The Intersection of Book PR and Writing Advice: A Round-Up

One task of a new author is to help generate positive online coverage/mentions of one's new book. Some are less within the author's control than others of course, and some are more fun than others.

Since spring (coinciding with the release of Starting with Goodbye from University of Nevada Press) I've been writing guest posts and answering interview questions from literary journals, bloggers, reporters and freelancers. Mostly, I've had a great time. I'm still having a good time.

While the goal is to keep the book in front of people's eyes, one of the more satisfying side benefits for me has been that many of the resulting pieces double as useful tips, advice, and information for other writers. 

The book launch, book tour, and general book promo craziness dominated my days for months, meaning I didn't have time to keep offering writing thoughts here at this blog, so whenever possible, I tried to tie in book publicity with literary citizenship. 

I've meant to share this sooner, but life piled on...Anyway, here's a round-up of some coverage from the last five months -- only the pieces that I think other writers might find useful. (If you want to see everything, check out the Media Mentions page.)

Guest posts and articles on writing issues:

Writing About Friends and Family in Memoir: Nine Key Questions (at LitChat)

How Lit Journal Publications Paved the Way to a Published Memoir  (at The Review Review)

How to Add Humor to a Sad Memoir  (at The Memoir Project/Marion Roach Smith)

Publishing with a Small (Traditional) or University Press: When it Might be Right for You and Your Book  (at Nonfiction Authors Association blog)

Writing About Family in Memoir: Fairness Counts (at The Writers Circle blog)

If You Give a Writer a Book Contract, She's Going to Want...Everything (at Women Writers, Women's Books)

Writers Recommend...for Writer's Block (at Poets & Writers)

My First (Disastrous) Writing Retreat  (at The Quivering Pen)

Author Interview Initiation: You Want to Know WHAT?  (at Bloom)

Interviews  (only those that cover writer advice, tips, insight, how-to's from my writing/publishing experience):

In Search of the Right Structure   (at Author Accelerator on Medium/Jennie Nash) 

Author's Notebook: Nine Tips on Writing Memoir (at The Whole Megillah)

Ruminations Interview (at Under the Sun, which published one of the original essays that became an important chapter in the book)

A Conversation with Lisa Romeo  (at Literary Mama)

An Interview (at Proximity's True blog)

Author Interview Q/A (at the blog of Caroline Leavitt)

Be Well, Write Well Interview (at DIY MFA)

Writers in the Trenches: Q/A on how everything before prepared me for the memoir  (at Fay Rapaport DesPres's blog)

A Conversation  (at the Sunlight Press)

Q/A  (at the blog of Christi Craig)

Podcasts (with in-depth dives into nonfiction writing craft):

The Creative Nonfiction podcast (w/Brendan O'Meara) - Episode # 98 - Lisa Romeo on the Power of Paper Habits

Write the Book podcast - # 508  (w/Kim MacQueen)

The Ish podcast (w/Cameron Dezen Hammon) - Episode # 8 - Grieving-ish Part II

And just for fun...

Spotlight (at Publishers Weekly)

How We Spend Our Days: Lisa Romeo  (at Catching Days blog)

Becoming a Published Memoirist at 58  (at Empowering Women in Midlife)

I hope some of these will prove useful for your own writing practice, writing life, writing challenges. As book mania settles down, I hope to be back here at the blog more regularly, with the spotlight once again trained on passing along good writing life advice and lessons learned from experience -- mine and others'. 

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- May 1, 2015 Edition

> Does your throat go dry (or your email go blank) when you need to ask someone to do something that will help your writing career? Check out Kamy Wicoff's excellent tips and get that Yes!

> In the final session of nearly every class I teach, I spend time answering any student questions about getting their essays and short memoir pieces published, so Richard Gilbert's "A Teacher's Advice to Students on Revision and Submission" was of special interest -- and not just to student writers!

> Any writer over 50 (me!) will probably find themselves nodding at Nikki Stern's post at Brevity on being a writer of a certain age.

> At Apostrophe Books' an Advice for Writers page offers video clips from folks like Margaret Atwood dispensing, well, writing advice.

