Tag: self-reflection

Being a Writer When You’re a Writer

Lauren (thebestpossibletime.com)2 Comments

“Being a writer” has a low bar to entry. It’s not like “being an engineer”—you don’t have to work as a writer or be trained as a writer or ever publish a word of your writing. You just have to write. Being a writer as a career obviously takes a little more effort. I am a writer by nature and by trade—for the last two years I’ve spent somewhere between two and ten hours a day, five days a week, writing. It’s not what people would consider “glamorous” writing, creating product copy for ecommerce websites; it’s not being a novelist or a features writer or any of my “dream” writing jobs, but it’s nice to be able to say that I pay my bills as a writer.

Plenty of writers have no interest or ability to write as a profession, and simply write in their free time as a hobby. Sometimes I envy that. Too often, after a full day of writing for work the last thing I want to do in my free time is open up Scrivener and start on my own projects. Even on weekends when I haven’t been writing all day, I feel as though I want a day off from this thing that I supposedly love and feel endlessly passionate about. This is where I admit that I haven’t finished so much as a short story in nearly a year. Heck, I’ve barely even started so much as a short story in that time. And you, dear readers, have seen how infrequently I manage to even update this blog.

Sometimes the self-doubt creeps in and I think that perhaps I’m not a writer. Maybe I’m a non-writer who just happens to write for a living. I know this is the kind of self-doubt that nearly every writer struggles with; twitter is full of jokes from amateur and professional writers about the trials and tribulations of putting words on the page.

The recipe is simple: to be a writer, you must write. You must write when you’re tired, or sad, or after you’ve written all day for work. You must especially write when you feel like every word that spews out is pure shit. Thriller writer Harlan Coben said, “You can alway fix bad pages. You can’t fix no pages.”

Stephen King said that he writes 2000 words each and every day. I know from several years’ experience participating in NaNoWriMo, where the daily average goal is 1667, words that writing 2000 words can take an hour or twelve, depending on the day. Obviously, that’s not feasible for everyone, whether they write for their job or not. But what I must learn to better remind myself is that ending a day having written a single word on a personal project leaves me with one more word than I started with, and sometimes that’s enough.

I won’t be participating in NaNo* this year—for most of November I’ll be visiting Ireland and toward the end Steve and I will be moving across the world to New Zealand where I’ll almost certainly be too preoccupied searching for housing and a job. I can’t commit to writing 2000 words a day, or maybe even 200. But I’m a writer, and so I must write.

* For the uninitiated: November is National Novel Writing Month, where thousands around the world attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Published novels that began as NaNo projects include The Night Circus by Erin Morganstern, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, and Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell. 

My Self-Improvement Summer

Lauren (thebestpossibletime.com)Leave a comment

As most of you know, I’m back at my parents’ house for a few months between Steve and my epic three-month, cross-country road trip and reuniting with him in Ireland again before we head on to a working holiday in New Zealand. As my town is quite small and uneventful and my work doesn’t take up too much of my time, I decided that for the summer I would work on setting some habits, reaching some goals, and making it a summer of self-improvement.

I know that summer isn’t technically over, but I’m wearing a hoodie and drinking hot tea during the day for the first time in ages, so it definitely feels like fall and therefore I’m going to check in as I move into My Self-Improvement September. The eight things I wanted to work on this summer were: yoga, meditation, piano, guitar, Duolingo’s German course, running, dance and this blog. Let’s see how I did:

Continue reading “My Self-Improvement Summer” →

Stepping Back to Go Forward

Lauren (thebestpossibletime.com)Leave a comment

I used to be a fairly good pianist. Not impressively good, I don’t think I had the raw talent and I certainly didn’t have the dedication to practicing to take it anywhere beyond a serious hobby and a minor role in my high school orchestra. But I was also far better than “knows chopsticks and picked out the melody to ‘My Heart Will Go On’ once”; 12 years of lessons (more, if you count the keyboard classes before I was old enough for private instruction) will do that to you. At the end of each school year I participated in a program called “piano guild,” in which students were tasked with playing—from memory—a number of pieces for an adjudicator. One year, I presented 10 selections by Bach. In others, I included movements of sonatas by Mozart and Haydn. So yeah, I was good.

