Dear Reader(s),
I’m sitting in the Writer’s Collaborative Learning Center in Reading on a brisk Monday evening. It’s not my usual writing night, but I needed to get out of the house to focus; there’s so much to do. I mean, there’s always so much to do, but it’s the start of a new year, and so the list is extra long.
Yes, resolutions are silly. Yes, it’s ridiculous to join a gym or start a diet in January. Yes, most of these efforts fail. But there is an unmistakable energy and enthusiasm that comes with a fresh start, and doesn’t it seem foolish to waste it? If your car runs out of gas atop a hill, do you just bemoan your lack of planning and discipline and lie down on the grass to die, confident that your inability to maintain a motor vehicle now will inevitably result in your inability to maintain a motor vehicle at all times? Or do you take advantage of some free momentum?
I mean, you probably will get stuck at the bottom of the hill. It’s more likely than not; you can’t coast forever. But maybe there’s a gas station. Or a good samaritan.
Or maybe it’s a really big hill.
I am thinking tonight of several key projects, and I am thinking about my approach to the work, and I am thinking about how I’m going to get all of this stuff done, and the answer is that I won’t, unless I’m a little strategic in how I prioritize. Here are some thoughts in the format of my very business-centric day job, the eternally indispensable bullet-point list:
- I have finally gotten around to reading (starting to read) Anne Lamott’s excellent Bird by Bird, which is fundamentally a book on writing.
- The book reminds me that wanting to write and wanting to be published are two different things, and that being published doesn’t suddenly fix all your problems. It’s just a thing.
- In order to be published, you have to write. You have to write a lot. Also, you have to write well.
- I started doing this blog to force myself to to write a lot, and it has accomplished this. However, I have not spent as much time forcing myself to write well. We will come back to this.
- The book suggests that plot ought to be driven by character and not the other way around. This is troubling, because I’m all about cool plots and twists and situations and world building and architecture and space explosions and detailed descriptions of ponds. I am not all that good with people—understanding them, tolerating them, but also, creating characters who act based on their own characteristics and not simply because they are thinly-veiled versions of myself.
- This is a serious weakness that I’ll need to address if I’m going to get anywhere.
- Additionally, Lamott suggests that most writers struggle with their work and that no amount of practice or muscle memory grants an author the ability to simply sit down and bang out a best-seller with minimal effort and even less editing. Good things take time and take work; victory is not guaranteed. It’s not like, I don’t know, a Ferrari going up against a Toyota. Or maybe it is; the Ferrari is finicky and needs lots of attention to get moving and keep moving and shift and drive straight without spinning out into a ditch, and while it will definitely outpace the Toyota, there’s more to it than that. Otherwise, everybody would just buy a Ferrari, and I see a lot more Highlanders in the Market Basket parking lot than Testarossas.
So where does that leave us?
I am continuing to work on those few projects that are separate from this blog, that (continue to) need focus, and lots of it. But I think that these other focus areas make it easier for me to treat January River like what it started as: a place to play around with “art stuff”. So that’s what it will remain, with maybe a little bit of a pivot: namely, you may see stuff on here that is more experimental, more “work in progress”, more “rough draft”, more “behind the scenes”. I’m not even sure that I’ll be consistent with the scheduling of commentary one week, content the next, and so forth…writing this commentary often takes a lot longer than just creating a neat drawing or a 4-line poem or even just sharing an excerpt of something I’m working on. I’m learning new things; I’m trying stuff; I’m stretching my brain. You’ll get to see some of it.
I don’t plan to stop doing Tuesday updates, is what I’m saying, just that they may be less polished. I hope they won’t be any less interesting.
This turned into a bit of a ramble, didn’t it? I’ll leave it here, as an example of what happens when you don’t edit a first draft.
Happy New Year!
—jr
P.S. I did a quick edit. I’m not a complete monster.
