Month: February 2021 (Page 1 of 2)

Confessions, Part 2

February 27, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I know I’ve mentioned on this blog my dream of working from home, but as I’ve been thinking about that dream more and more, I realize I need to refine it. It’s not that I want to work from home, it’s that I want to work from home as a writer. I want writing to be my work.

(Readers are now thinking, “Yeah sure, you and about ten million other people. Quit yer dreaming, lady!” And I would echo their sentiments. My working-class, Midwestern upbringing has instilled in me a kind of ultra-realism that considers it highly irresponsible and borderline insane to pursue a career in the arts. I have spent many years trying to shake these sentiments, but they return to me time and again. Like, it’s hard to lose the values of your childhood.)

Anyway, the reason why I want to write for a living is because I like it. It’s fun. That’s as simple as it gets, really. I mean, I could blather on about feeling “called” to write, or thinking I’ve got a bit of a knack for it, but those are secondary to the fact that I really enjoy writing and think it would be awesome to spend my days doing it (and getting paid to do so).  To tell tales and string sentences together sounds like just about the best kind of work there is.

Now, I’m ultra-realistic enough to know that making a living as a writer is a HUGE long-shot. So I’m not banking on it. But since Covid (and perhaps even a bit before), I’ve been thinking about whether or not I should stick with teaching or start working from home as a freelancer of some sort. The idea being that if I worked from home, I would have more free time to get my writing done. For awhile — when schools went remote last March — I got a taste of what it would be like to work from home, and not gonna lie, I loved it. I started craving it, even when my school returned to in-person learning in the fall.

But the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more I realize what I loved about being home last spring wasn’t the working from home part, it was the fact that I had more time to do my writing. What I was craving wasn’t necessarily a remote job; what I was craving was time. Covid allowed me and many others to suddenly have more time on our hands. I filled that time with my writing (and reading and going on walks with my daughter and playing in the backyard). And ever since school started back up in the fall, I’ve been trying to recover that feeling of having time on my hands to do my writing. For awhile, I thought that this writing time could be recovered if I worked from home as a freelance editor or something. But I’m starting to see that a change in job isn’t the answer. The answer is a change in myself.

I recently read Atomic Habits by James Clear and have been implementing some of his strategies in my life. One such strategy was to write everyday. I “habit-stacked” and made sure that as soon as I put the kids to bed, I would go down to my desk and start writing. I started this habit toward the end of December and I’ve been consistently doing it since then. Which means that I’ve finished a short story, begun another one, written two chapters of my novella, and blogged nearly everyday in January and ten days in February.

Recently I started challenging myself to write 1,000 words per day. By my calculations, that could get me 306,000 words written by the end of this calendar year. In years past, I would have said 1,000 words EVERY DAY wasn’t doable because I just didn’t have enough time in my days. I work almost-full-time and have three children ages six and under. “No time!” I would say.

But the funny thing is, once I started organizing my day around small habits, I found that I stopped running out of time. The hectic, wasteful days that seemed to plague me were suddenly gone. I could pray everyday, write in my writer’s notebook everyday, read a book everyday, grade papers everyday, exercise everyday, and write fiction everyday. And I could do all this without skimping on my other responsibilities, like taking care of my kids, spending time with husband, and looking after the house.

So I started thinking: Do I really need to abandon teaching and start up a freelancer career in order to have more time to write? Or can I continue teaching AND have more time to write?

I don’t want to get all mushy and start slobbering all over the Atomic Habits book, but honestly, it’s helped me realize that I can do the things I want to do without having to rearrange my whole life or making sweeping and dramatic career changes.

And look, I would still love to work from home because I’m an introverted homebody who enjoys hanging out in sweatpants, but I want to work from home as a writer, and that might never happen (that old ultra-realistic Midwestern upbringing dies hard). And even if it does happen, it won’t be until I have several books written and published, and that won’t happen if I don’t write several books. So the “writing books” part has to be at the center of what I do and how I spend my time. Whether it’s Covidtide and I have time on my hands, or it’s now and I’m working outside the home. Either way, I need to write.

The insight I had recently is that I HAVE been writing: my new habit-filled days have allowed me the freedom to do just that. I want writing to be my work, but I don’t have to wait for some far-off future for it to be a reality. It’s a reality right now.

Creative = Make

February 22, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I’m rereading Tom Hodgkinson’s How to Be Free. I find this book, and its companion, How to Be Idle, eminently re-readable. Both Hodgkinson’s style and his philosophies are so buoyant, so carefree and merry, that I always feel emboldened and inspired when I read his books.

So I’m rereading How to Be Free, and this afternoon I read the chapter entitled, “Reject Career and All Its Empty Promises.” This chapter is relevant for me because I’m thinking about just such a thing (i.e.: chucking my career).

Anyway, the thing that struck me was how Hodgkinson implored his readers to do more manual work — not for money, necessarily, but simply for its own sake. For instance, there’s something quite wonderful about gardening or whittling a piece of wood or knitting or whatever. Not all of our work needs to be “mental work,” and not all of our time needs to be spent focusing on our narrow and restricting “careers.”

