How L'Engle's Advice Works for Me

I'm feeling calm yet productive in L'Engle Month so far. (See this post for more about Madeleine L'Engle Month. For more about the No Shame Novelist Project, see this post.) Here's what I'm doing and how I'm feeling about the three pieces of L'Engle's adviced that I picked to follow.

1. “Read at least an hour a day, something you feel you should read for most of the time and something just for fun the rest of the time.”

I'm meeting this goal easily because, as I said earlier, I read all through the day when I'm eating, resting, and going to bed. Her encouragement to read something I think I should read for most of the time has pushed me to read Tortilla Curtain by T. Coraghessan Boyle and I'm glad I did. It was an engrossing book with what I think is a fit ending, but I resisted reading it because I knew it would be about hard lives and covert racism. No neat happy endings here. Still, the characters resonated and the story will stay with me for a long time.

2. Write consistently each day. Do this in the spirit of fun, too, but make it a discipline. It's the only way to "build up a body of work".

I'm going to the computer consistently and usually getting a blog post out of it. My new short story is hard for me to get into. It's not going smoothly or easily. I'm also finishing up some nonfiction projects which are less enticing to me than writing fiction. I'm not getting a large word count. I actually expect to break out of this whirlpool soon. I think my productivity comes in large bursts, and then goes. It'll come back.

3. "Hold true to your vision."

Though Michael Palmer's method of outlining a book very carefully before starting seemed to work for me in November, I think I'm not willing to work on a project unless it comes from a strong feeling or force within me. There are so many discouraging times through the writing and publishing process that I don't think I can make it all the way through unless I believe in my project at a gut level or a heart level. A story that I write simply because I think it is a good idea that somebody will want to publish will not survive the process. At the first rejection, I'll stop believing in it.