comments?

I love to read blogs, particularly writing and publishing blogs.  I like reading about the experiences of other writers, and I particularly like learning the tricks of the publishing trade.  Publishing is an alien world to me, and I have come to appreciate the openness with which many literary agents and bloggers share their expertise with publishing hopefuls like me.

I don't, however, like to comment on blogs.

It isn't because I have nothing to say.  I have plenty of thoughtful, reflective, funny, engaging, and even wise things to say (as I tell myself when I am dreaming about writing).  Yet as every true introvert knows, once you enter the crowded room, even if the crowded room looks like 235 comments from other readers, your well-prepared ideas and reflections leave you standing open-mouthed.  

One of my favorite blogs, Write To Done, had a guest post earlier this week from the A-List Blogger Club, a group of blogging experts who have formed a club to mentor new blog writers.  Guest writer Mary Jaksch of Goodlife ZEN offered readers a scholarship of $20 a month to join.  All that is required is to write a response in the comment section that convinces the A-List Blogger Club that you are one of the top five people who deserve it.

How loaded is that?  First I have to believe I am good enough (who ever believes that?).  Then I have to enter that "crowded room" and push past my natural tendency to quiet myself, to listen rather than speak.  All this before my response even begins to pass whatever invisible hoops the A-List Blogger Club has in mind when selecting the scholarship recipients. 

I'm not complaining here.  As a blogger, I so appreciate the very few who have commented on my words.  I go back and read them again and again, so I can only imagine how encouraging it is to those who get so many comments.  Good for them, I say.

I'm just trying to think through the resistance.  My solution today is to just write my thoughts here instead, and to seriously consider just paying the fee and joining the club.  I bet they can help.

A very wise young woman once told me that the best way to work a room is to go to one person at a time and start a conversation.  Maybe I'll try that too.

And I just want to point out that this is the first time I have ever named myself as a blogger.  Just saying ... progress slips right up on us when we aren't looking.

the value of community

I am an author.

I am an author, a writer who has not written for a month.

There is a blank page.  It is patient. It never beckons or berates.  It waits for words.

I circle and touch and retreat and forget and remember and circle again.

It waits ... I rationalize.

I got a job.  A great job.  A job that makes me smile as I drive the 40 miles one way each day to get there.  A job that is only part-time (supposedly) and should give me plenty of time to write.

I've been busy with other things also.  My grandson thought it was a great idea to have a cookout one Sunday after church.  This idea became a weekend ritual for the grandchildren ... swimming in the pool and pouring themselves out of the water to feast on hotdogs, fresh cucumbers and cantelope from the garden, and cupcakes. 

These things take time. 

Time from writing.

I don't think busyness is the culprit here.  I think instead the difference may be that my writing group has not met in a month.  Not since our author reading in fact, and I miss them. 

I miss thinking about writing after hearing interesting, curious events described in their stories each week.  I miss the sense of having a deadline to finish a story.  Not that anyone in my writing group cares if I miss a deadline, but because they so appreciate what I bring to our reading table and encourage me to bring more.  I miss the conversation before and after our meetings, and I miss thinking about what each of them might bring next to educate, entertain and inspire.  Will it be an adventurous sailing story?  Or an unexpected epiphany teased from the memory of one's past?  Or simple entertainment in the telling of interactions with plants, animals, and human beings in yards, homes, parking lots, road trips, nail salons and myriad other settings? 

Thankfully, my writing community is reuniting again this week.

Shhh ... it feels a bit like a secret we shouldn't tell, but we are gathering again this week to receive copies of the first printing of our new book, Scenes from the Rear View Mirror.

We are authors, and we have written a book, the first of many we will publish either in partnership with one another or individually as we continue to follow our writing dreams.

I look forward to seeing the completed book, but most of all I look forward to seeing these women who by chance became my writing partners.  For this community, I am beyond grateful.

i am an author

Friday night, I attended my first author's reading.

And I was on the program as an author.

Let's just sit with this a moment.

Okay, so it was a gathering of my Creating Memoirs writing class members and their families and friends.  And, yes, we were reading stories that we wrote as students in our class.

Still, for the first time, I felt like an author.  I introduced myself as a writer.  I read my story with confidence, and people clapped when I was finished.  Isn't that what happens at author's readings?  One of my fellow writing colleagues noted how powerful it is to name things, and I agree.

I am an author, and I am blessed.

i've been writing

I think I may have found my genre.

And perhaps my voice.

Each week as I attend this new memoir writing class, as I listen to the stories of others, and as I write my own stories, I feel more and more settled, content, directed, home.

I think that it is entirely possible that the reason I have been struggling so much with writing fiction is because what I really want to write about is me.

I find this revelation a little funny and slightly egotistial.

