A Page of My Handwriting

A certain bearded gentleman recently asked me how small my handwriting is. This is the easiest way to answer:

click image to embiggen

Common answers to FAQs: yes, I can read it. Some people find it easy to read; others don't. This is the third-last page of my current novella project, so if you don't want spoilers for something that'll probably see the light of day in the far future, then, uh, don't read it? Also it is overwritten. If I can't decide how I'd like to say something, my tendency is to write it two or even three different ways, separated by commas, and pick one when it comes time to transcribe or edit.

For the curious, the marks and numbers in red on / over the text were made when I counted the words (545 in all for this page). I count words for record-keeping purposes, to help me stay on track for my annual raw word count goal (250k this year) and also so I have a sense of how long the draft is. The numbers in the left column are tallying the total number of words I wrote on June 20th (545 on this project / 1168 on another project); the monthly total (11968), and then the total number of words for this project (545 + 52379 = 52984).

So to answer your question, Andrew: I don't know if I'd say my writing is microscopic. It's not the smallest I've seen, but I've found that the key to fitting lots of words on a page is horizontal density - squishing the words left / right rather than how tall they are. I guess they're pretty closely packed.

My Instrument

I write first drafts by hand. I love it. I use a Rotring (literally, "red ring") fountain pen. For the money, fountain pens have all of the flow across the page of the best rollerball pens, are almost infinitely refillable, and have much more weight. I can write fast with this pen, and my hand almost never gets tired, since you can be all loosey-goosey with your grip, and you never have to press against the paper - the weight of the pen takes care of that for you.

This is a picture of my pen and one of two current bottles of ink I'm working on: I'm alternating this slippy, supposedly insoluble Noodler's Ink with some highly soluble, jet black Aurora ink, which is rich and lovely. That's my WiP under there, my current short piece for Write1, Sub1.

Yes, one of my characters is called Gandalf. Not the Gandalf - this guy is a homeless bearded fellow whose nickname is Gandalf. He does acquire magical powers during the course of the story.

For me, first drafts are a sensual experience. I like to feel as though I'm working hands on. It feels more like making art than typing does. When I'm drafting, I can also avoid turning on the computer, which is a huge bonus, because I am very, very easily distracted.

My writing process is a little bit slow because of the need to transfer a draft from its handwritten form to the computer. On the other hand, I get the bonus feature of at least two distinct drafts. I find it helps me to switch gears from writing to editing if I change what I'm doing physically (using two hands, not just one; working with a screen and a keyboard instead of pen and paper).

What are your writing rituals? Any other handwriters out there? How do you make writing special for yourself?

Woo Woo 101; or, Building a Better Connection with Your Muse

Luna by Helder da Rocha

In the other, non-writing portion of my life, I run with the woo woo crowd. I teach and practice tai chi and qigong meditation, and I train with a Taoist monk. My world is probably a little bit different from yours: in my particular (you could say peculiar) dimension, energy / chi is real, thoughts and intentions have genuine impact on reality, and non-corporeal beings are just part of a normal day.

It's fun where I live.

I don't tend to talk about it because for a lot of people, even the merest whiff of this stuff is a call to write you off. "I don't believe in energy," such a person will huff (while leaving behind a massive energetic stink wave that ruffles the feathers of everyone in the room).

I mention this now because I do think there are some things that creative types can learn from the woo woo crowd, and I'm planning a couple of posts around this theme. In the works is a post about using feng shui to arrange your writing desk so it's just perfect for you. Today, I want to talk about intentional creation, aka manifesting, aka getting what you want out of the universe.

(Don't click on any of those last three links if you have a New Age allergy, btw.)

You might be familiar with the concept of manifesting from the massive bestseller The Secret. Oprah promoted it. The concept behind The Secret is called the Law of Attraction. There's a large, complicated set of explanations about how the Law of Attraction works, but the basic message of The Secret is that if you can fully imagine yourself in the situation of having that new job, car, house, relationship, body, or whatever, and you don't engage with thoughts like "that's impossible," then it will be yours.

Personally, I find The Secret utterly repugnant on all possible levels. I think it's immoral to imply that people don't have what they want or need because they just didn't wish for it hard enough. Um...global political and economic hegemony, anyone?

Moola! by soleiletoile

Don't strain yourself waiting for your money ship to come in.

But - and this is a pretty big but - there is a softer version of the concept of intentional creation that is very, very useful for creative types. It doesn't depend on external events arriving that confirm your deep connection to the universe. It depends on your connection to your inner self, your subconscious, and possibly the collective consciousness. 

This is the essence of the idea: 

If you're stuck on a conscious level with your writing, ask for help with it, then relax. The answer will come. You do not have to wait for inspiration to strike any more, nor do you need to rely on a cranky muse who flits in and out when she wants. Who is in control here, anyway?

(I'm hearing a chorus of writers out there saying, "My muse is in control! Obvy!" Well, no longer, my friends.)

I don't mean worry about it. I mean sit back in your desk and think to yourself (or say out loud): "Okay, I need an ending that makes sense for this story. And I want it to match the tone of the beginning."

Or: "I need a new short story idea by this time tomorrow."

Or: "I'm going to go take a shower. By the time I get back, I want to have a clear idea about what needs to happen in the next scene."

Too often, we flail about while our muses skip merrily out the window just when we need them - or, if you're not into personification, while our creative urge turns to bitterness and our minds drift and we begin to feel so, so guilty for taking all this time to produce nothing. What I'm suggesting is that we can take control of our creative process by telling our muses - or our inner selves, our subconscious, our connection to Story - exactly what we need and then letting them go to work for us. Two key points here are very important: being specific about what we want or need, and then letting that idea drop down into the well of our inner selves.

We all know that we can't put the muse in a stranglehold. "Work for me, dammit!" is not a healthy creative attitude. But any relationship will benefit from a little clear communication. Your subconscious already passes info to you on a regular basis. Isn't it time you started talking to her?

At first, if you're unsure, it helps to sleep on it. If I'm working on a big problem (like I need a short story idea for this week's Write 1, Sub 1 and it's just not coming to me), I ask for an answer by the next morning. As I'm passing out, I think, "I need a medium-length short story idea to work on this week. Something I can write in a day or two." Lo and behold, when I wake up, usually the answer is there.