> Though not everyone ranks him among favorite writers, nearly every writer I know swears by Stephen King's words of writerly wisdom, and 10 terrific quotes are graphically captured here.

> One last bit of AWP coverage: Michele Filgate's attendance adventure essay at LitHub.

> What's more fun than seeing my #cnftweet on the back page of Creative Nonfiction magazine (issue # 55)? Seeing that one of my undergraduate students from fall semester has one there too (posting a #cnftweet--or 10--was part of an extra credit assignment).

> While I can't vouch for the accuracy (though it mirrors other illogical and accurate explanations I've read), and I can detect just a slight whiff of snark (which I rather liked), there's a lot to think about in "How the New York Times Bestseller List Works".

> Finally, is Times New Roman really the death knell on a resume? Do we care?

Have a great weekend!

Image: Flickr/Creative Commons - Boston Public Library

Guest Blogger Lucy Ferriss on Why She Had to Learn to Write Badly

I met Lucy Ferriss at a memoir conference at Trinity College in 2007. I was less than one year into a low-residency MFA program, and between on-campus residencies (at University of Southern Maine), I often went in search of literary community and inspiration closer to home (Hartford, Connecticut being only two hours away). Lucy was the conference organizer, and had put together a craft-packed and busy weekend which fulfilled my wish list. If memory serves, we also shared a meal and some lively discourse. Months later, I was pleased to find one of her creative nonfiction pieces alongside mine in Sport Literate journal. I've been noticing her work ever since.

Lucy has published 10 books, mostly fiction, including her latest novel A Sister to Honor, for which she traveled to the remote Pashtun area of Pakistan. She is writer-in-residence at Trinity and lives in Connecticut and the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.

Please welcome Lucy Ferriss

I haven’t sent anything to The New Yorker in years, but when I was young and starry-eyed, I used to polish my short stories until I could see my reflection in them and shoot them off to an editor there. This was back when you licked stamps and enclosed SASEs to get your pages back, since it cost twenty cents a page to photocopy a manuscript at the local library. Perhaps in recognition of this effort, or maybe because they weren’t yet overwhelmed with emails, the editors used to respond with a dashed-off handwritten note. Thanks, but we can’t use it. Good luck!

           

One time, the note was more instructive. You need, the New Yorker editor had written, to learn to write badly.

           

Well, I never.

           

What was she on about? Write badly? I was putting myself through this exquisite torture only because I wrote well. I had always written well. Writing well, as far as I knew, was my only positive attribute. I had paid attention in English class. I knew the difference between lay and lie. I knew not to write a series of sentences in a row as subject-verb, subject-verb, subject-verb. I knew how to use the serial comma. I knew alternatives for the verb to be, and I had a list in my head of all the different ways to write he said (he exclaimed, he gasped, he pontificated, he muttered).

           

I made a paper airplane of the editor’s comment and flew it into the wastebasket.

           

But "write badly" had to mean something.   

           

It nagged at me, and I found myself noting instances in the work of my favorite authors where they wrote, well, badly. The prose stuttered. It circumnavigated the subject. It dropped into cliché. It repeated itself, and used it way too many times. Take, just for starters, Emily Dickinson. What was it with all those dashes? Did the woman have no idea how to punctuate?

A Bird, came down the Walk - 

He did not know I saw -

He bit an Angle Worm in halves

And ate the fellow, raw, 

. . .

           

And what about Thomas Hardy? I loved Hardy. I wanted to be Bathsheba in Far from the Madding Crowd. But just have a look at what the master hath wrought, in The Mayor of Casterbridge:

One of the two who walked the road was she who had figured as the young wife of Henchard on the previous occasion; now her skin had lost much of its rotundity; her skin had undergone a textural change; and though her hair had not lost color it was considerably thinner than before.

Even accounting for Victorian wordiness, the description feels flat and diffuse. The verbs are weak—walked, was, lost, undergone. Surely Hardy could be more precise and vivid.

