Category Archives: On writing

Zen Accident

I began writing poetry at fourteen or fifteen, some terrible lost and vulnerable age. I wrote reams of poems about how profoundly I didn’t understand anything, using juxtaposed words like vomit truth and playground nightmare. It seems I’d always been a gawker, but I started to write little snippets of what I saw in my notebooks: man at bus stop shaving his feet, woman screaming fuck you fuck fuck on her way to the library, or an orange is a globe of light. I also started to write down the sentences from what I read that sent a charge of delight up my spine. If I could write like that!

I’ve identified as a writer from a young age and over the years I have continued to write, record my observations, and collect sentences with inconsistent commitment. This blog is dedicated to the commitment I’ve made to make time for writing in spite of the real and imagined demands on my writing time. I’ve been distracted by so many projects during my adult life including running a marathon and earning a Masters degree, both of which took far less effort and commitment than writing a book does. I’m not saying I shouldn’t have done these things, not at all. One can’t write every single moment of every single day. When you are not writing, though, everything else is a potential distraction.

Over this past winter break I had a moment of epiphany regarding my sometimes absurd cycle of professing I need time to write, then getting that time and struggling to write three sentences, then drowning my sorrows in a glass or two of red which of course completely kills my impulse to write and clouds my thinking. Of course there are other times where the writing flows and I finish my writing time absolutely buzzed by the feeling that I’ve created something dangerously close to what I want to say and with some tweaking, by God, it just might do. I’ve strategized ways to induce this kind of creative flow. I’ve turned corners of rooms into writing nooks, made signs for doors warning: Writer At Work, snuck away to cafes, bought noise-canceling headphones, and on and on.

We’ve just moved to a new house and by winter break we’d been there nearly a month and I hadn’t even once sat in the writing nook I fashioned in one corner of our bedroom. I’d written, but never there. And that’s when a new way of looking at the whole situation struck me dumb. Over the next few days I sat to write at our family computer that is literally wide-open in the middle of the house in the family room, the most unprivate spot one could possibly occupy.

What happened? Yes, children interrupted me. Dogs too with their endless need for ear-scratches and lap time. I’m pretty sure Chris also asked me where I had put the coffee filters, which were right in front of his face where they always are, just tucked a little toward the back. As all these disruptions happened, I didn’t react resentfully to them. Each disruption happened, then I returned to the writing. This is how I finished the novella I’ve been working on for six years.

Happy accident? Result of a recently revived meditation practice?

I don’t know, but I’ll take it.

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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

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Understanding Comics Review

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud

I picked this book up so that I might feel better equipped to teach a graphic novel this spring. In terms of illuminating the craft behind comics, this book definitely delivered. I have a vocabulary of the craft I didn’t have before. Additionally, this book provides a thoughtful reflection on art and the creation of art that resonated with me as a fiction writer. Part glossary, part textbook, but really more essay that explores perception, creation, and the question of why we work so hard to communicate through art.

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Worth the wait

I’m not entirely sure yet what this story has to do with writing, but I know that it does have to do with writing in a big way.

There are many little and big actions that renew my commitment to write every day.

- - Running/Walking

- - Yoga/Meditation

- - Getting right to it and seeing progress (as opposed to the days where I sit down to write and waste most/all of the time checking email or social media)

- - Reading great writing

- - Attending lectures/talks/readings

It’s this last one that is the main subject of this blog entry. Last Friday, I went to the Barboza Lounge in Seattle to listen to John Darnielle read from and talk about his new and first novel Wolf in White Van. John Darnielle is known for his part in the musical group The Mountain Goats, but is making his debut as a writer. I went with my husband who is a long time fan of Darnielle’s music. I hadn’t read the book in advance and I don’t know Darnielle’s music so I wondered whether I would enjoy the talk.

What Darnielle read from his book made me want to buy it and what he said about writing made me actually take out my bank card and hand it over to the man in black holding a mini iPad with one of those magic squares that have come to replace the cash register.

The stage was set up in the usual SAL style, two deep, broad-armed black leather chairs not quite facing each other. The best seats were crossed-legged on a concrete dance floor. Chris (husband) and I sat shoulder to shoulder, waiting out the thirty minutes until the show started, drinking IPA out of plastic pint glasses. All around us people sat on their cellphones, sometimes couples sitting together staring at their tiny screens, scrolling. The more I looked around the sadder I felt for how unaccustomed we’ve become as a culture with periods of waiting.

Paul Constant (Stranger Books Editor) interviewed Darnielle. As soon as Darnielle started to speak, doubt that I would enjoy the talk and sadness from watching the tech-crazed crowd turned to enthusiasm. I don’t remember everything he said about writing and in a way the particulars don’t matter. Darnielle did not hesitate and he answered every question with authority. That he loved making stories that people might be moved by was uncontestable. We listened, rapt, until the audience question part came and people started asking questions that had more to do with themselves than anything he had said in the last 45 minutes. Were they even listening?