I think of this technique as an ordering system for my imagination. Remember when you first discovered the wonderful world of ordering stuff online? You click a few buttons, and a package of books (I assume books, but it could be anything) arrives on your doorstep a few days later. Awesome! This is the true function of the muse: ask and you shall receive.

You don't have to wait. It's there at all times, waiting to be put to use. You can specify a time frame, long or short, for the answers you need. If I encounter a problem in my novel, for example I need a way for a character to get across town in the middle of the night and a reason for her to meet up with another character, I'll make a resolution: by the time I'm done vacuuming the couch, I'll know the answer. And so it usually is. 

Really I think the key here is learning to trust the connection between your conscious self and the vast ocean of your inner world. There are more stories roiling around down there than you could possibly write in your lifetime. Stories inspired by things that have happened to you; stories about people you've known and perspectives or ideas you've shared; stories from the earliest time that people told stories; stories that have never been told. That's the vast untapped wealth that we creative types carry with us at all times. 

All you have to do to remain unstuck is to put the necessary structures in place. Learning to work with (instead of at the mercy of) your Muse is like building a muscle. The more you do it, the stronger you will be.

What Write 1 Sub 1 Is Doing for Me

Yippee! Skippee!

I joined the Write 1, Sub 1 Challenge sometime in mid-January, let's say sometime in the middle of week 3. It's now the end of week 6, and I wanted to share some thoughts about how doing the challenge has helped me.

Goal-setting is relatively ineffective for me. I tend to reach somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of any writing goal I set for myself. But joining a challenge and having some kind of external-to-me group to whom I can report? Much better. For example, this week I had a couple of different short story ideas, but both of them required research and were probably going to be longer pieces. I didn't do any writing on either of them, but I got some novel writing done while I was procrastinating, and I did think about them a whole lot. In an effort to get something submitted this week, I went back and edited a short story that's been sitting on my hard drive since October. And this afternoon, I decided I just couldn't let a week go by without at least making an attempt to produce a new short story. I drafted half of one today.

It was a productive week, in other words. Even if I didn't meet the challenge this week, I'll have a couple of pieces that will probably be ready to go for a first round of submissions by the end of next week.

And this is my main point: Write 1 Sub 1 has gotten my creaky submission process in gear. I will sometimes go through jags of submitting stuff, only to drift away from it later. But the idea of having to get a story in fighting shape, super fast, is helping me to see that doing so doesn't have to be a laborious, painstaking process. It can be a fun, roller coaster, extra super fast laborious and painstaking process.

For the first time in a while, I'm engaging a skill I learned in grad school: researching, composing and editing a piece of writing at high speed and with an eye to high quality. I know I can do this. And hey, there will be time for any further necessary revisions after the rejections roll in, right?

A bit of theory here: in The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron uses the metaphor of "filling the well" to argue that what we really need as artists is a source of images, experiences, or encounters with art in order to stimulate our process. Otherwise, we risk becoming drained or "empty."

Right now, I'm feeling like a different metaphor is appropriate. I'm finding that as I work to "empty the well" by using ideas and engaging in writing, editing, polishing and submitting, I'm giving room for more fresh inspiration to flow in. Instead of stale, stagnant waters, I've got fresh, spring-fed, bubbling coolness. There might even be the odd mysterious sea creature down there.

I'm looking forward to finding out.

Multi-Tasking

About a year ago, I took a community course for writers, which was basically a learn-to-critique-others course - a handy skill, indeed. The slightly unfortunate part of the course was that it took place in Burlington, which is a much less interesting, much wealthier, and much more WASP-ish town than the Hammer. I struggled a little bit with the sensibilities of some of the other course participants. (Okay, I struggled a whole heck of a lot with them. Basically, we're talking about people who for the most part seemed transported directly from the more conservative environs of Mad Men.) Even more than that, I struggled with the way a lot of them were approaching the act of writing.

Not the best choice of role models, but feel free to dress this well.

A lot of these good men and women had been labouring for some time on just one big project. For a couple of them, the twelve-week course I was a part of was their third time around with the same project. This was true for the woman writing the conceptually and stylistically impressive literary novel about the woman who had travelled to Northern Ontario to bury the body of her mother. It was also true of the woman writing the not-so-great novel about a woman finding love/potential rapists (I was never sure which it was) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And of the woman who was putting together a short story collection the theme of which was Christmas. They'd spent twenty-four weeks of workshop already on these things, and they weren't writing anything else.

Me, on the other hand: I was workshopping my not-quite-vampire WiP, while producing short story after short story and planning another novel. I wrote during the course, fresh stuff on the WiP. I polished (and published) a flash fiction piece sometime in the first week or two.

I knew from the beginning of the course that my writing was different. None of the other participants were doing genre stuff (unless you count YA, which I don't unless it's speculative YA), a fact that eventually caused me to ditch the course. It took me a few weeks in, however, to realize that I was approaching the entire task of writing differently. They were using slender razors to carve increasingly intricate patterns on the same piece of paper. I was using a shotgun to blow massive, unpredictable holes in the sides of any number of plywood shacks from week to week. My work was focused in all kinds of different directions. And there was no telling what beasts would come flying out when the walls finally fell apart.

The penny dropped when I brought part of a new short story to the group. "I'm amazed that you can work on more than one thing at a time," said a Serious Novelist. "I don't know how you do that."

I don't know that I've ever considered working only on one big thing at a time. In grad school, you can't. Even when you're writing your thesis, you're also teaching a class, grading papers, heading off to conferences, and trying to get published. While the topic areas on all these different projects might vaguely resemble each other,  you have to learn how to task switch to survive. As a freelancer, I'm aware that one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to put all of your eggs in one basket. To diversify across clients is to have a better chance of surviving if a client goes down.

In creative writing, I know I am still learning. I hope I never stop learning. And if I work exclusively on one big project, I'll miss out on the valuable experimentation and excitement of actually finishing something that I get from writing short stories. And if there's only one big project going on at a time, well, what am I going to work on if I get stuck?

Then again, I find that working on so many things at the same time can end up making me feel a little cuckoo. At least a couple of times a day, I wake up to the sudden realization that I've totally forgotten to work on a WiP.

I'm all like, "Gah! I haven't written a new novel chapter in a week! How am I going to get back into my plot?"

Or I'll check out the calendar and it will be "Yikes! I'd planned to submit a story somewhere by last Thursday! But I haven't decided which one yet!"

