Thursday, August 16, 2012

Tonight I will start, really...


   Tonight I will continue work on my novel. But first I need to make dinner. After dinner I will continue working on my novel. But my husband puts on Pinocchio, and thats really cute of him. So after I watch the beginning, I will start working on my novel. Tony quickly shuts it off, giving me that knowing stare. I leave to go to the bathroom.
    As I get there, to the bathroom, I walk past a purposely positioned framed quote by J.R.R. Tolkien. My eyes catch the great, big, red letters.

    “It is the job never started that takes longest to finish.”

    I sigh. It's not that I don't want to write, writing is etched into my very being. When I am free to let my fingers go my world vibrates into a shiny, happy place. It's intoxicating. It's beautiful. It's scary. My ribcage open, heart out, my blood oozing all over the place. What if all I have inside is just garbage? That fear paralyzes me. I know that I should be satisfied just being able to express my art, but who doesn't want their work to be loved by someone else? This is why a writing community comes in handy. I need to constantly be reminded that ninety percent of what we write will be garbage. Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones has admitted that she has notebooks upon notebooks of garbage. Only by writing constantly can we get to that golden ten percent. We all have barriers. Some are full time jobs and babies, while others are emotional. My first novel writing professor, Laraine Herring, said that writing not only took bravery but also routine. A writer has to get into a habit and we have to push ourselves. It's like going to the gym. It takes time to get into a groove and if I stop, even for a day, it takes awhile to get back into it again. It's like that for writing and if you slip, well, there is no reason to get mad at yourself. Just fight that battle tomorrow and keep going because of what it means to you. A faculty member at Hamline told me that he has heard so many good ideas but so many of those ideas never come into existence. If you sit, write, and finish a work, then you are that much more ahead of all those other people. But you have to start in order to finish.


2 comments:

  1. You got that right. When I fall off the wagon I would rather sit in the road and watch it trundle away instead of getting up, catching up to it, and climbing aboard again.

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  2. LOVE this post, Nina! Welcome aboard!

    Write on,

    Mell

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