A Positive Post about Writing

Objective for the Day: Write more positive blog post about writing process.

Four hours later: Have checked Facebook, replied to three long overdue emails, done writing practice, written part of a poem, and prepared two submissions to potential publishers. Hmmm, not sure if this is going well.

I love writing. I live to write. I do not procrastinate when it is time to write. I meet my writing goals and complete novels on schedule. I have learned discipline in editing (although there is definitely room for improvement there). I look forward to hanging out with other writers and discussing process and technique.

However I struggle with classifying the overall writing process as positive. It was at first, as I churned out page after page and shared them with friends and family who seemed genuinely riveted by the story. I know – friends and family are usually just being nice. But some of them did stay up until 3:00 am finishing it and others sent threatening emails when they did not receive chapters when expected. A few of them read the whole thing twice (gladly). Either I have the best friends and family in the world (possible) or my novel was decent (equally possible?). That first year of writing was a wild and exciting ride. Probably the best year of my life.

As I learned more about the publishing world, took on more and more paid work, and my volunteer life became busier, writing became more fraught – something that had to eke out a space in a cluttered environment late at night where it became more and more challenging not to throw up my hands and say what is the point anyway. And so my life has become one of duty (which just let me be clear is to excellent causes working with excellent people) while the words “screw you all” rattle on my lips.

Today I spent the whole day working on writing when I should have been working. I even skipped exercise class (although I will go for a run shortly). I haven’t even put dinner on so I have no idea how it is going to get cooked while I go fulfill my duties as a cub leader, then take my son to track, then go to a work meeting. Raw ribs are never a good idea.

I feel marginally like I have engaged in a criminal act. Evidently, I would make a very poor criminal.

So what is positive about this? I have successfully completed a small act of rebellion against my life. Maybe this will make way for more small acts of rebellion. A friend suggested I need to learn to slack more. But I am more of an all or nothing person. Either I am a writer, or I am not. Either I am a consultant, or I am not. My only vision for doing more writing is to toss a lit gasoline soaked rag into my life (well except the children and the cat of course). I was horrified to hear this week that Vincent Lam has kept his day job as a doctor. Well, if that man can’t make it is as a writer…..

Oh right. Positive. Keep it positive. Gasoline soaked rags are never positive and people start to worry if you mention them too often.

Positive: Today I wrote. Now I must run.

Writing and Perseverance

I have not blogged much lately. Work has been busy and we went on a two-week holiday to lovely Sedona. I have also been experimenting to see what my life would be like if I put work first and pushed writing to the far back of my priorities. Not at all uncomfortable it would seem.

Despite making good progress on my third novel, riding the rejection route with my other two has been disheartening to say the least. Not that it has been all bad. I have had a nibble and a couple of nice rejection letters. But it has been enough to make me question whether the whole thing is worth it. My consulting work is valued and appreciated. Why not put my energies into that?

The more one stumbles into the writing world, the more one realizes that there are so many people that are trying to be writers. Add to that the people who are being creative with words in some other manner on-line or locally and I really have to wonder if everyone is ‘creating’, who is listening.

Moreover, after participating in an evening of local writers at the Rouge Gallery a few weeks ago, I am struck by how talented a lot of our local writers are. Two of the women reading that night are published writers and several of the other six writers read entertaining and well composed pieces. I have had similar revelations listening to local musicians. Many of them are very good, extraordinary even. I won’t even go into the fantastic art that was on the walls in the Rouge Gallery. Is our small town a haven for struggling artists, or are other small towns equally populated by talented individuals? I suspect both. But my main conclusion is that there are a lot of very talented people out there.

I am reading an excellent book entitled Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life by Gregg Levoy. The book offers intelligent and balanced advice about understanding what you are really meant to do in this world. However I question the notion of having a calling. I find it interesting that most of the cases that Levoy describes are people who want to be writers, spiritual leaders, or coaches. He has not yet referred to a single call seeker who wanted to be a mechanic, farmer, grocery clerk or a doctor. Do we all want to keep our hands clean and sit uninterrupted at our desks for hours in our pajamas with our cat? It is an appealing idea (at least to me, the creative introverted type), but we can’t all do that, especially if you don’t have a cat. Maybe those of us who hear ‘calls’ are just more entitled, selfish, and able financially to go on pilgrimages to find ourselves, or pursue careers that are less lucrative than being a lawyer or an accountant.

