Four Questions on Writing

I was thrilled to be tagged by Darwin and Mrs. Darwin to answer some questions about writing as part of the blog tour (you can read more about it here), because it makes me feel like a real blogger!  At the same time, I feel guilty because my bursts of writing are so far and few between.  One commenter remarks on this post about writing that she feels like "the writer who no longer writes"--and I go through intense bouts of that, as I explain here.  Nevertheless, I am on an upswing!  Thinking about writing and posting a thing or two.  So here goes!

1. What are you working on?

Blogs: I have, at this point, three blogs that I post to occasionally--this one, which is my "Booknotes" blog, my Teaching, Training, Blogging blog, on which I try to post insights into teaching that I gain from working as a (relictant) trainer, and my sewing blog, on which I try to document sewing projects and pattern reviews.  I started a blog to record last year's NaNoWriMo efforts, and I have the blog that started it all, Words, Words, which was an everything blog, before I decided that each of my split personalities needed her own internet space.  Mostly I post to this one--Booknotes from Literacy-chic.

Articles: In addition to blogging, I have, like Damocles' sword, two articles that I would like to write--one on where the Hunger Games novels fit in the history of dystopian discourses on literacy, and one that discusses the purpose and pedagogy behind what I call "notable moments" posts.  The former, on the Hunger Games, has (I believe) been more or less accepted as part of a proposed collection on dystopia.  The latter would be an extension of the paper idea that I proposed to a conference that I did not attend (I backed out), and I would have to write it by June 1.  I have only just decided to take it seriously.  

Fiction: Hanging by a slightly more substantial horsehair is the novel that I have been working on for two NaNoWriMos now... which is completely illegal by NaNo standards (writing the same novel twice).  I am very attached at this point to the scenario and the characters, but the two efforts, the latter chronicled here, are very different.  The scenario comes from a motif in Celtic songs--particularly "Broken Token," "So Early in the Spring," and various versions of "Step it Out Mary"--in which the young man and woman are in love, and he leaves her behind for a time to seek his fortune.  As the song progresses, there are a few different scenarios.  In "Broken Token," he returns and tests her loyalty.  In "So Early in the Spring," he returns, but cannot find her, then learns from her father that she is married.  In other songs that tell a similar story, we learn why she may have married in the previous scenario:  the father has arranged a match for her, and in "Step it Out Mary," unable to sway her father with her protests, she "drowned with her soldier boy." (Why the soldier drowned with her instead of taking her away, I'm not sure...)  It was "Broken Token" that gave me the idea, though the song is particularly moving to me--what if, after he went away, the entire world changed?  What if a catastrophic event happened in their village--if they were conquored and enslaved--and she had to adapt, or die?  When he returned, would they still love each other?  Would it truly work, when each had changed according to their own separate experiences? I guess I felt like it was a little unfair for her to be expected to wait... as well as unrealistic.  My novel will one day treat that scenario.  I started first from their reunion--and she is pregnant.  Oh, and a sniper.  My second attempt started from just before their parting, as a glimpse into what will be lost.  Perhaps in November we will see what the third try will yield?  But lately I've been thinking of revisiting my second try on the blog.

2. What makes your work different from others' work in the same genre?

Blogging: As far as I know, most bloggers do not compartmentalize the way I have done, but every now and then I come across one who has different pages for different interests.  I like the separate spaces, but having separate spaces makes it seem like I'm writing less over all, and it's a lot harder to write for an audience, which I'm not sure I'm doing anyway.  I would like an audience, and I have friends who visit, but I guess the main difference between my blogging and other blogs is that I'm not consciously joining a community by writing about certain things in certain ways or contributing to a larger conversation.  It's not because I don't want to; I guess that's not really where I am right now--or I haven't figured out who wants to hear what I have to say.

Book Blogging: My book blogging is different from other book blogs because I don't like to give overviews and reviews.  I have reviewed a few books along the way, but mostly to get what I have to say out of my head, not to recommend the book to other, like-minded readers, or to support a favorite author.  When I write them, my reviews are fairly critical, and they are usually the advice I would give to writers who have good ideas and a lot of promise, whom I (in the arrogance of my academic training) think could be doing better than they are.  One reason for keeping up with the Booknotes blog is to keep my analytical skills sharp and to collect ideas for scholarship, if I ever motivate myself to return to scholarship.  But if I'm being truthful, I would ideally like to share my readings with people who might not have seen what I see.  I'm pointing out the things in the books that I would have pointed out to students in the classroom.  I'm starting the discussion that I would start with a nonexistant book group.

