Did you ever lose your writing or other work because you didn’t save it, your computer crashed, or for no reason that you can see? That’s not a real problem. We know this. Cancer is a real problem. Your house sliding down a hill is a real problem.
And yet, losing those pages feels TRAGIC.
Lately, I’ve been hit with a bunch of–I’m not going to call these problems. Let’s call them “aggravations.” Aggravations that feel a lot like lost pages.
I got robbed in Florence. Very akin to losing pages in that, you know, I simply wasn’t careful enough. I KNEW better. But someone took my cell phone and my wallet, with our passports, my credit and bank cards, and even Prose’s passport! A LOT of hassle, the expense of replacing the phone and documents, and the creepy feeling that someone of that caliber knows where I live.
Then, through some sort of the-computer-program-knows-more-than-you-do weirdness, we lost something very precious to me. Your name. Hundreds of people on the mailing lists for my newsletter and the Village Writing School newsletter were mysteriously unsubscribed. I know I’m not always brilliant, but I can’t believe half my list unsubscribed at the same moment.
We worked with the mail program to discover that it was the result of an of automatic thing ran by Yahoo/AOL and it only affected newsletters coming from a .mac or .me address. It wasn’t just us. There’s lots of discussion on the web about it. But I feel like a peasant whose village is burned because the nobleman on one hill decides to attack the nobleman on the other hill.
Then my own government decided they had misfigured my social security, and I owe them money out of the blue. Aggravations. I’m telling you, they are piling up. It’s enough to get a girl down.
I feel like a deer in headlights or that squirrel crossing the road. Which way do I go, what problem do I work on next, and how do I do it? Here are three suggestions from my own snarly mess for when you find yourself in one and when aggravations feel like tragedies.
1. Roll up your sleeves and slog into the swamp. When you find yourself discouraged and unmotivated, sometimes you just have to go on true grit alone. We are so insecure about our writing that obstacles can feel like a sign from God. Oh, maybe losing those pages is a sign I shouldn’t even be writing. Or that that story was not any good. This is not clear thinking. Never make a decision when you’re beset by aggravations. It’s too easy to quit during times of stress.
2. Sometimes, you have to go back to your first moments of vision to remind yourself of WHY you wanted to do the thing that’s been derailed. I’ve had to do this lately. To focus on the key mission of the Village Writing School, which is that everything we are about is to help you tell your story. To help us find our stories and in that journey to find ourselves, to better know ourselves and our creative purpose. That’s my personal goal and my goal for everyone who has a story to tell.
3. Look for another creative approach. Sometimes when I lose a chapter, rather than trying to recreate what I lost, I just pretend I’ve never written it and I’m starting with a clean page. Maybe I write it anew by setting up a different scene or starting in a different place.
Instead of just digging out from under, you can use the derailment to reconsider your original vision and your approach.
That’s what we’re going to do with the newsletter. I think we all get too much mail. I think we need to get less and better mail. So we’ve decided to send out the same newsletter to my followers and the Village Writing School followers. It will contain my message, the school’s upcoming events, and a useful writing tip from one of our teachers. That’s it. Ok, maybe a picture of Prose.
I can’t express my gratitude to those of you who have followed my journey and written to comment or encourage me. You are so precious, which is why this email thing has me so bummed. But we will build again, better. We will write that chapter we lost, better. We will set up better automatic saves or whatever we need to do to not lose pages. And I will be even more vigilant in crowds of pickpockets.
We will not give these things power over us. We will call them what they are. Aggravations.
–Alison