The Importance of Being Yourself

Many people adhere to the idea that fitting in is better than standing out. I was one of them. I suppressed all of my creative inclinations so that I might be accepted by those around me who didn't hear the drum beat I did. I actually hung out with people who dimmed my inner light in the hopes that perhaps it would eventually die and I could be just like everyone else and no longer the butt of jokes, the weird one, the bitch.

I've been told I had my head in the clouds. I've been told I act like a child simply because I haven't allowed life to kill my imagination. I've been told I'm uncool, uptight, different. You name it.

Through it all, my inner fire remained (some days burning brighter than others) until one day I let it warm me instead of trying to extinguish it. Little by little, I kindled the flame until it burned bright. The past five years have been about shedding skins, evolving, being myself. I've become a mother, a novelist, and soon a self-published novelist. I've removed obstacles to my success be it people, places, or things. I'm still stoking the flames but am now comfortable in my own skin, proud of my ideas, thrilled with what it will bring in the future.

Last night I finalized the cover design for my debut e-book, the manuscript is nearly ready for a professional copy edit, and I'm ready to crack a bottle of champagne. None of this would be possible if I'd listened to anything other than my inner wisdom, my creative flame. I've gained infinitely more than I lost just by being myself.

Why You Shouldn't Fear The Process

It has been nearly a year since my last post and the completion of my novel. Through careful editing, tweaking characters, and a lot of cutting, my shitty first draft has transformed into an exciting tale with compelling characters. At least in my humble opinion.

The manuscript is now in the hands of a select few "beta-readers" who will collectively provide me with my first taste of scrutiny. As long as I've been writing, I've never been this excited about a piece of work or this confident in my creation. Will my readers' reactions meet my expectations? Or have I been so completely wrapped up in my own mind that I can't see the forest for the trees?  I will soon find out.

I thought this part of the process would be easy. The work is complete. It is out of my hands. Instead, I find myself anxious and worried which is no way to live. To combat my discomfort I've taken to channeling it into new and old projects. I currently have a slew of unfinished or unpolished stories. I am a chronic "starter." As it stands, I have three incomplete short stories, three incomplete novellas, and five incomplete novels that are part of the same series. To put it bluntly, I have plenty of ideas and very little discipline. That is all beginning to change.

Process. The writing lifestyle is all one big process. There isn't a definitive line between published and unpublished. There isn't a box I can check off that shows I've succeeded. You work, you research, you dream, you pour your heart onto the page. Yes, there are beginnings and endings, but really, it is just the ebb and flow of creativity.

The one thing I have learned through this process, as hundreds of other writers have stated before me and will long after me, is you have to write. Don't judge yourself too harshly. Choose work that you're passionate about and see it through to the end.

I'll leave you with this quote from the legendary Andy Warhol:

The End

Fifteen years after a horrifying dream left its imprint on my psyche, 9 years after I used that dream for a short story assignment in college, and 4 years after my attempts to edit that story ballooned into a novel of proportions beyond my skill set, I have completed the first draft of The Bloodsong Swords.

It is gloriously flawed and virtually unreadable. It is wrought with redundancies, with instances told rather than shown, with cliché turns of phrase, and info dumps. But within that are magical moments. Characters with yearning. Unique settings. There is a story that wants, indeed demands, to be told. 

My goal is to weed out all of the mundane and amateur and present to the world a version of this story worth telling. I feel obligated to do justice to the people and places that have lived in my unconscious mind for all these years. There is a lot of work left to do and I will admit that I am dreading the mountain of rewrites. There are points of view to eliminate, scene after scene in need of fresh envisioning, an entire restructuring.

Typing "The End" is only the beginning. I am up to the task even if I do feel like I'm in over my head. I've come to enjoy the writing process that once terrified and frustrated me. I can finally call myself a novelist. Up next: published novelist.

Trust The Process

I recently had a lovely conversation with a writing pal of mine about the genesis of stories and how they evolve over time. We agreed that most, if not all stories, begin as simply as tiny kernels of information or emotion. A snippet of a dream, a character's face, an emotional theme, a scent. I decided to look back at my original short story drafts for what has become The Bloodsong Swords. 

I wrote the original draft in my first fiction writing class back in 2005. It was the telling of a dream that I had six years earlier. This dream was so unusually vivid, emotionally intense, and completely terrifying that I remembered every detail. A few years after graduation I resolved to focus on my passion for creating fiction and dug up some old short stories that I could edit and submit. One of them was this particular original draft which I entitled "Thirst."

