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 advice do you have for yourself next year?

 

Day 30: Marching into the Void

By guest blogger Lenore Gusch

Back when I was still a student, complaining about being in school, how all of my time seemed to go to studies that didn’t have anything to do with my writing, and how much more creative I could be if I just had more time to myself, everyone warned me that life after graduation would be different, and maybe not in the ways I wanted. No more deadlines. No more workshops and writing prompts. No more interesting literary internships. No more instant writing community at my fingertips. My motivation to keep at it would have to be entirely my own.

It was true. I graduated, and suddenly was writing into a void. The writing community that had nurtured me for four years went missing.

Many of us on the March have been lucky to keep in touch with our writerly friends from school or to find our own new writing communities. (I still send drafts and story ideas back and forth with a few of my close friends.) Some have been even luckier to go on to MFAs, lead their own creative writing classrooms, or find other careers that foster their continuing to write. But I suspect that out of the fifty-six challengers this month, there are just as many of us who are not surrounded by a single other writer in our day to day lives. (My boyfriend sometimes jokes that he is illiterate, which, although completely untrue, still sends chills down my spine. He rarely reads and never, ever writes.) Many have other full time careers, significant others, and/or families commanding their attention. (Lots of it!) And still, we write on. For some reason, we insist upon it.

A lot of the posts on this March have been about doubts. “Why am I doing this?” “Am I crazy?” “Is my writing any good?” “What is the value of art, anyway?” Some of these are easier to answer, like the first one. Revisit Jennifer Simpsons blog to see why a whole slew of writers are sticking with this insane endeavor. Some of them are more problematic, like the second one. (Only you can tell you how truly neurotic you may or may not be, and why, and if you’re really crazy, you probably won’t be able to tell!) I tend to get hung up on the last one. What is the value of art? What is the value of writing? Why is it important that we tell stories to one another? Are there better things I should be doing? I have a deep belief built from groundless faith that it IS important. That it is, perhaps, the most important thing that humans can do while they’re stuck here together on the earth. But when it comes to articulating this to a society-at-large which is less and less invested in art as a measure of success and happiness, I often falter.

As a student, I had a built in excuse when I needed to go “work.” Now, when I have to explain to my boss why I don’t want to work full time at the douchey steakhouse downtown, or why I don’t want to go to yet another family dinner with my pseudo-inlaws, I can’t play the student card. I just have to be a degenerate recluse who isn’t motivated by things that make sense, like making as much money as possible, finding a career, starting a family, yadda yadda yadda. Instead, I’m just messing around with this weird hobby that few people really “get.” (I thought about writing a whole post on how society tends to measure success, and how we fit in—or don’t—as writers, but it goes down such a bitter rabbit hole that I thought better of it.)

Still, we are compulsive. We are crazy. We are going to do this thing no matter what, right?

Playing by the Mississippi river. Absolutely not writing.

 

All that being said, I will be the first guest blogger this month to confess that I totally, utterly failed at reaching my Writer’s March goals this time around. Partly, it was just bad timing. The busiest month of the year at the douchey steakhouse is March, and I was working twice as many shifts as I usually do, which left little time or energy for anything else. Then, I spent a week in New Orleans with my two best friends and my illiterate boyfriend, where I ate and drank and napped to excess, cooked, read, took pictures, biked around the city exploring and listening to great live music. I had a wonderful, wonderful time. I never picked up a pen the entire time I was there. So partly, it was timing, but partly I was unwilling to be that crazy degenerate recluse who skips out on that breakfast with friends or that last beer in order to go home and write. I didn’t demand it.

We’ve established during this month together that, for whatever reason, this writing thing makes us happy. It fills some need in us. My advice is: embrace the fact that you may, indeed, be a crazy reclusive degenerate. Stop justifying your motives to yourself and others. If you need to work less (ya know, for “the man”) and write more, demand it. If you need more time alone, demand it. If the only way you can produce anything is with Ziggy Stardust playing on repeat at top volume, demand it. Society be damned! When you start to do more of what makes you happy and fulfilled, low and behold, you will become a more productive member of society anyhow. You will become a better lover, parent, and worker because your neurotic, creative itch will be scratched, and then you can contentedly go about other things.

Now that I’m getting ready to march out into the void again, I regret that I didn’t take more advantage of all the lovely advice and writing prompts this month. I wish that Writer’s March could last all year. I want to run around screaming “No! Don’t leave me! Don’t go! I don’t want to be alone again!” But the spirit of the March can carry on!

I try to read something, write something, and play at least one instrument every day, for any amount of time, even if it’s just five minutes. It’s sort of a mini-March that I keep in mind all year long. Here are some things I do to that help:

• Set goals. They don’t have to be as extensive as what you chose to do in March. They don’t have to be daily. But as Sam keeps assuring us, they really do help.
• Keep in touch with your writer friends. (Some of these bloggers have their own blogs you can follow, for example.) Even if they are only virtual, remember that you are not the only crazy one. Exchange work if at all possible, and if you’re lucky, find people who will give you honest critiques.
• Buy a book of writing exercises, or look them up online, and play with them when you don’t feel like working on other projects.
• Ask friends for writing prompts (even then non-writerly friends) and then give them the results (even if they don’t care).
• Read as much as possible. I always think of reading as brain-food. Without enough brain-food your brain will be too hungry to write when you sit down to do it.
• Remember that you don’t need to justify what you’re doing—to yourself or anyone else. 

