Revision and the Multi-Faceted Self

By Amy Beth Sisson

My sister recently sent me a photograph of a piece of paper that had hung on my parents’ bulletin board for decades. It was a poem I had written at age nine, and my current, much older self could not resist revising the words of my child self. Common advice to writers is to let a manuscript sit in between writing and revision, but my example is extreme—most don’t contemplate a fifty-year timespan. This experience made me question the relationship between writing, revision, and the self. 

Maybe the passage of time works to allow us to revise because of the nature of the self. Maybe the gap in time between writing and revision works because the passage of time allows for new facets of the self to come into focus; facets who can stand in more strongly for the reader rather than for the creator. 

Many writers, such as Anne Lamott, talk about this from the perspective of the creation of work. The idea that the revising self is different from the writing self is useful when sitting down to write a first draft. They recommend finding a way to turn off your inner critic. Various techniques are useful for getting into the creative and generative mindset such as free-writing, walking, and meditation. But how do you go about turning the critic back on when revising?

The word critic can mean a lot of different things. I don’t think it’s ever useful to summon the stereotypical teacher with a red pen. I prefer to think of my inner critic as a stand-in for my ideal imagined reader, the person I am trying to connect with. When revising, how can you shift your mind from the wildly creative to the place where you have empathy for the reader’s needs. What do the readers need to know, what might resonate with their experience, what will raise useful ideas and questions for them? When revising, I am striving to access deep empathy for the person interacting with my words.

So, if you can, put the manuscript in a virtual drawer for a time. Think about what the optimal length would be for you. Too long and the revising self might be too far from the material. Stephen King recommends taking a six-week break between drafting and revising. If you take this tack, be accepting of the vicissitudes of life that can interfere with connecting to the revision. Are any of us the same self as we were before the upheavals of 2020? And, of course, if you have a deadline all bets are off. 

Here are some things that have worked for me to get out of my head and into the reader’s. Most of these can be useful regardless of the genre.

1. Move to another room. (I’d say go to a coffee shop if it were not for the Delta variant.) Have you ever gone into a room to do something only to find that you don’t know why you are there? Use this phenomenon to get in touch with your revising self.
2. Try rewriting from a different point of view. When you drafted you consciously or unconsciously selected a point of view to tell the tale. Thinking about the story from another point of view can break you out of assumptions and bring you closer to the reader’s experience. Even if you don’t keep the revision’s point of view, it can inform the work.
3. Try rewriting in a different tense. Changing tenses is a way to achieve a similar effect. If you switch from the present tense to the past tense you may give the reader more scope to understand the context of the events. If you switch from the past to the present tense you may give the reader more of a sense of immediacy. Again, you don’t have to keep this change, but it can be a useful exercise to help you have a new vision.
4. Color code the piece in some way that helps you to see the structure of the work. Play with it.  Some people will highlight specific parts of speech. In longer works some people highlight themes or characters. This can give you a sense of the balance.
5. Work on another genre. One of my critique partners, a short story writer, recently started revising a draft of a children’s book. She found that she was energized when she went back to revising her short story. Working on something for a very different audience helped her break out of her assumptions about her readers.

The next strategies I use help because they allow you to hear as well as see your words. I’m listing them in the order of my preference.

6. Read it out loud. This is very helpful but sometimes I read what I think is on the page rather than what is really on the page and don’t even realize it. 
7. Have the computer read it to you. This is slightly better for me because the computer will never fill in missing words, but the electric voice can be hard for me to focus on.
8. Read it to someone. Having an actual person as my audience forces me to attend in a way that I don’t do when I’m alone.
9. Have someone read it to you. This, for me, is the most effective strategy. I follow along on the page while my generous friend reads my words. I hear where they trip up. I hear where they feel awkward voicing something I wrote. If I can’t find a willing reader, Sometimes I will read something into a recording device on my phone and play back the recording.

Experiment with the ideas above to see what works for you to shift your perspective.

