Work it!

Even though I’m regularly asked to speak on my perspectives on writing and literature, I never really feel qualified to do so. As is evidenced by ten blogs in a row about my writing process, it’s a tenuous and delicate and scary thing, so how could I ever master it? Luckily, I doubt I really need to. I just need to keep getting back to work, back to myself.

Rather than depressing me, a workmanlike (workwomanlike?) attitude toward writing keeps me going. It reminds me that I can improve with practice, that I need to plug away. Treating writing like work is not the most glamorous choice in the world (pro tip: neither is any aspect of writing, at least for me), but it results in writing that gets done with the minimum of fuss and emotional trauma. This is not to say that there is not emotional trauma galore in the process…how can you really get to readers if you don’t strip naked and wander around every once in a while? But for me, it always comes back to the work.

Luckily, I am a person who loves to work. I am a hard worker. This could be due to insecurity or incompetence or some other word that starts with “I”. I’m sure it’s safer for me to keep my identity as a worker instead of as an artist, but it works for now.

Might this change as I mature? I guess we’ll see. For now, there’s a big pile of work awaiting me—the work of finding myself and others on pages I create and the work of showing up for my work. That sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? And yet I relish the rolling up of the sleeves. Who’s with me?

You know the big, huge, terrifying amount of time, energy and love you pour into your writing? You know the dreams you wrap up in every word? It will all be for naught if you don’t show up to protect it.

I don’t mean go out and buy a gun, or go out and get all obsessed with the remote possibility of someone stealing your precious ideas, unless that’s your thing. I mean that letting your desire for publication trump your common sense and your sense of self-protection is somewhat ludicrous. So is allowing people to divert you from your higher purpose or giving away your self-respect to someone who seems to offer “something for your career” in exchange for your firstborn child, or something. Find the right people to bitch to and trust. Find a sense of unwavering something that lets you shut the door a few moments a week to write those words, or stand up on behalf of the draft you can’t get out of your head, or murder the character you love too much for your own good.

I won’t go into specifics, but I have had to learn all this the hard way. Ultimately, I must show up on my own behalf and on behalf of my work.

That's what I like about you.

Look, the publishing industry is changing fast. Things are buzzy and kind of terrifying. There’s always something to compare yourself to—a stellar success that is just enough like you to make you really jealous, or a flameout that is just close enough to home to make you wince.

It might sound cliche, but the only way I know to combat this weirdness is to look for the book only I can write.

When I got close to my first book deal (spoiler alert: it didn’t happen), I really didn’t get this. I didn’t get that an editorial committee, or an editor, or a reviewer, or a librarian, or a reader would take a look at the cover of a book with my name on it and say something to the effect of “So? Why should I care?” And that’s okay. It really is. Because when I’m doing my job right, I’m writing the book only I can write, the book I was born to bring to all of you. This doesn’t mean that the book will change the world, but in order to succeed I have to bring my uniqueness and my voice and courage to the work.  It might be scary, or confusing, or really hard to get down to that essence, but I kind of feel like that’s my calling as a writer.

It’s also the hardest thing in the world to go for, because in order to pursue the book that only you can write, you have to figure out what “you” means at any given moment. That’s the really tricky part.

Mmm. Layers.

There are two types of revisers: the reluctant and the thrilled. Maybe it’s the former-school-newspaper-copyeditor in me, or the short drafter in me, but I love revision. At last! Drafting is done (ha) and I can make the damn thing a bit better, or at least I hope.

But revision isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. It’s a layered process, one with lots of nuance and fluidity. The layers I can think of are:

• Flow
• Story
• Voice
• Time
• Tense
• Facts
• Focus
• Pace
• Look
• Ease of Reading
• Grammar/Spelling
• Fun

I’m sure there are hundreds of other layers, if you look for them. But these are the common threads I look for in revision. I try to consider the piece from a reader’s standpoint. What comes before/after? Is the voice accessible or (woe!) dry and academic? Has the piece caved in to the wall o’text mentality or is it sparse and flimsy? Does it clog my throat when I read it out loud? Am I falling asleep with boredom?

