Category Archives: Writing

Two Jobs and a Midnight Snack

08 Tuesday Mar 2011

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Last May, I was working at a church, and it was awful. The pastor was a perfectionist, slow to praise and quick to point out anything I did wrong. The last straw came when he told me that he’d decided I had five typos left, and then I’d be out of a job. I hadn’t thought I was making that many mistakes, and I knew I was putting effort into my work. I also was involved in other projects, like helping overhaul the website, that were acknowledged minimally, if at all. So I quit.

About a week later, I was chatting to my MFA program director, who’s also the co-founder and editor of a literary magazine, and when she heard I needed work, she offered me a job on the spot. It’s a fantastic job. I’ve learned how to use two new computer programs since I’ve been here (not to mention a new operating system), and gotten markedly better than I used to be at two more. My bosses now are all about exploration and playfulness, and much less about mechanical perfection. I design posters, for example, for guest poets and speakers, for example, and once or twice it’s happened that a typo went to print and it hasn’t been a big deal (I keep wanting to clarify – I really don’t mess up that often, and I catch more errors than I make, but sometimes ‘night’ gets changed to ‘evening’ at the last second and I forget to switch ‘a’ to ‘an’). If I was thoughtless or careless about what I was doing, that would be another story, but in this job the bigger picture of what I’m doing matters more than any little bumps.

I’m still working on making a similar shift in my writing life. I’m still too quick to scold myself for not being as good or fast or prolific as I want to be, and need a hugely significant achievement (see Exhibit A) to happen in order to feel proud of what I’m doing. So I’m trying to quit, or rather I’m trying to be that kind of supportive presence for myself. I’ve got a new essay up in Stories & Things, a little piece I’ve been meaning to write for a while now, but hadn’t, perhaps because I thought it was too light to really matter. Now it’s written, and it made me happy to write it, and I hope someone may read it and like it too, but what’s best is that it is there now when it wasn’t before.

Electric Writing Days, or, How I Almost Missed the Train

04 Friday Mar 2011

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Much of the time, writing comes for me in fits and starts. I spend a lot of time treating myself like an old car, thumping myself around, muttering “come onnn,” and making vague promises and threats. Once in a long, long while, though, something magical clicks into place, and I get to spend a little while being the kind of synapse-firing, electric writer that I want to be. Yesterday was one of those days.

I wrote a story in a day, people. I wrote an entire story, beginning to middle to end, in a day. It came in at 3,174 words. Most days, I’m pleased if I hit 500 words, thrilled if I get past 800. During NaNoWriMo, my go-to insane writer’s challenge, reaching 2000 makes me feel like an overachiever, since you only need to write 1,667 to stay on track (I know. “Only.”). This is half again over the kind of overreaching goal I set for myself once a year. Forgive me for bragging, but I am feeling pretty boss right now.

And it was easy! For one glorious day, every time I sat down and opened the laptop, the next sentence came forth smoothly, and the next, and I already knew which scene needed to come after that. I nearly missed my stop on the Metro because I was so engrossed in what I was doing. It’s a good thing I happened to look up to think of the right word and saw “Metro Center” on the board, or chances are I would have been halfway to Vienna by the time I realized I’d been riding too long. It’s a good thing my stop on the way home is the end of the line, too, because it happened again. I only noticed I was there when I realized I was the only person sitting in my car of the train. All in all, between Metro rides, my lunch break, and two power sessions back home, the actual, physical writing of the story took about three and a half hours.

This is not, of course, the same as saying that the story took three and a half hours to write. I’ve been mulling over the world of the story for weeks now, ever since my professor mentioned there’s this crazy experimental poet who wants to use DNA strands as a medium for writing poetry and I thought, how cool would it be if human DNA did have poetry encoded into it? What would that mean for science, and literature, and religion? Who would read it? What would happen if someone didn’t have it? I took a couple stops and starts because there were so many different ways to go with it and I couldn’t figure out whose story I wanted to tell. So two days ago I got frustrated and spent my lunch hour putting together my notes of how this world worked, and who my characters were, and what they wanted and why. I don’t usually take that kind of prep time before writing, and I’m still not sure if I’ll make a regular practice of it, just because one of the things I’m learning is how different stories can be from each other. Practices that feed one story can suck the life out of another, but for this story, at least, making an outline worked in spades.