Good luck out there. I’ll miss you!

 

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 28: You Are Good Enough

Self-portrait: how I think I look when I’m feeling good about myself.

Last week was a good week. I made progress on a chapter that was giving me problems, and while I’m not sure I fixed the problems, I know I took a chapter that was once seven pages long and doubled it. I’m still not sure what this chapter is about but I have a lot more to work with and I’m much closer to heart of it. I’m finding my way through. And I had a coffee date that went well, followed by a flurry of flirty text messages…

This week was not so good.  I have been trying to work on two very messy early draft chapters that have a lot of overlap.  Each chapter needs to do something different, say something different, propel the narrative forward and instead I feel like I’m repeating myself. I don’t know which scenes need to be there, which ones should go or if I need to write different scenes.

So I did what I do: I made a list of all my chapters. I noted the scenes in each chapter and I noted themes.  When I realized I had 13 chapters I thought it was so poetic because my mother died when I was 13 so in my mind it made sense, but I still have no idea how to fix these chapters except to combine them into one chapter.

Self-portrait : how I think I look when I’m not feeling good about myself.

This morning when a friend posted on Facebook an announcement of a success,  instead of being happy, I felt this incredible stab of jealousy then a wave of self-doubt overcame me.  I did an inventory of everything I didn’t have, every award I didn’t win, and every rejection letter I’ve received.

I stared at the pages strewn across my desk and I stared at the blank document on my computer.  It didn’t help that the flirty text messages stopped two days ago.  I was left feeling not good enough.

Somehow I found myself reading the Dear Sugar column where Cheryl Strayed advised a young writer to “write like a motherfucker.”  And while that phrase has become an anthem for writers, there was lot more to that column that resonated with me. Strayed wrote of her own struggles with writing:

I’d finally been able to give it [everything] because I’d let go of all the grandiose ideas I’d once had about myself and my writing…. I’d stopped being grandiose. I’d lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Which meant I had to write my book. My very possibly mediocre book. My very possibly never-going-to-be-published book. My absolutely no-where-in-league-with-the-writers-I’d-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences book. It was only then, when I humbly surrendered, that I was able to do the work I needed to do.

And some advice:

How many women wrote beautiful novels and stories and poems and essays and plays and scripts and songs in spite of all the crap they endured. How many of them didn’t collapse in a heap of “I could have been better than this” and instead went right ahead and became better than anyone would have predicted or allowed them to be. The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve. And “if your Nerve, deny you –,” as Emily Dickinson wrote, “go above your Nerve.” Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

I was reminded that I need to let go of my grandiose ideas about my book. I need to stop comparing myself to other writers, those published ones I admire so much, my friends who are experiencing their own successes, and I just needed to write, to dig deep.

Yesterday my friend Elizabeth tagged me on an internet meme that’s going around: The Next Big Thing. This afternoon, after wallowing in my insecurity I started my own response and began to write. While I wasn’t working on my memoir, one of the questions is “Who or what inspired you to write this book?”  Answering the question reminded WHY I also need to write like a motherfucker.

I can tell you I’m writing to memorialize my mother, to memorialize my father, to tell someone what I know about grief and loss, to hopefully let one person know they are not alone in their grief….. but the bottom line is that even though it’s hard, I need to write this book because it’s harder to not write this book.

And I need to remind myself everyday that I am good enough–and so are you.

 

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 26: There’s Nothing Like a Good Butt (“Tuesdays with Nari”)

“I like guys’ butts. I look at a lot of the other stuff first, but there’s just nothing like a good butt.”

I composed those sentences during my sophomore year in college. My plan all along had been to study writing, but despite professors’ noblest efforts during my first four quarters, I wasn’t writing well. By “well” I mean authentically, with a voice that wasn’t pompous and stiff. I could put together grammatically correct sentences, but they didn’t pop with verve and personality. They resembled a perfectly coiffed hairdo set with ten too-many puffs of hairspray. They lacked movement. They hadn’t been lived in.

Then in winter quarter of my second year, I took a contemporary literature course. One of our assigned texts was Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, and our prof told us to pick any five of the book’s vignettes and write imitations of them. Unpracticed at true imitation, I retyped the first sentences from five different vignettes and used them as springboards into imagination. One such sentence, from a chapter called “Born Bad,” was “Most likely I will go to hell and most likely I deserve to be there.” In my “Born Bad” edition, I made a salacious confession: I had a thing for the male butt. For the first time ever, I wrote with glee. I had fun. I found freedom in writing about something that felt improper. Suddenly, I was voicing what I meant and sounding like I meant it. After reading my “imitations,” my prof said, “Whatever happened, keep it up.”

