My Next Learning Curve

By Carol Woolum Roberts

On Tuesday evening, some of our Sacred Community Garden members had a Creativity Conversation.  We had given them a creative challenge the week before that said this:

Learning to Navigate the Learning Curves

This is an exercise in encouragement. Faced with doing something new, we often forget we have successfully done many "somethings" old. Take pen in hand and list 10 things you have learned to do despite your doubt they could be mastered.

Here is my list:

1. Walking Cleo without her pulling on the leash.
2. Making pottery.
3. Painting watercolor.
4. Painting acrylic.
5. Running my own business
6. Do a weekly podcast
7. Creating a backyard living space
8. Write melodrama scripts
9. Write musical reviews
10. Learning to weld.

Some of our conversation Tuesday night centered around what was on each other’s lists.  It was fun to hear about the things people had accomplished in their lives, and how that made them proud.

Then one SCG member said this:

“Now I want to pick the next thing.  What do I want to accomplish, even though I doubt I think I can do it?”

What a great challenge for all of us.  What is the next thing?

As I pondered this question, here is one thing that came to mind:

1. Finish writing my novel.

Back in the mid-2000’s I came up with an idea to write an Historical Fiction Novel Series about the Silver Valley, where I live.  At the time I had been learning so much about the history of the area, things I didn’t know growing up in the Silver Valley.

Then the book got put away for over 15 years.  This last year I brought out all my research and what I had already written, and have now been slowing getting back into the project.

It has taken a bit of a different path than I originally had planned. I love the research aspect of this project.  I love making family trees, and putting the puzzle together of how everything fits together.

My first main characters’ family comes from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.  Her great uncle and John Mullan were at West Point together.  I am researching West Point, and what it was like being a part of this military academy.  I am researching John Mullan, the reason one of my main families leave their home in Pennsylvania and travel to the Coeur d’Alene Mining District.

In my research I am finding out things about the Civil War, and Women’s Seminaries where women were educated in the early 1800’s.  I am learning about the canal system in Pennsylvania, and the coal mining done in that state.

This is only the focus of one of the characters’ families.  Next, I show how an Italian family travel to America and have ties to Father Ravalli, the architect of the Old Mission, Idaho’s oldest standing building.

And the third main character is a member of the Coeur d’Alene tribe. 

I will continue to write this story and see where it leads.  Eventually all these three main characters will come together on a grassy hillside by the Old Mission when each of them is 14 years old, and form a strong and lasting friendship, watching out for one another as they travel away from the mission.

A writing group that meets monthly keeps me accountable to get work done.  I try and do work each Friday morning at a local coffee shop.

I do hope to get the book written and published.

The doubts are there.  I keep asking myself if I can complete this project.

Until I can write no longer, I will keep writing this story.

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Is there something you would like to accomplish, but don’t think you can do it?  What is it?

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