"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good."—Willlliam Faulkner

If you’re doing NaNoWriMo this year, you will need a mantra (or three) like this one to pull yourself over the rough spots. If you hit a snag don’t stop writing. Shrug your shoulders and dive back in and write whatever crappy sentence you can as a placeholder to get you to the other side. It’s not about making a gorgeous first draft. It’s about writing as fast as you can, leaving the editor and the critic in the dust. Just get the story told first. Then you can go back and clean it up, polish it, dress it up for company. Focus on the story, not the specific words. If you get to a scene you can’t see clearly, write a few sentences about what you think goes there, and then move on to the next scene.

If you’ve never written this way before, give it a try. It’s exhilarating. It’s like flying. And believe it or not, the editing process isn’t any harder than it would be if you took lots of time to carefully craft each sentence. Yeah, the sentences may be beautiful, but the story may demand a whole different direction. If you sprint, you don’t spend a lot of time polishing sentences, paragraphs or whole scenes that you’ll end up throwing out later. Once you have the story out there, you can decide what to keep and what to toss, and then focus your energy on polishing only the parts you want to keep.

“I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.”—Steven Wright

(If this is where you’re starting, email me. We need to talk.)

This quote is actually in honor of NaNoWriMo. Tomorrow is the deadline to sign up, and you can officially start tomorrow night after you put your trick-or-treaters to bed. 12:00:01am to be exact. There’s still time to join the fun and accept the challenge. You’ll have to spend more than five minutes a day, but you could probably do it in an hour or two a day. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel between November 1 and November 30. That works out to be about 1,700 words a day. That’s about 2 ½ pages a day if you use standard margins and don’t double space, or about 7 formatted pages.

The point to this type of writing is to focus on getting words on the page. Rough draft. The plan is to come back later and edit. Your inner editor cannot be part of this sprint. Your pace should be fast enough to outrun the editor and the critic, and to keep up with the muse. Don’t worry about spelling or punctuation. If you don’t know where the commas go, just poke them in wherever you feel so moved and weed them out later. Paragraph breaks, sentence structure, research for place names or location details – all that can wait for your second pass. Teach yourself to use brackets to note where you need a [tree] and you don’t know that what you really want to say is ‘eucalyptus’. You can come back in December and search for ‘[‘ to fill in the blanks.

Last year more than 30,000 participants crossed the finish line. Sign up, join the fun, and you could have a completed novel to edit before the end of the year.

“I think the scene—full of smack-talk and muffin crumbs on our keyboards—would have rightly horrified professional writers. We had taken the cloistered, agonized novel-writing process and transformed it into something that was half literary marathon and half block party.”—NaNoWriMo website

“We called it noveling. And after the noveling ended on August 1, my sense of what was possible for myself, and those around me, was forever changed. If my friends and I could write passable novels in a month, I knew, anyone could do it.”—NaNoWriMo website

“Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it” ― Natalie Goldberg

If you don’t show up at work, there will be consequences. If you don’t pay your bills, someone’s gonna notice and something not so great will happen. If you don’t do a yearly physical, someone will bug you about it. There are lots of things in life we do because we must, because something bad will come of not doing it. Our spouse may pester us to make a doctor appointment, the kids will ask us to come to their games, the cats will not let you forget to feed them, to dog will ask to go out . . . but no one is going to make you sit down and write. You either make the time to do it, or you don’t. No one will care (except maybe your muse).

If you are a writer in your heart, you will feel the lack, a restlessness perhaps, or a frustration. Or maybe a vague dissatisfaction with life.

Take some advice from Nike: If you want to write, “Just Do It.”

“I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.” –Isaac Asimov

“One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones”.—Stephen King

Good writing isn’t about a fancy vocabulary or poetic turns of phrase. It’s about communication. Your words shouldn’t call attention to themselves, but rather disappear into the fabric of the story so that your reader feels as if he has experienced what you’ve written and not seen it performed.

Good writing is about the images it evokes, the emotions it stirs up, the cadence of the language as it lulls with a soft rhythm or excites with staccato sentences. Play with how language fits together but avoid using fancy, frilly words in place of solid ones.

Stop and ask yourself: “Who is the narrator? What is her education and experience? What word would she use?”

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”—Michelangelo

When I first started writing I thought once I had learned the craft, I would be able to outline and draft a book without a lot of wasted words. I actually believed that for a fairly long time (I’m talking years). I still catch myself behaving as if this is true and it interferes with getting words on the page.

It interferes with lots of people I work with in the form of writer’s block. They stare at the blank page feeling as if they could only find the ‘right’ opening line they could avoid having to edit or rewrite. I’ve seen this with people writing fiction, nonfiction, a dissertation, an essay, a technical article or an obituary.

Although I’ve seen Michelangelo’s quote above (and more often the one below) used regarding writing, it wasn’t until today when I read an article on DailyWritingTips.com that I suddenly understood just how it applies to writing. The author of that blog added this: “As the writer, you must first create the block of stone. Only then will you be able to see the statue waiting to be released.”

This article says to write about four times more than you plan to have in your finished piece. Sounds like a lot, huh? I don’t know that my numbers are quite that high, but I’ve written a boatload of words for each story that didn’t make it to the final cut. Often times I write something that I know won’t be in the final cut merely to inform myself about the story. No words are wasted. If they don’t make the final draft, they are still part of the iceberg that helps weight the story and make it real.

Show of hands – who has heard of the iceberg theory on writing? (Here’s a great article explaining it in a bit more depth.) In short, an iceberg shows only about an eighth of its total mass above the water.

When you face the page, remind yourself that every word your write is information. Even if it doesn’t make the final draft, it is part of what gives your writing depth and history.

Writing practice (yep, I'm waving the ‘write every day’ banner again) helps to create the block of stone from which you chisel your angel. Instead of random writing prompts, choose prompts to fill in the history and the below-the-surface details that make your writing rich. When you face the blank page, remind yourself to start anywhere, don’t wait for the ‘right’ words, just use some words. If you decide this piece belongs in the final version you can come back later and polish it.

“I saw an angel in the marble and carved to set him free.” –Michelangelo

“Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.” —Anne Lamott

Depending on where you look, there are claims that there is only one plot, or three, or seven, or twenty two. But even if it’s a hundred and twenty-two, that’s still a pretty small number considering the number of books that have been written. The challenge then isn’t coming up with a story that’s never been told, but a new way of telling the same old story. The differences will be in the details filtered through your unique personality and experiences. Like bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope, the same plot can be retold a hundred, a thousand times, and still have a new angle, a fresh feel, an emotional connection to readers.

Writing practice is collecting all those bits of colored glass to be used to give your story its own flavor

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” –Sylvia Plath

A common mistake regarding this advice is to take whole chunks of life and try to turn it into a story. Even if you’re writing memoir, a whole chunk is indigestible and very often it is also flat. Thinking in generalities creates a distance from the reader because of the lack of detail.

We may say something like “I had an idyllic childhood.” But how did that look? What made it idyllic? Was it truly perfect? In my workshops I recommend Anne Lamott’s 1” picture frame as an antidote. If you want to show me your childhood was idyllic, pick a single example. Zoom in and crawl over every nuance of the scene like the ant mentioned yesterday.

This level of detail is useful in fiction because even invented characters and stories and scenes are made up of a variety of specific moments we have experienced previously. They are sliced thin and spread out over lots of stories and scenes, used in different contexts than we may have experienced them in reality, but because we are using real detail, they will have the ring of truth for the reader.

Employ a bit of creative license in memoir and combine this level of detail from two or three similar experiences into a single scene that underscores the illustration you are aiming for. Or use real sensory details from other memories and layer them into a memory that has mostly dialogue or emotion to bring it to life.

An actor portraying a character experiencing the death of a family member is encouraged to dig into their personal experience for a place to draw the emotion from. If the only death they’ve experience is the death of a pet when they were nine, they take that and extrapolate it into the emotion they are portraying. In fiction, we do the same thing. Even in fantasy, in a totally made up world, the characters (even the non-human ones) will experience recognizable emotions.

Writing practice is a good way to fill up your repertoire. Write about emotions and experiences and people. All of it will be useful no matter what you are writing.

“I took notes on the people around me, in my town, in my family, in my memory. I took notes on my own state of mind, my grandiosity, the low self-esteem. I wrote down the funny stuff I overheard. I learned to be like a ship's rat, veined ears trembling, and I learned to scribble it all down.” —Anne Lamott

“The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what you mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.”― Natalie Goldberg

In an art class a number of years ago, we were given an assignment with two parts: Take off your left shoe and set it on the table in front of you. Draw it.