           

Crossing into our century, I encounter Mary Gaitskill, perhaps my generation’s most forceful dramaturge of female desire. Her novel Veronica, about a fashion model named Alison, was deservedly a National Book Award finalist. But in one scene after another, the writing seems to miss its mark:

In Paris, things happened fast. Two weeks after my first job, I met the head of Céleste. His name was Alain Black; he was a South African with a French mother. He was the man I had glimpsed on my first day there.

I have no idea whether method attended the madness of these authors as they crafted these sentences. But I can tell you this. Dickinson’s dashes and oddly placed commas yield the sense of her breathing, or trying to breathe, as she writes that poem. Hardy’s uninflected description of Michael Henchard’s wife has the effect of stage directions, notes on the actress who is about to step onto the proscenium—making you feel that the whole novel is a sort of play. As indeed it is, a morality play about bad faith. As to Veronica, the third-person narration channels Alison’s indirect discourse, and she’s an insecure, narcissistic wreck.

           

The so-called bad writing, in other words, risks tasking a reader’s patience, but its rewards go beyond sharp description or elegant syntax. To learn to write badly, I had to

• abandon my own cleverness

• listen to the cadences of my characters, including their silences and stumblings

• put every bit of writing to the service of the story

• trust my reader as much as my characters trusted me.

I still struggle. I long to use words like penumbra and viscid and hate giving them up for shadow and sticky. In my latest novel, A Sister to Honor, I write of a character who has committed a terrible act, What, oh what had he been made to do?—which sounds melodramatic to me, but he’s a melodramatic guy, and that phrase kept hammering at me. Almost every time the copy editor corrected a verb to subjunctive voice (“I wish she were here”), I threw it back to the indicative (“I wish she was here”).

           

Elizabeth Bowen has a bit of advice for writing dialogue: Effect of choking (as in engine), more to be said than can come through. Though the reference has long been obscure—when was the last time any of us choked a car engine, forcing the gas through a tiny hole to give it more explosive propulsion?—I like to apply the advice to what my long-ago editor called bad writing. What can’t come through does come through, in the end, and all our velocity depends on it.

Note from Lisa: Lucy would be happy to answer questions from blog readers, in the comments section; she'll *stop by* a few times over the next two weeks, so leave your questions or other comments for her there. She's also like to give one blog reader a complimentary signed copy of her novel, A Sister to Honor. Just leave any comment here by April 11 to be in the running. (Must have a U.S. postal address.)  You can connect with Lucy via Twitter or Facebook, and visit her website. 

Images courtesy Lucy Ferriss

Guest Blogger Ryder S. Ziebarth on Her First AWP Conference

When she walked into my creative nonfiction class at Rutgers University two years ago, Ryder Ziebarth knew she could write. She'd been a newspaper reporter, public relations specialist, and occasional columnist – but that was years ago. What she didn't know was if she could land freelance assignments or write what she wanted to write in her second incarnation of a writer's life: memoir, literary journalism, essays. She could. Now, she's a regular contributor to N (Nantucket) Magazine and Nantucket Chronicle.com, and recently contributed to the Metropolitan Diary column of the New York Times.

Please welcome Ryder Ziebarth.

At the AWP conference in Boston last week, Pulitzer Prize winning author Tracy Kidder and his long time mentor and editor Richard Todd autographed their collaborative book, Good Prose, for me. Watching, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the similar relationship between E.B. White and his professor at Cornell University, William Strunk. A mentorship that culminated in The Elements of Style (you have one on your desk, right?).

 Most writers need that important one-on-one relationship with a trusted guru —a second pair of eyes, a reliable reader, one who does not placate, is not politically polite, and perhaps, someone who is good company. Writers get lonely.  

When Lisa asked if I'd write a guest post about my first AWP experience, I was both flattered and flustered. After two years as her student/coaching client, here I was being invited to contribute, not as a student, but as a reporter, a writer, chronicling my first time on the AWP front lines: left to my own devices, just as I was at the conference, trying to maneuver among new and established writers, MFA students, authors and their admirers, genre groupies and editors, trying to find my way to the page. Any page.

