I kept telling myself I had to get out, to get on with life, but knowing me, if I hadn't gotten a kick in the butt I probably would have stayed there far longer, complaining and being miserable, but doing nothing about it.

Working there did help my technical writing skills -- for example, I've learned to tighten up my prose quite a bit and not dilly dally with flowery words or overly long-winded introductions -- but it lacked the creativity I thrive on. Sure, I could be witty or clever with my choice of headlines and introductory sentences, but other than that the writing was very standard, very by-the-book. Also, working on a computer that, in the tech world, might as well require carbon dating to assess the age of, and working in an old, drafty, dusty, smelly, leaky building wasn't much fun either.

But it just wasn't me. It was kind of fun getting to tell other people's stories, their real stories, but the limitations on creativity and imagination were too stifling for me. Now, after several months of just kind of wandering about, loafing around and generally being useless, I'm starting to get back on track, I think.

I'm in the process of sending out more applications for MFA Creative Writing programs for next fall. I feel more confident this time around, because I'm applying much more widely, and am really taking a good look at the programs themselves to make sure they're right fits for me. Also, I'm applying much earlier than I had before. Although most programs say they'll consider everyone equally as long as they apply on time, I don't buy it. I have a feeling some of them have a slight bias to applications that come in early. So, hopefully I'll have a better shot this time; not to mention that I'm using fresh (as in new) writing samples.

I'm also signing up to do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) starting in a week. I'm hoping this experience will help me with a couple things: one, to get over my perfectionism and just finish a damn thing instead of revisiting the same chapters over and over; and two, to get my brain juices flowing toward new stuff again. For the longest time, I was just tweaking and rewriting old stuff, but now I am actually going to follow through with one of my other ideas that has never seen the light of day.

I'm pretty excited about this idea. It's basically a family drama set in Victorian era London. It will have elements of romance and mystery, sort of like a weird mixture of Charlotte Bronte and Arthur Conan Doyle. At least, that's how it seems in my mind. I won't go into plot details here. With this one I'm not concerned so much about being totally new or original. I just want to spin a well-written, thought-provoking, page-turning tale. I'm not interested in whether people can pick apart the deep themes or layers of meaning; I just want people to be able to read it, enjoy it, and have their thoughts provoked by it.

I think, above all, with this project I'm trying to go back to a time before my Literary Theory, Advanced Composition and Literature classes to a time when, as a writer, I just wanted to be a storyteller and spin an interesting yarn. So, we'll see if any of this works. But for now, at least, I'm back in the game.