Learning to Write While Writing
By Donna J. W. Munro
Let’s start with the heavy stuff.
At 53, I’m a bit, well … old to be an “up and coming writer,” but that’s what they call me. It’s nice and all, but I’ve been writing since 2004 with an eye to making it a career. I just forgot how to write along the way.
What happened?
This isn’t me whining or giving excuses.
Maybe it is, a little …
I’d graduated from Seton Hill University with a fresh new novel and a MA in Popular Fiction. I was shopping the novel and publishing short stories without ever seeing that a slow-motion car wreck was on the horizon.
I don’t want to bore you.
Here’s the list of life crisis events that hit me from 2007-2017:
1. Terrible rejection letter from a major publisher. “Your ideas are great, but your writing isn’t good.”
2. My father-in-law died falling off a roof and my husband found him.
3. My dad, my absolute rock, died of cancer on Christmas morning.
4. I got breast cancer, stage 2b with all the trimmings: surgeries, rebuilds, sickness.
5. My husband shot himself twice in the heart with an air hammer and had to have open heart surgery.
You might have your own terrible bingo card of events that knocked you off of following your writing path. Things like these all shove aside your writing career. Life works hard to tell you that you aren’t good enough, that you are needed elsewhere, that you couldn’t possibly give one minute to writing with all the other earth-shattering things happening in your life.
That’s okay.
You can’t always get right back up from a series of body blows that knock you to the mat.
For years, I went to my beloved writing retreat, In Your Write Mind at Seton Hill, living with the worst case of imposter syndrome ever. No matter how many times people reminded me that I could write, I just didn’t. I smiled and nodded and pretended around the trauma that they didn’t really know about.
It took admitting to myself that there was a problem (thank you to all the 12-steps for this ageless, immutable truth) and nearly giving up to get myself back in the game.
I met these writers who ran a weekly flash contest. They were two rando guys at a writing con who have become two of my besties in the long term. They challenged me.
“So, you don’t think you can write,” they said. “Just come write one thousand words with us once a week. It’s no big.”
One thousand words to a visual prompt, a bit of critique that was so encouraging, every week. I was immediately hooked.
I’ve been writing in this flash fiction contest for seven years now. Here’s the benefit. At first, my goal was just to do it. A beginning, a middle, and end. It didn’t matter if they were good or absolute shite. Words on a page.
Suddenly I was a writer again.
After that, I decided to drill down into skills. Every week I’d write a whole story, crappy or not, and pick something to work on. Dialog only. Strange form. I’d never written first person and spent six months getting good at it. I thickened my plots. I worked on making readers cry, vomit, sigh, wobble, and laugh.
Seven years later, I have a novel series and 150 short story publications.
That’s not a brag. It’s persistence.
This isn’t my baby, you understand. Ray Bradbury came up with this method long ago. He said, “Write a short story a week, every week for a year. At the end of the year, you’ll have fifty-two short stories and they all can’t be bad!”
He was right.
At this point, I’ve written about 400 short stories. Some of them have become novels. Others are in little experiments that will never see the light of day.
Here’s the takeaway …
1. I have lots of stories to sell, so none of them seem so precious that I get knocked out if they don’t work.
2. I have sold lots of stories, some to big pubs for good money. Sounds like writing to me!
3. Rejections no longer really hurt me. I get them and move right along.
4. Life happens and knocks me out sometimes, but I get back into writing with my flash fiction contest each week. It’s like a big ol’ hug and an affirmation waiting to happen. Sometimes, I write away the bad and the traumas in my flash pieces. It can be therapeutic if you don’t think of words as some limited resource to be hoarded.
I know so many good writers that don’t write. They believe they have writer’s block or they don’t have time to do it because everything else comes first. There are so many reasons not to invest in something so abstract, so difficult, and often thankless. But 1000 words is nothing. You can do it. And while you write, you’ll learn how to write more. It’s actual magic.
If you want to join me at the flash fiction contest, join the forum at https://weeklyflashfiction.com/. Lurk for a while, then jump in. We love reading, helping, and just being a place of experimentation. I hope I’ll see you there.
If you want to check out some of my stories, check out my website www.donnajwmunro.net. The story page is linked to my stories and novels if you are interested. Thanks for reading this hard-won bit of wisdom. I hope it helps you if you get in a writing funk. You can always write a thousand words. Promise.
AUTHOR BIO
Donna J. W. Munro teaches high schoolers the slippery truths of government and history at her day job. Her students are her greatest inspiration. She lives with five cats, a fur covered husband, and an encyclopedia son. Her daughter is off saving the world. Donna’s pieces are published in Corvid Queen, Enter the Apocalypse, It Calls from the Forest, Apparition Lit, Pseudopod 752, Shakespeare Unleashed, Novus Monstrum, ParABnormal, and many more. Check out her novels, Revelation: Poppet Cycle Book 1 and Runaway: Poppet Cycle Book 2, and her website for a complete list of works at https://www.donnajwmunro.net/.
Angry Gable Press 