(I live this way too. Every day it's "Crap! It's 5:00 and I was supposed to pick up Dave at 5:00. Why didn't I leave the house yet?" This is an unfortunate side effect of multitasking.)

But I'm not alone in these habits. Eileen Wiedbrauk of Speak Coffee to Me writes,

I'm always working on ten projects.  I think that's a conservative yet realistic number for what I'm doing.  I have four novel projects on the "this year" list. Ha. Other novel projects are chillin in the bread box.  I'm writing one academic paper, editing another.  I'm actively editing two short stories, and I've got another few who are patiently waiting their turn.  And then there's the teaching projects.  So ten seems about right.

The end result is that it seems like nothing gets done.  I work bit by bit, accomplishing a little bit more on each task daily.  But then I get frustrated for not finishing--much like I get frustrated when I over task my computer and slow it down.

She suggests a solution:

I'm beginning to think I need to streamline my process more.  Multi-task less.  Produce more finished items rather than switching projects.

Amen to that. I always, always wish that I could see the end of some of my projects a whole heck of a lot faster. It seems that the ones I do finish always happen with a whiz-bang. No coincidence that I've finished more flash pieces than anything else in recent months. The light at the end of the tunnel is just that much closer when your word count limit is under 1k.

I guess I don't see changing my multi-tasking tendencies anytime soon, but I do think that for me, the key is patience. I'm hoping it will also help that I'm scheduling some time to finish pieces of writing on a more frequent basis - if only so I can remember how. 

For some writers and other work-at-home types, scheduling is key. Charity Bradford at My Writing Journey recently posted about working out a daily schedule as a way to make sure her needs as a writer and her family's needs get met. What I like about Charity's schedule is that she's partitioning time for social networking as well as raw word count. In other words, she's making sure that she stays in touch with her support group of online writers. She's also got exercise scheduled in there. That's genius, Charity. Because I teach tai chi and attend classes so I can stay on top of my game, I have exercise enmeshed in most of my days, but I find that I do need to pay attention if I'm going to get time to play outside - meaning hikes in the woods or at the local park with the dog. (You all are getting regular exercise, right?)

On the other end of the spectrum, Loralie Hall at Apathy’s Hero talks about the demoralizing effects of setting a schedule and realizing that it just isn't for you. Of course, if you're like Loralie and setting a blogging schedule means you actually end up rereading and editing a novel project, you basically win.

So I realize that "schedule" isn't quite the name for what I do. What I do is more like "make a vague plan and emotional commitment involving as many people as possible and potential public shame, then cram it in somewhere when you finally settle down to work." This style of scheduling works best when it's combined with a little bit of a relaxed sense of obligation to the outside world, a sense of space in the course of a day, a sense that I don't have to rush. Even if I'm doing a lot and I will, in fact, have to rush at some point, if I can achieve that relaxed state of mind, then writing is much more likely to happen.

Ultimately, I think managing my life as a writer is more about the inner game of writing than the external, time-slotting game. I want to be like Trisha Leaver, who seems to be some kind of task-switching prodigy:

Yesterday I was asked how I do it . . . how I can switch from one set of characters to another multiple times a day. My answer: Mental White Board.

I am insanely organized. I don’t have a date book or a wall calendar posted anywhere in my house, nor do I use my computers handy post-it reminder system.  What I do have is this huge white board in my head, one that not only keeps tracks of appointments and coffee-dates, but has character maps, plot lines, and red-line editing projects clearly drawn out. It is so vivid I can actually smell my imaginary sharpie marker.

When I move from one project to the next throughout the day, I simply shuffle whiteboards. . . toss one to the back while bringing another forward.

Brilliant!

I guess the bottom line is that you should do whatever keeps your hand moving, right? The thrill and promise of raw word count is great, as is the elbow grease required to get a manuscript from first draft to finished. And submitting I find weirdly satisfying. Although it is a struggle to get a story to the point where it's ready to go, it's worth it. As Misa Buckley, writing about the importance of audience, says:

unless my writing is read, then it's just words on a page. It doesn't live And I remain a writer.

So this is my belief. That writing doesn't matter, nor editing, nor subbing. Not even being published. It's not until someone picks up my book and reads it that I become an author.

Happy plotting, writing, subbing, and getting read, everyone.

Aiming High, Shooting for the Middle: New Year's Writing Resolutions

I hope everyone's doing well. If you're like my cat Ben and already tired of playing with your Christmas toys, well, it's time to face the new year.

Ben is not amused

                                                

Since 2010 was the first year in which I set - and actually attempted to meet - serious writing goals, it's interesting for me to look back and see how I did.

Some might say not great. I met not a single goal. But what do you care? I mean, my whole point was to write more, read more, and learn more about writing well. And that I did.

The way I figure it, if I met my goals, then that would be a clear sign that I didn't set them high enough.

Here's the good: I wrote consistently over the course of the year (meaning not every day, not even every week, but most weeks). I didn't do like I usually do and end up trying to cram a year's worth of writing in while I moan and cry and miss Christmas and make everyone around me miserable, most especially myself.

I abandoned projects that I thought were precious and great at the beginning of 2010. This, I think, is a by-product of writing more and editing more and striving to get some stories out there. When you see giant improvements in what you're writing, it's easy to let go of stuff you thought was great six months ago.

I also learned that I still need vacations from creative writing, despite the fact that I love it. I took a couple of weeks in September, and a couple more over Christmas - much-needed breaks from writing, the computer, and life stuff. I'd like to plan to do that in 2011, with less guilt and more glee.

But anyway, here are the stats on my goals and how it all shook out - images squicked from my 2010 Goals page at the Stringing Words forums.

I'm proud to note that this raw word count does not include blog posts, online articles, documents I wrote for clients, or any writing that was not creative in nature. That 205k figure includes the 64,211 words of novel draft (my NaNo novel). It also includes 71,254 words from a non-fiction project. I'm on the downhill slope on both of these! There were a bunch of short stories in there, too. A small extra effort in 2011 should put me over the 225k mark, but this goal is low enough that I can afford to slack here and there. Tally ho!

I'm least happy with my story submissions track record. I was going strong(er) at the beginning of the year, but totally petered out in early September. I know why.

