Guest Blogger Stephanie Vanderslice on Rest, Writing, and the Walking Cure

The name Stephanie Vanderslice often comes up when discussing best practices for teaching writing. I’ve happily hosted her here on the blog before, and am pleased to welcome her back. Her latest book, The Geek’s Guide to the Writing Life, is chock full of solid, writer-tested, smart, and innovative tips on living a writing life in the 21^st century. Stephanie holds an MFA in fiction writing from George Mason University and now directs the Arkansas Writer’s MFA Workshop at the University of Central Arkansas.

Please welcome Stephanie Vanderslice

I originally put the book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, on my reading list last summer because the title was so tempting, because I am a victim of the modern culture of “busyness” as much as anyone else, and because I thought I might find in its pages the secret to managing my time.

Instead, what I found more than anything else was a history of artists and the creative life over the last several centuries, a history with a surprisingly common thread: walking.  Walking, or some kind of meditative physical activity undertaken without distraction, without trying to multitask or do anything else but put one foot in front of another. 

I was astonished to learn how important walking had been throughout history, how many of the world’s great writers and artists have been walkers. Jefferson, Kierkegaard, C.S. Lewis. Alice Munro, Barbara McClintock (Geneticist), Lin Manuel Miranda. They all got their best ideas walking.

I am no stranger to physical exercise. I ride for miles each week on a stationary bike while staring at my Kindle or reading a magazine, and I power walk around my neighborhood while listening to podcasts. Anything to keep my mind occupied, because even though I’ve exercised for 30 years, I still find it pretty boring. 

The kind of exercise advocated in Rest was different. The kind of physical movement that inspired the creatives of the past was exercise for its own sake. It was supposed to be boring. That was the point. As Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard reveals, “I have walked myself into my best thoughts.”

After reading Rest, I became so enamored of walking that I first began scheming to make my commute to the university where I teach on foot—a 20-minute prospect each way—but the problem of figuring out what to do with all the stuff I’d need to schlep back and forth persisted. In the end, I decided to start smaller, with a 45-minute neighborhood stroll after my morning writing sessions. The new caveat: headphones not allowed.  I had to give my mind as much freedom to roam as my body. 

The results have been impressive. Each walk has ended with so many writing ideas, especially development ideas for my novel-in-progress, that I quickly had to start a file called, “walking ideas,” to keep track of them. Moreover, I am learning not to pressure myself on these jaunts, telling myself that my mind can go wherever it wants, even if that means perseverating on what I should have said at yesterday’s faculty meeting. Still, I have yet to return home, even on the most stressful of days, without a revelation about something I was writing.

It’s not just Rest that’s onto something. Recently at a reading at my university, a student asked renowned poet Maggie Smith how she generated her ideas. “Put your phone away and take a walk,” she said.

No wonder the Romantics spent so much time wandering the moors. So, while Rest (the book) has not necessarily granted me an extra hour a day or helped me maximize my REM sleep, it has changed my creative life. See for yourself—read Rest and give the “daily constitutional” a try.

Connect with Stephanie on Twitter, Facebook, or at her website.

Images courtesy S. Vanderslice

The Art of Waiting while Writing...Writing while Waiting

Often, writers chat about The Art of Waiting (Waiting, not Writing). Only we don't call it that. We call it, "Why the hell isn't that editor/ agent/publisher/whoever getting back to me?" Or, "It's been X days/weeks/months, so he/she/they must hate my essay/poem/ manuscript/idea." 

Sometimes, the fine Art of Waiting sounds like "F*#k it, I give up."

We have better days, when we act like artists and sensitive souls and try to convince our skeptical selves that all is well.

My father used to say (before cheap long distance, cell phones, and 24-hour news): No news is good news. If he didn't hear from a child who was traveling, on a date, or away at college, he'd assume no planes crashed, the young man was behaving, and no one was flunking out.

I'm rarely that Zen, so I typically wait with nerves jangling, the "dead in a ditch" tape on continuous loop in my head until my kid texts me back.

As a writer, I've learned to wait. And not assume the worst. Usually. Until I decide—based on nothing but a quiet email inbox—that my work, or I, have been found wanting, or forgotten. But then I have an extra busy day myself, notice that I haven't even replied to a text from a close friend, and decide that perhaps the news I'm waiting for is being handled by a similarly busy person. Or that the wait is taking precisely as long as it has should. Still, I worry as I wait.

This past spring, I had to wait for some of the most important news of my writing life, and as the calendar plodded on, I noticed a call for submission on the theme of "Waiting and Motherhood." There's nothing better for a writer who's waiting than to stay busy…writing.

