Full Moon, Inspire Me!
Getting Unstuck When in a Rut with Literary Community and Sondheim Musicals
Happy Full Moon, and happy 2024! We’re almost in the Year of the Dragon (coming soon 2/10), and this month has felt like a lot of fresh starts for me… along with a lot of rain, wind, sleet, snow, and ice. Bring on actual winter, I suppose.
This post is going to be short and sweet, because the full moon crept up on me again (I know, who could have predicted it, every 29.5 days, someone should study moons and planetary bodies, like, helloooo), but I will say this, very honestly, with tons of humility:
I haven’t been writing much this month.
I entered 2024 with lots of plans, loads of energy, excited to finish up edits on the Taiwan book with my editor and pivot right into revising this fun novel, but have made very little headway. The Taiwan book is done, or very nearly so, pending a few final bits of feedback and a round of copyediting.
But the novel revision is fully stalled. I was teaching, I was seeing family, I was prepping my spring semester courses, I was doing all of this stuff that wasn’t writing and “just as soon as it all calms down, THEN I’ll have all of this uninterrupted time and space to write.” And while this is sometimes the case, as an academic in January, this month, it was not. And it reminds me that life is inconvenient.
Life doesn’t say, “Why don’t I just make some downtime for you to get inspired and carve out time and space to write? Maybe I can cancel some plans or take care of your friends and family for you, so you can disappear for awhile.”
We have to do that for ourselves, prioritize the writing, put ourselves and our dreams and our aspirations and our wild and impractical whims first, and say, THIS IS IMPORTANT. TODAY, I’m doing this first. I’m writing before anything else.
I hope to do that tomorrow. I hope to do that Sunday and Monday and 4-5 days a week for my entire spring semester, if I’m honest. But reader, I didn’t do it today. I didn’t do it yesterday. Something needs to shift sometimes, in order for us to quiet the anxiety and put ourselves and our writing first.
So how am I going to shift my headspace, starting…. erm, tomorrow?
Inspiration can come from the weirdest places, and also from friends who are doing that writing thing along with us. Tonight, I’m headed to my friend Rachel Stolzman Gullo’s Book Party for the re-launch of her debut novel, The Sign for Drowning, from 7.13 books. Rachel is in my writing group, and a brilliant, poetic, committed writer, who also holds down a full-time job and parents two lovely boys because she wants to do all of the things, and writing brings her a lot of joy. It’s been really inspiring hearing about her writing trajectory over the years, and that fills the well of inspiration.
How else?
Talking to friends who are doing an AWP Panel with me in a few weeks, called “Beyond the Debut: Publisher One-Night Stands vs. Long Term Relationships.” They’ve all published multiple books, had to re-evaluate their relationships to their publishers, agents, writing practices, and the capitalist toxic hellscape we call the publishing industry, and their tenacity and wisdom is so inspiring. I’m just there for the ride, guys! Come check it out if you’re going to AWP in Kansas City!
Finally, I got two pretty exciting new ideas for the novel revision in the last week, so I keep telling myself that I’m just stewing on these ideas a bit so that I can put them into great practice in the 2nd draft of the novel…. starting tomorrow. One idea was about how one character is extremely angry with another character, adding heat and drama and conflict, and this occurred to me two days ago in the shower. The other idea came from listening to the Into the Woods original broadway cast recording with my husband David, yesterday as we were driving him to work (so that I could take the car and do work and errands but not write, see the theme of the last week forming here?). However, Sondheim is one of the great musical writers, and his co-author Lapine is no slouch either, and I was thinking about the commonalities and dramatic similarities of Into the Woods with my novel. How each character needs to transform and discover something. And there’s this amazing song called “The Last Midnight,” which is a reckoning song near the end of the musical, and I realized something about the reckoning scene in the novel, and how I could make it better, more dramatic, more tense, more desperate, and more intense. Basically, it seems like one goal for this revision is to turn the knob up on the emotional stakes and needs of my characters, and this was a good thing to discover before really diving in.
But now I need to dive it. It’s the full moon, let’s roll! I wish you luck writing this week (and month, and year), and I wish me luck too. I need it.
PS: If you’re in the mood for a class to jump-start your memoir writing, or help you write some great Flash pieces, I’m teaching a Flash Memoir class with the Writing Co-Lab starting Feb 27. More info here!
Sending much love!