Movement

Steps forward, no matter how small, still move us forward.

February has been a month of transformation. I’m still getting myself closer to being a substitute teacher. I have a few more things I have to complete before I can actually get into the classroom, but even these small things get me closer. Last week I was at Rockaway Beach from Tuesday through Saturday. My friend and I were only supposed to be there until Thursday, but Wednesday night winter decided to dump a good six inches of snow on the coast, and we were snowed in. While we were there, I completed the training required to complete my sponsorship for my license. It was intense, but also incredibly exciting to complete.

I’m in my second to last semester of my second masters degree, and it is going well. I am definitely very burnt out on school work (thankfully I won’t have any classes over the summer), but I’m also excited to get into my thesis course in the fall. And then, of course, I’m extremely excited to just be done. A friend told me that I could quit, I don’t have to finish the degree, but I know myself. It would haunt me if I didn’t. So, it’s time to solider on, buckle down, and get it done.

I started the rough draft of the sequel to my debut novel. It’s slow going, but even slow movement is still movement. I’ve seen a lot of the people I went to college with fall out of their writing practice, and while it’s definitely a worry of mine that the same thing will happen to me, I think it’s also a poignant lesson. Writers don’t always “have the time” for writing, but like anything that we value, we have to make the time. Sometimes that means making a sacrifice. Sometimes it means giving up recreation time or socializing. Sometimes the thing we have to sacrifice is writing, especially when our mental health is struggling. And sometimes we just need to push ourselves.

I’m in a writing group on Facebook and last week a member posted about the struggles of editing. She was frustrated because she had been editing her manuscript for months, and it wasn’t improving. She assumed that she was missing something that would speed up the editing process; she said that it “wasn’t normal” to spend months editing a manuscript. I think this is where a lot of writers struggle. Sometimes we get this idea of what the writing process is, and then when the actual experience of writing doesn’t match what we think it will be, we assume we’re doing something wrong. In reality, it is extremely common for writers to take months and even years working on a single manuscript.

It’s hard to accept this when we see other writers rapidly releasing their work. I’ve seen some writers actually write, revise, edit, and publish a manuscript every month, and while this is very ambitious, I think it’s unsustainable for most writers. Most of us have full time jobs. Some of us are also full time students. Some of us have families. Unless we’re comfortable releasing books of lower quality writing, the vast majority of us simply can’t release multiple books each year. And forcing ourselves into that standard can be detrimental to our creativity.

Flexibility is, in my opinion, one of the most useful traits a writer can have. Each manuscript is different. Sometimes they rush through us like lightning, and other times they move through us like molasses. Neither one is right or wrong or better than the other. Neither one makes a writer more or less a writer. The important thing is that we remain as consistent as we can, and give whatever we have to our writing as often as possible. I also think it’s important to stop comparing ourselves to other writers. Trying to compete with people who have completely different lives than us does nothing but set ourselves up for failure.

So take this as a word of encouragement. You got this. Be flexible. And commit to your work.