I began my rewrites by fleshing out the formless parts and trimming down the ones full of fluff. One passage describes people climbing out of a limousine one by one until there are almost a dozen standing around the vehicle. I only had three of these people physically defined and only a basic idea of their significance and depth. I asked myself a simple question, "who are these people?" Just like that, an entirely new world, previously unimagined, emerged and absorbed me. I suddenly had more material than necessary for a short story. I had more material than necessary for a single novel! I never intended "Thirst" to be a novel but after that day it demanded to be written. Most of the specific details that subsequently developed arrived after I'd written half of the novel during last year's National Novel Writing Month.

Here we are on the first day of November and another NaNoWriMo.  I'm still weaving through the various interconnected threads of the same story. The lesson for me is to trust in the creative process. Trust that you have the skill it takes to complete your novel. Trust that your characters know who they are and will not lead you stray. Trust that your vision will coalesce into a readable draft. It may feel awkward or strange or the quality poor but there's a lot of value in what you learn by simply doing. However, I'm also an advocate of having some sort of outline of events, a road map of sorts, however vague. For me it all works best having a balance between these two philosophies and certainly neither is right or wrong, simply different strategies to the same end. 

Why I Write

It was proposed in my writers group that we begin some fun extracurricular activities to help motivate our work. The question was asked, “Why do you write?” It took me aback momentarily.  What a silly question, I thought, but was stimulated into deep contemplation. The short answer is that I write because I must. There is an undeniable yearning inside me to tell stories and so I do. Of course, it was not quite so easy to fully embrace my calling. 

My journey to this place where I, after all of these laboring years, finally feel comfortable calling myself a writer and desiring to make money solely by creating works of fiction has been tremendously long, winding, and often confusing. Kind of like the previous sentence. 

My fondest early childhood memories include reading in bed with my mother. I lay swallowed up under the adult sized blankets with a stack of Dr. Seuss books as my mom embraced an Agatha Christie mystery. Those fond memories also include my father telling me absurdist bedtime stories where the characters were creatures that did nothing except be exceptionally silly. Better yet, late Sunday mornings when I was (finally!) allowed to wake my dad up, I would crawl into bed with him while he spun tales of animals who would never coexist on earth having an adventure. Imagine a giraffe and a penguin going to the candy store together—those were the best of times. 

I will provide some context by saying that he was and still is a blue-collar warehouse worker and my mother a housewife. I didn’t grow up in a house of artists or writers or film makers but I was reared in an environment where imagination was celebrated and encouraged. 

My language arts skills were nurtured further in public schools where I was years ahead of my peers in reading and writing. I even had the honor of reading a copy of The Tortoise and the Hare on stage at my kindergarten graduation. In third grade, I had a poem about a snowman submitted by my teacher and printed in the local newspaper (the clipping still lives between the thin plastic sheet and sticky back of a photo album in my parents’ house). In later years, we were assigned to write stories that would be shared with the younger grades. These works of fiction were even illustrated by us, laminated, and spiral bound. 

In fifth grade, I wrote about two neighboring dandelions that fall in love and in sixth grade about a skateboarding ten-year-old boy who plummets down a sewer and ends up in the land of the Leprechauns where he is charged by the Leprechaun King to find his lost daughter. (Steal these ideas if you like—Just remember they were written by a ten and eleven year old girl, you horrible person, you.)

In eighth grade I wrote an autobiography as a final project for English class. In the section where we project what our future will be like I wrote that I wanted to be an English teacher or a writer.

Then came high school. Oh that glorious period of endless mischief, reckless abandon, and insane freedoms. Those four years transformed me. By graduation I had my heart and mind set on becoming a criminal profiler just like Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs (which I read numerous times the summer between senior year of high school and freshman year of college). After one semester of criminal justice, I reckoned that lifelong exposure to death and the criminal psyche would be too damaging to my spirit and so fell back upon my original passion, stories. 

I changed my major to English and my minor to Creative Writing since it was not offered as a major.  This plan also flopped. I didn’t want to spend the bulk of my time critically analyzing old pieces of writing as English majors do. I want to spend my time writing new pieces of fiction. So, I came to the conclusion that I should quit school and rethink life. This, coincidentally, is an extremely easy decision to make at age 22.

I chose to go back to school after a year or so of working part time with no aim or goals to fuel me. I knew I needed some direction or I would be destined to slave away at retail stores for minimum wage the rest of my life. What could I do that would be an affordable education and rewarding?  I landed on interior design, which I postulated would satisfy both my left and right brains with its mix of creativity and logical order. Boy was I wrong. Studying interior design was essentially studying architecture, which for me left very little room for the kind of freewheeling open-ended creativity that I yearned. Buildings exist in the real world, after all, and have to be structurally sound. 

