WOW:What’s Your Line?

Write On Wednesday’s Prompt: I think once you’ve found your voice, your theme, your preoccupation, then your writing life becomes a lot simpler. You begin to focus your vision of the world through that lens, and pretty soon you start relating everything you see and everything that happens to you in terms of that focal point. What do you catch yourself thinking about? What experiences and relationships in your life are the most meaningful? What catches your attention when you’re out and about? These are the things you’re going to know, the things you’re going to care about, and that knowledge and caring will resonate in your writing.

This is where you’ll find your line.

How about you? Have you found your line yet? Do you think you have one? How do you go about expressing it?

This was a prompt that was going to require more thought from me than I had to give to it on Wednesday, which is why I’m doing the Write On Wednesday on Friday. In fiction writing, my ideas all center around female search for self journeys, mostly around women who have a false sense of reality. My first nano novel was about a woman who was a wealthy elitist with the ‘perfect’ life, clothes, car and house until her husband dropped dead. Then she found out that he’d been having an affair for many years and was nearly bankrupt. She had to face the reality of who she was and how superficial her life had been. For my next novel idea, I chose a helicopter parent, because they drive me absolutely crazy. I really can’t understand how a woman can have no life beyond her teenager’s social world and think that that’s ok. Denial is a common theme: my child is perfect. So her son winds up dead and she has to face the fact that not only was he NOT perfect, but also that she doesn’t know who she is because her entire world revolved around being at his school activities.

I think I would have enjoyed being a psychiatrist, because I find myself constantly analyzing people. Even at work, I analyze (and sometimes overanalyze) their comments, actions, motives, intentions. I am always trying to figure out what people are going to do or why they behave the way they do. At social gatherings and in restaurants, I am usually listening to at least two conversations at the same time. I am mostly fascinated by women and our roles, the societal masks we wear, trying to be true to ourselves in a society that bombards us with who we should be and leaves us little time to figure out who we really are.

As I thought about this prompt, I realized that while I did have a “line” that I go back to for fiction writing, I really have never found that “line” for my blog. I think that’s why I have struggled so much, periodically, with whether to keep it up or not. And in ruminating over this prompt, I think I may have come to an answer. My fiction ideas focused on the circumstances that cause a woman to begin a search for self journey and portray that unraveling of pretenses. But in real life, my focus for the last couple of years has been my own spiritual growth and creativity and how to balance that with the demands of being a working mother. I spend a lot of time reading blogs and books on those subjects, doing morning pages, gratitude journals, and intentions. Watching the Oprah Monday night series. Nearly all my free time for most of this past year has been focused on staying centered and grounded, making time for first things first, keeping perspective…which is not to say that I was always able to do so.

Two weeks ago I discovered Christine Kane’s blog. Last week, for the second time in two months, I got poison ivy that required steroids. I’ve never really even had poison ivy before, other than a mild patch, even though I’m out in the woods all the time. And I kept trying to figure out why I was now so susceptible to it, so suddenly. On my second day of steroids, I opened her blog and her post was on poison ivy! She related it to spirituality, intentions, the power of the mind over the body… all the things I’d been reading about for the last year and trying to apply to my own life. And it suddenly clicked.

I should be writing about my own search for self journey and how I’ve been trying to link the theoretical, book explanations with the reality of life. Like: if we’re supposed to be able to control things with our mind, why am I getting poison ivy?? Because that’s the kind of crazy stuff I think about all the time. And there might be people interested in crazy stuff like that. Or what I’m reading about in Women Who Run With the Wolves. Or why I can’t get the female characters from The Pillars of the Earth out of my mind.  Or going to the zen garden and not knowing the significance of stacking the rocks.  Or why I don’t watch tv anymore.

I think I’ve always been so aware of writing for an audience, that I’ve censored a lot of my own writing.  And just as I need to find balance between work and personal time, I also need to find a balance between writing for an audience and writing for me.