Feeding the Inner Caged Thing (Not Just a Halloween Blog)

I’ve been noticing something that I think is worth repeating.

What I spend my time thinking about, that’s what I seem to feed. If it is a problem with teaching, I eventually will work through it. If it is an obsession about the other candidate I'm going to vote against, or how someone has wronged me, the perceived wrong grows. A feedback loop seems to radiate.

This feedback loop can work for good or for ill. To cite an example of the former, for the last week—week 8 of our fall semester where I teach—I’ve been trying to get back into finishing a novel I’ve been working on. During week 6 of my teaching schedule, I went a week and a half without working on it, and when I returned to it, it was cold. I felt like I was fighting a zombie. I may have been lucky enough to write 250 words that day, and it was all I could do to keep myself from getting up and doing everything, anything but writing. But then something else happened. The next day, when I had less time to write, new ideas for it came to the fore.

This got me thinking about changing my writing behaviors. So for the past two weeks, I tried something different. I put in at least some time—even time for editing—every single day on the draft. When it came time for my four hours of writing on Friday, I was very productive.

So I’ve continued this, and I’ve noticed that the novel is alive again (which may be the wrong imagery here).

I've known this for a long time, of course, that writers simply write, as swimmers simply swim. The more you write, the more you write.

This also seems a principle worth noting about mental hygiene and admonitions about what to spend my time thinking about. So right now, I’m spending less time on Facebook, less time worrying about personal slights or about all my failures, and more on the world of my novel. I may finish it soon. I’ll let you know.