Tag: writing

What’s the thesis of a life?

April 28th, 2017
I did it. I set out to fill a 100 sheet/200 page composition book in April, and today, three days before the month’s end I filled the final page.

A friend asked me recently if I’d ever considered writing a book. “I have not,” I told him. “What would I write about?!”

“That is the worst excuse,” he said.

I think not having a topic is the best excuse for not writing a book. When I told another friend I filled 80 pages of my notebook on vacation, he asked what I wrote about. “Whatever was in my brain,” I told him. In other words, random thoughts. I’m not writing a novel, I’m not working on a project.

I daydream about writing a book, but I know I couldn’t make a living from it, especially if I don’t even have a topic. Maybe in retirement, when my husband and I are living on a sailboat. I can write about what we eat when we live aboard. I’m sure there’s a huge market for that.

I’m reading Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction — and Get It Published by Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato, and as I progress through their advice, I stand by my conviction that not having a topic is an excellent excuse for not writing a book. As they explain in their chapter on proposals, and what an editor is looking for in a book proposal, there are five critical questions an editor wants the answers to:
1. What is the book about?
2. What is the book’s thesis (many in publishing refer to it as the book’s argument), and what’s new about it?
3. Why are you the person to write this book?
4. Why is now the time to publish the book?
5. Who makes up the core audience for the proposed book, and why will they find it appealing?
If my blog is any indication of the answers to these questions:
1. What is the book about? Everything. Nothing.
2. What is it’s thesis? I dunno. That trees have souls? That it’s okay to be ordinary? That you can write about everything and nothing and someone might read it?
3. Why are you the person to write this book? Good question. No idea.
4. Why is now the time to publish the book? It’s not. It would be a terrible book.
5. Who makes up the core audience? Goodness, these are hard questions!
As you can see, I do not have a book here. These questions are compelling, though, especially the thesis question. What would the argument of a book I wrote be? What is the argument of my blog? Surely there is a mindset that ties everything together.

Natalie Goldberg, poet and author of Writing Down the Bones, suggests that writers have obsessions — “things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released” — that they return to again and again. I recently published a post called I remember St. Simons, and what didn’t make it into the post, the words that are in my notebook but not on my blog are:

I remember writing all this before, or is it just that I’ve turned these memories over so many times in my life and my mind that it seems like I’ve written them before?

After I published the post, I searched my blog. I was certain I had written something similar, it couldn’t just be memories in my mind. And then I found it: a piece called Writer’s Block, which was published in the online journal Southern Women’s Review. In I Remember St. Simons I used some of the exact same phrasings I wrote more than four years ago in a piece I haven’t looked at in years.

So there are obsessions running throughout my blog, but as Rabiner and Fortunato clarify in Thinking Like Your Editor, an obsession or a topic is not a thesis. What is the thesis of my blog? What is the thesis of my life? That’s the more important question, but not one I have an answer to.

I still don’t have plans to write a book. I have no topic, no thesis, no audience in mind. But these questions have invoked a curiosity about what — if I had to sum my argument about life and living in one sentence – would my life’s thesis be?
The hamza and the ‛ayn

April 22nd, 2017

The hamza and the ‛ayn were driven to a meeting hall for an appointment of some kind.

“You two twins?” the cabbie asked. His right wrist rested on the top of the steering wheel.

“No,” said the hamza, with a roll of its eye.

The ‛ayn showed more compassion. “That’s a common question, sir, and I don’t blame you for thinking so. We look very much alike!”

The cabbie looked at them again in the rearview mirror. They hung like commas in the air above the back seat, black silouhettes against the bright rear window.

“Here we are.”

The hamza grunted.

“Thank you sir!” said the ‛ayn.

They jumped out of the taxi. The hamza bounced once. The ‛ayn, never able to supress the glee of using its foot like a pogo stick, bounced three times. They glided towards the hall for their appointment.

This was a silly writing exercise where I took a snippet from The Chicago Manual of Style about hamzas (’) and ‛ayns (‛) — “The hamza (’) and the ‛ayn (‛)…” — and meshed it with a snippet from The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff — “…were driven to a meeting hall for an appointment of some kind” — to create something new.
I used to think strengths are the things we are good at

April 18th, 2017

I define a strength as an activity that strengthens you and a weakness as an activity that weakens you.

— Marcus Buckingham

I’ve stopped writing many times in the past because I psyched myself out. I rarely read creative nonfiction. What business do I have writing it?

I read fiction. When it comes time for pleasure reading, novels have my heart. So why would I produce what I do not consume? It makes no sense for me to continue if I don’t even write the type of work I choose to read.

I’m reading The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner, and in the first chapter, she talks about finding your form as a writer. Do you write nonfiction? Poetry? Novels? Because whatever you write — whatever you gravitate to — is your form. Despite trends, despite what’s selling now, despite what you consume in your leisure time, write the form that works for you. (The fact that I am reading a nonfiction book is not lost on me. Well, it kind of was until I just re-read this. I guess I do read nonfiction, just not at night, in bed, in my leisure reading time).