What came to the page—titled, "From Boys to Men," in the lovely online magazine Motherwell—is an essay I love. It traces the most critical wait of a mother's life: those twenty-ish  years while we wait to see if our handiwork yields the desired result: a mature (okay, mostly mature) adult child that, unlike the first pancake, turns out just fine. Great, in fact.

I love writing essays in the second person, which is what I did here; the prose seemed to materialize on the page that way and the POV seemed right from the start. I thought it might be interesting reading at this time of year, as so many parents are sending their almost grown children off to college, again or for the first time.

Here’s an excerpt:

 "… First, you wait to conceive, wait for the fertility tests to reveal what flaws and whose, wait for the drugs to work, wait for that positive pregnancy test. You try to, but can’t describe the fearful waiting through a high risk pregnancy, the anxious waiting of prenatal testing, the watchful waiting for boy number one to blossom. Wait for the right time to have the second baby, wait after the miscarriage to try again, wait for that strangle-throated boy number two to leave the NICU.Wait. Hope. Pray. Wait.Two years later, you wait…"

You can read the whole (shortish) essay at Motherwell. And if you're inclined, you might share it from that page, as a few thousand folks already have. (This has NO affect on my bank account; it's just a nice thing to do if you think it's worthy, and I know the editors would love it. You can also check out the rest of the Motherhood and Waiting series.).

Meanwhile, if you are waiting for something—acceptances, something to get published, an agent requesting pages, a publisher offering a contract, admission into a writing workshop—I hope you are able to borrow Dad's advice. 

And maybe, write something else?

Image - waiting room - Flickr/CreativeCommons-katerha

This Week in Writing Workshops, Post-Election

In three writing workshops so far this week, before plunging into anyone's pages, I tried to take the temperature of the room, post-election. Since we all hadn't seen one another since BEFORE, I had set aside 10-15 minutes to chat and maybe vent—longer than we typically spend on small talk.  

I wasn't surprised to find the range of emotion included sadness, rage, confusion, frustration, fear, resignation. (And while I knew I had to be prepared to hear and make space for those with the opposite view, as I'd predicted, that wasn't necessary. We live in a deep blue part of New Jersey).

Then I moved on. Or, tried to.

But when I asked my usual opening question, always some variation of, "So, how did the writing go this week?" I was unprepared for the strong responses, most at one or the other end of the productivity / concentration spectrum. Either no words had appeared on the page because writers were too paralyzed, distracted, or emotionally wrung out to write…or, writing was all that had gotten done, in an almost nonstop stream.

I was in the latter camp myself. Since November 9, my fingers had barely left the keyboard. While I wasn't writing political opinion pieces or essays about what the election meant for America, I found that staying busy at what I love to do and do best, was my own private way of avoiding a total emotional meltdown. That—and making batches of soup and other comfort food, alongside my elder son.

Maybe I needed to remind myself that I would survive. For me, the act of writing alone means there are stories yet to tell, that we're not at the end of our own story yet, that the creative well inside exists apart from, and often in spite of, outside vagaries.

The writers around the workshop table told similar tales. Putting their heads down and plowing on with plots and drafts and (solvable) prose problems provided much-needed focus. Writing was available too, in the worried hours of the night, the frightening mornings before (or instead of) turning on the news. Like me, those writers were glad to have something to work on that felt do-able, whether unraveling a fictional character's troubles or describing a narrator's dilemma.

Others had the opposite response: the election outcome shut down their writing drive, pushed the writing impulse over a cliff. Either writing felt meaningless in the face of the gloomy bigger picture, or the bad news had completely robbed them of concentration and focus. Sitting still at a writing desk was not possible, given the upheaval in their minds and heart.

A few reported that while they had been writing, none of it was probably going to be salvageable; but the act of writing had felt comforting and familiar, and let them feel in control of something. Others said they were glad not to have brought all their negative emotion to the keyboard, so that when they are ready to return to their works-in-progress, and when they read that work in the future, it won't have the taint of "I remember writing this the day after…"

Finally, in each workshop, as the talk waned, I noticed a kind of unspoken hunger to get down to what we were there to do: talk about writing, read and share writing, listen to and give feedback on writing. It seemed to me that the act of gathering as writers—no matter what kind of week we'd all individually had—was important, or at least useful. That it was reassuring to be together, doing something familiar, something that at its core, promises things can improve, that we have change at our fingertips.

Revision, after all.

Images: All Flickr/CreativeCommons. Fingers on keyboard - Adikos; Tacks - HDValentin.

