Category: writing life (Page 10 of 19)

Reading Challenge (Day 6)

August 11, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to keep blogging about my reading challenge each day. There’s not much to say. I read some books. Two hours (give or take). The end.

Maybe if I was finishing a book every other day or so, but I’m not a fast reader, so I’ll be reading Pachinko and The Door to Saturn for several more weeks at least.

I did start a new book today: 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl. Good so far, but I only read the first essay. Very relatable. Ruhl is a playwright and mother of three kids. I too am the mother of three kids who writes stuff. So, yeah, it’s in my wheelhouse.

But really, what more is there to say about my reading today? Not much.

The reading challenge posts are good because they make me blog everyday, but I’m not sure the “reading” part should be emphasized as much, unless I read something that I want to review or whatever. The “challenge” part can be emphasized, I guess, if I ever had anything insightful to say about sticking with or completing a challenge, but alas, I can’t even go five days without flaking out.

I do like blogging everyday, so maybe I mention the challenge in my daily blog posts but don’t make a big deal out of it.  The book-reading challenge is still a thing, just chillin’ in the background.

I will say, James Clear’s book for developing daily habits is still the best thing I’ve read on forming habits, and even though I failed to meet my challenge yesterday, knowing that all I needed to do was accept it and make sure not to miss two days in a row was enough to get me motivated again. In the past, when I would miss doing something I promised to do daily (i.e.: not say my Lenten rosary), I would beat myself up about it. I would get ridiculously discouraged, and basically, give up on the whole thing.

Clear’s advice — to just let yourself miss that day and make sure not to miss more than two in a row — was mind-altering. Here was a productivity guru guy telling me it was okay to miss a day, that it didn’t mean I was a failure, and all I needed to do was just make sure to get back to my habit the next day. It sounds so obvious, but Clear gave me permission to accept that sometimes I would mess up, and messing up doesn’t mean the habit is destroyed. Also, better to read for five minutes if that’s all you can do than to not read anything because you didn’t have the perfect two hours of reading time all laid out.

I’ve learned this lesson with my writing too. I wish I could write for four hours a day, but realistically, that doesn’t ever happen. Instead, I write when I can with the time that is given to me. I try to keep my regular morning writing time, but even if I don’t, one sentence in my manuscript is better than none. Amazingly, one sentence every day can add up to a novel.

(Luckily, I’m able to write more than one sentence a day… most days!)

Reading Challenge (Day 3)

August 8, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Challenges like this are good because they help me plow through some books that I otherwise would get bogged down in. Case in point: the Clark Ashton Smith collection I started reading a few months ago. The second story (“The Red World of Polaris”) has been a slog, and I’d been stuck on it forever, but today I finished it. The two-hour-a-day reading challenge has pushed me to read as much as I can in whatever spare moments I have, so I simply pushed myself to finish the “Polaris” story and rack up my minutes for the day.

Same goes with the Jonathan Hickman Avengers run. I’d been enjoying it, but kept getting stuck.  I couldn’t get into a rhythm with it. But this challenge has helped me stay focused and keep reading.

I think that’s been my problem with book reading lately.

Focus.

Internet reading has disrupted my ability to focus. I know everyone has experienced this — we all know that our attentions have been arrested by the web — but I can really feel it as I try to read for two hours each day. I can feel my attention flagging at times, and then I get the desire to put aside the book and pick up my phone. But having the challenge gives me motivation to resist the distractions and keep reading. It’s the same when Lent rolls around and I give up the internet totally (except for work stuff); the challenge of giving something up for Lent motivates me to keep going.

These kinds of challenges seem to work (so far) when it comes to giving something up or reading or studying or practicing or whatever, but the weird thing is they don’t seem to motivate me for writing. Challenges like NaNoWriMo were often a bummer because I just couldn’t get myself to stick to them. Maybe the task was too big. But reading books for two hours each day has been pretty big, even in just these first few days, and yet I have found a way to make it work.