____

Amy Beth Sisson is struggling to emerge, toad-like, from the mud in a small town outside of Philly. Her poetry has appeared in Cleaver Magazine and The Night Heron Barks. Her fiction has appeared in The Best Short Stories of Philadelphia 2021, Enchanted Conversation and Sweet Tree Review. This fall, she left her day job in software development and started an MFA in Poetry at Rutgers Camden. You can follow her work at amybethsisson.com

Crane by Crane

By Irene Hoge Smith

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. . . he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds . . . Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” ~ Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. 1994

Most readers of this blog remember Anne Lamott’s small assignments, one-inch picture frames, and shitty first drafts. Written a quarter-century ago, Bird by Bird remains an invaluable resource for writers at any stage who may founder on a bad day, and now maybe for all of us living in a pandemic and wishing for some instructions. Her most valuable reminder for me is the one referenced by her title—that a project of any size has to be approached one small piece at a time—and this may be especially true when we can’t know the duration and scope of an undertaking. None of us knows how long pandemic time will last, or what more we may be called upon to endure, and it’s already hard to pin down even when it started. (For me, it was in late February, when I decided not to go to San Antonio for AWP. That conference  turned out to be one of the last of such scale to go forward before indoor life began, and the decision was not without controversy.)

Time was an early casualty of the pandemic. Even now, every other day seems to be Confuseday, and as Emily VanDerWerff wrote for Vox, “March was 30 years long and April was 30 minutes long.” We have trouble keeping track of how long we’ve been locked up, like the characters in Ann Patchett’s  Bel Canto. In the novel (loosely based on an actual hostage crisis in Peru) captors and captives are confined together in a seemingly-endless stalemate. Finally compelled to find a way to record the span of time, the revolutionary general ignores the many glossy calendars in the mansion and chooses instead to mark each day on the expensive wallpaper with a blue crayon.

The second Thursday in March was the last day I met my psychotherapy patients face-to-face, explaining that we would have to do telephone or video sessions at least until the end of the month. Two days later I wrote the first entry in what has become a sporadic plague diary.

Saturday March 14, 2020.  Day #2. People are beginning to say “for the duration,” as if we are living in one of the great wars of the last century. At home, we are grateful to have each other. We are already getting on each other’s nerves.

During the first weeks of lockdown I found myself too distracted to write, and couldn’t concentrate on a book I was supposed to review. My telephone sessions with patients in various states of fear about the virus (and outrage about the president), left me exhausted, and on some afternoons I found myself noodling around online, scaring myself silly. A better option sometimes was to start dinner early, or go for a walk, or, on a rainy day, listen to a recorded book while doing something with my hands.

That’s how I came to fold the first paper crane. My poet mother, who gave me my first book of origami when I was ten years old, was a paper-folder throughout her long life. I taught my own children, and still have a sizable stash of brightly-colored paper squares. The art of Japanese paper folding called origami—combining words oru (to fold) and kami (paper)—goes back to the invention of paper in China almost two thousand years ago. After World War II it was taken up in the United States, often by people like my mother (lefties, peaceniks, people who didn’t like Ike and hated McCarthy.)

It took me about five-and-a-half careful minutes to fold one paper crane, a meditative process that gradually calmed the overactive fight-flight part of my tired brain. Perhaps, I thought, I might make an origami crane for each day of the lockdown. I printed “March 13” (the first day after the last day I saw my office) on one paper wing of that first orange crane. By the beginning of April, twenty cranes hung on a thread in my window.

Friday April 10, 2020. Day #29. Another gorgeous day—chilly, blustery, full of sun. CNN says the peak level of infection will be this weekend. The last paper crane I made was a week ago.

We’re living an experience for which we can find no comparisons. At my age I find it startling, as Fran Lebowitz said in a New Yorker interview, to “have something happen that doesn’t remind you of anything else.”  We can’t grasp the big picture, we’re pretty sure nothing will ever be the same, and we can’t think about that. We don’t necessarily have a report due tomorrow like Anne Lamott’s paralyzed brother, but we’re terrified much of the time anyway.

Friday May 8, 2020. Day #? I don’t care what day it is. Wildly contradictory messages emerge from different sources; no consensus and no leadership. Today it seems entirely plausible that our president is trying to kill us.

