Tag: writing process

Practice makes progress

August 15th, 2015

I’m dusty. After my #aprildaily burst, when I posted a ten-minute write every day during the month of April, I fell off the writing wagon. I’ve been lying on the side of the road ever since.

This week, I creaked and groaned to a standing position. I brushed the dirt off my composition book and started scratching words on the crusty pages. Since I started writing again, I’ve been fascinated by how noticeable my lack of practice is. My word choices are vague, I don’t pull thoughts together coherently, I read what I’ve written and think, “Wow, that’s pretty bad.”

But where I previously strived for perfection — I wouldn’t post anything to my blog unless I had proofed and polished and gotten every last word, every last punctuation mark, as close to perfect as my skills would allow — perfection is not my goal anymore. Progress is.

Posting a ten-minute write every day in April was liberating. With a full time job and full time family, I didn’t have time for endless editing, so every day I wrote for ten minutes, then I closed my eyes and hit Publish. My pieces weren’t perfect — far from it — but they got me writing, they got me publishing, and in practicing, I improved. My words came together more gracefully. Pressing Publish became less scary. I wrote fiction for the first time.

While I write non-stop at work, which I LOVE about my job, the writing I do is mainly communicative: helping customers with their WordPress.com sites, joking around with coworkers, and conveying information across the company via internal blogs. This week, I found myself needing to write more creative type pieces — a pitch for a conference I’m helping organize, a blurb for a WordCamp speaker application. I needed to get my mind in that imaginative place: I needed to start free-writing again.

So I did. I started ten-minute writes again this week. Most of them weren’t great, and I thank you for bearing with my brain dump yesterday. However, whereas “Wow, that’s bad” writing used to make me feel awful about myself, this week I feel awesome. I feel awesome because even if the words aren’t perfect, my creative juices are flowing again.

I’m shaking off the dust. I’m loosening up my joints. And best of all, the free writes not only helped me write two pitches that I feel good about, but I’m writing again. I don’t need to be perfect. I just want to practice — and progress.
Call for prompts

March 30th, 2015

I admit. I fell off the writing wagon for about a month. This past week, I began writing again, and I’ve burned through almost all of the prompts in my prompt box. There are only about six more slips of paper in there. Will you help me fill it back up?

Feed me your favorite word, a vivid scene, an unlikely pairing. A piece of dialog, an object, a potent verb. I’ll write them on slips of paper and put them in my tea tin of ideas.

Some past prompts I’ve written from:

rolling pins
ocean
ink
thunderstorms
sun on my skin

You get the idea. I look forward to your words. Thank you!
Strategies for a year of craft: a weekly writing schedule

December 23rd, 2013

I’m all fired up after declaring I will dedicate next year to craft work within my writing practice: technique, structure, word choice, revision (gulp). The moment I pressed publish on my previous entry, 2014: The year of the craft, the moment I made the decision to postpone submitting until I have a firm grasp on writing, I felt giddy about focusing on what I love (writing) instead of what writing might get me (publication).

So giddy, in fact, that I read The Elements of Style, the first of my craft work resolutions, before the new year even began. I read the tiny guide-book in two sittings, chuckling and highlighting “Aha!” passages throughout (see review on Goodreads). Strunk and White invigorated me, and I went directly from the final page of their delightful little book to the first page of the latest issue of Creative Nonfiction. The special double issue, which celebrates the magazine’s 50th volume and 20 years of publication, chronicles the history of creative nonfiction, the genre, and Creative Nonfiction, the journal. The essays on its pages – sharp, poignant, beautifully written, and on a level I have not yet reached – convinced me of the rightness of my resolution, and I realized I’d better come up with a plan of action while my resolve is still strong.

I debated whether to share my steps here because, well, the titles are kind of embarrassing. “Mentor Monday.” “Talking Tuesday.” But the thing is, I’m not a young thing anymore; I need memory aids. If I want to hit several elements of craft work, and if I want to practice them regularly, I need to make time for each one in my week. And I’m pretty sure the only way I’m going to remember what I want to do each day is via a mnemonic device that works for me: alliteration. Here’s my plan, in all its cutesy glory:

Mentor Monday

I dedicate Mondays to craft exercises prescribed by writing mentors (i.e., the books I resolve to read this year). Specifically, I plan to work through Priscilla Long’s The Writer’s Portable Mentor. I plan to work through Long’s exercises with my writing group, but if you want to adopt this schedule, any mentor will do. Most writing books include writing prompts or exercises, and Monday is the day I plan to focus on that aspect of craft.

Talking Tuesday

Revision advice that crops up again and again, across writing books, across writers, across writing blogs and websites and comment sections, is to read your work out loud to listen for mistakes. I, too, have written about reading out loud, and how effective it is for finding holes or unnecessary repetition or phrasing that just doesn’t sound right. But despite learning the lesson first hand, I rarely remember to read my work out loud. Tuesdays will now be dedicated to the auditory element of revision.