Writing and reading contain so many periods of waiting and that is part of what I love about both. The chance to spend an evening with a good writer willing to share his own methods for navigating those periods almost always pays in droves of inspiration.

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Setbacks

This week I encountered a major setback in the progress of my novel after several days of sweet flow. I set a goal of eight pages per day Monday through Friday for the five weeks I will be teaching summer school. By the end of five weeks, I mused, I would be back in the practice I’d fallen out of during a challenging school year. I arranged my life so that I could be successful, including informing my family of my plan, setting up a space to do the writing, and writing myself a letter setting my intentions. Three days passed and the world was rainbows and hearts and flowers because holy cow I was writing again and that felt better than ________ (fill in the blank with your simile of choice).

Then Monday happened and I thought at first that I must be asleep having a freaky-scary nightmare. I opened the document containing the 30,000 or so words I had so far of my novel and what did I see?

and therefoswimmin’wimminerefore couladded, twisting

Figure 1

It looked like someone took the letters of all the words and tossed them in the air to see where they’d land!

In the hours that followed I felt pretty certain that I’d reached the point where Liz gives up and my internal editor rose to the occasion, beating me down in that way only she can. You’re wasting your time. Think of all the books you will be able to read, how many seasons of TV you will consume. You’re life will be less stressful and you suck at writing anyway. It’s just a delusion you came up with as a little girl and why the hell do you keep pretending you are a writer? You’re a writer about as much as you are the most popular girl in school or a spy with special powers to read minds, also things you used to think you wanted.

I cried. I went to the gym and upped the weight on all the nautilus machines to make it even harder on myself, the loop of all the reasons I should just stop the madness playing on repeat.

When I came home I opened the document again thinking maybe it would be magically fixed. It t wasn’t. I didn’t write that day, but I did print out as many versions of the garbled prose I could find, vowing to make a plan tomorrow.

My plan? Retype the entire novel one chapter at a time and that is going to take some rewriting and some deciphering of nonsense. It is forcing me to consider every line and I’m cutting and adding too. I am saving a new draft every time I sit down to write in three locations: Drive, Dropbox, and the hard disk of my computer. I’m pretty sure the problem happened in the first place because I was working on a Macbook and an iPad. My iPad makes a nice ebook reader and has a nice yoga app on it, but I’m done with trying to write on it.

I wish that I could say, lesson learned, I never again have to encounter the self-doubt that accompanies setbacks in writing. Not only am I certain that sometime in the future I will have to resist the urge to delete everything I’ve ever written and take up crossword puzzles. I am also fairly certain that these setbacks make me a stronger writer and remind me why I go to all this trouble in the first place. In order to come back I had to remember that I write because I love it and that’s reason enough to carry on.

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Why stories matter

My seniors have spent the last several weeks reading excerpts from different styles and genres and responding to creative writing prompts. These seniors are IB students who work hard and who have now finished their testing for the year. They are just waiting to graduate. They’ve donned the apparel of the college they will attend in the fall and are playing cell phone video games, wearing slippers to class, and passing yearbooks.
Not all of them are thrilled that instead of having study hall or watching movies all class now that testing is over I am still making them read and write, but most are curious and willing to give it a try and a few have been waiting for a unit that lets them just play with words and stretch their imaginations, reaching for their own standards, not IB’s or mine.
Their final is to select one piece to read for the class in a planned, practice presentation that might include props and/or costumes. A student came in this morning to present to me. She explained how her favorite part of books is the description and that she’s always been good at writing description, but her challenge is trying to make a story out of her imagery. She worked on the piece she read extensively to move from imagery to actually having a story behind the description. Her piece was lovely, compelling, and rich in story. Her story, she explained, was a work of fiction in which she attempted to explore something she had been dealing with for the past several months: the inevitability of losing someone close to you at some point in your life (In her case, her grandparents who had both been in and out of the hospital).
We live in a world rich in story that is ours for the spinning and those stories are all deeply personal in some way. One can start with an image or a line of dialogue or an idea for a character or a theme. Why bother? Because our grandparents have been in and out of the hospital, we aren’t sure who we are anymore, or we don’t know how to get the attention of the person we think we just might want to spend the rest of our lives with—to name a few reasons. The stories that connect us are infinite and that matters.

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What may seem crazy at first, may not be so crazy after all.

In Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life there is a section devoted to anecdotes of the strange means by which writers sometimes call their muses. In that section, there is a particularly bizarre story about a writer who writes with his coat on and his car keys in hand. He writes in snippets, always after rushing out the door and frantically running errands. Each time the pulse of rushing in and sitting down to write wears off, he heads out the door again. Or something like that. I may have messed up the details, but you get the idea.
I’ve laughed at this story many times while recalling it to friends. I mean, how crazy is that?
Today I had a wake up call.
It’s not so crazy if the writing is getting done, which for me lately, it is not.
There’s something to be said for sitting down to write when your heart is racing and you feel inspired. Today on my six mile run, the wisdom of this hit me and I resolved to run home and forestall everything else until after I had done some writing. I didn’t shower. I didn’t check my phone or my Facebook. I didn’t start dinner or kiss my fiance. I sat down and made my writing goal of editing a short story. And you know what?
I want to make a habit of running home to write. There’s something to it.

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Rethinking Self-publishing

When I first became aware of self-publishing, I dismissed the idea, figured it would last about as long as I <3 Boobies bracelets did at the high school where I teach.
As a writer, I’ve always said I didn’t really care if I got published. It would be cool, of course, but what I want is to write moving stories, to make art that people might connect to, which does require getting my work out into the world. That being the case, there was no way I planned on taking the easy way out. But my efforts have been too far between and too fruitless. What markets are out there for my work pay little or nothing and I can’t stomach one more article about the miniscule number of manuscripts that will ever make it through the supposed quality control that is traditional publishing.
Self-publishing turned out to be no flash-in-the-pan and as I feared it did open up a venue for really bad writing to ooze out into the world, adding to the pace already set by the Internet. In the past two months, I’ve seen three manuscripts from people within spit-wad distance of me for sale on Amazon that can’t possibly have gone through any significant revision. My first response to this was to stand my ground, a higher ground. If I was going to be a writer, I was going to do it the right way, damn it!

Here’s why I’ve changed my mind:

The line between a self-published writer and a traditionally published writer has blurred beyond recognition. The amount of self-promotion most writers have to do even if they are picked up by a tradtional publisher these days practically looks like self-publishing anyway.

I’m not looking to make money. I want to write and be read. I want to be part of the conversation that is fiction. I have a full time job where I have to answer to bosses and meet standards. Why should I waste the little time I have to make my art mucking around in the proverbial slush pile building rejection letter shrines?

I have high standards. I meticulously edit my work. Who do I really want to decide whether that work is worthwhile?

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I’m back!

The first inkling that being a writer might fit me occurred when I was eight years old. Our prim, petite third grade teacher at A.J. West Elementary encouraged everyone in the class to write something for the Grays Harbor Young Author’s Conference that year, though only a few did. I wrote a story that I can’t even remember now, though I know that it lacked much and had only two or three sentences handwritten per blank white page, each with a childlike illustration below. I stayed after school to bind the pages together with blue yarn and made a laminated cover and a title page. Then, boook in hand, I proudly attended my first YAC the following Saturday, where I listened to Steven Kellogg explain how he wrote and illustrated his stories and attended workshops where we wrote to prompts and read our work aloud to each other.
Not once since that Saturday have I seriously considered the possibility that I might not want to write. The writing part is easy. I have boxes and boxes full of old notebooks and thousands of files on my computer that serve as evidence of my compulsion to write.
Flunking out of my first quarter of college wasn’t going to stop me. By that time I had four years of food service experience that felt like mastery and I worked as both a cook and a waitress at a diner. I didn’t need college to write. All I needed was a typewriter from the junk store and enough money to buy coffee and cigarettes. But my dream of being a female Bukowski died when I got pregnant at 20 and decided to have the baby and be a good parent.
If I had any hope of succeeding as a mother I knew I had to give college another go, so I enrolled in Poetry Writing and Arts and Ideas that first quarter, safe choices that would serve as a warm up for greater challenges to come, like Chemistry and Math 107.
And that marks the point at which writing became this hobby that I had to strategize to make time for. But I did strategize and I keep strategizing. I’ve raised a child. I’ve been teaching high school English now for fourteen years, and I’m still scheming away about how to write and be a writer.
This past school year has been a crap one for getting any writing done and I’m starting to stare at that $60,000 MFA on my wall and wonder what the hell I was thinking spending all that money on something that will never be more than a hobby when I do not have money to spare, have never had money to spare, had to borrow against my own optimism to pay for college in the first place. When I enrolled in a rather expensive private college as an undergrad, I thought teaching meant pretty big bucks and a comfortable life. When you are raised on government cheese, this is an easy mistake to make. I also thought teaching meant summers off and therefore plenty of time to write my Great American Novel. The truth is: teaching is challenging work that never ends and when you are by personality an ambitious person and a hard worker, you do things like decide to go for your National Board Certification the very year that might have been your first year without a school-aged child at home to care for.
But my NB portfolio is complete and I sat down last Monday to begin writing again.

I was going to write! Finally! I was going to write!

