On Resting, and Rusting

May 29, 2012 by

If you rest, you rust ~~ Helen Hayes

I’m sure you’ve heard that Helen Hayes quote before. In fact, I’m somewhat sure that I’ve used it on this blog before.

It’s a valid idea, when you think about. Taking a break from something is a good way to let your skill set get rusty. It also causes you to lose momentum.

But we can’t be expected to push forward hour after hour, day after day, without a rest. Don’t we need time to kick back and just rest. Or enjoy what it is we love. Fill the creative well.  You can’t give and give and give without taking. Can you?

No. Sometimes you need to stop.

I hit one of those walls then of last week. My well was empty and my soul was tired. When I sat down at looked at the blank page, I was inspired to write a to-do list of everything that had to be done.I knew it was time to refill and recuperate.

So on Friday my husband and I went to a movie. On Saturday, we watched another movie from Video-On-Demand. On Monday (the holiday) I took up residence in my comfy chair and had Netflix on most of the day.

On each and every “nurture” day, however, I also worked. I critiqued, I revised and I wrote. Was this by choice? Yes, to a degree. But yesterday, it was more about a need.  There came a point that keeping my feet kicked up was making me restless.

My mind wouldn’t shut off. I was getting fidgety. I was fighting rust.

So…is the Hayes quote true? Do we need to keep pushing forward, never-resting?

I think, as with most things, it’s important to find a balance. I do believe as a writer, writing every day is important.  I do believe, that those who succeed at a goal, work that goal with a plan. But I also believe — especially for creative people — that we need to take time to feed our soul.

How do you fill your creative well?

 

Filed Under: Life, Writing Life Tagged With: , , , ,

Crawling Toward Goals

November 16, 2011 by

A couple of weeks ago I posted here about starting NaNoWriMo. I talked a bit about how it worked for me in the past, why I chose to do it this year, and I set two goals: an ultimate goal, and an “I’ll settle for this” goal.

 I hesitated even making a secondary or “settle” goal. I feared that if I reached it, I would grow content and become stagnant. Let face it, sometimes settling is easy.

The good part of my lower goal was that it required me to be active all month. It didn’t give me permission to stop. I had to write every day.

So, now that we’ve passed the mid-month point, I thought I would share a progress report on those goals and my “NaNo Novel”

In total word count, I’m a little shy of the half-way mark, teetering around 24,000 words. (50,000 words by month’s end is the ultimate goal.) The good news: that end goal has not slipped past the achievable mark yet. It is still in reach and the missed words can (and will!) be made up before the end of the month. The (not so) bad news: it’s going to take commitment and a day or two of being chained to the laptop to make it happen.

In my write every day goal, I’ve only missed two days so far this month. For me, this is tremendous progress over where I was before November 1. Now, instead of letting my circumstances control me, I’m reminding myself that I’m the one in the driver’s seat and on most days I’ve been able to squeeze in at least a chuck of time to devote to my writing.

The novel process itself? I’m feeling good about it. It’s been a really long time since I’ve been in a “first draft” mode. At first, I had a really hard time remembering and honoring my process. Accepting the fact that when the story is developing, the words that are oozing from my head to the keyboard are not the prettiest. My characters will be spinning circles and doing some passive things. But that is because the story is developing. As soon as I remembered a first draft to a pantster is like an outline to a plotter, I was able to push through. I just keep reminding myself “We’ll make that pretty later.”

I’ve reached the point in the story where my hero and heroine have declared they’re going to face their mutual problem together, head-on. They’re falling for each other, but there is an even more powerful pull working to keep them apart. It’s like wading through a big pool of mud, and it’s the ‘fun part’ of the story for me.

So, like the picture up top, NaNoWriMo has been a process for me. My expectations are playing out like I hoped they would. As I learn to get up and run again, I’m accepting the fact that crawling is forward motion too.

Filed Under: Fiction, Life, NaNoWriMo, Writing Life Tagged With: , , ,