Midweek #ROW80 Check-In

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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What Place Does Writing Have in Your Life? by Elizabeth Mitchell

Kait’s opening post this Round contained a quote from John Wooden as quoted by James Scott Bell.  In part, Wooden said, Don’t worry about trying to be better than someone else. . . . You have no control over that.  Instead try, and try very hard, to be the best you can be.  That you have control over.

 

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

Sunday #ROW80 Check-In

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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Midweek #ROW80 Check-In

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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Vulnerability Makes Strong Writing by Shan Jeniah Burton

Vulnerability scares me. More than that – it flat-out terrifies me. It clenches me, makes me cower, eyes huge and darting, looking for the direction and nature of the coming attack.

But I can’t share my deeper self by hiding.

I’ve been vulnerable, split wide open. As a child, I was often the target of frustrations and rages that rolled through our home like wildfires. Years later, I sobbed as I held a dying fiance, and again as my husband sat in a tiny NICU room, holding the body of our twelve-day-old son, unable to let him go.

I’m in no hurry to feel these things again, but I’m realizing, now, that there is strength in these raw and broken times. There’s understanding and growth that can’t come except through such catastrophic shreddings of the fabric of our lives.

I was raised in a home where parents hit and humiliated, in a milder version of what had been done to them. While I was still very young, I started to learn how to read people – body language, tone of voice, actions, the deeper meanings that lie beneath their words, the things they choose to focus on. More than that, I’m highly sensitized to others’ emotional energy. I can feel people from an empathic place deeper than language.

It was a survival skill, a way to know when danger loomed, maybe forestall it, and it’s saved me from many altercations with people who were not in control, or who intended me harm.

It’s made me a better writer, too, because adding these elements and frictions to the interactions between characters breathes deeper life and more complex motivations into the ways they think and treat one another.

I am the mother of a baby who died without ever crying. That’s a hard thing to live with, a forever shadow in my bright and happy life. I am the mother of two thriving children, and a dead one. There’s an unspeakable paradox in that.

It hurts – and hiding only makes the hurt worse, makes it impossible to share that paradox, to claw my way back to the brighter places when the shadows grab me.

Writing about vulnerable topics tends to be roundabout, for me. With Elijah, it began, several years ago, with fantasy fiction. I worked through much of my own heartache when my female protagonist had a child who died shortly after birth. Her life, like mine, was irrevocably altered, on nearly every level.

Within the last year or so, I have begun writing poetry about Elijah, and there is still deeper healing, nearly ten years after his death, in honoring all that happened, and all that it has meant in my life, my marriage, my mothering.

I’ve come to feel and value the healing strength of writing this way, along with the honest life in the writing itself.

And yet, I often fear and resist it. I hesitate, dancing written flamencos around powerfully emotional topics, without delving into them on a personal level.

Here’s an excerpt from the previous draft of this post:

~~ As I read others’ blogs, books, interact with people, and watch TV, I see that I am not alone. Many others, it seems, share my fear and unease with vulnerability. There is an incredible amount of marketing and political maneuvering that plays upon vulnerability. ~~

This passage splashes impotently on the surface of thought, never rippling the pools of my personal vulnerabilities.

That’s right.

In the midst of an essay on openness and vulnerability, I was hiding, protecting my soft underbelly, afraid to expose myself to you, or maybe even to myself.

We’re all vulnerable. We all die – the ultimate vulnerability. We grow older, we lose loved ones, jobs, sometimes homes and even our memories. We are stabbed by thoughtless words, broken apart by tragedies large and small.

Instinct says to shield our vitals, curl into a fetal position, and hide from the pain of our own frailties; gird ourselves in armor, to stay safe.

I’m challenging myself, and you, to go deeper– and, sometimes, to do so with pen and notebook, or keyboard, daring to record what is within us, laying ourselves bare – and giving ourselves the chance to find peace, healing, connection, and strength in the sharing.

I’m looking forward to the opportunity to honor your vulnerability – and your strength in embracing and sharing it.

~*~

Shan Jeniah Burton

Sunday #ROW80 Check-In

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

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Midweek #ROW80 Check-In

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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You Can’t Get There From Here by S.H. Aeschliman

“You can’t get there from here.”

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

Cinco De Mayo #ROW80 Check-In

: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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Midweek #ROW80 Check-In

Welcome to May!  Did all the April showers bring May flowers for you?  We’ve got baby mockingbirds in our bushes and my roses are popping all over the place.  Be sure to take a little time out to enjoy the gorgeous before buckling back down to work!

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