Partway through the year, I suddenly figured out how to be a lot more objective about my own work. This led to a "my God, it's full of errors" near spiritual experience, which in turn led to procrastination. I could see how I could make some of my short stories a whole heap of a lot better, but I also felt overwhelmed by how much work I had to do on them.

On the plus side, two of those submissions, "Voop" and "The Bell," saw publication.

More submissions in 2011! My current stable of submissible stories is not super huge, maybe five or six stories. But 20 just seems like a sad number. I'm aiming for 52 again.

Oh, Revenant Army. This was a book I drafted 90 percent of in late 2009, in a frenzy of gotta-get-stuff-written, just before my mood crashed out and I downspiraled into an existential crisis of sorts, fueled by the realization that I needed a career change. Yikes. But the book had amazing stuff in it (I think!), including Victor Frankenstein, sasquatch (anyone know the plural of sasquatch? Sasquatches? Sasquaii?), and reanimated creatures galore! I still want to work on it.

I'm going to rewrite it in 2011.

Cosy Sexy Vampire was the working name of my 2009 NaNo novel. I had a great time writing it, and I do think there was good stuff in there. Now that I'm looking at this, I'm recalling that a good portion of my 2010 word count went toward drafting new material for this book. (This makes more sense - I didn't think I wrote 70k worth of  short stories in 2010!) It looks like I had just about a complete draft, in terms of sheer volume of words, but the book was a mess, and the characters ended up in some nasty places that I didn't think were all that sympathetic.

Sometime in January / February, a writing coach dude told me that vampires aren't marketable. At the time, I was sore about it, but in retrospect, I realized that, along with the rest of the world, I'm pretty sickened by the state of the vampire sub-genre today. I decided to let this one go.

I recycled the best characters and themes from this book in my 2010 NaNo. Or, in the words of Chris Kelworth, I allowed my "chimera-like creature to pick at the dead bodies" of my former works.

(Why did this image turn out so tiny?)

Sometimes people ask me if I've ever used the work I did on my PhD thesis to write fiction. The Medlar Tree was my attempt to do that, but honestly, my fiction writing skills were pretty shaky in 2008, plus I'd been thinking for so long about how to turn my research - on syphilis, plague, and early theatre - into a novel, well, by the time I finally got around to writing it, it all felt like too much pressure. Like way too eagerly anticipated sex, the execution was ultimately messy and disappointing. I might rewrite it someday, preferably long after vampires are no longer so trendy. Strictly speaking, this wasn't a vampire narrative. Non-strictly speaking, it was.

It's shelved until I can figure out how to do it right.

I'm pretty close to finishing this, a non-fiction book project based on some spiritual stuff I've been working on for a while. I've got a chapter or two left to go. I anticipate a second draft and an introduction coming in 2011. Productivity!

Done, and done!  I'll be putting this on the list again this year.

I read more than 26 books this year (pinky swear!), but I got unexcited about updating my progress. I'm pretty sure I didn't make it to 52, though. Probably I hit somewhere closer to 35 or 40. Which is dismal, really. I don't know. I've read some great books this year. Do I really need to track my reading?

Eileen at Speak Coffee to Me, who suggested the 52 book year in the first place, has produced an amazing series of posts on her year in reading. I am in awe. I want to go to there. It's on the list for 2011.

Bwahahahaha. I hear it's a good idea to have a completed book manuscript before you do this.

At least now I know that I don't really know how long it's going to take me to scrub a novel manuscript into decent shape. I plan to learn that in 2011. I'm hoping in the name of all that's holy that it doesn't take as long, proportionally speaking, as it takes to edit and polish a short story, because those take me forever. I suspect it's probably even more complex than editing a short story. I'm not thinking too hard about that, though, lest I slip into the Slough of Despond.

2011 Writing Goals:
Raw word count: 225 000
Story submissions: 52
Books read: 52
Finish (30 000 new words), edit, polish Tree Talk 
Finish (36 000 new words), edit, polish The Gift (working title, NaNo 2010)
Rewrite Revenant Army
Start a new novel, NaNo 2011

Whether you're setting writing goals or planning to wing it, I wish all of you writers a wonderful and productive 2011 that's filled with magic, revelation and gleeful pissant mischief. Oh, and laser eyes. Who doesn't want those?

Demonic possession, happiness - what's the diff?

Writing Practice, Morning Pages, Raw Word Count

I have a tai chi friend who struggles with the concept of practice. At one point, he said, "I think in some way's it's better to sit in a chair and think about tai chi, rather than practice and do it wrong."

Can you spot the faulty logic here?

Keanu knows the answer:

That's right, Keanu. Tai chi is something you practice by doing it.

Likewise, if you want to write, the way to get better is to do it.

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with an aspiring writer friend of mine about how many words you can manage to get down on the page in a day. She was talking in admiring tones about a friend of hers who wrote a large manuscript in a relatively short period of time. The friend had done somewhere around 1200-1500 words a day. Which is pretty good. (Although some people claim you need 10,000 hours or one million words before you stop writing crap.)

I averaged a little better than that during NaNoWriMo this year, although on most of the days that I wrote, I produced between 2500 and 3k.

In many ways, this has been the year when I discovered I could do raw word count. Of all the lofty creative goals I set back in late December 2009, my 2010 raw word count goal (225k, if you must know) is the only one it looks like I'll meet. But it's also been, in many ways, the most important goal.

Because I learned a lot in those 225k (or, I should say, 200k - I've got about 25k left at this point).

My writing friend was a little mystified by all this raw word output. She has trouble squeezing out 300 or 400 words in a day of writing.

I'm not trying to boast here. But I was trying to figure out why I was able to get a couple thousand words of raw, rough draft in a couple of hours. The answer? I have done a whole heck of a lot of writing practice.

Back in the early 90s, when I was first realizing my dream to write, I discovered Natalie Goldberg. I read her Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life back then, and it was a revelation. Mostly, the idea that simply writing for writing's sake was productive and helpful and made you a better writer, felt correct to me. It also took a lot of pressure off. Natalie Goldberg recommends writing in ten-minute stints. Set a timer and go, keeping your hand moving throughout the ten minutes. I did a lot of timed writing when I first read Wild Mind, and for a long time afterward. Unlike journaling, timed writing is just stream of consciousness stuff. Goldberg says it's about learning to trust your mind. I agree with that. It's also about building stamina as a writer.

