It’s Always Possible to Write Something

If you are feeling uninspired, or held back by life, then you can always do just a little bit on your creative projects

I thought it was time to review what I had managed to achieve in 2021 and whilst I would like to say that I have finished the damn draft (that one has been on the list going back to 2019, you can see here) I can’t. And life has really got in the way. Though the imperative Mum, Write NOW shouts from the title of my blog, the order doesn’t always work. Sometimes, I believe in a wondrous future when I will have all the time and energy I need to write. And other times I remember to just do a little bit of what I love.

So despite at times crippling fatigue, I have spent slivers of time working on the creative works-in-progress this year and got maybe somewhere along the way. I think it is a good idea to review each project. And I hope to keep up these tallies on my work going forward on the blog and Instagram to hold myself more accountable.

The largest project I have worked on is a comic novel that occurred to me last November which I even plotted a bit – a miracle – since November 2020 and September 2021 I managed to write just over 20, 000 words on this project. I got a bit stuck because I reached the beats of the story a bit early and I am wondering whether this could be a short novella or it is worth developing into a larger novel. To find comedy in some of your own foibles and also laugh at the pressures of motherhood has been a light relief and I think suited the brain space I have had available this year.

The unwieldy work-in-progress without any ending still has been languishing in my proverbial bottom drawer. I can see that I tried to write missing link scenes in April and May this year and managed just a few hundred words. But I took the chance to challenge myself to re-read it over the Autumn. It is not as bad as I had remembered, so that seems like a positive. I am just deciding whether it is time to “kill the darlings” and start over the story now. It has been going on so long that a pandemic happened in the mean time. It feels that writing about a woman living all alone and closed off from society was a bit too heavy to face this year, even when I had some energy back.

The final piece of the puzzle of my writing projects are the pieces I have written by hand, I decided in planning my Autumn refresh that I also needed to get back to notebooks. There is something about slowing the brain enough to write by hand that helps with my creativity. I have done some research notes, some short stories and ideas about my characters. As my strength is building up, I really hope that I can take more trips out, notebook in hand, to enjoy cake in cafés and at least pretend I am being creative.

So, despite living with fatigue for eleven months now, my creativity has still happened. I am taking a resolution into the new year to value the time and energy I have by using at least some of it for these projects. And even if this time next year I am not a published author or a millionaire, I will be able to understand that it is imperative that I write now.

How was your writing year?