As I get into revision, I always start with an assessment of what I’ve written. Usually this consists of me scratching my head and feeling mystified at my word choices and decisions, but then I get down to business and do a paragraph-by-paragraph summary, just a few words to describe each paragraph. Just going through that exercise usually immediately reveals big holes, things begging to be rearranged, things that can go now. It also, strangely, reassures me a bit. Okay, I have a slight idea of what I’m doing, or at least what I’m doing wrong.

I am pretty brutal about cutting, but every once in a while there’s a turn of phrase I find particularly brilliant and can’t bear to let go. This tends to be a warning sign of tunnel vision. Rather than forsake it completely, I force myself to experiment: What if I cut it out and put it in another document of dead darlings? Would it improve things or detract from them? Nine times out of ten it languishes in that file forever as I find I can live without it.

My last gasp is always what I call “the fun pass.” My insecurity tends to show up in wordy academic tendencies that make every sentence into a parenthetical disaster, so I go through one last time and get honest with myself. Is this fun to read? Really?

Since the revision process is a multi-layered one, there’s no right or wrong way. This is maddening and heartening at once.

How about you? Are you a reviser? What’s your favorite revision trick?

My drafts are tangled and confused!

So, you’ve given yourself permission. You’ve made the space. Now it’s time to draft.

I will be frank: this is my least favorite part of writing. I feel like that makes me a freak (do you sense a theme here?) since writers are, you know, supposed to enjoy writing? And I do enjoy writing, but much more the fixing part than the vomiting out raw material part. Because that’s what drafting is for me.

I will be frank once more: though the thought of an outline gives me the chills, I really work better with one. Usually I try to draft too early and the first draft turns into a truncated, Frankenstein-like thing with lots of brackets and indicators of things to add. When I was writing The Heroine’s Bookshelf I would outline each chapter in five lines or less. It helped me know where to go when I got lost (and wow, did I get lost).

Drafting is terrifying to a control freak like me. It all looks so disgusting! It’s weird and doesn’t get anywhere near where I’d like it to go! But beneath all that grossness is a big leap, a sense of “here goes nothing, I am just going to show up and go through this crazy process” that always leads to serendipitous and good things. Drafting is where I really get in touch with my gnarly, confused subconscious, and my best drafts are totally unfamiliar to me once they’ve been written. It’s like creating a ball of tangled yarn. It’s disgusting and weird. I promise. And then it’s over and I can do what I do way better…editing.

How about you? Do you enjoy drafting?

And then there was me, a person who wrote my book in stolen moments at the mall, for chrissakes,, who went to an arts high school but has never considered myself to be an artist. I was at a total loss. I may even have gone into the bathroom and texted a friend something along the lines of “omg these people are all artists omg they will all discover that I’m here by mistake omg can I please leave now?” I’ll leave it to the phone records to tell.

What role does permission play in your writing?

It struck me that my problem might be one of permission. See, I’ve always been insecure about taking up too much space, physically and emotionally. Writing a book is a pretty dramatic statement on space, isn’t it? And pressing for its publication is a very public way of saying “Move over. I have some ideas to share, people.” I spent many years writing to escape my life. I did it surreptitiously and in secret. So coming clean with my identity as a writer meant I needed to find a sense of permission for both the act of writing and the even bigger act of going public with my words.

We’ve all seen examples of great writing that occurs without permission. Passed notes in high school. Secret diaries of people undergoing the most horrific experiences. Without permission, my writing remains trivial and small.