Next week is revising time, so chances are I’ll be grumbling again, but for now I’m still on the high. These are the moments to hold onto all the other times when nothing is working, and I hope next time I find myself in that place I’ll have the presence of mind to reread this and remember the rush.

Why “Taking the Bull by the Horns” Feels Particularly Apt

28 Monday Feb 2011

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“Submission” is a funny word for the process of sending out work. It makes it feel like it should be a passive process. My mind goes for the classical Greek metaphor, imagining some demure temple acolytes padding silently toward the altar of Publishing, clean white papers ready in hand for the sacrifice. Then, once it’s gone, it’s gone, to be accepted or rejected according to the whims of the Editors.

That’s the tricky part, you see: the acceptance or rejection. That’s what means that submissions cannot be passive, or all that submissive. It’s a lot more like the version of sacrifice where you need six or eight muscular men and thick ropes to drag some roaring animal up to where it can already smell the blood of the others. The Publishing Gods are more known for their silence and disapproval than their welcome, you see, so offerings have to be frequent and animated enough to call the attention of those who see thousand similar creatures every day. It is exhausting even to think about. Maybe there are other writers who can flippantly whip submissions into the mail, but I am not one of them. I need a certain amount of prep time to psych myself into looking up magazines, reading guidelines, looking up whether that editor with the ambiguous name is a Mr. or Ms., and shuffling through the stack of things I want to send out. By the time I get through two or three of these, I’m feeling pretty beat, which is not so good if I figure an honest-to-goodness freelance writer must have to send out dozens every week.

I do realize, however, that it’s really silly to make myself a cute little writer’s site if I’m only going to be publishing blog posts. So today I sent off five pieces in one swoop, all different: a memoir essay, a story, a handful of poems, an article, some recipes. If nothing else, you cannot fault me for not offering something from any genre I know how to write. And it does feel relieving to see them crossed off my list, even if I’m feeling a little drained. Now to see if the offerings appeal, right? Editors, I believe it is your move.

Trouble with Time

16 Wednesday Feb 2011

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I’ve hit a problem with writing every day. For a while, it worked fantastically well to pull up a blank Word document when I got to work in the morning, type out a sentence or two whenever I had a moment and inspiration hit, and email myself the result at the end of the day. I was hitting anywhere from 200-1000 words in a day, making great progress on the story, but suddenly it’s not working anymore. The main issue I’m finding is that as my story progresses and complicates, it’s harder to remember where I left off. I’m starting to amass a collection of fragments and scenes without a solid connection to the previous pages of the story. When I get home, it’s about all I can do to sort out the general order of what takes place when, and more often than not I’m too tired to get in there and start writing the passages connecting what I’ve been working on. It’s getting to the point where I’m writing maybe three days a week, and I’m starting to feel frustrated. I’ve been trying to think what I should do instead, and the main idea I’ve got now is to take my laptop to work with me, so I can write on the Metro and maybe hit a few hundred words during lunch hour. It means lugging another bag around with me, but I’ll have to see if that helps me get back on track with keeping writing a priority.

More than a Room

07 Monday Feb 2011

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Big news: I finally made the leap! After years of dreaming and months of scraping every last dime together, I’m in my own apartment. Ms. Woolf’s making me smile lately, because I still have trouble believing I have more than just a room of my own these days. There’s a whole one-bedroom apartment with my name on the lease and my own decorations inside it — I even get a little patio/balcony so I can write outside when the weather warms up. It does mean for a while my commute to the law office job is going to hurt (I’m near Baltimore now, and the office is in D.C.), but it’s worth it for the independence.

The main thing I’ve been telling Andrew about this apartment, over and over and over, is “I have a vision.” And that’s about more than the furnishings, although he’s heard ad nauseum about white couches and dark wood furniture and modern, abstract floral rugs in black and white and red. It’s about creating the kind of space I’ve daydreamed writers live in. I promise I do know being a writer is not as simple as surrounding yourself with the trappings you think the cool writers have, but trying on the shoes does wonders for the confidence. I’m looking forward to making meals in my new place and entertaining my friends, but also to growing into a newly vitalized sense of where I want this writing thing to go.

