Slice of Life #31 - This Is it!!!!

The Slice of Life Challenge is hosted by Two Writing Teachers.

Honestly, I love you Slice of Life Challenge, but I am also ready to move on with my writing. I have a book that I really really really want to work on but this challenge was different from my book writing. I love the Slice of Life Challenge for generating ideas. For realizing you have to find your writing territories and you have to write about something you really want to write about. That is an enormous lesson. I understand what it's like to get stuck and not know what to write. I understand what it's like to write and feel pressure to write something meaningful and coherent so that someone can read it everyday. But I am longing for the days of writing something just to write something. Just to get something down on paper or on my computer. To say I have moved forward in my book instead of having just written something just to write something about my life. Believe me, I have learned about myself as a writer and I don't mean to sound snarky towards Slice of Life, but I have recognized that writing is something different for me right now in my life. Writing just to write about my life every single day isn't the kind of writing I want to be doing right now.

As I think about what writing is going to be like in the future, I'm thinking about how I would want to define writing for myself, how it will look different from this challenge. (And this is possibly the biggest lesson I have learned from this challenge.) A challenge is a challenge. Someone else lays out the guidelines and you fit yourself into that mold. You do it to have said you have done it. Now I can write for myself. While it was hard for me to have to write everyday for the Slice challenge, I see myself wanting to desperately write everyday still...but on my own terms. I want to write part of my book in progress every day. I want to get more words down, see where the book will take me, flush out ideas and make things come together. I realize that it will only happen if I really work on it, if I really do add words and make changes everyday. But this writing has a different purpose and while I will be writing everyday, my purpose will be to make progress in my book, to work on little pieces towards a whole, to work on something knowing that it can totally suck because I'm the only one who's going to see it for now.

Thank you Slice of Life and all my friends who have stopped by to see what I was writing about. I love you and appreciate you for wanting to see what I have written and encouraging me through my mood swings as I have gone along. Thank you Slice of Life for pushing me to write and helping me come to a place of clarity about my own writing and what I want writing to be on my own terms. It truly has been a learning experience for me.

I'll be posting on Tuesday. I really will. My plan is actually to do my own writing and then chime in on Tuesdays to express my headway and to share how my writing life is progressing. The SOL won't be me writing just to write, it'll be me updating my progress on how my writing is going because writing is part of my life more now than ever before.