We are chugging our way through Round 2 and have round about a month to go, y’all.  HOW ARE YOU DOING?  Have you met some goals?  Set new ones?  Had to adjust?  Tweak?

Let us KNOW, and then go swing by and wave some pompoms for your compatriots.

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Ever since I joined ROW80 8 Rounds ago, I have struggled with comparing myself to others, so Wooden’s advice seemed targeted at me and my green-eyed monster. So many in the group have published, write very well, work diligently at the craft, and in many ways have the fire in the belly that denotes dedication. Me?  The fire doesn’t burn in the same way.

About a year ago, I accepted a more complicated day job; it offered good pay, excellent benefits and life in an interesting part of the country. More immediately, I wasn’t in a place to strike out as a writer. After several months of juggling the two lives, I was bemoaning my difficulties to an instructor in WANA International, who replied with, “It’s okay to be a hobbyist.”

Her words entered my brain like liquid nitrogen, freezing the speech center, while I sputtered to myself, “I’m not a hobbyist, I’m a writer.”  After some thought, I realized that writing is an avocation for me, done for the love of writing. I  am proud to be counted with many writers who held day jobs while practicing their avocation.

Although William Carlos Williams is better known as a poet, he was a pediatrician; Peter Mark Roget of thesaurus fame was also a physician. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. Geoffrey Chaucer had an active career as a bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat until his death. The Renaissance poet Veronica Franco was a cortigiana onesta, an intellectual courtesan. Not all writers had demanding day jobs. Brian Jacques was a milkman, and I can well imagine that he treasured the freedom to think about his novels.

So how do I become the best hobbyist writer I can be? Perhaps not surprisingly, in the same way I would become the best professional writer I can be, with a few differences. I cannot be lazy because writing is “only” my avocation.  It is an avocation that requires hard work, honing the craft, writing and editing and rewriting. I write because I want to make people think, recognize the human struggles I am describing, and think some more.  None of this sounds very different from what I hear from many of you.

There are differences, to be sure, but they seem to be in terms of time and product. It takes me a long time to write.  I try to write before work, but sometimes all that comes out is dreck.  I also edit while I write.  It makes sense to do that in the day job, so I live with the difficulty of turning it off with my avocational writing.  It does mean that I would set myself up for frustration if I joined NaNo or Fast Draft, or any of the other quick-writing tactics that many in this group have found helpful.

Another difference is that my product  can be anything I want to write, and not a means to put bread on my table.  It is freeing not to worry what an agent, the market, or my freelance client will think of my work.  I don’t always get to write what I want in the academic arena, so it is freeing to be able to play in the sandbox with my fiction/creative non-fiction.  It means I can be experimental and write, say, steampunk, or my horror piece about sentient boxes.

As Wooden said, all we can control in life is to be the best we can be. What “best” entails is up to the individual; only you know if you have done your best.  I used to wince when my sons’ teachers would write something about doing their “personal best” on their papers, but I now understand the philosophy behind it. Many of us in ROW80 have advocated finding the habits and goals that work for you.  I will now add finding who you are; find what place writing has in your life;  what place you are able and willing to give it; and own that place, whether it be best-selling author or hobbyist. No matter which you are, you are in good company. I can only speak for myself, but I am proud to embrace my amateur status.

~*~

Elizabeth Mitchell

Celine Dion performing “Taking Chances” at Celine Dion ‘Taking Chances Tour’ Concert @ Bell Centre, Montreal, Canada in August, 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

All by my seeeeeeeelf.  Don’t wanna be all by myyyyyyyyyself, any mooooooore!  So go visit your fellow ROWers and let them know they AREN’T ALONE!  (C’mon, I’ve been doing this for 3 years…I run out of non silly material…)

If you are interested in BEING A SPONSOR (so that I, your illustrious leader, am not by MYself) for Round 3, email me at kaitnolanwriter (at) gmail (dot) com.

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Middle of May already!  Wow, where is the time going?  I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the last days of spring.  Swing by and cheer on your compatriots!

And because I’m me, I’m already thinking about Round 3 sponsors.  Round 3 begins July 1st.  If you’re interested in being a sponsor, email me at kaitnolanwriter (at) gmail (dot) com.

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I’m fresh out of pithy remarks.  Report in, troops!

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Okay, so I’ve been woefully slow getting this out here.  Part of it has been personal scheduling, part of it was the close occurrence of other, more well publicized disasters.  Thankfully Susan Bischoff helped me out by creating the entry form.  THANK YOU SUSAN.

