For the course I am currently working on (fiction writing B) I have to keep a reading and writing journal, a small part of which I eventually have to turn in as a polished piece of work. Something that I keep coming back to in this journal is the frustration of not knowing where I'm going. I have to also turn in a short story for this course. And the sort of emphasis of this course is experimental writing, which is a little outside my comfort zone.
What I'm finding is that my intellect is telling me that I just need to do lots of writing. I need to experiment, play, and see what comes out. But: I have an idea for this story - I've already written maybe 2000 words, in bits and pieces - but I'm not sure where it's going. And I keep coming up with this frustration that I feel like I might be wasting time. I know on the one hand, that as long as I am writing and experimenting and trying things out, I'm not wasting time. But on the other hand I have eight weeks left before my - somewhat self imposed* - deadline of getting a solid draft ready, one ready to submit for critiquing, as well as a completed, polished, 2000 word 'reading and writing journal'. And I only get to work on Sundays. So that's eight days, basically.
So I have this dual sense of needing to be efficient, not waste time writing something that's going nowhere, and at the same time knowing that I need to just write write write, it doesn't really matter what in someways. That I need to experiment, that I should expect to write perhaps five times the word limit of the story and delete 80% of it. And that that's okay. That that will be facilitating the learning which is, after all, the whole point of doing this Masters degree.
Unfortunately, every Sunday these two different senses collide and I end up with something like writers block. I find myself procrastinating because I don't want to work on something that is just a waste of time. Idiotic no? Still, I got somewhere today, and even though towards the end I did start to freeze up with that sense of 'But what is actually happening here? Where is the plot? Where is the tension?' I did get somewhere. And I feel like this process - of recognising what is going on with my frustration - is a useful one, perhaps even the most useful thing I will get out of this course. Now if I can just keep making myself work through it...
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*The deadline's self imposed in that the course doesn't actually officially start until a few weeks after the baby's due, and that deadline is when I'll be 34 weeks pregnant. But I know from past experience that I am not going to be wanting to sit for long hours at a computer past that point, especially if my pubic symphasis dysfunction keeps getting worse (as seems rather likely, since the baby will keep getting bigger). And it seems unlikely that I will be functioning at my academic/creative best with a newborn, and I'll still need to be doing some other work - submitting comments online, and later critiquing other students' work - during the semester. So I really do want to get this done now.
