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!

Rooting

Our month off from lessons is half over.  When I mentioned that fact to the boys yesterday they groaned but I'm looking forward to getting back to it soon.  Due to our weird homeschooling year, they've already completed one 10-week 'quarter', before we took our July break.  I have yet to do my paperwork for the coming year, but that's par for the course-- I always send it in sometime in August.  I don't know why I'm so looking forward to going back to lessons-- because we started back in May, there is nothing new to the work they'll be doing.  For now, I'm happy with all the materials we're using (and beyond happy with History Odyssey, but that's a separate blog entry, or will be soon).  Next year I'm going to look into Discovery K-12, a free online comprehensive curriculum that I just heard about from Ariel, homeschooling mama extraordinaire.

Homeschooling and staying home with babies is like living on a glacier.  Everything is slow, out of step with the rest of the world and their hurry, but at the same time there is constant change and we never return to where we were before.  It's funny to look at my last post from a month ago and see that I was concerned with not giving Snorzy enough enrichment on a daily basis unless I planned for it.  The weeks between then and now have been a kind of a renaissance for him, his language has grown exponentially and he's gotten more clear and firm in his will too-- I could never go a day without reading to him now, when he brings his favorite "boo" to me over & over throughout the day (the favorites evolve every few days, he isn't loyal to one the way Primo was to Dinosaur's Binkit or Radish to both The Pudgy Where is Your Nose? Book and Quack Quack by Claire Henley).  I can't make it through a day without taking him " 'side" either-- he insists on being taken out on the front porch or into the backyard many times each day, aside from any outings we might go on in the car to shop or swim or whatever the day holds.

I drove myself crazy for a week at the beginning of the month, the way I do periodically-- I get too much time on my hands and end up somehow thinking that I can single-handedly solve the whole 'work-life balance' thing that has plagued mothers since the dawn of time.  I nearly convinced myself that it made sense to spend an enormous amount of time and money taking a graduate class that would throw the whole family's schedule into chaos twice a week for the fall semester, and then lead nowhere (it is the only evening class available in that department, so I wouldn't have been able to follow up with any more classes in that field without quitting homeschooling).  Out of the blue, one evening, inspiration hit and by the next day I was over at a local community college, jumping through hoops to register to take an (inexpensive, conveniently placed in the week) night class in writing fiction this fall.  I literally had not written a word of fiction since I was ten years old (a poignant, one-page tale about a bunny, if I remember correctly), so this is scary good fun to look forward to.  In preparation, I've been working through a free online mini course from Open University's OpenLearn portal, called Start Writing Fiction.

I've been spending more time on GoodReads this month than on any other social media, and getting almost depressed by the exposure to all the things that I don't have time to read.  My appetite for books, like my appetite for sweets, makes me feel like life is too short.  If I did nothing each day but read novels and eat cake & cookies, there still wouldn't be time to consume everything that I want.  What's the answer to this?  Is it to have a taste of something exquisite each day, and try not to think about all the rest?