writer in progress: you can't write everything.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit until one is amazed at one's luck. -- Dame Iris Murdoch
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The artist--the successful artist--wants to play, wants to wallow in the piece, wander, go off track, marry purple to orange, turn up the volume, introduce lions. -- Heather Sellers, Chapter after Chapter
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I got my English major at a private liberal arts college, and secretly or not-so-secretly, most of my pals and I expected to graduate with 1) a degree, and 2) an engagement ring.

For those of you who missed out on this experience--or have yet to be part of it--it can lead to funny frames of mind. Sleep-deprived and coffee-animated, a few of us began to see every boy that crossed our path as potential husband material. (This doesn't help you study, just in case you're wondering.)
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And then one of my pals said, in a matter-of-fact voice, You can't marry everyone.
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This made me laugh uproariously at the time, since it's a pretty obvious fact. But at the same time, it lifted that weird urgency that was already dancing around our last year of college.
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You can't marry everyone.
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Fast forward through graduation (degree yes, ring no), my huge outrageous decision to not be an editor but to write from home instead, my move home... click forward to the image of me, sitting at my desk, quiet, terrified.

Write from home? What was I thinking? What was I thinking?
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There is no syllabus, no guide, no DIY plan for "hey I think I'll learn how to write my own stuff."
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All I had was the framework of my Creative Writing minor. I had classes in creative non-fiction, short stories, poetry, and my 60-page honors thesis. That's what I knew how to do. So, I made a plan. (This is a theme, by the way. If I ever write a memoir, I could just index all my plans and there you have it: my life as a list.)
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A plan that, shockingly enough, I thought was reasonable. In my first three months at home, I would:

• send out fifty poems. Fifty. I had about twenty written during my poetry semester, so I'd need to, um, write a few more.
• send out five essays. I had a handful from class, and they could be tweaked for whichever market I decided on.
• send out three short stories. I had written three in class, so, that was pretty straightforward.
• oh, and then get started on a novel: research, draft an outline, come up with a scene list, and get 50,000 words toward the rough draft.
• also, apply at bookstores for a part time job, aiming for about twenty hours a week.

Should I laugh or cry, looking at a list like that? (My college advisor had a little sandy Zen garden on his desk, just for crazy students like me.)
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You can practically hear me hyperventilating, trying to keep the insane pace of my senior year. Basically, I thought I was a machine. I'd written on command for the last four years, so why not stick with what worked?
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But what I needed most was time to explore with my writing, not work through a thousand more assignments. I'm glad to say, I threw out most of those goals by midsummer. I can write poetry, but I'm not a poet by heart or inclination. Same goes for essays, short stories... I think that, truly, I'm a novelist.
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So this was one of my very first, steep writing lessons: You can't write everything.
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You can't use a million projects and dozens of publishing credits to prove to yourself that you're allowed to write. You can't just make enough noise at your desk, in the hopes that you'll stop worrying about your work.
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The biggest gift I gave myself and my work was this: focusing on one main project--the novel--and giving it my energy and time. Soaking into it, studying it from the inside out, puzzling through its particular problems.
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All the writerly attention that could fly toward a dozen different projects, making me absolutely batty in the process, is focused instead on one, my main squeeze, my longtime friend.
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Nope, I can't write everything. And after all the fun I've had with my novel, I'm not even tempted to.