storygirl

One of the best things to do when I am having trouble getting started writing is to read.  What I read is going to depend on a lot of things: how I feel, what I want to write, what kind of inspiration I need, etc.  Here, though, is a short list of the go-to books that make me want to write again.

Books on writing

Writing Down the Bones or Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg

Natalie Goldberg doesn’t give a lot of practical tips or nitty gritty solutions for various types of writing.  What she does offer up are healthy portions of inspiration and courage for writers of all kinds.   Somehow reading these books always makes me feel good about writing and more willing to pick up a pen.

In the Palm of your Hand

This book is my favorite resource for writing poetry.  It offers various types of poems with models, assignments, and practical tips.

Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern

The absolute best book I’ve ever read about writing fiction.  It lays out the various different shapes fiction can come in.  It is an amazing way to look at fiction and will help you to write better immediately.

Fiction

I really love language, so reading authors who know how to kiss the written word really gets me excited about writing again.  Some good ones I’ve read lately:

Unless by Carol Shields

Wedding in December by Anita Shreve

Poetry

When I want to write poetry, the best thing to read is poetry.  I like to read contemporary poets, especially American female poets.  Places I look for new poetry:

<a href=”http://www.poets.org”>The Society of American Poets</a>

<a href=”http://poems.com”>Poetry Daily</a>

<a href=”http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/”>Poetry 180</a>

I don’t know about you, but this is the time of year when I am least likely to do any writing that I consider productive.  Whenever I sit down to write in my journal, I find my mind wandering to the many obligations that I have for Christmas and the things that I ought to be doing.   Even my Christmas card notes start to sound contrived and distracted.

And yet, and yet.  There’s so much beauty in the world at this time of year.  The image of myself standing outside, snow in my hair, smiling up at the heavens. . . you just need to add Nat King Cole singing The Christmas Song in the background and it seems like a scene from a movie.  Perhaps a very cheesy movie, but at this time of year I’m not sure I care.  I wish that I had the words to capture the glittering of the lights on the houses, the warmth of being snuggly inside while the world turns white outside, the  bright greens and reds emerging from what would otherwise be gray.  But all my words seem insufficient, and I just keep fixating on the images and the sounds.  Maybe I need to get my camera out, or learn to paint.

And once again it becomes clear why I can’t write this time of year.

But I can, of course I can.  It wasn’t too long ago I was in college, with final papers due for lit classes this time of year.  Munching cookies and folding paper snowflakes while letting The English Patient turn over and over in my head.  Finishing a quilt while studying a psychology textbook and eating Chinese food at 2 in the morning.  Finding a way for it to be Christmas and finals at the same time, finding a way for everything that needed to come out of me to do so.  But now, here I am, stunted by my own movements forward, convincing myself that I can’t do two things at once, can’t be two things at once, that if it’s Christmas, I need to write about Christmas, and that I can’t do that well.  There’s a whole world to write about, and a past and a future.  I just need to pick a new place to start.

In my most recent move I threw out all of my old notebooks.  It was kind of a rash decision.  We were packing things and I couldn’t come up with a reason to justify bringing them.  For the past two years, I had been occasionally pulling them off the shelf and re-reading old entries.  To be honest, I probably spent more time re-reading them than I spent writing.  I surprised myself, I was sometimes charmed by myself, and I uncovered some damn good writing that I never expected to be there.

But the truth is, I needed to stop.  I didn’t just get rid of the notebooks to save space or to keep from having to pack them.  I got rid of them because until I let go of what I had written, I was running out of space for what I was going to write next.  It was perhaps a bit more unceremonious than I would have liked; my darling words just flung in a trash bag.  And sometimes I wonder if someday I will regret it, I will want to have those memories, to have tangible evidence of a life lived and of the writing that went with it.  But I think right now I want to live my life and write my writing instead of dwelling on what was before.  It was time for the old notebooks to go.

What do you do with your old notebooks?  Do you keep them?  For how long?

There is something simultaneously freeing and terrifying about sending your writing out into the world.  I have been writing since I was about 13.  I’ve filled notebook after notebook, I have folders on my computer full of poems.  I have written and deleted more than some people I know have written in their lifetimes.  But to write something and put it out there where other people can see it, where they can hate it or criticize it or . . . just completely ignore it, fills me with utter panic.

My instincts tell me to hold back, to not put the truth on the page, to guard myself and my feelings against public scrutiny.  I know that good writing is raw, is open, puts everything out there, but I just can’t make myself do it.  So instead I try to be cute and clever, witty.  None of that is real.  None of that is what I would want to read. But who I really am?  Why would anyone want to read that either?