Then I went away to college. And grad school. And across the country. And to Canada. And I just stopped playing. Sure, I occasionally got to put my fingers on a set of keys, but I never made any effort to seek out regular access to a piano so I could continue practicing regularly. 

And that’s okay. I’ve always loved making music, but it’s just something I enjoy rather than an unyielding passion for me like it is for some. So letting it fall by the wayside wasn’t a heartbreak. 

Still, though, I have always enjoyed it, so since I’m back at my parents’ house for a few months before Steve and I head off to NZ, I decided I wanted to shake some of the rust away and start playing again. My parents were kind enough to have the piano tuned, and I’ve made it a point to practice a few times each week.

Here’s the thing: I’m still good. You don’t just lose your skills at something you worked at for over a decade just because you spend some years away. I don’t remember most of the songs I once knew by heart, but I can still play them if I look at the sheet music, and they still sound pretty decent. 

The problem is this: while I know logically that I am undeniably rusty, my intuition doesn’t seem to be able to make the connection. I still have a degree of muscle memory so my fingers try to fly over the keys a tempo to hit notes they don’t quite know anymore. 

Continue reading “Stepping Back to Go Forward” →

Successfully Failing (aka the obligatory navel-gazing 2014 review post)

Lauren (thebestpossibletime.com)Leave a comment

The most important thing I did this past year was learn how to fail. A brief and probably incomplete list of things I failed at in 2014:

  • I don’t even remember if I made New Year’s resolutions so if I did I’m sure I failed those. Certainly any that had to do with consistent running.
  • My Goodreads 2014 book challenge: I read 39 out of my intended 52 books, although in my defence I was reading plenty of academic texts and articles for my thesis.
  • Update my blog: I think I was aiming for twice a month, which I nearly averaged (22 posts counting this one), but most of those posts came at the start of the year, and there were a few months I didn’t write at all.
  • Getting a job in Galway (I did do some freelancing at least)
  • NaNoWriMo: I did it for 2 years in college, took a year off last year because I was doing my MA, and planned to complete it again this year. I got 20k-some words in and that was the end.

I’m sure there are more 2014 failures that I’m forgetting, but what’s important to me is that I’m okay with it. I mean, I’m not okay with it—I obviously want to do better in 2015—but I don’t regret trying anything just because I wasn’t able to complete it or  be the best at it.

I’ve always been a perfectionist, and I still am, but my fear of failing doesn’t outweigh my fear of trying. When I look at previous years, my regrets come not from failure itself (I learned a long time ago that it’s okay not to be perfect), but from realising that I could have pushed myself further and didn’t, stopping at the level at which I knew I could succeed. A big one that comes to mind was studying abroad in Spain: it’s still one of the best things I’ve ever done, but looking back I wonder if, had I been willing to step further outside of my comfort zone and go into a course that wasn’t all Americans or spend more time conversing with native speakers, would I have gotten even more out of it?

When I compare that to another Spain-related topic from this year—writing my thesis on Francoist oppression of the Basque Country’s publishing industry—I see the difference. I could have written on an easier, more comfortable topic, relating to journalism or even Castilian Spain, and not had to deal with the fact that there was so little information on the subject and that much of that information had to be translated, by me, from Spanish (though luckily not from Basque). I didn’t fail my thesis, of course, but I chose a topic that I knew would give me a harder time and probably not a better grade, because I was willing to take the risk.

I’ve also learned to look at my “failures” positively. I would never have considered myself a “glass half-empty” type of person, but there was a time when I would’ve looked at some of my “failures” above and thought “I failed my reading goal” or “I failed NaNoWriMo” instead of “I read 39 books this year” or “I wrote 22,000 words in under a month.” Far from feeling discouraged about trying again, I’m motivated to push myself to do better next year.

I don’t think I’ll ever be accused of playing it safe by anyone other than myself, but I’m ready to do more without knowing what the future holds. For example, in the past five years I’ve lived in four countries on two continents, but each time I’ve moved has been for school, where there’s a set plan and a fairly predictable outcome. When I go back to the United States in the next few months I’m immediately planning a move across the country—but this time I don’t really have a plan. And I feel good about that.