It is New Year’s Day, January 1, 2015, and I thought I wasn’t going to make any resolutions this year. I’ve got a new job, and in the second half of 2014 I set goals to make sure I didn’t forget my personal life in the excitement of my new work life: exercise four times a week, blow dry my hair twice a week (I work from home).
After a couple of months on the job, I carved out time – 6 AM – for exercise, and I managed to dry my hair and (gasp) wear makeup at least twice a week. I felt pretty good accomplishing those two goals and didn’t feel like I needed any others.
The only problem is that the 6 AM time slot used to be my writing time. So while I’m adding health and hygiene back into my life now that I work full time, I haven’t managed to add writing back in. I rarely write for myself anymore. I’ve journalled maybe 5 times since I began my job in July, and many of my recent blog posts have been photo-heavy or have been recycled content. Not so thoughtful or writerly anymore. I haven’t been to my critique group in six months, and I quit my craft group as well (sniff).
I want to change that in 2015. So I guess I’ll be making a resolution after all. It feels like I’m going backwards: last year I resolved to focus on the nuances, the skills, the craft of writing, this year I’m just trying to write.
I’ll start small. I’ve fallen out of the habit of writing. It is no longer a part of my daily routine. I want to add it back into my life, to make it as integral to the structure of my day as coffee and exercise are.
In 2015, I resolve to dedicate ten minutes a day to writing. Ten minutes is so little. I can do it after my 6AM workout, when pushups have gotten my creative juices flowing. Or I can do it before that workout, when I’m still in a dream state. Or on lunch. Or on a break. Or in bed when I realize, Oh crap, I haven’t written yet today.
I don’t have to post what I’ve written to my blog, though sometimes I’m sure I will. Like this post, the first of 2015’s ten-minute writes.
A man without a wife can be lonely in a big black Mercedes, no matter how many readers he has. – Howard Jacobson
Have you ever read a book that just didn’t do it for you, but had one character, one scene, or one line that has stuck with you forever? You’re going through life, feeling sorry for yourself that you don’t have more time to write, and then BAM. You remember a line from a book you had otherwise forgotten, and you thank God you read it?
That’s how it is for me with the line above from Jacobson’s novel, The Finkler Question. The book itself was only okay to me. The characters, meh. Kind of endearing, but kind of annoying, too. The story was not funny in a laugh out loud kind of way, but was witty, in an internal chuckle kind of way.
But that line. I have come back many times to that line. And it made the whole reading worth it.
I met with a fellow writer recently to trade critiques, and our conversation gradually transitioned to where to submit, who pays, who doesn’t, you could pitch it this way for this publication, that way for that journal. She is far more seasoned than I am, and when I asked whether her writing contributes substantially to her family income, she responded, “It doesn’t supplement my husband’s salary, but it pays for my writing studio.” And I was instantly jealous. A writing studio! God, how I’d love a studio. A room of my own, with a window seat, and light on my face, and a door that closes.
But more than that, a designated room would mean that writing was more than a hobby. That it was something serious, that I had time to do, that I wasn’t squeezing into an hour here, a half hour there. I’ve got 17 pieces I have started, then abandoned when it was time to wake the kids up, or volunteer at the school, or shop for groceries, or meet the school bus. By the time I get back to the essays, the mojo is gone. I’m not with the feeling anymore, and I can’t finish.
At these times I get frustrated. I fantasize about having large chunks of time to focus on writing, to research, to finish pieces, to edit, to polish. I go into my head, mulling all those incomplete essays, thoughts for this one jumbling with ideas for that one, and I think, if I were alone, and didn’t have all these responsibilities, I could take care of these. I could get them out, get them done.
A man without a wife can be lonely in a big black Mercedes, no matter how many readers he has.
And then that line from The Finkler Question snaps me back to reality, reminding me what it would really mean, at this stage in our family’s life, if I dedicated that kind of time and mental focus to a life of words. Because that line, regardless of its context within the novel, is about more than the emptiness of fame and fortune, or the loneliness of the writer’s life. It’s about throwing yourself into something so deeply, dedicating so much of your attention to this passion, or job, or hobby, that you risk losing contact, sacrificing closeness, with the most important people in your life.
There will come a time in the not so distant future when our children leave home, and there will be silence where their voices once were. Like the writer in The Finkler Question who lost his wife, I will rattle around in our empty house, with all the time in the world to write, and every room will be a room of my own. I will think of the pies I made with our daughter, of reading The Old Man and the Sea with our son, of answering their questions about sex and bad words, and I will give thanks for that single line in an only okay book. The line that reminded me to take my time, to enjoy my kids. A woman can be lonely in a room of her own, no matter how many readers she has.