Then we were told to draw the same shoe a second time, but this time not to think of it as a shoe. Think of it as some unfamiliar object and ourselves as an ant, crawling over each and every line and shadow.

Once the drawings were all turned in, the instructor put them up on the wall. Without fail, every shoe that had been drawn as a shoe, was a sad imitation, and sometimes had more resemblance to the black ovals on Charlie Brown’s feet than to a real shoe.

The other group, the ones drawn without a label in mind, were many times better. They had shadows and highlights, scuff marks, stitches, crease in the leather, knotted or frayed laces . . .

Empty your mind of clichés and stereotypes. They are good for generalizations, but not for authentic renderings of anything – shoes, people, or ideas.

Next time you are writing, try to write as if you were an ant tracing every line of the scene. Sure, you’ll have to edit it, but you’ll also have a wealth of rich detail you might never have discovered if you had glossed over the details and described a generic scene without individuality. Write the scuff marks and knotted laces.

“What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head. First there's the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly, "Well, that's not very interesting, is it?" And there's the emaciated German male who writes these Orwellian memos detailing your thought crimes. And there are your parents, agonizing over your lack of loyalty and discretion; and there's William Burroughs, dozing off or shooting up because he finds you as bold and articulate as a houseplant . . .” —Anne Lamott

Have you ever listened to the voices in your head? Not the characters. If you write stories if goes without saying you listen to your characters. But those other voices, that committee in your head that offers opinions on pretty much everything you think or write about.

I heard someone once describe that committee as the seven dwarves. There was a television sitcom a number of years ago that was mostly made up of the aspects of the main character’s personality, all weighing in on the events of his day. Stephen King referred to his Muse, or possibly his council of Muses, as ‘the boys in the basement.’ If his Muse is a group of rough guys hanging out in a basement, what must the rest of his committee look like? When you are writing and you think “this stinks. I should delete the whole thing”, assign that voice to one of your committee members, possibly the critic, who never has anything good to say about your writing or anyone else’s (unless he’s comparing your atrocious scribbles to someone else, because even though they stink, they don’t stink as bad as you do).

Then there’s the voice that tells you to put a comma here, break the paragraph there, stop and pick a better word. That’s the editor, and his job is useful, but he has to be made aware of his boundaries because he often thinks he has more authority than he does. He and the Muse often can’t work together without arguing, at which point the writing grinds to a halt.

There may be other voices, too, like Anne Lamott’s Reader Lady. Or maybe your mother pipes up now and then when you write a particularly graphic scene of some sort, cautioning you to mind your manners.

Pay attention to the voices that speak up while you’re writing, and if necessary, call a meeting and hand out pink slips to a few. To those you keep on, make sure they’re aware of their boundaries. Make them work for you, not against you.

Who is on your committee?

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.” –Vita Sackville-West

I discovered a blog I started last year after the death of my friend and writing partner Patty. I can’t tell you why it suddenly came into my mind to go look at it, and then to read each of the ten or so posts I wrote. But I did. It was comforting to see that much of what I said then is almost identical to what I teach now about writing. What was even better, was to read those distant words, aware that they were mine, but distant enough that I could not remember writing them or feel the immediacy of the emotions I felt as I was typing those words, and yet have them stir up fresh emotions, almost as if I were reading and reacting to the words of some other writer.

In writing about our present, we capture the moment and offer it to others as a sign post – “I’ve traveled this way and felt about it this way” – as a reassurance that they aren’t alone on their journey.

If you’d like to read a few early writing blogs from me, go here.

“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.” —Anne Lamott

I think sometimes the goal of publishing, or the actuality of publishing, gets in the way of being able to enjoy the process. It clouds the reason you started writing in the first place. If publishing is your goal, or if you are already published, take care to separate that from the process of writing. This is part of being able to write with the door closed: Just you, the page, and the Muse.

Schedule time for the ‘tea ceremony’ – to engage with the written word. If you have deadlines or a busy schedule (who doesn’t?), it may not be as long as you like, but you can still schedule it. This is what writing practice was meant to be. Writing for the sake of writing. Playing with words, reveling in language and images and ideas. Consider making part of your writing ritual a few minutes of focused thought on the tea ceremony aspect before you begin writing. Time enough later to jump back into the fray and keep up with your social media networking and marketing and pitches and outlines and synopses.

“E.L. Doctorow said once said that ‘Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.” —Anne Lamott

There are several applications for this quote, so don’t be surprised if you see it from me again sometime.

Whether you’re writing fiction, nonfiction, or a report for work, beginning a project can sometimes be the hardest part. We sit down and start the blank sheet of paper or the empty document and are so overwhelmed with the idea of the finished project that we are paralyzed. Ideas might swirl around in your head or maybe there are just a few lonely tumbleweeds rolling past.

Take the fear out of the blank page. Scribble at the top. Draw a stick man in the margin. Change the font to something quirky. Use colored paper or the back of a shopping list. The less ‘official’ it looks, the better.

Now jot some ideas. Don’t think about the finish product. Just focus on what’s immediately in front of you. Do you have a topic? Scribble 5-10 ideas you could talk about on the topic. Brainstorm. See if you can come up with 15 ideas. If you have the luxury of time, stop here for now. Reread the list, then go do something else. If you’re on a tight deadline, reread your list, then see if you can come up with 2-3 points for each idea. Some will have a bunch, some may have one or two, or even none. Doesn’t matter. Just brainstorm for now. Let these ideas simmer in the back of your mind for an hour or a day. Maybe reread the list once or twice and see if any other items come to mind.

When you’re ready to work on it again (don’t let more than a day or at most two pass before facing the page again), skip a few lines, or get a new sheet of paper if you need to, and play with organizing the ideas you came up with yesterday. Is there a particular order they should go in? Is there a beginning, middle and end? Do some ideas lead into others? If you have time, write each idea on a separate index card along with the points you came up with for each. Deal them out on the table, move them around, look for a logical and pleasing order.

Now, start writing, but only on the first idea. Just rough draft, brainstorm, as if you’re talking out loud to someone about what you plan to write about. Don’t worry about punctuation, spelling, or sparkling vocabulary. Write a few lines under each point if you can. Keep it in outline format still, partly for organization, partly to fool your brain into thinking this isn’t “for real”.

Set a goal each day, either time or number of points, depending on your deadline. Write about each point independently from one another if you like.

Once you have something written for each point, take a look at the whole collection again. Are the ideas still in a good order? Does one feed into the next? Or do you need to do some rearranging? Play with it until you like the order.

After you have it in order, go through it from start to finish, and smooth it over. Don’t worry about making it perfect, just get the obvious stuff in shape. Then read it out loud to yourself or to someone else. The reason for this is your ear will hear things differently than your eye sees them. You’ll pick up on awkward phrasing, wordiness, even punctuation errors sometimes. Tweak things, then let someone else read it over. Have them make notes if you want.

One last pass and it’s ready for review or submission.

Tada! You’ve ‘driven’ the entire journey by looking only at what you can see directly in front of you. Anne Lamott calls this the ‘1” picture frame.’

   “You -- with all your doubts and fears, joys and sorrows -- are enough. You -- the one reading these words at this very moment -- have everything you need to become the writer you want to be.
   'Me?' you may be asking. 'Just as I am?'
   Yes, you, who may, at this moment, be feeling scared, frustrated, blocked, discouraged. If so, join the club.    Because so does every other writer in the world, even the most successful ones, who, after all, were once struggling writers themselves.
   And now that they're successful, guess what? They still struggle. They have the same doubts, fears, longings, worries. They just don't give these feelings the same negative meanings you do. Smart writers recognize their feelings as important information about their inner lives, as the raw material of their writing craft. Just grist for the mill.” —Dennis Palumbo

It may seem that I’m continually on the same writing bandwagon, waving the flag about priorities and daily writing. Rather than a bandwagon, I would challenge you to consider it as the foundation of being a writer. Everything else will follow once you are able to clarify your priorities, and once those priorities include writing on a daily basis. Notice I said “daily basis” without specifying a minimum amount of time. Although the more time spent writing the better, I believe it’s more important to write every day than it is to write reams every day.

