Day 31: The End is the Beginning is the End

This is not a race.  After writing for 18 out of my intended 24 hours, this is the conclusion I came to right before I decided to go to sleep.

I woke this morning to the sight of Randi glaring at me from her side of the bed.  At three thirty this morning, I  told her I was calling it a night.  I had written for 18 hours: pure, focused, and (mostly) blissful 18 hours of work, pausing now and again  for the occasional walk, snack, meal, glass of water.  Randi was upstairs working steadily; I was downstairs writing in our covered porch.  At three thirty, I weighed my options:  I could drink a 5-hour energy drink and keep going, or I could go to sleep.  I had accomplished a huge chunk of the work I set forth to do.  I was revising the final two chapters of the book and I was exhausted, both mentally and physically.  I had made it through 250 pages of text, and here at the climax, I was out of steam.

All day, I kept confronting my fear of finishing (every three hours, the need to distract myself from the task would re-emerge), and so I checked in.  Was I stopping because I was afraid of the end?  If I kept working for the next 6 hours, would it be to the betterment of my project?  If I did get sick, would that keep me from working next week?  Were all of these questions simply excuses to call it a night?  I was satisfied with my answers: NO, I wasn’t afraid of the end, I was mentally drained; and so NO, it was not in the best interest of my project to continue; and YES, getting sick was not a good option at this point in time; and MAYBE these were excuses, but what did it matter?  I was satisfied with the work I had done.  I have never felt so good about my manuscript.  I I set my alarm for the following morning, intending to finish the 24-hour goal then. I went to sleep with a clean conscience.

If you run marathons, you probably understand why Randi was glaring at me.  After I had gone to sleep, she worked another 4 hours and then, irritated that I’d abandoned her, stopped her own push with only 1.5 hours left to go.  She then commenced to lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and glaring until I woke two hours later.  Before you judge her for getting mad at me (or judge me for not finishing the night with her), you should understand that Randi has done things like this before–she has run marathons, she finished NaNoWriMo, she embarks on crazy impossible projects and pushes herself to the extreme all the time.  For her, 18 hours of writing is nothing if not for the 24.  Remember, this crazy idea was hers after all?  And when we woke this morning, she couldn’t understand how I could give up like that.  Right at the end, she said.  We were so close! 

It occurred to us, then, that we saw the 24-hour writing finale in two totally different ways.  For Randi, success was about recognizing your limits and then pushing far, far, far past them.  A key part of this was seeing something through to the end.  To be successful and tired the next day was okay, it was part of the excitement.  But to be unsuccessful and tired the next day?  That was not okay.  For her, to go to sleep before the 24-hour mark was was the equivalent of quitting a marathon when you were a mile from the end.  In that way: all that work?  Wasted.  For me, someone who has never run a marathon (or completed NaNoWriMo or some other crazy feat), twenty-four hours of writing in a single weekend was a huge accomplishment, and writing for 18 hours straight in a day went above and beyond what I thought I was capable of.  Not so long ago, I thought it would be impossible to write 30 hours in a  week, and now, my world has been cracked open.  A three-hour writing stint–from here on out, that should be a walk in the park!

This has me thinking about the Writer’s March project, which makes for a fitting final post here on Day 31.  I think it is important to remember this: Writer’s March is not a race.  What does that mean?  For me, it means that you cannot fail at Writer’s March.  It means that success is marked not by whether or not you met your goals, but by whether or not you feel good about the work you have done regardless of what you set out to do.  Why?  Because if you feel satisfied with the work you’ve done, you are probably more likely to do more of it.

In our numbers-oriented world, we always want to quantify success.  If Goal A is 15 min/day then success is achieved when Subject A completes Goal A.  Subject A can now move on to Goal B.  But I don’t think  this creative process has to work that way.  What makes something successful for us is a different thing entirely than what makes something successful for science or athletics (though I do understand that they are related).  I am not arguing here that goals are not important.  That would defeat the entire point of this blog.  Clearly, if we want to finish our books or write our stories or learn our craft, setting goals will help us get there. I am simply saying that meeting your goals is, for me, only part of this picture.  The rest involves learning what you are capable of and, in the process, creating space in your life for words.

