A Writing Life: Ronna Wineberg

A Writing Life

I’m a fiction writer and sometimes I’m asked about my writing life. The question has caused me to think about my writing process and what a writing life entails.

My writing life consists of different parts: writing, submitting work, creating books, publicizing a new book, giving readings, building community, and reading literature.

Writing is the focus. I like to write for three or four hours a day or more. But if that isn’t possible because of other commitments or tasks I need to complete, I write whenever I can. Even an hour is helpful. 

Some days it’s hard to clear the concerns of real life from my mind and begin, especially if a short story I’m working on is challenging or if I slip into the black hole of the computer, checking emails or social media.  

Since I was in my twenties, I’ve kept a journal. Most mornings, I write in it—dreams, lists, snippets of conversation, opinions, complaints. This helps clear distractions from my mind. What I write there sometimes transforms into scenes for a story. Writing in the journal exercises the writing muscle, wakes it up.

This is my process: I’m often excited to begin a new short story. I may have made notes about it and feel inspired. I sit at my desk in my study and write longhand on a pad of lined paper. Then I transfer what I’ve written to the computer. I go back and forth between the printed pages and the computer, writing and revising. An early draft often consists of opening scenes and then scenes out of sequence—I haven’t decided where to put these yet. I’m building scaffolding; it takes a long time to construct the story. 

My inspiration wanes. I’m not sure where the story is going. Or I know where it’s going, but haven’t figured out how to get there. If I’m stumped, I try to work through this. If I can’t make progress, I set the story aside and go back to it another day.

I work on a story day after day, month after month. This is my process for writing a novel, too. Ideas come to me as I traverse real life.

When I compiled my new collection, Artifacts and Other Stories, I looked through my inventory of stories and chose those with themes that fit together. Then I revised all the stories I selected, including those published in literary journals. I wrote new endings, new scenes. I learned the unconscious has a will of its own. I was surprised to find I’d repeated images and names over the years. I had to find replacements. 

Letting go is part of a writing life. Letting go of a well-crafted sentence or a character or a paragraph that doesn’t work. I delete a sentence, later put it back. I move paragraphs to different places. I labor over words, images, characters, descriptions. Sometimes I start over. There is the letting go of a piece of writing as well. Do I abandon a story? Or complete it? 

When I haven’t looked at a story in a while, I lose the narrative threads. I have to dive in again and find them. Sometimes I discover the key to a story then.  But consistency, working on a story every day, is magic and generates ideas. 

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A few years ago, I read an essay in the Michigan Quarterly Review, a reprint of a lecture the writer Susan Choi gave. She wrote: “the associative movements of the mind, which are constant and strange, are the real engine of writing, over which we have little control, regardless of what we say after the fact… Every part of our lives is potentially part of our work… literature is the organizing of experiences, the ordering of emotion.”  

This is true for me. I’m inspired by my imagination, by what I see in the world, what happens to family and friends, and by my own experiences. I don’t think about ordering my emotions as I write, but that, in fact, happens. I think about characters, words, and telling a story. I’m often surprised by what I put on the page.

When writing is going well, I’m immersed in the flow of it.  I don’t want to stop. I have been digging for something and found it. I am not thinking about real life or if a reader will like my work or not. I am in love with the process, hard as it is, putting one word after another. On my best writing days, I feel the joy of creating something new. The next day or next week, when I look at what I’ve written, I’m often appalled or pleased. I continue to revise.

When writing isn’t going well, it’s a discouraging, arduous, struggle. I’m ready to stop for the day or even set aside the project for a while.  

I allot time for other parts of a writing life. I’m grateful to read a friend’s work, for a friend’s comments about my work, an acceptance in a literary journal, or an editor’s comments on a rejection. 

A short story has two lives—one in the writer’s mind and one that the reader gives to it.

The writer’s goal, a teacher told me, is to make a piece of writing look effortless, no matter how much effort went into creating it.

I try to accomplish this in my writing life. 

Every day that I write, I am reminded once again that writing, like any art, is fueled by labor and repetition, and not by inspiration alone. 

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Ronna Wineberg

Ronna Wineberg is the award-winning author of three collections of short stories, Artifacts and Other Stories; Nine Facts That Can Change Your Life; and a debut collection, Second Language, winner of the New Rivers Press Many Voices Project Literary Competition. She is also the author of a novel, On Bittersweet Place, winner of the Shelf Unbound Best Indie Book Competition. Her stories have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Colorado Review, and other literary journals, and broadcast on National Public Radio. She has been awarded a fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a scholarship in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and residencies to The Ragdale Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is the founding fiction editor of the Bellevue Literary Review. Wineberg was born in Chicago and lives in New York City. 

Website: www. Ronnawineberg.com

Twitter: @Ronna Wineberg

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronna-wineberg-460b49220/

ARTIFACTS AND OTHER STORIES

Artifacts and Other Stories explores the exhilaration, disappointment, and surprises of love and connection. These fourteen short stories portray relationships — between lovers, spouses, parents and children, and friends. Desire, longing, memory, marriage, betrayal, adultery, loss, and fresh starts dominate lives.

Men and women navigate their feelings and domestic struggles, wrestle with the shifting tides of affection, aging, and illness. Past and present weave together, spilling into the futures as these vibrant, deeply human characters face unexpected changes in their lives and in themselves.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips