Vince’s Daily Journal – Day 18
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*Restructuring Writing Goals*
In trying to advance my writing ability, I’ve been researching groups that work with imprisoned writers. While there are a ton of groups out there, most of them are weirdly specific (one group I found was only for female writers incarcerated in federal prison in North Carolina – of which there is ONE; one was only for minors in Michigan, etc.). Really, I only found one that didn’t fence me out automatically because of the state I’m in or the prosecuting authority or my gender or age, and that’s PEN America’s Prison Writing Program. However, when I reached out to PEN, they responded within a matter of a couple of hours with encouragement and information, they sent me a book as well as a packet of information about their program. The part that most intrigued me is the mentorship program. PEN hosts a writing competition for incarcerated writers, and anyone who wins at any level in any category – as well as writers who didn’t win, but who their team identifies as someone with great potential – are paired with an author, editor, or someone else with experience in the industry to become a writing mentor for that inmate for at least a year. That’s an incredible opportunity, and one that I want desperately.
With that in mind, I’ve shuffled my writing goals somewhat.
The submission for the PEN America competition is 8/1/24 – 12/31/24, with categories of Fiction, Memoir, Essay, and Poetry. So between now and the end of the year, I’m going to work on submissions for each of the 3 prose sections of the contest. In the meantime, I’ll be working on world-building and plotting for the novel I had originally intended to finish by my next birthday. By 1/1/25, I will begin writing the narrative of that novel, though if I finish and submit to PEN, I’ll start on the novel sooner.
I realized that, as rusty as my writing skills are, jumping directly into a novel-length work guaranteed roughly a thousand drafts. I need to do quite a bit more practice before I get to that point. With the PEN competition, each submission is limited to 20 pages, and that brevity makes it much more realistic (and way less stressful) to be able to take multiple cracks at each submission, giving me room to practice my craft. The contest requires that any submissions be unpublished, so I won’t be posting any of them in advance, however I may put in excerpts, or even chunks of writing from drafts that got scrapped.
I also want to acknowledge that I haven’t been doing great at posting on a daily basis. It’s that whole ‘perfect is the death of complete’ issue for me. I’ll be focusing on fixing that, even if not every post is the best piece of writing I’ve ever produced.