Writing Ideas, Interruptions, and Sometimes, a Storm of Inspiration

Where do writing ideas originate? In our minds? Our hearts? A little of both, surely. Do they come along in a flash, or simmer for some time? In my experience, both. But some arrive with a powerful, abrupt interruption to life as usual. And then hold on, refusing to be shaken loose.   

About 10 days ago, folks here in New Jersey marked two years since Hurricane Superstorm Sandy slammed into our coastline, then worked its way north through the state to where I've lived most of my life. BAM, regular life was interrupted. Like many writers, I wrote about it, not once but several times.

First, even before the winds howled, an essay poured out of me about what it was like to be huddled in my home with my husband and one son, while another son was away at his first year of college. Though geographically safer from the storm, he was actually wishing he had been home (a meteorology major, one of those odd people who like bad weather); and that stirred up powerful emotions.

 About two weeks later, I wrote a different piece for the blog of a regional writing center where I was just about to begin teaching. That essay focused on the way people in my state were still talking about the storm in ways that seemed clear we were actually talking about a lot more than the storm--and how, in personal essay and memoir, we often *talk* about one thing while telling the real story about something else.

Next came an invitation to contribute a guest post to the popular blog of a friend from high school. This one, in keeping with her blog's theme of empowerment, focused on how the storm had forced me to look at my relationship to being flexible and adaptable.

Finally, a few weeks after that, when I'd had a chance to consider what the Jersey Shore – an ever popular vacation haven for most Garden State residents, but alas, not for me—meant to me now that it was ruined. This piece, like many of the layered and slightly more lyrical pieces I love to work on, took me places I hadn't anticipated--from childhood longing to newly married compromise, young motherhood to middle age, and finally, to facing a parent's decline, when bad news once reached me while on a rare Jersey Shore visit.

Noting the anniversary has put me in mind of how pieces begin, grow, and then are linked, not only in obvious ways, but sometimes less clearly; how (if we're lucky) one piece of work leads to another; why we can't rule anything out. It made me again consider how what we think we are going to write is sometimes usurped by what feels most urgent to write. And it reminded me to appreciate that squirrelly, unreliable, and gratefully welcome thing we might call inspiration.

Had you asked me in mid-October 2012 what I was planning to write over the next month, I surely would not have said four essays that relate to weather and the Jersey Shore (and more). Even when the storm was making landfall -- I was working then as an editor for a regional news site, frantically gathering and posting storm preparedness tips; interviewing health, power company, and local government officials; and texting my son to interpret the weather updates -- I still hadn't planned to write anything personal about the storm.

Then, the storm was upon us, and my fingers began to move over the keyboard. The first essay felt like I'd said everything I needed to say. Until the next essay asserted itself. After that one, I felt finished.

And then…well, you know; you're a writer too.

Over the next few months, my family will spend our first Thanksgiving in our hometown in about 20 years…my elder son will turn 21 and my husband's niece will marry (on the same day)…my younger son will take the SATs…my family will attend a concert we've been looking forward to for six months (hint: we'll be in a New York state of mind)…and who knows what else might happen, what unexpected events, large or small, hopefully not tragic, will occur. I don't plan to write about any of it.

Images: Lightbulbs-Flickr Creative Commons/Andrew Enright; Rollercoaster-Flickr Creative Commons/Anthony Quintano

Banish the Inner Writing Critic? Maybe not so fast.

The polite name for him or her (or them) is the "inner critic". The more common appellation might be that lousy jerk (or crowd) inside my head who won't shut up and keeps telling me what I'm writing is crap. You know that voice, don't you? 

The one on constant rewind, that endless loop of self-recrimination that's moving along at a faster clip then your fingers on the keyboard, dancing to its own destructive beat, that repetitive drone of No! Wrong! Bad! Unoriginal! Cliché! Trite! Been done before! Boring! Stupid!

I think every writer, to some degree or another, has this internal censor, the uninvited disruptive guest whose job seems to be to put a stop to your writing, to make us doubt ourselves, our stories, our right to write those stories.

So, what to do?  I think we've got three choices.

If you're lucky, or practiced and determined and experienced – or maybe just handy with self-hypnosis – find a way to completely turn this voice off. Flip a switch, banish it, move on. (Good luck and let me know how you did it.)

If you're not that writer, then you'll still be dealing with that critic's carps:  It's too long!  Too short!  Not deep enough!  Plot hole!  Thin plot! Why the hell can't you think of a plot!

Option two: we learn to ignore that voice. It doesn't go away, and yes, we know it's there, but maybe we grow skilled at letting the unhelpful chatter fade into the white background noise of our brain. Yeah, we hear it, but we've learned not to acknowledge it, to write anyway. We deal with like the stand-up comic trains herself to ignore the hecklers and turn away from the audience members who keep their arms folded and mouths arranged in frowns.

