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

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

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

What Impels You To Write? by Beth Camp

Some of us are motivated by routine. We start each day with writing, and all is well. Skip the writing, and something seems off balance, unfinished.

I know some writers called ‘bleeders’ who write very, very slowly. These writers think through the entire story before beginning and test each word before it drops on the page. But those words are nearly perfect, needing little revision. Perhaps you write this way, planning exactly and on all levels how the story should unfold. Perhaps you spend more time agonizing and thinking about what you want to write than you actually spend writing. But you persevere.

Or you may write as I do, sprinting ahead without a plan. I know generally where I want the story to go; I know my characters and some key scenes, but I am surprised along the way. I draft great clumps of text that can be moved and revised and reshaped until my characters and their story come clear. I spend as much time drafting as I do deleting. But I persevere, having finally accepted that how I write works for me. Even so, my writing process remains a draft, subject to revision!

Thinking about HOW we write can sidestep the issue of WHY we write.

I write to bring order to my universe, to work out issues fictionally I do not confront so easily in real life. I write to create the happy ending that escapes so many of us, especially when forces beyond our control create chaos. I write to protest economic and historical change, to learn from the past, to appreciate the efforts we all make to create beauty in some form. Even if no one reads my stories or poems, I would write. For there is satisfaction in seeing well-crafted words on a page, the characters come to life, and the story itself eases something deep within me, something almost unnameable.

I do believe that we each have a unique story to share, that writers, as any artist, bring craft and heart and skill to the process of creating a story. And that we must confront what is hidden in ourselves and in our characters to truly understand our writing. Sometimes we discover what we mean only after we have written.

While we may fall in love with a particular time or place or character, I’ve always thought that we each have unique issues that motivate us to write. We may not realize it consciously: These themes ring through our writing like a great bell. For example, I do not have to be a psychologist to know that my storytelling is informed by issues of loss and abandonment. I am drawn to the happy ending where joy meets joy.

My characters thus undertake a grand quest – to surmount evil, to bring beauty into the world in small ways and large, and to understand through action, what it means to be a moral person, what the costs of personal choice might be, and to celebrate the resilience and strength we all share in spite of differences in class, gender, and circumstance, or human frailty.

Can you identify what underlying themes consistently appear in your writing and why? Knowing what themes you find most compelling may help you work below the surface of the story in those areas that are implied rather than known. Then you will know what essentially inspires you to write and what you must write.

As Morgan Dragonwillow commented recently, “May you find the strength to be who you are, say what you need to say, and dare to write your truth.”

~*~

Beth Camp serves her first term as a sponsor at ROW80, having benefited greatly from the goal-setting and accountability in each round of words. For April, she’s also participating in the A to Z Challenge, where you can read more of Morgan Dragonwillow’s writing atwww.morgandragonwillow.com or visit Beth’s blog at http://bethandwriting.blogspot.com

The Importance of Taking Time NOT To Write by Eden Mabee

We writers almost never want to think about… those times we can’t write. As far as I know, there is really only one real cure for Writer’s Block. Writing…

Yes, it’s good to have a fertile list of inspirations to draw from; reading is an excellent source of ideas (as well as a great way to learn how other people have put these elusive things we call words into forms and patterns that create pictures in our mind’s eyes). May writers swear by brainstorming; it’s great to get involved in writing challenges and try prompts that other people have tried and found helpful. Pictures and movies, hanging out with friends… all of these help build a fertile mental soil for the growth of stories.

There’s one more thing, and this is vital.

Any farmer or gardener can tell you… It’s all well and good to have excellent fertilizers. And if you plant the right seeds there’s always going to be a harvest of some kind. But you need to maintain that soil: You need to water it; you need to plow it, hoe out weeds, and be able to gather in that raw produce to share at the market. This takes effort. This takes work, and you need to be fit to do it.

You need to hone your Writer’s Body.

You need to get away from the keyboard and the pens and the books. You need to give those young seedlings of ideas some oxygen and some refreshing showers…

Yeah, I’m talking about exercise.

