IWSG: Major Life Events and Writing

Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds! Posting: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writer - aim for a dozen new people each time - and return comments. This group is all about connecting! Be sure to link to the IWSG page and display the badge in your post. And please be sure your avatar links back to your blog! If it links to Google+, be sure your blog is listed there. Otherwise, when you leave a comment, people can't find you to comment back.

Let’s rock the neurotic writing world!

October 3 question - How do major life events affect your writing? Has writing ever helped you through something?

The awesome co-hosts for the October 3 posting of the IWSG are Dolorah @ Book Lover, Christopher D. Votey, Tanya Miranda, and Chemist Ken!

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Oh, wow--I think our IWSG leaders chose this prompt for me. Do life events affect my writing? Well, yeah. You know that, because I've been whining about it all year!

This has been a year of change for us, though in fact the change didn't happen until June. But we have spent much of the year planning for the big events: retirement and the sale of our home of 20 years (last year was the year of empty-nesting, as our second son started college), followed by major travels. Just the planning badly disrupted my writing--I think that any significant writing stopped by early March, and I am only now starting to get at it again.

A lot of that disruption to my writing was what I'll call physical: my time was eaten up by preparing the house for sale, then by our summer backpacking extravaganza, and finally by moving out, putting all our goods in storage, and driving across the country to begin our year of vagabonding.

The other aspect that has made it hard to write, though, is the psychic and emotional burden of these life changes. Having our last kid move out (a year ago) was one thing, but ripping my life up by the roots is quite another. Part of the point of this exercise (besides getting to see more of the world) is to shake us up and keep us sharp by forcing us to adapt to new situations. That's not an easy thing for me, so facing the prospect (maybe even more than actually doing it), left me often unhappy and upset, and in search of the comforts and consolations of re-reading old favorites, rather than the adventure of diving into new stories of my own.

I'd like to say that through it all, writing has been my point of stability. But I'd be lying. Writing is my calling, but that doesn't mean it isn't hard. And, being hard, when everything around me is in chaos, I find it all too easy to find something else to do. I'll give myself credit for keeping this blog going the whole time, the one writing task I managed to sustain. I still have visions of writing my way around the world--but I think that I'll do very little beyond maintaining my journal of our travels, and, I hope, sharing them here.

How about you? Can you treat writing as your rock when chaos erupts around you? Or are you with me--in search of a nice novel and a bowl of ice cream? Leave your answer below, then follow the link in the logo to visit the other participants in this most encouraging of writers' blog hops.