The word “permission” sounds weird, now that I’m using it. It means someone needs to grant it. Over the years, I have learned that only I can grant myself permission to enjoy my work (or not to enjoy it), to struggle, to experiment, to step out into the world as a writer. When I get caught up in envy, comparison, and other fear-based habits, I’m telling myself I don’t have permission to try it anyway, to struggle and to learn. In those (frequent) moments of weakness, I have to wrest permission from my own petty, clenched fists. I have to give myself permission to write as myself, sloppy, undisciplined at times, fear-driven, ridiculous. I’m the only person who can grant that to myself.

What can I say—every writer I know struggles with a sense of their worth as a person. And every great writer I know gives themselves permission to be themselves, to sit at the table and to do it anyway.

A few weeks after the reading, my book won the Colorado Book Award for the Nonfiction-General category. And I stood up on stage, bewildered and still feeling like a mistake had been made, but marveling that space was being made for me. The presenters moved aside, gave me the mic. The room quieted and people leaned forward to hear my words on my book and my experiences. And I gave myself permission to stand there and speak.

What about you? What role does permission play in your writing?

Making space for writing: The final frontier.

When I first started freelancing, writing felt like an interim afterthought. It took up the space that was available during my workaday life, filling in the cracks. I quit the day job eventually, and the challenge became a space war between creative and professional writing. Then I started my marketing and brand strategy business, and in the early days of our partnership, my business partner and I had some long and intense conversations about where my writing fit in to the mix. My business partner is infinitely patient with me and knew/knows that writing is one of my top priorities in life despite my business goals, and we pledged early on to figure out how to make room for writing in our business. This was put to the test when I got my book deal in 2009. First I had to write the book, then make room for promotion, small-scale touring, etc. Just knowing there is room for writing in my job makes it easier to do, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a challenge. For example, the last three months have been extremely intense on the work front, and writing has to be turned into a priority to combat those sweeping pressures.

Then there’s the emotional space I need for writing. I have noticed that emotional strain and family issues occupy the same space my brain partitions for creative endeavors. Similarly, when I’m chewing on a bigger project (as I am now), writing seems to cordon off about 1/4 of my mental space. It’s absolutely necessary that my brain have that room to turn the same thoughts over and over and over again. This is hardly convenient, but I’ve learned it’s the way things have to be.

My actual writing space embodies a lot of those tensions. I write at a dinette set from the ’60s that has been reclaimed and repurposed as my workspace. It sits in the kitchen and is basically in the middle of my life space. I bounce between this desk, a couch at the mall, and various coffee shops and libraries when I’m writing, and the takeaway for me is that writing still sits somewhere between my professional and personal life. Hopefully I’ll continue to give it the space it needs to flourish.

What about you? What kind of space does writing take up in your life, and how do you make room for writing?

Yeah. I write short.

Writer confession time: I write short. Woefully short.

Maybe it’s the years spent writing articles as a freelancer, working to deadline, cutting my own writing down, but in recent years I have picked up a bad habit. Where I used to cut millions of words as a fresh writer, I now find it challenging to get to my word count. It’s even worse when I’m in a real rhythm—when I was writing The Heroine’s Bookshelf, my chapters were all of roughly equal length, and I’d find that I’d slow to a stall right at the appropriate word count, whether I knew how long the chapter was or not and whether the narrative portion was done or not. 

I have to wonder if this is part of my sad habit of writing the bare minimum. See, I love the process of editing with a real passion, but drafting gives me the heebie jeebies. It’s just so messy, so uncertain. It’s the literary equivalent of standing on a street corner naked. The wind whips. People are staring and laughing. It’s awkward.

Instead of trying to break myself of the habit, I’ve instead tried to give myself permission to write the bare minimum. I can begin the process of revision with very little, but there’s got to be something to fashion into something else. Hence, my first drafts are quite short and inevitably expand over later drafts. I write the bare minimum, then let the minimum grow into something more complete.

