Parallels Between Life and Writing

Do you wonder why we write so much about not writing and not working and not finishing? It’s the reason we started this blog in the first place (one year ago! Happy Anniversary to us!). We write to you about not writing because that seems to be the biggest problem the three of us have encountered. Even when the reasons are good – Shonna going on vacation, Stephanie spending time with her son home on military leave, me moving to another country – the fact is we still aren’t writing. We’ve broken – even for a short while – our routine. And broken routines are so very hard to get started again.

I am still trying to settle into my new life here in Sydney. So focused was I last week on getting the keys to our new apartment and all the related tasks that I completely forgot to even write a blog here, let alone post it. But as I wondered what to write to encourage you in your writing routines (when I still have none), it occurred to me that there are a lot of parallels between life and writing.

Unexpected setbacks - I had a fair idea of what our costs would be in moving overseas, but there are so many things I didn’t think of or didn’t know about. I have more things to do than it seems I have time for – customs forms, legal forms, school application forms, etc. That doesn’t even count the book that I’ve been not writing for the last several months. Even little things are tripping me up like writing this blog yesterday on a borrowed computer with very little time and then losing it just as I hit Save.

From a writing perspective, you have these same kinds of challenges when you or a family member gets sick, when you get two writing assignments at once and are suddenly pressed for time, when your hard drive crashes and even though you backed up your work it’s still gone. Sometimes all you can do is take a deep breath and ask yourself – what can I really do about this? (Answers that don’t count: panic, cry, yell, complain, give up.) Sometimes the problem is unsolvable, but often there is a solution, if only “wait to buy furniture till next month” or “rewrite the blog again.” And sometimes – like the rewriting of this blog entry – things turn out better the second time anyway!

Unexpected blessings - It only took us two weeks to find an apartment, but it was another two weeks until we were allowed to move in, which was the same day we had to be out of the company apartment. But our friends rallied and soon all of our belongings were transferred, borrowed mattresses were delivered, and we became the happy owners of a used refrigerator.

I wasn’t too happy when I had to rewrite a book the first time. But I did it. What a shock to find when it was done that there were many parts I liked better than the original. I also found my writing in general had improved. (I always think this every time I write – that it’s better than anything I’ve done before!) Since we moved I’ve been trying to decide if I want to get a job here to pay for school so we don’t have to scrimp so much on just my husband’s income. (Hmm, eating or books for the new semester? Actually here in Oz, it’s drinking or books for the new semester?) I hesitated to “give away” my writing time (you know, that time I have been using for other things for months), but then I remembered that when I worked full-time at NBC I was the most productive I’ve ever been. I’m hoping for unexpected blessings from working full-time for a few months.

Irritations - Some things are just irritating. They shouldn’t bother you so much, certainly not enough to justify not writing, but they do. I’ve killed six cockroaches in the last six days, four of them in the last 24 hours. I’ve been praying for months that God would help me not freak out when I see them but simply to find an answer to the problem. (Imagine me the last time we were here, curled up in the fetal position on the couch, bawling my eyes out because there were so many cockroaches in the kitchen, only to look up and see one crawling on the couch!) Thank God for answered prayers. This time I didn’t freak out, I just murdered them in cold blood, then got a quote from a pest control service. Irritating, but fixable. Same with the mothball smell. I can only assume the owners left the bags of mothballs in the closets because there is a problem they prevent. (I haven’t seen any moths – what else do they do?) But boy is it getting old to have all of our clothes smell like mothballs!

Similarly, I find the phone and the ding of new mail irritating when I’m writing. Because I am probably moments away from being diagnosed with mental problems, I also cannot help but check email every few minutes. When I can’t think of what to write next, I have been known to check email every few seconds. I know. Mental. But I’m halfway there – I don’t answer the phone anymore! Yay for me! However, now that I live in another country, and maybe one of my friends will call from overseas, maybe I should answer it every time it rings…? Irritations can be dealt with. And they must be dealt with if you want to be a writer at peace. If you thrive on angst, by all means, answer your home phone and your mobile.

Gratitude and a positive attitude - One of the things I do remember from the blog I wrote and lost yesterday is to have a positive attitude and keep negativity at bay. I don’t think I can stress this one enough. When I realized that I’d miscalculated our funds and funding needs here, I was first shocked, then ticked off, then self-pitying. Fairly quickly I remembered nothing is accomplished by negativity. I winged to my friend (I’m learning all these great words – to winge [rhymes with hinge] is to vent or complain), then decided to laugh about our priorities. We may not have any furniture to sit on, but we are the proud owners of a 37″ flat screen HD TV! Sometime, somewhere, that is going to be a funny moment in a book!

I still have so much to do here to get settled. But if I can focus on being grateful for being able to live here again for a while, grateful for a new writers group (next week!), grateful for the delicious sounds of parrots and cockatoos and all kinds of birds I don’t recognize, I’ll be relaxed enough to think about my book in those spare moments when I am waiting for a bus. In fact, that’s another thing I wrote to you about yesterday: if I still lived in LA, I’d have less “thinking time” than I have now. I would get places faster because I’d have a car, but when taking the bus I don’t have to focus on the road so I can think about characters and story and plot. See? Something to be grateful for.

We write to you about not writing because we want to encourage you to keep at it. When you get out of your routines, find a way to get back into them, or create new ones. Creating this web site has kept writing at the front of our minds (well, except for last week for me!) for the last twelve months. That alone was one reason we decided to do it. But Stephanie and Shonna and I are like a lot of creative types – we want to change the world! We want to help people and encourage people and cheer them on and give them fresh ideas.

So in the immortal words of Commander Jason Nesmith of Galaxy Quest fame, “Never give up! Never Surrender!”