You see, you as the Writer are the most important part of your writing career. YOU. You need to take care of yourself; you need to exercise and eat healthy food, not just food for the brain and soul, but food for the machine that holds the pen, the great device that pushes those buttons for you and dictates into the the microphone.

This is my second run as a sponsor for the ROW80, but even when I wasn’t sponsoring, I visited other ROWers. One thing I saw far too often are posts by people who are blocked and tired or worn out (and thus doubting themselves). I’ve made more than my fair share of these posts. It’s disheartening. But I think I’ve found the answer… It’s getting away from writing. Just a bit, just a few minutes.

Taking a break and standing up or stretching gets things circulating again. There’s something that happens in our bodies when we sit for more than 20 minutes. Triglycerides build up, our oxygen demands go down… we lower our metabolism; we start conserving instead of expending. (Read that part about how we get sleepy? Being sleepy is no way to work well. So stand up and grab yourself a cuppa–water will work as well as coffee; it’s the standing that matters.)

Considering that writing is an active act, an act of giving our thoughts and words to the world, <emwhy are we doing it in a state of conserving resources? Get up, stand at your desk for a few minutes, do a few toe touches, a stretch or two… renew the blood flow; start breathing deeply again.

And then write. You’ll be glad you did.

(For those ROWers on Facebook, you might want to join in our ROW80 Fitness group where we inspire each other in maintaining our Writer’s Bodies. Or if you’d rather avoid Facebook–not necessarily a bad idea given how fast time seems to fly there–maybe you could add a fitness goal to your ROW80 goals. Make that boy work for you. Believe it or not, it will give you more writing time, not less.)

~*~

Eden Mabee

Be The Best You and State Your Round 2 #ROW80 Goals

I do a lot of reading, and it seems I’m often coming across quotes about stuff that makes me think “Oh, I should write a post about that.”  It’s not a surprise that my brain takes stuff from all kinds of venues and sources and twists them around to fit for writers and the writing life.  It’s how I filter the world, interpret it.   I’ve been reading my way through The Art of War For Writers by James Scott Bell, and last night, I came across the perfect quote for the start of this new Round:

Don’t worry about trying to be better than someone else.  Always try to be the very best you can be.  Learn from others, yes. But don’t just try to be better than they are.  You have no control over that.  Instead try, and try very hard, to be the best you can be.  That you have control over.  ~John Wooden, legendary UCLA basketball coach (p. 49 The Art of War for Writers)

So much of our lives as writers leads us down the path of comparison.  It’s a dangerous road to walk.  It can lead us to turn a disease ridden GREEN.  Because there’s always someone further along the path than we.  Someone who got lucky or was in the right place at the right time.  Someone who might not have been working as hard or as long (according to our perceptions) as we have.  That way lies madness and envy and a soul-sucking waste of energy.

I’m big about issuing challenges around here.  I like to push people.  So of course I have a new challenge for y’all this round.

For the next 80 days, I want you to resist comparison.  Don’t you give a single thought to anyone else’s goals, anyone else’s progress.  You are the only one who matters.  If you must compare, compare your progress this round to what you did last round.  Push yourself to do more.  Up that daily word count by 50 or 100 words.  Edit a few extra pages.  Read a craft book.

But don’t you be checking your Amazon ranking.  Don’t look at anybody ELSE’S Amazon ranking.  Or their number of reviews.  Don’t pay attention to whether Billie Sue wrote 5,000 words a day to your 500.  It doesn’t matter.  You’re not Billie Sue.  If you’re hanging out on Twitter and Facebook and talking to other writers, use it to get into some word wars and push your own limits.  Don’t pay attention to whatever the latest article is about whoever the latest wunderkin is who sold 100,000 copies of their ebook overnight.  You aren’t them.  They don’t matter.  They are not part of your path.  All these potential comparative distractions are like the moles in Mario Kart.  They pop up and blind you to your true path, trying their damnedest to make you crash rather than win the race.

The only one in this race is you.

So keep your eyes on the road and challenge yourself.  See you on the other side.