This whole thing got me thinking about creativity.

In one of the classes I teach, we spend some time trying to define creativity. Most often, my students come up with some variation of this: “Creativity is figuring out a new way of doing something or an original way to solve a problem.” It’s all about “thinking outside the box” (a most unoriginal expression if there ever was one).

I’ve always rebelled against this definition, though I don’t often say so to my students. I might prod them a little bit with Socratic questions, but I never outright dismiss their ideas. But what annoys me about “originality” and “newness” as central pillars of creativity is that it elevates novelty above all else, AND it ignores the root word of creativity itself: CREATE. Not that newness and originality aren’t aspects of creativity, but they aren’t the center of the thing. Creativity means creating.

To create. To make. To bring something into being.

When looked at this way, creativity is less about ideas and much more about THINGS. When we are creating we are making. And if creativity is making, then anyone can do it. It’s not something that only the rarefied among us is any good at. It’s open to all. Anyone can make something. And thus, everyone is creative.

Being creative, i.e.: CREATE-ive, could mean baking a cake, or drawing a picture, or throwing a party. After all, what does throwing a party really mean? It means creating a party. You gather people and food and drinks, you decorate the place, you make up a list of games and activities for everyone to play. Where once there was no party, you have MADE a party. Brought it into being.

Same thing for knitting, or gardening, or dancing. Or making music, or tinkering, or writing, or building something (or making a baby!). Anyone who does these things is being creative: where once there was nothing, something has been made.

I often hear students remark that they “aren’t very creative,” as if it’s a special skill or something. But it’s not a special skill. It’s simply the act of making. A creative person is one who creates.

And everyone is capable of creating. Everyone can make something.

Leave out whether it’s good or bad; that’s not important. The creating is what’s important. The making.

If I could implore my students to consider one thing, it would be to realize they are, in fact, creative. And that they should spend a good chunk of their time making things, whether it’s a cake or a song or a fabulous party. When we are making things, we are imitating our own Creator. I can’t think of a better way to live.

A Book Within a Book

February 16, 2021 / / 0 Comments

In one of my current works-in-progress, Avalon Summer, the main character, a young girl named Sarah, finds a book that captures her imagination. She starts to see parallels between the book and things in her own life.

Anyway, as part of the story, I make reference to chapters from the book, as well as story-lines and characters. Today, I decided to come up with titles for each chapter in the book, just in case I wanted to use the chapter names in my story.

Well. Now that I’ve made the chapter names, I’m starting to get excited about this made-up book. It’s just supposed to be a plot device in my novella, Avalon Summer, but the chapter titles are so evocative that they make me want to write THIS story too.

Is it a good idea to write a book that will then play a role in another book’s plot? Does that even make sense?

Here are the chapter titles for the totally-non-existent novel, The Gates to Illvelion, which I created as a plot device for my in-progress novella, Avalon Summer:

Chapter 1: “Faerie Night”

Chapter 2: “A Heart Wrought with Spells”

Chapter 3: “Gwenhivar‘s Choice”

Chapter 4: “The Glass Pool of the Hidden West”

Chapter 5: “Oak Abode”

Chapter 6: “Gallien, the Unicorn”

Chapter 7: “The High Cliffs of the Mud Lord”

Chapter 8: “Agravaine’s Curse”

Chapter 9: “The Never-ending Melody of Night’s Enchantment”

Chapter 10: “The Blood Sword”

Chapter 11: “The Iron Key”

Chapter 12: “The Sea-foam Bird”

Is my desire to write The Gates to Illvelion a form of procrastination? Should I take a break from Avalon Summer until I finish writing The Gates to Illvelion? Should I write them both in tandem? Should I just keep The Gates to Illvelion as a plot point in Avalon Summer and leave off writing anything beyond these chapter titles?

I just came up with these chapter titles today, so maybe I need to give myself time to see if this is a real possibility or just my excitement overwhelming me right now.

Input Update 2/15/2021

February 15, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Reading: Kothar: Barbarian Swordsman

Also reading: Out of the Silent Planet

Also also reading: The Twilight Realm

Listening to: The Raveonettes

Watching: Cadfael

I really should do a post about The Twilight Realm and that curious fantasy sub-genre of “friends-who-unexpectedly-get-transported-into-a-role-playing-game.” Part of my fascination with this sub-genre is that as a kid, I remember reading one of these books and feeling as if the book was perhaps “too adult” for elementary-school me, and reading it secretly because I figured my parents wouldn’t approve. (Of course, I never realized my parents wouldn’t have known what was in the book, nor would they have ever tried to find out. But somehow, I was convinced this book was verboten, and thus I would sneak around to read it. Gosh, I was a weird kid!)