By now, you know: writing is unpredictable and unwieldy.  A short story can become a novel, an essay can become a book, a scene can become a poem.  How do we quantify that shift in pages or time?  And so, as you write onward, don’t forget that goals, like projects, should also be flexible.  A goal that doesn’t change over time is no longer a goal, but a stubborn pursuit.  As long as you can recognize that you aren’t making excuses and are honest with yourself, then you should be fair with yourself and allow yourself to revise your goals accordingly.  As you think about writing in the next month, the next year, the next decade–and I hope you will–keep this in mind.  Take stock of what happened this past month.  Adjust.  Revise.  Keep going.

One way you might think about success in Writer’s March:

• Meeting BOTH your daily and monthly goals
• Meeting your monthly goals, but not necessarily your daily goals
• Meeting your daily goals, but not necessarily your monthly goals

Other ways that–I believe–signal a successful March:

• Writing on a day when you would not have written otherwise.
• Writing a story/poem/essay/scene/page that would not have been written otherwise
• Thinking about writing every day this month even if you only wrote for a small portion of it
• Wanting to write even more now that the month is through.
• Revising your goals for April and, with or without the blog, writing onward

Randi feels it is important that I point out that we came to this conclusion together.  We woke, made breakfast, drank coffee, and I convinced her that it was okay to finish her last hour and a half at 9:30 this morning, which she did, plus some more.  Knowing Randi, there will be even more after that.  Goal Revised.  Goal Accomplished.

Thank you friends, for writing with me this month.  I look forward to making the trek again together next year.

What about you?

What did you accomplish this month?

Your answers will be added to the official 2013 Challengers page.

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What did you accomplish this month?(required)

What advice do you have for yourself next year?

 

Day 29: The Final Sprint and One Last Crazy Proposition

In 1990, comic creator Scott McCloud dared a friend to construct a 24-page comic in 24 hours. This included all the drafting, sketching, plotting, drawing, and finishing touches–if you’ve never seen the process of making a comic, let me tell you, it is a lot of work.  Today, twenty-three years later, inspired by this crazy endeavor, writers and artists around the world embark on the 24-hour Comic Day every October.  The dare even sparked other 24-hour sprints including the 24-hour play and the 48-hour film festival.

Randi, who is working on a graphic short story, told me about the event over dinner one night. “I’m thinking about doing this,” she said, and I thought she was crazy. I thought, typical Randi to want to do something so taxing on both the mind and the body.  I thought, there is no way I would ever do anything like that.

And then, this past week, I had my my fear of finishing panic attack, which I posted about this past Wednesday. That post was probably the most important thing I wrote this month.  Learning that I was not alone in freezing up at the end of a project has helped me to feel more confident that I will get there if I keep going.  It is amazing what the act of knowing that you are not alone can do (so thank you, friends, for taking this journey with me).  And yet, in the back of my mind, I wonder if there is another approach.  What if, rather than waiting for another panic attack, I go for an all-out, Olympic-Gold-style sprint to the finish?

What am I talking about?  The 24-hour Writer’s March finale.  That thing I had thought I would never do? That write for 24 hours thing?  I decided to do it.  Randi is doing it, too. And today, three days from the end of this March, I’m also inviting you.

Now, hold up.  Before you think I’m completely and totally nuts, give yourself a second to think it through before you talk yourself out of it.  Where are you in your goals?  Have you reached them yet?  Are you close?  I was charged with finishing this final revision to my book, and I am so close I can taste it, but I know there is a lot of work left to do, and I am running out of time.  I average 3 hours of writing a day.  In 24 hours, that’s at least 8 more days of work.  If I take into account that the first of those three hours is usually spent trying to get into a good rhythm, the 8 days stretches longer.  If I add in the distractions of life, particularly with the official March being over, plus the possibility of another few days of frozen horror, suddenly, I’m looking at 2-3 weeks, maybe 2-3 months, which I don’t have.  I want to be done with this book, and I think I can get it done in one, all-out, crazy 24-hour sprint.

