Hi everyone. It’s the first Wednesday of the month and this means it’s time for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group (#IWSG) to meet. I didn’t do as well on my writing in February as I’d hoped. In part, I blame COVID, because over the last week of the month, I felt too blah to write much. I’m still not feeling 100%. Truthfully though, that’s not all. I’ve also just not felt as inspired as I’d hoped.
I’m feeling really disappointed in myself with the fact that I didn’t complete #Write28Days. I know the idea of keeping a landing page was frustrating me from the get-go, but I could have written the posts and not linked them up, I guess. Instead, I gave up after three or four days only.
With this being the case, I’m feeling kind of conflicted about whether to sign up for the A to Z Challenge in April. It was a huge success in both 2020 and 2021 and I know from those years that I can make it work. That being said, I’m so scared of yet another failure and disappointment.
This gets me to this month’s optional question, which is about feeling conflicted about adding a scene to a story or writing a story at all. Since I write autobiographical non-fiction, I feel this sense of conflict all the time. When I was younger, I didn’t feel it much at all, but this led to extreme oversharing. For instance, I remember in 2007, when I’d been in the psych hospital for a month, posting the graphic details of my suicidal crisis to my blog. I later felt the need to erase the most triggering aspects.
Other than that, I’ve not felt conflict about adding scenes into stories or writing a story at all. I mean, my fiction, which I also wrote during my teens and early twenties mostly, was also hugely personal. However, at the time, like I said, I wasn’t really concerned with this.
If you write personal stories, how do you find the right balance between oversharing and not sharing enough?