The second day of The Longest Write was less about information and more about perspiration, and I don’t mean that we were all sitting in an overheated room. It was time to get to the task of actually writing. But first, we had one more speaker to listen to.
Jessica White, the recent recipient of the Ridgeline Residency, spoke about the essay she has been working on, her writing process and her experience of being published as a novelist. Once again it became all too clear to me that there is not only one way to be published. It takes a lot of perseverance and luck, as Jess claimed, and it has just as much to do with timing and who you know as it does your work and experience.
Jess also shared some sensible advice. ‘Be assertive’ and enter prizes and competitions. ‘Have a back-up plan’, which sounded very much like ‘don’t quit your day job’ – sensible advice within itself; and ‘be persistent’. When you do get published you will need to be on the ball and know what’s going on and whose doing what because people are busy and you can’t expect them to just be concentrating on you. I appreciated the honesty in Jess’ words. Though I am way off being published myself, at least now I have a better idea of exactly what I’m getting myself into.
After Jess spoke it was time to get to the task of actually writing. The Longest Write weekend was different to other writer’s workshops and weekends that I have been to in that the focus was on dedicated writing time. To most writers it is no secret that the hardest part about writing is just sitting down and doing it. The most common excuse for not writing is not having enough time. There were no excuses this weekend; we were all in this together.
My aim was to finally get down on the page a story I’ve had in mind for a while and this was my opportunity to do just that. I had all my research and false starts with me and I was ready to go… only I didn’t. I wasted about an hour listening to frantic fingers on keyboards and reading back over my notes and trying to find some sort of order in it all to get a better idea of what I wanted to write.
Once I had my first sentence down though, I was off. After I’d written a few hundred words it was time for us all to break for lunch. Lunch was delicious – and it was nice to get an opportunity to talk to the other writers, talk about their experience of the weekend and what they were working on. However, after lunch, my momentum was lost and I found I just couldn’t pick it up again. I had hit a wall and couldn’t push my way through it. I didn’t hang around for the celebratory drinks at 4pm; the more I sat listening to the sound of key strokes the worst I felt about not contributing to the noise.
At the end, I was happy I finally had a start on something – and I knew in a roundabout way where I wanted it to go. I will spend time working on it, newly motivated by the fact that I have an opportunity to get some editorial feedback as part of The Longest Write experience. Overall it was a fantastic weekend and I now have so much new information and so many ideas to process that I may be ready to push on further and finally write something worth publishing.
Read more from M.A. Blake at A Woman of My Word