Successful writers also deal with time management issues, families, housework, holidays, company, persistent pets, illness . . . . The main difference is that writing is one of their top priorities. They treat writing as a job. A commitment. They set a time, put on their game face, punch the clock, sit down, and work. Of course the amount of time they spend producing words is also an important factor, but once your butt is in the chair and you’re writing, increasing that time isn’t as difficult.

If you are unable to rearrange your priorities to spend lots of time writing, commit to writing for small increments – every single day. Do you brush your teeth every day, even when you’re tired, even when you have company, or it’s a holiday, or you’re on vacation? Consider writing to be at that same level. Five minutes. If you don’t have a project you’re working on, or are having trouble figuring out what to write for those five minutes, use writing prompts. Pick one, set the timer, and forget everything else for five minutes. When you are able to set writing as a priority, you will already have a habit established and an open pathway to your writing.

"Every worthwhile accomplishment has a price tag attached to it. The question is always whether you are willing to pay the price to attain it - in hard work, sacrifice, patience, faith, and endurance."—John C. Maxwell

"Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy."~ Dale Carnegie

This is the primary reason for writing practice. Whether you have a WIP (Work In Progress), or you are using random writing prompts, writing every day increases your confidence as well as your ability to take literary risks.

As I said yesterday, fling words at the page with abandon. Maybe only ten out of every hundred will stick, but those ten will be ten more gems than you would have had if you had spent your time just thinking about writing.

"Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong."—Peter T. Mcintyre

“Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough – that we should try again.” –Julia Cameron

How many times do you stop to read over what you’ve written and cringe at how awful it is? How often do you stop writing because of that?

First off, don’t reread something you’ve just written if you can help it. If you must transcribe longhand to the computer, do so by focusing only on the keys you need to hit with your fingers to get the words accurately recorded, then close the file and wait. Preferably a week or two. Or a month. When you go back, you will be able to be more objective.

Secondly, even if your writing legitimately deserves a cringe or at least a scowl, don’t give up. Bad writing begets good writing. Here’s a bonus quote for you: “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

Blog “Strangle Your Muse” author Sandy Ackers compares writing to mining. You have to dig through a lot of dirt to find a single diamond. So happily scribble junk, garbage, crap, anything at all. Fling words at the page with abandon, spend them frivolously, and at the end of the day, sift through them for the gems.

“Embrace your mediocre writing and your pieces that fizzle out. Because the more rock you chisel through, the closer you get to a diamond.” –Sandy Ackers

"You don't have to change that much for it to make a great deal of difference. A few simple disciplines can have a major impact on how your life works out in the next 90 days, let alone in the next 12 months or the next 3 years."—Jim Rohn

You don’t have to spend huge chunks of time writing, you just have to spend a little bit of time writing every day. Don’t wait for the magical time when you’ll have a whole day to spend writing. Start now, write when you can as often as you can, and make it part of your daily routine.

"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." ~ Calvin Coolidge

“The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners...” ― Natalie Goldberg

This is one if the reasons for writing with the door closed, for needing a safe place to write. You need to be free to explore the dark places without the fear that your mother will peer over your shoulder and shake her head at you. “I thought I taught you better than that. Why can’t you write something nice?”

Even Disney movies and fairy tales have their dark side. What good is the light unless it is in contrast to the dark? Just because you don’t write the literary equivalent of cotton candy doesn’t mean you can’t write a Happily Ever After. Just put your characters through hell before they get there. Let them be real people with real faults and fears, facing the consequences of bad choices and surviving—and thriving—anyway.

“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.” ~William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958

“Nothing is impossible; there are ways that lead to everything, and if we had sufficient will we should always have sufficient means. It is often merely for an excuse that we say things are impossible.” Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Yesterday I preached about making the time to write no matter what. A writer writes. If there are things in your way, consider what they are, and of what importance. I say I have no time to write. What I mean to say is writing isn’t as high on my priority list as some other things are. Job, relationship, family time . . . . Once today is gone you can’t get it back, and there is no guarantee how many tomorrows you’ll have. Be sure to spend your time each day doing things that matter to you.

I’ve seen any number of acknowledgements in books thanking spouse and children for surviving on frozen pizzas for two years while a book was finished. That’s probably an exaggeration and more about taking shortcuts on things that aren’t priorities than it is about locking yourself in the study for two years. In 10 years no one will remember what you had for dinner, but your kids will remember if you weren’t there for their performance in the school play or their winning touchdown.

It’s all about priorities.

Make a list of all the activities that you spend time on every day.

Now make a list of your priorities in life as they are today. (You will need to revisit this occasionally.)

Are your priorities the things you spend your time on? Or do you spend time each day on things that don’t matter? Consider what you could simplify to make more time in your day and use that extra time writing. But also be honest – maybe this season of life is not when you will be able to be a prolific writer. Keep practicing, keep in touch with language, and write when you can so you are ready to pour some energy into your writing when the season changes.

“Writing everyday contributes to continuity of your thinking and generating the ideas you need to write. Your mind will function differently when you write every day. We all think about our writing every day. But the cognitive processes involved in writing are different from those involved in thinking. Your project moves forward when you write…even if you write a gosh-awful first draft.” –Columbia Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

Note to self:

I say don’t have time to write. I say it pretty much every day and I mean it. Anyone looking at my calendar or hearing me describe my to-do list agrees with me. “You don’t have time to write.”

But what do I do if writing is what lifts me up? What if writing is what I was created to do and not writing makes me unhappy and frustrated with myself?

The truth is, no matter how busy you are, no matter what demands there are on your time, you can probably find 15 minutes. The hard part about that is wanting the luxury to sink into a world you’ve created and spend hours with your characters. It’s not easy dipping in and out of your writing in 15 minute increments here and there with no predictability. But it’s better than not writing. Or deferring writing until life is less busy (will it ever be less busy?)

So maybe your writing takes on a different shape while the kids are little. Maybe you write short stories or articles during soccer practice. Stay up fifteen minutes later or get up fifteen minutes earlier and write only what you can see through Anne Lamott’s 1” picture frame. The opening of one scene. One short description of a character or setting. One snippet of dialogue. A single paragraph. Instead of journaling about how little time you have or how much your coworkers annoy you, turn it into a character sketch (about an annoying person, or someone who is annoyed by a coworker). Create characters that do not yet have a story. Write a one paragraph snapshot of a memory you plan to use in your memoir.

There are a hundred ways to turn fifteen minutes into writing.

“. . .all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame.” –Anne Lamott

“It is like this: there are wonderfully gifted people who write a little piece and then write it over and over again to make it perfect, - absolutely, flawlessly perfect, a gem. But these people only emit about a pearl a year, or in five years. And that is because of the grind, the polishing, i.e., the fear that the little literary pearl will not be perfect and unassailable. But this is all a loss of time and a pity. For in them there is a fountain of exuberant life and poetry and literature and imagination but it cannot get out because they are so anxiously busy polishing the gem.”—Brenda Ueland

I’ve known a few writers over the years who have spent months writing and rewriting chapter one and never getting any further. They are determined to ‘polish’ this chapter before moving on to the next, certain that if they ‘just get it right’ they won’t have to come back and change it. They are sure they can avoid having to edit this way.

There are several pitfalls to this approach. One is, as I mentioned last week, constant editing is a form of procrastination. What Brenda Ueland didn’t say in today's quote is that constant editing very often dulls the spark, the life of a scene, almost as if it wears the finish off. It becomes grammatically perfect, but it loses immediacy and sparkle.

There are lots of quotes out there about this subject, and they all seem to agree – write the first draft without stopping to edit. The “don’t look down” draft. The "discovery" draft.

Just fly thru the pages as fast as the Muse can take you. If you hit a snag, a scene where you don’t know what should happen, skip it and continue with the next chapter as if you already figured it out. Chances are the Muse does have it figured out and All Is Revealed as you continue to write. An outline is no guarantee you won’t hit a snag, or have to go back and add something in, or change a detail to match something that comes up toward the end. If a gun is fired in the last chapter, you have a chance to go back and put it on the mantle in the first chapter. (Bonus points to anyone who can provide the quote and attribution I’m referring to).

Once you have the story on the page and it’s starting to gel, that’s the time to edit. Then go back and fine tune nuances, choose details to highlight the tone or theme or character. Like an artist who first sketches the portrait, then blocks in the colors, then adds the delicate shading that brings the portrait to life.

Unless you’re writing a dissertation or thesis, writing is messy. And, I would argue, even a dissertation or thesis will have its messy stage before it’s ready to go to committee.

“Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived…Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation… Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.” –Anne Lamott

“Storytelling is healing. As we reveal ourselves in story, we become aware of the continuing core of our lives under the fragmented surface of our experience. We become aware of the multifaceted, multichaptered ‘ I ‘ who is the storyteller. We can trace out the paradoxical and even contradictory versions of ourselves that we create for different occasions, different audiences… Most important, as we become aware of ourselves as storytellers, we realize that what we understand and imagine about ourselves is a story. And when we know all this, we can use our stories to heal and make ourselves whole.”–Susan Wittig Albert

Storytelling is healing. Writing is healing. (Did you notice how cleverly I recycled yesterday’s theme? It is worthwhile enough to bear repeating.) Whether you are writing fiction or memoir or a blog, if you write what calls to you, if you write honestly about the light places and the dark places, you will learn to understand yourself, and you will start to untie knots in your perceptions and feelings. If you are courageous enough to explore those dark places within yourself and then share those discoveries, others will benefit from your experience.

“I write because something inner and unconscious forces me to. That is the first compulsion. The second is one of ethical and moral duty. I feel responsible to tell stories that inspire readers to consider more deeply who they are.”—David Guterson

“You must be able to step inside your character's skin and at the same time to remain outside the dicey circumstances you have maneuvered her into. I can't remember how many times I advised students to stop writing the sunny hours and write from where it hurts: "No one wants to read polite. It puts them to sleep."—Annie Bernays

Sometimes when I am feeling down or overwhelmed or hopeless, I think “Why bother writing? No one wants to read something depressing.” When I am feeling this way, I forget that writing is the way out. Writing can entertain me, but more importantly, writing can lift me up and give me perspective. All it takes is handing my worries and fears and frustrations over to a character, or even divide them up among several characters, and then taking a step back to ‘watch’ them work through it. It makes whatever I am dealing with seem more manageable and it releases (vicariously) many of the emotions I’ve tried to keep under control.

I say it so often, it has become my mantra: Writing is healing. Now if I can just remember that when I need it most.

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” ― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.” ~Arthur Polotnik

Write first, edit later. Follow the Muse and write your first draft without looking down. Whether you write from an outline or discover the story as you go, don’t stop to rewrite until you’ve reached the end. The risk in editing too soon is that you may just edit the best parts out thinking they don’t fit, and then discover a hundred pages later, the Muse had a reason for the image she handed you.

Another big reason for waiting to edit until you’re done – rewriting is a form of procrastination. Editing doesn't count toward your writing goal for the day. If you must edit, set a writing goal AND an editing goal.

“Don’t begin rewriting until you’ve finished the piece. Not necessarily the whole of a thing, but a scene, a section, a chapter. Since you don’t know at the beginning where the writing might take you, to begin rewriting too soon could dam the stream before it has a chance to find its natural course. Also, rewriting before you’re finished is a way to keep you from the actual writing. “—Judy Reeves

“The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.” ~Alfred Kazin, Think, February 1963

Focus on the process, not the result. You spend a lot of time alone at your desk writing to hate the process of writing. If you are in it only to publish, you may want to reconsider your desire to be a writer. Enjoy the journey, savor the process, write what inspires you, what intrigues you, what entertains you.

“You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time. You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself.” —Anne Lamott

“Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.” ~Samuel Butler

Sometimes stories come to us nearly fully formed. Characters with names and histories and needs and motivations come to us and demand to have their story told. Sometimes it is only a persistent thought or question that nags at the back of our mind. Once we turn toward it and open our mind and heart and start writing, the words pour out of us as if they come from somewhere else.

If you have not yet experienced this wonder, keep freewriting, keep relaxing and following your Muse, keep letting your imagination lead you, no matter how far afield you think it’s going. When you let go and become a channel, you might just be amazed at the words that show up.

“It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.” ~Joan Baez

"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." -Howard Thurman

Don’t ask what is selling and go write that. Look inward to what draws you, things that seem to want figuring out, questions that called to be explored. If you write what draws you in, it will draw readers in, too.

Don’t write only what you already fully understand, write what you need to learn to understand. As you process—in journal, memoir or fiction—you will experience insights you can discover no other way.

“If you want to write you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people.” –Real Live Preacher

“Sometimes people say to me, “I want to write, but I have five kids, a full-time job, a wife who beats me, a tremendous debt to my parents,” and so on. I say to them, “There is no excuse. If you want to write, write. This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don’t wait. Make the time now, even if it is ten minutes once a week.” ― Natalie Goldberg

If you want to write, make the time to write. Make it a priority in your schedule. Don’t wait for a big chunk of time, or the muse (she is fickle, remember?), or inspiration or anything else. Just write.

Decide on a reasonable amount of time you can regularly commit to, whatever it is. Then make it a priority. Click here for a wonderful analogy for time management.

Take a look at what the important things are in your life and schedule them first. Everything else will fall into place.

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”—E. L. Doctorow

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ~Anton Chekhov

Look at me, spending quotes like there’s an endless supply . . . I admit it, I have an addiction—to quotes. (I bet you hadn’t noticed.) I love it when someone is able to put something into words that captures a wealth of meaning in a sentence or two. I especially love it when they are able to convey a thought or belief I’ve held without being able (or taking the time) to put into words.

Today’s quotes are more craft related than most and call for very little commentary from me. They stand on their own. The only more succinct advice I’ve heard on this topic is “show don’t tell.”

Read to identify authors who use description effectively, both with ordinary everyday language and with language that sounds like written music to the ear, and practice, practice, practice.

“Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.”
—Stephen King

“Writing practice is showing up at the page. It’s running the scales, executing the moves. It’s writing for the experience of it, forming the words, capturing the images, filling the pages. Like an artist’s sketchbook, a writer’s notebook is filled with perspectives, character sketches, shadings, and tones. A writing workout is trying out phrases and auditioning words, letting the imagination have free rein while the editor in your head takes a coffee break. One of the best things about writing practice is that it is practice. It’s not supposed to be perfect. You’re free to make mistakes, fool around, take risks.”—Judy Reeves

I have always been a fan of writing prompts and freewriting. Even when I’m working on a particular story, I take time for writing prompts. Of course, my characters may insist on getting involved, but that just makes it more interesting and often times I learn something new about the characters or the story.

One time, after sharing a random writing prompt, one of the writers in my writing group asked “what’s the take away from this? What’s the point? Although I personally understood the value of freewriting on any random prompt, I hadn’t ever put it into words before. Writing practice, freewriting on a random prompt, is the sandbox you can play in. Build a sand castle, knock it down, build another. It’s play. It’s discovery. It keeps the ideas flowing freely from your imagination through your fingers to the page. No matter what prompt you start out with, if you write long enough, you’ll discover what you really want to say.

“When you show up at the page and put in the time day after day, you learn to trust your pen and the voice that emerges as your own. You name yourself Writer. “—Judy Reeves


p.s. If you haven't yet experiences A Writer's Book of Days by Judy Reeves, take a stroll through her website: http://judyreeveswriter.com/

“Every writer experiences bad days and sloppy, swampy writing. Sometimes you get the handsome prince and sometimes you get the frog. The point is, no matter what, you show up at the pond. “—Judy Reeves

“Some days are diamonds, some days are stones,” as the old Neil Diamond song goes. That goes for writing, too. But don’t use that as an excuse not to write. Writing every day serves a purpose beyond getting a useable scene or a completed chapter.

Writing every day helps keep the self-consciousness at bay—if you write every day you spend less time worrying about what to say and more time just getting words onto the page.

Writing every day reduces the anxiety of the blank page—facing the blank page every single day is a form of desensitization therapy so that the blank page becomes so common it becomes a part of the landscape.

Writing every single day whether you feel like it or not teaches you to rely on discipline rather than inspiration for motivation—it becomes a habit like brushing your teeth so you no longer think about ‘if’ you should write, you just do it.

And writing every day also teaches you faith. Because sometimes, even on a ‘swampy day’, it’s the prince that shows up and not the frog. I could easily quote a dozen writers who echo this advice, but will restrict myself to just two well known authors:

“Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.”—Ernest Hemingway

“Write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you are writing, and aren't writing particularly well.”—Agatha Christie

“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.” —Anne Lamott

‘Real’ doesn’t always mean nonfiction. I think there is sometimes more truth in fiction than there is in fact. Whatever you write, be truthful without regard to how it will be accepted. There is time enough after the first draft to decide if there are sometimes things better left unsaid, but don’t leave them unsaid only for fear of what people will think. Truth is sometimes scary. When someone points out a truth, it encourages us to look at our own truths. And sometimes our own truths feel uncomfortable out in the open.

