Writing

Retreating

By on October 19, 2022   /   Articles, For Writers, Writing  

A few years ago I was awarded a Residency from Playa, Summer Lake. Cue the universe. First, in the form of a wild fire
that postponed my much anticipated Residency for one year. Then, Covid, which is still postponing pretty much everything. But this month, the stars aligned, and I was able to pack a bag, some food. and my laptop for a much-needed internet-free retreat.

Armed with some wonderful advice from Therese at Writer Unboxed (if you are a writer and aren’t familiar with this blog, be sure to check it out!),
Jen Louden’s The Women’s Retreat Book, and my N95 masks, I set out for the Oregon’s Great Basin to do some much needed healing – of my manuscript, sure, but
also of my soul.

I was not disappointed.

Playa is a haven on Summer Lake – a  desert lake in Lake County, Oregon. The Great Basin landscape is a unique mix of ponds, dry lake bed, and wetlands.

It is magical.

It was the perfect place to rest, repair, and rejuvenate my writer self.

I spent my mornings watching the sun rise, journaling, and writing.

I took long walks. Sometimes I made notes about my novel using my phone’s voice recording app. Sometimes, I just walked.

I sat. (I honestly cannot remember the last time I just sat down and took in the world. It was marvelous).

I read.

I spent a not insignificant amount of time lying on my back on a bench by the pond, looking up through the trees, and feeling like a kid.

I wrote.

I did self-hypnosis.

I watched a hawk hunt, a woodpecker peck, and a flock of goldfinches flutter.

I spent my evenings watching the sun set, journaling, and writing.

I listened to coyotes sing.

I looked at the stars.

I felt my writer self expand. Which is magic in and of itself.

I can’t really articulate the value of my experience. 5 days, solely dedicated to your artistic self is a luxury that not many of us can afford – even in the best of times.
I’m not sure when I will be able to make such time again – let alone spend it in such a magical place.

But if you do get the opportunity to spend some time alone, dedicated to your writing self, I have a few tips to offer – one for each day of my Residency:

1. Be generous with yourself. If you are on fire to write, by all means write. But if your soul is crying out to sit, to wander, to play, to rest, please let yourself do those things. They all fill the writer well. They all count.

2. Bring music. I don’t listen to music at home when I write. But, I brought some with me, just in case. I was so happy I did. I played music off and all all day – when I wrote, when I needed a dance party break, when I did some yoga stretches. I was surprised by how much simple joy it brought.

3. Bring something great to read. I brought two writing craft books and my Kindle. I had borrowed a middle grade novel, some poetry, and a short story collection from the library’s Ebook library before I left. The poetry was great for starting and ending my day. The middle grade provided some nice afternoon reading on the deck and not a small amount of inspiration. I never touched the collection of short stories (sorry Hilary Mantel. I know it’s wonderful and I will read it. May you RIP).

4. Bring some art supplies. I’m not an artist by any means. But I did throw in some old watercolors and some fresh pens before I left just in case. I was glad to have them. I doodled and created some laughably terrible and totally fun watercolors several times during the 5 days. It was surprisingly freeing to just let myself be bad at something and have fun doing it.

5. Bring food, but don’t get too precious about it. (Unless food is really your thing. Then do you). I looked at some retreat tips before I left and so many people mentioned food. Elaborate food. I kept it simple because I didn’t have time to prepare something wonderful. I’m glad I did. It turned out I just didn’t care that much about what I ate. I had toast and fruit most mornings, crackers and cheese, raw vegetables, and salami for lunch most days, and fruit and bread for dinner most evenings. Soup and sandwiches filled in the gaps on other days just fine. I did have a few pastries (nothing special) and some cookies as treats which were nice when I wanted them, and a tiny bottle of Prosecco to acknowledge the experience. One thing I wish I had brought was better coffee. That’s it.

Now that I am home and back to the regular world of laundry and grocery lists and empty cat bowls, I am eager to weave the learning and magic I gained from this Residency into my everyday writing life. I left the Playa with a plan for my current work in progress and for myself. I’m excited to get started on it.

Huge thanks to everyone at Playa who made this possible, with extra thanks to Carrie and Kris for being so gracious and wonderful and accommodating <3

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Hop Down the Rabbit Hole

By on September 21, 2022   /   Articles, For Kids, For Parents, For Teachers, For Writers, Writing  

Writing is tough.

Writing is tough. At any level. From learning to put one word after another (and in order!) to construct one meaningful sentence to the classic high school essay to writing award-winning books, it isn’t easy. It’s a rewarding kind of tough, though. Challenging but rewarding as most creative ventures tend to be.

The blank page can be a fearsome opponent. The nothingness intimidates. One of the magical rewards of writing is overcoming the mountain of blank space with a word or an idea. The breakthrough lets the creative gears fall in place and allows the river to flow. 

Perhaps as daunting as the blank page is a second barrier to writing. Its roots lie in the way we are taught to write from day one in elementary school. It’s constrained, tightly-focused writing. The expectation a well-written sentence has to come out of the gate and hit the center target with great precision using a minimum of words. Don’t get me wrong, focus is an absolute in teaching beginning writers. What would written communication be like if we all wrote exactly like your favorite five-year-old breathlessly telling the story of how the clown at the birthday party tripped and popped the balloon elephant he was making which scared the magician’s rabbit who escaped and pooped while hopping across the birthday cake? 

So, out of necessity, we are taught to write tight from the beginning. We are taught we must not take a false step off the path or else, like in Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder, we crush a butterfly and scramble the entire space-time continuum. But what happens when we’re ready to take a step and can’t see even a hint of a path? Like with the blank page, we can get stuck. Paralysis by analysis. 

See? Writing is tough.

So, what’s the remedy?

