Fridays should be non-negotiable days for writing. Last week, I was able to steal some precious hours and plot some of the possible chapters to develop for this “work order”. The official code for this is WrEng-YA (and the invoice number is 17032277).

In an apple green notebook with spring, I have jotted down B’s official time of writing her diary. The year is 2020 and in the diary, she is going back to the most difficult years of her young life — 2017. Also plotted were the milestone years of her relatives, but I have yet to finalize her family tree for easy recall.

The chapter I began drafting last Friday, March 18, is B overhearing the details of a memory which, in my plotline can serve as a frame for a kind of before and after scenario. The happy memory which, in the plot going through my head, will say something about the family’s congenial relationship before everything turned sour in 2017 for B specifically, and for the family in general — is going to be repeated in the form of a similar event, but in a later celebration where B will be a participant. (B was still a baby the first time this same event happened).

In other words, I have found my dramatic situation. There is that very real conflict which B is going to process in her diary, after everything has happened. In a sense, this can be a bildungsroman, albeit late for my young heroine because now, she just sees all the ruins and is trying to make sense of what she perceives as something unnatural or reversible.

The plan is to jot down the chapters that should be included using a main event of a month as setting or memory or situation or scene. So for example, the chapter called “First Niece” is a January entry because B points out that she’s watching the “Nazareno” on TV. This led the narrative to divulge her faith orientation which will be a major factor in the turn of events in this story.

So far so good.

But well, although I’m keen about tomorrow — I should block out the following:

I need to deliver the Bernardino manuscript to OMF – edited and finalized.

I need to deliver the module for Junior High featuring the play “Oedipus Rex”

I need to check student papers and quizzes, record them and finalize their grades.

In other words, I should stop this meandering on this blog and do some work already so I can have my Friday free for WrEng-YA.

PS

I can’t spell the plot out in this blog because it will still change, I think. And besides, everything is not yet that clear in my head. But I know that this YA novel is about family, and one can go back to “Tanging Yaman” and realize that Filipinos ought to write more about families because we have always boasted about it and yet, are we truly a nation of strong family relations?

Time spent earning extra income, (because reduced teaching load salary isn’t enough to pay the bills) takes up a huge chunk of my schedules. Using the desktop computer here at the faculty center, I am able to type these words now  about writing because I don’t have an urgent email that requires me to translate, edit, proofread, or validate a translation ASAP. But last week, a series of small urgent job orders that totalled to about three hundred dollars gave me no time to write.  Every job was “URGENT” as the subject line of client emails had always indicated. There was no way I could default at each step of the job, from acceptance of the PO to answering client feedback. Happy about the number of job orders, I set aside all writing agenda for the week. I spent zero moment in thinking about how Bianca’s Diary should proceed
(after the teenager and her mom watched a play).

A novelist friend (she has written two award-winning novels) tells me that when she writes, she needs “creative space”. This is a time to just be quiet and stare, observe and absorb evocations from the stir of people and events. To meet this need, she goes out of town, the farther and more isolated, the better. The trick she says is to just savor this creative moment, to sit down, and to write.

Right now, all alone at this spacious faculty center at the library, I can enjoy some creative time and space. So I sit down and write.

But the task of writing is really more than sitting down and writing. Writing is thinking clearly, logically, meticulously. Not a word should end up where it doesn’t need to be. Not a sentence longer for a thoroughly thought out idea.

I began this blog here at 11:00 AM. By this time, 11:31, it isn’t finished. There is no time to polish the final outcome of this in the next thirty minutes because I have to leave this desk and attend a writer’s meeting. I will come back to the blog later and edit it until it becomes useful for a target reader. Outside, the muted street sounds hardly inspire me to write. I am tempted right now to sleep on the sofa. It takes about twenty seconds before I am able to type the next sentence that will keep the focus of this blog to the thought of “creative space”. This paragraph meanders.

Bianca’s Diary can’t be put on hold any longer. It deserves its creative space. The best way to work this out I think is to impose a deadline on myself, to treat this YA novel like a job order, to work like Bianca’s Diary is a client that needs to be served with utmost professionalism.  Then, once in the “pipeline” of my freelance job calendar, I should dive to the task with urgency, meticulousness, and diligence. I should deliver on deadline and expect a return on investment, so to speak. This is work. Writing.