The experiment now, in the interest of disciplining myself to submit as well as write, is to send out one piece or query every weekday. It’s going to be tough to do both submitting and writing as well as keep up my schedule (I have to admit I haven’t written any more of my novel in about a week — between making last preparations for the move and doing my homework for Experimental Forms, I was too pooped after work to rouse myself to the keyboard again), but not even Ray Bradbury says writing is easy. Exhilarating, when it’s going well, but even that doesn’t mean easy. I sent out a pretty neat query today about diary-writing, and probably it’ll get shot down, but what’s important is not only that I did it, but that I put some preliminary research into it, too, so I’m not just throwing out whatever’s on the top of my head (that’s what the blog is for!). And that when that rejection email comes, I’ll get to read it in my brand-spankin’ new shiny apartment. Once I call Comcast to come bring me the Internet, that is. Moving sucks.

Niche Markets

31 Monday Jan 2011

Posted by in Breaking Boundaries, Uncategorized, Writing

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In the past few weeks, I’ve been doing some serious thinking about where I’m trying to head as a writer–doing productive daydreaming sessions about what I’d like my career life to look like, thinking over what kind of writing I could happily do or not, and writing up 5-year plans (if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s plans). One of the things that jumped out at me is that if I’m going to get anywhere with this, I need to seriously step up my submission rate. Doing three a week tires me out at this point, and my guess is I need to get at least to about 25 a week if I wanted to consider supporting myself with writing. Goodness.

So I was looking through my Writer’s Market guide, trying to put together a file of potential story and article ideas, and I have to tell you something: there are some strange magazines out there. Like, I understand that people have different hobbies and interests, but we are talking some niche stuff. Here are five of my favorites:

5. Atlantic Salmon Journal: This seems kind of normal–lots of people like fishing, and salmon are pretty neat fish, if you’re into that–but you need to think long term. This is a group of about 8,500 people who are prepared to put money into the promise that every three months, enough is going to change in the arena of this one fish to merit some hundred-odd pages of news.

4. Balloon Life: I’m just really excited this magazine exists at all. It makes me happy to think of the thousands of people who love hot air balloons so much that they can say, without sarcasm, that they have adopted a balloon lifestyle. They are balloonists. You get up in the morning, in your house for once because the new issue’s coming out, grab Balloon Life, hop in the ginormous red hot air balloon tethered to your chimney and head back to your natural habitat. This is what Jules Verne wanted Heaven to be like, I promise you.

3. Toy Farmer: I would expect there to be magazines about collecting toys. I would expect there to be a market for farmers’ magazines. Toy farmers, though? I’m not even sure I knew that was a thing. And I went to the website, and they have a Toy Farmer blog, for when the new issue can’t come out fast enough to keep up with the changes in the world of toy farming, and–AND–they have this link. It’s “Zeke’s Toy Box.” I’m not making this up. And you click it, because how do you not click something as adorable as “Zeke’s Toy Box,” and it gives you even more than you had imagined. “Zeke’s Toy Box” is where kids send pictures to “Grandpa Zeke” of their own toy farming inventions, or their dad’s combine, or what have you, and it is so cute I could cry.

2. Vintage Snow Mobile Magazine: Who knew? I may have been unsure of whether I knew about toy farmers before, but I promise you, I had never before in my entire life been aware of such a thing as vintage snow mobiles until I found out there was a magazine dedicated to them. Two and a half thousand people subscribe to this magazine, too. Think about that for a moment. Two and a half thousand people care about vintage snow mobiles so badly that they pay money to read about them. I don’t even know how many people are out there buying single issues off the grocery stand (in Alaska, I guess? Canada? On which newsstand do you find this magazine?), or just walking around feeling like they’re the only people in the world who are passionate about snow mobiles that have been around for a really long time. How old does a snowmobile even have to be to qualify as vintage? I don’t even have a basic starting point to know a vintage snow mobile if I walked outside and one literally hit me.

