Last year, on Wordy Girls, I posted that my 2007 theme would be Ask Questions Later. I wanted to be more fearless, decide to say yes before I analyzed every single cotton-picking pro and con. And I think I made good progress on that. I said yes to presentations I was unsure about and to writing assignments, especially, that I wasn’t sure how they would go. And overall, I was so pleased with my yeses.
But now it’s time to pick a new theme! After a little thought last nast night, I decided that Lose Control was going to be my theme for 2008.
All my life, I’ve been the responsible one. I moved out of the house at 16 and worked more than full-time to put myself through college. I never got drunk. I never touched drugs. In grown-up life, I made the charts, I did the budget, I planned everything.
I got sick of that.
I’m especially tired of what responsibility has done to my writing. I’m a professional, and that’s a good thing. I turn in manuscripts on time. I follow editors’ directions. I research accurately and write thoroughly. All of this works fabulously well for my work-for-hire work and my speaking and teaching engagements, but not so much for my personal projects.
Over the past few years, my husband and I have shared more of the duties of running a house with kids, and it’s been so nice to get some of that weight off my shoulders. I don’t want to be responsible for everything. In fact, sometimes I just want to be irresponsible.
The same is true of my writing. Being 100% responsible, in control, is not always the best thing.
Kelly R. Fineman had a fantastic E.B. White quotation in her quote-skimming post this week: “A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape bottom on anything solid. A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify it by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.”
I love that. I need a little more mystery, intensity, loss of control in my writing. Probably mostly in my poetry, but in other forms, too. I want to be more open to not knowing what’s going to happen when I let my fingers strike the keys. I want to just ride air waves, wind currents, and dip into the ocean (but not scrape bottom) like a seagull does.
Unlike the goals I set (which are always measurable and attainable, of course), this theme isn’t something I research and plan out–thankfully! Instead, it’s just something I will try to keep in my head during 2008 and get better at. It is possible to be conscious of trying to become a more subconscious writer? Anyway, we’ll see what happens.
What about you? Any theme you’d like to set for 2008?