Fast forward to early 2007. For some reason - I don't remember why now - I picked up a copy of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. This book is laid out as a multi-week course, with different exercises and areas to explore in order to release any blocks you have to creativity. The fundamental structure of Cameron's program is two-fold. She recommends a weekly "artist's date," where you take yourself to places or allow yourself time to do something that inspires you - what Cameron calls "filling the well." She also recommends what she calls "morning pages:" three raw, unedited, written-as-fast-as-you can stream of consciousness pages of writing, done first thing each morning.

Now, I never did get the hang of the artist's date, except for when I was living in Washington, DC, and I could go to a different and free museum every single weekend. But I did do morning pages, for a long time. They are time consuming. I have since fallen off the morning pages wagon. But I learned a whole heck of a lot by doing them. (If you're like me and barely functional in the morning, take heart: according to Noelle Stern, writing at Archetype: The Fiction Writer's Guide to Psychology, doing morning pages at night will not kill you or anyone else.)

Now, when I do raw, unedited, stream-of-consciousness writing, it's in the service of plot and what I call raw word count - the number of words worth of creative fiction I've written in a year. The 200k I've done so far includes 61 079 words of new novel, a bunch of short stories, and pieces of another, now-defunct novel. Not all of that word count was easy to execute: a lot of it came out with the approximate elegance of phlegm at the end of a bad cold. But the habit of just letting it all flow out on the page is something I trained myself to do through lots of practice, lots of timed writing, and lots of morning pages.

I've had people - creative writing teachers, specifically - sneer at the concept of writing 50k in one month, or getting a ton of writing down in short order. And I'm intrigued by claims that your creative juices really flow if you write as little as 500 words a day. But for me, I have to say, I'm comfortable with larger output, if I know my plot point A and point B for the day. I'm amazed at how little 3k really is, how little plot happens in that space, and some days, the best days, I'm scrambling to get it all down and keep up with the idea factory.

My point is, writing fast is something you can learn to do. Likewise, writing is something you can learn to do. If your dream is to write creatively, you have to practice. Your brain has a writing muscle, and you're training to become an Olympic athlete. Writing practice, morning pages, and raw word count are your training tools.

The Fussy Writer's Guide to Making Time to Write, part 3

This post is part 3 of a 3-part series. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

It's not just about the writing, you know. It's about having time to dream. It's about a sense of spaciousness. It's about having room to breathe.


Without these things, I personally think we're not fully human. We need time. You need time.

For me, the answer to getting a dribble of income going has been turning (again) to freelancing. For a while I worked for a charitable organization, writing web copy. That was an okay gig. Eventually, I discovered the world of online content writing. I write for a large studio that offers up front pay, and my goal for 2011 is to get more into writing for revenue share. I've barely begun putting ads on my own websites, mostly because my track record in writing consistently for those is crap (obviously), but it's something to consider. There are people out there who offer great and free advice on how to get into online writing. Start with No Job for Mom, and if that turns your crank, try The Freelancer Today's Make Money Writing a Blog series.

Let me be clear about this: online writing is not your key to instant wealth, and I don't recommend it for everyone. Most sites pay a scanty amount. You have to write very well, very fast, in order to make an okay amount. If you're going for revenue share / ad revenue, you have to be persistent and you have to not have a pile of bills or debt waiting for immediate payment. Many people have a fantasy that writers make a ton of money, and that there's some magical online source that will pour cash into your bank account if you can only get there.

This fantasy is false, at least for me. (Of course, if any of you have reached the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, feel free to comment!) My experience is that online writing is okay part time work that pays an okay part time wage, most of the time.

But remember how you just spent some time paring down your expenses? It doesn't matter if your income is a dribble. Your outflow is also a dribble. And you'll have the luxury of time.

It doesn't have to be freelance writing. Try dogwalking. Or part-time receptionist work. Or anything that doesn't make you feel like hell all the time.

If you're a fussy writer, like me, it will be worth it.

The Fussy Writer's Guide to Making Time to Write, part 2

This is part 2 of a 3-part series. Part 1 is here. Part 3 is here.

So, let's say you're a fussy writer like me. You want to write a lot of the time, while having some time left over for other life pursuit type stuff, but you also have bills to pay.

Two words: marry rich.

Just kidding. (I am not totally kidding. If you find someone to love who can support you in your vocation/s, take them up on it.)

But okay, let's say that marrying rich is not an option. Here's the first thing you need to do:

Pare down your expenses to the lowest possible amount.

I'm talking about really looking at where your money is going. Shave your budget right down. Decide what you need and what you don't need. Second car? Get rid of it. You won't need to go anywhere: you'll be writing. New shoes? Buy them later. Clothes? Value Village, Goodwill, or some other discount store. Or, consider this: that old sweater you already own is perfect writing gear. No one is going to see you in the workout pants that have a hole in the knee.

Obviously, how you do this is up to you. Some expenditures will have obvious solutions. I traded my book purchasing habits for trips to the library: easy peasy. I planned major expenditures - car repairs, vet visits, dentist trips - such that they spread out over time, rather than clumping up in one month where their effects would be disastrous.

The big thing for me was groceries. In our household, my partner covers rent and utilities, and I deal with groceries, car insurance, basic car maintenance, and internet. Groceries were the biggest item on my list. They still are, since I'm not too willing to compromise on eating healthfully. But I did cut back on our bills by shopping almost exclusively from the perimeter of the grocery store - the dairy, bread, meat and produce sections - focusing on healthy, unprocessed food rather than prepared stuff. I had been doing this already, but I amped it up pretty extremely.

My point is that it's vital to cut back on all expenses if you want to live like a fussy writer.

Why?

Fussy writing is not about taking 15 minutes a day to try to squeeze in your writing dream. It's about great gouts of time that you can roll around in and play with and dream in.

If you want more time, the easiest way to get it is to cut back on the hours you work. Negotiate a day off. Move to part time. Move to a lower responsibility job. The bottom line here is, you need to make a change. Time is money, people. Less money earned equals more time.

Being frugal - as extremely as you possibly can - will allow you the freedom to write.

Maybe you're entertaining fantasies of J.K. Rowling-like success. That's totally fine. Entertain those fantasies all you want. The fantasies won't pay the bills. That novel you're writing, well, it might not either. But it definitely won't get written if you don't take the time.