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Fix Your Focus

Champagne glass (Photo credit: Adam Mulligan)

It is a True Thing during all rounds of ROW80–but most especially as Round 1 comes to an end, that people have a tendency to wail and bemoan all that they didn’t get done this Round.  This is very often because they give in to the New Years Resolution fever and end up setting unrealistic goals.  Or they end up having Life Stuff that they didn’t anticipate (God knows, I’m guilty of that one).  It is a symptom of the misappropriated focus of our society that all we see is the negative.  The missing.  The things that didn’t happen.  The perpetual Glass Half Empty.  Which, frankly, is a depressing state of affairs.

It’s a bad habit, y’all.  It sets you up to feel constantly BEHIND, constantly like a failure.  I bet when you lay down at night, the last thing you think about are the things you didn’t get to that day.  And after you’ve had coffee, you stare at that list of stuff you need to do that just grows ever larger, until your brain just gets PARALYZED by the sheer scope of it all.  Or maybe that’s just me.

But the fact remains that unless you bailed at the very start YOU ACCOMPLISHED SOMETHING.  Whatever words you wrote, whatever pages you edited.  They aren’t nothing.  And it does you a disservice to ignore them and focus on the vacuum of unfulfilled goals.  And maybe you met or exceeded your goals this time.  If so, GREAT.  But I guarantee you’ve done this to yourself at SOME point or other.

And as we are NOT about failure here at A Round of Words in 80 Days, I am issuing you a challenge!

I’m challenging you to change your outlook.  Become, at least when dealing with your writing, someone who looks at the glass half full.  At the end of each day, give yourself a pat on the back for what you DID do, even if it was just picking a new character name or plotting the next scene.  Set yourself up for the positive, reinforce yourself for DOING.  I promise it’ll make it easier to condition yourself to work better, harder, faster.

So keep that in mind as you jet toward the end of this round, and carry the habit forward into Round 2.

Inspiration For The Small Days by Lee McAulay

Some days you sit in front of your story and the words fight back.

“This isn’t any good,” say the Angry Words, before you’ve even got your fingers warmed up for writing. “Why bother? Let’s go watch TV, and see how real professional writers do it, because let’s face it, they’re wayyyy better than you are at this storytelling lark, and their stories are much better than yours. Your story isn’t as important,” they say.

This post is intended to put those Angry Words back in their place.

Let’s start with the first argument: this isn’t any good.

Well, if it’s a first draft, it’s allowed to be a bit rubbish. That’s what a first draft is for – to spill the story out as fast as you can release it in a jumble you’ll sort through after that first rush of excitement.

The key is to ride that wave of creative storytelling until it casts you up, exhausted, on the page. And if you don’t write it, you’ll never have a second draft, or a third, or however few you need to finish the story.

The next argument: others are wayyy better than you are at this.

What, you mean they’ve spent more time working at it? Like a concert pianist who still spends eight or ten hours a day making mistakes on their piano at home, for weeks on end, so that when they turn up for the Last Night of the Proms they’re perfect.

This is all, really. Those hours may come slowly, for those of us with other commitments, and we choose to spend our time writing – or not – according to priorities. But the story still nags, and we snatch time during baby’s naps, or on our morning commute, or during the ad breaks of our favourite TV programme. And we write.

Now for the last argument: your story isn’t as important.

Kill this now.

Everyone alive needs a story. Whether it’s a broad sweeping epic of emigration and war, or a gentle romance of childhood sweethearts, or a tale of a sweet life in paradise, everyone needs a story. Stories are how we share experience, ways to deal with what happens in life, to show that there are other worlds, other reactions to your circumstances, other strengths you can borrow. Small works are just as important as Great Works.

In Lord Of The Rings, Aragon is fired up about the story of a mortal man who marries an elf princess, centuries before; it’s what he wants in his own life. He knows this mythical pairing forged a long and happy marriage, and for him, as a homeless loner in love with a woman way out of his league and no longer in the first flush of youth, the story of Beren & Luthien is his lodestone.

We don’t all live – or write – sweeping epics that inspire great deeds. Not everyone wants to live in a Great Work. Some of us have small, domestic stories that provide warmth and succour and what Tolkien called the Last Homely House In The West.