My method is to blog what I call "notable moments."  I asked students to do this throughout my teaching apprenticeship (because truly, it was never a "career")--to write a short analysis of a moment in a novel that interested them, and explain what it was that they found so fascinating.  These can be more or less personal, but ideally would get the students to pay attention while reading, to make note of what they responded to, and to look a little bit closer at a scene or paragraph before trying to understand the work as a whole.  The last time I taught an upper-level (college) literature class, I had students keep blogs that would document their reading process. The "notable moment" became more developed in that class, and really enriched our class conversations.  Now I blog notable moments myself!  It's not something I see too many people doing on blogs, and it really works better on the second or third read of a book.

Fiction: What makes my fiction attempts different is that I seem to want to write Young Adultish fiction scenarios, with a little bit of sex or grittiness that pushes it out of what I think is okay for YA (but is still present in YA), with more mature relationships and 20-something characters.  So I seem to write a novel that is not quite adult fiction, but is not quite YA, though it resembles YA a bit more than any adult genres.

3. Why do you write what you do?

As I say on my blog profile, "I am a compulsive writer in search of a subject."  I have written as long as I can remember, though I have never written a journal or diary because I felt foolish writing to myself, or because I didn't quite know how to write a genre that was, by definition, private.  I wrote silly things and wound up destroying them from embarrassment.  The same fate befell most of my poetry from high school--though the undergraduate poetry stuck around.

I blog notable moments because they're how I read--they get stuck in my head and I just need to say something about them.  I also think they're a good mode for blogs, and a great research and pedagogical tool.  But mostly, it's how I read.  And I fear to lose the ideas I have when I'm reading, because they will most likely not become articles or research papers now.  So I blog them.

I blog on my Teaching, Training, Blogging blog in order to reflect on my current job and think about how I can apply those ideas to teaching if I ever get back there.

I blog on my sewing blog because sewing blogs are cool, and I want to be one of those people who sew things and write about them.

As for fiction... When I was in high school, I wrote some fiction, but mostly drama and poetry.  Only the poetry really came naturally to me, and I produced a fair amount of poetry as an undergraduate, some of it good.  Being happily married with children whom I like doesn't lend itself as well to poetry as I might like, but I guess I'm okay with the tradeoff!  I read more fiction than poetry now, as I did when I was younger, but I've never felt like I was particularly good at writing it.  I have a hard time with plot, in particular.  I'm writing this novel because I participated in NaNoWriMo 2011 with Mrs. Darwin, and I loved it.  I loved the creative energy, and the sense of actually having produced something original--a story.  I think I did a marginally better job than some published writers, and I would love to do something with that story (titled "The Merman's Daughter") some day.  I would also like to continue writing the story that I started in 2012 and started again in 2013--the one about the estranged lovers.  There's something I need to say about love and friendship and sex and commitment and memory and pain.  At least, I think that's it.

4. How does your writing process work?

I have never managed a writing discipline.  Even when I was writing my dissertation, and I was told to write SOMETHING every day, I couldn't.  Or didn't.  I'm thinking of Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow... recollected in tranquility."  My writing process looks something like that, even if it's not terribly emotional.  Rather, I write the thoughts that don't want to stay contained in my head.  The things that I turn over and over and seem to be too large for thought alone.  When I've thought it out to a certain point, I fear losing nuances, and so I write.

Although I am a night person by nature, and I still write on the weekend, one of the impediments to my writing is work--specifically, working a 40 hour week.  When I get up early to be at work, say 6:30, I can't stay up late and write.  If I get up after 9, I can write late.  During the week, even if I feel creative, I don't have the energy after 10 P.M.  But since I am awake earlier, I actually find that my creative energy occurs earlier in the day.  So I want to write in the morning.  Preferably before I get any real work done.  However, I am at work, and I really shouldn't.  It's quite a problem.

When I read on my Kindle, I usually make note of a passage I would like to write about and then go to the computer when I'm ready and use the desktop Kindle software to copy and paste the passage(s) into separate blog posts, often titling them according to the idea I have about the passage and maybe typing a few notes to remind myself what I'd like to say.  Sometimes, they end up as full blog posts.  Sometimes not.  I have about 20 posts queued up related to the Outlander series that I never actually completed, and one or two about the Hunger Games trilogy--not entirely satisfactory, but not completely lost, either.  When I'm reading a paper book, I do something similar, though I don't always type the whole passage before I start.  Sometimes I do, though.  I like titles, and I do usually think in titles as a starting point!

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Melanie from Wine Dark Sea, how do you write?  I would also love to know about my favorite craft blogger's writing process--LiEr from IkatBag.