Since Lisa couldn’t attend this year, I wanted to soak in everything I could over my three days of this behemoth of an annual conference, for both of us. Early each morning, I rushed from my hotel through a raging late season blizzard, and then tunneled my way from one Westin Hotel to  another like a mole, and to the Hynes Auditorium, the heart of the conference from which all blood and ink flowed, for 10 hours each day. I powered my way into overcrowded seminars, borrowed too many pens, and passed out business cards in the seemingly endless ladies room lines. 

Having preregistered weeks prior to leaving my home in New Jersey, I could choose the panels I'd attend from the AWP digital catalog before arriving, but my original list changed many times, and then again, daily.  For me, mostly nonfiction-related seminars made the cut,  but I was able to squeak in a  tribute to former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, do some quality cruising through the book fair, and catch the tail end of  a panel including novelist and creative nonfiction craft guru Bill Roorbach. Quietly ducking in and ducking out of rooms mid-seminar was the only way to pack everything in, as I wrung the days dry.

For me, the standouts symposiums and panelists I remember most: The Unreliable Narrator in Creative Nonfiction (including Tom Larson, Mimi Schwartz, Michael Steinberg); I Essay To Be (Phillip Lopate, David Shields, Maggie Nelson, Amy Fusselman); The Art of the Ending (Amy Hemple);  The Urge Toward Memoir (Jeanette Winterson, Lily King); Flash Nonfiction (Sue William Silverman, Judith Kitchen, Dinty W. Moore). 

In the evenings and scattered through the days, there were keynote readings and panel discussions with noted authors Cheryl Strayed, Alice Hoffman, Tom Perotta, Tracy Kidder, Augusten Borroughs, Derek Walcott and others.  I sat, I stood, and at one pointed, lay prone on the last remaining inches of audience floor space.

Here are my top take-aways from the presentations and my overall experience of AWP:

Lesson One. No matter what topic or genre, what labels and writing-speak were bandied about  -- purple prose, literary journalism, flash nonfiction, braided essays, micro flash, personal narrative, memoirs, autobiography and spiritual autobiography (my head was spinning) -- one thing was clear: Good writing is good writing, and good writing practice is essential to becoming a writer of any import. Period.  

Lesson Two. Perhaps equally obvious, but worth repeating: write every day.  Get your process on. Malcolm Gladwell’s premise of practice, in his book 10,000 Hours, said Sue William Silverman, is how she became the author she is today.

Lesson Three. For the nonfiction writer, fight the urge to invent for the sake of narrative flow. Let memory serve the story, and even though it will not always be what someone else remembers, it will be your truth. Phillip Lopate was adamant that a writer “keep true to the artist truth. Facts and truths cannot be separated, they are hand in hand. Facts have implications and truths should never be altered.”

*Note to self: No cheating.

I won’t even go into debates and discussions on multiple narrative lines, third person narrative, or digression in story and plot lines; frankly, I am still burping-up this rich, three day buffet.

 I took copious notes, shyly asked several (burning) questions and made sure, when I could, to thank the writers and panelists for their time and contributions. Although I think most of them didn’t much care, and suspect they shook my hand while looking over my right shoulder to see if anyone more important was behind me, some were heartfelt in their appreciation.

*Note to self: be nice to everyone when famous.

Will I attend the AWP Seattle conference in 2014?  Yes, but with a lighter suitcase (fashion was low on the list), more power bars (the Au Bon Pain frequently ran out of food), and I will ask the Strunk to my White, the Todd to my inner Kidder, if she'll go with me. 

Writing Gods: Give me this day my Daily Brief.

In the online Boot Camp I run --  for writers who are a bit stuck or otherwise need a little push (or giant cattle prod) to get writing again -- I send out a Daily Boot Camp Brief, six mornings a week. It may be a writing-related quote, a bit of advice about something I learned (often the hard way), or a re-interpretation of some tried-and-true writing wisdom.

I've run this class a half-dozen times in the past few years, and while it would make things easier for me to re-use the same Daily Briefs each time, except for a few I truly love and can't bear not repeating, I don't. I come up with new ones each day, each time I run the class.