Which brings me back to the original topic of this post, which was to be about perseverance. We all know the rule if you want to be successful in the writing world: Be persistent, be patient, don’t give up, many successful writers were rejected countless times. There are many great blog posts on this, such as those by Claire De Boer, and Ellen Jackson. As Ellen Jackson observes, “Success as a writer depends more on intelligent persistence than on raw talent.” Richard Bach once said, “A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.” Indeed.

Of course we all know you have to show up, you have to write, you have to finish whatever you are writing, you have to edit it, you have to figure out who might be accepting the kind of thing you are writing, you have to determine what their submission requirements are, and then you have to send your out writing in accordance with their requirements. Add to that the need to tweet, blog, and post on Facebook. Those are the basic requirements for even getting on the writing gameboard and they all require perseverance.

But that does not change the fact that there are many good or decent writers out there, including many right here where I live apparently. They are all in their pajamas with their cats right now. As a result, getting your work published, unless you are lucky, requires a whole different level of perseverance than that which I outlined above. The question is does the world need more writers?

Don’t get me wrong. I love the written word. Novels, poems and essays are the most important things in the world as far as I am concerned. But there are already more wonderful books, poems and essays in the world than I will ever be able to even consider reading. With the advent of blogging and self-publishing, we are even further awash with words. While I am all for having the opportunity to read a diversity of opinions and styles, have we reached a point of information overload in which few people even finish reading what they started?

In thinking about this piece I checked into what other writers have to say about perseverance. I came across a post selling a book about being the writer that you were meant to be. The post reads: “Every day, writers fail at one important task: being who they are. They succumb to their own doubts and don’t embrace their natural gifts and talents that the world desperately needs.” I am just not sure about this. The world desperately needs a lot of things: people who are willing to roll up their sleeves and work with troubled youth, clean up littered streets, maintain community gardens, cook meals, take care of the sick, make things…. Writing about these things is important and somebody needs to do that too. But we need more people doing things than writing about them.

And before any writers want to throttle me on this: Some writers should absolutely write. Their gifts to the world are required. Moreover, some writers contribute significantly to their community both by doing and by writing. Everyone should try writing for themselves on occasion for the contrbution it makes to one's well being and thoughtfulness. But there is no denying that good writing takes time, and for some people, perhaps that time would be better spent doing something else.

Which I guess brings me back to the question of perseverance in a way. I had perhaps thought my issues related to whether I could persevere. But perhaps my more fundamental question relates to whether I should. Of course I don’t want to upset my cat.

Faith and Writing

Shelovesmagazine.com proposes that instead of making a long list of New Year’s resolutions for the year, which people rarely keep, that you pick one word for the year. That word will be come your focus and a compass for your actions, decisions and priorities.

This suggestion struck a chord with me and I decided that if an appropriate word came to me, I would adopt it as my one word 2012. The word that came to me was faith.

At first I thought it would be appropriate. This will be the year that I believe that I can be a working writer. And if I believe, then maybe I will take the leaps of faith required for me to execute on my dream (like quitting my job). Choosing faith gave me a feeling of serenity for a few days. But I have a bad relationship with faith. We don’t trust each other.

However as a writer, or more accurately, a person who would like to write for a small amount of pay, faith may be required. There are few other pursuits in which one can work assiduously for many years, have reasonable talent, and yet still fail to achieve the goal of being published. I honestly think I would have a better chance of becoming a Supreme Court Justice or a brain surgeon than a working writer.

My husband promulgates the notion of faith. He believes that we all have a life’s purpose and that we just need to read the signposts to indicate whether we are going in the right direction. He believes, probably due to a lack of understanding of the writing world, that the signposts have pointed me in the direction of being a writer. He believes that I just have to keep working at it.

I am not so sanguine about the idea of faith and life’s purpose. I used to snatch up every Oprah magazine and book that promoted following your dreams, finding your bliss, believing that you can do anything, or whatever the catch phrase of the day was. Despite the promises of the cover or the dust jacket, none of these magazines or books ended up resonating with me beyond generating temporary feelings of hope. Now I pass Oprah by, and find myself entering bookstores looking for “the” book and coming out empty handed.

I turned to tarot cards for a while and they gave me brief reprieve from the abyss of no faith. I saw patterns in the cards and I believed that I could take guidance from them. I gave readings for a few years, and still do, and was shocked by what I could see in the cards for people I did not even know, an impending divorce, the illness of a child, a successful self-publishing effort. I tested the cards, demanding that I be able to pick the same card three times from a shuffled deck and surprising myself because I did (once). But I grew disillusioned and came to believe that the cards were just telling me what I wanted to see, or worse, nothing at all.

