10 Ways to Procrastinate Writing Fiction

#1.  Resurrect a lapsed blog.

As I told you last summer, I signed up for a Writing Fiction class at my local community college, rather than deciding what kind of graduate degree I want to pursue.  I was very excited.  And as you know if you've been reading me, to get warmed up and make sure I didn't embarrass myself in class, over the summer I did a free online course through Open University called Start Writing Fiction.  I was concerned because I had never written a story before, not since I was a tiny little girl and wrote only a few sentences.  Class started in late August, a little while after I wrote my last post for this blog. 
At first I was really inspired, I had a bunch of ideas (mostly hare-brained) for short stories.  I wrote one of them over the course of a number of weeks, but it turned out sounding stiff and bloodless.  It was about a middle-aged character having a very quiet sort of experience.  Even though the class I'm taking is at a community college and meets in the evening, I am the only 'adult learner' in there, the rest of them look to be 18-19 years old.  I wanted to write something that they would like, since we have to read our stories aloud and have the class critique them.  I scrapped my first story at the last minute (one week before my first 'workshop') and wrote another, a YA short story about teenage Wiccans.  My classmates ate it up, although they misunderstood the story somewhat.
Once I survived my first workshop, I found to my dismay that all my ideas and inspiration had dried up, and I didn't know what to write.  I tried writing another story, and started it twice but both times it sounded stiff and contrived.
Meanwhile, Ariel had told me about the Young Writer's Program part of NaNoWriMo , and I helped Primo sign up.  He got really excited about it, and started writing character bios and story ideas.  Soon his friends were signed up too, and even Radish asked me to help him make an account.  I decided to sign myself up for the regular adult version of NaNo, the 50,000 word write-a-novel-in-a-month challenge.  I figured there was no way I'd make it to 50K, but writing toward that goal would give me something meaty to bring to my second (and final) workshop for class.  The professor seems to prefer unfinished 'first chapter of my novel' pieces over finished short stories, and the class, too, criticizes those less.  Anyway, I took my most substantial idea and wrote an outline, put it aside until November 1st.
Today.  I tried, this morning, to write from that outline, and the result was the poorest, most bloodless writing that I've done so far.  I think I might scrap the whole idea and write 'by the seat of my pants' in a genre, rather than straight real-world fiction.

But for this evening, I'm finding lots of other things somehow more pressing or interesting than getting to work on writing fiction.  There's this poor, neglected blog, for instance.  How could I let it languish for one more day? :)  Also, there's:

#2.  File away the kids' homeschool work in their notebooks.

#3.  Make a cup of tea, and some toast with jam to go along with it.

#4.  Hmm, laundry.  No reason to let it sit, just because it's Saturday night!

#5.  Christmas shopping!  Online, natch...

#6.  Email.  Oh, so urgent, these messages, must read right now...

#7.  Get ahead on tomorrow's chores: plan meals for the week, write lessons for the week (including all-new 'Baby Lessons'! more on that in my next post!)

#8.  Read-- if I can't write fiction today, I can still immerse myself in it.  Specifically, a terrific book by Octavia Butler, Wild Seed.  It's so interesting to read this book after reading about it and reading the first paragraphs, broken down, in Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy.  I'm having one of my reading crises again-- I've stacked myself up with too many things to read, trying to find inspiration.  I have an old favorite, Orson Scott Card's Maps in a Mirror out from the library for over a week, but untouched.  And a fun, YA collection of short holiday stories called My True Love Gave to Me.  Then there's the short story collection (Best American Short Stories 2014) that I don't have to read for class, but I feel like I should anyway (it was the 2013 edition that was mandatory for class, but I finished that).  And the boys have several things out from the library that I want to read, and I have a few more on my NOOK, and don't get me started on magazines and non-fiction (I have three or four books about helping your homeschooler get into college which I haven't started yet).

#9.  TV- and this one is ridiculous, because we only have the most basic cable and on a Saturday night there is *nothing on*, not until SNL and that's hours away. 

#10.  Make a list of some kind.  Oh.  Check. 

I guess I'll be mad at myself tomorrow if I don't at least make an attempt to write something worth continuing (the 150 words I put down this morning is not it).  But first, I hear Snorzy talking upstairs, more than an hour after I put him down in his crib.  A few more minutes before I have to face the blank page!