Anyway, whatever this book was from my childhood, I’ve never forgotten the feeling I had while reading it. Trouble is, I can’t remember anything else about it! I know it involved kids getting sucked into a role-playing game, but that’s it. So now, with the help of the internet, I’ve begun making my way through mid-80s to early-90s books that involve people from our world getting transported into a fantasy role-playing game world. As I make my way through these novels, I’m hoping one of them will stand out as the one that was so scandalous to nine-year-old me. So far, The Twilight Realm is maybe, kinda fitting the bill, but none of it makes me go, “Yes! This is the book!”

I’m not sure what I’m expecting with this project, other than I just really want to KNOW what that book was.

A few words about my inner critic

February 13, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I just wrote a bunch of words for Avalon Summer (my work-in-progress novella that’s part-memoir, part-fantasy), and now I want to erase them all. Part of me is mad: mad at myself for writing such garbage, for wasting time, for not having enough good ideas. Part of me is trying to salvage them with unconvincing excuses: “Maybe it’s not that bad. Maybe I’m just being a perfectionist. Maybe if I keep going, it’ll all work out fine.”

And then there’s the part of me that knows what needs to be done and is struggling to stay level-headed and cool about the whole thing. What needs to be done is this: I need to cut those words and start over. I need to rethink the scene and try something different. The calm, collected, level-headed part of me is saying, “Hey, no worries. It was an experiment. It was a bit of a ramble down an unbeaten path, but it didn’t work out. Time to turn around and go in a different direction.”

But then the angry, frustrated part of me is on the other shoulder whispering feverishly: “You suck, you suck, you suck, you suck!”

‘Cause the perfectionist, the doubter, the critic are all hidden away inside my head, and the critic loves nothing more than to point out my failures. Let’s face it, the words I wrote the other day are “failures.” They’re not good. They need to be cut. They’re not gonna end up in the book. And the critic doesn’t want me to forget. I wasted my time. I wrote something crappy. I’m a bad writer because only bad writers ever write anything bad.

And on and on and on goes the perfectionist, the doubter, the critic.

This is the struggle, right here. This is what makes it hard. I KNOW that this bit of bad writing is not a big deal. I know it. I know that it’s all part of the creative process. I almost always do better when I can ramble and sometimes get lost, because the other method, the planning everything out method, kills my creativity and energy. It stops me from writing because once I know where the story is going, I lose interest. I’m a “discovery writer,” which means I get to discover, and that means sometimes there will be wrong turns. I know this. My cool, level-headed self knows this.

And yet it’s hard to kill the critic. It’s hard to block out the pessimistic voice that says, “You just wasted all that time writing to a dead-end. What a failure! What a fool!”

I know I need to silence that critic. Problem is: I’m not sure HOW to silence that critic.

When the Music’s Over

February 11, 2021 / / 0 Comments

After my sojourn through the realms of Dungeon Synth, I finally figured out why my writing sessions have been so “blah” lately. My routine has been to write after putting my kids to bed, but for the last several weeks, my mind has been foggy, my imagination has been feeble, and the words have come slowly. I wondered why. Was it just because I was writing at night, drained of energy by the long days? Or was I not reading enough? Not enough input?

Well, in a way, that was exactly my problem. But it wasn’t a problem of not enough reading. I’ve actually been reading more books lately than I have since winter began. The input problem wasn’t a literary one: it was a musical one.

I realized the other day that I haven’t been listening to enough music. My days are filled with kids yelling and causing a ruckus, with podcasts, with NPR, with students discussing novels and poetry, with conversation and talk. Most of these are good (minus the yelling children), but they aren’t music.

I have been living a musically-deficient life for awhile, and I think it’s having a detrimental effect on my writing.

Ever since I was a teenager, music and my creative process have been intrinsically linked. Songs would inspire stories, lyrics would generate images, melodies would create moods and feelings that led to ideas. The novella I’m working on right now — Avalon Summer — wouldn’t exist without the music of R.E.M. The Merlin’s Last Magic series owes its existence to The Smiths, 80s New Wave, and Loreena McKennitt . And my Icelandic-Sagas-Meet-Film-Noir world (the one where my short story “Things” takes place) wouldn’t have been conjured if I hadn’t been going through a Franz Ferdinand/garage rock phase in my late twenties.

Whether it’s Led Zeppelin or the Grateful Dead or Miracle Legion, music has been the seed from which so much of my creative work has grown.

And why am I struggling right now? Because I’m not listening to my music!

The forays into dungeon synth helped me realize that I NEED music to give me ideas and conjure images. Without images in my head, I can’t write. Without the moods and feelings that come from music, I have trouble generating the spark that gives my ideas life.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is what I’ll do for Lent. It’s coming up soon, and I think the right answer for me is to give up the internet (with exceptions for my teaching work and this blog). I’ve done this kind of sacrifice before, but this time, I want to make sure I fill the space with something good. Prayer, of course, is the best thing to do in place of my doomscrolling, but maybe I can also use that time to listen to music. Grab the ol’ ipod and some earbuds and go on a sonic journey. Maybe the more I immerse myself in music again, the more I’ll be bursting with ideas for my writing.

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