I've gotten quite a few inquiries wondering if my trip to Laramie was "successful". I put that in quotes because success is such a chameleon of a word. My trip was successful in that I wasn't in a car accident, I didn't get food poisoning, or kidnapped, and I even returned home despite having a credit card.
The schism, in my mind, is that I had a dangerous case of expectations, and what the trip was like didn't meet my imagination head-on. Some of it was in the ball park because I certainly know what the drive to Wyoming is like, and I am all too familiar with the inside of a hotel room, but I couldn't settle down and write for hours in the room like I had hoped. Just hated sitting there at that little desk. It also didn't help that hotels use cleaning products that give me an allergic reaction. Benadryl apparently cannot be overpowered by caffeine, but I tried.
My mistake was thinking I could move writing to the forefront, after a lifetime of writing snippets and pages whenever and wherever I could. My writing time has always been so fragmented that it's hard to write anything that requires development. It took this attempt at a writing retreat to clarify the problem. Even in Laramie, I wrote in coffee places, in my car in the parking lots of parks, and while sitting in a picnic ground in a national forest. Occasionally I wrote in the room while on the bed surrounded by books and paper but I read more than I wrote.
Trying to write a novel this way is like trying to row a trawler.
I ended up feeling like I had banished myself to a long time-out. Go to your room, old lady, and think about what you just did. I did my thinking and will do things differently next time. For instance, send the rest of the household to Disneyland while I stay home and write.
The schism, in my mind, is that I had a dangerous case of expectations, and what the trip was like didn't meet my imagination head-on. Some of it was in the ball park because I certainly know what the drive to Wyoming is like, and I am all too familiar with the inside of a hotel room, but I couldn't settle down and write for hours in the room like I had hoped. Just hated sitting there at that little desk. It also didn't help that hotels use cleaning products that give me an allergic reaction. Benadryl apparently cannot be overpowered by caffeine, but I tried.
My mistake was thinking I could move writing to the forefront, after a lifetime of writing snippets and pages whenever and wherever I could. My writing time has always been so fragmented that it's hard to write anything that requires development. It took this attempt at a writing retreat to clarify the problem. Even in Laramie, I wrote in coffee places, in my car in the parking lots of parks, and while sitting in a picnic ground in a national forest. Occasionally I wrote in the room while on the bed surrounded by books and paper but I read more than I wrote.
Trying to write a novel this way is like trying to row a trawler.
I ended up feeling like I had banished myself to a long time-out. Go to your room, old lady, and think about what you just did. I did my thinking and will do things differently next time. For instance, send the rest of the household to Disneyland while I stay home and write.
A nice place to write.
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