Am I that self-absorbed?  Is my ego so large that I think others might be interested in reading about my life?  Do these questions come as truth?  Or do they come from the "one" who has haunted my every pursuit with taunts of "Who Do You Think You Are?".

Well, as they say, the proof is in the pudding, and the "proof" is that since I've started this class I have rewritten two stories and written first drafts of two new stories.  This is a watershed experience compared to the laborious albeit dedicated progress I was making before discovering this genre.

And my writing group's response to my first story was that it was "poetic".

I like this. 

I like the writing.  I like the encouragement.  I appreciate my teacher, Tonya McGue, who has given her time to nurture small voices like mine.

Selah ...

writing memoir

I began a class on writing memoir yesterday.

The best part of this is that for the first time, I have "gone public".  I have joined a group of writers, most of whom thank goodness have about the same amount of writing experience. 

It felt good.  It felt good to meet others who yearn to express through the written word as I do.  It felt good to think about hearing their stories and perhaps to share a few of my own.  It feels good and scary to know that I am now on a timetable with a certain amount of accountability to others.

We are assigned the task of writing one story each of the eight weeks of class. 

This is really going to pick up my pace.

This means I am going to have to put my inner critic in timeout while I write.  I wonder about this as it seems to be my biggest obstacle to writing - the steel rod that holds me captive.

So far I have managed to waste my entire first day, thinking furiously about all of the things I could write without writing the first word.  I am feeling somewhat courageous at this point that I am here at least, that I am confessing.

But thinking about writing is not writing

Margaret Atwood says that "writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light."

I certainly understand the darkness - the fear, the resistance.  I also understand the compulsion - the obsessive thinking, the circling, the short plunges into the darkness only to dart away again. 

Illumination is the hope, is my hope.

the snowflake method - step three, sort of

I started using The Snowflake Method with the usual exuberance that often comes with my new ideas.  I thought, "I will chronicle my use of The Snowflake Method, sort of like the movie Julie and Julia, and then I can build up a strong base of interested readers and eventually this will become a novel which can then become a movie, and ..."

As a writer, I am certain you are quite familiar with the fantasy, yes?

However ... by Step Two, I realized that I don't really like this kind of structure so much, and so I skipped it.

This morning, I determinedly decided to try Step Three which is to answer a series of questions regarding the motive, goal, conflict and epiphany of each character and then write a short one paragraph summary of each character.

I found the process somewhat painful, BUT it was also quite helpful.

I completely changed the motive and epiphany of my heroine.

I began to understand other main characters more completely.

I began imagining scenes and dialogues as I thought through the motives and conflicts of the characters.  These I wrote quick notes about as I am certain they will be explored later, in full detail, as part of this process.

I did NOT write a one paragraph summary of each character yet.  My mind began moving too fast to slow down and think with full sentences.  This is okay, because Step Four is to expand each sentence in the summary paragraph to a full paragraph.  I can do both of these at the same time, which I will do ... eventually.

I worry that I am being contrary and even worse, disrespectful to Mr. Ingermanson's Snowflake Method.
http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/snowflake.php

I don't mean to be.

I'm guessing that other writers maybe struggle with structure also, even though we all know it is important.  It is the same quirky resistance that often keeps me from befriending the unwritten page at all.  My way of getting through it is to bargain with myself, and in this case, Mr. Ingermanson. 

I wonder how others do it?

rejection

I received my first rejection.

I immediately called my good friend who is a poet, and her response was, "YAY!"

"Huh?"

"Your first one is over," she said.  "Make a file.  There will be more, a lot more."

She told me about a well-known author in the area who proudly displayed a whole box of rejection notices as a teaching tool in his creative writing class.  His point being that as writers, we must learn to be thick-skinned about rejection.

"Yes," I responded, thinking there is something very odd about this.

I wonder about a writing community that has learned to wear rejection like a badge of honor.  Is there some defense mechanism in this?  Display proudly so as not to be sad?  Cry?  Doubt?  Give up?

I feel disappointed.  I poured my heart into those 1200 hundred words, so much so that I wondered if there were any words left in the universe when I was finished.  Which of course I have since learned there are - plenty more - but that's another post.

I want to cry.  I am entertaining a certain amount of doubt ... actually a great deal of doubt.

But give up?

This is not an option.  I am beginning to understand after all of these years that a writer simply writes.  This is why after so many times of "quitting" for various reasons, I keep PICKING UP MY PEN AGAIN.

Later when I relayed the news to my husband. he said "GREAT!  You should frame it."

"Yes," I said but with less confusion.

I will frame it but not as a badge of honor.

I will frame it as a reminder that a writer writes, not because she wants to be published (though honestly she does ... so VERY much) but because she must write.