So, there’s truth.  I am alone, I am lost.  I have trouble catching my breath.  I am married and glad that I am.  I am in love.  But I know that there’s more to life.  I am looking for answers, looking for meaning and purpose.  My whole life I’ve been the good girl, the one who did everything right, did everything well, but nothing has ever been easy for me. I have never been able or willing to show anyone who I really was.   I want to say it, I want to write about it, but I don’t even know who it is anymore.   I am sad, very sad, and I don’t know how else to say it.

There it is, the first bit of truth I’ve said in a long time.  If I don’t look at it, if I don’t re-read it before I publish it, maybe I’ll be able to put it out there.

When I taught 8th grade creative writing, I used to have to come up with journal entries on a daily basis, as well as writing games and take home assignments.   Since I’ve been hungry for inspiration, I decided to go back through them and try some of my favorites myself.  If you use one of these starters, please feel free to post a comment below or a link to what you have written, or if you use them with a class, let me know how it goes.

Write about your favorite toy from childhood.

Describe your bedroom with a focus that shows something specific about you.

You throw a penny into a wishing well.  What happens next?

Choose an object in your bag to “interview.”  What are its biggest fears?  Dreams?  Plans for the future?

Bob is having a bad day.   Why?

Make a list of everything blue you’ve seen today.

Start with the phrase, “I never expected it to start today” and write for 10 minutes

Write one page using all of the following words: umbrella, innocent, purple, Utah, cheesecake.  Give it a title.

The truth is, when you get right down to it, writing is work.  Even if you love it, even if you don’t make a penny off it - and even if you don’t intend to make a penny off of it - writing is hard work.  It requires a kind of mental perseverance that most of us don’t exercise in other areas of our lives.  You have to take an idea, develop meaningful prose (or poetry) around that idea, and find a way to put it into words that will convey your meaning to something else.  Writing is an act of interpretation, or communication, of meaning making, of emotional release.  It can be draining, can be difficult,  can fight against you when you try to make it work.

And if you want to do it, want to do it for real, it takes work.  You have to keep doing it even when you’re sure it isn’t working.  You have to commit to doing it even if you don’t want to.  You have to take all the raw stuff of life and mold it into something beautiful.

For me, the best way to conquer that is to schedule my writing in as if it was a job, even when it isn’t.  To get dressed, turn off the TV, log off of any social networking or chat sites, and not let myself do anything but writing until I’ve either reached my goal or the time has run out.  Once in a while it’s pure drudgery and torture.  Sometimes - most times - it’s a delight, and by the end I’m very glad I did it.

It isn’t easy.  If it were easy, everyone would do it.  If you expect it to be easy, or if you think that it’s easy for everyone but you, you will be horribly frustrated.  But if you do the work: if you read, study the craft and most of all write, you will be rewarded.

I’m in the process of reinventing my life: new city, new apartment, new job.  The first thing that I let go when things got crazy was my writing.  This was absolutely the wrong thing to do.

The truth is, for me and for a lot of people, the easiest way to make sense out of life is to write about it.  When you put the words on paper or on a computer screen, suddenly they are linear and clear instead of swirling in a cloud through your head.  The simple acts of forming sentences and paragraphs force you to impose some kind of logic on your most illogical impulses.  The more you write about it, the more you start to understand.

I always feel like, when things aren’t going well, I don’t have anything to say until I get everything else in my life worked out.  In fact, I can’t work anything else out until I write first.  And what’s more, I realize now that what I like to read the most is written with a certain sort of rambling honesty.   Truthfully, I don’t want advice from someone who has written an outline.  I want someone’s heart on the page, I want to feel the vulnerability, the confusion and the panic, and to see it start to come together and make sense.

I have been feeling lost, I have been looking for a way back, and now I realize that I had it all along.  Writing is the way to get my head together, it’s the way to connect with other people, and if I do it right, it might even work out to be a great new job.

There are certain moments in my life that I just keep coming back to in my journal writing.  Moments when something changed, moments of loss or victory, moments I’m still trying to figure out or make sense of.  Sometimes when I sit down to write, I just start with “I remember” and then write whatever comes to me, letting my mind flow from one idea to another.  When I keep fixated on one thing, though, I know that it’s going to need more work than that. 

When I’m having trouble getting past something, either in my writing or in my life, the only way I can find the truth about it is to write it every day until I get it right.  I don’t mean that I revise and rewrite the same text.  I mean that I write about it, turn the page, and then write about it again, without re-reading what I’ve already written.  I write about the same moment, or a different moment.  Sometimes they get better, sometimes they get worse, but I just keep writing about it until I feel like I’ve said everything I need to say.