Partly it's because for the six weeks of the course, I like knowing there's an expectation that I must get up on 36 mornings and create a new Brief; each morning I must either write, find, comment on, or research and pass along, something new.

It's a daily discipline for me, and frankly, if I can't do this small creative task each and every day, then how can I ask the writers in the class to be faithful to whatever regular writing routine they are hard at work developing for themselves (which may or may not be a daily routine) during those six weeks? 

Occasionally I see a theme developing in what I have to say each morning and once I see the pattern, it often points me toward something in my own writing life that needs attention but which I didn't notice before. Other times, I am either happy merely to share something that works for me, or to draw attention to what another writer has to say.

Here are a few from the past four weeks of Boot Camp:

Ø  There's nothing worse than writing something you think is good only to read it over the next day and realize it's not so good. Oh yes, there is something worse: NOT writing it at all.  You can do something with not-so-hot writing. The blank page?  Not so much.

Ø  If you're not reading, you're not writing.

Ø  A documentary I saw on PBS titled, "Who Does She Think She Is?", follows three women artists. They talk about how challenging it was to carve out time for art in addition to being mothers and wives, and in the face of the lack of support and recognition. One said, "I stopped feeling guilty and selfish when I saw the work developing."  That really hit me, and I realized it was true for me too. But the thing is, it takes time for the work to develop.

Ø  "Accepting that your first draft will be your worst draft can be extremely liberating. It's all right to sound like a jerk at this state…nobody's looking…Later when you revise, you can agonize over the details and cut out the embarrassments. In the meantime, nothing is too ridiculous for a first draft." – from WordsFail Me, by Patricia T. O'Connor.  

And this one, written after I attended a family wedding:

Ø  Although I extol the benefits of keeping a tiny notebook on hand and sneaking off to make notes and record ideas no matter what, there are times when it's more interesting, and of course, social, to just let it all wash over you and observe, participate, stay in the moment. Sometimes you lose some thoughts and ideas. Oh well. But other times things simmer in your brain and heart, and something new and maybe even richer is waiting when you do get that chance, later, when you are home and in your sweats, on the couch and can scribble. Life first, writing second.

  

What if you had to write, or find for yourself, a daily writing brief, a few words to get you going if you were stuck or needed a bit of motivation?  What might you say or pass on?

What about the advice that writers must write every day? I say, no. And, maybe. And sometimes, yes.

There is so much cookie-cutter advice about writing, and in particular, about the importance of regular writing routines, that I often wonder how less experienced writers, newer writers, writers with day jobs, or writers have a more well-developed worry-meter than I, ever get through a day without being convinced they are doing everything all wrong.

Don't get me wrong: I am a big believer in an established writing routine, in writing regularly, in integrating writing into the rest of one's life so fully that being awake and writing more or less co-exist.

But to my mind the most detrimental piece of standard writing advice is the one that declares that in order to be a *real* writer (whatever that is), one must write every single day, often amended to include that one must write a set number of pages or words, or a set amount of time per day.

Look, there are times when I do just exactly this, namely when I have something due on a certain date and know I will need to steadily produce in measured increments so I will not go entirely crazy with anxiety over whether or not I will finish on time. 

But in general, I don't hold myself to an arbitrary write-every-single-day-or-else standard.  And neither do dozens of other writers I know, even those who have published many books, churn out essays by the boatload, poems by the hundreds.  Like them, depending on a number of factors – deadlines, research needs, other pressing projects or jobs (paid and not), family obligations, health -- there are periods when I do write every day and then there are times when I do not. There are even times when  – horrors! -- I don't write a blessed thing for a week. Or two. Or more. During that time, do I forget how to write?  Get kicked out of the Writing Club? Drop every writing idea I ever had?  Become someone who is not a *real* writer?

Of course not.

Typically during that time, I am still a real writer. How do I know? I know because I see myself doing other things that support and nurture me as a writer, sometimes intentionally, sometimes without even meaning to.  I read. I make lists of writing ideas. I connect with other writers. I read. I contemplate what has accumulated in my writer's notebook. I seek writing assignments and jobs. I read. I teach/mentor others. I study writing-related stuff – song lyrics, for example. I read. I edit manuscripts. I do research for things I plan to write, or am in the middle of writing.  Maybe I watch films, go to a museum, but mostly I read a lot.  Did I mention I read?