Here's what I've learned in the last couple of years of actually writing: dreams of success don't even come close to the happiness you feel when you know you're making yourself into a better writer. Finishing a short story and submitting it is a great accomplishment. Drafting a novel, realizing it's horrible, and drafting another one is good, hard work. Learning new tricks and understanding more and more about how to make your writing better - that is where it's at. All of these things are so, so sweet, and all of them are only possible if you spend great gouts of time on your writing.

I have to admit I'm at an advantage here, although it probably won't sound like one. When I decided I was done with higher education, it was at the crest of the economic crisis (which, admittedly, seems to have continued cresting). I was not super employable, and there were no jobs, anyway. I learned to budget on no income to speak of, and I learned exactly how little I could get by on. I realized that a full-time job isn't necessary for me right now. I would imagine that many of my decisions would seem totally absurd to someone with a good job (or at least a job), but coming from the totally unemployed side, working part time looked great and not scary at all.

Since I've started to cobble together a living, I've found that it is totally possible to fit work into my life, not the other way around.

More on that in part 3.

The Fussy Writer's Guide to Making Time to Write, part 1

I am a fussy writer. I am also a fussy cook, a fussy walker-in-the-woods-avec-chien, a fussy meditator, and a fussy tai chi practitioner.

What I mean by "fussy" is that when I find something that I like to do, I want to do it right. I want to spend lots and lots of time doing it. I want to clear my schedule for that thing. I want to take my time. I want to treasure it. Otherwise, I find it difficult to focus, and I become a cranky jerk. I don't feel right about myself, or about other people. I become irrational. I lose it. It's indecorous.

When I decided to clear my schedule for writing, three years ago or so, I began to poke around looking for advice from other writers in my situation. I talked to friends about it. A lot of them were trying to skootch 15 minutes of writing into their week, or whatever. They were sad. They weren't really writing.

My martial arts background has served me well, in many ways. I know that you can't learn something by practicing it for 15 minutes once a week.

I wanted to find writers like the one I wanted to be, meaning writers who write all the time and still stay afloat financially without becoming super burned out.

I spent some time researching this. I looked into writer's blogs of various kinds. The successful ones mostly seem to have hatched from an egg with a contract with a major publishing company clutched in their yolky talons. When a well-established writer did talk about the days before he or she made it, the stories tend to be about slogging at a day job and crying into the keyboard while becoming increasingly sleep-deprived. While I respect and admire people who work at soul-grinding, mind-sucking jobs - or even just full-time, regularly tiring jobs - and then come home and still find time to write copious gouts, I just can't.

I'm getting old? I don't know if that's an excuse or a reason. I'm getting impatient is more like it.

With a little more research, I found some blogs by writers just starting out, who talked about freelancing to fill in the gap in income. Fortunately for some of these aspiring writers, they happened to be skilled in certain highly valued and well-paying areas that meant they could divide their time between writing and paid work and still make a good living. Unfortunately for me, my degrees are all in the arts. These days, let me tell you, it seems that nobody wants an English major. Especially not one with a PhD.

Ultimately, my goal was to create time to write, meet my financial needs, and allow me to feel like I still had some juice left over after I did work for pay.

Because there is a dearth of information out there about the seedier choices made by aspiring writers, and I am (pretty happily) living some of those seedier choices, I wanted to use the space of this blog to post about how I'm managing to stay afloat while still doing what I want.

I hope that parts two and three of this series will be useful to you, especially if you're facing a similar set of conundrums.

Time Part 2

One of the trickiest things about time is its weird subjective flexibility. We’ve all had the experience of concentrating on something we enjoy, and looking up at the clock to find that it’s much later than we could have guessed. Good conversation can be like that. Good writing can be like that, too.

(And there's the opposite scenario, the experience of doing something you hate and watching the time drag.)

Because I meditate regularly, I am familiar with how easy it is to sink so deeply into an altered state of consciousness that time has almost no meaning at all. It’s always surprising to look at the clock after meditation. Sometimes I’ll feel like hours have passed, and it’s only twenty minutes since I first sat down. Sometimes I’ll feel like I was only down in a meditative state for a few brief minutes, and I’ll find that it’s been forty-five minutes or an hour.

So: time is a slippery bastard. Ultimately, our idea that time is something to be measured in steady, regular increments is one of our most delusional notions.

I guess one of the questions that got me into trouble* when I was at a career crossroads was getting into the habit of asking not whether I’d gotten good value for my time, whether I’d been “productive” or “used my time well”, but whether I could look back at the end of the day and feel satisfied. Some days, I noticed, just felt right.

How much time does it take to achieve this sense of satisfaction? If you have to ask, I’d like to propose that you’re thinking about satisfaction in an entirely wrong fashion.

For me, whether a day is good or bad depends entirely on how I feel. And how I feel is in turn dependent on a number of ephemeral and non-ephemeral things: did I write something that made me excited about writing? Did I drink the right amount of coffee? Did I get to play with the dog and cat? Did I do something to make me think more deeply about my art? Did I get outside and clear my head at some point? Did I manage to fit a really good stretch into my day? Did I learn something new? Did I imagine something outrageous?

When asked years ago, I defined a good life as getting into a state of flow and staying in it as much as possible. A concept that was co-opted by western psychology in the early 1990s, flow could be characterized as one of the core methodologies and goals of eastern meditation practices. When you’re in flow, you’re riding on the cusp between focus and relaxation. You’re totally engaged in what you’re doing, and everything else falls away. The question is not how much time you have, but how fully engrossed you are in the task at hand. This applies to doing dishes as much as it does to putting words on the page. In flow, there’s an escape from the pressures of time. In flow, there is access to the essence of joy.



*made me decide to stop doing almost everything else and make a major publication effort

Time Part 1

I’ve been thinking lately about time: how we use it, how it uses us. How it continues to move, even if we don’t use it. How we think about it in terms of bankability: I’ve got two hours, therefore I can do x amount of actions. As if having time were the only factor involved in our capacity to get things done.

All of these concerns about time and how to get things done are of essence to a writer. If you don’t spend some of your time putting words on paper, then it’s pretty difficult to lay claim to the name. At least it feels that way to me.

But I guess one of the most relevant questions about time and writing is, how much time do you need to write?

There are many writing advice guides that will tell you that all you need is fifteen minutes or half an hour of writing every day. This advice is helpful at the beginning. Indeed, an academic version of one of these guides, Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day by Joan Bolker, was one of the golden keys that allowed me to get through my PhD.

