All Those Hours (it wasn't for nothing)

This blog post is unique for a few reasons. 1) I 110% forgot to post last week. Completely. That's what having extra responsibilities an adorable new sibling will do to me! 2) Grappling with laziness vs needed breaks has been a huge theme in my life lately. So I've really been thinking about whether all those hours I spent writing stories that were never meant to be was the most colossal waste of time EVER. 3) I've been slowly adding to this post week by week in a note on my phone. 4) As a result, it shows a huge shift in my thinking. I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

I don't know about you guys, but I wrote casually for years and years. I have two little stories I finished before the age of ten. And probably around forty others saved on a Word document with character names and sometimes chapters and chapters of writing.

About half of those are garbage and the other half remain my Pinterest-board worthy stories who hope to see the light of publication one day.

So do you ever ask yourself--what was the point of all that? Before I knew the difference between plotting and pantsing. Before I knew what passive voice and action beats were. And yet I for one spent countless hours just ... writing. With little thought of what was right or wrong. Lots of it has rookie mistakes. However, I think I also learned something.

Without all those hours, I wouldn't have known I could get ideas onto a page. I wouldn't have known that writing with chapters helped me generate new ideas. I wouldn't have learned that I get inspiration from movies and "what ifs." I wouldn't have the inquiring mind that files away every name and odd circumstance. And I certainly wouldn't have read as often, learned how to use word processing so young, or squirmed through so many "scary" movies if the power of story had not captured me from an early age.

So even though the actual words I spent those hours on need a lot of refining, I came away with a passel of now second-nature skills that help me build my stories of today. I'm really thankful for that, because it does look like a big waste of time at first glance. I know now that if I'd gotten "serious" about writing sooner, I might have missed the most important part of the slow growing process. Because that only comes through practice.

That's what I consider those thousands of crummy words documents--practice. They're fragments of ideas, but bits of my past imagination. Honestly, I'm a little too impatient to write thousands of useless words just for the sake of practice nowadays.

It's amazing to look back because I always assumed I'd be an author. I knew someday I'd finish something and it would be published. I never questioned what would come in between. It didn't worry me that I had the attention span oif a gnat. I kept at it, never getting anywhere new. And never doubting the importance of what I was doing. I am SO thankful for that. And I'd very much like to bottle that contentment with my slow progress and the hunger to write.

I think God's slowly leading me back around to having to really wait on His timing, because I'm a green light girl. As soon as I feel like what I want to do has gotten the okay from God and parents, I'm off ... often charging into a brick wall and wondering how that happened when the truth is I was never supposed to be the driver in the first place.

With this break I'm taking from writing so my wrist can heal, I feel really lazy. I'm hardly on my computer once or twice a week, let alone hours every day *gasp*. Without my writing, I've lost my motivation to post on social media, reply to emails, read ... Lame, I know. Writing is the lifeblood of all those things, and without it I'm pretty content just to hold my new sister and watch Netflix. So maybe you can tell just how much it meant to find out that I haven't been wasting my time from the very beginning. Even the no-writing stages are learning stages.

And for the first time this month, I think I can finally see what's next, because all of a sudden the next few months are packed with editing work. It's a good thing I'm not god of my own universe or my life would be much much more boring than this.

I have to know: did you write a bunch of fluffy words as a kid, too? Or a teenager, even! Can you see how they shaped you as a writer?

Thank you guys for tagging along on wherever this crazy writing part of my life leads me. It's so much more fun to go offroading and get lost with all of you in the backseat! I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas with your families. I'll try not to drop off the face of the earth again. ;)