Guest Blogger!
Today, I have a guest blogger, my daughter Brynne, a sophomore at Whitman College, in Washington State. It is through her encouragement that I began writing fiction five years ago. I asked her to blog today about combining writing, which she does as naturally as she breathes, and could no more stop writing than stop breathing, with the rigors of college academics. Welcome, Brynne!
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I’ve been blogging for the last two years about random happenstances in my life—neither as interestingly nor as informatively as my mum—and there I write, you might say, as if no one can see.
I write because that’s what I do. Eight novels have come of it (the quality varies extremely!) but the finished product isn’t really the point. I love sitting down and writing till I just can’t anymore. It’s not the “right” way to go about it, but it’s my favorite part of the process. When it’s midnight and you’ve been on your laptop since nine AM, you just killed someone important, and your characters are going crazy . . . there’s nothing quite like it.
That’s a luxury I can’t afford when I’m at school, because school means eighty pages of readings a day, essays, Spanish translations, discussion prep, research, on and on in a litany of tasks that never really ends. There’s just not enough space in a day to write for even two hours straight. I don’t have to work that way, but once I get in the mode, I WANT to . . . right now 12,500 cut words are calling to me and I need to type a whole new plotline to fill in the spaces. It’s exhilarating . . . but at the moment that method just isn’t going to fly.
Schoolwork isn’t that hard. It’s FUN. As a history major, I get to read fascinating stories AND IT COUNTS AS STUDYING. That’s pretty cool. Even though Augustine gets preachy, I’m delighted to be reading him. And even though my giant project on Edward I’s war with Wales in 1277-1283 (never say I’m not my mother’s daughter!) is daunting, I love seeing the little bits and pieces of people’s stories that weave themselves in.
But I have to learn to write at the in-betweens.
I’m not a scheduler—I don’t have set times when I write. But I do it every day, even when I’m crazy-busy. I go some place where my laptop doesn’t get wireless. I work on my essay. And then I open “Home and Haven” and start typing. I might get one page or six, but I find the time to do it, because it keeps me happy. And then I get back to schoolwork. It’s not my ideal, but when I’m in a period where the ideas are coming, I need to write. Even if it’s only a little bit at a time.
Tags: Writing
February 2nd, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Great post, Brynne! That’s exactly how I wrote in college–just a page or two at a time, but it adds up and the story somehow gets told.