And then the sky fell. No chicken-little, about it. I shut my iPad, stared hopelessly at the wall and cried like a toddler who’d dropped her toy off the deck. I couldn’t even remember what it was I last decided I should be working on. At least four pots were simmering on the back burner and I couldn’t remember where I had left off in tending to them. Once I calmed down, I remembered that this problem I could solve. I opened document after document, read passages, paused to ponder, and finally picked up the thread of what I’m working on.
I’m back, hopefully stronger and more committed, and now with a plan that includes self-publishing my novel for reasons that I’ll write about in my next post about why I write and why I’ve come around to an idea that I previously shunned: self-publishing.

What are you working on? How is your writing going?

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Today I made time.

I didn’t have much time. My other had dinner in the oven and I’d just returned from errands which included a four mile run to pick up our car from the Uhaul store where we dropped it off last night to have a hitch put on. We need the hitch for our trip to CA to pick up my 18 year old son who is moving home. Then, I stopped off at the pet store to buy a crate that might contain our escape artist not yet potty trained puppy, Maverick. The night ahead would mean for me some concentrated hours of grading if I’m going to get work back in time to wrap up the semester in a meaningful way. I probably only had 45 minutes tops until it would be time to eat and then get down to work.
How many times have I wasted a sweet chunk of time like that?
Not tonight, though. I sat down, opened my story and wrote until dinner. I didn’t check my email or spend my time pacing around moping about the limited amount of time I had and the long list of tasks I needed to do. It wasn’t much time and I didn’t write much, but how I wrote and that I wrote seem crucial upon reflection.

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Found sentences, Happy New Year, and how have you been while I was away?

Writing here with more regularity is a goal I have for 2014 for mostly selfish reasons. The more I am writing and thinking about how to stay focused and producing words on the page in spite of an already full life, the more likely I am to write more than in fits and starts. I also hope that you, reader, might find among these posts the aid or inspiration you are seeking in your own creative practice. 🙂 I hope to post more visual prompts, letters, found sentences, and musings on writing practice than ever this year.

I made the decision to put a piece of writing I’ve been lingering on away and start something new, to add one more mostly done book to the proverbial drawer. They say that I shouldn’t feel bad about that and that these failed attempts at writing books have made me strong and agile-minded for the book I’m about to begin. I hope so. There is contradictory advice on just about every aspect of writing out there. When I came across this article on Twitter today from Writer’s Relief, I nearly lost my nerve.

Then, I reminded myself how my decision had emerged while freewriting with some friends at The Spar Cafe downtown Olympia and how you know a truth when you come upon it, no matter how difficult that truth may be. So, I’m starting a new book and so far I don’t have a plot, only a main character I’m obsessed with getting to know named Hannah Farouche. I’m also working away at a dozen or so short stories I’ve got going.

Here are some sentences I’ve been collecting over the last few months. I meant to share them along the way, but I saved them up instead. I think they are exceptional and worth looking at on their own.

From Open Secrets by Alice Munro:
“On the runway, in Honolulu, the plane loses speed, loses heart, falters and veers onto the grass, and bumps to a stop.”

From Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood:

“Around the corner was the Maple Leaf Tavern, where I drank draft beer in the dark, two stoplights away from the art school where I drew naked women and ate my heart out” (91).

“One day someone appears in the schoolyard with a bag of marbles and the next day everyone has them” (68).

“Futon, duvet: This is how far we’ve come” (13).

“Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid” (122).

“I’m sitting in the mouse-dropping and formaldehyde smell of the building on the window ledge, with the heat from the radiator going up my legs, watching out the window as the fairies and gnomes and snowballs below me slog through the drizzle to the tune of ‘Jingle Bells’ played by a brass band” (127).

From The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus

“The occasional ambulance stopped on our block, stayed too long, drove away finally, too quiet, its lights revolving in funereal silence” (21).

“Hello was the perfect word. It began and ended all contact, delivering us into private chambers from which we could enjoy other people in textbook abstraction, without the burden of intimacy” (27).

“I looked east toward the man-shaped silhouette between two houses where the sun would appear in a few hours, but there was nothing there to suggest a sun could ever heave itself into the sky again” (94).

“What a lovely chart one could draw of this word sorry” (112).

“Such a shared habit allowed ritual nudity to occur at home, a nudity that often heralded nothing but private fits of sleep on top of the same, vast bed” (235).

“We wrestled in much the same way we had when we were erecting the play tent for Esther when she was four, sliding collapsible stilts through a long canvas sleeve, except this time there was no play tent between us, just deflated geometries of air, and we were two old acquaintances grimly determined to extract pleasure from each other” (236).

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Make Time.

Liz Shine: Author, Editor.

Category Archives: On writing

Zen Accident

Understanding Comics Review

Worth the wait

Setbacks

Why stories matter

What may seem crazy at first, may not be so crazy after all.

Rethinking Self-publishing

I’m back!

Today I made time.

Found sentences, Happy New Year, and how have you been while I was away?