Word Work Wednesday

This may be the day I’m most excited about in the week. I LOVE word work: exploring dictionaries, cataloging color names, mining for verbs, making mind maps. In February of 2013 I started a lexicon. At first I registered a favorite word every couple of days. Now it sits dusty on my writing shelf, along with all those writing books I started and abandoned because I was burning with submission fever. No more. My lexicon will get a work out every Wednesday in 2014. This Wednesday, Christmas day, I plan to collect words for the color red: holly berry, cherry pie, peppermint swirl.

Workshop Thursday

I didn’t really need an alliterative title for this one because I meet up with my writing group on Thursdays; it is unlikely I will forget what Thursdays are for. In weeks we don’t meet, however, I will spend Thursdays doing what we normally do in writing group: 10 minute prompted writes, exercises from writing books, and planning for the next week’s work.

Free Friday

Do I need to explain this one? Friday is for whatever the heck I want it to be for.

Wisdom Weekends

That sounds awfully stuffy doesn’t it? If you can come up with a W word for reading, please let me know. I plan to dedicate weekends, if I have leisure time, to catching up on reading: magazines (Poets & Writers, Creative Nonfiction); literary journals (The Sun when I finally save enough money for a subscription), online journals (Vela magazine, Brevity), and of course, all the writing books I aim to finish throughout the year.

That’s the plan for 2014. I’ll let y’all know mid year how it’s going. Until then, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and may your resolve hold for all your 2014 resolutions!

P.S. If you have any favorite festive yuletide words, please share them here. I’d love to gather them in my lexicon for this week’s Word Work Wednesday. Thanks!
Completing work: the submission process.

May 7th, 2013

Work never sent out is never finished. Hidden from the world it remains safely (and sadly) on the writer’s shelf. – Priscilla Long

I wrote recently that I altered my writing practice one morning – I sat by a window and penned thoughts on paper rather than staring into a pixelated screen and clacking keys on a keyboard – and the shift electrified me. It shuffled my synapses and portended a heightened level of productivity.

Since that day, I shifted my focus to not just producing more and more new work, but to doing something with all the words I’ve already written. I bought a copy of the 2013 Writer’s Market and devoured the first 180 pages in one sitting. I learned about query and cover letters, how to format a manuscript, how to negotiate contracts, track submissions, build an author platform, use LinkedIn. Then I scanned 400 pages of submission guidelines for consumer magazines, trade journals, and writing contests, highlighted titles that my work might fit, and marked pages with paper clips.

I browsed our library’s periodicals and checked out back issues of magazines to familiarize myself with the work they print. I ordered introductory issues to The Sun and Creative Nonfiction, journals our library doesn’t carry. I studied content on online journals like Brevity, who publishes brief, concise literary nonfiction (less than 750 words) and is happy to work with budding authors.

Then? I began the work of submitting. And have reaped the heightened level of productivity my pen and ink session activated. In the past two weeks I have submitted five manuscripts to online and print magazines, two to my critique group, and one to a blog I follow. And I’ve got four more queued up.

Meanwhile, I check email obsessively, wondering about a manuscript I sent out nearly 6 weeks ago. Waiting for the note that says, “We’d like to publish your work.” To my surprise, the first email I received was not about that 6-week old submission. It was about a piece I sent barely a week ago.

And it was a rejection. I received my first rejection this morning. I felt strangely calm about it as I entered today’s date in the “date returned” column of my submission spreadsheet. Maybe because I’ve known all along that this is part of the process. Writers probably write as much about rejection as they do about writer’s block, and before I began my submission process, I read a particularly entertaining piece by Alexis Paige on The Rumpus – Rejection Sucks and Then You Die: How to Take a Dear Sad Sack Letter (and Shove it). Paige, and every writer I’ve ever read, talked to, shared a critique room with, has prepared me for this first of what will be many rejections.

So though my heart flutters with every new email I receive, now dreading the next “So sorry,” rather than anticipating the “Congratulations” I originally hoped for, I will keep submitting. Today, I will buy envelopes so that I can mail a manuscript to a publication that does not accept submissions online or by email. I will continue through my queue.

I will complete my work.
Stitching Sentences

April 24th, 2013

Instead of staring into a cold glow of pixelated light this morning, I kept the computer shuttered away in its desk and sat by the window, where blackness transitioned to grey, and grey blushed warm and pink as dawn approached. I turned on a lamp, pulled Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones from the shelf, and folded my legs underneath me on the couch to write, pen in hand, ink on paper, in a marbled composition book.

I went to bed last night not knowing what I’d write about today, and I woke up in the same state of emptyheadedness. I didn’t know much, but I did know that staring at the same computer screen I stare at every morning at 6am wasn’t going to inspire me. I needed to change things up, to disrupt my routine. To jibe.