Maybe this is one of the reasons certain books are so often challenged – they point out uncomfortable truths that people would rather not face. It’s easier to ban the book, perhaps, than deal with what they see in the mirror.

“I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.”—John Mortimer

“If you want to write . . . a novel, a short story, your memoir . . . if you want to write anything, the first step is to start writing. It’s the next step that’s the tricky one and the one where many writers trip up: keep writing.”—Judy Reeves

The key to writing anything is a daily writing practice. Sure, you can write now and then, only when you feel like it, but the writing muscle cannot develop any strength if it is exercised only once in awhile. If you want to finish a project , if you want to improve your craft, write every single day.

If you don’t, you’ll become like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz – you’ll need lots of time and effort to oil those rusty joints before the words start to flow.

Write every day, even if it’s only for a little while. Don’t let your writing joints get stiff and awkward. The more you write, the more limber you get, and if you write every day, soon you’ll be cartwheeling through stories and sprinting through the pages.

“Write every day, the muse insists. Don’t skip a day no matter how you’re feeling, no matter how many wars your country is fighting, no matter how many tornados are heading your way. Crawl into your storm cellar and pick up a pen. If you can’t think of anything to say, write the word God again and again. If you don’t believe in God, write the word dog. Everyone believes in dogs.” – Sy Safransky

“In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.” ― Natalie Goldberg

When I started writing, one of the first rules I was told was “Read. Write. Don’t Stop.”

Often, I meet people who want to write or are writing, but who don’t read. Maybe they used to, but they just don’t have the time anymore. I think they view reading as a luxury. A leisure pursuit. Which it can be, but as a writer, it’s part of your craft.

As a writer, you learn to read differently. You may still read the same old fluff you always enjoyed, but now you look at it and decide which parts you admire, and which you would do differently. Read in and out of your genre, read anything and everything. Read writers whom you admire. Read classics. Read what you want to write.

I’ve heard some writers say they don’t read because they are afraid it will affect their ‘voice’ (the style in which they write). It probably will, but what you write probably won’t be derivative. What you read will join the rest of what you’ve read, and mingle and simmer in your head, and emerge as your very own style.

Art students used to copy the masters before they began painting on their own. Writing isn’t much different, except our medium is words rather than pigments. When you find a writer you particularly admire, try copying a few paragraphs or a few pages. Get the feel of their rhythm in your fingers as you type. Examine how they handle transitions and body language and dialogue. Learn from them.

Look at reading as study for your craft. Set aside time to read just the same as you set aside time to write.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write. --Stephen King

“Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.” —Anne Lamott

When you practice freewriting, you learn to let go and let the words come up from wherever they reside without trying to form them or push them into being a certain way. It takes practice and effort, just like those Magic Eye books that were so popular in the 90s. It seems counterintuitive to look at a picture and instead of focusing on it, to let your eyes relax and gaze into the space beyond the picture. But that’s the only way you’ll ever see the Magic Eye picture form out of the crazy pattern.

Freewriting is learning to unfocus your mind and let images emerge. It is about letting Wild Mind be in the driver seat. Let your Muse take charge. You’ll know you’re there when your characters start doing and saying things you never would have expected.

Once you reach that place, you’ll feel as if your characters have a life of their own, a past you must discover rather than invent, secrets you must coax out of them, fears and dreams and desires they may or may not tell you about. Enjoy the discovery!

“'Writing Begets Writing.'
If you're stuck on a difficult scene, write it anyway.
Write it badly. Write it in verse. Write it as a journal entry, a Dennis Miller rant. If you're frustrated at being stuck, write about that. I don't care. But write.
If you have angry, self-critical feelings, give them to a character in your story. If there isn't a likely candidate, invent one. There IS one, anyway: you. Your anguish, doubt, fears and frustrations are as vital and elemental to what you're writing as any character or plot point.” —Dennis Palumbo

The first and most important step is to get words on the page. Trick yourself any way you need to, to get the first sentence written. Sometimes, when I’m having a particularly hard time, I skip a few lines and start typing without indenting, without capitalization or punctuation. I just blather on for a bit, hunting for a loose corner to start picking at. Eventually, I’ll hit my stride and the writing will take off, no longer needing me to push it, but instead, pulling me along. When I finally pause to look over what I’ve written, I notice that at some point, I’ve started punctuating, indenting, creating paragraphs and dialogue without being aware of it.

Occasionally, the writing won’t transcend the struggle. I push it uphill for the duration of my writing time, save the file and find something else to do. When I come back to read it the next day or week, I realize there are some great threads I can follow, even if the writing itself is cumbersome and heavy.

Once in a great while, when I go back to read a piece I know I struggled through, I don’t find any particular gems. But even then, I recognize that the time wasn’t wasted. It was simply a day for exercising the writing muscle. Which is still a worthwhile pursuit.

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.” —Anne Lamott

“There's a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstance permit. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.”—Art Turock

No judgment either way, but it’s important to be clear about your intentions. This advice has come up for me a number of times over the years, both as it applies to myself and as it applies to others. Dieting, exercising, writing . . . Don’t say you want to do something and then make excuses as to why you can’t. Face it, if you have excuses – “reasons”—why you’re not doing it, it just means it’s not as high a priority as you might wish it was.

This quote comes up now because I almost allowed myself an excuse for not posting a quote today. I burned several fingers in a stupid kitchen accident last nightand I spent the evening holding a baggie full of ice. “How could anyone expect me to type with burnt fingers?”

Sounds legit, doesn’t it?

But in all honesty, I was able to post to Facebook, work on name tags for my upcoming workshop, reply to an email, and add a really cool widget to my website. So obviously, though my fingers hurt like the dickens and I frequently had to stop to hold the ice bag, I was still able to type. So why allow myself to make excuses for skipping the quote of the day? I made a commitment on September 9th, one I intended to keep for an entire year. How serious was that commitment? Did I mean it? Or did I mean ‘only on days when it’s convenient’?

Then followed a short discussion with myself, a search for an apt quote (during which I found a really cool blog I shared on my Facebook), and here I am, typing a bit slowly, lots of typos I have to fix, but very proud of myself for sticking to it.

Now it's time for me to put my fingers back on ice.

“If you don't want to do something, one excuse is as good as another.”—Yiddish Proverb

Writing is Healing

Storytelling is healing. As we reveal ourselves in story, we become aware of the continuing core of our lives under the fragmented surface of our experience. We become aware of the multifaceted, multichaptered ' I ' who is the storyteller. We can trace out the paradoxical and even contradictory versions of ourselves that we create for different occasions, different audiences... Most important, as we become aware of ourselves as storytellers, we realize that what we understand and imagine about whole.—Susan Wittig Albert

When I first started writing seriously, I had no idea that making up a story would lead to self-discovery. Of course I journaled during high school and college, filled dozens of spiral notebooks with melodramatic retellings of various events and my feelings about them. But that was more akin to whining or venting than true processing.

When I was in my mid-thirties, my grandmother passed away. One of the last things I remember her saying to me was “I’m afraid everyone will forget me.” After years of trying unsuccessfully to write, it was her words that gave me the nudge I needed. I started writing a story very loosely based on her youth, using bits and pieces of her history along with scraps from my own imagination, stitching them all into a quilt that unintentionally bared my feelings and perceptions about life. The more I wrote, the more I realized I was thrashing my way through all the assumptions about life and happiness I’d taken as gospel over the years.

Time and again, I’ve found my deepest beliefs and desires tucked between the lines, sliced thin and passed out to multiple characters to play out.

When we write with abandon, simply taking dictation from our imagination, from our subconscious, without attempting to alter or deny or pretty it up, we discover things about ourselves that otherwise might have remained buried. If you keep at it long enough, eventually you can stand back and see patterns changing, perceptions about life and the world opening up, coming unknotted, making sense, and sometimes finding resolution.

Write fiction or memoir, explore your past or make up a world for imaginary characters, write without restriction and see where it leads you.

"Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy." — Stephen King

“I wonder if I don't give too much of myself to writing: I am always half where I am; the other half is feeding the furnace, kick-starting the heat of creativity. I am making love with someone but at the same time I'm noticing how this graceful hand across my belly might just fit in with the memory of lilacs in Albuquerque in 1974.”—Natalie Goldberg

I remember hearing Diana Gabaldon say one time that being a writer means that if you were held up during a convenience store robbery, one part of your brain would be able to remain detached enough to observe “so this is what it feels like to be held at gunpoint.”