Maybe you aren’t as motivated as I am.  Maybe you think, the way I did, that this is insane.  But in the last two years that I’ve done this March, the end of the month has gone the same: I slow down.  I see the end coming.  I feel tired.  I slack off.  I feel so proud of the work that I accomplished that I think its okay that I didn’t quite meet all of my goals–and it is.  I truly believe that any word you have written because of this March is an accomplishment, particularly if you wouldn’t have written it .  And yet, at least for me, I still wonder what might happen if I pushed myself a little more.  This go-around, I’m not going to do that.  Instead of letting up, I’m going to press harder.

Are you with me?

If so, stock up your refrigerators.  Buy sandwich fixings, bottles of water, protein-heavy snacks.  Randi and I are starting at 8am on Saturday morning and writing clear through to 8am on Easter Sunday.  Let me know if you want to do this, too!  Shoot me an email or write a comment to this post!

If you aren’t, I invite you to still push yourself.  Instead of the hour a day, might you make it two?  Or three?  Or four?  What’s the longest you’ve ever written in one stretch?  What about trying to see if you can beat your own record?  Until this moment in time, I have been an advocate for doing what you can, even if it was only fifteen minutes.  Here, at the end, I urge you to push yourself further.

Three days left to go.  Thank you, friends, for writing with me this month and following along with the blog.  I look forward to writing you a farewell post from my sleep-deprived delirium on Sunday morning.  Until then, keep marching.

 

Day 27: The Fear of Finishing

This past week, I discovered a new form of torture.

It goes like this: I have two to three days of full-blown, all-out writing. I’m talking the best writing days of my life: the I’ve-finally-revised-that-troublesome-scene kind of day, the elusive-climactic-moment-finally-made-right kind of day, the this-is-the-reason-I-do-this, maybe-I’m-decent-at-this-after-all, I-think-all-those-years-were-really-worth-it kind of a day. I’m talking about glorious, beautiful, easy, right-brain writing heaven. When writing IS that thing we tell our parents it is. The days are so good, I think, “My God, two to three more like this and I will finally be DONE!” This, of course, leads to fantasies about book deals and query letters and agents (ahem, call me). I find myself imagining book covers, famous people’s blurbs, and readings that I can give in places I would like to visit. At the end of such a day, I go to bed, stare at my darkened ceiling, and let myself whisper, “I am just about there…”

Then, the next morning– Nothing. Complete and utter agony. Horrified staring at my screen. A complete and utter stall. All joy in writing has vanished. All joy in life has vanished. It is painful, awful work, this writing thing, and while I’m at it, my book is awful, too, and don’t try to argue with me, I know what I know…and oh, does knowledge hurt. I spend a sullen, mournful day watching Law & Order SVU or reruns of The Walking Dead, then I proceed to clean my house. The following day goes much the same. And then the one after that. And then after that until I am at the ecstasy’s polar opposite: the terrible, terrible agony when I worry if I will ever find joy in writing again. I contemplate medical school. I think about a degree in Rhetoric and Writing. I look for a way to return to retail.

The fear of finishing. A quick Google search lead me to a number of forums, blog posts, articles, and even a dissertation where different people–some of them writers–ponder why humans put so much work into a task and then suddenly go into hiding, right there at a project’s most crucial moment: the terrifying end. In a post titled “Whip your fear of finishing,” blogger Chad Schomber explains the phenomenon as follows:

To use a football analogy, going 99 yards is easy. It’s that last yard, crossing over into the end zone, that’s the hardest. The same holds true for writing a novel, designing a logo or filing our taxes. Right when we can see the end, our brains whoa the horses, momentum slows and we sink into procrastination. Why?

Maybe we fear criticism. Or we’re not sure what to do next. Or worst yet, we lack the confidence to say it’s done because it’s not perfect. It’s natural to feel that way. But heed Miles’ advice to Joel in Risky Business: sometimes, you have to say what the fuck, and finish.