While I waited for my coffee, I flipped the pages of Goldberg’s book till I found an exercise that looked easy. Page 87. Lots of empty space with two lists of words. One list nouns. One list verbs. Sweet! I like lists.

The exercise, entitled “The Action of a Sentence,” instructs you to fold a piece of paper in half. I did this in my composition book. On the left side, write a list of ten nouns. I wrote:

dogwood
ink
martini
candelabra
shoot
goggles
sapphire
butterfly
Dutch oven
fingernail clipping

On the right, write a list of ten verbs. Goldberg actually instructs you to “Think of an occupation; for example a carpenter, a doctor, a flight attendant,” and then write verbs that accompany that occupation. I missed that part though (remember, no coffee yet?) and just wrote some verbs:

jostle
drape
billow
slice
sizzle
nick
stitch
thrust
peel
jibe

Then? Put your nouns and verbs together in sentences, and voilà! You are writing.

A stiff wind peeled fresh dogwood petals from their branches.

With velvet ink, she stitched sentences onto paper.

The cold martini billowed warmth into her belly.

The candelabra draped the room in light, and in shadows.

Chartreuse shoots sliced the black earth, stretched toward the light, and unfurled triumphant cotyledons.

A butterfly jibed, frantic to find shelter as the storm gathered strength.

She thrust the Dutch oven into the coals, angry that he had swindled her. Furious that she had misjudged.

Sunlight sizzled on a sapphire sea.

Her goggles were jostled in the maelstrom of elbows and feet, already leaking two minutes into the open water swim.

Staring out the window, he nicked his knee, tap, tap, tapping it with a sharp, dried fingernail clipping.

This 72 inch geographic relocation, from sitting at the computer to sitting by the window, and the changes that resulted from it – natural light and an incandescent lamp; a paperback (not electronic) writing book, opened to page 87, tented on the couch; my hand moving across paper; lists of nouns and verbs, and the physical action of stitching them together to sew sentences – has electrified me. Has shuffled my synapses.

I feel a high level of productivity coming on.

Goldberg sees writing as a practice that helps writers comprehend the value of their lives. The advice in her book, provided in short, easy-to-read chapters with titles that reflect the author’s witty approach (“Writing Is Not a McDonald’s Hamburger,” “Man Eats Car,” “Be an Animal”), will inspire anyone who writes—or who longs to. (from Natalie Goldberg’s website)
From Posts to “Pieces”

April 14th, 2013

Lord, I don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into. I started attending a critique group, and for the past few sessions, I’ve been perfectly content to read other writer’s work and give them what I hope is helpful feedback. But when the organizer emailed a call for submissions for next month’s meeting, I impulsively hit reply and said, “I’ll do it!” Do I have something for them to read? No.

A good friend wrote last week, “I have been reading a lot about writing recently. Specifically, I am curious about the writer’s process as I am developing one of my own.” As I attempt to come up with a piece worthy of my critique group’s time, I’ve thought a lot about her statement, reflecting on my own process. I set an alarm for 6am during the week, getting up to write while the rest of the house sleeps. But that’s not really a process, that’s just a schedule, right?

During times of deadlines, my process is one of avoidance. I have dozens of “big ideas” jotted down in Evernote, on post-its, on the lines of my navy blue Moleskine – five or six word phrases like “I am an unreliable narrator,” or “Notes under my pillow for God.” My phone is full of voice memos for those pieces. But when I think about sitting down and trying to put it all together? I procrastinate. I delay. I use my writing time to blurt out blog posts. Like right now.

A local friend and I trade critiques sometimes. We email our work to each other, then meet for lunch or coffee and trade feedback. Lesley’s advice is instrumental in my growth as a writer (as I hope mine is to hers), and thanks to one of her critiques, I tightened up a piece that was ultimately accepted. This past week, after reading the work I gave her, she told me, “I love your voice.” But the piece still needs a lot of work.

That’s where I get stuck as a writer. My voice comes through in my blurts, in my blog posts, in my “shitty first drafts,” as Anne Lamott calls them. When I start polishing, though, when I cobble together the voice memos, and the scattered notes, and rearrange and cut and organize, I don’t know how to keep my voice. The writing feels forced. “That’s why I loved Wild,” I told Lesley. “Strayed’s writing is raw, like when I blurt, yet it’s also refined. Somehow she keeps her voice through all the polishing.”

It’s a tricky transition, this progression from posts to pieces. From self-publishing on a blog to submitting for review by others. But reading about writing and setting an alarm clock, meeting deadlines for your critique group and maintaining your raw voice while refining your words, I guess those are all part of the process.

Tag: writing process

Practice makes progress

Call for prompts

Strategies for a year of craft: a weekly writing schedule

Mentor Monday

Talking Tuesday

Word Work Wednesday

Workshop Thursday

Free Friday

Wisdom Weekends

Completing work: the submission process.

Stitching Sentences

From Posts to “Pieces”