So, here’s how this is going to work.  A whole bunch of paperbacks and ebooks have been donated by various and sundry authors and have been assembled into prize packs.  Everyone who donates will be entered into a drawing to win one of the prize packs.  For simplicity’s sake, you have just as much chance of winning for donating $1 as you to for donating $100 (trying to figure out how to do it in some weighted fashion was one of the other things that held me up).   When you click through to the form, you will see that we ask for your paypal email address that you used to make the donation.  This is so we can confirm that you donated and also in order to notify you that you have won.  I know a great many of us write under pen names and therefore donated anonymously (since our Paypal accounts are under our real names).  This gets around that without breaking your privacy (certainly *I* won’t be sharing your real name or paypal address with anybody).  Only Lauralynn and myself will have access to those names (due to our access to the Fundrazr itself).

So, without further ado, the prize packs are as follows:

The semester is drawing to a close here in my world, so I’m tying up one set of loose ends, getting ready for summer semester, and still juggling words.  How’s life in your universe?

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by S. H. Aeschliman

The other day I was explaining to my friend Johannes, who is from Norway, about the expression, “You can’t get there from here.”

“Oh, it’s kind of a joke,” I said. “Like, you’re out in the middle of nowhere and you stop to ask for directions, and the local says to you, ‘Taggart Road? No, sir, you can’t get there from here.’” And I laughed and explained to Johannes, “Of course that’s funny because you can get anywhere from where you are now. So it’s ridiculous to say that you can’t get to where you want to go from where you are.”

But a couple of days ago I started thinking about this expression again, and I realized that it does actually make some sense. Because the point is not that there’s no way to get to Taggart Road from where you are. The point is that there isn’t a direct route. No straight shot. It’s going to involve some work on your part, potentially some retracing of steps to figure out where you took the wrong turn. The point is that it’s going to take first getting to somewhere else, and then somewhere else after that, and potentially even another somewhere else after that before you can even see Taggart Road.

The point, fellow writers, is that the path from where our writing is now to where we’d like our writing to be isn’t going to be some magical leap that we achieve in one step. It’s not going to be a straight shot. It’s going to be a lot of work. You can’t get there from here.

Let me back up for a moment and introduce you to this talk on the creative process by Ira Glass. Click on that link, listen to it – it’s only two minutes long – then come back here.

Okay? Got it? Good.

Basically what I hear Ira saying is: You can’t get there from here. It doesn’t mean you can’t get there, it just means that perfection is probably not just around the corner. We can’t expect that our writing is going to be wonderful right out of the gate. Or even a few stories/poems/whatever in. He’s saying that we should expect our writing to fall short of our aspirations for a long time. Many years, even. And that the writing falling short of our aspirations is not a reason to give up.

Giving up at this point is like saying “Well, if it’s not a straight shot from here to Taggart Road, then it’s impossible to get to Taggart Road.” Which, as we all know, is not the case. Giving up at this point is tantamount to saying, “If this next story doesn’t live up to my aspirations, it means my writing will never live up to my aspirations.”

Either that, or you’re admitting that writing doesn’t merit hard work. Did someone lie to you and say that writing comes easily to those who are meant to do it? Because that’s a load of crap.

So if you can’t get there from here, how do you get there?

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any one right answer. I think it takes a lot of fumbling and experimentation on the part of each writer to figure out what works for him/her.

But I do know that it won’t happen unless we write a lot. And in order to write a lot, lots of writers – myself included – spend lots of time playing psychological tricks on ourselves.

Fellow #ROW80 sponsor Sandy Taylor Fowke sets word count goals and then tricks herself into exceeding them. “I aim for 500 but then I check and the count [is] like, 524 – Well I may as well take it to 600 – I check and it’s 632 – May as well take it to 700.”

In July 2012 I wrote this blog post about how I trick myself into overcoming some of my barriers to writing. And in a September 2012 post called “On never being good enough,” I suggested that, rather than let the fact that my writing does not yet live up to my aspirations keep me from writing, I can “affirm that where I’m at right now matters too” and not “devalue it just because it’s not where I someday want to be.”

In other words, I may not be able to get to Taggart Road from here, but I can make it to the gas station. The gas station may not have that comfy bed and fireplace I’m looking forward to, but it’s got some good stuff too. Like gas. And cheese puffs. And a bathroom. And from the gas station I can see how to get to the bridge across the river. Across the river’s good. At least then I’m on the same side of the river as Taggart Road. And so on and so forth, until finally, possibly a long time later, I get to Taggart Road.

Which is all just another way of saying: keep writing, even if you don’t like what you’re producing. Even if you’re disappointed in what comes out, keep going. Write on.

~*~

Sione Aeschliman

:dons sombrero:  Hola Amigos!  I hope your week has gone WELL and that you’re loading up on your favorite Mexican food today in honor of Cinco de Mayo.   Be sure to get your words in before you fall into a nacho coma!

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