I question the idea of having a life’s purpose and following your dreams. Sure it works out great for some people. But there are a lot of people that end up disappointed. Otherwise most of us would be famous rock stars, business tycoons, wealthy writers or hockey players. The people who promote the idea of following your dreams would counter that the people that are disappointed did not actually do anything to actualize their dreams. But I believe many people work very hard towards their dreams and are still unsuccessful. Perhaps due to insufficient talent, bad luck or bad timing.

Maybe the ‘you can do anything’ industry is selling us a bill of goods that makes us less happy with our lives because it creates unrealistic expectations. Most of our grandparents worked crappy jobs in dangerous industrial settings and had no dream beyond a steady paycheck, warm bed, food on the table and Sundays off. The majority of the world’s population would be thrilled with that level of security.

Chris Hedges, in his book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, outlines the rise of a culture of narcissism.

“Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality.  Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity.  The New Age mysticism and pop psychology of television personalities, evangelical pastors, along with the array of self-help bestsellers penned by motivational speakers, psychiatrists, and business tycoons, all peddle a fantasy.”

Perhaps pursuing one’s dreams at all costs, no matter how outlandish, as the main route to happiness, is at best risky, and at worst selfish and egocentric. The Twitter hash tag #firstworldproblems is a reminder of how trivial many of our obsessions really are.

Which brings me back to my word for 2012: faith. Faith does not necessarily have to be in oneself or one’s ability to realize one’s dreams. It can be more of a faith in the universe. In his book Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest, Michael Krasny talks about envying people who have faith because of the comfort it gives them. He further suggests that it is in the human heart to yearn for purpose. Krasny references a line from British writer Julian Barnes, who said, "I don't believe in God but I miss him." This resonates with me. No matter how much I yearn for faith or a God, it does not come easily to me. Too many bad things happen to too many of the world’s people for me to have the conviction I need that there is a guiding hand. What lucky straw did I pull to land me here in first world comfort, while so many people suffer?

But there is the issue of Pascal’s Wager which suggests that it is better to live with faith and assume that God exists because if you do and he doesn’t, you have lost nothing (indeed one could argue that living with faith even if God does not exist will make you happier), whereas if you live as if God does not exist and he does, then you could have lost everything. There are many problems with this argument that are pointed out elsewhere. But the point still remains, maybe there is more to be gained from living with faith, even if you are ultimately proved wrong, than living without.

Can Pascal’s Wager be applied to living with faith about following one’s dreams? That is not as easy because living with faith and following one’s dreams, particularly when it comes to writing, involves taking risks and does not necessarily involve losing nothing. Indeed if one were to go ‘all in’ with total faith, this could involve quitting one’s day job and writing full time. Most experienced writers would not recommend this. Yet, mastering one’s craft and achieving success could require this level of risk.

We hear about the writers that were rejected countless times before their work found an audience and vaulted the writer to success. We also hear about writers who diligently wrote at night or early in the morning because they held full-time jobs. These examples are held out by writers time and time again as the basis for faith and hope. But we don’t hear about the writers who were rejected countless times and never had their work accepted, or the writers who had breakdowns from overwork, or the writers who ended up divorced because they neglected their spouse.

Most of the time I just dip my toe in the pool of faith in following my dreams. I keep my day job, but write with moderate hope. The signposts that my husband refers to are far apart and hard to read. Good signposts hold my faith just above the ground on gossamer strings: moderate interest from an agent, a friend or relative telling me that they loved my novel and could not put it down, particular tarot cards, wonderful supportive writing friends, strangers emailing to say that they appreciate my writing.

Bad signposts dash that faith to the ground: critiques of chapters that I do not agree with, offers of more contract work in my day job (surely I a sign that is what I should be doing), successes of other writer friends, not hearing from agents, or publishers, or literary journals, friends asking (with good intentions) when the book is going to be published, 22 more reasons to stop writing, and the knowledge of how people live in many other parts of the world and the fact that I should be grateful, so grateful, to have the life that I do.

Faith may be my word for 2012 because 2012 may be the year that faith and I are finally going to have it out. I hope faith wins.

