On headbands and writing

I was never without my notebook and pen.
Image courtesy of Stefan van Bremen
rgbstock.com

Happy Tuesday! Today is Blog Me MAYbe's "May I tell you something about myself?" day, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to share a little about how I began writing.

I've been writing stories and poems from the moment I learned to print, but it wasn't until I was around twelve that I wrote the first story I can remember with clarity. It was a short about a twelve-year-old girl who caved in to peer pressure and shoplifted some headbands from a department store. She was caught, of course, and the rest of the story was about the Big Life Lesson she learned. Never mind that I had no firsthand knowledge about the topic. I didn't care. I just wanted to tell the story, and so I told it--simple as that. My seventh-grade creative writing teacher (I wrote about her here) encouraged me to do more writing, and I did, using most of my free time to tell tales and pen poems. I was happiest whenever I had a notebook and pencil in my hand.



The words didn't come easily.
Photo by Anna Langova,
courtesy of Public Domain Pictures

Not long afterward, though--right about the time in high school when I decide I wanted to be a Writer with a capital W--writing started to get more difficult. Ideas didn't come as freely, and neither did words. Where I had once found writing freeing, I began to find it somewhat enslaving. It became something I felt I had to do rather than something I really wanted to do, and I started to have doubts about whether I was good enough to make it. Instead of writing, I began worrying. I worried about my ideas, my word choice, my writing process. I even worried about things I really had no business concerning myself with at that early stage, like marketability and appeal. My Inner Critic had come to town and worked me into a writer's block that lasted for nearly a year. I didn't think I had it in me to write again.

Eventually, though, I did, and what brought me back was the realization that writing is supposed to be hard. It's supposed to take time and effort. Once I let those thoughts sink in, I was able to tell my Inner Critic to scram, at least for a time. Writing still isn't easy, of course--and as I said earlier, it isn't meant to be--but I've found my way back to that twelve-year-old girl who wrote freely and without abandon about whatever was on her mind, and every day as I practice my craft I'm learning more and becoming a stronger writer.

And my Inner Critic? He's still around, of course, but Charis, my muse, helps me kick his butt. ;)



We all have a passion. For some, it's writing, and for others, it's something else. So for those of you who are also writers, how did you get started? And if you're not a writer, tell me about what made you decide to follow your passion.

Muse! Muse!

Today's 100 words:

I wonder if speaking of the muse can bring her back, if merely uttering her name will call creativity to an uninspired mind. I did this yesterday--spoke about her here, talked of how she'd gone silent, killed by the inner critic who does everything in his power to keep my pen from the page and my hands from the keyboard. I called her, and mere hours later she was back, bestowing upon me ideas for a new poem, word pictures appearing out of the air. If speaking of her can bring her near, I'll call her daily: Muse! Muse!

When I'm not writing

Today's 100 words:

When I'm not writing--those days, weeks, and months when words won't grace my page--I feel lost, left out, alone. I have many writer friends, creative people who scribble each day, painting word pictures in their chosen genres, and I love talking with them, hearing about their successes, lending an ear as they (sometimes) grouse about editing or the maddening existence of plot holes. Meanwhile, my own pages are blank, my muse silent, my inner critic on duty full-time now with no vacations planned, and although I try to call creativity into my corner, it has been KO'd.

Doing this for me

I spent a lot of time this afternoon thinking about writing and about how it hasn't been fun for me recently. I've been too wrapped up in worrying about what other people will think of my work, and as a result, I've become paralyzed, unable to write a single word without analyzing it and second-guessing it. I delete more words than I write, and my inner critic tells me that none of my ideas are interesting, that my prose is flat, that no one will ever want to read--much less publish--anything I write. This thinking has gone on for at least a couple of months now, bringing so much insecurity and fear with it.

Today I decided that I was no longer going to let these negative thoughts keep me from doing what I enjoy. I made the following declaration this afternoon, via Twitter:

Decided the only reason to write is because I love it. Worrying about who else will like it stifles me. I need to do this for me. #amwriting

Do this for me. For me.

I can't let worrying about not being good enough keep me from putting words on the page. I can't keep listening to my inner critic as she tells me that I'm no good and should just quit. If I love writing--and I do--then I have to do it for that reason: for the love of it. If other people like it, that will be a bonus. If I can get some of my fiction published someday, that will be wonderful, a very proud moment, I'm sure. But I learned today that writing with my eyes solely on publication--concerned only with what other people think--doesn't work for me. I'm happiest when I'm doing my 100-word exercises, which I once did as mere writing warm-ups but have recently been taking more time with and really contemplating what I want to say. I don't know what that means or where those little snippets can take me. I only know that I enjoy writing them, and I have to let that kind of enjoyment spill over into the projects I'm working on: the collection of short stories I'm planning; my young adult novel about Jed; my NaNoWriMo project, if I choose to do one this year... The bottom line is, I need to write because I want to. I have to do it for me and no one else.

