Category Archives: On writing

Starting the year right: On teaching and writing

Today is my fourteenth Professional Day. Wait—thirteenth. The year I started teaching I was hired six weeks into the school year. This is the day before school starts, kids gathering up their fresh notebooks and pens and getting haircuts, teachers vying to get their needs met: printers hooked up, furniture moved, copies made. A day full of hope and anxiety.

And yet, there is one feature about this professional day that stands out above all the rest: I am not simultaneously trying to prepare myself and my child for another school year. He has already started college and appears to be doing just fine without me.

When I started teaching in 2000, my son entered kindergarten. His arrival in my life played a big part in my becoming a teacher at all. At sixteen, then still at eighteen and twenty, I believed full-heartedly that I did not need college to be a writer. One of the books that I carried on my short list of books you must read now if you want to change your life forever during those years happened to be The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. Here’s a quote:

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”

Why the hell should I go to college when everything I needed could be found in the library? What I needed was to read A LOT more books and spend a lot more time sitting in coffee shops trying to get it right. There was also that fact that I was on my own in terms of how to apply and how to pay for school, and it was very hard for me to imagine that I deserved that kind of money. We were a poor family and a mostly poorly educated family.

Getting pregnant scared me into figuring out the money system whereby smart kids who don’t necessarily earn top grades during the most painful, vulnerable years of their lives can borrow money to go to school. I panicked.

WHAT WOULD I DO?

The dream of being a starving writer fell apart with the prospect of motherhood.

Of course I chose teaching. I’ve been anxious and uncomfortable for much of my life, but the place I’ve felt most comfortable has always been a classroom. When my parents split and my mom married a raging predator, I found gold stars and Good Jobs! pretty damn consoling.

It hasn’t always been easy, but even through the demands of motherhood and a profession, I have not let my writing dream die. And every summer I get to pretend I’m just a writer again, set the teaching-bits aside.

So it is with every Professional Day a kind of conflict within. I love teaching students to be better readers and writers, to share my own passion for words with adolescents who range from couldn’t-care-less to kids like me who words are a kind of prayer for, an obsession. But I won’t be one of those teachers who sacrifices her own passions and interests in order to grade papers faster and have longer office hours. Every year there is a pull for teachers to do more and be more and I do believe in working hard and serving children, but I draw a firm line where I no longer have time or energy to read books of my own choosing and write my imaginations. I have fought hard to preserve my teaching and writing practice side-by-side, and now here I am, up at 5:30 on a Professional Day, more ready for the first day than maybe I’ve ever been in terms of planning and preparation. What am I doing?

Sitting in my writing room, writing. Now this is a good start to the year!

In honor of myself and all the years of struggle and practice, In honor of my son, who is eight hundred miles away learning to make the music he wants to make, In honor of all you out there pursuing your practice even when time seems small and the demands of others great: I commit to write every day this school year.

Join me?

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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

What I learned from binging…

When I read I almost always pick up something longer. I subscribe to magazines and journals but rarely read them. I have read plenty of short stories and essays, but I read them here and there, one at a time. I re-read the ones I really love, because I tend to find a way to feed them to my students.

A dear writer-friend gifted me with a subscription to One Story a while back and though I wanted to read them, the pile just grew higher and higher over the past two years.

Nothing like spending twenty three days as the passenger in a car to encourage binge reading. And did I binge!

I didn’t read only short stories, but I did read a lot of them. I read the sixteen One Stories that had piled up and I read half of the Best American Short Stories of 2011.

I expected to pick up nuances of structure and style. That’s what I keep a pencil handy for when I read. It’s what I didn’t expect that I want to talk about here.

Empowered

I read over twenty different stories in the span of a few weeks. You don’t get that scope of style and structure and voice when reading books. Especially if you read as slow and careful as I do. What happened from reading that range of stories? From seeing how many ways there are to approach any tale?

I feel empowered to write what I want to write. All those rules about showing versus telling and adverbs and scene versus summary are scaffolds put in place for novice writers, like the five paragraph essay, and the more I think about these rules and structures, the more I wonder if in the end teaching them does more harm than good.

There are no rules in writing fiction. There is only the story. You’ve got to tell it however you can and probably not everyone will love the way you tell it.

Humbled

A short story is somewhere between a poem and a novel in density of language, often leaning more toward the poetic. So much has to be accomplished in so short a span of pages that every word truly does count. There were sentences in those stories that I wanted to eat slowly with a knife and fork, bite by bite, licking my lips in between.

I noticed them more than I do when I read longer works and have to worry about enduring hundreds of pages, tracking a longer sequence of events.