When I do this, I find that my writing starts to flow faster.  I write about other things too, and at some point I hit a point where when I start writing about my fixation, I find myself writing “I dont’ want to talk about this anymore” and then I let myself go on to other things.  When I feel like I’m done, and I give myself some space from it, I can often go back and find the most precious kernels of truth in it, the thing I was afraid to say for so long, that I don’t even necessarily remember writing.

The same thing works with fiction.  If you write a chapter, an opening, a character sketch, and it doesn’t feel right, just turn the page and write it again.  Then do it again.  Keep writing it until you dont’ feel like writing it anymore.  Then, when you’re done, give yourself some space from it and write something else.

When you look back at it later, you’ll be able to find somewhere what it is that you really wanted to say.  It may be in the first one, or the last one, but somewhere in  your writing there will be truth.

We all have days when we just don’t want to write, when it feels like work, when it feels like we just have nothing to say, when we can find a million and one things to do that don’t involve writing and that all seem terribly urgent (but aren’t).  Once in a while it’s okay to be compassionate with yourself, but if you have too many of those days you’ll lose momentum.  You’ll glance down at your journal and realize that you haven’t written in months.  So, here’s my list of things that I can do when I don’t feel like writing, but know I should.  I hope that readers will add to this list, since I can always use suggestions myself.

1.  Pick a writing topic that lets you whine a little, like how to write when you don’t wan to.

2. Disconnect from the Internet so you can’t convince yourself that reading another self-improvement article (and then another . . . and another) will get you into your groove again.

3.  Don’t clean your house.  Don’t cook.  Have sandwiches for dinner.

4. (Thanks to Natalie Goldberg for this one) Open your journal and start a page with “I remember” or “I know.”  Set a timer for 10 (or 20 or 30 minutes) and write the whole time.

5.  Fill an entire page of your journal with a single word again and again. Pick a word that’s fun to say or that has multiple meanings.  Half of writing if physical and once you’ve been at it for a little while, you’ll have loosened up.

6.  Take your notebook and go to the park or a coffee house or the library.  Best if it’s somewhere that you don’t have anything to do but write.

7.  Give yourself a deadline.  Set a minimum page limit and a date by which you must have finished it.  Don’t worry about what you write, but fill the pages.

8.  Make lists.  They’re often easier than prose.   If you’re feeling especially fluid, turn them into list poems.

9.  Pick a page from your journal and copy the lines backwords or in mixed up orders until you find something interesting in it.

10.  Make a writing date with a friend that you’d feel bad breaking.

11.  Turn your notebook sideways (you rebel you).

12.  Go somewhere public and just copy down everything you hear people say.  Even if you’re uninspired today, you might be glad to have that dialogue someday.

13.  If you have a project that you’re working on, and you can’t force yourself to keep writing it, write something completely different.  Let the story go for a while, and just write something else.

Anyone have any other good suggestions for hwo to get writing?

Since I was a little girl, I’ve been afraid.  I didn’t like answering the phone unless I knew who was calling; I wouldn’t go to the deli counter for my mother because it involved talking to someone.  I wasn’t afraid of strangers, really, not in the normal way at least.  My biggest fear was being a fool.  I was afraid that I would say the wrong thing, would be ambiguous or unclear, would somehow embarass and shame myself. 

I’m a grown up now, and I can order from the deli counter now.  I’ve been on several successful job inverviews and - perhaps most shockingly - stood up in front of a group of high schoolers every day for nearly five years.  I’ve tripped over trash cans in front of them, flung markers, stuttered and twitched at times, and made any number of forgiveable mistakes.  And yet I still get overwhelming anxiety when I have to call the doctor’s office and make an appointment.  What if I misspeak?  What if they misunderstand me?  What if they think I’m an idiot?

And that’s the same way I still feel some of the time when I sit down to write.  Whether I’m writing to send my work off into the world or even writing in my journal, there’s this sense of panic that comes over me.  What if I say something stupid?  What if the best I can do is trite blabber?  What if I never write anything worth reading?

 And so every time, I have to tell myself, “Oh well.  Blabber away,” and keep writing.  And I usually have to write for more than 15 minutes before I can break through the panic.  For the first fifteen minutes, I write nothing but guarded repetitions of a single theme.  Then something happens, something opens up, and suddenly words are just pouring out of me.  I don’t usually recognize anything good in them until months or years later, but experience has taught me that it’s there, that if I keep writing I’ll get somewhere good, even if I don’t notice it at the time. 

With practice, I have learned to accept the fear, to live with it, but not to overcome it.  It’s still there and I’m afraid (of course) that it will always be there, that I’ll never be able to truly open up from the beginning.  But so it is, and this is who I am, and so it’s part of how I write.  I think I have to accept myself, neuroses and all.

But it can’t be just me, right? So, gentle reader, what do you do about the fear?