Friday, June 20, 2008

I can't get no satisfaction...or can I?

A month ago I described my increasing dissatisfaction with my writing and my need for time away from the keyboard. Unfortunately, a vacation was out of the question.

Instead, a series of events that may be evidence of the hand of God or may just be amazing coincidence, have me feeling better about my writing and about my career choice. Some of these are personal and beyond the boundaries of this blog, but three things stand out:

1. Some promotional material I wrote and designed for a campaign I created has proven highly effective. This reminds me that the often mundane advertising and public relations material I write has the potential to inspire to action, something my fiction rarely does (or rarely does to my knowledge).

2. I began leading an on-line workshop for confession writers. This has forced me to think about how and why I write and to attempt to convey that information to other writers. I'm unsure how the other writers feel about my approach, but I'm certainly gaining insight into writing tricks and techniques that I've been doing for so long that I had forgotten they were tricks and techniques.

3. I have not completed a single piece of fiction in more than a month. I've been writing fiction, and every piece I've touched is longer than my usual work. Longer is not necessarily better, but it allows me more space to explore characterization and setting, and it allows me to build more intricate plots or to add more or better sub-plots.

Am I now satisfied with my writing? No. But I'm much less dissatisfied.

3 comments:

Kevin R. Tipple said...

Sounds like things are headed in the right direction. Where is this confession group deal you are leading?

Kevin

Michael Bracken said...

The course is something I offered to members of the TrueWriters Yahoo group. I'm trying to adapt a workshop I lead at conferences to an on-line format and I'm creating a good bit of it on the fly. If it works I might offer it again. If not, I'll stick to leading workshops at conferences.

Kevin R. Tipple said...

Makes sense. I joined that yahoo group for something like this and when it didn't seem to be happening after several weeks I dropped it.