This is where I find myself most often. When I hear the internal cynic revving up—No one cares! Dumb details! Vague! Generic! Learn some new damn verbs!—in another part of my brain I'm thinking, "Yeah, yeah, yada, yada, yada," and I keep writing that lousy first draft, or revising that limping second draft

But not always.

Sometimes that voice is too loud, too insistent. And sometimes, got to admit, sometimes that loathsome little twerp is too close to what I think may be the truth. Yep, sometimes that inner critic has something to say that I need to hear.

So I listen. But. I don't stop what I'm writing, don't just agree with the voice, delete, and close the laptop.

What I sometimes do is find a way to acknowledge the points that voice is railing about. I take notes, either in the side margins of what I'm writing (you can use Track Changes, or divide the text into two columns, one for your draft, the second for the critic's notes). Sometimes I jot these nagging nabobs of negativism on a sticky note, or in my writer's notebook.

Just the act of recording the criticism seems to end it – I've cleared it out of my head and have it on hand should I need/want to consider whether it has any validity. In a way, I've "honored" that inner critic—or at least what I like to think of as his well-meaning but tactless spirit—by taking down the message, and moving on.

Mind you, I don't write precisely what I hear between my ears (Crappy dialogue! Confusing backstory! Terrible transition!), but try to translate the raw thought into something that may prove helpful later: Is this conversation authentic to the time period?  Can I move more of the backstory to previous pages?  Find a smoother way to get from A to B?

What I've figured out is that the grumbling, grousing, complaining, crabby, argumentative, techy naysayer who lives in my head is not going away. He can be silenced on occasion and I know how to ignore him and push him into the background, but once in a while, that guy is going to have something handy to say. He just doesn't always say it so nicely. 

Images - all Flickr/Creative Commons: NO - AranZazu; Switch - LynnDurfey; Listening - BesZain

Writer Seeking Silence and Quiet. Or, I'll Make My Own.

Shhh. That's better.

Silence. Quiet. 

I love both.

Sometimes I am in control. On a solo car trip, when I'm not in the mood for music or NPR, or a book on CD, I like only the sound of the wheels on pavement, a rhythmic backdrop. In my home office, on a day when everyone else is elsewhere, I like quiet, punctuated only by the sounds of the house settling, the wind whispering by, an occasional car, the newspaper landing on the porch steps, the hum of the refrigerator.

My mother played the radio all day while she performed her household chores. I like to cook and do laundry and straighten up (mind you I didn't say "clean"), in a soft relative quietude.

Sometimes when I'm not in control, the universe is kind to me and the aural and visual "noise" is dialed back to a slightly less bothersome level than usual (I consider flashing television screens and blinking, beeping phones very noisy). When the televisions I encounter in public are muted; when cell phones and tablets and laptops can't find a signal so that texts and emails stop dinging and website loading is a fantasy, I'm typically pleased.

I love creating my own sense of (relative) quiet--maybe what I mean is psychic quiet?--by staying still in a noisy environment.  I love keeping my own silence when there's noise.

When there's sound all around (even happy sounds at an enjoyable gathering), I tend to lean back from it. At a wedding (or barbecue, pool party, holiday fest) when music is playing and people are talking, I'm quietly watching it all from my seat (to be clear, I'm not feeling left out, bored, or otherwise unhappy at these times; I simply like the view).

I'm not a shy person and I like to talk. I enjoy music and the sounds of others having a good time is wonderful. But take all, or any of it away, and I'm happy.

Perhaps I'm strange. Or is it because I am a writer? And I'm "writing" in my head much of the time? I think so, but of course many people who don't write also treasure quiet, for all kinds of reasons.

For me, quiet opens a pathway to writing, or at least to hearing the early scratchings of writing in my brain. I like what happens in my head when there's quiet outside my head, or when I create a cone of quiet around myself.

I crave the quiet. I seek it out, so those scratchings can come out to play.

Whether I record those scratchings (on little notebooks I have stashed everywhere at home and carry along when I'm out), or I simply attend to the words, thoughts, phrases, ideas, and observations swirling around, that I know are the kindling for future writing, is not really what matters.

Quiet is often negatively associated with feeling lonely, or the idea of being a loner. But both, in my mind, in relation to the quiet that comes along with those states, are not negative at all; especially if you think (as I do) of feeling "lonely" as simply the state of being alone, and the idea of being a "loner" as feeling settled and not upset by having only one's own company. In those contexts then, I want to be  a little lonely, and I'm not put out by being labeled a loner.