Maybe I'm in a not-writing phase because I'm mentally exhausted after finishing a big project. Maybe I'm physically worn out, battling a cold or aches and pain. Maybe someone in my family needs me, maybe even for days or weeks at a time, which cuts into, or possibly eliminates writing time. Life happens, and being present in life sometimes requires that we don't write (at least not in notebooks or on screen); in the words of one of my mentors, poet/memoirist/MFA professor Richard Hoffman:  "Life first, writing second."

The point is, I'm not a slave to some one-size-fits-all routine, and despite what you may have heard or assumed, neither are hundreds of other writers far more successful than I. And you don't have to be either. 

What you do need to do is find a routine that suits YOU.

If you are NOT writing at all but want to be, if you are the type to squirm out of routines, if you have an ambitious writing goal and/or firm deadline (real or self-imposed), if you have gobs of flexibility in your schedule -- do I think a commitment to daily writing is a good way to get and stay on track? YES. YES. Of course, YES.

Yet that may not be practical given your life situation. Further, I think that holding everyone to some arbitrary standard of needing to write every day only fosters anxiety and guilt. If you think you must write every day, but you cannot actually do so, then you will only end up feeling guilty the next time you actually do sit to write. Who needs that?  Who wants to begin a writing session feeling as if there is so much lost ground to make up, you are already losing?

Who needs to write every day?  Only someone who feels they can, who wants to, who needs to (for deadline or other reasons), and for whom that kind of schedule is workable, enjoyable, nurturing, and possible.  

Everyone else needs another routine instead, one that works for that writer alone. 

Does writing every day help?  Of course. Writing is a mental muscular activity and one does strengthen it by frequent use. So writing every day is good. But so is writing every other day. Or three days a week. Or for six days in a row and then four days off.  Or… It depends on your circumstances, goals, abilities, and especially time constraints and life situation.

Does that mean, hey, since you've got a tough schedule it's okay to write for 10 minutes on alternate Sunday mornings and call that a routine that fits, and assume you will properly develop as a writer?

No !

The idea is to develop an individualized writing routine that works for YOU – that supports YOUR life situation, YOUR writing goals, YOUR capabilities and skill level, YOUR desires.

Tomorrow, I will post what I consider to be the 10 most important criteria for creating a writing routine that works for you.

The above is adapted from Week One of *I Should Be Writing!* Boot Camp:Reclaim Your Writing Life.

Of Writing Advice, One-Liners, and an A Game.

Once I met with a writer who had asked me to evaluate her memoir-in-progress. It was time to return her pages and my report, and over coffee, maybe pass on some tips for moving on. I wanted to convey both encouragement and a realistic idea of the amount and type of work still ahead for her.   

It was mid-morning, and possibly because I had been awake until 2:00 a.m. watching old episodes of Downton Abbey working on another project, I worried that I wasn't saying anything particularly hlepful. But then she told me that something I had mentioned weeks before, just one sentence which I barely remember saying, had already been a big help as she worked on additional material; roughly this: "Your experience itself is not so unique, so just tell the story you can tell." Or something like that. I don't think it's especially brilliant, but I was pleased to have been of help.

This reminded me that so much of the useful, memorable writing advice I've gotten over the years, has come in the form of a one-liner. I can recall one writer I admire telling me, "Nice writing, but what is this really about?" Good advice, coming after several drafts in which I was spending a lot of time trying to write elegant prose, while avoiding writing about anything. 

Another mentor in a workshop once asked me to explain, out loud, something I had made overly obscure and complex on the page, and after I did, she simply said, "Okay. Now write exactly that." One author's offhand remark, tossed out during a panel at a writer's conference on creating the *I* narrator in memoir, has also stayed with me: "Get over yourself; you're not that interesting." Or something like that.