Superwoman and Creativity

My consulting work has been steady lately. The right projects with the right level of commitment seem to be coming my way with reasonable consistency, allowing me to work and exercise during school hours and still do everything in the house during non-school hours. This should be celebrated on some fronts. I have achieved what I set out to. I have a reasonable income stream. I work from home. I am fit. I cook marvelous dinners. I parent effectively (or effectively enough) and am there for most events in my children’s lives. My house is sufficiently immaculate. I volunteer and just ironically received an award for my efforts. I attend book club and read the books. I sleep well. I carve out some time (not enough – it is never enough) for writing.

But at the same time my day has become a series of tasks that must all be done with a high degree of efficiency or the whole house of cards will collapse. There will be no healthy tasty dinner. I will lose my fitness level. I will not be seen as super performer at work (and let me assure you I am probably not). If people ask me how I am, most of the time my only honest answer is “shitty” because I am not enjoying any moment (except my workouts) and I am trying to figure out how I am going to get through all my remaining tasks that day and my mind is often casting ahead to the next day where the same number of tasks await me. Not surprisingly shitty is not really how I want my life to be defined.

So why shitty? I really have by most accounts a great life. I have found a reasonable balance. After all I did downhill ski without guilt for three days in a row last week with my children. But after skate skiing for an hour through deep wet snow on Tuesday (cause that is better because you work twice as hard), I came across a friend standing alone in the snow, and she looked at me and said. “I think I have become a shrew and I don’t want to be a shrew.”

I started to wonder if I too was becoming a shrew. If the number of tasks I was required (or I required myself) to perform was simply too much and it did not leave space for me to tolerate general inefficiency and lackluster effort in others (mostly my husband).

Then I started to wonder how it was affecting my writing. It is hard to feel creative when you are bogged down with a never-ending list of small required tasks (that my husband probably does not even know that I do, but would notice if I did not). Other writers, such as Steven Heighton, have noted the importance of solitude and the need to avoid interruptions like email when writing. But the multiple tasks required of the modern woman every day are equally intrusive. This is compounded by the fact that my job, because it consists of many small contracts, often mirrors the multi-tasking approach that I must take to managing the home, so I never get long stretches of time in which I am not having to shift from one thing to another.

Why do women feel pressured to do everything while men do not seem to?  Paula Nicolson, author of Having it all?: Choices for today’s superwoman points out that because men can father many children in their lives where as women can have only a few, women’s investment in their children is much higher, which makes them more nurturing and self-sacrificing and prevents them from being as aggressive with their own agendas as men. Thus while men see arriving home as an end to their primary source of stress, women see it as the beginning of a second source of stress as they start their “second shift” as coined by Arlie Hochschild.

This is compounded by media images in the last two decades. We have been bombarded with images of women having it all, with Kelly Ripa bouncing around her house like a lunatic claiming that “you can be even more amazing”. Meanwhile, as Terry O’Reilly noted in CBC’s wonderful The Age of Persuasion The Happy Homemaker: How Advertising Invented The Housewife (Part Two), the imagery of men has shifted from “daddy knows best” to that of hapless buffoons that can’t even navigate a fridge.

I am not saying that men are hapless buffoons, and acknowledge that many of them have taken on significant roles in the house. But I do believe the buffoon imagery has had an insidious effect, allowing men to do a bit less and giving them permission to cast their wives as bitches. Whatever the men don’t do, the women often have to pick up becoming ever more bitchy and shrew like in the process, which just amplifies the cycle and leaves women crumbling under a weight of guilt at the end of the day and men confused as to why their wives are so bitter. Somewhere in there I am also supposed to provide my husband with marital relations, which I would rather provide to my fantasy lover who was smart enough not to procreate with me.

Ann Patchett, an extraordinary writer, has been very open about the fact that not having children was a conscious decision related to putting her writing first and suggests that women who want to be writers and have children must find husbands that want to do at least half or more than half of the work associated with child rearing. This is hard to do, and although some modern men profess that they will do half the work, and believe they will, they often don’t. Part of this is that they just don’t agree on the scope of the tasks. Men are often more inclined to be satisfied with good enough, whereas women are more inclined to insist on domestic perfection. Even though many men do what their wives request of them, they don’t see the importance of it, which forces their wife to bear the burden of being the taskmaster.

So what are suggested solutions for women writers? I don’t buy the finding time to nurture yourself approach. I simply don’t have time for that. I sleep, exercise, read and spend time with friends. A pedicure or a massage are just going to add to my guilt.

Leave your house in a mess. Yes maybe for those of us who don’t find that emotionally disturbing (there is evidence to support the fact that some people require tidiness for their brains to function).

