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Tuesday 25 April 2017

Small successes help beat the dark pit!

My writing world has taken a bit of a knock lately. My confidence hit rock bottom and I even gathered all my writing material together and shoved it in a corner. When things happen they all seem to come at once - negative feedback, rejections and then on top of it all a cold that is reluctant to go. When I'm ill I withdraw. I think it's a self preserving mechanism. I've always had it. I switch off from everything and loose myself in sleeping, reading or listening to music. All those problems can wait until I am well enough to tackle them. This time I found it hard to do that. It worked for a while and then I'd go down into the dark pit!

Whatever has happened has changed me this time. I'm still not sure how good that is! So for now I'm sticking with what I feel I am good at - flash fiction and some short story writing. Out of that came a piece published on Visual Verse and today a piece of my flash is published on the great Paragraph Planet. Last week I also got a surprise - I have been longlisted in the Nottingham Writers' Club short story competition. Okay there are 95 longlisted stories there, but at least I'm in there and hanging on.

To help get back into things I have joined two online communities. I'm taking things slowly. Writing is beginning to happen again. My little writing group meets this afternoon and I had nothing to take to share. I pulled out the Back to Creative Writing School (Bridget Whelan) book I've been working through and an exercise in that book ended with me writing a fully formed poem - one of those strange writing experiences where the piece almost wrote itself.

2 comments:

Andrew Shephard said...

Despite your doubts, it looks like you are being very productive. Useful to examine one's doubt - yes, it gets in the way, but it can also point towards a new direction.

Heather said...

Thanks, Andrew. It's the novel writing that's giving me the most headache. Some hard thinking needed and decisions to make about direction. Maybe, as you, a new direction!