Last year, in a post at Catching Days, Dan Chaon says, "The real secret to a writer’s day is how much time you’re willing to be alone, how much you like being lonely, how much you crave it."

He also talks of his preference for staying awake far into the night. I do that too. Because I'm alone then, in control of the quiet. My writing keeps my company.

Thinking: An undervalued, vital part of writing.

Let me think.

Factoring in time to think, that will probably take about….

Think about that some more.

Rethink this.

Wait. I'm thinking.

Hmm…but what do you really think?

The above are things I say at various points in the drafting, writing, revision, editing, or rewriting process.

I say them to myself.

Reminding myself about the need to factor in thinking time – as a preamble to the drafting time, within the writing time, around the editing time, as part of the research time, before and during the revision time – has become something I do now as a matter of course.

This wasn't always the case.

Time was, I didn't give a thought to thinking time. It happened, of course, but often as a side effect, a belated blip, the thing that popped up and slowed me down.

Now I try hard to recognize, and honor, the time we need to think. About how to approach a topic. About what a story is really about – underneath the topline situation, the this-happened-then-that-happened. About why I'm writing about some particular thing in the first place, and how I could make it better.

About what needs to happen on the page, about why I'm even at the page.

I'm also learning to take, or to ask for (or find a way to insert, quietly), time to think more deliberately before responding to requests, prospective projects, the occasional mean-spirited or disturbing comment, and to my own knee-jerk reactions.

But mostly, I'm now honoring the time that is a vital  -- and largely undervalued and unrecognized – part of writing.

What do you think?

It's Beginning to Look Like *I Did It* Time

It's mid-December, almost time for me to begin thinking about The I Did It List – my small act of defiance against all the emotionally upsetting lists we humans tend to mentally make as the year draws to a close: the one that ticks off the things we failed to do all year.  We didn't lose weight, clear out the basement, organize the photos, cook better meals, take that trip, call that old friend.

As writers we do our own version of the miss list – we take ourselves to task about the books or chapters or essays not completed, the conference not attended, the acceptances not received, the work not submitted, the agent not contacted, the class not taken, the revision left undone. We tend to see our writing year as a finite lot of things not yet achieved instead of a valuable step along an infinitely curvy road.

Give yourself a break. Please.

Write your own writer's version of The I Did It List.  

Make it a good one.  Please. Write down everything that's happened in your writing life in 2012 that's been good, maybe even great.  At least positive. Little steps accomplished. Medium goals reached. Medium ones broached.

What did you do that moved your writing life ahead?  What did you get done? Who did you help with their writing goals?  Were you published someplace that meant something to you? Did you begin a project?  Finish something, anything?  Did someone you respect say something encouraging to you about your work?  Were you invited to participate in a writing project you are pleased to be involved in?  Did you finally "get" some aspect of writing craft you'd been stymied on before?  Did you write more regularly? With more conviction?  Did you?

In my own I Did It List, I include all the small and the big things. Why not? The tangible and the intangible. The noteworthy and public, the private. Not only does everything add up, it's all part of the whole. Without a lot of small "I did it's" the larger ones can't have transpired. That's how I choose to see it.

I know you did something, many things good for your writing life in 2012. You know you did too. Write it down.

That's the challenge.  Some time between now and December 31, write your own "I Did It List" all about your writing year.  

You can even get started now, and share one "I Did It" in comments.

A Seat at the Table of Alone and Still.

I rarely think of myself as more productive than the next writer, and certainly I'm never convinced that I deserve a seat at the table. Most days, I'm certain my productivity cannot possibly keep pace with my unrealistic expectations. But I try to maintain a minimal level of confidence that what I'm doing has some merit; some days that's enough, and those are the days when I hole up, work in blessed absolute silence, ignore the clatter and lure of phones and social media, turn down invitations to meet for coffee or lunch. Me. Alone. A pen or keyboard.  That is all, and that is more than enough.

The other days, well -- those are the days when I go out. To the bank, supermarket, shoe store. For breakfast, coffee, lunch. To the post office, gas station, Target. To the music store to get my son a new cello string. To the municipal building to pay the water or tax bill. To anywhere, away from the silence. Because the silence is what I must fill up – with words, with writing.

I love silence. I love when silence feels like solitude. I love being alone. But when the writing isn't going well, and if the editing clients and writing students don't need me, then the silence isn't solitude, but condemnation, criticism, disapproval; vast and unfilled, yawning and beckoning and mocking all at once. So I leave it.