Finally, with this last one, I knew what these must be when I read the title, and I think I maybe had a book with one in it when I was very little, but the fact that there is a magazine for this proves to me that it does not matter what it is that you care about: you are not alone. There are probably thousands out there with you, writing articles, taking pictures, hanging out in whatever pocket of the Internet posts breaking news, and painstakingly printing hundreds upon hundreds of magazine copies about it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

1. Miniature Donkey Talk. Oh my goodness. I wasn’t even going to say anything here, because the title alone is better than any words I could give you, but I just read the home page of their website, and you need to see these quotes:

“The best donkey magazine being published!” Dr. Julian Cable, DVM

AT LEAST 4 times greater distribution than ANY miniature donkey publication!!!

…which suggests there are more. I think I’m feeling about the same right now as if I’d just come across incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial life. I have actual goosebumps on my back.

I have not yet, I have to admit, submitted any articles or queries to any of these fine magazines. I’m not sure I’ll ever be qualified to swim in those waters. But I’ve developed a whole new appreciation for what’s out there. I’ve already started writing down the more esoteric of my interests. We’re gonna go explore.

The year of winning

06 Thursday Jan 2011

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Bring it, 2011. For about the last three years now, I have promised myself in New Year’s Resolutions that this was the year I was going to become a Successful Writer. I’ve come at it from all kinds of angles: write a novel, edit a bunch of short stories, produce a completed new piece every week, Get Published. So far? Goose egg.

I think part of the problem is that the aspirations I’ve been choosing are either too rigid (produce a new piece every week? that’s an invitation not to attempt a novel if ever I heard one), or externally based (whether I get published is at least as much up to the editors as it is to me. heck, if it were up to me I’d be a bestselling author by now). One of the pep talks in NaNo last November pointed out that the writing is what’s on the page. Anything else, glorious as it may be in the head of the writer, is just thought.

This year, I’m tackling the leap between the brain and the page. I’m trying to create resolutions that will encourage me to stretch myself as a writer, but also allow enough flexibility that having an off day once in a while won’t make me feel like I’ve failed. Here they are:

1. Write every day. The rules are that it must be creative, blog posts don’t count, and I have to give a good effort to finishing a piece I start, rather than ending up with a thousand opening lines by the end of 2011. Beyond that, if I write a sentence one day because I’m exhausted and the story’s not coming, so be it. I’m taking even that token time to dedicate to writing. So far this year, my low is 88 and my high is 524 in one day. Not NaNo numbers by any means, but I’m hitting a pretty steady 200-300, and hoping to increase as the year continues.

2. Blog once a week, minimum. This site does wonders to make me feel like I’m taking writing seriously, so even though I might have been using the time it took to write this post to work on my actual story, I think it’s worth it to make this blog and site an active part of my life. Besides, when I make it big and people search for me, don’t you think they should see something that has relatively recent content? Yeah, me too.

3. Read at least one book a week. Normally I’d scoff at such a basic “requirement,” but I’ve been finding that my new schedule gives me less time and energy to read than I’m really happy with. This is more of a safeguard to help me remember that reading is something that recharges me and gives me pleasure, and I don’t want to let it slide in favor of my other responsibilities. Plus, if I read a book per week, I can at least update what I’m reading here, so making time to read lots of awesome books will help me fulfill resolution #2. Double points!

Incidentally, I wish I could crank out 500 words of story as easily as 500 words of blog. My new system to make sure words happen has been to pull up a blank Word document when I get to work. Anytime I think of the next sentence of my story, I stop what I’m doing for fifteen seconds to write it down. Since I’m in front of a computer for eight hours a day, I thought, why not be thinking about stories for part of that time? So far it’s working out well. One particularly slow, particularly creative day, I had over 1000 words by closing time. On busier days, I’ll squeeze in just about 100. Anything helps push the story along, though, right?  know I have all of one reader right now, but if anyone comes across this and has other tips for how to fit writing into a cramped schedule, let me know!

Milestone!

23 Thursday Dec 2010

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I just hit 5,000 words on my novel! I’m taking this story slower than a NaNoWriMo novel, but I am still getting places! It is helping right now to say that I’ll write something every day, but not set a particular word count goal. So far my best day I hit 1,000 words, and my worst was around 40, but the point is that I am back to putting something more toward this story every day. I’ve got one chapter down, and working on Chapter 2, and it makes me very happy.

