Author Archives: lizshine74

About lizshine74

Liz Shine wrote and read her way out of small-minded, small-town doom. We’re not talking about riches here. We’re talking about how a practice like writing can save a person. How it can give hope, shape identity, and ignite purpose. She hopes to write stories and poems that move readers the way certain works have made all the difference to her. She lives in Olympia, WA in the USA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She has published in Shark Reef, Dual Coast, and Blue Crow Magazine. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.

A Room Of Your Own: Wake Up Early

A few days ago I was whining to my best friend (also a writer) about how I lack discipline and am not writing consistently.

We have this conversation quite often. We both teach high school and have families. We both have a tendency to want to solve everyone else’s problems before our own. We both really want to publish a book some day.

Now, we know that means sitting down to write on a consistent basis. Daily, really. We just don’t always do what we know we need to do. Sound familiar?

It’s summer and if I choose to I can sleep in every day.

I really want to sleep in every day. I love sleeping in. I could sleep through anything.

The problem is than when I sleep in, by the time I get up, I am drawn into the daily grind and too distracted to settle in to write. I go through my day promising myself that I will get to it later.

Later, I am too tired.

The early morning is a writer’s paradise. The world is quiet and no one needs anything or wants to talk to you.

I didn’t exactly wake with the roosters this morning, but I did set an alarm and was ready to leave the house before 9.

My friend and I drove to Bayview Market downtown Olympia and sat outside trying to write to the squawking of seagulls (a nice soundtrack for writing, I think).

I struggled. It had been days since I’d really gotten into a flow. I was beginning to doubt everything. I considered leaving after writing only a page (it had been an hour). Look what you did! I told myself. You wrote a whole page! That’s good for a day, right?

But when I looked over and saw my friend, hands on home row, focused and still writing, I stayed on for more.

In the end, I had finished a chapter I felt good about and written an outline.

*reluctantly sets alarm*

What sacrifices are you willing to make to achieve your writing goals?

Buy my books here.

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Sunday Book Review: Lolita

I finished reading Lolita last week. It took me a while because originally I started reading it for my writer’s book group and didn’t finish it on time. After our meeting, other obligations rolled in and it wasn’t until summer that I found time to pick it up again. Once I began again, I couldn’t put it down.

The fact that you spend the entire story in the warped point of view of a narcissistic, delusional pedophile holds a valuable lesson regarding writing. I’m not going to review Lolita here. That has been done and the status of the novel as a classic and the fact that the writing is fantastic isn’t arguable. What I want to talk about is the lesson the book offered me as a writer.

We are all of us thoroughly socialized. Our individual sense of right and wrong in any given social or moral dilemma has been years in the making. We judge without thinking about it. We act to the best of our ability in accordance with the rules we have internalized. This reality is the primary cause of boundaries between people of different socioeconomic statuses.

Our desire to be good people can be a crutch in our writing.

It is extremely hard to create characters outside of our own boundaries of morality and propriety convincingly. It requires objectivity and a commitment to character and story and a faith that the characters we write are not projections of ourselves. They are fiction. Writing fiction requires stepping outside the self and into other.

Is it just me that finds that task to be the greatest challenge of the work we do?

Humbert Humbert is the perfect villain. He thinks he is really quite good: good intentions, good looking, highly intelligent, and charming. It is entirely up to the reader to read between the lines and see Humbert as he truly is: predatory and gross.

This extreme example of flawless characterization serves a model for all character-building. The consistency and depth of detail Nabokov employs in rendering his villain really shouldn’t be missed.

Buy my books here.

Dear End Goal,

You are publication, ultimately, but also just desire to have finished the work.

At a recent writer’s group meeting a friend proposed that one of our greatest crutches as writer’s might be impatience. The hallelujahs started in my head at the suggestion. The mouse maze of my own impatience had been really effing things up for me lately.

It doesn’t help that we live in a fast-paced world where not even children are content to spend hours aimlessly wandering their neighborhoods in pursuit of whatever daydreams emerge. Boredom, a place where any end goal seems dangerously out of reach is a necessary step on the path to creation.

