Growing up, I always admired my father’s Saturday morning ritual of washing the family car. Every Saturday, the bucket, rags, soap, and Turtle Wax would appear from his tool shed, and he’d go to work. Hours would go by as he washed and detailed the interior and exterior of the car, never asking or wanting any help from anyone. When I moved out for college, I found myself taking my car to the local do it yourself car wash with a handful of quarters to wash my old blue hatchback, gaining some sort of satisfaction out of scrubbing the tires,wiping the dashboard with protectant, and every so often changing the wiper blades.
Category Archives: Blog
Shutting the Door
In her essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf claimed that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” While Woolf’s essay had more to do with the lack of financial and educational freedom female writers were subject to, the title of this piece strikes upon an essential piece of equipment in the arsenal of any serious writer: a place to write.
Writing Your Way Out
I tried the exercises. I wrote in different rooms of the house, different times of day. I tried writing something completely unrelated to shake myself out of a rut. I freewrote. You name it; I tried it. But none of it mattered because I’d managed to write myself into a corner. Everywhere I looked, there were obstacles. Somehow I’d worked my way into a scene I couldn’t get past because everything that would come after seemed to hinge upon it. Everything.
Rebooting Your Brain
What do you do when you get stuck on a story or run out of motivation or creativity? How do you refresh it? How do you get inspired?
I’ve been wrestling with these questions lately because my imagination has been quite stingy. Just last week, while I was working on a short story, my brain froze up. Instantly, I felt stupid and incapable of forming complete thoughts. I couldn’t figure out why this was happening or what to write next or how to form the second half of the piece. Every idea I came up with seemed obvious or lame. It was extremely frustrating and I went three days without writing a good word (and this is bad because I have some deadlines coming up).
The Well-Worn Book
As a young girl, my grandmother would take me to pick out fabrics for the dresses she would sew for me to wear. My fingers loved to browse through bolts of soft cotton, rough tweeds, linear corduroys, and ethereal gauzes. I would hide within the racks, all the while feeling each pattern, each texture, each subtle pick of fiber.
The Importance of Writerly Friends
I have a few hundred Facebook friends. Out of all of them there are maybe thirty or forty who have any semblance of an interest in writing or literature. Fewer still actively write, and I would only consider sharing my early drafts with a handful of them. These ‘writing friends’ are not only writers whose work and opinions on craft I admire, but they have also helped me in many ways. They’ve pushed me through drafts I thought were dead in the water, broadened my reading horizions with books I never would have picked up on my own, and helped me improve my writing as a whole. I’m always happy to look at a manuscript they might be working on, or to be a sounding board for their new ideas for novels or short stories. These kind of relationships are the ones that have gotten me through the more difficult times of being a writer. Not that family and loved ones aren’t great, but there’s no substitute for a friend who is right there with you in the thick of it.
Life on Mars with My Father-in-law
A fellow-writer once told me that the ending of a story should be “surprising yet inevitable,” meaning unexpected, but not outside the realm of possibility. I’ve found in my own writing that the easy part is to come up with a good start or interesting concept but wrapping it up takes much more than a few hours, or days, or even months.
I was reminded just how important a clean ending is over the last two months or so. Every Sunday my father-in-law made me, my wife, and my mother-in-law watch a show called Life on Mars. It started as an alternative to watching him watch NASCAR but quickly moved to a ritual we looked forward to. Since the whole series only has 17 episodes, we moved through it fairly quickly.
Queuing Up Quiet
My husband and I were driving home from dinner the other night, our toddler snoozing in her carseat behind us, when the shuffle on my husband’s phone queued up one of my favorite songs, the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four.” As I sang along (a little too enthusiastically), one of the lines struck me as it hadn’t before. McCartney suggests that on Sunday mornings, he and his partner could “go for a ride.” Suddenly, I was trying to remember the last time I took a car ride recreationally. The closest thing I could think of was a few years ago during our house-hunting phase, but even that was goal-oriented driving. Not even our annual Christmas lights cruising really counted since we always have a plan, an agenda.
Behind the Scene Words
Recently, I had a wonderfully productive day as a writer. I wrote 1,200 good words of fiction. For me, that is maybe a once or twice a year thing because on a typical day, my goal is to write 300 good words. If I can do that, I feel really good about what I’ve accomplished. This, however, is beside the point. What’s important is that less than 300 of those 1,200 words made it into the final draft of my short story.
Rejection.. No Big Deal?
If you’re taking your writing seriously, then you probably have a space, time, even specific snack or drink you take to your writing spot to work. My own routine requires a big mug of tea, my cell phone in another room, the door shut, and some classical music. I used to think in a little way that if I did everything in my writing routine on time and stayed ultra organized all the time, then maybe the journals I was submitting to would know it and publish all my poems. This is wrong and stupid.