I guess reading is simply an easier task for me than writing. I guess with reading there is no perfectionism to deal with. I can’t really “fail” at reading unless I don’t read for my two hours each day. But with writing, even if I write for two hours, there’s the chance of failure. There’s the chance that what I write will be shitty. I think this is what makes writing challenges too hard for me. Fear of doing it badly. I can definitely write for many hours in a day; my writer’s notebook is proof of that. But the writer’s notebook is private, it’s just me mucking around. It’s not meant to “be” anything other than a place to experiment. I can write pages upon pages in my notebook each day without a second thought. There’s no real “failure” with the notebook because there are no expectations.

But writing a story, or an essay, or even a blog post like this means there are expectations. There is good and there is bad. And when I start to think of my expectations for a story or essay or blog post, then I start to freeze up. Then there’s a chance for failure. Fear rears its ugly head.

Giving up the internet for Lent isn’t really something I can do “badly.” I either stay off the internet or I don’t, so as long as I stay off, I win. Same for my two-hour reading challenge. As long as I read for the requisite amount of time, I can’t do it badly.

But writing for an audience can turn out badly. It can suck. Somehow I need to get over these fears and do a writing challenge.

I suppose I could do a time-related challenge, i.e.: sit at my computer for two hours with my manuscript in front of me. Or I could do a word count challenge that’s manageable (like 500 words per day). Or a story-per-day challenge. I was doing a word count challenge earlier in the year, but as life stuff happened, I fell off the wagon and gave up. And by “life stuff” I don’t mean anything major; just the normal ups and downs of life with kids and work and responsibilities.

I think the best kind of writing challenge for me is to have a “writing time” and sit down at that time every day. Even if I don’t get very many words written, there’s something about the regularity of the appointment that works. All I have to do to win the challenge is sit down at my desk at the appointed time.

Maybe I can modify/combine the writing time challenge with the time-amount challenge. Once per day — any time that presents itself during my hectic day — I sit down at my desk with my WIP open and try to write for fifteen minutes. Set the timer, sit for fifteen. If writing happens, great. If no writing happens, I still meet the challenge for that day.

It’s worth a shot.

Zesty

August 4, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Have been reading Lawrence Block’s A Writer Prepares and loving it so far. It’s about his earliest days as a writer in New York in the 1950s, writing a bunch of stuff under pseudonyms. What I love the most — besides Block’s very funny conversational style — is the way he describes his writing process and the sheer energy he brought to his work at the time. It’s inspirational to me. I realize that I very much want to be a pulp-style writer who writes quickly and with gusto. I’m reminded of Bradbury’s working habits too, his furious energy and joy. Bradbury calls it “zest” in Zen in the Art of Writing.

The question I keep coming back to is this: How do I write with more zest? How do I sit down in the morning and by the afternoon have an entire short story written? How do I write 4,000 words per day (or more) like Block and Bradbury and the rest of these pulpsters?

Of course, the simplest answer is, “Sit down for four hours and write four thousand words.” But I don’t have four hours, not really, most days. I could probably piece together that time if I took every spare minute I wasn’t working as an editor or taking care of my kids or my home, but most of my free hours are after the kids are in bed — when I am a living zombie and my brain can’t string more than three words together — or in drips and drabs throughout the day (also, a girl has got to eat sometime).

Unfortunately for me, my brain can’t sit down for only five minutes and start writing fiction. I need a bit more time to gather myself, to clear my head, to reenter my manuscript (this last one is the most important… I need at least five minutes to reread what I wrote previously before I can get back into the story). Maybe this is my fatal flaw, I don’t know. But my brain just doesn’t work that quickly.

So if I have, let’s say, ten minutes free time (this is the average length of time between the fights my kids have over toys or whatever). I sit down at the computer, reread what I wrote. That’s five minutes of the ten. Then I start writing for five minutes. Cool, I get about fifty words written, one hundred if I’m lucky. But then I’m called away by my kids or a household chore. I might not have another ten minutes again for the rest of the day. Having little kids means not having a set time when I can sit down to write. Little kids means a life of flux.

It’s not a great plan for finishing a short story in one day (unless it’s super-duper flash fiction). And it’s not a great plan for writing a novel at pulp speed. Sure, I can write one hundred words a day and eventually finish something. And there’s nothing wrong with doing that. Maybe that’s what I have to do. I have done that before.