Katherine Jenkins, another blogger, discusses her own moment of procrastination at the end of finishing her own book. She writes:

What I’ve come to realize is that dreams are never quite like reality. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t dream. You must dream. Just don’t get stuck in the dream. Put a foundation under that dream of yours, otherwise what’s the point? Dreaming and coming up with ideas are the easy part. Seeing your dreams through to the very END is the hard part. Why? Because when you dream about becoming an author or an actor or a painter or a musician or starting a business or changing careers or having a baby or getting married, the pictures of what this life looks like in your mind’s eye are, well, dream-like. You don’t imagine the baby screaming non-stop or the hours of writing with no human contact or the money issues or the lack of work or the economy crashing. Everything in your dream is rosy and cheery and maybe even….perfect!

But nothing is perfect. No one’s life is perfect. I’m not a perfect writer. But I continue because I set this dream into motion. I put the foundations down. I asked for it and I got it and now I have to FINISH IT!

I am reminded of one of the most beautiful and most profound things I ever heard a student say to me. When I asked him why he kept turning in his stories late, he said, “I do not have the heart to write them down. They are so perfect in my head, and none of it comes out like I imagine.” Is the advice for me, here at the end, any different than the advice I once gave to him?

Put the pen to the paper, turn off the excuses, and write.

 

Day 25: Writing on the Right Side of the Brain

Do you see Tree’s Foot?

Yesterday, I spent 12 hours filing my taxes.  My tabletop is cluttered with enough tax forms to Papier-mâché Randi’s face, which I can then hang on the wall in gratitude for her help in tracking down the many forms I needed to complete and for occasionally bringing me plates of food and glasses of water.  If this all sounds overly dramatic, that’s because it is.  I was determined to file my taxes with the appropriate forms, which I’d acquired from the public library.  It was tedious, mind-numbing work that required me to learn another language.  Tax language.  I wish I would say that I am now well-versed, but about four hours ago, I gave up and used Free Tax USA.  Advice for those out there: don’t follow my lead.

Where am I going with this?  At this point, you may be expecting me to suddenly give you some tax-inspired prompts (ack!) or advocate the importance of undergoing tedium (no more!), but at the end of this minutia, I find myself thinking about my poor neglected right brain.

For those who can’t remember: two hemispheres in the brain, right?  The left and the right.  The left hemisphere is our logical side.  It thinks in words and spreadsheets and taxes.  The right hemisphere is our creative side.  It thinks in images.  It is illogical, magical, wonderful.  You are exercising different parts of the brain at any given time, but the left side tends to dominate because our world is moving more and more in logic’s direction (Logic, after all, is just so logical…).  Overtime, that left side can take over.  We, as writers and artists, have to keep that left side in check.

Left Tree and Right Tree Might look the same, but they are quite different…

Why do we want to access the right hemispheref?  Easy: it is the place where writing is easiest.  You know you are in the right hemisphere when time disappears and you lose track of your surroundings.  It is the place when you stop worrying about the act of writing and become engrossed in the story itself.  The words disappear.  Image takes over.  It is the writer’s sweet spot.

A lot of artists resort to drugs or alcohol because it allows for quick access to this creative vault, but you can get there in other ways, too.  Meditation or dream-work are good tools for the writer.  But, I would argue, you can also draw.

Betty Edwards’ book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, uses the understanding of the right and left hemispheres of the brain to teach students the drawing process.  Unlike a “how to” book that might focus on the act of drawing, Edwards emphasizes the importance of seeing.  Such focus allowed her students to make drastic improvements in their craft in a very short amount of time.  Rather than thinking about planning or perfection, Edwards teaches her students to move what they see into what they create by training the eye first and letting the hand follow.  Art, after all, comes from how the mind interprets what is seen, which is (and should be) unique from what everyone else sees.  She advocates for simple drawing exercises to aid this process along.  Her students do this to help them enter into the creative space for visual work, but these exercises help the writing process as well.

And so, in honor of Betty Edwards, the right side of our brains, and my recently filed taxes, here are a few exercises (I got them from Randi, but I think they are Edwards’…) to help you access the creative side of yourself faster.  The key, of course, is to move from the drawing to your own writing.  I’ve been doing this the last few days and have found it quite phenomenal.

