A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-Three-Hundred-And-Thirty-Three

In discussing the difficulties I have been encountering getting myself to return to writing more fiction, I also need to acknowledge the role of routine.  I began a daily writing practice around eight or nine years ago, and it always focused on writing poetry.  While I have written fiction as a part of this practice, at times, it has rarely been something that I did with the same regularity as I have with poetry.  Certainly, my confidence as a poet connects to this, though that connection runs in both directions: I believed in my competence to write poetry when I began this practice, and that certainly made it far easier to begin, and writing poetry each day has helped me to develop as a poet, and has provided me a greater feeling of mastery over my practical ability to produce poetry, putting aside the specific merits of any particular poem.  By contrast, I am not as certain in my fiction writing, and that has made it far more challenging to create a truly sustainable fiction writing practice.  In part, this is why I think it is important for me to remind myself that the best way I can learn to write the fiction I want to write is by attempting to write the fiction that I want to write.