Ugh

Nothing like a cold to kill your creative spirit. I have been useless this week on all fronts, be it writing for work or the novel. Just want to lie down and take a nap...

Working Mom Blues

I am having a blah day today. Probably has something to do with it being Monday and the start of another work week which means leaving my lovely daughter with her sitter and sitting in this windowless office for nine hours. Blah. Not to mention we are having just gorgeous weather for August. So to be honest, I'd just really rather be hanging in the backyard with my sweet girl, watching her discover the feel of grass between her toes.

Ahh, working motherhood...

I was thinking on that topic earlier and remembered my sister saying (before my daughter was even born) that working moms can't have it all, that something will inevitably be neglected. At the time I dismissed her comment, thinking that because she was essentially a stay-at-home mom, she didn't know what she was talking about. Now that I am on the other side, however, I think there is a grain of truth to her statement.

In my experience as a working mom, the thing that gets neglected the most is, well, me. During the work week, I wake up at 6:00 a.m. (well, more like 6:27 a.m. thanks to the snooze button), and I really don't stop until I put the baby to bed at 8:00 p.m. Sometimes later, depending on what chores need to be done. Weekends aren't much better sometimes, though I do get to sleep until 7:30 or so thanks to my darling husband. Yesterday, for instance, from the time I got up until after 8:30 p.m., I was going, going, going. Making breakfast, cleaning the kitchen, doing the grocery shopping, feeding/changing/playing with the baby throughout.

By 4:30, when my husband plopped down on the couch to watch a movie, I looked on with envy (and anger?) because I would have loved nothing more than to do the same. But the baby needed a snack, and, oh, I have to clean the toilets, etc. etc. etc. Sometimes the weekends are worse than the work week and I look forward to Monday and the one hour I get for lunch so I can sit still and read my book while I eat leftovers in my office.

I bring all of this up to vent because, honestly, I don't have a solution. If only I didn't have to sleep...

Inspiration

I am inspired. Digging out Windows to the Soul and rereading all the commentary I received on it and realizing (9 years later) what I should have done with it in the first place (namely do a little research and revise it, all of which you can read about here and here) has inspired me to work on this piece again and see if I can't make it into something halfway resembling a good story. (Phew! Take a breath...)

Up first, learning a little more about New York City (as in more than the name and that it's a big, exciting city)...

Crappy First Drafts Part II

So when I left off with this story, I had just turned in my first short story for my classmates to read and critique. Here is an actual entry from my writing journal from that class:

"My first story, Windows to the Soul, was workshopped today. They didn't tear it/me apart like I thought they would. However, several big things were brought up.

First, characterization. They didn't feel like I'd developed Sherry enough. K thought it was strange how [Sherry] got prettier when she got closer when its usually the other way around. Dr. N wanted me to write more about her apartment, that I really missed an opportunity to develop her character there. The funny thing is that in my [hand]written draft, I did describe her apartment in detail, but I decided that it wasn't necessary and took it out.

Plot was also brought up. L said she didn't think that this would happen in real life. Others said similar things like, 'Why would Mark tell Sherry all this when they just met?' and 'How is it possible that he could make such a huge change after one conversation after ten years?'"

So... Poor characterization and an unbelievable plot. Sounds like a pretty shitty story to me.

At the time I took it in stride and was just proud that I'd tried. This was, after all, the first time I'd tried to write a story. Looking back on it though, I can see so many things I could've done to make that story a success. The first being, write more than one freaking draft!

If I took nothing else away from that experience, it was this: Your first draft, by nature, is going to be crappy. And that's alright. It's supposed to be. First drafts are about getting the juices flowing, getting something on paper.

The trick, however, is to then research and revise. Then research and revise some more. And maybe then, turn it over for someone to look at. This whole concept was beyond me at the time. I still thought writing was supposed to be easy, remember.

Well, that's enough of my history for now. I'm sure I'll regale you with other thrilling tales in the months to come so stay tuned...

ESF

While taking a break from a very mundane task at work today, I Googled one of my writing teachers from college, Elizabeth Stuckey-French. One of the results that popped up was this interview of her from 1998. This particular passage really struck me:

"Some people think that once you get published everything is set forever, but that is not how it works. Once you are published you don't feel any more worthy as a person, or as a writer, and you don't feel like you can just kick back and rest on your laurels for the rest of your life. You have to keep writing -- and you have to keep getting up to change the baby's diapers. Life goes on."