These books all sing the same song: just begin. Do one page of writing. Three pages of stream of consciousness whatever. Squeeze it in between laundry and making dinner, between dinner and bedtime. Get up half an hour early, get into bed fifteen minutes before your usual time. Grab a notebook: any modest spiral bound will do. You don’t need a special pen. Just whatever you’ve got lying around.

The thing to realize about these guides is that they are lying to you. Fifteen minutes a day is not enough time to write, if writing is what you want to do.

You know what fifteen minutes a day of writing is? Or half an hour? Or three pages first thing in the morning?

These little scraps of time spent writing are the gateway drug to wanting to be a writer. Start with your cute little journal pages. Get into the habit of writing your stream of consciousness here’s-what-I’m-thinking-about stuff every day. The next thing you know, you’ll be scrounging around for an hour to spend with your writing. On the weekends, you’ll start thinking about Sunday afternoon in a whole new way. You’ll shift your responsibilities around. You’ll cut back on sleep. Maybe you’ll do what I did, and start thinking about whether you can quit your job.

And worse yet, before you know it, the ideas will start to come, because writing daily – no matter what you’re writing – will call down the muses. They’ll start fluttering by your ear when you’re doing other stuff, “important” stuff. They’ll wake you up at night. And they’ll demand that you tell their stories. To tell them well, you’re going to have to practice writing. You’ll have to practice hard. For that, you’ll need more time.

Great oceans of time that you can dive into and swim around in. You’re going to need all the time in the world so you can dream and think and plot and plan. And space – you’ll need that too. You’re going to need to tell everybody to back off.

You’ll do what you have to do. You’ll find the time. Great oceans of it, or at least small lakes. And you’ll make a space for yourself, somewhere in the world, whether it’s a room in your house or a corner of the library or a table at a coffee house.

Once you have that, once you give yourself time, let me tell you, it gets so good. You can relax, because you know that in the course of a day you’ll be sitting down to do some writing. Whatever issues you’ve got with your story, you’ll be working them out. Whatever questions you have about how to proceed, what makes good writing, how to make your writing better, or the mechanics of a good novel, you’ll start to figure out. Because the only answer to these questions lies in sitting down and writing it out. If you want to be a writer, you have to give yourself time.

Accountability

Before he left for work today, Dave told me he's going to drop in at his besties' place for drinks tonight. His plan was to grab dinner near work, and if I know Dave and his besties, they'll probably imbibe and revel until quite late in the evening.

Since I didn't make plans for tonight, I am left unaccountable to anyone for my time.

Woo. And hoo!

I have back-to-back classes to teach on Friday afternoons. Once they were done today, and I was home, the evening opened up to me like a gorgeous vista. The first order of business was to do a little checking of various email accounts to make sure I have no brush fires that need extinguishing before the weekend. Then it was off to the woods with the dog for a little treacherous trail walking. The sunset was incredibly gorgeous tonight - I was grateful to be outside and looking at it, despite the ice that is all over the trails right now.

Now I'm sitting at the computer facing the rest of my evening. I'm nursing a small glass of Chianti and a small bowl of nibbles. I've got a roasted garlic pizza in the oven. Once I've had some awesome, effort-free dinner, I plan to down a dose of caffeine - probably some coffee with a lot of warm milk in it. And then I will spend a few hours getting some raw word count down.

It's been a busy week. I've been doing a lot of editing and too much rush work for other people. More than anything right now, an evening to myself, and time to commune with the page, sounds just about right. Time to create. Time when no one will be looking for me, no one expects me to be anywhere, and no one is waiting on me.

When I think back to my time in D.C., I think that the low expectations I had of my social life there was among the best things about it. I was in a city where I knew almost no one, and I let myself off the hook for feeling bad about not having something to do on a Friday or Saturday evening. Time did amazing things in those two winters away: it stretched like a lazy cat, and I could finally see that it was my choice to do whatever I wanted with it.

Not that you shouldn't have a social life: don't get me wrong. Just that occasionally, it's good to hide out. Good to be alone with your thoughts and plots. Good to set aside a vast expanse of time - however you define that - for playing with your muse.

If you're going to get your oar in the water, you've got to have a lake.

On External Validation

I've been chatting with some folks on Stringing Words about organization. I am by no means a naturally organized person. One of my biggest issues has been fighting chaos in my physical environment. I don't like it when things aren't clean, but I do have a high tolerance for disorganization and a moderate tolerance for filth. My partner is similarly disposed. It seems that there is always something else to do, no matter how much of a disaster area our home is.

In the last few months, I came across a solution to my issues with keeping organized: the FlyLady. I mentioned her and her system as a way for one of the other Stringers to deal with clutter, and met with a neutral / negative reaction that gave me cause to think about why I love the FlyLady so much.

To me, the FlyLady is pure magic. Signing on to her email newsletter was one of the best things I've ever done for myself. Basically, she and her team send out a constant, enormous stream of email messages that give you a structured routine to follow so that the dishes get done, the toilet gets cleaned, and you are coached in numerous ways to create a gradual, general increase in the level of cleanliness of your home. I can totally see how some people would find the system and its accompanying barrage of messages annoying, but I totally needed a generous Southern lady to cajole me into using my vacuum.

Talking about the FlyLady with others has led me to an insight about how I operate. It's something I already sort of knew, but it's always good to have reminders of who you are and what turns your crank.

I am totally susceptible to external validation. Which is another way of saying that my primary motivators come from the outside, and not from within.

That fact is part and parcel of being an extrovert. Where introverts are less likely to put it all out there, I have a hard time keeping it all in. Where introverts look to their inner selves for cues as to how things are going, I'm always looking for gold stars.

I would never say that one way is better than the other, although I'm extreme enough in my extroversion that I don't pretend to understand the inner workings of introverts and their self-motivational capacities.

All of this is to say, simply, that now that I've been reminded of this fact, I plan to use it to brainhack myself. The more cookies, treats, A plusses, gold stars, and pats on the back I can arrange to get, the better I'll perform, I'm sure. These don't have to be personal at all. When the FlyLady writes in her e-newsletter that she's proud of me, I know she's not really talking to me (exactly). But I still get a little thrill from it.

