A Note On...Writing That Surprises Us
One of the regular features of my blog is the "A Note On..." series in which I ask writers I know or hope to know to blog about lessons they've learned about writing, the creative life, or just general topics they have an interesting insight into. To kick off the series, I asked my friend and former classmate Molly Ann Magestro to describe the experience of having one writing project catch fire in the middle of working on another.
As I sit down to write this, I am six days away from finishing the fifth draft of a novel I’ve been working on for two and a half years. It takes place in a world I created, a world populated with characters I know better than I know some members of my family. It is the writing I’ve envisioned myself doing since I was a child who thought the most important part was filling the notebooks, not whether or not the story made any sense. I like to think I know better now.
I work on this draft every day. It is more 90,000 words long. I may not love all 90,000 of them, but I love the product they are becoming more than I love some members of my family. This is the work I take with me when I go on vacation and that I still do when my job teaching writing feels overwhelming and when amazing or tragic things happen in my life off the page.
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As I sit here writing this, I am months away from finishing the first draft of an academic book about an idea I had a little less than a year ago. *Trigger Warning* The idea is that television shows sometimes do a terrible job when they take on the daunting prospect of representing rape narratives. The book focuses on some of my favorite cop shows and courtroom dramas. It is the writing that had you asked me about it six months ago, I would have had no idea what you were talking about and made you listen to me talk about my novel instead.
I work on this project every day. Some days that means writing, but most days, at this point, it means watching episode after episode of violent television. I enjoy watching television, but there are 295 episodes of CSI alone. This is the work I am invested in because I think it is important and worthy of study.
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Only one of these books is under contract (fingers crossed for the other some day soon, though). It’s not the book where my heart lives. I essentially stumbled into writing a book about rape on television. I noticed a pattern that made me angry and, for me, doing something about it meant presenting at a conference where I met with an editor who offered me an opportunity.
The biggest reason I considered not taking advantage of that opportunity is because I consider myself, first and foremost, a creative writer. It’s a set of skills that I have been cultivating since I was a child, something I have gladly dedicated years of my life to. When I first began thinking about a non-fiction book project, the idea of taking a break from my creative writing was almost enough to convince me to say no. But here’s the reality of my situation: ever since I was small, I have always made opportunities to write creatively because without it, my life would be less. And I may never have another opportunity to write my other book (Assault on the Small Screen: Treatments of Sexual Violence on Prime Time Television Dramas is under contract with Scarecrow Press).
So maybe I won’t consider writing a different book as taking a break. I tell my students that any kind of writing they do helps them to improve every kind of writing they do. Working on this other book, and focus on this other type of writing, might just been the opportunity I didn’t know I was waiting for to help me grow as a writer.
Molly Ann Magestro has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She teaches creative writing and composition at UW-Washington County, and she has written many books that very few people have read. For now. She infrequently blogs about writing at mollymagestro.wordpress.com.