A secondary milestone is that, although this will technically be my third novel, it is the first I am doing deliberately, without any organized external motivation. Basically, my first novel was with NaNo, and it was awful. My second novel I wrote on my own, but it kind of became a novel by accident. I started writing a story with the “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way” mentality, and several months later, I caught on that this was getting into novel territory. For a good portion of the time, I’d sit down to write wondering if today was the day the story ended. This is the first time that I’ve sat down with the thought, “I’m going to take these characters and the things I know about them and work on making their stories into a novel.” And here I am with a satisfying chunk of words, and I have a general idea of what might happen next. So far, things are good.

For Real, People

13 Monday Dec 2010

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I read writing magazines sometimes, and one of the articles that comes up perenially is the “How to Quit Making Excuses and Actually Write” feature. It seems that I am not the only writer who can be pretty bad at getting down to writing. There are plenty of logical reasons. I work an overloaded week, plus grad school. Writing is not always (or even often) fun enough to entice me to the computer. I am still learning what works for me as a writer in terms of scheduling (early or late? write a set number of words/pages a day or whenever I feel inspired, regardless of word count?), and I’ve been noticing that even if I find a good rhythm, what works one day usually changes by the next week or so. Hitting a writing rhythm is more like swimming in an ocean than a pool, and it can be exhausting to locate the current, never mind work once I’m in it.

Here’s the thing, though. I always make time for my boyfriend, even during finals week. I never go a day without reading for pleasure, even if it’s just a few pages, even if I have to sacrifice half an hour of sleep to get it. If I want to make cookies for one group of friends and catch up with another friend, I’ll put her on speaker phone so I can talk and knead dough simultaneously. I insist on having time for the people and activities that are most important to me. It’s fairly clear to me that what I must do if I want to start getting this writing thing right is treat it as if I want it as badly as I want to read, or say good night to Andrew, even if that is not the case.

My plan over Christmas break is to write the lion’s portion of a novel. I’d like a minimum of 40,000 words done by the time I go back to class on January 24th. Yesterday, according to the schedule I’d drawn out for myself, I should have hit 2500 words. I’m at about 600. I’d like to hit 25,000 by the end of this year. I’m going to try and post here every week or so on how it’s going (one of my plans is to have a more active presence on my little site, too), and we’ll see if I can beat this “no time” myth. Wish me luck!

A Question of Genre

18 Thursday Nov 2010

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One of the main hesitations I had when I was applying to MFA programs in the U.S. was that without exception they insisted I pick between fiction, non-fiction and poetry as my primary concentration. I’ve never been good at tying myself down to any one thing. I’m half Dutch and half American, I grew up celebrating two religions, and none of my friends are ever surprised to hear that the reason I like autumn the best is because I get to watch everything change. One of the main reasons I am where I am now is because they do both writing and publishing classes here, and I want nothing more than to see both sides of what I want to do with my life.

Writing works much the same way for me. I’m at UB for fiction primarily now, but I rotate between seasons of fiction and poetry, with the odd month of memoir thrown in as well. I believe the genres feed each other. When I’m running out of breath on stories, or my characters feel wan and boring, I know it’s time to return to poetry. Poems are meant to be so clean, so pure, like drops of water. Everything is essential. I’ve heard people complain about overanalyzing poems, and too much analysis is bad, but I think some is necessary. I think you’re meant to look close enough to understand how much weight each word has to carry to make you feel the way it does once you’re done.

So I write poetry for a season, and batter my head against internal rhymes, and meter, and where to break a line to make it mean two things at once, and one day I wake up and the poetry is done. The images are making me think too much or not enough, and I’m putting in people and miniature scenes with line breaks, and wondering how to work dialogue into a genre that frowns on quotation marks. And then I am back to fiction, trying to see stories through poet’s eyes.

It’s always about balance, in my life, and it’s a very difficult balance to keep sometimes. My sister is tens of thousands of words into her latest NaNo, and I’ve written maybe a thousand words this month on the story I care about right now, and sometimes it feels like a catch-22 that I have to work so many hours to pay for a program that will let me write. What I am trying to keep in mind is that these seasons of writing are something I am still learning about myself. I’m still negotiating the dry spells and writing jags, and finding out what will fill me. My goal is to send at least three pieces out before Thanksgiving. I’ll let you know how it goes.