Drawing Exercise #1:

Draw your own hand.  Look only at your hand and not the paper.  Remember that the left brain will get impatient.  It will say, why bother doing this.  it will say, this is a waste of time because the left brain worries about things like time.  Recognize this is a left brain worry, and draw through it.  Go very slowly.  Move your pen in the shape of the lines, and try to get them all.  You’ll know you’ve succeeded when you notice the lines and not your hand.  Do this for at least 10 minutes.

Drawing Exercise #2:

Find a moderately complicated line drawing.  I’ve been using random images from M. Scott Momaday’s Way to Rainy Mountain.  Turn the image upside down, and now draw.  Again, go slow, focus on the lines.  Try and move your pen at the same rate that you move your eye along each sweep and curve.  Just like in Exercise #1, you’ll start to batter yourself, you’ll wonder why you are doing this, you might even start to make fun of me, or worry that I’m doing this as a joke, but draw through these as well.  Draw until you see the lines and not the image.  Do this for at least 10 minutes.

Word Exercise #3:

This one is exercise in free association.  Take a word, any word, and build on it.  Start, for instance, with “snow,” and play with it.  Let the list grow: “know,” “blow,” “joe,” etc.  Let it move to wherever it wants, like “paper” might suddenly appear and you don’t know why.   Write it down and follow it the way you would follow a line..  As soon as a sentence wants to come out, let it.  Keep going.  Don’t try to make sense.  Don’t think, now I am going to make this into a poem (that’s your left side trying to rationalize the act).  Let yourself be free, illogical, random.  Again, do this for at least 10 minutes.

 

Week 3 Update

Well folks, 22 days down, 9 to go. How is your work progressing?

Pick one:

And just for fun…Pick as many as you like:

 

Day 22: Action Poetry a la Billy Collins

If you’ve followed the blog long enough, you’ve probably noticed my love for TED Talks.  Since I haven’t given you a TED in awhile, I searched for another inspirational talk on the creative process only to find that I’ve already shared my three favorites (Elizabeth Gilbert, Amy Tan, and Young-ha Kim).  A more broadened search lead me to a lecture given by former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins.

I really like Billy Collins.  I feel like I’m always running into people who don’t care for his work, and I can’t really understand why.  I find his poems funny, profound, accessible (maybe its the accessibility that people dislike?).  His TED Talk only confirmed this for me.  I guess you could describe it as a poetry reading with a twist: rather than simply reading the work off the page, Collins presents five animated versions of his poems.  If you’d like to view the talk, it’s quite fun.  For this post, however, I thought I’d go straight to the work.

And so, here are four animated Billy Collins poems for your fourth Writer’s March Friday (in no particular order).  I always find that poetry inspires my own work.  I hope it does the same for you.

Budapest

Forgetfulness

Some Days

The Best Cigarette

Retired smokers beware…  It might have you aching for another cigarette..

To see more animated poetry, visit the Billy Collin’s Action Poetry Website.

 

Day 20: Focus Focus

Hold onto your hats, folks, it’s about to get metaphysical in here.

On my writing desk, I keep a handful of things: an array of notebooks, a tin of pens, random memorabilia like a sumo wrestler paperweight and a glass fish within a fish, a scattering of framed photographs, Japanese candy, tissues, hand lotion, scotch tape, and a deck of Oracle Cards by Doreen Virtue called “Healing with the Angels.”

There are a number of writers who work with tarot cards including Stephen King, John Steinbeck, and Italo Calvino, who is quoted as saying that the tarot is “a machine for writing stories.”  If you Google “writers and the tarot,” you’ll encounter a slew of websites that offer the tarot as a useful  tool for writers (including this one that helps you choose a tarot deck and this one that offers different writerly spreads and this one that connects a group of Minnesota writers in an online forum).  Each presents ideas on exploring plot, developing characters, understanding setting, and other ways of overcoming writerly obstacles.

