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.
Category Archives: Blog
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.
Frivolous Reading
As a third-semester student in an MFA program, I have spent the last few months in the local library poring over books and rifling through periodicals. The librarians there have grown accustomed to seeing me untidily sprawled in the aisles or else haunting the study carrels for hours on end. In addition to writing a paper, I’ve devoured numerous books on the matter of craft and diligently read the work of poets that I’ve found useful to my paper topic. In a funny way, I’ve had a good time. I was genuinely interested in the topic of my paper, and I enjoyed the poets I was reading. Overall, it was nice to feel that I was making some headway on something useful.
The day after I turned in my paper I went to the library once again. After plucking my scribbled sticky notes from the pages of several books and dropping the heavy volumes in the return box, I turned my attention to a matter I had anticipated for weeks: the gathering of as many frivolous, unwholesome books as possible. I got together a pile of about fifteen books that I had been burning to read during all the weeks I was pegging away at my paper. Some of these were books that I had read and loved in childhood, but others were by authors and poets that I had discovered in recent years. A couple were random impulses chosen either for their beautiful cover art or an interesting description decorating the book jacket. But all were books that I would have classified firmly as “pleasure” reading. These, I was sure, would never become source material for any great academic papers. I took the books home with me and I have been reading happily for about a week.
As I read, however, I became aware of a curious phenomenon. All at once, book-related habits from childhood were reappearing. They accompanied me to the supermarket in my purse, snoozed under my pillow at night, and beckoned to me appealingly from the dinner table. When I read the books I had loved as a child, I found myself perking up at passages I had always loved, finishing sentences in my mind before the pages had even turned. Reading through the old books and the new, I was reminded of why I had wanted to devote my life to writing to begin with and the power of a book to sweep you off of your feet with the beauty of its language and the charm of its characters. Although it was a completely unintended result, I found myself scribbling down more and more ideas for poems or stories as my pile of books dwindled.
Although my studies have been important to me, and I have read many fine pieces of literature over the past eight or nine years, I can no longer feel that there is any type of reading that is entirely frivolous or unwholesome. The most unassuming little book might speak volumes to you as a writer, and might influence some great change in your work. As writers, we must always be open to the work of others, and must constantly reevaluate what influences are helping us most in our writing lives.