The answer to getting through a long project is sometimes “very short assignments,” as Lamott advises of writing. Something small enough to see “through a one-inch picture frame.” So I sweep the floor, have a phone session with a patient who is finally recovering from the virus, clear off my desk, and make one origami bird, writing on its little wing: “Sunday May 31.”
___

Irene Hoge Smith lives, writes, and practices psychotherapy near Washington D.C. Her essays have appeared in various tiny venues, and she is toiling away, bird by bird, on a memoir about her lost-and-found poet mother francEyE.

 

Angel Talk

A guest post by Melissa Ballard:

I’m sitting at my desk, getting ready to write.

Translation: I’m checking Facebook.

I hear a rustle, followed by a sigh, and I see movement out of the corner of my eye. When I look up there is a tall, slim woman with spiky blonde hair lounging on my upholstered chaise. She is wearing black Vans, ripped jeans, and a black t-shirt with “Rabid Feminist” in white letters. Her scent is that of excellent coffee; the to-go cup she’s holding must be from the Slow Train Cafe.

“Who are you?” I ask. “How did you get here?”

“I’m your angel, Gloria. Never mind how I got here. So, how many words have you written this morning?”

“Um, I don’t do word counts. That doesn’t work for me. I just write, mostly when I’m inspired. Sometimes for a long time, sometimes not for very long.”

She snorts. “So, then, none? Zero? You haven’t written anything and it’s almost noon?”

“Wait, are you the Angel of the House that Virginia Woolf wrote about? I thought you’d be smaller, and wearing gauzy robes, with long hair in a loose knot. But if you are that angel, you should know I cleaned the refrigerator this morning.”

Gloria rolls her eyes. “Are you kidding me? This is the 21^st Century. I’m here to make sure you’re writing. So, what’s the problem?”

“The fridge was really dirty. I found sticky stuff that had dried in all the ridges of the vegetable crisper. And in the fruit drawer, bits of the orange plastic mesh bags from the clementines we ate six months ago. Oh, and a couple of cat hairs. We don’t even have a cat!”

“Great. Next time write first, then clean. And now that you’ve cleaned, why aren’t you writing?”

“Well, right now, I’m composting.”

Gloria sniffs. “In your office? Why don’t I smell anything?”

“No, no, it’s a term from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. It’s when you’re thinking about what you’re writing, but not actually writing.”

Gloria squints at me. “What’s that noise? Oh, it’s Natalie. She’s groaning at the way you’ve used her idea about the need to process some experiences before you can write about them, and turned it into a procrastination device. How many books about writing have you read, anyway?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A few.”

Gloria rolls her eyes again. “I have something for you. Catch!”

I usually miss when someone says “catch,” but this time I reach up at just the right time. It’s a good thing, too, because the object is small, but heavy and sharp.

It takes me a minute to realize: it’s a one-inch picture frame.

I smile. “Anne Lamott. Bird by Bird! Right? It’s a metaphor for focusing on one small part of a piece, instead of constantly worrying about the bigger picture.”

Gloria groans. “So, you’ve read that one, too.”

I nod. I squirm in my desk chair, hoping to block her view of the shelves behind me, which are crammed with writing manuals, collections of essays about writing, and memoirs about writing.

“So, it’s not as though you don’t know what to do,” she says. You just need to get out of your own way and write. My work here is done.”

Gloria disappears as quickly as she came. I stare at the empty chair.

Perhaps I imagined her.

As my eyes wander back to my computer screen, I read a card I’ve placed on my desk, in my line of sight. It’s a quote from Natalie Goldberg’s Wild Mind:

Forget expectations.

Just write.

And, finally, I do.

_______________________________________________

Melissa Ballard composts, checks Facebook and, occasionally, writes from her desk in Oberlin, Ohio. You can read her essays at https://melissaballardsite.wordpress.com/

Yes, Virginia, There Is A Sh*tty First Draft

Sorry kid, we regret we’re unable to include your pony request in North Pole Review, please keep us in mind for future submissions

Interviewing an author for the Brevity Podcast, I ask how his book is coming along. He says it’s terrible. He has no idea how he’ll make his way through, finish a draft so he can fix it in revisions. I trust and respect this writer, but part of me still thinks, yeah, right. I know him to be an amazing writer, I love his work. I can’t imagine him writing the same pages of unfocused crap I do.

