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Posts from the ‘Writing Life’ Category

Sep 22

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When do you call yourself a writer?

Some days, it seems as if everybody thinks they’re a writer. A few years back I was visiting my mother-in-law in Cherry Valley, California, where I spent the mornings writing at a local Starbucks. As I sat outside sipping my latte and working on my laptop, at least five people a day approached me to ask what I was doing. When I said I was a writer, most of the people proceeded to sit down and tell me their own writing dreams. Guess I just have one of those faces.

One woman, a teacher, hoped to retire and write full time. One man had already published a technical book but really wanted to write fantasy. Another man said, “Oh, my sister is a writer, too.” When I asked him what she wrote, he replied, “Oh, nothing yet. But she’s going to start soon.” Read more

Sep 20

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Three ways to feed your muse: writing away procrastination, Part 3

Throughout history, artists have called their sources of inspiration many things: ego, God, muse, daemon, genius, angel, their higher-self, or as Edwin Land, American scientist and inventor once said, creativity is simply, “a brief cessation in stupidity.”

Most days I feel about as creative as a slug on a morphine drip.

I have to fight for my creativity. I have to force myself to stay in my chair and to stay writing. Some writers call it “bum glue”—writing something without getting up twenty times to stare longingly at the chocolate pudding inside the fridge.

Why is it so hard to stay focused? Usually there’s a reason.

Yes, I run my own business and I have a zillion busy things to do each day. And, trust me, I’ve used that excuse a zillion and a half times to avoid my writing. But why do I find so many excuses to avoid what I love to do most in the world? Mostly, I think, it comes down to fear.

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Sep 15

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Find your story’s emotional throughline

Even though I didn’t fully realize it at the time, an incident as a teenaged babysitter taught me one of my first lessons about subtext and story.

I was babysitting a nine-year-old boy who was literally out of control, a human tornado. He wouldn’t listen. I had plenty of babysitting experience, but I’d never dealt with a child like this. At one point, he found a cigarette lighter and before I could grab it from him, he’d flicked it on and burned his hand.

Later that day, after I had gone home and was walking down the street with a friend, the boy’s mother drove by. She stopped and started screaming at me about her son’s injury. While it wasn’t good that he had hurt himself, her response was extreme for the superficial nature of the burn. I tried to explain how hard it was to manage him, but she just drove away. Read more

Sep 9

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Did you write today? Put a star on your calendar

I love it when I find another writer who has a ritual or a way of thinking about writing that I share. It’s one more way of feeling connected to a community. This week, I had one of those moments when I read an interview with writer John Reimringer. 

In The Aroostook Review, the online literary journal at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, Reimringer speaks about the practice of writing, how he got into it, and his routines and rituals. One especially struck me because it’s a ritual I’ve done in the past with working out and one I now do with my writing practice.

I give myself a star for each day I write.

I like to use a calendar that shows a month and has big enough squares for the stars. Something about seeing those stars pushes me forward. I like to look back and see my writing history at a glance. If you post your calendar in a place where you work, it can even become a conversation starter. I’ve influenced more than one person to start marking their writing progress with stars. (It’s actually a good way to mark any progress toward a goal, not just writing.)

Reimringer and his wife, poet Katrina Vandenberg, do something similar. Read more

Sep 8

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What if you write only what is meaningful to you?

I’m a big fan of passion. I believe that whatever we do has to be done with passion. Maybe this is why my house is currently a certified disaster zone or why I’m behind on bookkeeping—because it takes me awhile to work up my passion for these tasks.

When you do something with passion, you do it for yourself and nobody else. You have an inner fire. I can tell when an author has passion—I feel it in their writing, in their words, in their images. They capture me.

I recently read a post on Photofocus.com by photographer Scott Bourne (@scottbourne) where he asked the question of his fellow photographers: “What if you concentrated on making only meaningful photos?” Bourne explores what this concept might mean to his body of work and encourages photographers to find what is meaningful to them as artists—not what they think is meaningful to others.

He writes, “There seems to be a rush to mediocrity in so many of the things that surround us lately that we may be in danger of simply forgetting about excellence.”

As writers, we have to be knowledgeable about the market—what’s selling, what’s not, how genres have shifted or combined to make new opportunities. But we don’t want to write to the market. We don’t want to write about vampires just because that’s the new hot trend (unless that’s truly your passion).

The most successful authors make their own trends. They find what they’re absolutely passionate about, what is most meaningful to them, and write about it. Read more

Sep 5

Do you have a writer’s disaster plan?

As writers, we must let nothing deter us from our mission.

Sometimes that is easier said than done. One major deterrent in this age of gadgets and computers is our dependence on electricity — especially when the power goes out. I’ve endured a power outage during a frigid winter when a wind storm blew trees over and knocked out power lines in my neighborhood. For eight days, I scavenged for hotel rooms and went to the library for wireless Internet access.

So when the recent destruction caused by Hurricane Irene blew out power for thousands, I could sympathize with everyone who suffered from outages and flooding.

Chicago Sun Times columnist Andy Ihnatko (@Ihnatko), who went for a full week without power, wrote an informative column about how he navigated the outage and still managed to write. Read more

Sep 2

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Conquering your writing fears: what you focus on expands

I’ve never ridden a motorcycle in my life. Never even been on one. So when my hubby recently suggested we take a motorcycle class, I had no frame of reference. I didn’t even know he’d owned one when he was younger and living in Southern California. I’m not sure what prompted his sudden need for speed, but we talked about it and decided to take the two-day safety course to see if we could pass the test (back in his early riding days there were no classes, nor tests). I wanted to take the class to see if I even enjoyed riding.

Being a type A, my hubby arranged for us to have a private class and to have both days collapsed into one (to save time, of course, since we are busy business owners). We passed the written test in the morning. No problem. Then from 12:30pm to 7:30pm we went through two days of riding instruction. Keep in mind I’ve never ridden. Keep in mind I didn’t know where the brakes or clutch were or what a choke was. (Other than this is what I wanted to do to my husband by six o’clock that evening). Read more

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