Am I a Stump?

Years ago, I attended a lecture by Sharon McCrumb, a local author who's "made it." This was when she writing her ballad novels, and at the time I had not read a single one (I've since listened to a couple as books on tape). In fact, I had attempted to read her first book and found it so difficult to stay with that I had abandoned it.

But she was published and winning awards, so she must have been doing something right. She once was a columnist for one of the newspapers I was writing for at the time. She went on to bigger and better things. I wanted to see how she did it.

So I went to the lecture at the Blue Ridge Library. She evidently made quite an impression, as I recall much about her talk. For one thing, she believed the Blue Ridge Mountains were part of a larger chain of the mountains of Scotland, separated by the Atlantic by seismic activity or something. Since I'd long heard from my Irish and Scottish ancestors that the area reminded them of home, I had no trouble believing this.

Then the talk turned to writing. She said it takes great dedication to write a novel (I should think so). If I'm remembering this correctly, (and I may not be) she said she sent out a book synopsis and received a positive response. But she had to turn in some number of pages or her first draft, perhaps, and so she had to do all of this writing. I presume she had a deadline to meet.

She said she sat crying and writing one Halloween because she could not be with her child during the trick-or-treat part. She had to work while her family was enjoying themselves. The idea was, then, that if you're not ready to completely deny everything else to meet the deadlines, then you're not ready to write a novel.

Or at least, that is what I took away from that talk.

Over the years, I've wondered if this is why I am very good at shorter things, like news articles (or blog entries) but not so good at sticking with something longer. I don't put the longer works first. I put my husband first, actually. And that means keeping up the house and the laundry and fixing dinner, and trying to have an income to contribute to the household. The income part means writing short little articles, because I know I can pay the bills with those.

So maybe I am not a novelist.

But there is also a part of me that thinks that an hour spent with your child during trick-or-treating would have stopped the flow of tears and wouldn't have made that much difference in any piece of work. How many words can you write in an hour, after all, particularly if you're that upset? Isn't there some line between sacrifice and living?

I have written a novel. I have two completed in the drawer; neither will probably ever see the light of day. And I've started several and not finished them, for whatever reason. Sometimes I lose interest, and if I've lost interest, I suspect my reader will too, so I boot that one out.

I write a lot. I write about 250 articles a year. My blog entries, if you put them in MS Word, run into hundreds of pages. I have journals piled in closets, bits of poetry stashed about. It is not that I don't write.

It is what I am writing. I am searching for something here, some answers, maybe even the questions.

I think I am searching for what it is I really want. I am searching, maybe, for the way to find out how to even begin that search.