Ruby Slippers

Once in a while, life just turns blah on you.  Situations get toxic.  Your writing doesn't cooperate.  Work just isn't as interesting as it used to be.  Blah.

Those are moments when you need ruby slippers.  I don't mean literal ruby slippers like in The Wizard of Oz (though someday I will own a pair of these babies all my very own).  What I mean is, you need give yourself something decadent and luxurious, even it's it's tiny.  Something that tells you: "I'm pampering myself for a change.  I'm being nice to me today, because I deserve it."  Ruby slippers can mean different things to different people.

For me these little luxuries include:

• Wearing glittery lip gloss
• A sparkly bookmark, preferably pink
• Brewing a pot of coconut vanilla tea
• Lavender hand lotion

How do you like to pamper yourself when life gets you down?  What are your Ruby Slippers?

Who's in Your Corner?

It's easy to be a supportive friend and colleague when things are going according to the status quo.  People fall into patterns and get used to things being normal.  They adopt roles within their social groups and communities: "helper" "mentor" "leader" and so on.  But what do you do when the "helper" is the one who needs help?  Or the "mentor" needs some mentoring?  Or the "leader" needs someone to take the reins for a while?  When anything veers away from the standard pattern, relationships get tested.  This is true of friends in all walks of life, including writing friends.

There are key moments when you find out who's in your corner, like when you and a friend bump heads, or when you're going through an especially tough spot in your own life.  This is when you discover who you can count on and who you can't.  Because a true friend will adjust his or her role and adapt to the crisis at that moment.  Friends recognize the difference between the person and the problem at hand, and they find a way to move forward.

Moments of success are also key for showing who's on your side.  True friends will be happy for your success and you'll be happy for theirs as well.  There's no competition or need to compare with one another because you trust that there's enough goodness in the universe to go around.  Good friends will celebrate with you, whether the obstacle overcome is small or enormous.

In life as well as in writing, it's important to know who's in your corner.  To those of you who have seen me through happy writing moments and through not-so-happy ones, I'd like to say a huge "Thank You."  To those who have just joined the fun, welcome!  I can't wait to hear what you have to say and learn more about you.  And to those special people who are my anchors and support (you know who you are), I don't deserve you but I'm so glad you're my friend.

Happy Friday!

Binge Writing

First off, I wanted to give a huge shout-out to all my readers who are participating in NaNoWriMo 2010.  You guys are awesome and you continually amaze me with your strength of spirit and dedication.  Go writers!

In light of it being November and NaNoWriMo being under way, I thought I'd talk today about binge writing.  I myself have never done NaNoWriMo but I've experienced my own writing binges in different contexts (mostly academic).  For instance, I completely rewrote my college thesis two days before the deadline.  My psychology master's thesis got done during the week before I moved from upstate back to NYC.  In fact, the only thesis I've ever written that was not started and completed in the days before the deadline was the MFA thesis, believe it or not.

My point is, I know what it's like to crank out pages in a short period of time and to write so hard you don't know whether you're crying or your eyes are bleeding or your brain's exploding.  Or all of the above.  I know the rush and thrill of when all those disparate ideas come together at the last minute and the whole project feels like it's suspended in air, waiting for that last breath, that last keystroke.

But aside from the frantic rush of it all, there is strategy to binge writing and I thought I'd share a few things I've learned from my own binge writing experiences.

1) Don't forget to eat.  Whether you take a short break for dinner or keep a snack next to you as you work, remember to refuel with food.
2) Sleep can be optional for a day or two.  But if you're planning to pull all-nighters for a month, be prepared for lowered productivity.  I know because I've actually done this and it's not a good idea.
3) Bathing is optional. (Unless you plan to go out in public, in which case, do the world a favor and take a quick shower.) 'Nuff said.
4) Take breaks.  Sometimes your brain needs to zone out and relax.  Beating it with a stick isn't going to get the words on the page any faster.
5) Goals can change and that's OK.  You may find as you work on your project--be it NaNoWriMo or something else--that your goals may shift.  That's perfectly OK and it's important allow yourself the flexibility to change directions if need be.


Here are some happy writing vibes to all you awesome writers, especially those doing NaNoWriMo.  Hope your project goes well!

Waiting

Sometimes in life all you can do is wait.  Wait for good news.  Or bad news.  Or any news at all.  But regardless, you're waiting.

It drives me crazy sometimes because when I want to know something, I want to know NOW, and everything else just feels like passing the time.

Writers know what it's like to wait.  You send a story out and then you wait.  You send a batch of queries and you wait.  You send your piece to a critique group and you wait.  And all the while, it feels like the writing process gets suspended in time, just waiting.