But I long for the Lawrence Block/Ray Bradbury life of writing entire stories in one day, of writing at a furious speed.

I can try to get up early, before the kids wake up. But due to several issues (one of which is that I’d like to spend time with my husband in the evening before bed, so I can’t go to bed before 10:30/11:00 p.m. if I want to see him and talk to him; my kids have a rather late bedtime of 9:00 p.m.), I can’t get up too early. 6:30 a.m. is probably my earliest wake up time. So from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m., if I can peel myself off the bed sheets, I can write without distraction. Not exactly four hours, but it’s something.

In fact, I did that today. Got up at 6:45ish and headed down to the computer by 7:15. Did I work on my manuscript? Yes.

I wrote one sentence. One.

My brain just wasn’t functioning. I didn’t have the zest.

How can I get the zest? How can I cultivate it? This is why I can’t seem to be a Block/Bradbury-style pulpster writer. I had thirty minutes to write fiction, and I could only manage one sentence. My brain is pretty useless in the morning, apparently. It sucks that my ideal writing time is neither early in the morning nor later at night, but right smack dab in the middle of the day when I need to take care of my kids and get my freelance work done.

But what this morning’s one-sentence affair shows is that time isn’t really the issue. Yes, I was tired this morning, and yes, I couldn’t manage more than a sentence. But what really stops me from writing swiftly and with wild abandon like Block and Bradbury is fear. I can’t be zesty and write with gusto if I’m afraid. That’s the real problem. Fear.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to let go of the fear. Should be easy, right? (This is sarcasm.)

What am I afraid of? Fear of writing something bad, which is almost always the fear for writers. Bad can come in different flavors: using the wrong words, writing a stupid idea, sounding like a fool. Bad can mean writing something totally derivative and unoriginal. Bad can mean boring (the worst crime of all). Bad can mean incoherence or a canyon of plot holes or one-dimensional characters. That’s the fear. Fear that I’ll write something bad and be judged for it. And that judgment can come from others or it can come from myself. I can hate it or others can hate it, but either way, I’m afraid to be judged.

This is where the process mindset stuff comes in. Focus on process not product. Who cares if the finished product is terrible, what matters is the process. Enjoy the process!

I keep telling myself this. Because I do enjoy the process. I love the process. I love thinking up stories and images and characters and writing down what’s in my head. I can’t think of anything I love more (except maybe reading books, but reading books and writing books are like two sides of the same coin).

But my process, despite my best efforts, is a slow process. I need time to get back into my story. I need time to think and ponder and daydream and let stuff simmer, and maybe all of that is just my way of dealing with my fear, but I don’t think it is. I think that’s just how my brain works. Or not. I don’t know.

I do know that it really helps to be thinking about my story all day long, to be listening to music, to be daydreaming while washing dishes or making lunches. What gets me stuck is when I let my story drift into the background and all the other anxieties and responsibilities of the day take over. I can’t be zesty on command, when my butt hits the chair for ten minutes a day. I need to stay zesty all day long. I need to make the whole day part of my process, even as I’m doing other stuff, all the survival stuff like feeding my kids and making money from my day job. I still need to keep my story in mind, still need to let my imagination wander.

I want to restart my morning writing habit, my 6:30-7:30 butt-in-chair time, but in order to write more than one sentence, I need to be thinking about my story all day long. If I’m caught up in my story — in the process of making stuff up — then hopefully I won’t have time for fear. If I’m having fun all day using my imagination, then the anxieties about judgment can’t creep in. Zesty is a state of mind, but it’s also a habit of being. I need to stay zesty all day by living in my imagination all day. Then, when 6:30 a.m. rolls around — or those ten minutes of free time — my brain will be ready.

That’s the theory, anyway.

No More Vacation

July 12, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Since summer began, I feel like I’ve been busier than ever. Should summer be this busy? When I retired from teaching in June, I hadn’t realized that I would need to start work right away, and that my usual “summer vacation” was a thing of the past. How foolish! Of course I’ll have to work in summer from now on, and not just work on my fiction, but work on my freelance career. Summers will be like any other season.