Some days, I don't choose to leave it, but life needs attending: Meetings. Appointments. Travel. The thing is, no matter why I leave the silence for the distraction and activity and noise and sometimes the necessity of errands or shopping or meetings, there's still a space in my head that represents that quiet, the silence, that writing place.  And I'm always trying to fill it. Silas House described it beautifully in his New York Times essay last week, about a writer's relationship to the art of being still, no matter where, no matter what.

Today I'm in the quiet silence all morning. This afternoon, and tonight, I'll move out into the noise – banking business, a son's dermatologist appointment, a client's holiday party.

I'll be there, but still.

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.

Guest Blogger Lynne Barrett: Angles of Belonging

I love when two strings of my writing world suddenly knit together. A while back, I read an article online which so clearly laid out the landscape of submitting to lit journals, I printed out the 10 pages, and passed the link to students and writing friends.  Last month, my friend, novelist Christina Baker Kline mentioned that her writing friend, Lynne Barrett, was coming to our local bookstore in late May. The name seemed vaguely familiar and when Christina told me Lynne had written that fantastic article about submissions, I knew I had to have her on the blog.


Please welcome Lynne Barrett.


        I’m from New Jersey. Born in Newark, I grew up in Verona, and my parents’ families lived in Essex County long before that. But now I find myself a “Florida writer,” and since my third book of short stories won a Florida Book Award, interviewers ask me to comment on why Florida is a great state for writing and how it inspires me. 
        It is and it does, yet I know that I am also, somehow, always, a New Jersey writer. 
        Most of the stories in this book take place in Florida, but the opening one is set in West Orange, NJ, and across the Hudson in Manhattan (not far in miles, but to the characters, different worlds). Though I put this story first for other reasons, it is also a bit of a claim: this is my original territory.
        I could also make a case for being a North Carolina writer by training, or, if summers of scribbling count, lay claim to Maine.  We could ask why states are used to label authors at all. (Or regions— Southern, Midwestern—though it seems nobody is called a Mid-Atlantic writer.) But what I’ve been thinking about lately is how origin and residence, place and displacement, have informed my work. I’ve made this list of at least some of the angles:


Of:
In my deepest memories, I’m not “in” New Jersey but of it: sliding down a mass of honeysuckle on the slope in front of our house till I was sticky and fragrant, when I was four, or tumbled in a broth of salt water and sand at Lavallette. Like all the kids in my neighborhood, I learned the secret back ways into Verona Park, as I gradually expanded the map of my known world. When I write from this state of belonging, setting and character intermingle in a way that feels both exhilarating and endangered.  I’m always conscious that a character’s movements out into the world promise both adventure and loss.


Near:
Growing up where I did meant that cresting a street, looking out a high window, or gazing through binoculars from the Eagle Rock Reservation viewpoint, I could glimpse New York City’s skyline. On mornings when I walked with my mother to post a letter at the mailbox there’d be people dressed in their going-to–the-city clothes waiting for the bus.  This presence just offstage always had magnetism. And when I began to go to Manhattan myself, I was conscious of the double perspective: I’m here, but I know what it looks like from afar. Sometimes I juxtapose a character’s experience being in a place and then seeing it from some height or distance. I think this helps to create a sense of its reality and significance, whether the city is Los Angeles or Oz.


From:
I went away to college, and I was eager to go. But only then did I become from New Jersey and see the distance between how I knew home and how others saw it, or spoke of it without knowing it at all.  I had to explain and defend it. Even a week ago, when somebody said, “Oh, you’re from Joisey,” I snapped, saying I’ve never heard anyone from New Jersey speak like that. If anything we hit our R's extra hard. I’ve since known many people who are “from” a place that is not well understood, whose prickliness I recognized as like my own. If characters are “from” Argentina, or Alabama, I think about how they seek to define themselves rather than be defined. I remember that they’ve lost the comfort of belonging without thinking about it, that to be from is also to be away from. 


To:
Coming to a place, being new, not knowing the rules and manners of those who are “of” it, means you notice things its denizens don’t. Being an outsider is great writer training, and writing outsider characters is an opportunity to explore trouble, as they make mistakes, get lost, misunderstand and are misunderstood. I like to plunge characters into some new territory, which could be a strange town or simply a new workplace, and let them study its language and codes. Will the character learn what’s really going on in time, or figure it out just too late?  


