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I did make an attempt last week. I attempt to write most weeks; I usually fail brilliantly on the execution so for weeks like last week, where I was supremely jealous of anyone who managed more than zero words, it’s hard to admit that I fell into nothing. I couldn’t even fall gracefully or with style, I just… face-planted into blank.
I had an idea, not that it counts. I wanted to write about a battlefield, blood-soaked and muddy with the boots and bodies of fallen warriors. In my head, I developed a world, saddened but accepting of the sacrifice; that washed away the sins of its inhabitants. I hoped to present a cleaned, renewed planet, ready to resume its fruits and fats of land. It didn’t happen and I have to move on.
This week, I’ve been bouncing between several ideas. The desire to write is there, absolutely, but I’m too emotionally drained to string sentences of fiction together. I even tried a new pen (the deal was too good), the Lamy 2000, with a happy magenta ink: Pilot Iroshizuku Tsutsuji (it’s darker than the pictures). By the end of Friday I wrote 600 words. I’ve wanted to write this story for a month and I’m finally taking the chance on it but I am collapsing in a heap at the idea of producing.
I feel defeated by the emotional toll of 1,000+ emails a week. I want Webster’s to come up with a new word for the level of soul-deep exhausted I am. And yet, I keep coming back. I love WW and what we do so much that I don’t mind volunteering 80+ hours a week, every week, during Writer’s Games because the feedback and entries are important to the writing community. What WW does matters.
This week I surprised myself, and lately, that hasn’t been easy to do. I learned that the more words I’m able to eke out, the more energized I am by the mere fact of creating.
This story I’ve been desperate to try, with a genre and subject that are completely outside the realm of anything I’ve ever attempted, is writing itself. It’s giving me hope that maybe it is possible to find that beautiful vein of words and allow my mental stressors to take a backseat. It feels like renewal and in this story, somehow, I remember the reason that words speak to my soul.
Update during our blog reorganization, Sept 2022: I finished this story the next day. I rewrote it in 2021, at just under 5k, and it was published in an anthology earlier this year under my pseudonym. I still love this piece.
Fiction projects: 1
Fiction words this week: 1460 (so far)
About the author: Theresa Green is the co-founder of The Writer's Workout and a crime fiction writer.