So, here we are at the end of a year which might be most charitably described as ‘challenging’. You may have felt, like me, that some days you didn’t even want to turn on the news for fear of hearing about war and terrorism, political hectoring and division - and yet another celebrity's death.
At this time we stand on the threshold, looking back and looking forward – and perhaps feeling ambivalent about both. If you’re a regular newsletter reader you may remember I started this year with a questionnaire designed to help you focus on your feelings about the writing life and set your goals for this year.
This is the first of four messages at the turn of 2016/2017, as you pivot between past and future, ready to take those first steps into a fresh year.
We’ll start by taking stock – and I’ll share thoughts about my year with you along the way:
1 What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced in 2016, with regard to your writing?
It may have been lack of time, or a loss of faith, or rejections when you submitted your work. It may have been the realisation that your part-written story had lost its way. You may have decided not to pursue it any further or you may have managed to steer it back on course but it took some doing!
For me, it was, quite simply, overwhelm. Not only did I have various writing projects I wanted to work on, I had lots of competing commitments tugging at me all year long. You may recognise that scenario!
2 What are your wins for the year?
Think about what you’ve achieved. You may think you haven’t achieved all that much but nothing is too small to celebrate! If you wrote one page on February 5th and nothing else until August 23rd, celebrate! Essentially, whatever you’ve created that didn’t exist before you should be proud of. You were the ‘onlie begetter’ of those words on the page. You may, of course, have had bigger successes: stories accepted for publication, competition wins or listings, somebody saying to you how much they enjoyed your work. Celebrate them all!
For me, publishing An Oxford Vengeance was a win. I had intended to produce a different, longer work but it just wasn’t possible – and I wasn’t going to compromise it by writing in a rush and getting it out there half-baked. I had made it my goal to publish some historical fiction before the opening of the Historical Novel Society’s conference in September – An Oxford Vengeance went live on Amazon the day before it started!
I also had an amazing, intense summer of teaching international creative writing summer schools for adults on behalf of Oxford University. The pleasure of that counts as another win, as do the responses of clients whose books I’ve edited or the workshop attendees whose company I've so much enjoyed.
3 What lessons have you learned about yourself and the writing life in the past year?
Take a sheet of paper and record your thoughts. It’s interesting to do this exercise because most of the time you may trundle along feeling your view of yourself as a writer is pretty much the same from one year to the next. But it isn’t. You can draw a line, if you like, showing how your levels of confidence or optimism have fluctuated during the year. You can write down key phrases such as taking pleasure in writing; the desire for publication; ambition; confidence with writing skills; understanding of how the publishing industry works; genres/areas of fiction I’d like to try my hand at – any categories that apply to you. Jot them down, then either mark them out of 10 or write a list beside them. For example, you may find your desire for publication used to be 10/10 and now it’s around 6. You may have always thought of yourself as a crime writer but you’d quite like to try your hand at romance, or you may have been writing in one sub-genre, like cosy crime, but would like to try something more hard-boiled.
For me, as I assess my year, I find what matters most is that I continue to be true to myself as a writer, exerting creative control over what I produce.
That’s it for Part 1! I assume that most of you know I’m a Scot (!), so I’ll now wish you a very Happy Hogmanay rather than New Year’s Eve. Raise a glass to your loved ones and don’t forget to celebrate your achievements and joys in 2016!
Warm wishes,
Lorna
P.S. You can still help me by visiting https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/2YSJDBV to give feedback and help me plan future Fictionfire services and activities.
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