The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson. “Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, Jacobson’s wry, devastating novel examines the complexities of identity and belonging, love, and grief through the lens of contemporary Judaism.” (Publishers Weekly)
During the holidays I will be republishing posts from my first couple of years on Butterfly Mind. My site has this fancy new look now, and since I don’t foresee myself writing a lot over the next couple of weeks, I didn’t want the makeover to go to waste. This post was originally published two years ago today, on December 18, 2012.
Several friends have asked, “How’s your writing going?” now that I’ve got a full-time job. While I haven’t been writing as much for my blogs as I was when I was a stay-at-home-mom, I am excited that my job as a Happiness Engineer involves writing All. Day. Long.
Even more thrilling, especially for a writer working on craft, the types of writing I do throughout the day are varied and hone different types of skills: bug reports and internal blog posts require technical writing; support documents require the ability to translate technical information into understandable language; support replies and chat messages call for skill with tone, specificity, and brevity. Most fun is that the internal messaging we do through Slack allows me to write like I talk – it’s the place to write easily and with humor, especially in our water cooler channels where we goof off and post lots of GIFs.
This week I and many Automatticians have been writing about our workdays, and today I want to approach from a writing angle, with word count estimates pulled from my Wednesday workday.
For a little background, I am a Happiness Engineer on the Store team, and my days consist mainly of providing live chat support to Business and Enterprise users. What this means is that I am always working to improve the WordPress.com experience by troubleshooting issues live with users, by submitting bug reports, updating documents, testing, and by being in constant internal communication with teammates. While on live chat, we collaborate in real-time on Slack. We troubleshoot together so we can give the best possible solution to the user on the line.
What this means is that we all read and write. A lot. And quickly. So I thought it would be interesting to look at my day in terms of communication inputs and outputs. The graph above shows an estimated word count output for Wednesday, October 8, not including this blog post, which I count as personal word count (Slack and O2s/P2s are our internal communication tools):
Support Chat messages: 250+ (2500+ words in 14 chats)
Internal Slack messages: 240+ (2400+ words)
Support tickets answered: 12 (1600+ words)
O2 comments: 7 (189 words)
O2 posts: 1 (82 words)
Trac tickets: 1 (65 words)
Support docs updated: 1 (14 words)
Words spoken aloud: 1
emails: 0
TOTAL: 6769+ words
**Number of times I laughed out loud: 14
By the time I manually added up estimated my word output, I did not have it in me to go back and calculate the word count for all the O2 posts, O2 comments, Slack back scrolls, live chat messages, and tickets I read today, so I’ll break it down by unit instead of word count:
Communication input and output for Oct 8, 2014
I found it funny that I only spoke one word aloud during my work day. The one word I spoke was “Bye!” as we all signed off of our team video hangout.
You’ll probably notice something strange there on the email line as well: those 40+ emails I read were notifications of blogs I follow that are relevant to my work or to the company as a whole. We do not use email as a means of communication for the most part – we interact via Slack, where we text chat synchronously, and via blogs that are open to the entire company. Unlike email, which is closed and only available to the senders and recipients, all company communication is archived and available for anyone at Auttomattic to read and participate in. This makes Automattic an extraordinarily democratic, and empowering, work environment: every Automattician has access to everything. I think a lot of work environments would benefit from the open discussion that inline commenting on a blog facilitates when compared with the closed system of email.
So how’s my writing going? It’s going awesome. With all the practice I’m getting on the job, and as our family settles into a new routine to accommodate me working again, I’m slowly adding personal writing back into my life as well. In fact, this post bumps my total word count to 7000+ words for the day. Not bad for a writer who’s trying to make time to write.
In an effort to get to know each other’s work days better, and to share publicly what it is like to work for a distributed company where most of us work from home, some of us at Automattic will be publishing “A Day in the Life” posts on our personal blogs throughout this week. The posts will be tagged #a8cday if you’d like to follow along. And if you think a job like this sounds awesome, join us! We’re hiring.
WordCamp. It wasn’t a camp for writers, or even for word nerds. It was a camp for WordPress wonks, and I loved every second. I must have said ten times, “I feel like I’m on this level,” as I swished my hand parallel to the ground, back and forth at my waist, “And all of you are up here,” and I swished my other hand above my head. “But that’s okay,” I’d say, and I’d smile, and I’d mean it.
I was one of only a handful of writers there, one of a handful of bloggers, and instead of intimidating me, being among all those web designers actually made me feel special. At a writers’ retreat there would be so much opportunity for comparison, for reading someone else’s work and thinking I’ll never be that good, that the thought of a writers’ retreat kind of frightens me. But at WordCamp I didn’t compare myself to these people who write, but in a different language: they write in code.
The rooms, full of creatives, hipster beards and mustaches, fun colorful fingernails and patterned blouses, glasses, web designers, plugin writers, theme developers, who all make beautiful, elegant things only with a different medium from mine, they energized me instead of making me feel less than. I never felt stupid despite how much I did not know. Instead I felt awe, an emotion I predict will appear on the list of core values I plan to construct as soon as I finish this free write.
One of the speakers, Alicia Murray, when she spoke about work life blog balance she posted a slide with a quote from Albert Einstein: a fish is going to feel stupid if it tries to climb a tree (or something like that – find quote) –
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
– and I could totally relate. She was advising us not to compare, which is a very, very difficult thing to do when I’m surrounded by talented writers. But in a room full of talented code poets, I don’t compare myself. I just thank the internet gods that these poets exist so that they can make us beautiful websites on which we can write our words.
The conference, I should say for all the bloggers who follow me, was not a writing event, and it wasn’t a blogging event either. In fact, it was not a WordPress.com event. It was geared more to the nuts and bolts of designing, developing, and using websites powered by WordPress using WordPress.org (there’s a difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com, in case you didn’t know). As @Ashevillean tweeted
Wordcamp: NOT a writing event. WordPress-friendly conference for tech professionals: developers, designers, content creators, & more #wcavl
I knew that going in, and I loved that aspect of it, but I just wanted to let all of you know that in case you are considering attending a WordCamp. There were content and beginner tracks, but you need to know ahead of time that the language you hear might be unfamiliar. I used to have a self-hosted website for my soap company, a site that was powered by WordPress.org, and so I was familiar with the language many of the speakers used: plugins, FTP, PHP.
And, with your everyday WordPress.com blogger, very little of that applies.
When we had the self-hosted site I felt like half my time was consumed with managing the website: which plugins to use, which ones had glitches, how to resize my images to fit the theme, who to host the site, how to alter colors, fonts, headers. All by hand. All with very little knowledge. And while we had complete control over the look and functionality of our site, it ate a lot of time I could have spent making soap, or better yet, writing. It was a powerful, robust platform for our e-commerce site, but for blogging, I’m thrilled to use the streamlined WordPress.com and know all that is taken care of. I don’t have to sift through 500 “follow” plugins to find the one that works. If something goes wrong with my site I don’t have to disassemble it and reconstruct, piece by piece to find where the problem was. It’s all there for me and all I have to do is pop in my words.
That being said, I like to know how things work, and I learned a ton this weekend about things I can do within my WordPress.com site to tweak and improve if I so choose, and I understand the back end of a website much better now. I feel empowered by that. On top of sitting in on some great content sessions, I took a refresher on basic CSS so if I want to customize colors or fonts, I can. I learned some SEO tips so I can become more findable when folks are searching for creative nonfiction or literature resources. I learned the basic anatomy of a blog-perfect-story, and how to find balance in my life when I add a job to the mix of blog and family.
And the takeaway I am perhaps most excited about: a link to how to determine my personal core values. Those values will provide guidance as I try to navigate my career path, my blog posts, my writing. Because it’s when you’re writing about what you care about that your voice will come through, and when you have a niche-less (i.e. everything) blog like I do, the thing that holds it all together is not a topic or a product or a theme, it’s the author’s voice. The continuity, the It thing in a flitting, butterfly-minded blog, is the voice. And the way to find and use that voice is to write about your passion, the things you value most. Like family; like words; like nature. Like awe.
This week in our writing group we worked on openings. We each selected an unpublished work, excised our first paragraph to a separate sheet of paper (to keep the work discrete and achievable), and rewrote our openings. We began with the first sentence.
This was hard work. That one sentence carries a heavy burden, a pack laden with all the supplies for a journey before the reader has consumed a single morsel to lighten the load: tone, setup, character, summary, the launch, a hook. The essence of the entire piece.
1. For inspiration, I pulled favorite novels off the shelf and copied first lines into my notebook, like this one from A Prayer For Owen Meany:
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. (John Irving)
Wow. Right? I mean, I was ready to put everything down and start reading Owen Meany again. But then I realized I don’t write fiction, and I certainly don’t write novels, so maybe I should find inspiration in the type of work I do write: creative nonfiction. I made a list of essays and nonfiction pieces that have stuck with me, and I dug through internet bookmarks and compilations of The Best American Essays to find their openings. Here are the ones I wrote in my notebook. Notice the compelling titles; the title carries tremendous weight as well, and when combined with a great opening, a title can be unstoppable.
Maybe the rejection letter was curt, churned out like a widget, or maybe it was wordy, with a misused semicolon, and penned in a respectable Serif font.
My favorite kind of “travel writing” — or I suppose writing about place — embarks on an inner journey, and uses a physical location as a diving board into one’s depths, into their mind.