An early-career writer friend says, “Every time I read an interview with a famous author, they all say they write shitty first drafts. But they never show them to anyone, so it just sounds like something they say to make crappy writers feel better about themselves. Like telling us to believe in Santa Claus.”

The idea of the shitty first draft has been around for a long time. Ernest Hemingway: “The first draft of anything is shit.” Bernard Malamud: “The first draft of anything is suspect unless one is a genius.” Many of us know the concept from Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird:

Shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.

People tend to look at successful writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter.

But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts.

But it’s still hard to believe.

As a circus performer, I spent hours in the gym falling into mats over and over again, watching people I loved and respected, people I knew to be far more skilled than me, also fall into mats over and over again in the same room. In a museum, I can see Picasso’s sketches and mistakes hung next to his masterworks. But once a writer’s no longer in school, we rarely see the process of our peers. (If you’re still in school, start planning who you’re going to stay in touch with to share work.) I’m lucky to have a few writing buddies I can share shapeless early drafts with, people I know will be sensitive to whether I need encouragement or critique, people whose early and middle and final drafts I see, too, so it feels like an exchange instead of judgement.

Shitty first drafts aren’t the only way to write. Some writers prefer revising as they go. I’m sure some writers think through their story so thoroughly in their heads, or outline so precisely, that once they sit down, the right words come out in more or less the right order. But for many of us, the first draft is basically telling the story to ourselves. Thinking on the page–finding the heart of the story way down on page five, a single beautiful sentence in the margin, or the perfect opening in the final paragraph.

As a teacher, it’s embarrassing to share a terrible, misguided, overwritten, overwrought first draft with our students. As a writer, no-one wants to let our weak sentences out into the world before we’ve muscled them up and trimmed them down. But there’s value in a a sloppy, disorganized, poorly written first draft. It’s not a failure, it’s a necessary first step. It’s barre exercises before ballet, scales before singing, charcoal on newsprint before oil on canvas. It’s writing a 1500-word narrative essay/journal entry that becomes a 700-word hermit-crab essay. Taking the time to assemble the materials of events, characters, plot and themes, letting them be jumbled until they tell us what they want to say, trusting that from the pile of pieces we can find a story, we can pull a shining thread.

Yes, Virginia, wherever there are writers, there are shitty first drafts. And just as presents and nibbled cookies prove Santa showed up in the night, the very existence of finished, glorious work means someone, somewhere, wrote a terrible first draft.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. Want writing news, events, and upcoming webinars? Join the A-List!

On Hating Writing from Prompts

By Alice Lowe

You hate writing from prompts, because you’re no good at it, because despite the human brain’s instantaneous capacity to absorb new input and coordinate an appropriate response, you cannot put pencil to paper with any degree of intelligence or coherence. Within seconds of hearing a prompt—prompts like “write about saying goodbye” or “riding the all-night train” or “a pool of blue water”—all potentially interesting and challenging topics—you’re at a loss, stammering internally, increasingly anxious as a fleeting memory or opening line evades you, as any possible direction remains out of reach.

You look around the table—prompt-writing usually takes place in a small group around a table—you look around as the prompt is being read, and at the dropped voice, the sound of the concluding period (or ellipsis) ending the prompt, it’s as if a starting shot has been fired, heads down, pens and pencils moving in notebooks with seeming constancy, confidence and speed. “Keep your pen on the paper,” you’re told, keep writing, don’t stop to deliberate or, god forbid, to edit, to scratch out a word and replace it with another; be spontaneous, let your hand be the channel for the words flowing unobstructed from your mind like water over the falls.

It doesn’t work that way for you, how well you know this, but you came here to write, to get past this impasse or phobia or whatever you want to call it, and so you grasp the prompt with both hands and hold it vise-like to keep it steady as you wrestle it to the table and firmly secure it with your left elbow, while with your right hand you grasp at the effluvia that looses itself from your mind until you have something in your fist, something soft and flabby but something nevertheless, and then, after more hesitation, after staring at the dark water stains like Rorschach blots on the ceiling, you start to write, and then lo and behold, you get on a roll of sorts, you write in fits and starts, but you write until “Time” says the timekeeper, and you stop abruptly, mid-sentence, mid-word, it’s like taking the GRE, pencils down or you’ll be disqualified.

