I don't feel like writing. Does that mean I'm not a writer?
from Cary Tennis’s advice column on Slate

I printed this out, because this line in particular really made an impression on me:
“But I have observed that mastery of a craft is personally satisfying, and that failure and frustration are not.”

I have been in a bit of a funk lately, which I mentioned in my last post. Getting advice at third-hand from the Internet seems to have been my only connection to writing recently, and it didn’t feel good. It made me feel like crap.

But I have realized something about myself. Look at my description of myself on my user profile:
“I am a wife, mother, master's student, freelance copyeditor, and aspiring writer.”
I have been doing a shitty job of actually *being* the last three. It is so much easier to just *think* of oneself as something than to actually do it. And I hadn’t exactly realized that was what I was doing. It’s not as simple as it sounds.

Take, for instance, the statement, “I am a master’s student.” Yes, I am enrolled in courses, which I attend. Yes, I think of myself as intelligent. But I must admit that I have not been engaged in my courses. I complained about not knowing what was going on in one of my classes, but that is because I was not putting the necessary work into it. I was doing the bare minimum and expecting to be able to coast on my brains and my ability to read English. I wasn’t actively engaged with the material, and that is why I scraped by. For someone who considers herself to be intelligent, that was a really dumb thing to do.

Same thing with writing. *Thinking* about writing and actually *writing* are two different things. So it will take time. It will take effort. But doing it will be “personally satisfying”, as Mr. Tennis says above.

Now I must work on the paper for my class that I scraped through.

I haven’t managed to sit down and crank out a complete story, but I have been putting words on the page, so that is a start. So far I’ve managed to write more than 5 words *each* on:

my Godred story
my dragon fetishist story
my children’s book (not fantasy)
my Cinderella story

For whatever reason, I have been in a bit of a funk recently. If I manage to write anything, I immediately develop a block/aversion/something that keeps me from progressing. I guess I’m just mental.

And more advice from someone more experienced than I:

Slushmaster (at Realms of Fantasy): „A Reason to Keep Submitting“
The point is, for all you fledgling writers out there, you have to keep submitting. There is a good chance that if you refine your writing skills to a publishable level there will always be that one editor who doesn't get/connect with your stuff, and your stories will be rejected no matter how brilliant they are, and no matter where else you've been published. But, and this is the most important part, one rejection from a market tells you absolutely nothing. You have to keep submitting, over and again. Some of these markets will keep sending you standard rejection letters. It doesn't mean you should stop submitting to these places, but if you've received a dozen standard rejections in a row, now you can safely assume this will be a tough market to crack. Meanwhile, if by your second rejection from a good market the editor is telling you "try us again," well, your chances of cracking this market are obviously better. But you'd never learn this by giving up after one rejection.


And in the comments to the above, someone helpfully linked to the following:
James Van Pelt, from "Perseverance, Publishing and the Urge to Write"
I have never sold a story to the first market that saw it. However, last year I sold a story that had been bounced thirty-one times previously.

Not much to report on writing, just dribs and drabs, but I thought I would pad, ahem, enhance the content here with bits and pieces from other people's blogs. To get you (and myself) thinking, not just to hijack content.

Jay Lake, from his blog post “Goals, Behaviors and the Writer's Mind”
There are so many writers I know who have high minded goals, but don't align their behaviors with those goals. "I'd like to be published by the time I'm [age]." "I'd like to sell this novel." But they don't write consistently, or submit consistently, or seek out paths to improve their work. Almost all of us writers have an astonishing capacity for self-deception, and it gets deployed to great advantage in this arena.

My suggestion is if you feel you aren't achieving your goals as a writer, examine your behaviors. If you want to be published, are you writing consistently? Sending those stories out? If you want to be a novelist, are you working on novels? It doesn't matter what you're goals are, only that you understand them.

Hey, don't knock spending large amounts of time in bed or in the shower (or extra large bathtub). I prefer the bath for creative thinking but you have a point about losing the thread while spending pesky minutes drying off. Fortunately for me, the bath (and the handy shelf next to it) lend themselves to quick jotting of important notes.

I have no time, and lots of urges, to write. Isn't that my luck!

I picked up something I had started writing as a whim between editing my most complete work and threatening to throw it out, and I was surprised at how much I liked it. Oops, I forgot what I had written at the end, but it was definitely some good stuff.

Maybe I need some more bathtime so I can finish it.