Category Archives: A Room Of Your Own

A Room of Your Own: Cartwheeling

When I was eleven years old I would spend hours and hours out in the yard working on my cartwheel. This went on for years, and that is probably why I can still turn a pretty impressive cartwheel.

It’s been harder to accept that some of the writing I’ve done is just like all those cartwheels—just practice. I tend to believe that every story I ever write should be bound in a book. I want to be a writer so badly and getting work out in the world makes that label feel more real.

I’m becoming more and more comfortable writing just to get better at writing. That is why I am starting a new draft of a novel I’ve been working on for at least four years, in a blank document with only an outline. That is why when one of my high school seniors said (in response to my sharing that I’d written a new outline over the weekend) “Is that the same novel you were working on our freshman year?” I proudly replied, “Yes, it is, actually!”

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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

A Room of Your Own:Don’t ask me!

How do we keep writing in spite of our busy lives? Don’t ask me!

Everything was going so well. Pages were getting filled with fiction. Post after post for this blog spilled forth with negligible effort. Then, just as the blackberries began to ripen, I got tense about the list of what I had yet to do this summer and started worrying about the lesson plans I had yet to make. The writing stopped before I even went back to work. There’s a dead period of three weeks I’ll never get back where I’m not sure what I was doing at all. And now school has started and I am once again overwhelmed with how quickly the day passes and how much I have left to do. Yesterday, I got as far as cleaning my desk. Today, I am making an outline. A nice long run is in my sight, but I can’t have it until that outline is done. So, I’ve set up a reward and I’m lighting this candle.

Keep your fingers crossed for me.

How is your writing going?

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A Room Of Our Own: Don’t Always Trust Your Feelings

A paragraph came without warning. I was reading Great House on the way to a wedding in Seattle. I didn’t even have a notebook to write it down, so I wrote in on the inside cover of my book. Hardback or not, I wasn’t going to lose that paragraph.

I’d been struggling to revive an old novel all summer. It was working about as well as it has for me in the past to revive old boyfriends. A couple of good dates while hope and nostalgia are still fresh, then boredom and reality sit in.

I wrote the first draft of that book in 2005.

I’ve always operated under the assumption that everything we ever write is worth returning to, that time and distance allow us to return with a fresh view.

Now I see that this is only true to a point.

What’s at the heart of a piece of writing comes from an urgent need to communicate an idea. Those urgencies change as we age and experience (resolving old questions, asking new ones).

That paragraph?

The beginning of the book I needed to be writing now.

The very next day I started in on it and as I mentioned last week my goal was 1000 words per day, every day. That was a week ago and my word count total is now 3515. As that number implies, I had successful days and not so successful days.

The first chapter came easily and the writing was pure bliss.

Day 1: 793 words

Day 2: 1813

Day 3: 2824

Day 4: 0

The second chapter was a slog. It had moments, but the narrative voice and immediacy of the action of chapter 1 were not there. I was telling too much. Too much backstory.

I started to question the project itself.

Day 5: 3629

Day 6: 3821

As if that weren’t bad enough, I started to question what the hell I was doing trying to write novels anyway.

Imagine me sprawled belly up on a bed in the middle of the afternoon, whining, “I just don’t know what I should work on or why the hell I’m even bothering. There are so many other things I could do with my time.”

That is exactly what happened.

At the time, my boyfriend was gracious. He complimented me, offered words of encouragement, and promptly grabbed his children and drove to the lake, leaving me to figure it out myself.

I cleaned the house.

Three hours later, forty minutes before our dinner guests arrived, I started to work on an opening for a different draft of a different story I am also working on. I wrote three possibilites. None of which I liked.

My feelings of failure as a writer were unresolved after our guests left, but I had better perspective. Our friend had asked me over dinner how my writing was going.

I surprised myself by the clarity of my answer. I told them about my day and was finally able to laugh at myself. It had been a bad day, I said, laughing.

I read the first chapter of the new story to my boyfriend after our guest left. He loved it! But I got stuck in chapter two, I explained. Send it to me, he said. “I’ll tell you where you went wrong.”

I sent it. We went upstairs to watch the next installment of Breaking Bad.

The next morning he did read both chapters and confirmed for me what I already knew and listened while I strategized. I would highlight everything I would cut later (the telling, the backstory), but not delete the words. Deleting wasn’t an option. Okay, he said. Highlight, then. I could start chapter two with this line, he said. Or this one, I replied.

Writing today went well. Very well.

If I had trusted my feelings yesterday, I would have deleted all the writing I’ve ever done.

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A Room Of Your Own: Count words

When all else fails, count words. Pick a number, any number and write that number of words daily until you are back in the habit, until sitting down to write is no longer a struggle.

Once, I was so desperate that I enlisted the help of a friend to meet a daily word goal. 200 words felt like a lot at the time and for weeks I had been dry, staring at a blank page.

The immediate boost of having someone to boast to did get me writing again. We simply communicated our word count via text and then replied with a smile or a You-Go Girl. In this way, I began a flood of writing that led to eight short story drafts.

I am at that point of desperation again. Not dry like before, but lacking focus and daily discipline.

So, I will count words and I will tell you here each week for the next several weeks or as long as is necessary to write a first draft of this new novel how many words I wrote and how I went about getting those words on the page.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A Room Of Your Own: Write one sentence

The end of a school brings a flood of emotion. Woo-hoo! Summer-time–Cooking outside–Sleeping in–Reading whatever I want.I’ve started three lists of all the marvelous ways I’m going to spend my summer time this year. (Yes, writing is on it.) But everything must be graded before that last day and you need to check out with EVERYONE and they sign your paper saying that you don’t have any overdue library books and everything that you were supposed to check in is checked in and the asset number on everything you want to check out has been properly documented. You may or may not know what classes you are teaching next year and either situation gets your mind reeling.

After school today, I found it hard enough to string words together into sentences, let alone muster the energy and inspiration to sit down to write. I took the dog for a run, a measly two and a half miles (cut down during the run from four). I dragged my body along, conscious of every step.

It was on this run that I conceived the idea for this blog.

When you can do no more, just write one sentence. Then, write one more. And one more. And one more. Until you have a page. Maybe more?

I have wasted so much time living under the myth that sitting down to write constitutes a major commitment of time and energy. When I’m feeling tired or vulnerable, thinking this way makes it virtually impossible to write.

On these days, I tell myself that I must only write one sentence today. I tell myself this one sentence at a time.

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Make Time.

Liz Shine: Author, Editor.

Category Archives: A Room Of Your Own

A Room of Your Own: Cartwheeling

A Room of Your Own:Don’t ask me!

A Room Of Our Own: Don’t Always Trust Your Feelings

A Room Of Your Own: Count words

A Room Of Your Own: Wake Up Early

A Room of Your Own: Walk It Out

A Room Of Your Own: Pair Up

A Room Of Your Own: Light A Candle

A Room Of Your Own: Only Write

A Room Of Your Own: Write one sentence