Participants are encouraged though not required to read what they’ve fashioned, and the rules are reiterated—no comments or critique, as these spontaneous efforts rightfully fall into the category of Anne Lamott’s “shitty first drafts,” accepted and forgiven no matter how abysmal, received with half smiles of concealed scorn or pity or envy—and you listen and think, jeez how’d she do that off the cuff, or what crap and here I thought I was bad, and then it’s your turn and you know you could pass but you think come on now, this is part of the discipline, what you came for, and you read, knowing as you do that it’s a heap of excrement, you’ve written business letters with crisper verbs and better development, but you read, your handwriting getting increasingly indecipherable as you go, so you skip a word here, a phrase there, until you finish and look up and smile wanly without making eye contact with anyone as the next person takes up the baton, and then it’s all over, and you pack up your stuff and say your goodbyes, and you go down the stairs and out the door and head for home, an hour-long walk, and wouldn’t you know it, about a third of the way there you’re struck with the big “aha”—this is what I could have, should have written to that prompt, and you beat yourself up a bit for not thinking of it earlier, but you’re excited, and you start composing in your mind, and you walk faster and faster to get home and get to your computer to spew out these finely crafted sentences, the spot-on metaphors, the brilliant stream of prose.

And when, after several drafts, after considerable editing and revision and all of the pains that go into a completed essay, you read through it a few times, and you  smile and nod and say to yourself, “yes, this is it,” you submit it to several journals, and it’s accepted by one of them and published, and you look at it in print and recall that if it hadn’t been for that prompt, this sterling piece of work might never have seen the light of day—and yet you still hate writing from prompts.

__

Alice Lowe reads and writes about life and literature, food and family. Her personal essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including 1966, The Baltimore Review, Crab Creek Review, The Millions, Permafrost, and The Tishman Review. Her work is cited among the Notable Essays in the 2016 Best American Essays and has been nominated for the 2016 Best of the Net Anthology. Alice is the author of numerous essays and reviews on Virginia Woolf’s life and work, including two monographs published by Cecil Woolf Publishers in London. Alice lives in San Diego, California and blogs at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.

First Drafts are Lousy, and That’s Good

Julie, with paintings she made while avoiding first drafts

By Julie Cole

Anne Lamott calls it the “the shitty first draft.” Ann Hood prefers the more delicate phrase, “a beautiful mess.” Whatever your chosen label, it’s that first version of your story or essay, the one James Earl Jones is so eloquently narrating in your head (even though what shows up on the page is a babbling toddler.) Why is there such disconnect with our vision and the elusive first draft?

Ann Patchett articulately describes the issue in her essay “The Getaway Car.” She refers to her unwritten work as a butterfly fluttering around in her head:

This book that I have not yet written one word of, a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book, and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is the single perfect joy in my life…and all I have to do to is put it down on paper and then everyone can see the beauty I see. And so I do…I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it.

As writers, we have all committed this type of homicide, but isn’t it involuntary manslaughter? It wasn’t our intention; we were just trying to transfer the brilliant concept in our head into a stunning story on the page. This disconnect between what we envision and our initial draft can cause paralysis. I know this all too well. My fear of the first draft was partly responsible for my 20-year hiatus from writing. Of course, I can rationalize that the first ten years were justified. It was the mid-90s and I got caught up in the young adult whirlwind of marriage, two children, a new job and an out-of-state move. Despite a lifetime of writing, there just wasn’t time.

But by 2005 life had settled, the kids were older, and I was excited to reconnect with my passion. I began participating in writing workshops and trying to reclaim this dormant part of my identity. My mind exploded with ideas; characters showed up while I was trying to sleep and had the most fascinating conversations. My mind was spinning with ideas; I began to write my novel, capturing all the brilliant dialogue and scenes that had been swirling in my head. It was as if some force had taken over my body, my hand was sweeping across the page at a furious pace. I just let it flow for several months and then one day I sat down as an editor and read my first draft. I was aghast. It resembled nothing of what I had imagined. When I examined the draft again, I felt embarrassed that I had waited ten years only to produce a pile of crap. There was only one logical explanation—my talent had evaporated. Defeated, I put the manuscript away and subconsciously focused on other activities for the next ten years. In hindsight, I’m convinced it was the horror of the shitty first draft that prompted me to find other outlets for my creativity.