After a period of soul searching I quit Interior Design and moved on to art school to study what I really wanted to study: Fiction Writing. Yes, there really is a BA (or BFA if you’re so inclined) in Fiction Writing available and I have the student loan bills to prove it. The two years I spent constantly creating fiction were some of the most rewarding years of my life. I left them behind feeling impassioned toward my calling. I also left them with a desire to seek out a stable form of income for myself and so the career-building phase of my life began. 

I quit what I considered my “while-at-college-job,” moved across country for what I thought would be better work and came back to the same “while-at-college-job” within a year of receiving my BA. It was a crazy ride that pushed me farther into financial troubles but it was well worth the effort if only for the intense personal and spiritual growth I acquired while on the journey. I regret nothing.

The latest phase of my life has been my coming to grips with the fact that there is no stable form of income to be found if I’m going to do what I love. I need to create a job for myself, not work for someone else. What I intend to create is a career selling fictional tales that I have conceived and written. 

The last 18 months have been all about finding a balance between working a day job, writing a novel, and having a personal life. It is not easy. I’m still learning but getting better with every month that passes. I’m also unlearning bad habits like procrastination and being overly critical of my first drafts.  I feel more fulfilled now than I ever have. I will keep my pen on the page and my fingers on the keyboard until I look back and find a body of work of which I am proud.

“Seek and you shall find.” Never a truer statement was said. I sought out a path that never existed because I didn’t trust my instincts or my heart would lead me right. I think that is something we all have to go through, a testament to the power of personal growth. And maybe some of us don’t.  Maybe some people are born knowing who and what they are and work every moment toward those ends. It matters not what path you take get there as long as you arrive.

Why do you write?  Post answers in the comment section. I'm interested in the motivations of other writers (and people in general) and would love to hear about your journey.

The Secrets of a First Time Wrimo

November was a long and bumpy road. As you probably noticed, I have been very quiet of late. My head was down and my mind fully focused on reaching my goal of 50,000 newly written words for National Novel Writing Month. I achieved my goal! The real world was dead to me. Only my imagined world was worthy of my attentions. I ended November with 50,066 words and won my very first NaNoWriMo.

I hope that nobody thinks my pretty little web badge means that this was easy for me. It was one of the most challenging things I have ever done. I wasn't sitting pretty at my desk all month, whistling a tune, and typing away while blue birds fluttered around my head and small woodland creatures applauded around my feet. It was painstaking, terrifying, and absolutely insane!

I will preface this by saying that I bent the rules and wrote a novel that I started over the summer. What can I say? I’m a rebel. I already had one complete chapter of 8,711 words. I did not apply that chapter toward my final word count. I will also say that while I had 15 of the characters already in mind, they were nothing but faces, names, and basic motivations. In some cases, they were only names.

Week One, 7,229 words:  The first week was strange. I thrust myself into unfamiliar territory. I did not write a single word on the first day. I had stage fright. I wasn’t sure what to do other than to type.  On day two, I cranked out over 4,000 words. “This is easy,” I thought. “50,000 words will be no problem at all.” How I lied! The rest of the week I putt-putted like an old jalopy. By the end of the week, I was 4,000 words below par. One unexpected side effect to plunging headfirst into a fictional reality was the dreams. Every night I dreamt such vivid and lively dreams that when I awoke, I felt as though I never slept at all.

Week Two, 7,506 words:  I spent week two staring at a brick wall. My characters would not speak to me. They would not speak to each other. My fictional world was a gray haze and my plot made no sense whatsoever. Every word I typed felt clunky and forced. I was as a child lost in a mammoth grocery store crying out for her mother. I learned that a week two slump is common among Wrimos.  This knowledge did something to boost my ego but that boost was very short lived. By the end of the week, I was 7,000 words below par.

Week Three, 6,889 words:  Week three was a famously raucous pity party with full on streamers, balloons, and pointy cardboard hats. “I’m probably not going to make 50,000 words,” I told friends, family, and coworkers. “But it’s okay,” I said with a brave face, “I have a better sense of my story and more words than I did before.” Inside me was a big ugly ball of disappointment. It stared me in the face and spat out insults. I considered cheating. If I added my previously written chapter to the word count, I would be sitting pretty. I chose not to. I couldn't bring myself to sully the process. I pressed on despite my anxiety.

