Tag Archives: writing life

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.

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.

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.