The First, Biggest Challenge of Grad School

After I drop my daughter off at school in the morning, shower and dress, I take a steaming cup of coffee into my home office and get to work.  I open my Mac laptop, click on Word, and a blank page appears on the screen in front of me.  Now...what to write?

Over the last few years, enrolled in undergraduate writing courses, I've been able to rely on assignments to feed my writing.  Rarely has a professor looked at me and said, "Okay.  Go write something.  Whatever you feel like writing."  This is a new experience, and one that I'm finding more than a little intimidating.  This semester, my "assignment" is to write short pieces, many of them.  Topics are completely open, but the finished pieces need to be self-contained (a beginning, middle and end), and range from a paragraph to no more than five pages.  Those of you who have been in writing classes with me, or who taught those classes, know that writing short is not my strong suit.

More than one professor has told me that I'm a "book writer", someone for whom the long form is the most comfortable fit.  A lover of detail and setting, even when I try to write short pieces, they turn into longer ones.  Whenever I work on something that was originally intended to be short, someone that reads it will inevitably ask me if it's going to be book length.  "No," I reply.  "This one's really going to be short."  They look at me, bewildered by my answer.  "Are you sure?  I think this needs to be long."  Sigh.

So, even though writing short is a difficult thing for me, doing just that for an entire semester will help me to grow immensely as a writer.  My longwinded tendencies have to be shoved into a drawer, as I create short pieces that actually end.  I'm starting with the longer ones, four or five pages, and working my way backwards to the shortest of them.  Provided that I can think of enough short topics to write about, this should be a great experience for me.

The blank page stares back at me, and it knows that I'm struggling.  It teases me, taunts me with it's open space, knowing that even finding a topic is elusive.  I grab an old journal and dig for inspiration.  Something catches my attention - a snippet of an idea that I never followed, or a line of dialogue that I wrote down on the train.  I write one sentence, maybe two or three, and stop.  I save the document and continue digging, mining for new ideas while the others marinate.  Right now, getting plenty of ideas down is half the battle.  The war awaits...