While I’ve used tarot cards in the past, over my own systems of trial and error, I have worked through different decks of cards and wound up with the Angel ones at my desk because, unlike the above authors, I don’t usually seek plot or character insight, I seek encouragement.  Whenever I am at a loss or feeling down or unsure why I am doing this thing writing thing anyway, I pull a card.

Today, I pulled a card for Writer’s March, and here is what I got:

And so, the angels offer up the advice of “Focus.”  I had to laugh because this is one card I pull for myself nearly every day, no matter how many times I shuffle the deck (which is crazy because there are 44 to choose from).  And here is the message:

Think about what you want, not what you don’t want.  Guard your thoughts carefully, because they create your experiences.

Sometimes it seems that our thoughts choose us, but this is never the case.  We always choose our thoughts–every moment.  Our thoughts always have an effect, and there are no neutral thoughts.  One-half second before you hold a thought, you decide to hold it.  So, with practice, you can learn to monitor and alter your thoughts.  This is the equivalent of putting your hands on the steering wheel of your life.

I love this card.  I usually pull it when I find myself getting distracted or making excuses for work.  It appears when I tell myself things like, “I don’t have time,” or “I’m too tired,” or “I can’t do this right now.”  The message of the card is simple.  Our thoughts have power.  When we think in the word “can’t,” we cut ourselves down because thoughts equal actions. If we think in can’t, then we won’t.  If we believe we can write, then we will.  If we believe we don’t have enough time or can’t muster the effort, then we won’t even try.  If we believe our work has meaning, then it does.

I cannot think of a more fitting message for Day 20 of this Writer’s March.  Perhaps, if you are like me, you are feeling the weight of the month.  It’s easy at this time, to cast our goals aside, to forget, to put off, to defer, to decline.  Well, friends, as the Angel oracle says: “Think about what you want, not what you don’t want.”  If you committed to this month, it is because you wanted to put writing in your life.  Remind yourself of why.  Now, go to it.  Act.  Write.

 

Day 18: Going Home

Yesterday, my mother and I held a garage sale.

Packed into that single sentence is an entire twenty page essay.  It would involve a large discussion of my father, his death, our grieving.  I would tell you about the house. Not this one, but the OTHER house, the one that emptied. I would talk about the move, the apartment, the second move. I would tell you that I could chart my mother’s grief with locations.  I would describe for you several bedrooms worth of unused things.  The essay would grow longer. I would wonder if memoirs could be the size of a novella, then I wouldn’t worry because the novella would expand into a book, and suddenly, that one sentence would become my entire life’s story, starting with the scattering of homes we occupied in Ohio and Oregon, flinging itself past and through cancer, and ending with $183.49, yesterday’s earnings.  In case you can’t tell, this is a post about the ripeness of writing about home.

I have just spent the last 10 days in California.  I type this from the airplane.  I post this from a terminal in Phoenix.  I’m about to hop on a red eye to Indianapolis. These are the things I cannot get out of my head:

From the garage sale:

• One of the biggest argument my mother and I got into was about whether or not to sell my sister’s bed.  My sister did not want it. My mother did not want to let it go.
• The stuffed leopard we spent $20 trying to win at Reno’s Circus Circus? It sat on said bed for about ten years.  It now belongs to a very destructive dog and, by now, has probably had its stuffing scattered around some woman’s home.
• In twenty years we had collected an enormous quantity of baseball caps, ranging from Golf tournaments to tourist caps to free caps given out at McDonalds in the mid-80s. At least thirty of these ball caps are now warming other people’s heads.
• My brother’s dog pissed into a box of my old VHS tapes. No one wanted them anyway (the DVDs were another story), but I still felt crushed they wouldn’t find a new home.

From my hometown in general:

• 

  This Bloomington Building still bears the sign of its Coca Cola origin. Now, it’s ” full service catering business owned and operated by Middle Way House, an abused women’s shelter”

  Nothing is what it was anymore: the Blockbuster video is now a Wells Fargo bank.  The high school painted its orange beams beige.  My tennis backhand has no sense of timing.  There are no video rental stores left in town.