Ask your husband to do more. I’ve tried that and although he tries for awhile it just doesn’t quite take enough of my plate as I still need to organize and prioritize the “more” that he does.

Quit your job. This is being touted as the solution by some high achieving women who return their exclusive focus to the home. I have done this and it is not awful, but you do feel frighteningly dependent and inferior. I know you are not supposed to – that it is a team effort and being a stay at home mom should be absolutely applauded. But the evidence still shows that most women feel they are giving up too much of their self-esteem by giving up paid work. Besides we need the money I bring in. Now if I could get paid to write, maybe it would all work out. But that is just not a realistic expectation in the writing world.

Better scheduling. I have also tried this. I write every Monday or I write between 9 and 11 each night, but invariably work comes creeping in. People who can only meet on Monday or a task that must be done or the whole project will go off the rails. And then the harried feeling creeps in. It is no wonder that the word harridan is very similar to harried.

Run away. It is no wonder that some women feel pushed to do this and I have run away temporarily on a 4 day writing retreat where I don’t feel any compulsion to clean my host’s filthy stove or give a shit that I just spilled coffee all over his counter (although I did wipe it up). I will return home having pressed the reset button and feeling great. But it won’t last. I will be once again harried and lacking creative time.

Perhaps I just need to write The Shrew’s Guide to Happiness and be happy with it.

Book Review: Work Book

Steven Heighton’s eagerly awaited Work Book: Memos and Dispatches on Writing arrived in the mail two weeks ago. It is a slim volume (74 pages) with lots of white space – I consumed it voraciously in about an hour with my pencil in hand.

A key theme of Work Book is Heighton’s belief that boredom is desirable because it leads to periods of creativity. Instead many of us spend our days as efficient functionaries crossing items off our to do list (sometimes as mundane as deleting email). That this act of accomplishing something is like a narcotic that is deeply ingrained in our psyche. Moreover what many of us do in a moment of boredom is check our email, or some other screen related application, which keeps our minds in a state of hyperstimulation. Heighton contends that boredom is the laboratory for creativity and the path to seeing the unseen fish, the “small, suggestive ripples” and suggests: “Don’t just do something, sit there.” This resonated with me. I challenged myself to sit and read the entire book with out checking my email once. I made it, but I was twitching at certain points and it is good that the book was short. How often do I spend a few hours at night mindlessly wandering around the internet or check my Facebook account when my attention starts to wander? Too often I suspect.

Heighton also speaks a lot about the notion of the daymind, the calculating, busy ego, versus the nightmind, “the anonymous stenographer transcribing words from some higher or deeper self.” The daymind, the ego, is a control freak and determined that we be useful and occupied with perfecting ourselves. The daymind does not tolerate boredom. How often do I measure the success of my day with the number of things I accomplished and checked off the to do list? The more things the better. But as Heigton notes later on “when you are maniacally accomplishing and crossing chores off your list there are no cracks, no openings in your attention.” Heighton observes that in a wireless world, the daymind is never permitted to shut off.

The next sections provide thoughts and advice in the form of memos. Many of the memos are sound and helpful and Heighton opens the window wider into the experience of living as a writer. Fill your toolbox year after year, avoid earnestness, learn to savour cutting, hang around and observe people, and learn when to be appropriately irresponsible (i.e. ignore your to do list, but make sure the electrical bill gets paid before the lights go out) without guilt. Heighton advises successful writers to avoid becoming too accustomed to the respectability that comes with modest success because if you become too concerned with your social position,  your writing suffers. He emphasizes that not all characters are good, or extol good behaviour – but they must be “intensely alive.”  He observes that in reading an excellent writer for the first time, writers are torn between the urge to go write and the urge to give up writing altogether, and stresses that while failure can make writers miserable, success does not necessarily make them happy.

All of his points are sage. I keep going back to the notion of the daymind versus the nightmind and the relentless grind of my urge to always 'do something.'

Work Book was the perfect start of holidays read. For me, Christmas always offers a time to reflect, and a brief opportunity let the nightmind wrest back control from the functionary that guides my frenetic activity during the non-holidays. The white spaces in the book provided a space for me to breathe and fill in my own thoughts. Work Book made me remember why I like writing poetry and reminded me that what I need to do this holiday is turn off my email (or at the very least Facebook), sit here and do nothing (the chairlift is a great location for that...at least for 15 minutes...).