It's like this with the act of writing too.  Some stories just aren't ready to gush out as quickly as you would like.  Some books need time to ripen before you harvest them and put them on the page.  You can't always beat stories out of your brain with a stick; it just doesn't work that way.

Of course, we've all heard writers say that you can't wait around for inspiration, because writing is about BIC (butt in chair) and not just that glimmer of an idea.  And I agree, in theory.  But I also believe that writing is about balance and about recognizing when one idea needs time to lie low and when you need to work on something else for a change.

I call this Active Procrastination, a trick I perfected in college.  It works like this: when faced with a lot of tasks, some of which you're just not ready to deal with right now, you pick an easy and harmless task to do first.  Like watching a movie for your film class before starting on the scary research paper.  You're still getting stuff done, but you're letting your brain rest until you're ready to tackle the big things.

Lately I've had some big stuff on my plate, some of which I've had to be dealt with quickly because it was time-sensitive and this has totally discombobulated my writing practice.  Now I'm waiting.  Not for something relating to my writing but for someone central to my life.  And the minutes can't tick by fast enough.  In the meantime, I'm trying to read or write or do anything to pass the time.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

What about you?  What do you do to make the waiting part of the writing process more bearable?

The Big MFA Question

Today Kidlit.com posted an interesting article: Should You Get an MFA?

This, of course, is the central question to anyone pursuing a DIY MFA.  Should you uproot your life or perform feats of time-management acrobatics in order to go back to school?  Or should you go it alone?

I chose the former and was glad I did because the MFA program taught me several things, though not all necessarily about writing.  We learned about the literature in our field and attended several publishing talks.  Of course, it helped that the program was specific to children's writing.  At the same time, though, I realized when I graduated that the MFA is not for everybody, which was the whole thought process that motivated DIY MFA back in September.

Now, as we near the end of October, I wanted to check in with all of you who participated in DIY MFA.  How is everything coming along for you?  Have you found some readings to attend and read some good books from your list?

Most importantly, how's the writing coming?

When Your Inner Writer Gets Spooked

For a few weeks now I've been writing away on my WIP, just cranking it out like it was my job or something.  Then all of a sudden, I got spooked.

It all started when I reached this one critical chapter, and I've been scared stiff ever since.  I know exactly what needs to happen in the chapter, I only have this chapter and a little piece of another left to go, and yet I'm terrified.

All these sneaky little doubts keep cluttering my mind.  What if I write this chapter and it totally flops?  What if I can't pull it off?  What if I only had a few good chapters in me and I used them all up already?

So I've been doing what I always do when I get scared: I've been reading a lot.  It's a way of getting all those scary thoughts out of my head and distracting myself.  Kind of like the mental equivalent of leaving a nightlight on.

What about you?  What do you do when your inner writer gets scared silly?

Which Comes First?

Last week, I got an interesting question about writing big papers and coming up with the argument.  The question was:

"Is it more like an argument that you will prove or disprove by reading the books? I don't know how I can make such any statement without reading the books and finding out how authors are approaching a topic..."  ~Kerryn Angell

This question got me thinking about the chicken-egg dilemma that often accompanies academic papers.  The problem is this: most papers we write in high school, college and even graduate school are artificial.  The parameters of the paper force us to look at only a limited number of works and construct an argument from there, ignoring the rest of the canon.  Not only that, oftentimes professors require us to get a stamp of approval on our "thesis statement" before we've even read the books!

The reason professors and colleges often use this method is because of a simple, yet powerful constraint: time.  Students just don't have the time to go on a hunting expedition to craft a scholarly paper so the teachers narrow the task down for us.  They limit the number of books we discuss in the paper, they check our thesis statements before we start, they make sure we're headed in the right direction.  They do all of this because they want students to focus on learning to write the paper, and not waste hours of time hunting down a thesis through piles of books.

In DIY MFA things are a bit different.  We have the freedom to make mistakes, beat our head against the wall and have a few false starts.  When I wrote my literature thesis for the MFA, I didn't tell the professor but I read at least ten books that fit the thesis.  We were only allowed to choose four, so I chose the ones that best illustrated my point and saved the rest of the books for later.  Someday I will go back to that literature thesis, rewrite it to encompass all the books I want to include.  But that is a project for a later time.

My point is, that when you're writing or planning the "Big Paper" for DIY MFA, you have the freedom to explore the literature first.  Read a lot.  Think a lot.  Then make up your mind about what you want to say about the literature.  The goal here isn't to write a mind-blowing paper (though that would be awesome).  Rather, the point is to build a strong relationship with reading and to see how books fit together, relate to each other.

In this aspect of DIY MFA it's OK to be a detective.  In fact, that's probably a good thing.  And who knows, maybe as you sleuth out your argument and look for connections between books, you might just find a few of these.