• El Asadero, our favorite Mexican restaurant, is still El Asadero, and the hamburger painted on the wall still makes us reminisce about strawberry milk shakes and Bub’s burger.  And that empty lot turned into an Albertson’s and now that is vacant again.
• In six years my grandmother went from still young and spry to an 89- year-old woman with a failing mind.  When looking through some old photographs, she pointed at her ex-husband and asked, “Who’s that?”  She, too, wants to know why I’m in Indiana.  She asked me this question nearly 100 times.
• The kids are all new, but they look awfully familiar.

What has struck me about this trip in particular is the way the simplicity of ‘before and after’ has lengthened to the ‘before and after and after and after that.’  I find myself looking for people and landmarks that no one but my siblings seems to remember.  The last time I drove into town, I got lost.

In 2010, I attended the AWP Conference in Denver.  One of my favorite panels was a talk about place.  One of the panelists, a writer whose name eludes me, discussed the way her understanding of place revolves around an intersection between one’s landscape and their mind-scape.  This includes both the way a place can hold a memory/memories as well as the way our minds can remember and know the history of a place.   Today, friends, if you are looking for some inspiration, why not mine your stories from your own encounters with home by playing with the conflicting images of the land that we hold within our minds.  Here are three writing exercises to get you going.

#1:  the garage sale search

Take a notebook and pen and filter through your garage or the thing that stands in for your garage… a hall closet, an attic, the top shelf of a closet.  List the objects you find.  Spend no more than fifteen minutes doing this.  Then, return to your writing place and let these items appear in a scene or poem.  Let yourself take tangents on why a particularly useless item might have value.  You may also want to consider the way different people have different takes on the same objects.  Maybe one of those people even suggests the other throw the thing away…Or, you may want to consider which of your items you would or would not be willing to sell.

The alternative: which items make it to the move and/or which items do you unpack and wonder why the thing made the journey?

#2:  the mental map of your home/hometown

Draw your hometown in as much detail as possible.  List the homes and businesses of places you used to go. If the places have changed names or ownership or colors, also list what the places are now.  List back as far as possible.  Now, use this mental map in a scene or a poem.

#3:  the random encounter with a “stranger”

Write a scene or write about a time when you or one of your characters has a chance encounter with someone from your/his/her past.  Where does this meeting take place?  Who is the stranger? Who were you to this person? Who are you now?

 

Day 13: Triskaidekaphobia, Don’t Let Fear Keep You Away

Writing: A safe place for the Triskaidekaphobics (is this a stretch? probably)

The Apollo 13 mission may have made it safely back to earth, but it wasn’t without overcoming major obstacles.  The superstitious types were shaking their heads: with a name like that, the mission was doomed from the start. And, as if that ominous name wasn’t enough, NASA seemed to be taunting fate: the spaceship launched at 13:13 from pad 39 (13×3).  On top of that, astronaut sleeping arrangements were scheduled for 13 minutes after the hour.  With so much 13 in play, it’s wonder the crew made it back alive!

The superstitious 13 has caused a number of omissions:

• Tall buildings and hotels often eliminate their 13th floors
• Airlines often eliminate their 13th row
• In Italy, lottery tickets often eliminate the number 13
• in France, a dinner party with 13 guests marks a major Faux Pas

The 13 has struck such fear in people that the state of anxiety has number even earned itself a name: Triskaidekaphobia.  Today, on this 13th of March, don’t let the unlucky win.  To help you hunker down, here are three writing methods aimed to help you barrel through (I was going to give you 13, but that seemed a bit much…)

#1: TYPE INTO THE VOID (A writing prompt from Danner)

Sit at your computer. Turn the screen off. Get into the head of your perspective character. Type into the emptiness without worrying about editing, typos, or anything else. Just let yourself speak with your fingers into the computer for an hour.

#2: RETYPE YOUR REVISION (A writing prompt from Nari)

Print a hard copy of our draft.  Read it through and edit the paper copy.  Then, sit at your computer, open a blank word document, and retype the draft in its entirety.