But perhaps this summer has been busier than I expected simply because I’m not used to it, and once I get used to the rhythm of my new work life, I’ll find summers can still be a respite from the hurly-burly. Maybe. It’s all uncharted territory, isn’t it?

I think that’s what’s making this summer so stressful: I’m in uncharted territory. I’m fearful. I’m worried. Maybe I’m not actually that much busier than normal, it’s just that everything has taken on an added weight of importance. No longer is freelance editing something I do on the side; now, it’s something I must do to eat and pay the mortgage. Summer’s freedom is weighed down by this new responsibility. Perhaps, after a few months, this uncharted feeling will abate. I hope. I guess even if it doesn’t, I’ll get used to it. I don’t want to trade this new adventure for my old way of life, but I do have to start accepting that being on an adventure means a lot of discomfort. Like Bilbo going out his door with Gandalf and the dwarves. There’s that tension between the comfort of Bag End and the excitement (and fear) of the open road. I want both, just as Bilbo did.

Figuring out a daily schedule has been the hardest part. Between summer school for my eldest, and swimming lessons, and birthday parties, and fireworks, and all the rest of the summer stuff, I haven’t been able to find four or five hours each day to get my work done. Every day is different, every day is a jumble of activities. I need to figure out how to settle things down and find a schedule that works. I suppose this trial and error is part of the adventure too.

Daily Blogging?

July 8, 2022 / / 3 Comments

Can I get back to daily blogging? Would it be worth it? There’s a part of me that thinks, “What’s the point?” since nobody really reads my website, and the time devoted to daily blogging might be better spent elsewhere (like soliciting new editing clients…), but then I think about the joy I get from hitting “publish” and seeing my blog post go live to the world. Sure, nobody will read it (except my husband, maybe), but there’s something satisfying about being able to write a few thoughts, ramble a bit without any direction, and then hit publish.

I have loved the act of blogging since I first discovered it more than fifteen years ago. I have always preferred blogs to any of the other social media that have sprung up afterwards. Yes, I do have a newsletter (I’m on Substack like everyone else), but the blog is a different kind of space. It’s more intimate, somehow. And it’s a lot more like a playground. I’m just doing whatever, no pressure or purpose other than to muck around. I’m not doing this blog to make money; no monetizing or ads or anything like that. I just want to write and explore and post it for other people to see. Even if no one sees.

Maybe daily blogging wouldn’t be worth it. Maybe I should be doing something else, something more “productive.” There’s an argument to be made that I should spend these fifteen or twenty minutes a day working on my fiction instead. That’s probably the most persuasive argument against daily blogging. I love to write fiction, and I should always be doing more of it if I can. I have novels and series that need finishing. I have readers who are waiting for new books.

But—

As much as I love writing fiction, blogging uses a different part of my brain, a different writing muscle, and I want to use that muscle. Blogging has a way of helping me with my fiction. It gives me a chance to get words down on paper, to open the floodgates so to speak, so that all of my writing — fiction, nonfiction, journaling, copy writing — becomes easier. There’s this weird phenomenon where words beget more words, and more words beget even more words, and if I’m writing on the blog, suddenly I’m writing more fiction, and if I’m writing more fiction, I suddenly have words I want to add to the blog. Instead of the blog taking away from my other writing, it almost ends up feeding it.

Time, of course, is the most precious commodity, and there will be days when I don’t have enough time to let all the words out that I have bubbling up inside, and so I guess on those days, one type of writing will be sacrificed for the other. Maybe some days I only blog or I only write fiction. But I gave up my teaching job precisely so I could have more time for writing, and even though time is still scarce (I have young children, after all), I have more freedom now to use my time as I will. Even if it’s just for five minutes, I can use that time for blogging.

It’s not really the time that matters anyway. It’s the desire, the will to do it. If I say I want to blog everyday, then I can do it. If I say I want to write fiction every day, then I can do it. Even one minute is enough.

I think that’s why I want to start blogging again. It’s another way to write, another way to get words on the page. And words beget more words, and more words, and more words. For a writer, that’s a good thing.