There is much to be said for a book within whose covers a reader knows they are safe.
Some days we need that sanctuary. But judged against the Great Works, those stories often seem small and unimportant, and as writers we’re often encouraged to dismiss the small and safe. On those days when you look at your story on the page and think it isn’t important, remember the words of the poet Emily Dickinson:

“They may not need me, but they might
I’ll let my smile stay just in sight
A smile as small as mine might be
Exactly their necessity.”

Replace “smile” with “story” and keep writing. Let the small stories have their day, and provide their own special strength, when we write them and when we live them.

The Inspiration of Quotes… and ROW80

I love quotes. Someone else thinks the same as me, then captures it perfectly in a few words. They often feel poetic. I enjoy learning from them. A great quote can resonate with my own psyche. This one sums up ROW80 for me, for example:

 

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”

― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

 

It does so because although I don’t have your phone numbers, I can communicate with a wonderful writing community and find support in all things writerly, at the click of my keyboard. In Salinger’s time, this was certainly not the case.  Although, once he found that illusive support we all crave, it turned the tides for his life-path and writing career.

 

Indeed, until he attended a Columbia University writing class, taught by Whit Burnett, longtime editor of Story magazine, Salinger had ‘failed’ at everything; dropping out of one course after another. He hadn’t even distinguished himself at the writing course until a few weeks before the end of the second semester, when Burnett finally praised his work. Soon after this, Salinger’s debut short story was published in the magazine’s March–April 1940 issue, and Burnett went on to become Salinger’s mentor and friend for several years.

 

How about that? That’s the power of praise, of support! Of course, without a huge dollop of talent, The Catcher in The Rye wouldn’t have been so brilliant either, but would Jerome have had the confidence to write it, to even show it to anyone in the first place? How many The Catcher in The Rye’s are hidden away forever, beneath insecurities and doubts?

 

My point? Support. Without it, Salinger may have flopped from one job to another, only ever writing beneath his sheets, secretly, erroneously believing himself talentless. Once he’d found Burnett, his true talent emerged, invigorated by Burnett’s encouragement and faith. But what if we aren’t so lucky. What if we don’t find our Burnett?

 

Support can come to us from various sources. We may look to our family for example, but can we trust their opinions 100%. If they praise us, isn’t that out of duty or bias? If they don’t, is that because they haven’t forgiven us for pulling their pigtails twenty years ago, or dating that greasy biker at 16? Or perhaps they think being a writer is a pipe dream and encouraging it would be somehow negligent.

 

I have also found that writers are at heart not massively social animal’s (there are exceptions), which can often leave them lacking in the friend department. Unless they’re lucky enough to have found an understanding buddy who is fine with regular weeks or months of irregular hours, of repeatedly declining invites to party or even meet up, of constant requests when we do so, to read/hear about our latest WIP, which would be lucky and extremely unlikely.

 

I’m a loner at heart, always have been. Age has strengthened that part of me, which is why an online writing community allows for interaction without the strain of small-talk and apologies for my social impatience. The encouragement and guidance of fellow writers, now that’s something special. There can be doubts there too of course, but not in a community like ROW80, where we feed off, reinforce, inspire and reassure one another.

 

In essence, with support, we can go far. Without it, we flounder in the darkness of uncertainty. Some need less of it, others need a constant stream of it during the process of writing. Whether you participate twice a week, every round, or only once a week during a few selected rounds at the most difficult times, it’s up to you.  The community is always there, ready to welcome you back into the fold.

 

Without you all, I’d still be writing stories and poems, which only I would ever read. I wouldn’t have had the courage or self-belief to push the goal-posts, to embrace the torrid tides of publication, to take the icy plunge into the sea of readership and possible condemnation. I have no idea where it will take me, but I know I am supported no matter what the outcome, and can consult you all every step of the way.

 

Thank you.

~*~

Shah Wharton

The Imagery of Possibility by Shan Jeniah

How do you see the place where all your ideas dry up, and there seems no hope of more? What imagery might help you to accept that place, learn it, and begin to move through it?