She also says:

"The only reason to write fiction is because you feel compelled to do it...Writing fiction is such a strange thing to do: inventing characters and having them talk to one another is such an odd way to express yourself. If you don't feel compelled to do that as a way of making sense of the world then I would suggest trying something else."

I am certainly guilty of getting wrapped up in the idea of "being published" (as evidenced in my About Me blurb). What I tend to forget is that what matters is that I write because I want to, because I enjoy it. I always feel like my best work comes out when I'm not thinking about the reader, per se, but about the story itself and the characters and how they would react in a situation and why.

Thanks for the reminder, ESF ;-)

Crappy First Drafts Part I

My next lesson to learn was how much work writing can be. As I said in my previous post, I'd always envisioned writing as a glamorous job. I imagined an author sitting down and writing a story from start to finish, the words flowing onto the page effortlessly, scene after scene until the story was told.

So maybe that is why, when I sat down to write my first short story for my fiction workshop, I was surprised when I found myself staring at an empty notepad, pencil in hand, for the better part of an hour. I couldn't think what to write. I had no idea where to even begin.

So I thought of a random name, Mark. I tried to create a character around this name. He lived in New York City (a place I'd never been, but that sounded cool). He was sad. And he was sitting alone at a bar. That's all I could think of.

I sat pencil in hand for another 15 minutes.

Then I thought, what if there was a woman in the bar that caught his attention. So I made him notice a woman at the other end of the bar and proceeded to describe her with every cliched phrase I could think of.

What if she approached him, I thought. Brilliant! So I decided she was a painter and that she painted people's eyes (just because that sounded different). She walks up to Mark and asks if she can paint his eyes. He agrees.

(Now I was really on a roll.)

They go back to her place and she starts to paint and while she's painting she starts asking him about himself and about why his eyes were so sad. Now I had to come up with the big finish, the big answer to why Mark was sitting alone in a bar in New York City looking sad.

So I made Mark answer (after only a very little hesitation) that his wife and child had died in a car crash back in his hometown and that he'd moved to New York to forget about the past. He even cried. She had helped him overcome his grief, and he was now able to move on with his life.

I ended the story with Mark seeing the woman's painting of his eyes in an art gallery and smiling.

Pencil down. I had written a four page masterpiece! I titled it "Windows to the Soul" (because I apparently had a thing for a good cliche) and typed up my story. I made copies for the class to read and critique and prepared to hear the praise.

Stay tuned for what the class had to say about my mini-masterpiece...

A Writer is a Reader First

It is my firm belief that all great writers start out as great readers. I have had a love affair with the written word for as long as I can remember. I have vivid memories from when I was very young, six maybe, of pulling a stack of books from my parents' bookshelf, curling up in my father's chocolate brown recliner and reading.

I think I first realized how much I loved reading in middle school, when I spent the entire summer before seventh grade staying up into the wee hours of the morning reading the entire Anne of Green Gables series. I literally (no pun intended) lost myself in those books. I was Anne, on Prince Edward Island at the turn of the century. I fell in love with Gilbert right along with her. That was really the first time I realized the power of the written word. How it could transport you to another time, another place, give you an all access pass into someone else's thoughts and feelings.

I didn't realize I was a writer, however, until my sophomore year in college. On a whim, I signed up for a fiction workshop. I felt like I needed something light in an otherwise heavy schedule (I was preparing to major in psychology and had a courseload full of classes like statistics and social psychology). As we started the course, reading through Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction and writing short stories to share with the class, I began to see all the books I'd read differently.

I'd always had this idea that stories came out all at once, that a writer sat down at their desk and typed out a novel from start to finish. I had no idea how much thought and effort it took to write a single page or paragraph or sentence. I didn't realize that you could sit down to write one story, and end up writing something completely different.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The more I learned about writing, the more I learned to read like a writer. To appreciate the beauty of a well paced plot, enjoy a particularly well-rounded character, admire a setting described so well you could feel the bitter cold or sunshine on your face. In short, I began to learn to recognize good writing when I read it. Thinking back over all the novels I'd read through my life, I realized that the ones that really stayed with me, the ones I'd read over and over, were also the ones that were written well.

So what happened next? Stay tuned for my next post, where I'll tell you about my first (awful) attempt at actually writing fiction...