One more I remember was an MFA faculty member who had read a lot of my work, and reacted to a new, lackluster piece I'd written with, "If you settle for your B game, you may not get the A game back." Ouch.  But, she had gotten through, and to this day, I swing for an A game every time. I sometimes strike out, but that's okay; and if I knew more about baseball, I'd find a clever way of saying it's not the home runs that count, but a decent batting average. Or something like that.

Note to (Writer) Self: Who do you think you are?

Occasionally, like all writers I think, I waste time (and energy) talking myself out of some major project I'd like to tackle.

Self, I say, you simply don't have enough time to write that. Pathetic little self, you don't yet have the credibility you need to get that project sold. Little nobody self, what makes you think you can get access to those interview subjects? Insignificant little writer self, how do you plan to execute such a vast project, the likes of which you've never even tried?

Delusional self, I continue, that just wouldn't contribute to the bottom line, so stop dreaming. Sorry old self, I say, that idea is just too big (or too different or too much of a reach); you shouldn't try it until you have more (take your pick) experience, publishing credits, contacts.

Finally, I say to myself (by this point I'm on a pretty good self-defeating roll): Who do you think you are anyway?

It's pretty easy to see how quickly I can go from the above to….procrastinating, hedging, avoiding, delaying -- and forgetting all about it. Eventually, I put the BIG idea in a mental drawer, sigh, and move on -- to projects I know I can handle, those that come with guaranteed paychecks, those I know (based on past performance) I can complete with relative confidence.

The funny-sad part of all this is that I don't (ever, really), become unproductive on a daily basis. I keep on producing words and pages and finished pieces, like I always do. I keep taking on new editing clients and ghostwriting projects and workshops, as I always do. I don't stop writing new material or stop teaching, or stop coming up with good ideas for the work I'm already doing. I don't stop querying for freelance assignments or stop submitting my work to literary journals, like I'm always doing.

But then, that's the problem right there: What I'm already doing. Not reaching. Not stretching. Not thinking about or doing something about even one of the bigger solo projects that I both hunger for and recoil from.

I try to ignore and deny this tendency I have to push aside my own BIG goals and just keep doing what I do. I reason with myself that there's no DIShonor in that, in continuing to write, teach, edit and otherwise work hard at a writing life I've carved out through hard work and perseverance, is there? No.

But.

Sometimes I forget. I drop the smiley face, and the sunny everything's-fine front, and let someone see what it is I keep shoving aside as a writer -- that raw, empty spot I want to fill in with the work of that BIG idea, that hole I keep covering over. That happened a few weeks ago when I shared a meal with a writer friend who told me, simply and firmly, to get over it, to get on with it.

Writers, this is the kind of writer-friend you want. You want this kind of friend even if, at the moment, you want to toss your Caesar salad onto her lap.

Since that lunch, I've been thinking about the bigger picture, my BIG ideas, and for the first time in a long time, there's no attendant Greek chorus of Oh-No-You-Can't and Who-Do-You-Think-You-Are playing an endless loop in my brain.

And now, here comes 2011. Time for me, a list lover, to make the planning list I do every January, of what I'd like to accomplish writing-wise (or at least work on, diligently and with conviction) over the next year. Looking back at last year's list, I can cross off 7 of the 10 things I listed, and that's pretty good.

But nowhere on that list was there even one BIG idea, one project that beckoned and also scared me.

In 2011, I plan to scare the hell of out myself.

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: July 2nd Edition

Here are just a few quick links for your long weekend. Enjoy!

►Highlights and takeaway from The Future of Freelancing conference, held last month at Stanford University, are here (see the yellow box at right of page).

►If you've been told (by a publisher, agent or writer friends) that it's time to begin blogging, or you just plain want to, but are worried about filling the screen, this post by Michelle Rafter will come in handy.

► The 10,000 Words blog asked its Twitter followers for the best advice they ever received from a mentor or colleague, and posted the results.

►And finally, what's an author to do when, following industry advice, he puts up a Facebook page using the title of his book, quickly racks up more than one-half million fans -- but almost all of them aren't even aware that it's a book they "like"? Gregory Levey discusses his strange dilemma.

Have a great weekend.