This inner gold star collecting princess will, I think, will be a major key to getting stuff done over the next little while.

So even though I am not really big on New Year's resolutions, with the turning of the calendar year and the beginning of a sort-of new decade, I did make some big plans for my writing, set some word count goals, and began to think about getting (even more) serious about my creative career.

Over on Stringing Words, the powers that be have set up yearly and monthly word count and project threads. Lots of people, myself included, have established lists of projects we hope to complete, things we'd like to see happen, and raw word counts we'd like to achieve. The site gives us a place to keep track of all these plans, and to note success as we meet them. Perfect for my inner princess.

I guess the lesson here is that knowing what makes you tick is useful information. Once you figure that out, you can hook a carrot to your stick and head off toward the horizon of your choice.

Trading Up

Two years ago, I decided to rearrange my life around my writing. Some people work a regular job and do their creative work on the side. I am convinced that I am not one of those people. A lot of different things factored into my decision, but a huge part of it was hitting my late thirties and realizing that I didn’t want the rest of my life to look like the first part of my life. I wanted to make creative work the centre. I had always wanted that, but how I came to own my desire is a little bit of a story.

Here it is, in case anyone wants to know.

I’ve always wanted to write. My real passion for it began when I was in grade three and Mrs. Thompson gave me three gold stars for my story about a duck. She even let me write it out in huge letters! in magic marker! on a giant pad of paper! so everyone could read it. I guess that counts as my first publication.

I took a degree in English and Philosophy after high school. I finished my undergrad in 1993 and said goodbye to school. I jumped head first into a dysfunctional relationship that would last for most of the nineties. Despite my crazy love life, I wrote on and off during this time. I did manage a few publications, mostly in homemade magazines with bad artwork and utterly gross aesthetic sensibilities – right up my alley.

After a few years of freelance editing, I decided that the whole school thing wasn’t so bad after all. I went back for more. During my Master’s degree I flirted with minor intellectual stardom. I was a medium sized fish in a small pond. I liked it.

My dysfunctional relationship couldn’t share space with my burgeoning academic career, so I took the cat and moved into an apartment all my own. I took a PhD in English Literature, specializing in Renaissance Drama. I replaced my crazy ex with a crazy thesis supervisor.

All the while, I was studying tai chi and various other forms of energy work. These two different worlds – academia and the mystical – didn’t quite mesh, but I was okay with that.

Throughout my years of study, I always meant to do creative work, but there was just never time. Grad school really crushed the creative urge out of me: since you’re supposed to be publishing constantly, there’s little time for any writing beyond the academic. In my field, it’s article writing or nothing, so I wrote articles. I told myself that it was enough of an outlet. All the while, a protest was building in the hidden chambers of my soul. Because I was busy, intellectually and emotionally engaged in school, and under the special kind of pressure that grad school brings, it was easy to ignore.

Things began to turn around when I finished my degree and won a fellowship to do two years’ further research. Part of the deal was spending winters in Washington DC. Through a mixture of stubborness, determination not to be separated from my cat for three months at a time, sheer good luck, and kismet, I ended up renting a Victorian house on Capitol Hill for those winters.

There was something magical about my time in Washington. The cat and I had this huge, rambling place all to ourselves, I had all the free museum access I could handle, and there was enough cash to keep me going without having to worry – at least for a little while.

Most importantly, for the first time ever, no one was watching me. I was a little bit accountable to my new supervisor (who was lovely and not crazy in the least), to let him know what I was working on. I worked steadily, but slowly. I gave myself lots of space and time to fiddle around. If I didn’t show up at the research library, people did comment, but my funding was from an independent source, so it really didn’t matter. Most of my time was my own.

Sometime in these Washington winters, I started to play with creative work again. I meditated and I practised tai chi in the tiny garden at the back of the house. Slowly, I reacquainted myself with the magic of words on paper. Once I started, I didn’t want to stop.

A realization was beginning to simmer at the back of my brain: if I wanted to be a writer, I couldn’t be an academic too. I’m sure some people can. Some people are way more amazing and capable of multitasking than me.

But I have to say that I’ve also seen a lot of academics who are battered down, unhealthy, and drained dry by their careers. The average English department is chock full of frustrated creatives who just don’t have the time or energy to play with writing. Those people scared me. One of my mentors – one of those people who seemed to be balancing creative work with a professorship – ended up in the hospital with a serious illness. When I asked senior faculty members what their careers were like, they did nothing but complain. I saw a possible future me in those people.

At the same time, the academics of my generation who were getting tenure stream jobs were the ones most incredibly driven to succeed. They worked tirelessly at their research and nothing else.

The academic job market that was supposed to be wide open by the time I graduated was tighter than ever. I found myself competing for the few available jobs with people who had been at it for years. They wanted it more than I did, and I knew that. I’m sure the committees who interviewed me knew it too.

As someone who had outside interests, I was an exception. I knew sooner or later I would be forced to decide between my academic work and the rest of my life.

Slowly, I started to make a decision. This was in no way something I rationally thought through. It’s more like my heart broke open one day and all this stuff came flooding out. I couldn’t put it back in, not without causing myself some damage.

In September 2007, as the academic job market was gearing up, I went up north to our family cottage, sat by the lake, and cried my guts out.

When I was done, I walked back up to the cottage and told my partner that I wanted to quit academia.

He nodded. “I know, it’s making you miserable,” he said. “What else would you want to do?”

I think telling him that I wanted to be a writer took more courage than just about anything else I’ve done in my life. Admitting it to him meant admitting it to myself.

I’ve been working at it for two years now. Mostly it’s been a downhill ride in a shiny red wagon. I'm not where I need to be if I'm going to make writing a career. But I know what I want to do and I’m giving as much of my time as possible to doing it. I have rearranged my life around writing.

I won’t lie: this is a crazy tough road. I’m living with a ridiculous degree of instability. There is nothing right now on which to base the kind of future plans that most people make. I’m working very odd jobs. I would say “to make ends meet”, but at this point I’m really just hoping that ends agree to talk to each other sometime in the future before my line of credit runs out.

For the first time ever, I have peace. My insides feel right, and that is something you can’t buy.

I’m unsure that my creative career will ever go anywhere. But I do know that it wasn’t going anywhere before, and I do believe that if you put positive effort into something, it will grow.

Into what, that’s not for me to say. But I’m going to do my best to make it something awesome.