Sunday, February 24, 2008

Procrastination


I am in the drafting semester of my MA in creative writing program, the semester we've all been waiting for-- to get our ideas on paper and get sound advice from our mentors and classmates and just kick start that book that's inside all of us.

I have an awesome mentor -- and am late with my first subsmission- not a good way to start things off.

So why is it that a lifetime of stories for my memoir aren't getting on the page? I think it's because don't know where to start. I think I am too sponstaneous a person to work with an outline.... The bulk of this is going to be my early teenage years- but I feel like I need to start earlier. Can I start in the middle? Do I start at the end?

While I've been contemplating where to start, I have been looking at coffee tables on Ikea, uploading pics to Facebook and biting and feeding and turning people in Zombies on Facebook-- and other random online things that are fun, but quite distracting. In one of the panels we had at the January residency at Wilkes was to have a computer NOT hooked to the internet, that way you are focused solely on writing. I guess in the days of typewriters, writers were a lot more productive.

I have so many ideas and so much to write, I just am having trouble getting them "down on paper." Anyone else have the problem?

1 comment:

Jon said...

Trust me Donna, I know what you're going through. That's why we're constantly blogging, right? What I do to combat the internet distraction is to take my laptop somehwre where I can't get a wireless connection. I go to Barns and Noble, where they expect you to actually pay for the internet. I'm too cheap for that, so instead I end up getting some writing done each time I go there. Another thing I do is print my work out to edit it on paper. That way I'm focused on the work, and not my need to compulsively blog. By the way, you're blog is my current distraction! Good luck with everything!