A Year of Writing Dangerously: Getting Your Story On the Page
by Barbara Abercrombie • Santa Monica, CA

You’ve always wanted to write a book, or maybe a collection of short pieces, and you keep telling yourself someday. Someday you’ll write or you’ll go back to writing; when life calms down and you’re not so busy, when you have more time, you’ll write. But life never calms down and it’s unlikely that extra hours for writing will magically appear.

Like all writers, to get your book written, your essays out in the world, you have to make the time. Let’s say you decide to be serious about your writing for one year –whether for fifteen minutes every morning or one hour every night after dinner, or  maybe every Sunday afternoon. A year can be a manageable amount of time for a writer – long enough for you to complete a first draft of a novel or memoir, or to finish a number of essays and market them, and yet short enough to be a serious deadline. It’s not off in the fog of the far future, the someday that you keep promising yourself, but twelve months from right now. You need consistency and an eye on a serious deadline to help you get your story on paper and eventually published.

Try setting up your writing practice the way you’d set up any other discipline in your life – learning to play the piano or to speak another language, a spiritual quest, training for a marathon or practicing yoga. Find a regular time and place to write. Don’t count on being in the mood. I personally don’t know any writers who go to their desks every day because they’re in the mood. You get inspired and in the mood from the writing itself.

Take time to get ready. Choose a specific day that you’ll start writing your book or essays. On your calendar for the next twelve months put a slash through the time slot or the days you’re going to write so you won’t inadvertently plan something else.  You wouldn’t blow off a doctor’s appointment or a business meeting, so treat your writing time with the same respect.

Make your writing space inviting with photographs or pictures, objects and books that you love. You’re courting the muse after all. And read, read, read. We write because we love good writing, this is our fuel. We need to find ways to inspire and encourage ourselves and this can be done by reading other writers who have struggled with their own writing and found ways to get their stories down on paper and published. Determination is an inside job but inspiration can come from the outside.  

Sometimes when you sit down to write, the negative voices in your head start chanting, second guessing your ideas, questioning who you think you are to spend all this time and energy writing a book, and who cares about your boring life anyway? It might feel dangerous to write your story, but who has ever written anything from his or her own life or imagination without feeling a sense of risk? There’s always the fear that maybe someone will deny our version of things, or get angry at us for what we write about, or be shocked by what we can imagine. Writing, even under the veils and masks of fiction, will always feel a little dangerous.

The best way to ignore negative voices is to simply do the work. Write. And a good way to get into your work is by doing writing exercises – writing so fast that the voices get drowned out and you move out of your own way.  When I teach I use a lot of writing prompts, lines from poems or just one word, and I encourage students to go off in any direction that the prompt takes them. It’s not a test, it’s a way of practicing writing, and often a way of getting into your own material or discovering new directions to go in. I always give a five minute time limit to the exercise because five minutes is too short a time to have big expectations for your writing, it let’s you off the hook. Yet I’m always astonished by what people can come up with in five minutes. And often they themselves are astonished too. “Where did that come from?” they’ll ask aloud mystified, after they’ve read it to the class.

You can find your own prompts – cut words or ideas from newspapers or magazines to choose at random out of a box. Or copy down lines from poems or whatever you’re reading. Or choose a state – Florida maybe or Wyoming and just start writing whatever the name of that state brings up for you. Or a room in your house or the name of an animal or the weather outside your window. Write about what you know and also what you don’t know. Write about not wanting to write about the prompt. You’re writing your way past yourself, getting out of your own way, writing through your stuckness. And it’s for only five minutes!

What you need to remind yourself during your year of writing dangerously is that your story – whether fiction or memoir or essay or autobiography – is important. No one else can tell the story the way you can.  And perhaps someone out there needs to read your story, know what happened, what you did, how you managed, and what you learned or imagined. The only way you get through the dangerous part, the doubt and fear and sometimes stuckness of writing, is simply – and not so simply – by writing your way through it. 
 
Barbara Abercrombie is the author and editor of books including Charlie Anderson for kids, Courage and Craft, Cherished, and two novels. She has published a total of fourteen books and numerous essays and articles, and has taught creative writing courses for almost three decades. Many of her students have published novels and memoirs, and hundreds have published essays. www.barbaraabercrombie.com.

Adapted from A YEAR OF WRITING DANGEROUSLY: 365 Days of Inspiration & Encouragement Copyright 2012 by Barbara Abercrombie. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA.  www.newworldlibrary.com or 800/972-6657 ext. 52.