I've been interested in writing for as long as I can remember. Even in grade 5, my teachers would groan when creative writing assignments would be due and I'd hand them a half full exercise book as opposed to the 1-2 page efforts submitted by my classmates. In high school I'd write my stories in larger exercise books and after I'd finished each chapter, would pass them around to my friends, who would read it and then give it back the following week, along with feedback and demands for me to hurry up and write the next bit.
After high school, I did a diploma in writing and editing, which I thoroughly enjoyed. My favourite classes were the creative writing workshops. Being able to get feedback (regardless of whether it was positive or negative) from other people who actually knew about writing was encouraging and helped me grow as a writer. After I finished that course, I swapped into a degree in Information Technology, and though I still fiddled with writing occasionally, I didn't write as often as I used to (though in the final year of my undergraduate, I did come up with the idea for my current WIP (a fantasy novella whose current title is taken from lyrics to a song that inspired the story, which means I'll need to change it at some point to avoid legal/copyright headaches; the initials of the title are DASW), which I worked on solidly for a few years, resulting in about 22,000 words of the story being written). Once I started my PhD, my writing slowed to a trickle and then eventually stopped altogether as I became too busy and burnt out from academia to do anything more creative than doodling on the notepads in my retail job.
Having finally submitted my thesis earlier this year, I've been trying to get back into writing, with the goal of actually finishing my WIP. So far it's been a colossal struggle; all I've managed is to open my outline or manuscript, stare at it blankly for a few hours and then close it again. It's a bit like picking up a video game you were halfway through when you haven't played it for several years; you can't remember what you were doing, so you don't know what you're supposed to do next. It also seems like all the writing communities I used to be active in back in the day have died; there was a hashtag on the birdsite called "ROW80" where people would see how many words they could write in stretches of 80 days, and while the hashtag used to act as a watercooler for writer folks to gather around, it mostly seems to have died off; in the last few years there are only a handful of posts with the hashtag, and they're pretty much all just links to blog posts rather than actual conversations. I used to also join in NaNoWriMo each November and briefly considered starting that again, but noped out of there quicksmart when I saw how problematic they had become (or maybe always were). I've tried finding other writing communities on emerging social media sites, but the ones I've come across either seem cliquey or like everyone is just shouting into the void without really engaging with one another.
Not having a group of other writers to engage with has made it a little harder for me to get back into writing, I think. That feeling of needing to 'update' other folks with my writing progress helped me to actually make progress, as it put pressure on me to write regularly so I would have something to write about in my blog posts. With that gone, I've decided to start writing this blog; even if no one reads it, I'm hoping that having something to post updates on will give me some incentive to start writing again and keep writing.
DASW Word Count: 22,131
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