Zine Syllabus

July 3, 2022 / / 0 Comments

IMG_0070I thought that by making my American Literature syllabus into a zine, I would be saving something. Saving my desire to teach. Saving my subversive stance against traditional education. Saving my students from their mistaken ideas about learning and literature.

(Egads! This last one sounds condescending, doesn’t it? I don’t mean it to be).

If my passion for teaching was flagging, if this might be the last hurrah, then I was gonna go out in my own way, with my own style.

I have always wanted to find a way to make zines more integral to my work. I’m still in that process of discovery for my writing and fiction, but in my work as a teacher, I thought, “What the heck, I’ll do it!”

So I made a zine for my American Lit class. The zine was both syllabus and statement: it was my philosophy as a teacher, distilled into a few pages of amateurish cartooning and clumsy designs. I figured that a zine might intrigue enough students by its format that they would actually read the syllabus. Maybe some of them did.

But making the zine wasn’t enough. By the end of September, the 2021-2022 school year had turned as dismal as the previous one. (This isn’t a Covid thing, by the way. I’ve been in the process of questioning my work as a teacher since about 2018.) The gloom is caused by a lot of things: my ever-lingering feelings of inadequacy as a teacher; my inability to handle the workload of grading papers; my disillusionment with traditional schooling.

(Okay, this last one can be chalked up to Covid… Once we went online in March of 2020, I really started questioning whether the bells and the rigid schedules and the hyper-focus on grades was healthy or good for real education, for real learning. When we suddenly all went home and could spend our time more freely, I began to wonder if the whole “school” thing was just a way to keep kids under control and supervised while parents went to work. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not against parents working or free childcare. But I started to wonder if that’s what society really valued about schools: not the educational aspect but the childcare aspect. Which is fine,  I guess, but let’s not church it up.

If we cared about education — real learning — then I feel there is so much more we could be doing to “de-school” our schools and make learning the focus. And then I started reading a lot of anti-Capitalist stuff, and John Holt and Ivan Illich and Teaching as a Subversive Activity, and before I knew it, I was wondering why we kept the traditional model of schooling going at all when it didn’t seem very healthy or fulfilling. Basically, I’ve been in a state of cognitive dissonance for a little over a year, and I don’t know why I thought making a zine syllabus would allay all of these doubts, but I did make one and I did hope for the best. Alas, none of these hopes came to pass.)

So here I am, at end the school year, and the zine syllabus didn’t save me. Nothing I’ve tried has saved me. I’ve tried going “grades-less” (but that’s caused as many problems as it’s tried to address… and surprisingly, students are quite attached to getting grades, at least at the school where I taught). I’ve tried being as subversive as I could, decoupling “schooling” from learning to the best of my ability. But nothing has worked. I mean, it worked for some students, I guess, but the vast majority? No. And it didn’t save teaching for me. It wasn’t the panacea I was hoping for. At about the midpoint of the school year, I thought, “I could go back to a grades-based classroom. I could go back to sticking with the status quo.” But I didn’t want to do any of that. I didn’t want to be part of a system I didn’t belong to anymore.

So that’s why I decided to retire. June 30, 2022 was my last day as a teacher. I feel both insanely afraid and wonderfully free. It’s nice not having to live with the cognitive dissonance anymore, but I won’t lie and say I’m not scared for the future. What if I don’t make enough money as a freelancer? As an indie author? As anything? What if it all goes horribly wrong? For most of my professional life, I’ve been a teacher. Now I’m not.

I can’t say these fears don’t cross my mind everyday. But then I remember the alternative. I remember how miserable I was in the classroom, and how unfair it was to my students to be so miserable. I couldn’t change anything, not really. Not even myself.

I’m glad I made my zine syllabus, though. I’m glad I took the risk to make it and share it with students and parents. I’m proud of the statement it makes, even if that statement hasn’t really come to fruition in my own classroom. But anyway, I’m glad I made it. And I’m proud that I had the courage to move on from teaching into something I’ve dreamed about my entire life. Now all I have to do is keep going.

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