I didn’t see the jellyfish, but I felt it—a searing pain at my ankle that shot up through my leg, bringing me, in a matter of seconds, to my knees in the sand.
8. “Small Rooms in Time” by Ted Kooser in River Teeth (The Best American Essays 2005)
Several years ago, a fifteen-year-old boy answered the door of a house where I once lived and was murdered, shot twice by one of five people – two women and three men – who had gone there to steal a pound of cocaine.
I’m sorry about that time I ran over a piece of wood in the road. A pound of marijuana in the trunk and a faulty brake light—any minute the cops might have pulled us over, so you were edgy already, and then I ran over that piece of stray lumber without even slowing down.
Enjoy, and I hope you find inspiration from these too.
I recently had the privilege of guest-hosting a writing challenge on The Daily Post, WordPress.com’s site dedicated to the art and craft of blogging. I was honored by the editorial team’s confidence in me, that my name came up when they brainstormed writers to invite, and though they did not ask me to guest-edit, as a private show of gratitude I committed to putting myself on their side of the desk for the duration of the week-long challenge. I traded my pen for reading glasses, and I vowed to read every submission to the challenge, not as a casual reader, but as a would-be-editor curating content for a website.
Within one day, I sent an email to the lead WordPress editor, and I wrote: “I bow down to you and all editors of the world.” Because editors, I do.
I was shocked by the patience, lucidity, and stamina your job requires. I was thrilled by every submission – readers are responding! writers are writing! – yet my head ached from ciphering symbols on a pixellated screen; from trying to find my place in a piece with no paragraphs; from wading through unnecessary parentheticals, misspelled words, and four paragraphs of explanation before the meat of a story began. My head ached from recognizing mistakes I continue to make in my own writing.
I realized quickly, within 30 submissions, why you give writers the tips you give, the tips that until this experience I dismissed as too simple. Punctuation? Please. There’s got to be a bigger secret than that. But these editor tips I read over and over again – always the same, from all the editors, often in what has seemed to me a resigned and tired tone – I understand at a visceral level now. When I was on my 78th submission of the day, these simple second-grade basics meant the difference between me reading further or glancing at the first sentence and clicking the little “x” to close the tab:
Spelling, grammar, punctuation: Mistakes here were jarring. Every misspelled word jolted me out of the piece and into my living room. A narrative had to be really strong to overcome mistakes that could have easily been corrected before submission. Until experiencing this from your side of the screen, I was careless with mistakes in my work as well. No more.
White space: I don’t think I’ve ever been a bigger fan of the paragraph than I am now. My heart died a little each time text filled the screen without any breaks. I tried to read the first few stream of consciousness submissions, but the strain of keeping track of where I was distracted me, and I gave up.
Title: A boring title might not make me shut down a piece, but an exciting one will sure make me happy to open it – and keep reading (as with My Descent into “Mom Jeans” on Becoming Vivid).
Beyond those fundamentals, after reading so many submissions, I came to appreciate the ones that were different, that made me sit up in my chair and pay attention. Like when one blogger wrote from the point of view of a calculator (Alexia Jones: The Evil Calculator), and another made me want to say goddamned a lot (Forgotten Correspondence: The 6th of March 1997 – Fishkill, New York). I wanted to kiss the writers who made me laugh (Emily Schleiger: Him; Merissa Bergen: Frying Pans and a Knife), were brief but beautiful (A Full Cup of Tea: Haiku Trio), who taught me something new (Flour Mill Reflections: Egg UKO), or left a lasting image in my mind (The Silver Leaf Journal: Three Red Chairs).
In other words, I experienced the truth in those craft tips that appear in every writing book, in every workshop, on every editor’s pages:
Surprise us with a different point of view
Language matters
Funny is good
Be concise!
Teach me
Show don’t tell
Until this experience, I had only seen the finished product of your work as editors: the perfect pieces, the fresh voices, the error-free, beautifully spaced narratives with captivating titles, proper pacing, concision, and imagery, and voice. I now understand your joy when a writer provides all those things, when on submission number 473 your forehead relaxes, and your mouth twitches, and you take off your glasses and lean back in your chair and allow yourself a full smile. Your patience, and clear head, and stamina have paid off, and now you can provide a writer and the world with the same joy you just felt when you read that submission and said, “This is good. This is really good.”
Wearing your hat for a week – or at least the brim of it – has made me appreciate these tips you keep giving us. As a writer, I am an advocate for writers, and I understand now that you are, too. You want to read and promote good work – that’s why you do the work you do. You want more than anything for writers to write well. I will do my best to improve my craft, to give you good work, and in the meantime, thank you. Thank you for your patience, your clear head, and your stamina.
Butterfly Mind 