And it occurred to me, a professional chef does not only eat the type of cuisine she specializes in; an Olympic swimmer does not only attend swim meets when he consumes sports in his leisure time. A pastry chef doesn’t stop baking because she loves savory soups, nor does a swimmer stop swimming because he loves to watch tennis.

As I digested this new way of thinking, that it’s okay for me to keep writing even if my preferred leisure reading is different from what I personally produce, I thought about the way writing makes me feel (productive, fulfilled), and I remembered a podcast I listened to a few months ago. It was an EntreLeadership interview with Marcus Buckingham, a former senior researcher with Gallup who has studied strengths for more than 30 years, where he surprised me with his definition of a strength as something that strengthens you, not just as something you have an innate talent for, or are good at.

Other people might say that a strength is what you’re good at and a weakness is what you’re bad at, but I don’t find that a very compelling definition because frankly there are many things that I am quite good at that bore me or drain me or for which I have zero passion, but I’m good at them.

He describes how some people build entire careers on the mistaken notion that a strength is something you’re good at, like medical professionals who became doctors because they were good at biochemistry. When they got into the job realized they don’t like sick people, but sadly, every day, there are more sick people lined up at their door.

This definition of strengths resonates with me because I find truth in it. I excelled in math and science in school. I started to build a career in science, even got my degree in a biological field, but ultimately realized the work itself did not interest me. The day-to-day activity of life in a lab did not energize me. I had no passion for it. Science was not my strength, despite an aptitude for it in school.

Yet, I continued to read and write, and gain energy from them.

Writing this blog, writing in my journal, writing for work, it all invigorates me. Communicating via words on a screen or a page is the activity I gravitate to, it is how I choose to spend my time when I manage to carve out free time, it is where I find flow, where time disappears, where I produce things I’m proud of. Writing is what I reward myself with at home — “When I get the grocery list done, I can write ten pages/brain dump my morning/edit my blog post” — and at work — “When I finish these tasks, I can write that P2 post/review that draft/revise that page.”

In other words, writing strengthens me. It sustains me despite the lack of results: I’ve not received a single paycheck for my writing, no awards, no print publications. I’ve barely submitted work anywhere, but I have more than 40 filled journals going back as far as 1982 (when I was 8), five blogs with more than 700 entries, and more than 1,200 internal blog posts at work (438,000+ words). The lack of adornments, as Buckingham calls the rewards people seek when they want the fame or the money or status of a role but don’t actually love the activity of the work, have not stopped the words from coming out.

I write because I love to write, and creative nonfiction is the form that fits me best. Reading fiction exposes me to stories, paragraphs, sentences, and words the same as any other reading would do. It exposes me to structure, to vocabulary, to themes. It makes me feel, it makes me think. It is different from what I write, so it exposes me to different points of view. Reading fiction should not stop me from writing nonfiction.

Nothing should stop me from writing, in fact, except simple desire. Our strengths — the activities we do that strengthen us — are what energize us and help us thrive. It makes no sense to stop doing them.
Becoming rich

April 15th, 2017

On my smoothie break from writing, I started eggs boiling for the kids to dye. I often forget about eggs once I place the pan on the stove and set it to high. I’ll wander off while waiting for the water to boil, then an hour later realize, “Oh shit! The eggs!” This time, I brought Writing Down The Bones into the kitchen and read while I leaned against the counter and sipped my green smoothie.

As the water began to simmer, and the eggs rattled against the metal pot in excitement, I came across this line, which describes the fulfillment I’ve noticed since I began writing again:

I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work.

— Natalie Goldberg

That real work may be writing. It may be sticking my hands in the dirt; studying about the bottlebrush plant I think I may have killed; nestling on the couch before bedtime with our 11 year-old daughter, sipping orange tea and looking at pictures of butterfly plants in a magazine. It may be cozying up to a fire under the stars while the kids toast homemade marshmallows and poke sticks into the fire then pull them out to watch their tips glow. It may be snuggling with my husband and our kitties while I listen to birds twitter through our open bedroom window.

These past few days of writing again, of observing the world, of carving out the time to enjoy being alive, have made me feel very rich indeed. I may be writing about nothing, and the plants may not survive my care, but I am happy.
A whole lot of nothing

April 11th, 2017

I watched the sun rise while I wrote this morning. “Write about the quality of light shining through your window.” That’s what my exercise was today. I’ve written ten pages per day the past two days in some wild effort to fill my composition book by the end of the month.

There was no light shining through the window at 6:21 when I picked up my pen. There was a blue darkness that I spent about 10 minutes trying to describe. I did not succeed. I wrote “why can I think of no blue things in nature that are the same as this color?” Robin’s eggs, blueberries. Bahama shallows, Atlantic depths. Forget-me-nots, Plumbago. The white porch rails and white siding of our house were none of these colors. They glowed blue-white like they do in moonlight.