In, Among:
I rarely visit a new place without feeling an urge to research it, I think because my drive to be oriented is so strong, though I tell myself it’s so I can use it as a setting. I’ll retrace my steps till I don’t need a map (though I pick up lots of maps). I think it’s better to learn a few square blocks well than just see tourist highlights. I try to find people who like to talk and set a stranger straight. It’s not hard: people love a listener. Once, in Mississippi, I was at dinner, working on my notes from that day’s research (I’d gone with an archaeologist to an Indian mound he was excavating), and the restaurant owner stopped to ask what I was doing. Learning I was a writer, he got his wife and her friends to move to my table to share stories and, soon, wine. Next day, as I was leaving my motel, a couple also checking out said to me, wistfully, “Oh, we saw you at that restaurant last night, with all your friends.”  I felt triumphant: I had seemed, for the moment, of the place.  Somehow this made me sure I could write my Mississippi story.


Back Around:
Once, when I was in my twenties and home for a visit, I needed to pick up a friend at Newark Airport. My grandfather wrote out directions for me, and I drove off.  His road numbers were the little, last ones you see on signs, the old roads that have been overlaid by highways.  One of his instructions read: “Turn where Dugan’s Bakery used to be.” I had to guess, and managed to guess right, and didn’t tell him how poignant I found it that he steered by landmarks no longer there. A person who continues in a place watches it change out from under him.  And one who comes back can’t help but measure what’s altered, can’t help but feel that there was some alternative life that would have been continuous, instead of ruptured.  The place revisited is always haunted.


With:
In stories, I like to combine characters who represent different relationships to the setting. I’ll have a first-time visitor meet someone deeply embedded in a locale, or bring together people who have arrived from different places, for different reasons, yet are now sharing and attempting to define a new “home.”  I pay a lot of attention to who’s on whose territory. In the end, I think the setting should act on characters and characters should affect the state of things in that place, so that we feel that nothing will ever be quite the same.


Notes from Lisa:  
           >>Lynne will be back in New Jersey on May 31, reading at Watchung Booksellers in Montclair at 7 PM, with a reception starting at 6:30. 
          >>Magpies, winner of the Gold Medal for General Fiction in the Florida Book Awards, is Lynne’s third collection of short stories. She co-edited the anthology Birth: A Literary Companion, and has won the Edgar Award for best mystery story. She teaches in the M.F.A. program at Florida International University in Miami.
         >>Everyone who submits to literary magazines should read  “What Editors Want,” from The Review Review (also cited in the L.A. Times and New Yorker book blogs). 

Stuff My Writing Students Say, Part 13

"I'm doing the assignments and reading, taking in all the feedback, and doing a lot of revising and new writing based on all of that, but I just don't know if my work is improving. I keep waiting for the 'aha' moment and it's not coming."

     Aha. 
     There's a short, and I believe, simple answer to this, and I'm not being flip or glib:  Stop waiting. 
     Really, how often do moments of epiphany, instances of "Oh now I get it!" come along in precisely that fashion, at just the time when you anticipated, hoped, planned for?  Mostly, sudden moments of realization, striking occurrences of forehead-thumping, Oprah-esque "aha" moments sneak up on us. When we don't expect them. 
     But that's too simple of an answer to the frustrated writing student who is working diligently, with an open mind, and willing spirit. 
     I have been in this student's shoes. Many times. I can recall writing workshop experiences, where I had willingly signed up for the tough love of a stellar mentor, and been working hard, trying this, experimenting with that on the page…and waiting for the clouds to part and a balloon caption to appear over my head: "Oh now I get it. Look how much better my writing is now. Wow." 
     This never happened. Only later was I able to trace back a dramatic shift in my work to a precise discussion in a workshop. Over the years, I have found that the "wow" moments don't typically occur in the middle of a workshop series, class, seminar, or any other organized writing improvement situation. And now that I'm on the other side of the table (at least sometimes), I understand why. 
     When writers are trying their best to absorb, to push, to step out of the comfort zone, to experiment on the page, to read and expand their knowledge base about craft and story and technique, to grow as writers – that's not really the ideal time to step back, stroke one's chin, examine their newest pages, and wonder: Have I really gotten significantly better in the last few weeks?
     Because there's too much going on, then. The brain is in overdrive trying to assimilate all the new information, input, and ideas. We're evaluating suggestions and advice, trying out new approaches. We look here at the craft readings and ponder their importance to our work. Then we look over there at the instructor's and/or peer feedback and wonder if we agree with it or not, and how much. We study published works to observe the masters at work on the page and consider, How did she do that? What can I learn from it?
     We are in motion on many fronts – which is all good – but it's a lot to take in, and there often isn't enough mental energy, or time, to understand how it's all going to shake out, eventually. It's tiring for the mind. Then there's the compressed deadline nature of most classes/workshops which demand that writers start, revise, and finish a piece of work in less time than is ideal. 
     In my experience – and I'm talking here in broad terms that include not only writing but also  motherhood, marriage, career, relationships – the aha moments come in two general forms. Either they hit me all at once at an unexpected and always later time:  in the shower hours after the marathon writing session, while awaking the morning after an argument, during the long drive home from the much-anticipated event…or a few weeks or months after a writing workshop/conference/class ends.  
       Or else they creep along, small and quiet at first, and then build speed and grow in size and shape until one day I realize (with very little fanfare) that some new writing craft understanding, a technique, angle, method, mindset, approach, skill or proficiency has worked its way onto my pages.  And that's when it occurs to me: Oh, look at that. Now I see. Aha. 
     This has been borne out by a number of writing students and editing/coaching clients who contact me weeks or months after we've finished our time together to let me know that what we were working on during a class or editing project has all fallen into place. I had a breakthrough, they say. "Suddenly" it all makes sense. 
     So my advice for the writer I quoted at the top of this post, the one who said this about two weeks into a four-week class is this:  Corner-turning, breakthroughs, aha moments have their own agenda, and it's not yours. Relax. Stop waiting. Your job now is to take it all in, to read, to study, to try, to experiment, to think. 
     Call me in six to eight weeks.

