Back in the Habit!

It's finally happened. I'm writing again.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was about 8 years old. It happened after my first experience with ludic reading, or getting lost in a book. Until that time I'd had to split my concentration between decoding the words and comprehending the message. But this time was different. I decoded the text automatically, and was swept off to a new world created by that author.

When I finished that book and returned to reality, my first response was not to think that it was cool and that I needed to do it again. Not me. Instead, I thought it would be really cool to be the person who created those kinds of experiences for other readers. Yeah, I've always been a little weird.

Anyway, since then I've considered myself a writer. I wrote my first short story in second grade, not long after that first ludic reading experience. The story was about how my red wagon (no, not my station wagon, but a pull-cart style kid's wagon) rolled down a hill to the other side of the street. The conflict was how I was going to get it back, because I wasn't old enough to cross the street yet.

This first story, by the way, is another reason why I titled this blog "Red Wagon Musings."

Since "The Red Wagon Conflict," I've done all kinds of writing. There were school essays, of course, plus poetry, drama, and fiction for creative writing classes, articles and opinion pieces for the school newspaper, and a teen romance novel that never found its way to "The End." I've filled boatloads of journals, and done plenty of technical writing for my job. And then there's my recent interest in mystery writing -- short stories as well as a stab at a full-length novel during NaNoWriMo 2005.

The problem is that publishing my own stuff has rarely been a priority unless it was a school assignment, job task, or some other piece of writing that someone else expected of me. And if publishing isn't important, well, then, there's no rush to get any writing done. As a result, my non-work-related writing had devolved into nothing more substantial than journal entries. And journal entries were of no use to anyone but me. Didn't I want to write because I wanted to give someone else that ludic reading experience? I started to wonder if I could still call myself a writer if I wasn't writing for those ends.

I tried setting a daily quota, like Stephen King recommends in On Writing, but that didn't work. A daily habit is hard when there's so much else going on in life, when I come home after frying my brain all day at work. Then I tried outlining a writing project according to my Franklin and Project Management training. I figured that would give me the flexibility to work in bursts, like on weekends. But my weekends were horribly busy, catching up with chores and friends after neglecting them during the week. Besides, there were no repercussions for missing my self-imposed deadlines, so I blew one after another.

I began to feel like I just couldn't write under my current circumstances, that my lifestyle had to change in order for me to fulfill my lifelong dream. I thought I had to quit my job, but I couldn't do that because we needed the money, and because I couldn't bring myself to abandon the products I'd been working so hard to develop. I felt like I had to choose between my lifelong dream and the career path I was already on. But having to choose between either one of those loves was depressing.

Finally, I gave some serious thought to starting a blog, and it wasn't long before I followed through. No, it's not fiction writing, which is eventually where I want to be, but it is writing, and that's the important thing. I'm happy to see that it's working, too. Two weeks in a row with three posts each -- don't they say that you're supposed to start an exercise habit 3-4 times per week? I'd say I'm right on track. I'm happy to say that I now have no qualms about calling myself a writer again, and I look forward to mastering this habit and moving on to the next one.