Well, we first need to loosen the thumbscrews of the deeply ingrained idea of user-focused writing. We need a distraction to help us step back and attack the blank page and/or the paralysis of a constrictive focus. Pull back and give yourself some space. That’s what drafting is. It’s finding your way but on a wide and sometimes rambling path.

(Psst, come closer. I don’t want the writing police or your high school English teacher to hear this.) There are also rabbit holes! Yes! The dreaded rabbit hole can help your writing in more ways than you think if you use them with discipline and measure. 

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 640px-Down_the_Rabbit_Hole.png

John Tenniel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The rabbit hole of research is one of my personal favorite places to hang out as a writer. It’s part of what brings me joy as an ever-curious 58-year-old writer. I used to feel guilty about this research rabbit hole obsession until I discovered that, while the rabbit hole can be a distraction if entered unchecked, it was creating path after path after path for my writing. Paths forward, new paths, paths that veered away from dead ends on discarded writing projects. What has always been considered a waste of time and focus became a great creative tool for me. 

The rabbit hole has become a way to fight through blank page syndrome and break the shackles of tight, and often restrictive, focus that is still ingrained in my brain from elementary school. It’s an idea generator, a brainstorming tool, and a source of necessary or (often at the time) obscure facts which may worm their way into future stories. Out of chaos comes order.

Chaos into order.

The tricks to making the rabbit hole work for you as a writer are simple but can be difficult in execution. The first trick is to stay the master of the rabbit hole, whether it’s the internet, the library, a stack of articles, or books. You can’t turn yourself over completely to it and tumble endlessly from researching what kids might have eaten on the banks of the Nile in the Old Kingdom period to find yourself 45 minutes later checking out the latest Beyonce videos and fashions. 

The second trick is a very useful skill. The beauty of a skill is it can be learned, practiced, and mastered. It’s the ability to look at the chaos, organize it into a fashion that makes sense to you, and store the organized pieces for later. It’s like being a sculptor. Take a block of stone, wood, or clay and remove the pieces that don’t belong in the composition. The skill is the ability to manage information. The skill to find the gold hidden deep within the rabbit hole and then establish order from chaos.

As you can see, rabbit holes can be a writer’s friend and a valuable tool in the writer’s toolbox. Writing is tough. Any tools we acquire to help us over the hills and humps that stand in our way are more valuable than gold. Because, in the end, the most important thing in writing is writing that next word and building our stories one word at a time, brick by brick.

The moral of the story.

Find what works for you. 

Find what brings you joy in doing creative things. 

Do those things. 

Repeat.

 

Alex Lehner, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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A Case for New Beginnings

By on September 5, 2022   /   Articles, For Writers, Writing  

Writing Excuses is in its 17th season!

For years now I’ve listened to a podcast called Writing Excuses. It’s a show that focuses mainly on writing technique, and it’s hosted by a plethora of veteran authors, one of whom is the very talented Brandon Sanderson. A few seasons back, Brandon made a comment about deleting the early chapters of a manuscript and rewriting them completely (in fact, Brandon talks about this often and even includes many of the deleted scenes on his website).

As a writer who barely scrapes together enough time to write a first draft at all, the idea of deleting entire chapters was (okay…is) pretty terrifying. All that work, all that setup, all those precious words just…gone. 

I have beginnings on the brain this month largely because I’m a middle school teacher, and September is a month of beginnings. New classes, new students, new Spongebob Squarepants socks. As I think about it now, there have definitely been school years that could’ve used a better introductory chapter. Life, of course, doesn’t allow us to delete and redraft, but as a writing technique this is something I’m warming up to.

Maybe you’re like me — balking at the thought of trashing entire sections of a manuscript. With that in mind, I’d like to make a case for new beginnings by highlighting a few authors who aren’t shy about laying their work on the chopping block.

The 10% Rule

In his book, On Writing, Stephen King recalls early advice from an editor that suggested his second draft should be 10% shorter than the first. The idea that much of editing is deleting transformed King’s writing and helped propel him to the success he has today. Writer and editor Erin Whalen digs into the details of this strategy on her blog, and it’s definitely worth a look.

Short Chapters

Another wildly successful author who’s recently branched out to middle grade is James Patterson. In countless interviews and articles about his craft, Patterson’s notoriously short chapters are often highlighted and pondered. So much of what gives Patterson’s books the punch and the pace they have is his willingness to sometimes say as little as possible. The underlying mantra here is not too dissimilar from my own mindset when I have to stop by a fellow teacher’s classroom on my way out at the end of the day — get in, get to the point, and get out!

 

Murder Your Darlings

This is perhaps one of the most well-known ideas where writing and editing is concerned, but just to be clear, no one is advocating for actual murder here. The phrase, which has taken various forms and been attributed to several different authors (William Faulkner among the most famous of them), centers on the idea that sometimes deleting the things most precious to us is the best way to advance a story. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule (Margery Bayne at the writing cooperative does a great job unpacking this idea more fully), but the takeaway for me, both as a writer and as a human, is to edit objectively. Getting swept up in the emotion of something is a surefire way to keep stuff around that probably needs to go, whether it’s chapters in a manuscript, junk in the attic, or toxic people in my life (but just to reiterate, actual murder is bad).  

The writing graveyard isn’t as scary as it sounds!

Whether you’re writing a new book or just starting a new season in life, a willingness to remove the unnecessary and even start over entirely is profoundly helpful. I’ve already got a few chapters in my new manuscript that need to go, and thanks to techniques like the writing graveyard, I don’t necessarily have to toss anything permanently (though I suspect some of it should definitely be tossed permanently). 

Best of luck as you embark on new beginnings this fall, and feel free to drop other editing strategies in the comments. Happy writing!

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