I don't even know if I had any other life besides working on the submission this week. I'm just emerging from the fog today -- catching up on sleep, wondering whether I can pull off the same rhythm for the next month. I hope so because I think it worked for me. It was the most challenging month of the MFA, the most challenging month of my creative writing life ever, but the upside of that is that the intensity with which I immersed myself in my project spilled over onto the page.The writing really came together this week with some late-breaking insights into where the piece needs to go. What I sent off yesterday is not in its final form. I still feel that it has a long way to go. I worry that it is kind of "flat." But it is the first time that I have let go of something while having a reasonably clear vision for it, for its potential. I could have kept working on it, will keep working on it, can't wait to keep working on it.
Last semester, whenever I sent in something for a submission I felt crummy about it. This time I can truly say that I felt okay about it. It was worth every single early morning, and deserves its rightful place in a few more of them. Besides the steady pace that I took with my writing this past month, there is one more thing to add to why this piece feels so much more "true" than previous writing. The very first class of the very first semester was a seminar called "Finding Your True North." The instructor took us through several emotionally intense freewriting exercises. By the end of it, I had about 5 or 6 single spaced pages that came right from my soul. The instructor said that we will find in those pages, our "true north," the compass point towards which our writing needs to aim if it going to sound true, real. Then she said to put them away for awhile. Let them sit. I let mine sit for eight months, until three days ago, when my new writing started to "take me there." If you did that exercise and haven't re-visited the themes in the writing that came out of those meditations, don't waste another submission period ignoring them. Accepting my true north has taken me out of the fog. I have honestly lost that feeling of groping around in the dark. Between that and mind-mapping, I can't wait to see what the month ahead has in store!
[Pictured: the protea, South Africa's national flower, ready blossom]
3 comments:
Kudos and Congrats! GREAT work.
Your pic reminds me of this quote:
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
--Anais Nin
It's true, n'est pas?
Wow. That's so wonderful. You've really challenged yourself and then stepped up to the challenge. I hope you're feeling proud. It's always a strange feeling to go to the post office and send away the envelopes and watch the submissions get thrown into a mail bin, awaiting their trip to the mentor's home. I never know what to feel. Like, all that work and struggle and in the end, from the mail deliverer's perspective, it's just another package. Sometimes I feel good about it and sometimes I don't. Glad you're feeling like your soul is connecting to the page. That's amazing.
Funny, ti- I had almost the exact same experience this past week. I was so entrenched I could barely come up for air. And I, also, for once feel pretty good about my story. Like something's starting to happen. And believe it or not, I'm starting to tap into what came out of that workshop as well- the thing I was running from. Hmmm. Congrats to both of us!
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