You can read the first 12 installments of the Stuff My Writing Students Say series here.

Lies Writers Tell Themselves

I am not a morning person. I loathe getting up early, as in before 10 a.m. For a few years, when my husband and sons went camping for a week each summer, I'd work from noon to four, have lunch/dinner, relax, do chores and errands, see a friend, then work and read again from 10 p.m. to 2:00 a.m., turn in around 3:00 and awaken, refreshed, around 11.

Sadly, this is no way to conduct a responsible adult life when I’m not alone. Instead, I get up every weekday by 6:45. I eat breakfast with my younger child and deliver him to school before 8:00. Then I often go to a breakfast meeting I've willingly scheduled, I sit at my desk and open my computer. I work, I write, I edit, I talk to students or clients.

I pass for normal every morning and function mostly, I'm convinced, because of the lie I tell myself when the alarm first rings, which is this:  I'll just get my son to school, and then I'll come straight home and go right back to sleep. I tell myself this lie nearly every morning. Except for a morning or two each winter when the annual major cold arrives, the lie doesn't become the truth. I know this – that I am not going to come back home and go back to bed – but I persist in telling this to my semi-conscious self in order to make myself get up.

This came up the other day in a conversation with a writer who told me that if it weren't for the lies she told herself on a daily basis, she'd never have gotten her memoir completed (now signed by a small literary press; translation: it will be published though little money will likely ensue). Some of her sillier daily lies went something like this: The house will clean itself. My kids will fondly remember this time as the wonderful year they got to watch endless TV, eat peanut butter sandwiches for dinner, and their silly mother forgot to make them practice piano.

Her more serious daily lie goes like this:  Just go ahead and write whatever you want because no one is ever going to read it anyway.  She tells herself this lie, despite two traditionally published novels, dozens of essays, and a poetry chapbook.  The lie is necessary, she says, because it allows her to be daring on the page and to block out thoughts of what comes after the final draft – agent review, finding a publisher, critics, readers, marketing. Yes, she admits that it's a lie, that deep down, she's fairly confident what she writes will make its way to readers, but if she thought about her words existing anywhere out in the world while she's still at work on early drafts, she'd panic and possibly stop writing.

Driving home from our (yes morning!) coffee chat, I wondered if there were any lies I tell myself while I am writing. One that bounces around my brain when I'm in the first draft of a personal essay is: I'll never be able to finish this in a way that satisfies me. I believe I persist in this particular lie so that I won't skip over the necessary mental (and often emotional) steps involved in writing the all-important middle of the story. Even if I already have a great ending in mind, I am still convinced I'll never get there, and that's a good thing. It means I won't just skate over the middle, never going deep enough.  If I never really believe the end is in sight, I'll spend more time getting that middle right.

Another lie I tell myself is: I have no business writing this; I don't have the skills or experience to tackle it. Why this lie? Because if I feel too confident, if I don't have a simmering case of being a bit of a fraud, then I tend to write too quickly, with less care, and less respect for the particular piece. So I tell myself, You can't write that, and in some counterintuitive way, this keeps me going. Maybe I want to prove myself wrong. Or perhaps a part of me recognizes that one always has to write that very first….book review, scholarly article, prose poem, short story, lyrical essay, something… and so the fear is necessary. Then, while I am scolding myself that I shouldn't be writing the thing I'm currently writing, I can remind myself that in the past I've written many things I had no experience with the first time around either.

I suppose there are other lies I tell myself too, but I can't think of them now. It's 8:15 a.m. and I'm thinking of going back to bed.