As I sit in the cafeteria of my local hospital, staring at a blank screen, it dawns on me that graduation was barely a month ago. I have had nagging feelings of being a procrastinator over the last four/five weeks because I have yet to finish a single piece of fiction but I think I need to slow my roll a little bit and allow myself some room to breathe.
The ruminations on story are there, bouncing around in the back of my mind, coming forward as I'm mixing drinks, as I'm reading, or about to fall asleep. I need to understand that the impulse to write is not gone, it is merely in one of the more fallow periods. I have been reading voraciously over the last few weeks (a habit that tended to start every working semester in the program) and I am getting a lot of ideas from the activity.
I am trying to move into an entirely new direction with my writing, at least thematically. I want to leave the "Father" stories behind and focus on a new dynamic, "Mothers." I have really had to focus on the idea of motherhood a bit, in order to not recycle my father themes in a female form. I want to be true to the experience of motherhood. I want to have the women of my stories to be fully formed, dynamic forces in their own right, not in reflection to the men in their lives. I need to quiet my own masculine mind and delve into the feminine. It is an experience which will take patience on my behalf. I feel I am up to the task but I need to be patient, an attribute that is, historically, attributed to the feminine, so maybe, in a way, I'm already doing the work.
No comments:
Post a Comment