On My Lack of Motivation

So I enrolled in a creative writing class offered by Phoenix College that is specifically geared toward writing the novel. Our first meeting was Saturday and it went well, I like the instructor and the people in the class seem to all be intelligent. I'm the youngest person in the class, however, which was definitely surprising.

I enrolled in the class because as much as I write, as many ideas as I have, I haven't actually finished a novel for ... well, 9 years. I wrote four novel-lenght stories between my freshman and junior years of high school and since then ... nada.

If you know me, it might occur to you that the sudden drought in finished works coincides nicely with a few things, cheif among them (1) getting a driver's license and (2) girls. In a nutshell, that's the problem even today: I want to write, it's just that there are so many other things I want to do that I get easily distracted. In college, probably the time in most of our lives when more doors are open than at any other time, I couldn't even finish a short story unless I had a class deadline coming up. I still wrote good stories, they were well-developed since they'd been knocking around in my head for months. It just took a deadline for me to actually get it all down on the page. Obviously, it's even tougher with novels.

I solved part of my problem last summer with the purchase of a laptop, which negated one of my eternal obstacles: namely, that I don't tend to be inspired to write while sitting at my office computer but that (again) I lack the motivation to transcribe anything I might write out longhand into the computer. But with a laptop I can usually write when I want to and where I want to (coffee shops, airplanes, other cities, etc.).

Last summer I got off on a tear and wrote a lot. In fact, I wrote so much that what I had imagined as a novella or shortish novel (maybe around 100 single spaced pages) quickly reached that length ... and I wasn't even halfway through yet. This is another problem I always have: overwriting. I blame too many years of growing up reading Dickens, John Irving, and Stephen King. For a brief while in high school I was obsessed with Hemingway and the novel I wrote while reading Hemingway is crisply written, if not well plotted. Why hast thou forsaken me, Ernest?

Still, I figured with such a good start I might even be able to finish the book before the wedding. Instead, between Halloween and Christmas I wrote very little. And then between Christmas and the wedding I wrote little short stories, not parts of the novel. It was only a few weeks ago I got back to actually working on it, but by then I wanted to go back to my original conception (ie, something short) and so I restarted it. You can see why a class might help motivate me to actually get something valuable done.

Tonight, I need to turn in a synopsis (though it can be vague) of the story I'm going to write. I'm thinking of starting something new entirely, but I haven't decided for sure yet. Which is why I just wrote this blog instead.

I think I'll do the new one (I think of it as the Los Angeles story) and give the one I've been fighting with (the Las Vegas story) a rest for a while.