Something miraculously profound happened inside me on Sunday November 20^th. The labor pains stopped and I held in my arms my screaming infant novel. He stared up at me with eyes of wonder. I looked down at him and I knew exactly who he was and what he wanted to say. I embraced him close to my chest and rejoiced. “I am a writer,” I said. It no longer felt like a partial lie. I am a writer. I vowed to reach my goal. If not for myself, then for my story and all the glorious people and places therein. By the end of the week, I was 14,000 words below par.

Week 4, 28,442 words:  I cracked my knuckles and got to work. This was it. I had nine days to scrape out as many words as my fingers could type. I literally ate and slept my novel. I shut off my phone and ignored my messages. I woke up hours before work and typed. I toted my notebook and scribbled during the bus-and-two-trains commute to work. I scribbled while scarfing down lunch.  I scribbled some more during my commute home. In the evenings, I typed up what I wrote during the day and typed some more. I typed until my eyelids weighed a ton and my mind was swimming. I allowed myself 5-6 hours a night for sleep and those hours turned out more dreamful and less sleepy.  I tossed and turned. My characters that a few weeks prior wouldn’t talk to me now talked nonstop.  “Shh, I’m trying to sleep,” I said. “But we have business to conduct,” they whined. At one point, I literally forgot how to spell “pour.”

I’m pretty sure I hallucinated that weekend. I saw things and heard things that likely were not there.  If it weren’t for my boys in the red Indian head sweaters, the Chicago Blackhawks, I would be wearing a straight jacket right now. Hockey was just about the only thing rooting me to reality (they have the third best record in the league right now. Go, Hawks, go!). On November 30^th, I still had 6,125 words to go. I made a giant pot of strong coffee and went to work. By the evening, I hit the magic number and sighed a massive sigh. I cracked open a bottle of wine, poured a glass, and validated my word count.

I am extremely proud of what I have achieved. My novel is by no means finished and by no means publishable. This shitty first draft still requires at least another 50,000 words. After that, I will begin the long journey of editing. I plan to have a version to share with the world by August 2012. Writing a novel is no longer a distant hope. I have evolved. At long last, I am living my dream!

Why The Sacrifice Is Worth It

Writing is a solitary activity. Do it consistently and your laptop will become your best friend. You’ll clasp your notebook like a security blanket. You’ll wear black for days at the loss of your favorite pen. You’ll eat many meals out of Styrofoam containers. You’ll forget what household chores are.  And you’ll spend little to no time with the people you love.

You’ll receive angry texts, curious emails, and plenty of phone calls asking, “what’s up with you?” or “where have you been hiding?” If you’re lucky, you’ll explain that it’s nothing personal, that you've been committed to your writing goals, and your loved ones will accept that and proudly support you.  If you’re unlucky, feelings will be hurt and ties will unbind. You may even find yourself half a pint deep in a tub of ice cream asking “is all this worth it?”

The answer is incontrovertible: YES.

Everyone has dreams and desires, goals and plans, but few have the courage to restructure their lives in the profound ways necessary to achieve them. One day, with a copy of your book in hand, you’ll look around and notice those standing with you. Those loved ones believed in you, stood by you, and comforted you during your self-imposed isolation. You’ll owe them undying gratitude and be all the richer for it. 

Baggage has no place in a writer’s life besides on the page. I can no longer focus on what was. I’m taking baby steps on my path with eyes locked on the future. I’m planting seeds, making connections, and watching new life grow. I’m listening to that quiet voice deep inside me that yearns to tell stories. It grows louder with each day. I simply refuse to feel guilty about dancing to my own tune. 

I’m offering a sincere and heartfelt thank you to every single person out there that is supporting my dream. If you’re reading this, you’re definitely one of them. THANK YOU.

It's All Inside

The above image is the last page of an autobiography I wrote for a final project in Eighth Grade English. It appears that my thirteen-year-old self knew her destiny even if my adult self spent loads of time denying it.

I opened every door I came across during my young adult life. I searched for something new or better--something that clicked. I went to four different colleges. I majored in Law Enforcement, English, and Interior Design before coming full circle and receiving a BA in Fiction Writing. What I've learned is that the answers are inside me. If I search deep enough and honestly enough, I can't go wrong. 

I'm glad that I saved this autobiography. It serves to underscore my desire to share stories with whoever is willing to read them. I wish I could go back in time, hug that thirteen-year-old girl and tell her to seize her dream and never look back. She was wiser than she gave herself credit for.