I continued to write as the sky lightened and the first rays of sun struck the tops of the pear trees in the neighbor’s yard, a subtle glow on their round crowns. A few minutes later, pink cotton candy clouds appeared as the sun climbed above the horizon. The sky was a little closer to Robin’s egg blue at this point.

I wrote and wrote, a whole lot of nothing. It’s amazing how much nothing you can write in 30 minutes. I’m not sure the point of it all, but it does feel quite good. I feel like I’m unclogging arteries. Cleaning things out. There’s nothing I’m preparing for, no book I plan to write, no great masterpiece. I’m just writing because I like to write.
In defense of the ordinary

April 8th, 2017

I often get down on myself for the lack of meaning in the spurts of writing I publish on my blog, the ten-minute free writes that are unedited streams of consciousness, the spewing of thoughts after pulling a prompt from a box. “Who cares?” I ask myself. Who cares about the details of everyday life? The creaks and hums my house makes when it is empty? The smell of coffee and paper and ink when I write?

And then I sigh and recognize I am no writer, not like the real writers who don’t just write the details to plop you in the middle of a scene so you feel the warmth of golden light on prairie grasses and smell the grain scent they radiate in sunshine. Real writers get to a deeper truth beyond just being in the setting. They get to meaning.

Or so I thought.

I am in the car on a Saturday morning in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’ve dropped our son off at the soccer field for tournament warmups. I’m taking time to myself on this chilly morning to read and write. With my shoulders, lower back, and thighs warm from our Jetta’s heated seats, and my ankles cold from the chill creeping in on the floor now that I’ve turned the engine off, I sit in the silence of our car, a writing book on my lap, and my composition book propped against the steering wheel. Our sedan’s windows muffle the thunk of car doors slamming in the parking lot. Boys and girls throw soccer bags over one shoulder, and they click-clack in cleats to green turf grass that shimmers with dew. Another mother sits at the steering wheel in her van, directly in front of me, and studies something in her lap. The 7:30AM sun slants warm across her face. I parked with my back to the sun — it was low and shone in my eyes — but it looks pretty on the trees, and the mother taking time to herself, in front of me.

I am reading Writing Down the Bones, in which Natalie Goldberg writes about an experience she had when she wasn’t yet a writer. Leading up to this moment, she had been a lover of literature, couldn’t get enough of it, was wild for words, but it never occurred to her that she might write. Then she picked up Erica Jong’s book of poetry, Fruits and Vegetables:

The first poem I opened in the book was about cooking an eggplant! I was amazed: “You mean you can write about something like that?” Something as ordinary as that? Something that I did in my life? A synapse connected in my brain. I went home with the resolve to write what I knew and to trust my own thoughts and feelings and to not look outside myself.

And so Natalie Goldberg became a writer. Just like that. Based on a poem she read about cooking an eggplant. Since then, she has not just written her own poetry and stories and books, she has also taught thousands of other writers to let go and write. She taught me to let go and write.

In the next chapter, Goldberg describes the tools of writing. She figures that your thoughts will match the size of the paper you write on: big paper to give big thoughts room to reveal themselves, small paper for small — or pared down — thoughts. She describes William Carlos Williams’ writing habit, who as a children’s doctor wrote many of his poems on prescription pads because that’s what he had handy.

Detail

Doc, I bin lookin’ for you
I owe you two bucks.

How you doin’?

Fine. When I get it
I’ll bring it up to you. ¹

This poem has no deep meaning. It describes a patient who owes money to a doctor. I suppose you could analyze it and find deep meaning about class, socioeconomic status, kindness, generosity. But the meaning I found in it was its ordinariness. Through these simple words, I am part of a situation that is simply human. The poem invites us to exist in a human experience that is not our own, or maybe that we have experienced before, or that we can at least understand and sympathize with. For me, that recognition is enough. For me, it doesn’t need more meaning than to stand in that patient’s shoes for a minute.

I read to experience other places, other people. I write to describe a moment in my ordinary life. Sometimes there are scents, sometimes there are sounds. And I often wonder, is that enough? Maybe not if I wanted to make a living writing. Maybe not if I wanted to write the next great American novel, or publish a short story in the The New Yorker. But to write for my personal blog? Sometimes scent, sound, and a sense of “in this moment” are enough. The poem about cooking an eggplant, that was enough for Natalie Goldberg; Williams’ poem written on a prescription pad, that is enough for me. Details are meaning enough. Being present in a moment is meaning enough.

¹ William Carlos Williams, The Collected Earlier Poems (New York: New Directions, 1938).

Tag: writing

What’s the thesis of a life?

The hamza and the ‛ayn

I used to think strengths are the things we are good at

Becoming rich

A whole lot of nothing

In defense of the ordinary