Writing is a solitary enterprise. Some of us leap out of bed in the early mornings, dash to our desks and write for two hours before breakfast. These are the same people who wrote their first novel at the ripe age of 19 and are living beautiful glamorous lives.
Most of us aren’t so lucky. We lumber around, moping and pouting and praying for divine intervention. Then five hours later, we finally sit down to write and are most unhappy with the results. We are no longer in our teens and find, by completing rudimentary multiplication, that we are closer to the century mark than we originally thought, and in no way approaching the end of our first or second or sixth drafts.
Two things to counteract this cycle of worrying and self-doubt: find a friend and check-in.
Recently during a mentoring class in the Book Writing World, Elizabeth assigned us “buddies” so that the process of completing our enterprises, a.k.a. our books, would not be so lonely.
The job of a buddy is simple: maintaining contact and “checking in” periodically, to assess or possibly re-assess short-term goals for the week and communicate what the long-term goals are, and to hear “how it’s going.” Some of the BWW colleagues find that checking in every day or every other day is working well; others check in once or twice a week.
Elizabeth has also established a goals check-in for those of us in the mentoring class as well. In the “community center” there is a goals thread that we update every week and it is helpful to “see” our goals in print, and hold ourselves accountable.
So, for those of you with buddies, please check-in. For those of you without buddies, please find a friend and then check-in. 🙂
Devi Laskar is a founding member of the Book Writing World. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, is a rabid Tar Heel basketball fan (who is sad right now because for her, March Madness is over already) and will be reading some of her work on April 9 at the Sacramento Poetry Center in CA.