What’s the maximum number of drafts you’re willing to write? How long can you sit staring at a blank page before you say fuck-it and go on with the rest of your day? How many different publications are you willing to get rejections from before you stop trying? Are you contemplating self-publishing?

In part, we want to publish so we can finally be done, when we should really want to publish because we’ve walked away from the work, come back to it and felt even after that distance that yes what we’ve written is good and ought to go out into the world.

What I’m trying lately is to work on projects at different levels. Now, I have a story I’m just about ready to send out, a novel I’m reading after putting away for a while and gathering feedback on, and a new draft of a new novel I’m meandering through. The novel I am reading and gathering feedback on I will start editing in the fall.

End-goal, when it comes to writing fiction you need to be flexible and rooted more in the work itself than any outcome in regard to publication, which requires infinite reserves of patience. end goal

Buy my books here.

A Room of Your Own: Walk It Out

Stuck?

Try moving. The body-mind connection is no joke. Take as many walks as you need to in one writing session to reach your goal. Try jumping jacks or sit ups. Pace. Throw in a few yoga moves. We use words like stuck or blocked to talk about impediments to our thinking process for a reason. Brains and bodies work in cooperation. Use that to your advantage in your work.

Buy my books here.

A Room Of Your Own: Pair Up

Writing occurs in solitude. It can only be done by you and requires that you linger long in that internal space of imagination where you have to go alone in order to write your story.

The joy we feel in writing something well is deeply personal–all ours. So are the struggles, and there are many. I am a strong woman capable of writing through all the ghouls my imagination can conjure to block my writing. I am even strong enough to face them alone. But, why would I do that?

Expending mental energy to try to solve a friend’s writing problems helps you solve your own problems too. At least half of A Room Of Your Own entries I’ve written thinking of my friend Carrie and then passed the ideas on to her as advice. We both struggle to write every day despite family, doubt, and lack of discipline, but I cannot imagine how much more difficult the writing would be if I did not know that in every moment of struggle or joy, she is always there, waiting to cheer me on or pick me up and dust me off.

I say fill your life with as many people like this as you can gather!

How do you do that?

By giving support. Whose pages have you read lately and given words of encouragement back? Who have you shared a quote with or a book? Whose story idea have you listened to? Who have you written a letter of support to? Who have you shared your writing process with?

Make a habit of encouraging others. I promise your own writing will benefit.

Buy my books here.

Sunday (It is Sunday somewhere, right?) Book Review

I picked The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women up on a whim for 50% off what are already delightfully low book prices at Goodwill. This is not the sort of book I usually buy. Maybe 10% of books I read are non-fiction and those are usually not so screamingly self-help. I don’t mean to disparage the genre. I’ve read some life-changing books of this sort, but aside from a binge I went on between the ages of 16 and 18 and my final year of college when I read five books on anxiety hoping to put and end to increasingly crippling panic attacks, I don’t tend to like them very much and they almost always go on longer than they should.

Though this book did go on longer than I wanted it to, I remained engaged and inspired through the first seven secrets. McMeekin manages to write good advice based on her own experience and the experience of women she interviewed and successfully spin that advice in a cultural context of who we are as women and to what extent we can reclaim our individual spirit in a culture perfectly happy to let us submerge our own creative urges for any perceived collective good. Each chapter covers one of the twelve secrets and moves through describing and analyzing to an exercise for the reader to use to reflect and set goals. The margins throughout the book are filled with quotes on all of the twelve topics. I found myself circling the ones I liked best or drawing a little heart next to the quote.

I skimmed the last five secrets as McMeekin at this point got a bit too prescriptive for me in her calling for logs and charts and hair-splittling list of feelings. Ironically, I think that sort of thing just zaps my creative energy and takes my creative time.

But I LOVED the parts that just mused and the book is worth a read at least for that.

From the margin of page 97: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deep fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” –Marianne Williamson, Writer

Buy my books here.

Dear Ladies,

Your awesomeness inspires me! Your perseverance in the face of struggle keeps me humble and faithful.

All the dreams I’ve ever had began with those first friends, those girlfriends–at that time in life when all that matters are girlfriends and when dreams and imagination rule. Before boys and other such betrayals.

I am older, more practical. My imagination’s been shrunk by knowledge. I have to work a lot harder these days to follow my heart. But, ladies, it’s still you I can count on for encouragement in that!