So what does one do when they are unwittingly avoiding their writing? Well, I started with basket weaving. A relative who was quite proficient showed me the process and I began buying and soaking reeds and weaving baskets of various sizes and colors. And then there was the foray into acrylic painting classes offered through our local recreation center. I showed up every Thursday night with a blank canvas and a tote bag of rich paints. Blending the colors and creating abstract landscapes calmed me. There was also an excursion into mosaic. I loved breaking pottery shards and putting the pieces back together; it was very symbolic at a time I was going through a traumatic divorce.  Throughout this period, I still journaled, but I was too busy to really write, because I had signed up for a series of improv classes. After a year and a half of intensive instruction, I was good, but not great; sometimes funny and often clever, but improv was not my true passion. I rationalized that improv would help me with my writing, which it did when I would occasionally write.

But in January 2015 the universe sent me a wake-up call. The global staffing company I was working for went through a series of restructurings. I, and two-thirds of my team, were suddenly unemployed. The silver lining was that I had a healthy severance and a lot of time on my hands.

Each day, I would sit by a roaring fire and journal, and I finally accepted the fact that I had talked about writing more than I had written. I found my box of old manuscripts and saw their imperfection, but also their potential. That’s when I decided to get serious about matching my actions with my intentions. I applied, and was accepted, into the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. The requirements have been intense. Each month, I’m responsible for reading two books, submitting approximately 25 pages of new creative work as well as two critical essays. Through the rigor of this program, I have learned to not only accept, but embrace the shitty first draft (SFD). Now I intentionally scrawl “SFD” on all first drafts, in essence giving me permission to produce a less than perfect version. It also helps when I look back at prior work to not be horrified. But I have really focused on the ‘shit’ part of the shitty first draft. I recognize that this initial piece of prose is my fertilizer. It takes a lot of manure for a rose to blossom. It’s how we can go from shit to exquisite.

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Julie Cole lives in Milwaukee and has recently re-entered the writing world after a 20-year hiatus. Before her procrastination period, she worked as a copywriter at The Columbus Dispatch and held several corporate communications positions. She holds a BA in journalism from The Ohio State University and is pursuing her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

 

 

 

Anne Lamott Is Right

Ellen Shriner

By Ellen Shriner

Whenever I tell people I’m a writer, they always ask, “Are you published?” For years, being published was my primary writing goal. So when I first saw Anne Lamott’s advice in Bird by Bird, my reaction was, “Yeah, right”—

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

At that point, I was in my 40’s and had decided to split my time between my career—writing marketing communications—and my passion—writing essays and memoir. I was determined to get serious and break through. Lamott’s words sounded inspirational, but I wanted to be published. Anything less and I was a wannabe.

A decade later, I rediscovered her comments and wished I believed them. Then my infrequent publications would feel OK. I was in my 50’s and had been steadily working at the craft of writing: taking classes, participating in a writers’ group, submitting pieces, and revising my memoir. BIG publication (i.e., a book) was elusive but still seemed possible. Despite my skepticism, something about her perspective compelled me, so I filed it away.

Like most writers, I crave the cosmic acknowledgement being published brings. Publication means an editor or publisher considers my writing worthy. But at 62, I have to admit cosmic acknowledgement has been sporadic: a dozen of my pieces have been published in anthologies and literary magazines. And yet, I’m still writing.

I have begun to see the wisdom in what Lamott says. After devoting ten years to writing and revising my book-length memoir and several more years to seeking publication, I’ve accepted that it’s unlikely to be published. Although I was sad to let go of that dream, it was also a relief. The single-minded pursuit of that book meant I didn’t have much time for new topics or styles of writing.

Writing is its own reward

Today, I write essays and I blog. Initially, WordSisters was meant to build my platform so I’d be more attractive to publishers. After a few months, I discovered I liked the discipline of blogging. It’s a shared blog, so I have to come up with something every other week. And I do. When it’s my turn, I complete a short piece and put it out there. Now and then, a blog falls short, but many of them are pretty good.