A well waiting to refill? A puzzle with a missing piece? A mind teaser? A koan intended not to be solved, but felt and pondered? The frozen ground of winter necessary to the renaissance of spring? Something completely different?

I was humming along on my current WIP when my momentum lagged… then crashed to a stop. I couldn’t think, feel, or dream how my characters were ever going to get there from here.

I trudged along for a few days, hoping the words and ideas would flow again. That was a bust. My ideas ran dry. I had nothing to write.

I’ve been there before. Writer’s block. The ghost town of creativity….

That was before I knew how hugely the language and imagery I choose affects my approach to challenges. Through them, I claim ideas, consciously or not. And what I claim frames how I view myself, reality, and my writing.

If I claim writer’s block, I am blocked. Thwarted. Sometimes stopped so cold that I can’t move forward. I exhaust all my tricks, all my energy. Battered and bloodied, vanquished by a wall of frustration – an implacable, concrete enemy reinforced with iron beams and barbed razor wire. When I struggle against it, I end up prostrate in its ominous shadow.

Is it any wonder I can’t find the story?

I experience life most intensely through imagery and emotion. They are the soul of my writing, too. I need to feel, not an obstacle, but a challenge I could grow into. I chose to look at that place as an ebb in the flow – a pause, and nothing more.

I stopped trying to write against the tide. I moved on to other things. I read blogposts, answered comments, and chatted on Facebook. I did a lot of gaming. I watched a lot of television. I played with the kids, did things with Jim, and visited with a dear friend I don’t see as often as I would like.

I didn’t work on the story. I let the stray bits of ideas float by without trying to catch them.

During that time, an image of weaving formed in my mind – with a tangled place that halted the process…

A tangle in the weaving. A sign that something has gone amiss, but not an insurmountable wall of impossibility.

Weaving fascinates me. It appears often in my writing. A major supporting character in the Trueborn Weft Series is a healer who weaves to help heal her broken people. The telerotic bond between my protagonist lovers is woven, over decades, in a dance that eventually creates something new, of them both, yet more and other.

Weaving is a happy image, for me, so I relaxed. I trusted that I would eventually move through the ebb, and the texture and pattern of the tangle would become clear. I would be able to see what had happened, where the smooth run of the pattern began to twist.

I left it as it was, letting my mind wander ahead, and around, to the climactic scene I imagined, and to other stories in the series. I let myself consider cutting the threads and creating something else, or tossing the whole thing out into the yard in the hope that the wildlife could make more use of it than I could!

I stepped away from my loom and its tangled weaving. I gave myself time to rest, to play, to talk, to move my body and mind in other directions. I didn’t rush back. I took hot showers, spent lots of time with loved ones, and allowed my imagination to go where it wanted. I simply lived my life.

After a week or two, I had a desire to revisit the story. I played with ideas and lists for the pending series timeline, then wrote few pages of random notes, then bulleted points for two scenes for the companion fan fiction story. I could feel space and possibility opening up around the tangle, and something indefinable was slipping into place. I found myself feeling the story again – without strain or angst.

I am still feeling my way through, unraveling a bit of the knot here, deciding that this bit won’t ruin the pattern but will add texture, finding that, over there, I like the altered weaving better than what I had planned.

I am learning, yet again, to trust my natural inclinations, and to allow the ebb, daunting as it may seem, to be, because the flow is behind it, deep and sustaining. I’m weaving again, with attention and intention – and I am laying the loom aside, sometimes, to instead weave a basket, a memory, or not weave at all for a bit, because rest and dreaming are important, too.

The tangle is unknotting, in some places. In others, the roughly twisted threads shift the pattern into unexpected, deeper, truth.

For me, it matters how I see and name the ebb. If it is an obstacle, I create struggle. When it is a tangle that can be undone, repurposed, or cast off, I have possibilities and options.

If you are stuck, when you feel your story will never escape alive, consider giving yourself time to name that feeling in a way that creates space for you to see all the possibilities the pause can offer.

 ~*~

Shan Jeniah