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“Writing the Summer Novel”by Waverly Fitzgerald I always have a hard time writing during the summers in Seattle. It's not just the sunshine that lures me from my desk with the promise of warmth and light but something about the energy of the season—I feel distracted, restless, scattered, like a bee buzzing around the flowers. All those extra hours of daylight beg to be filled with busyness: meeting new people, visiting new places and trying new activities. My usual routine requires that I spend two hours every morning and complete a chapter of a novel a week. But the disruptive energy of summer makes it hard to stay in the narrow channel of routine. And so I've decided to go with the flow of the energy. Once again summer becomes vacation, a time of play and indulgence. Many years ago, one of my writing partners told me about the concept of the summer novel, that is, a novel that you write just for sheer fun, something perhaps lighter or just different than what you normally write. The idea came from her friend, Nancy, who took a break from working on her serious and thoroughly research historical novel set in ancient Egypt to write a time travel romance one summer. I like the idea of choosing a light-hearted goal for summer and approaching it with an emphasis on the pleasure of the process rather than the value of the product. Summer can also be a good chance to expand your writing repertoire. Last summer I took an online class on haibun from Allegra Wong at www.writers.com. This was a stretch for me in two ways: I had never taken an online class before and I don't think of myself as a poet (which is how I experience the compressed lyricism of the haibun form). The class was rich and challenging and I'm glad I took it during the summer (when I'm not as busy teaching myself) because the homework was intense. All of the trips I made that summer — and it seemed like I was always on I-5- — are now preserved in hiabuns and haikus, for example,
Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist's Way (an excellent summer workbook—invite a group of friends to do it with you or take the class I'm offering through the UW Women's Center) assigns two weekly tasks to her readers: morning pages (writing 3 pages every morning) and an artist's date (a chance to indulge in some playful activity that nurtures the creative self). Despite my initial resistance to the idea of morning pages (get up earlier in the morning? no way!), I adopted it as a practice and am still going strong (111 UW Huskies notebooks later). But I sputter along with the artist date, which sounds so much more like play than work which makes it suspect to someone raised in a Puritan culture. Most of the students in my Artist's Way classes have the same experience. You might think of summer as one long Artist Date and fill it with activities that will spark your imagination. Here are some ideas to get you started:
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More articles on writing by Waverly Fitzgerald: Getting the Most Out of Summer Writing Conferences Imitation: Conscious and Unconscious |
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