Need I explain how this helps me when it comes to the writing of fiction? 😉

Buy my books here.

A Room Of Your Own: Light A Candle

We’ve been quiet here for a few days at All The Muses, in part because my sister-in-law and collaborator had her gall bladder removed and hasn’t had the strength to write much. She is home recovering now and will return soon with more musings and recipes. I am sure she will struggle some to get back into a writing routine. It takes far less than a gall bladder surgery to throw me off my groove. In truth, an unexpected phone call can do it or even just an impulse to check my email. That is what this blog thread is all about. Staying in the room. All the ways we keep writing though at times it feels like wading through calf-high mud in flip-flop sandals.

In reading a book that I will be blogging about soon I came across a piece of simple advice that seemed meant for me: light a candle. When you sit down to write, light a candle and keep it lit as long as you are in that room. Let everyone around you know what that flame symbolizes. Do what you intended to do when you struck the match.

I’ve had a candle sitting on my desk for three months and have only lit it once.

This piece of advice feels meant for me and I am going to try it, but I think the sentiment could apply to other gestures that communicate the sacredness of your writing time. Perhaps a special writing hat? A song you always play at the start and end of your writing time? Pre-writing meditation? The sound of a writing bell?

Your writing time IS that sacred. Light the candle.

Buy my books here.

Dear Letter In The Mail,

I look for you every day, though at times you have stayed away for years. I have put bundles at a time of my own letters in the mail in hopes of your reply, a sort of message in a bottle.

I dig for stationery remnants in thrift stores and tuck them inside my iris-adorned letter box. I have some with a pink tea rose design and some with sea turtles wearing sunglasses. The best letters I have ever gotten, I save in that same box in case of emergency.

Always, it seems, I have been a sucker for a hand-written note, even when the notes were as simple as “What are you doing after school today?” written with hearts over the “i”s and passed during Mr. H’s lectures on the War for Independence.

Letter in the mail, you remind me of why I write anything at all, even so called fiction.

I will never forget the day. It was March. Gray-covered. Rain fell in that weak-persistent way that salt and pepper race on a tuned-out television. Before that day, I’d never considered the term panic attack. Now, if I hear the words from across a crowded bar, they sober me.

Nothing big happened to trigger the attack. Staring out the kitchen window, a sink of dishes half done.

I had been looking forward to an evening of solitude so I could write. But my mind just went wild with imagination and I thought I would surely die.

So certain was I of my own death–probably by heart attack–that my hand shook as I wrote, “Dear Grandmother I Never Knew”, then kept writing more and more words.

Nothing less than a miracle, then, that by the time I closed the letter “You Loving Granddaughter, Liz” my heart drum had returned to that steady, familiar knowing.

Letter in the mail, you remind me.

Love,

Liz

Buy my books here.

A Room Of Your Own: Only Write

I’m a planner. Planning anything comes easy to me: a backpacking trip, a date night, a novel, even this blog. Always in the execution is when doubt, that mental bully, steps in my path to block my way.

Because I am most comfortable planning a thing, I can inadvertently keep myself puttering away in that space when I should be writing. I can fill my writing time making writing schedules, picking inspirational pictures for the wall of my writing room, creating idea collages of my latest work, or cutting out pictures of people in magazines who remind me of my characters.

These are all necessary things.

They are also dangerous.

I urge you: do not spend your writing time doing any of these things. Like me, you can convince yourself for weeks that you are writing when you are really just planning to write.

Do not hesitate one day more. You are a writer. You write something every day. You write at every stage of your story and before you rearrange the furniture in your writing room or create a collage of inspirational writing quotes.

Buy my books here.

Make Time.

Liz Shine: Author, Editor.

Author Archives: lizshine74

About lizshine74

A Room Of Your Own: Wake Up Early

Sunday Book Review: Lolita

Dear End Goal,

A Room of Your Own: Walk It Out

A Room Of Your Own: Pair Up

Sunday (It is Sunday somewhere, right?) Book Review

Dear Ladies,

A Room Of Your Own: Light A Candle

Dear Letter In The Mail,

A Room Of Your Own: Only Write