Posts Tagged ‘writing’

Last year, my book was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. I was invited to a reading in downtown Denver. When I got there, I felt so overwhelmed and confused—surely, I thought, a mistake has been made. I’m not supposed to be here. These people are artists, and I’m…me. Art talk was thick and heavy. People were talking about inspiration and muses and visions and their identities as experimental poets, or flash fiction writers.

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.

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?

Writing might seem abstract, but more often than not I think of it in terms of space. This works on a physical level—Where do I write? Is there room for it on my desk?—and on a metaphorical level as well. Making space for my writing is one of the great challenges of my life, and one of the biggest indicators of its success.

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?

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?

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? 

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?