I write poetry because I have never felt like I had the patience to write a novel. Poetry is a quick one off which I usually barely even edit. That’s not a brag. It’s a declaration of my laziness when it comes to writing. Now seems like a good time to talk a little about my writing life so far.
I have always been a reader. From the time I was able to comprehend words on a page, I have been a reader. As a teenager I used to be embarrassed that my primary hobby was reading. It felt like a lazy hobby, but it was what I enjoyed more than anything. Reading late into the night, reading on a Sunday afternoon. My dad and I would go to the library on a Saturday and both come home with a stack of books. He would go to his chair to start on his and I would go to my room to start on mine. At the library, he at first dropped me at the children’s section while he went to look for his books. One day I decided I was beyond the children’s section, and wandered into the rest of the library. My reading was never censored, only encouraged.
I wrote little short stories as a kid. I wrote a story in fourth grade called “A Robot Named XY2” that won fourth place in our school’s young author competition. I started keeping a diary when I was nine years old and I keep a journal still. Paper spanning forty years. My brain never turns off and I need some place to put it all so that I don’t talk nonstop to the people around me (I still talk way too much). “Paper has more patience than people,” Anne Frank wrote on her diary, and she was right. I never even minded writing essays in school. I enjoyed researching things and writing about them.
I started writing poetry in the eighth grade, as many people do. The teen years are so full of mood swings and emotions and change. Poetry is perfect for expressing all of that. I wrote poetry all through high school and into my mid twenties. I never did anything with it. Just wrote it for myself. Once I became a proper adult, with a job, a home, and children, the poetry and creative writing stopped for a long time. I still kept a journal, but didn’t write much else. When my daughter was school age I would give her fun little writing assignments and I would do them along with her. It was when I had her try her hand at writing poetry that I remembered how much I loved it.
In 2016 I started writing very bad haiku. Just three lines about something on my mind or about the day. I discovered that there was a large poetry community on Instagram. I started sharing there and using the prompts that were floating around. It was so nice to know other people who were drawn to poetry for whatever reason. I started getting more serious about it and published a book of poems in 2018. Poetry and writing have had to remain a very small part of my life as a mom, but it is very important to me that I keep this little thing just for me.
Several times over the years the idea of writing something longer has bounced around in my head, but as I said, I was sure I never had the patience for it. A book of short stories maybe. I actually wrote a whole poetry collection that told a story through poetry, but it never felt complete enough to publish. But a novel seemed like way too much of an undertaking. Not that I haven’t had ideas that seemed like stories I would love to read.
But now, now there is a story that won’t let me go. I thought it was many different stories, but they were all just the separate pieces to this one story. My heart is saying this is the one. This is the story I have to tell. So I am writing it. I am giving myself a year to write and research and get at least a first draft. I am still a mom first, and my time is limited. A year seems like a good goal.
This is another thing this blog will come in handy for. Book updates, Process notes. Questions I am asking myself. It feels a little scary to announce to the world I am writing a novel. What if I fail? But it also feels like a commitment to take my writing to the next phase. I hope you’ll join me for the journey.