Binging on short stories reminded me how important slow writing and editing are, how patient we must be to produce our best work.

Awed

I love writing short stories and short pieces and responses to prompts and I am reminded through my binging how it feeds my writing overall. Even if they are never used. They are practice for the mind, like running is for the body.

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You are not alone.

Natalie Whipple writes here about the struggle with confidence that I have heard every writer I know struggle with at some point. Her assessment rings pretty true to me and she offers her best advice, acknowledging all the while that there is no cure and probably for good cause.

What works best for me is to remind myself that “success” as a writer (getting paid) is secondary to my passion for writing. Logically, I shouldn’t give a damn whether I’m any good, so long as I keep trying to write well.

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Beginning, again.

One has to be comfortable with beginning again to stick with writing.

I am beginning summer again, that time when hours of time for writing open, which, paradoxically, can slow down my writing.

Sometimes, I begin new projects just to keep going, because I’m stuck in what I’m working on.

Sometimes, I have to begin a new draft in a blank document in order to honor the story over the precious phrases I’ve collected along the way.

I am beginning being single again, and when I say single, I mean my child is stepping out on his own life journey and I’ve got no one whose care I can use for an excuse for not writing.

I truth, I think one of the best choices I made as a parent must have been to begin really writing again with NaNoWriMo in 2005 (my son was 10). In ten years I had written in fits and starts, sometimes I would go months without writing at all. But that November I wrote a novel, well 25,000 words of a novel. Shortly after that I joined a writer’s group and started researching into MFA programs.

I have been working at writing pretty steady since then. I earned my MFA. I’m still in a writer’s group. As my son goes off to CA to pursue his dream to produce music, I smile that maybe my persistence somewhere along the way inspired him.

And why quit now? When I can really begin again.

Summer goal: Write every day. At least 700 wc.

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This shit takes practice.

Today, I got mixed up on carpooling details and missed my weekly critique group meeting. I walked all the way downtown to make the car pool ( a couple of miles), so once down there, I couldn’t see the sense in leaving without having done some writing.

The fact is, I was headed off to critique again without having written much new since we’d last met.

I’m still here, writing, and I wrote two new pages on a short story that I’m as of now quite proud of. And it occurs to me in this moment one of the things that keeps me from writing every day: the baggage I bring to the page. The barrage of insults I hurl at myself every time I sit down to write. There is no denying the fact that those insults gain strength the less often I persist in sitting down to put word on the page.

I’m reminded now of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and her advice to write all the shit that is keeping you from writing down, put it in a jar, and set it aside while you write. Whether you use an actual jar or not, I see right now just how necessary this advice is, just how pervasive the self sabotage that keeps us from writing at all can be.

This shit takes practice. One has to do it every day if one wants to be any good at it.

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Tell me the stories that have left you burning for days.

At first, I couldn’t manage more than a poem, but the poems came so fast I carried a notebook with me everywhere. I wrote my first short story when I was eighteen on a manual type writer bought at Clevinger’s Thrift Shop downtown Aberdeen. Coincidence that I had just finished Still Life With Woodpecker?

So much time has passed since then. I’ve written three first drafts of novels, started a couple more. And yet, here I am, cozying up to the short story again.

What do you think is the essential difference between the a novel and a story? What are your favorite stories?

A short list of stories that have truly moved me?

The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin

Happy Endings by Margaret Atwood

The Swimmer by John Chever

Corporal and 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 by Richard Brautigan

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been by Joyce Carol Oates

Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

To Build A Fire by Jack London

Tell me the stories that have left you burning for days. Those are the ones I want to read.

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Dear First Writing Friend,

We were eight, maybe nine, when we met. I don’t remember the first moment, but I remember a lot of important moments along the way, including the time we went to the public library to research fruits and vegetables for our comic book, The Wacky Fruit Gang. I wrote the stories, you drew the pictures, though I think you drew a hell of a lot more than I ever wrote.

When you were here last weekend and you said you’d gone through a Stephen King phase, I remembered the fat paperbacks that lined the headboard of your Queen Size bed. I remember how we both participated in The Young Author’s Conference every year. Then there was the year in 8th grade when I had written nothing I felt I could share and you loaned me some poems to put my name on. I will never forget: I am a flamingo, all pink and tall. I live in Florida, along the ocean wall.

I remember how after driving out to the beach to burn our caps and gowns, we lost touch for nearly twenty years. I could never wrap my heart around why, though I suppose I could explain it.

There have been two opportunities lately to reacquaint ourselves, both involving wine and photo albums.

