Project October 2017: Week Four

Yes, it’s that time of year again when I go on a partial hiatus to do a really intensive month of writing. Normal posts will resume in November but, in the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy an insight into this year’s Project October.

Week Four: Roadblock

I’ve started discussing the idea of my book on motherhood with the people whose stories I want to include. The three sisters I’ve written about previously are all eager to participate and so are many other relatives, friends and friends of friends. My own mother is hesitant though. She’s a very private woman and judges herself and some of the motherhood choices she made harshly – I think she fears others doing the same.

It’s something I hadn’t considered because I’ve gotten to a place in my life where I understand that judgement achieves very little. Instead I try to understand why people make the choices they do and even if I can’t, I don’t try to make them feel bad about them. The internet (particularly social media), however, proves that a lot of other people act differently. Judgement is how they make themselves feel better about their own deficiencies and they indulge freely. I’d hate for a project I have envisioned as a tool for helping mothers to become instead a tool for making their lives even harder.

Also, somewhere in the back of my mind was the idea that this would be an easy book to write because I wouldn’t be doing most of the writing, just helping others to write their stories. But, of course, most of the women I’ve talked to aren’t confident writing, let alone writing something so personal. They don’t know where to start or finish or what to include or to leave out. So they mostly just want to be interviewed and have me write it up. It’s going to be as much, maybe more work than any other book I’ve attempted to write.

And to top it all off, I still haven’t written a single word during this month of Project October. I think the ease with which I wrote my last three books (Project December, Project January and the upcoming Black Spot) has lulled me into a false sense of it being easy all the time. Ridiculous, right?

But it’s an important lesson for all writers that we can’t be afraid to fail. We can’t stick slavishly to plans when they aren’t working out. We have to go where the ideas and the writing take us.