Some weeks I feel like I’m whispering into the void. Half a dozen people like the blog on Facebook and even fewer comment on it. That’s disappointing, but I try not to dwell on it. Many people deal with an onslaught of written words every day. It’s inevitable mine will get lost now and then.

After I focused on writing essays and blogs, I sensed the magic of Lamott’s advice. At first, tiny glimmers of peacefulness replaced my anxious striving. Just sitting down to write is a win. Of course, I get discouraged and feel loser-ish sometimes. But more often, I feel flashes of contentment and simple joy in the work. I’m holding up my part of the writing bargain, regardless of what editors do with it.

These days, I’m writing whether or not anybody publishes it. Because I want to. When drafting, I love being caught up in the rush of ideas and words. When revising, I enjoy the challenge of coaxing meaning and clarity from my jumble of thoughts.

Anne Lamott was right: writing is its own reward.

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Ellen Shriner is one of the founders and contributors to WordSisters, a shared blog (wordsisters.wordpress.com). Her short memoirs have been published in several anthologies (The Heart of All That Is: Reflections on Home, Mourning Sickness, and It’s About Time). Her personal essays have appeared in Wisconsin Review, Mothers Always Write, BrainChild, Midwest Home, Philosophical Mother, Minnesota Parent, and Messages from the Heart. She has written a book-length memoir about coming of age in the workplace during the late 1970s. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, and she has two grown sons.

 

 

Finding the Time

I want to write a book.

Of course I do.

After I work out for fifteen minutes, drink two bottles of water, wash the dishes, drop the curtains at the tailors, do a few hours for my freelance job, research places to submit, listen to a podcast, eat lunch and make love to my boyfriend, not in that order.

I’m not sure where the book time is going to fit. And my sense of “responsibility” wants me to be responsible to everything else I can possibly commit to, before allowing me to commit to my own creative life.

Anne Lamott’s essay for Sunset proposes a terrifyingly simple solution. What can writers give up? What matters less than writing? Where can we carve out an hour for a page?

This is what I say: First of all, no one needs to watch the news every night, unless one is married to the anchor. Otherwise, you are mostly going to learn more than you need to know about where the local fires are, and how rainy it has been: so rainy! That is half an hour, a few days a week, I tell my students. You could commit to writing one page a night, which, over a year, is most of a book.

Maybe the curtains can stay hemmed with binder clips. If I leave the washing up, my boyfriend will (gladly) do it. Especially if I skip the podcast and keep the making love.

Read Ms. Lamott’s essay here.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book. Want writing news, events, and upcoming webinars? Join the A-List!

On Writer’s Terror

A guest post from Sharon Rawlette, suitable for Halloween:

Everyone who is a writer or knows a writer is aware of how terrifying it can be to sit down in front of a blank page. Why? A carpenter doesn’t look at a bare cinderblock foundation, drop his tool belt, and run away screaming. A chef doesn’t look at an empty frying pan and despair. Why does the writer, confronted with a blank piece of paper or a window labeled “Document1,” want to give up the ghost?

I think it has something to do with the fact that the carpenter has blueprints. The chef has recipes. And no one will complain if they build or cook the same thing twice. The writer has no such luxuries. The writer is cursed to start over, from scratch, every time. Like Sisyphus. Except the writer has to make the boulder, and each time it has to be a unique but precisely sculpted blend of levity and gravity, transcendence and relatability. In short, a miracle. By 11:59 tonight, please.

Honestly, I think the real trouble lies in that a writer doesn’t know how she does what she does. It’s not wise to admit that these days, when everyone is supposed to know everything, especially about the way they make their living. But it’s true. A writer can make herself sit at the desk and string words together, but she can’t make them be the right ones. She can try to think profound thoughts and have unparalleled insights, but trying will probably make the good stuff flee, like the soot sprites in Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro.