I feel kind of strange admitting this. There’s a part of me that feels that “real writers” have endless wells of inspiration and words, that they struggle not to exceed their minimum word count by 50 million words, that nothing can stop the unfettered flow of brilliance from their pens. Next to this impossible ideal, my bare-minimum reality seems small and pitiful. Will you see this and dismiss me as a hack? I comfort myself with the thought that the reality that works for me is usually better than the insecure fantasy of what a “real writer” can accomplish. Usually.

How about you? Do you write long or short?

Reading is integral to writing.

It should come as no surprise that reading is a huge part of my writing process.  I’m a compulsive reader, so any word that comes around my eyes will get read at some point.  What surprises me is the breadth of work that helps me through my own writing.  I tend to approach nonfiction like fiction and vice-versa.

Though some complain that reading like a writer is exhausting or depressing, I find it particularly pleasurable.  What’s the voice?  How is the story told?  What details catch the writer’s attention and which are jettisoned?  What about subject matter…what brings the author closer to the story?  What does the actual page look like?  Are the sentences dense or curt or do they vary?  I try to let myself get swept up in the story, but once I’m done, I look back on the experience and try to glean some broader lessons. 

My day job is marketing and brand strategy, and it brings a lot of nontraditional reading material my way.  I inhale everything from long-form investigative journalism to tweets about Britney Spears’s boobs.  Both help me look at words and information in a different way.  Add in some biographies and a few Georgette Heyer novels and you’re just about right. 

I can’t imagine wanting to write without my ongoing reading habit, nor can I imagine being the writer I am/becoming without reading widely and curiously.  For some reason, I’m not worried about other voices imbuing themselves in my writing.  I really can’t afford to miss a thing. 

What about you?  How does reading fit into your writing process? 

Sometimes, ideas just need to percolate.

I’m deep in writing mode lately, which means that I slip off the radar socially.  The social media strategist and marketer in me is cringing, believe me. I don’t know about you, but the real work of writing occurs under the surface for the most part, as things are thought through and sorted out. That’s no excuse, however, for falling out of touch with you. So I’m giving myself a challenge: post ten new blogs over the next ten days.  Just to shake things up a bit, I’m going to be focusing on my own writing process (as opposed to that of my literary heroines). 

Today’s topic?  Ideas. 

I think there’s a myth that writers wake up in the morning, float over to the desk, look out the window on the glistening springtime or pastoral view, and are visited by a gentle muse who bestows a Good Idea.  “Ah,” they say, stroking their chins appreciatively.  “That’s it!”  Then they begin to write in a whirl of inspired bliss. 

Maybe that’s how other writers do it, but my experience is way messier and infinitely more frustrating.  Here’s my process:  Get one idea that kind of stinks.  Go down the path of research, thought, planning, figuring it out.  Realize it’s total crap.  Get new idea.  This one seems downright brilliant.  Tell someone about it—they blanch and stammer something polite but unenthusiastic.  Suffer from crisis of confidence and abandon idea. 

Et cetera. 

This process is repeated multiple times, with fits and starts.  Sometimes it takes a long freaking time (Only this month have I become confident enough about an idea for a new nonfiction project…yes, almost two years since my first book appeared.  Sorry, Harper.). Sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes I desperately need the input of my partner, my business partner, or a few trusted writing buddies.  Sometimes I have a sense that if I tell another human being, it will be jinxed forever and will surely fail. For me, the important part is to remain open to the right idea.  Nothing is perfect, but good thoughts sometimes take time to percolate.  I try to read widely, talk to new people, eavesdrop on conversations, give myself long walks and time for random, unstructured thought.  Given all of those inputs, ideas usually come. 

Before I go public with an idea, I always ask myself several questions.  What’s the idea? Is it really unique? How? More importantly, what can I bring to the idea that nobody else can?  Is this something I’m willing to talk about all day, lose sleep over, and devote at least a quarter of my working brain capacity to for the near future? 

If the answer is yes, I freak out.  Oh, God.  Here we go again.  And that’s the place I’m in right now.  Here we go again…

What about you? Where do you find your ideas?