Last year, Jennifer offered this same advice in a post titled “Retyping your Revision.” This year, Nari send the same idea in when she officially joined the March.  As Nari explains, one day, “I found myself at a coffee shop without my flash drive, and since I had a hard copy with hand edits, I decided to retype it. I started to do so (and still am) because I’ve found quite a bit to refine. Retyping the sentences that I’d read on my computer monitor so many times before has forced me to rethink them and, most importantly, really listen to them. This is a great way to work with a draft when you feel it’s almost there, just not quite there yet.”

#3: HAND-WRITE THE SCENE TWICE (A writing prompt from Sam)

When working with a particularly troubling scene, write the pages by hand.  Then, write the scene by hand a second time.  Then, type the scene into a word document.

Lately, this has been my method of choice.  I’ve found this process to be particularly helpful when writing problematic scenes (particularly climactic moments or difficult conversations).  When I write the first draft of a scene, I find myself putting in some fillers (as in “yadda, yadda, yadda, something will happen here” or “this scene is still not quite right.”)  Or, more often than not, I’ll be so compelled by the scene that I’ll skip exposition and narrow in on the dialogue (during these moments I feel like I, the writer, am simply trying to keep up with the characters).  When I hand-write the scene the second time, I focus on filling in these moments and playing with my sentences.  The second hand writing is important because it doesn’t allow me to become impatient.  I have to take the moment slow.  By the time I type the scene, I’ve found that I can type quickly, ironing out the language and punctuation but usually able to leave the scene in tact.

FINALLY:

What are you waiting for?  Set your timers (for 13 minutes!) and go!

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Information about the Number 13 were taken from “Number 13: The Legends, Myths, and Facts”.  Click the link to learn more.

 

Day 11: Kurt Vonnegut and the Shape of Story: A Cure for the Manic Monday (particularly if you suffer from problems of plot)

What is plot?  How do we figure it out?  I’ve attempted to talk plot before in a number of different posts.  I’ve had a innumerable conversations with writers who say things like, “I suck at plot,” or “I don’t understand plot,” and I’ve been taught by plot-junkies (that’s you, Gregory Martin) about the importance of the Aristotilean plot structure.  I’ve even tried playing with school-like worksheets in order to school myself into following plot.  In other words, I have been trying to write about, post about, talk about, and figure out plot for years.  And mostly, my comprehension has fallen short.

And so, I am very grateful to Sidel, one of this year’s challengers, for sharing with me a Kurt Vonnegut infomercial on the shape of stories.  This, of course, lead me on a trail of Vonnegut-inspired happenings and this 4:36 minute lecture given by Vonnegut himself.  It is sooo worth watching.  Very funny and such a refreshing look at this tired topic:

What I love about Vonnegut’s take on story is the way he doesn’t force each work fit into a single arching shape.  He offers other views: The Man in a Hole, the Boy Meets Girl, the Kafka Story, the Cinderella Story.  It makes one feel like there are innumerable structures, each shared and recognized by writers and readers alike.  Not sure about you, but I find the idea quite freeing.

So, this Monday, why not think about your story in this manner?  As Sidsel asked, “Wouldn’t it be fun to take a well-known tale (or one of our own stories or life experiences) and re-tool it to fit a different shape, just to see what happens?”

Today’s Exercise:  Let’s try this out.  I think the exercise would be a useful undertaking for your own work or, as Sidsel suggests, the work of another popular work.  If you use it for your own story, this might also be a good way to think of scenes you’ll still need to scratch out.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Story Axis

Also, if you are interested in sharing your plot shape, I’d love to see and share them on the blog. If I get enough images, I might compile them into a post or maybe even add them into the official Challenger’s page.  (Sorry poets.  Perhaps a fun practice for a prose poem?).  Interested?  Shoot me an email (writersmarch@gmail.com) with your image attached.

I’ve heard it said that every now and again, its good to step back from the page and think in a more visual form.  Today, folks, why not give this idea a go?

Interested in more of Vonnegut’s insight on writing?  Check out:

• Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories and Good News vs. Bad News 
• Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story
• How to Write with Style: Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Keys to the Power of the Written Word