Writing is not so much a process of creating as it is waiting–waiting for the good stuff to show up. We writers fill up a lot of pages in the waiting, what Anne Lamott calls “shitty first drafts.” Sometimes there are second drafts that are just as shitty. Or third drafts that are even worse. But the practiced writer keeps cranking out the pages until, here and there in all the crap, they see enough decent ideas or turns of phrase to make them believe they have the kernel of a story, or an essay, or a book. Then they trim out as many of the awful passages as they can bear (sometimes the awful passages can be very close to one’s heart), whittling things down to a tenth of their previous size, and the process begins again. Write, write, write, until more good stuff appears and we can throw more of the crap away.

There is no recipe. No blueprint. No line of stepping stones that will lead one to the creation of a brilliant piece of literature without moments of wandering in the dark. We writers strive to bring into being something bold, original, and heart-stoppingly magnificent. But, as clichéd as it may sound, that stuff only arrives by way of inspiration. Don’t get me wrong. We writers have to work hard. We have to show up. We have to put pen to paper or fingertip to key. We have to cry and sweat and bleed. But there’s no direct link between our suffering and the end result. Our tears, our sweat, our blood get poured out, and then, magically, from somewhere off in left field, the miracle appears. And the end result seems so disconnected from our effort that we wonder why it couldn’t have just shown up earlier, before we had that little visit to hell.

But of course, the work was necessary. The work did get us the result. It just happened somewhere in the depths of the unconscious. We couldn’t see the gears turning, the neurons firing, the gods descending and re-ascending from our little brains. And so, when it’s time to face the next blank page, we still have no clue how we do what we do.

And we’re not at all sure that it will ever happen again.

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Sharon Rawlette’s work has previously appeared in Salon and the academic journal Philosophical Studies.

Trapping the Ephemeral: Meg Rains

Meg Rains,  author of “The Memory of My Disappearance“ in the March 2013 issue of Brevity, reflects on the origin of her essay and the need to sometimes drop the story line:

It was my first date with J., and I talked for over three hours. About my mother. I was desperate and excited to explain myself. Or maybe I was just nervous. In any case, he finally swooped in for a kiss just to shut me up. You don’t have to tell me everything tonight, he said.

I’ve always been clumsy telling the tale: She was my best friend; had a psychotic break; disappeared for more than a decade; left me heartsick and grief-struck. For years I was tangled in nothing but story. Then she reappeared—this very familiar stranger—with only six months to live. I brought her to me; bore witness; knew that those moments in the nursing home made me the luckiest girl in the world.

J. may well have been The Little Dutch Boy; dam(n) this narrative, please.

Plenty of writers focus on getting the first draft down, and then going back in to comb and craft. But that makes me anxious. As if confronting reams of familial footage in some darkened theatre with a burned-out exit sign. (Whoa, that was melodramatic—which would likely be the outcome if I tried to work that way.)

For a long time, I didn’t know how to work with the material at all. So I didn’t. I read. I stared out every available window. Took lots of walks. And naps. I collected sentence fragments and word lists; made collages with paper and paint and glue. I decided to be gentle on myself; consider it all processing.

Finally, two things got my momentum going. The first was an art exhibit where everything was 5” x 5”—paintings, sculptures, framed flash fictions. It all seemed so manageable, you know, emotionally. It was Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird in action.

The second was something my friend Joshua Poteat once said about his writing process: “Collect notes on most anything… amass a large amount of random items… try to cram a bunch of it into a piece by removing its context and make it work all together.”

Those sentence fragments started to come in handy. So I’d pick out a few at a time and, rather than building the narrative, I’d attempt to frame up a feeling, which I soon realized was akin to trapping the ephemeral.

In Start Where You Are, Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön suggests that we “… begin to drop the story line and experience what all this messy stuff behind the story line feels like.” She’s referring to ways of living, of course. Though, I love this idea in the context of writing.

What use is a storyteller who drops the story line? I use this question as a kōan to consider each time I sit down to work. These days, I’m finding comfort in the process, which generally looks like this: slouch back / lean forward / slide out / rearrange. Whether this refers to my writing or my posture depends upon the day.

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Meg Rains grew up in Little Rock, Ark.; dropped out of music school; graduated from Emerson College; worked in advertising, the arts, psychiatry, philanthropy, et al.; took an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts; and nowadays lives in Richmond, Va., where she nine-to-fives in an office park.