Anything is fodder for your writing. Fiction or nonfiction, nothing is off limits. As soon as you start setting boundaries on what you are or aren’t willing to explore, you miss out on discoveries that could enrich your writing. This isn’t to say there shouldn’t be boundaries on what you’re willing to put out into the world, that choice may be different for each of us. But at the outset, there should be no corner too far away to be explored, no closet so dark we should not cast a light into it.

“Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, "We *told* you not to tell." But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.” —Anne Lamott

“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”—James A Michener

In addition to my fetish for stationery, I have a passion for words. Written and spoken. Language is like music to me, like a puzzle, like a secret code. Dialect, syntax, colloquialisms, inflection, slang, romance languages, Germanic languages, Latin roots. Sometimes I can sort of unfocus my mind a bit and step back into a place of amazement at how language works. How we can convey complex thoughts and ideas with some sounds shaped by our breath, lips, teeth and tongue.

This love of language then morphs into wonder at how fluid reality is, how each of us can interpret the same event through different eyes and different contexts. Then there’s the granddaddy of all paradoxes – how sometimes fiction can be more true than facts.

When you have a love affair with words and language, explore it all. Write about everything. Write to discover how you feel about something. Let your subconscious lead you across the page. Let your imagination carry you away to dance with words and ideas.

Sometimes when I read, I want to read slowly, to savor the language like rich chocolate. “All the Pretty Horses” (Cormac McCarthy) is that way to me. Sometimes, language is fun like cherry cream soda – like Dr. Seuss or Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky.

Whether you’re reading or writing, stop once in awhile to enjoy the language.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”—Anais Nin

“But now I know that imagination comes, works, when you are not trying, when you have a peculiar passive clarity.” --Brenda Ueland

Natalie Goldberg calls it Monkey Mind and Wild Mind. Some people think of it as right and left brain, rational and intuitive, concrete and abstract . . .

Whatever you call it, the place where your imagination lives is a wide, expansive place, sometimes difficult to access. You can’t force it.

I think your imagination lives in the same place memory does. Have you ever been watching a movie and recognized one of the actors from something else you’ve seen? You try to think what movie it was, what character, and the harder to dig for the memory, the tighter your mind clenches around it. Finally you give up. Later that night while you’re washing dishes or taking a shower, suddenly the movie, the character, the name, whatever it was you were trying to remember drifts from your subconscious accompanied by a feeling of “well, duh”.

It’s like the old story about how to catch a monkey. Cut an opening into a coconut that is just large enough to put a hand in, but not large enough to pull a fist out. Put a tasty treat inside. Tie the coconut to a tree. When a monkey reaches in for the treat and can’t remove his hand, he gets quite upset but doesn’t let go of the treat, thus being caught. The irony is the true trap is not the coconut, but the monkey’s mind and his unwillingness to “Let Go.”

The next time you’re trying to remember something, or trying to solve a problem (with writing or otherwise), if the solution doesn’t present itself, try relaxing and letting go. Wash dishes, do some gardening, go for a walk, engage in something creative like painting or coloring. Or write around the problem. Let your subconscious, your Wild Mind, work on it. Write what comes before (before the story opens, even) or what comes after, or whatever is happening meanwhile back at the ranch. Relax and have some fun. I like to call these informative scenes ‘outtakes’ because I never intend to include them in the final draft. I just write them to entertain myself, inform the story, or solve a problem.

“...[T]here should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.” —Anne Lamott

“Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus ticket, on the wall of a cell.” --David Nicholls, One Day, 2010

Okay, I’ll admit it. I have a fetish for stationery. I love colored parchment, pretty flowery designs, new fountain pens, and most especially, fancy journals. Since I was very young, I’ve always felt that if I could find just the right notebook, the prettiest paper, the smoothest pen, I would be able to stay neat and organized with my homework, or when I was older, that I would be able to write the Great American Novel.

The truth is, the fancy journals get in the way of writing a novel. They get in the way of writing to discover what I have to say on any given subject. They get in the way of most everything type of writing except for the imaginary kind I do in my head with poetic turns of phrase and flourishes of my pen. I have a whole shelf of various kinds of fancy notebooks and journals, and every one of them empty.

This is why I particularly like Natalie Goldberg’s advice:

“Sometimes people buy expensive hardcover journals. They are bulky and heavy, and because they are fancy, you are compelled to write something good. Instead you should feel that you have permission to write the worst junk in the world and it would be okay. Give yourself a lot of space in which to explore writing. A cheap spiral notebook lets you feel that you can fill it quickly and afford another.”—Natalie Goldberg

“The best way to get quiet, other than the combination of extensive therapy, Prozac, and a lobotomy, is first to notice that the station is on. KFKD [K-Fucked] is on every single morning when I sit down at my desk.” —Anne Lamott

Most of us recognize the conflicting mutter of thoughts in the back of our mind as we write. Some are maybe more aware than others, but we all have it, and if you pay attention, you come to realize each voice has a different personality. I heard of one person who referred to this mutter of thoughts as the Committee. She said she pictured them to be the Seven Dwarves sitting around the boardroom table in Snow White’s cottage, arguing.

Maybe you remember the television series “Herman’s Head” in which the majority of the show took place in the main character’s mind. The various aspects of Herman's personality would discuss the event, replay realted memories, worry about possible outcomes, demand desires be met.

My committee changes. I think they must have a term limit. Sometimes my Muse resembles something along the lines of Stephen King’s boys in the basement. Sometimes my Muse is the Lily Tomlin operator character. One time when I was particularly frustrated, Debbie recommended I have a meeting with my committee. I recognized it as a good suggestion and when it was time to write that day I sat back for a few minutes to conjure up my committee. I was pretty surprised to see the cast of the Waltons filing in and sitting down.

Anne Lamott’s “committee” apparently broadcasts their board meetings on a radio station.

Whatever your committee is, it’s important to recognize each of these voices for what they are – fear, worry, boredom, optimism, pessimism, inspiration, and so on. Once you’ve recognized them, excuse them. Thank them for their input, ask them to leave. Then go on with your writing time. Just because all those voices have something to say doesn’t mean it’s constructive for your writing, or even particularly truthful.

Try this: Open your writing notebook and draw a line down the middle of the page. On one side, choose your writing prompt, set the timer for five minutes, and start writing. On the other side of the paper, take notes about what the committee members have to say as you write. When the time is up, read over the committee’s comments. Personify each voice. Have fun with it. Put a hat on one, give a cigar to another, let one wring her hands, let another one make sweeping generalizations and grandiose statements.

Once you have met and gotten to know each one, acknowledge their opinion and thank them for participating. Then ask everyone but the Muse to leave your writing space. One or two may be invited back in to help edit later, but for now, when you are freewriting, it should only be you and the Muse.

“Imagine how little good music there would be if, for example, a conductor refused to play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on the grounds that his audience may have heard it before.”—A.P. Herbert

“There are only 7 basic story plots.”
“There is only one basic plot and that stems from conflict.”
“There are twenty basic plots.”
(Click here for short description of each of these theories.)

They may argue on the exact number, but to be sure, the number of plots in literature is far less than the number of great stories. Don’t be afraid to explore a common plot or theme. As long as you write honestly your unique combination of personality, experiences, education, voice, and influences will give whatever plot you choose originality. No one else on earth has the same set of circumstances you do, and for that reason alone, no one else can see the world quite like you do.

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” --C. S. Lewis

“Don't let a single day go by without writing. Even if it's garbage, if garbage is all you can write, write it. Garbage eventually becomes compost with a little treatment.”—unknown

If I approach my writing time with discipline, determined to write no matter how wooden or bland it feels, I often discover that, as I’ve been plopping words on the page without enthusiasm, an idea emerges that I had no idea was lingering in the back of my mind. Rather like one of Rorschach’s inkblots, the image may be merely a suggestion, I may have to squint and tilt my head to the side, but hey – it sure does look like an idea worth following.

Remember, no word is wasted effort. Some words grow into ideas, some are mere fertilizer, but even fertilizer serves a purpose.

“Nora Roberts says ‘you can fix anything but a blank page’ and that’s absolutely true. If you spend a day writing crap, you can fix it. If you spend a day not writing, you’ve got nothing”.—Eve Ackerman

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”—Stephen King

The first time I heard this advice, I was appalled. Why would you write something good and then delete it? I had to sweat over those words, had worked hard on them and was proud of them. So why get rid of them?

