Keeping the Writing Going Part-Time*

Like many who write and work full time, I suppose, I try to keep a regular schedule so that the writing I am doing stays alive to me and doesn’t go stale. I’ve also found it beneficial to be flexible. When I’m stuck on one work–the novel–I can turn to work on the memoir. And there are other times when working on my ideas as poems helps as well.

As for the memoir, some friends expressed to me that they expect a “self-help” treatment to guide to help others. I know that self-help writing is popular. The trouble is that I am writing to honor my son and to engage in the ideas concerned with surviving suicide. I am no expert and don’t really think that self-help advice actually works for people facing the loss of a loved one to suicide. I can’t guide others. I can’t make others “feel better about their situation.” There really is no silver lining to any of this, nothing to feel better about, except for the small adjustments to the new “norm.” I can clearly empathize with others, say that I hear what they are grieving about. I can sit with them and grieve with them. And I can write about what I’ve been through. I’ve been reading many grief accounts and found them comforting and helpful, and hearing others who have faced this has been a help to me. But the only help I can offer is to say, “This is what happens, this is how it feels, and it will feel this way for a long time. But you will laugh again. You will also cry again. You will have days of forgetting your loss. And the opposite.”

And, as I noted, progress continues on Radio Eden. I hit something of a road block before break, and then set it aside. And then I had some breakthroughs in terms of the plot and structure of the work. I found the same thing happening with my first novel. So I’ve learned to make the road blocks and the part time writing schedule work for me. It never moves as fast as I’d like it to. But that is part of the adjustment. Many people who have regular projects they work on often note that they get ideas even while away from their work. This is the case for me as long as I keep my hand in the work, returning to it every other day or so, even if it is only to rewrite a few sentences or add a paragraph. To give myself a feeling of confidence that I am moving forward, I remind myself that the word count continues to increase. The memoir stands at 14,000 words (I am aiming for about 40,000); the novel stands at about 39,000 (I aim for 70,000). This objective sense of forward movement is always enhanced when I get new breakthroughs with the material.

The trick is, however, that the breakthroughs come after work. So I keep working.

(*This segment is from the January installment of my monthly newsletter. If you would like to subscribe to my newsletter, please use the form in the sidebar on this page. I promise to send out news only once a month.)