My albums first. I pulled them from the top of the closet, brushed the dust off and told you my stories as we flipped through each book, sitting side by side on a table bench. As we looked through, I realized at some point I had stopped printing pictures (so much I wanted to show you wasn’t even there!) and that I really needed to put others in a shoe box to mail to my ex-husband. I explained to you, as we flipped page after page how I had come to have a child about to graduate from high school, where I had lived along the way.

Some weeks later, we went through your albums. My turn to listen to your stories: college-town friends, all those bright-burning loves we’ll never forget and the rock, sometimes around our necks, that are our families.

Mondays I try to keep a 6:30 date with my fiction critique group, and mostly I do, though sometimes with no fresh words in hand. Tonight I sat at a table with three other writers. All women this time, which hardly ever happens. We took turns passing out our four pages, reading those pages aloud and listening while the others gave advice on how to fix our stories.

On the walk home, first writing friend, I thought of you and photo albums. I thought of how after that first visit, I went through and took out all the photos that didn’t belong. Because they weren’t my story any more. Because there were four other pictures of the same moment that didn’t quite capture truth like the best one did. I printed almost three hundred photos to add, to tell my story from where I’d left off having prints made.

As I walked up the bridge to West Olympia, it occurred to me that writing is something like arranging photos in an album.

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A Room Of Your Own: Don’t Hesitate

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.” (The Writing Life, Annie Dillard)

Hesitation wants to stall my writing. She spends her time mulling over and over again. She thinks it matters where one begins or ends. I know her well. She pressed me to the wall at middle school dances. She conjures excuses for me and I take them like an alcoholic takes to drink.

In elementary school, I preferred to blend in. I hated situations where all the attention turned to me and avoided them as best I could. I learned to ask others questions and to defer.

Step up to the line our P.E. teacher said, stop watch in hand. One at a time. i went to the back of the line and when my turn came, by will I had induced an asthma attack that cleared me from having to perform.

“Jennifer, will you walk Liz to the office,” said pudgy Mr. E.

Hesitation has plagued me all my life, but with practice and experience I am learning to keep her in her place.

Want to know my most recent trick?

In The Faith Of A Writer , Joyce Carol Oates tell the story of a writer who writes always in a rush. He puts his coat on and goes out on errands, then comes back to write. When the urgency worked up by his errand running wears off, he goes out again, then comes back to write some more without taking off his coat.

My trick is a lot like this.

When I return home after a run, I sit down immediately to write. No shower. No tidying up the house. No talking. Only write and write to a specific goal. It works! The momentum of the run breaks through the hesitation that so often slows or even prevents the flow of words to the page.

Must be a body-mind thing. 😉

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A Room of Your Own: Boundaries

Let the people you live with know when you are sitting down to write. Tell them that for an hour or two or a page or a word count or whatever your goal is to please not disturb you.

It is your fault that at first they won’t listen to you. You’ve been at their beck and call for so long that they will need you without even thinking.

And you like that they need you.

Even if they do listen to you and they leave you to write just like you asked, you will start to feel guilty about twenty minutes in and begin to wonder how they are getting on without you. You may even make an excuse for needing to talk to them.

You forgot to ask how the oral book report went.

What are some synonyms for relaxed?

Did you remember to pay the car insurance?

What do you think of a trip to the beach this weekend?

You will need to be willing to let the domestic paradise that is your household fall to pieces without you. And you know it will fall to pieces without you.

Barring blood or broken bones, you will need to ignore every crash, every whine, every hard-shut cupboard or door.

When they don’t listen to you, you have to channel another you. The you that is a writer. The you that knows that in the long term you are helping the people you love more by showing them that if you really want something, you have to be ready to put in the time and work at it.

So, tell them when you are going to write and for how long and prove to them that you mean it by staying in the room and writing your heart out until you reach that day’s goal.

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A Room Of Your Own: Pick A Fight

You are a writer. Just consider it.

There is nothing that can get get you in the mood for sweeping or writing like a good fight.

I don’t care what they tell you, it’s healthy. And the make-up is oh-so-sweet, you know.

You know!

Sometimes in order to write you have to make some wrinkles, break things up, let words fly.

Come on, let it all hang out.

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Make Time.

Liz Shine: Author, Editor.

Category Archives: On writing

Starting the year right: On teaching and writing

What I learned from binging…

You are not alone.

Beginning, again.

This shit takes practice.

Tell me the stories that have left you burning for days.

Dear First Writing Friend,

A Room Of Your Own: Don’t Hesitate

A Room of Your Own: Boundaries

A Room Of Your Own: Pick A Fight