I gradually came to understand the intent of this advice, even though I still hated having to follow it. I would read through a draft and debate how darling a particular line or passage was, and why it should remain. The harder I argued to keep something in, the bigger the red flag to take it out. The point is, your writing shouldn’t call attention to itself. It should transfer the story to the reader’s imagination without preening and admiring itself in the mirror. Especially if it’s only a line here or there.

Eventually, I learned to recognize the voice that liked putting those darlings in and fought so hard to keep them. I call it my greeting card voice, my melodramatic voice, my show-off voice. I don’t trouble keep this voice out of the first draft. Sometimes that voice has really good ideas cloaked in the poetic turns of phrase. But on the second draft, watch out. I recently found a way to soothe my poet's feelings over deleting the darlings. Greeting card companies will pay for poetic turns of phrase they use on their cards. They don’t like sappy, sweet, or melodramatic voices either, but they do sometimes like ‘the darlings’.

Stephen King was not the first to offer this advice. Check out the dates for these other quotes:

“Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” --Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784

“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – whole-heartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings”. –Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, 1916

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” —William Faulkner, 1897-1962

“If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.”—Louis L’Amour

What is it that gets in your way to prevent you from writing? Sometimes it’s life. Events out of your control pop up and interfere with your schedule. Not much we can do about that except have a plan for a minimum amount of writing time on those days. But what about the times when you sit down to write and you just don’t feel inspired? When anything sounds more interesting than sitting at your keyboard wrestling over one word at a time?

Give some thought to why you might be stuck –is it than you’re bored with what you’re writing? You don’t know what happens next? You’re worrying if it’s good enough?

While you’re pondering that in the back of your mind, change up your writing routine. Pack up and head to a café or to another room in your house, or outside. Ditch the computer and try writing longhand. Set a timer for small increments and practice freewriting (keep your hand moving, no stopping, no editing, no rules).

“You can't think yourself out of a writing block, you have to write yourself out of a thinking block.” --John Rogers

“Within our dreams and aspirations, we find our opportunities.” –Sue Atchley Ebaugh

There are many different words to describe how it happens. Serendipity is one of my favorites. The actual definition of serendipity is “The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.” Jung called it synchronicity. Others call it a lucky break or the hand of God. Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way) says the what must come before the how. A perfect example of this the famous line from Field of Dreams – “If you build it, they will come.”

Sometimes what is most needed is to step out in faith and do the work you love. The Universe will meet you more than halfway. It may not look quite like you first envisioned it, but it is surprising how opportunities seem to present themselves once you wholeheartedly commit to a course of action.

Use S.M.A.R.T. goals to set a course toward your dreams.

“Leap and the net will appear.”—John Burroughs “If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.”—Thomas A. Edison

“We have seen too much defeatism, too much pessimism, too much of a negative approach. The answer is simple: if you want something very badly, you can achieve it. It may take patience, very hard work, a real struggle, and a long time; but it can be done. . . faith is a prerequisite of any undertaking.”
—Margo Jones

Patience, hard work, time, and faith. It’s simple recipe. If you have a dream you want to realize, the first step is to set a SMART goal. Try applying this method to your writing goals.

• Specific – Too general and you don’t have a target to aim for. You should be able to state what, why, and how, each in a single sentence.


• Measurable – You must be able to measure your progress, which means setting milestones and target dates.


• Attainable – Identify goals that are important to you. If you set goals that are too far out of your reach, you probably won’t commit to doing your best to achieve it. This also means setting goals you are able to reach without luck or dependency on other variables falling into place.


• Realistic – This doesn’t mean easy. It means ‘do-able’. Set the bar high enough that you have to work for it, but reasonable enough that you don’t feel doomed to failure before you even begin.


• Timely – Set a timeframe. Set deadlines. Set target dates for milestones along the way. If you don’t set a time limit, the commitment is too vague and you will put it off because you feel can start at any time.

This method works for any goal you can set. Try it. You might surprise yourself with what you can accomplish.

“If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you’re right.”
—Mary Kay Ash

“When people make changes in their lives in a certain area, they may start by changing the way they talk about that subject, how they act about it, their attitude toward it, or an underlying decision concerning it.” –Jean Illsley Clarke

How you view yourself will affect how seriously you take your desire to write, which will profoundly affect your ability to be a writer.

When someone asks what you do, how do you reply? Do you offer your title at your day job? Or do you say “I am a writer”? If it’s the former, it’s time to come out of the closet and claim the identity. As long as your writer identity is in the closet, your commitment to making time to write, making the effort when inspiration is lacking, or submitting your writing somewhere will be less than what it could be.

“The Chinese say that water is the most powerful element, because it is perfectly nonresistant. It can wear away rock and sweep all before it.” --Florence Scovel Shinn

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” As children we are taught that words are just words, as harmless gentle raindrops. As we grow up, our experience tells us differently. It’s true, words are just a collection of vocalized sounds or black marks on paper, but in their silent, nonresistant way, they can be a torrent that wears away the rock of someone’s prejudice, or a river that carves a canyon between cultures, or cool relief that soothes the sting other words have caused.

Never underestimate the power of honesty and passion in your writing.

“The pen is mightier than the sword.”—Edward Bulwer-Lytton (author of the famous “It was a dark and stormy night.” opening line)

“Like an old gold-panning prospector, you must resign yourself to digging up a lot of sand from which you will later patiently wash out a few minute particles of gold ore.” –Dorothy Bryant

I’ve heard it said you sometimes need to write 100 pages and throw away the first 99 to get something good. If you think about words like sand, that you need a hundred pounds of ‘sand’ to find ten flakes of gold, suddenly freewriting takes on a whole new meaning. It becomes a sluice box rather than a single pan. Freewrite as if you need to produce a hundred pounds of words for every ounce of gold.

“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

"I believe that true identity is found . . . in creative activity springing from within. It is found, paradoxically, when one loses oneself." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I believe this is true about all writing—fiction and nonfiction. The act of writing opens a channel to the page from an inner world that we tend to keep under tight control lest some 'inappropriate' idea escape. If you really relax and let it flow, i.e. 'lose oneself', often the words that find their way to the page surprise and inform. And once out there, we can realize even the 'inappropriate' ideas have value, an honesty that will resonate with others far better than any carefully shepherded words are able to.

When you sit down to freewrite, do so with the intention of staying out of your own way, of not directing your thoughts into safe, 'acceptable' channels.

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." - Rumi

Quote of the Day

A little more than a year and a half ago, inspired by the movie Julie and Julia, a very good friend of mine made a New Year’s resolution to blog every single day for one year. She was just embarking on a writing journey separate from many years of academic writing. During the course of the year, she confided she had a hard time blogging some days, was uninspired some days, but in the whole 365 days, I think she missed blogging only one day. I was impressed by her commitment and self discipline, and through her effort, our discussion of how to write even when it’s difficult was born. That led to the book I’m currently working on, which indirectly led to an idea for a quote a day with a daily ‘meditation’ for writers to help through the uninspired times.

Debbie died unexpectedly a few weeks ago, leaving unrealized dreams, unfinished writing projects, and a world poorer for her absence. Today is her birthday and today I am committing to 365 days of posting to my blog.

After some consideration, I decided to post writing quotes, which Debbie and I both loved to share and discuss, and a daily ‘meditation’ to help in uninspired times. My hope is that, rather than being preachy, it will be an inspiration, as Debbie’s blog was to me. I hope it will also be a reflection of my core belief that writing every day is a crucial habit for writers to form. Even if it’s only five minutes, don’t let a single day go by without writing.

With seven kids at home, a full time job, teaching writing workshops, and volunteering, some days five minutes of writing time is all I can manage. If I can do it, my hope is you will be inspired to, too.

(Click HERE if you’d like to read Debbie’s yearlong blog)

Writing Rules

Writing Rules - whenever I bring this up in a discussion, I get mixed reactions. If you read this article on Writing Rules thru to the comments, you'll see a sampling of more mixed reactions. In my workshops, I teach that there are no rules for the first draft. If you stop to worry whether or not you're doing it right, you'll stifle your creativity. The first time around just dance. When you're ready to revise is time enough to look at the rules and decide which work and which you will choose to skip.

The Perfect Time To Write

Awhile ago, I signed up for Daily Writing Tips blog via email. That's about my speed, since some days I barely take time to look at my email, let alone surf and read interesting articles. Anyway, today's was particularly apt: "Why there'll never be a perfect time to write." Check it out: Daily Writing Tips.

