Missing Pieces

Once upon a time, the writing process was about telling a story for me, something crazy and wild plucked from my imagination or from roleplaying games I played with my brothers.  I mentioned this before.  But then my baby died, and I discovered those hundreds of pages I had written before meant nothing.  Those pages provided practice for my real writing to come.

Then I turned to LDS/Christian writing, writing wherein I could explore explicitly meaningful and often spiritual ideas.  I wrote my first novel for publication, one in which I could explore aspects of my spiritual and emotional journey after my loss in the code of someone else's story.  I had the safe distance of fiction but yet could deal with very real emotions.

Now, I'm almost 50,000 words into my next manuscript and I'm finding one big hole that needs to be filled: spiritual meaning.  I've been writing from my head, not from my Spirit.  I write daily, and there are days in which I don't feel very in tune with the Spirit and days in which I write to fulfill my goal of daily writing and don't have time to deal with deeper meaning.

I think it's time I took a step back from just writing and pray for guidance about what meanings need to be here.  It's a little more challenging because this time, the story is even farther removed from my experience.  It's about difficulties, but they're in no way my struggles.  I have never had fibromyalgia or Hashimoto's as Robin has or ADD like Connor has.  But I want to give voice to all kinds of struggles, not just those I know best.  I know people with these issues and can talk to them.  But it's a little harder to make connections and meaning when I'm not as connected to the subject matter.

Still, I know this is the story I need to tell now.  So I know I can receive guidance, both from my associates and from the Lord, to make sure the themes and layers of meaning resonate.  I'm wrapping up the fun part of writing.  Now, it's time to get to the real business of telling the story as the Lord wants me to tell it.

An Introduction

ANOTHER blog? 

I have three other blogs, so a fourth might seem inessential.  But one is from the point of view of a cat, one is purely concerning mourning and only touches on writing as an incidental side note on occasion, and my primary writing blog is about general thoughts and tips to help and inspire other writers.  This one will get more personal about my writing and what I'm doing.  I will write shorter posts, but I will write them more often.  It will be a little like a writing journal with notes, thoughts, and progress reports.  I will sometimes include little snippets of writing or story starters.

My Writing Background  

For those who haven't read my other blogs, I'll start with a bit about me.  I've been writing since elementary school.  I started with children's picture books for my younger siblings, nothing special and mostly derivative.  In high school, I wrote poetry and my first novel.  I'm a little skeptical that fantasy novel will ever get finished because it is painfully cliched, boring, and just not very meaningful.  It was based on a role playing character I created when I was 10, and it was basically me in fantasy form: a  shy, blonde girl with an alien, telepathic, shape shifting cat in her backpack.  Her stories were elaborate and involved several characters, all of whom fed into a standard prophecy yarn. 

I spent much of middle school, all of high school, and into undergrad and even my master's program fantasizing about going back to that particular genre and story line.  My novel in high school was the first in the series, and a novel I wrote in college would have been the end of the series.  During college, I also started working on short stories, mostly with a sci fi or fantastic element, but always with some kind of insights on humanity.  That's when I started to get an inkling that fiction could be more than just a story on a page, something meaningful.  I submitted several of these short stories to writing contests, and some won awards and got some of these published locally.  I did the same with children's books I wrote during that time.  Meanwhile, I worked on my poetry collection, even taking classes to help in that endeavor.  I don't know if I'll go back to poetry, except in my personal journaling, but I am working on turning the women's experience/social commentary short stories into a collection called One if by Starlight.  I also published my undergraduate and graduate theses while I was working on everything else.  So I have quite a bit of writing but no actual long fiction in print.  It always seems like there are more urgent things to do with my time.  

The Change: 

All of this was fun, and I viewed it as a side hobby, something I'd do on the side.  Then my whole world was rocked to its core when my third child died.  I no longer waste my time on anything that doesn't have some kind of meaning.  I turned to LDS fiction, particularly though not exclusively, romantic fiction so I can deal with issues that have become central to my life.  I have submitted the first of these, After the Dream, to Covenant Communications and am playing the waiting game. I am also working on a fantasy/sci fi series for middle grades, aided by my children.  My boy insists that I must never work on these without child supervision.   

That is my writing in a nutshell.  All other entries in this particular blog will be shorter.  I invite you to come along for the ride.