Now I’ve got a graduate degree in creative writing. I teach college composition to new faces every quarter, and several times during each course I tell my students, “If you accomplish anything in this class, I want it to be a paper with authenticity. Be yourself. Sound like yourself. Try to shake off that formal, five-paragraph-essay writer that high school made you become. Relax your verbal muscles. Speak onto the page.” Of course I want to be that inspirational coach or army general who in movies always says the right thing at precisely the right time, eliciting fist pumps and “Hell yeahs.” I want my students to magically write their own versions of “Born Bad.” Usually it doesn’t happen. Occasionally it does.

And while I’ve learned a lot about how to write since my own “Born Bad,” I still see that early vignette as a kind of holy grail, a standard that even now I try, and often fail, to reach. My current writing projects include essays about reverence and womanhood, and they’re worthy topics to explore, but as I revise drafts about such serious stuff, I can feel my writerly muscles tense, the old, formal, impersonal voice seep in. I don’t mean to say that somber topics can’t be written about with comedy or ease, but by nature of being weighty, they’re the most susceptible to that high-school writer who resides in most of us with annoying longevity. So during this Writer’s March, I’m trying to maintain momentum but also stay in hot pursuit of what keeps my words mine.

I’ve seen better.

Very soon, I plan to revisit “Born Bad.” That’s right: I’m a grown, lettered woman who teaches college students and folds clothes, and I plan to write a full-out essay about my love for the male butt. The life and playfulness should stay the same, but I’ll develop it, include some whimsical research, update it, mention how I’m lucky enough to have married the guy with the nicest ass I’ve ever had the pleasure of ogling. Maybe someday you’ll read the finished draft in the magazine that’s crazy enough to publish it, and maybe you’ll blush. I hope so.

But writing about lascivious topics, or anything else that loosens your writing voice, isn’t just about making your audience blush or about penning an extended “dear diary” entry. It’s not just a confession that wallows in self-indulgence. If it’s to become art, it will have to do more. Through revision, it must come to mean something to someone other than yourself. The bothersome quandary is, the craftier a writer gets about infusing her work with meaning, the more contrived–and therefore less meaningful–it becomes. Put authenticity first, and once you’ve written a draft about which you can honestly say, “This sounds like me,” you’ll have a potent clump of clay to form into what you and your readers need.

In the meantime, though, try writing about something naughty, something that you haven’t dared put to paper. Start with the same sentence I started with years ago, “Most likely I will go to hell and most likely I deserve to be there,” and write what comes next. Or in prose or verse, write about what body part you find sexiest. Write about what turns you on. Write about the weirdest, sincerest crush you ever had. But whatever your topic, enjoy the slightly wicked feeling it brings and write your way toward a natural, real voice. And once you’ve found it, hold onto it as firmly as I would to a damn fine ass.

 

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 21: Write to Make Your Reader Cry (Thursdays with Jenn)

I really wanted to title this post “There’s No Crying in Writing” but that would be just wrong.  Maybe crying while writing is more of a memoir thing, especially when you’re writing a memoir about death and cancer. Or maybe it’s a female thing.  Crying is a natural, biologically driven response for women.  Women actually have more of a protein called prolactin (more as in 60 percent more!) than men, which triggers crying (and also lactation, but that’s another blog post).  Crying is good for you, keeping your eyes healthy, releasing stress, ridding the body of toxins and of cortisol, a stress hormone.

Maybe this blog post is just me justifying my propensity for tears.  (Read about the times I cried at work on this blog article titled “There’s No Crying in Welding.” (Hey, the title worked there.)

I don’t actually weld, but when I write I cry.  All the time. It’s annoying. It slows me down. It makes it hard to write certain scenes, scenes where I have to access the tough emotions (this is probably where fiction writers and poets can relate).

And there is a part of me that thinks that if I don’t feel deep emotion when I’m writing there is no way any reader is going to feel emotion either.

The January/February issue of Poets & Writers included a great article, “The Heart and the Eye: How Description Can Access Emotion,”  by J.T. Bushnell.  Unfortunately it is not available online, else I’d offer up a link, but I am going to quote from it:

“By description I mean the concrete, the things we can observe with our five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. I do not mean simple adjectives. I do not mean descriptions such as ‘The weather was glorious.’ Glory is an abstraction, a category of word that George Orwell calls meaningless. By itself, the word glorious is useless because it can’t show us anything concrete. It  can’t show a white-hot sun perched overhead, or a sky so hard and blue that a fly ball might shatter it. It can’t show a pitcher’s shadow puddled under his cleats, or heat rising from the ground in shimmering corrugation. It can’t produce the smell of hot aluminum bleachers, or the lubricated slide of a sweaty armpit, or a sunburn tightening the skin on the back of your neck. It can’t let you taste the sweat on your lip when you go too long between slugs of cold beer. Only concrete description can do that. “

So your challenge for this week:  look at whatever you’re working on and remove  words like “pretty” and “glorious” and any other concept word and replace it with detailed descriptions.  Thus, “Autumn was pretty.” becomes “Autumn was tall and thin with long straight brown hair, her brown eyes catlike, her face heart-shaped, her cheekbones high….” (or something like that)

Then have a good cry!

 

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.