What's keeping YOU from writing?

Til Death Us Do Part

I'm currently working on a writing book, and one chapter is based on one of the very first quotes I stumbled across when I began to pursue writing seriously. "Either marry your writing (write every day) or date it (write only when you want), but know which you are choosing and the repercussions of both." (I have searched and searched and found no one to attribute this quote to - if you know, please share.)

Make a Commitment.

If you truly want to do something with your writing, you need to make a commitment. You need to "marry your writing". That means writing every day whether you 'feel' like it or not.

It means:
For better or worse (even on the crappy days),
For richer or poorer (yeah, probably poorer - unless you keep your day job, too),
In sickness and in health (sometimes your writing can take care of you when you're sick. Plus, you don't have to get dressed or leave the house),
Til death do us part.

I've been thinking a lot about that last one recently. My best friend and writing partner, Debbie, died suddenly last week. At first I couldn't face writing because I was working on a draft that was covered with her notes and fresh with memories of our brainstorming. But I know Debbie wouldn't have wanted to be the reason I stopped writing. So I've been struggling to take baby steps each day with my writing goals. Because my vow wasn't to her - I can't stop writing because she did (maybe now she has all the time she wants to write?) - my vow is to MY writing. Even while I grieve, I need to carry on and keep working toward my goals.

I think that along the road of life (excuse me while I wax poetic), we all encounter 'deaths' - the loss of friends, jobs, book deals, and more. Sometimes those can be hard hits to our motivation to write. But, if you're truly committed to being a writer, you need to keep writing. It's like getting thrown from a horse. The best thing you can do is to get back on and keep writing....er, riding. Because if you don't, the permission to stop for a day or two can turn into a week or two, and then a month or two, until you have to start all over building that daily practice again.

How do I know this?

Because last September, another very close friend and writing partner died suddenly. It was months before I pushed myself to return to writing. I lost my momentum on the book I was writing and still haven't been able to return to fiction. So Debbie and I worked out a plan where we'd meet every week and I would set writing goals to get myself back on track. We'd meet at a local coffee house, and we'd share how our week had been, if we'd met our writing goals, what our challenges were (read: excuses), and then set new goals for the next week. Many of those conversations were fodder for the writing book I'm working on now (titled, strangely enough, Face the Page). The last time I saw her was at my most recent writing workshop. It was the first time I used the "Marry Your Writing" topic, and our exercise was to write our vows.

I know if Debbie was here, she'd gently but very insistently remind me of those vows, and help me keep them.

Time to practice what I preach, right?

Writing rituals, totems and talismans

A ritual is a pattern of behavior, which, like Pavlov's dog, signals us that it's time to write. A walk, mediation, a cup of a particular flavor of tea, a certain kind of music...

The word ‘totem’ is of Native American origin, but totem-like beliefs have been historically present throughout much of the world. In Native American culture it’s a spirit guide. In writing it symbolizes the Muse.

A talisman is regarded as a repository for magical energy, like a battery. In writing this can be most anything that inspires us or carries symbolic power. Quartz is believed to increase inspiration and creativity.

What rituals, totems or talismans get (and keep) you writing?

The Power of Positive Thinking

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in making new landscapes but in having new eyes." —Marcel Proust

Carpe Diem (a.k.a. time management)

"A year from now you will wish you had started today." -Karen Lamb

"In truth, people can generally make time for what they choose to do; it is not really the time but the will that is lacking." -Sir John Lubbock

"If you really want to do something, make the commitment, then break it down into baby steps and be sure to take at least one step every day." -Barb Aeschliman

Writing Quote - what does it mean to you?

Novelist James Carroll put it well: "We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they save us.”

Time Capsule

Write about items you would choose to put into a time capsule to give future generations a glimpse of our world today.

Story Starter

Set your timer for 5 minutes. No stopping, no editing, no deleting. If you hit a dead end, bulldoze through....

“It was many years ago in that dark, chaotic, unfathomable pool of time before . . .”

Story Starter...

Sent your timer before you read the prompt below. Have your pen (or keyboard) ready. Read the prompt and start writing. Don't stop to think. Try to write without stopping for 15 minutes. Even if you think it doesn't make sense or you want to edit - resist the urge. Just follow the train of thought until it runs out.


“They came through on the hotline at about half past two in the afternoon . . .”

Write about spilled milk...

Real or metaphorical, action or reaction, a family scene, a scene in a restaurant, use the line in a bit of dialogue (for bonus points, use it to convey subtext). Share a few sentences here.

“He found a package of seeds in his coat pocket . . .”

Begin a story with “The day he went to Disneyland, I went to . . .”

Share the first paragraph (or two) here.

Write about going nowhere in particular...

Random Words

Set your timer for 15 minutes and write a story using the following words:

Moon
Umbrella
Empty
Purple
Zebra
Violin

Write about a childhood pet.

Poetry and Musicals

My youngest has a poetry project due next Friday, so we've been up to our nether regions in verse. He really likes to write limericks and haiku. Here's a haiku that I wrote -

My baby can't write
Will he ever graduate?
Please pass me the wine

He's also in the high school musical that opened last night. They're doing "Urinetown". I haven't seen it yet. We're going next week. I think that the people at the high school like to be thought of as edgy and cool. Since (to teenagers) anyone over 25 is neither, why can't they do freaking "South Pacific" or freaking "Oklahoma"?? Here's a limerick -

My youngest, he loves Japanese
He spouts it whenever he please
His grades are a mess
Though he aces mosts tests
And he's bringing his mom to her knees

It's been one of those weeks.

A Day of Renewal

At 12:01 pm, EST, as President-Elect Obama placed his hand on Abraham Lincoln's bible to take the oath of office and become President Obama, something very 21st century happened.

The White House website changed hands.

As I listened to President Obama's speech on my TV, my iBook in my lap, I clicked into the Presidential Blog (a blog! The President has a blog!), and saw that the new President had declared a proclamation. He declared today, January 20th, a Day of Renewal.

A Day of Renewal! What a beautiful idea. For many of us, 2009 really started today, not on January 1st. 20 days have passed since we made our resolutions. How are we doing on them? I know I could be doing a lot better. So how fortunate that today, on this Presidentially-proclaimed Day on Renewal, we get to take a deep breath, and start again.

Let a new era begin, both without and within ourselves. "The fierce urgency of now," President Obama said. Let us take this moment to re-dedicate ourselves to our goals and our dreams and move forward, filling each minute with the fierce urgency of now.

We are no longer asleep. We are wide awake to the world around and inside us, so let us meet it with renewed breath, faith, hope, urgency, and grace. Amen, amen, amen!

Surprising your inner critic

Happy January, everyone! Things are getting back to normal-ish around here after our extended winter break, freakish twelve day snow event, and holiday madness. The oldest boy is back at his university, the middle boy finally applied to a college this week, and the youngest turned in a science paper...on time. Thank you magic homework pixies!

I've had quite a writing holiday, too. I haven't done much in a month or so and I want to get back on track. To bring myself up to speed, I thought I'd re-read what I've written so far, then start on an 800 to 1,000 words per day goal. Sounds very do-able, and probably easier than my wish to find an exercise that I can do on a regular basis without dry heaving.

Here's the surprise moment for me: as I re-read my work-in-progress, I found that I liked it. I really liked it. I couldn't wait to see what was going to happen next. My mouth fell open - where had I come up with all this? Sure, there were a few things I wanted to tweak along the way, but this was total vomit copy written during NaNoWriMo and I still thought it didn't suck. My lovely critique group (hello lovely critique group) knows that I can be pretty hard on myself. I am my own worst critic. For me to read my own work and react like this...well, it was a huge shock-o-roonie.

So what's surprised you lately? Family, friends, your work...what's given you a little smile that you never expected?

New Year's .... Ideas

Well. Gerb tagged us over on her blog : ) And so then she had to explain to me what that meant. Yes, I feel very undereducated at the moment. Which is okay. Nothing a little chocolate and a willingness to ask questions won't cure!

So, what a bunch of us need to do here is share three of our New Year's Resolutions. Personally I chafe at the idea of New Year's Resolutions. Just the word "resolution" makes me feel like I'm setting myself up for failure. This is probably a learned response, having failed at resolutions for years. So that's why I called the post "Ideas". I'm trying to trick myself. And to that end, I'm going to take a break and end this post here. I'm going to go hunt down some more chocolate, then come back and share three of my New Year's Ideas.