I'm not giving up my dream of publication. That's still something I want very much. I just realize now that I can't place all my focus on that dream. I can't make it the only reason I write. First, I have to write for me, and as I realized today, that's really all that matters.

The bad, the good, and NaNoWriMo

The bad news? I'm still in a writing slump. I don't know what it is*, but whenever I sit down to write, I find myself paralyzed by the blank page (screen). However, the other day, a very helpful Twitter friend, @noelle_clark, asked me if I had thought about doing NaNoWriMo this year, as she was sure that it would be just the thing to get me writing again. The good news? I think she may be right.

Most writers probably know that November is National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo). According to the Web site, "National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000-word (approximately 175-page) novel by 11:59:59, November 30." What's different about NaNoWriMo is that writers are encouraged to work on new projects and write without worrying about quality, reasoning that getting the words down is more important. After all, what "they" say is true: words can be edited later, but a blank page can't.

That blank page is a real issue for me. I think that part of my problem with writing is my desire for perfectionism. I want everything to be just right, so if, for example, the first line doesn't sing, I just can't get past it. (Hello, WIP.) It's okay to want perfectionism, but to expect to have it in the first draft just sets the writer (me) up for failure. (Somehow, though, I keep forgetting this.) Perhaps trying once again to abandon my inner critic and give myself permission to write--as the NaNo rules state--"crap" will help me to get over this hurdle.

I can't remember now how many times I've participated in NaNoWriMo, but I think a good guess would be about four. I "won" two of those years, which means that I made the 50,000-word goal before November 30. I did do what I call an unofficial NaNo last year--unofficial because I wrote a memoir rather than fiction. I ended the month with over 70,000 words on that project, so even though I didn't follow the rules to a tee, I definitely consider the effort much worth my time.

As of this moment, I'm leaning toward participating again this year, although I'm not sure what my project will be. I could do another unofficial NaNo and work on my Jed WIP, but I'm concerned that that particular project is the cause of my writing burnout. I think it might be better to work on something new--but what? Unlike most writers, I seem to have a problem with coming up with solid story ideas, but maybe by the time November rolls around, I'll be able to find a workable one.

What about you? Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year? Have you participated in the past? And does writing with no goal other than hitting a specific word count work for you?


*On second thought, I do have an inkling. See paragraph 3.

A progress report

I've been home for about a week now, and I'm still not back into the swing of things as far as my writing goes. Vacation always alters my life's "schedule," and even after it's over, I find myself feeling sort of off-kilter. Before we left for our trip, I had been working on my novel during the hours before the kids woke up, but since we got back, I've been using that time to catch up on laundry and all the other household tasks I had neglected to do before we left, and work on my WIP has been put on a back burner. As far as my novel goes, then, I'm giving myself a C for effort--and that's only because I'm grading on a curve! ;) Maybe next week I'll feel less tired and stressed and more inspired. Here's hoping!

I have been managing to keep up with my 100-word exercises, however. I enjoy them. They usually don't take long, which has been a bonus lately, and they allow me to get other thoughts out of my mind in order to make room for reflection about my projects. (Even though I haven't been writing my WIP, I have been thinking about it.) The exercises are also a good way for me to banish some of the doubts I have about myself as a writer. Through them, I let my inner critic speak. When she's done having her say, I feel like I can ignore her for the rest of the day, which helps my creative mind immensely. I generally don't post these 100-word "talks" with my inner critic, but maybe someday I'll share some of them here.

Enough about me: I feel like I'm so behind on all of your projects. How are they going? How would you grade your progress?

Fighting the enemy

Sylvia Plath is one of my favorite writers. I've turned to her works--particularly her poetry--countless times in my life. I can always find something to learn from her, some truth that resonates with me in whatever situation I'm facing.

One of my favorite of Plath's quotes serves as an inspiration to me whenever I feel that, despite my desire, I'm just not good enough to be a writer--and never will be:

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." ~Sylvia Plath

Self-doubt. I'm sure all writers go through periods when they feel as though all their hard work is for nothing, that what they have to say is uninteresting, that their creativity is nonexistent. I feel this way more often than I'd like. I've been enthused about story ideas so many times in my life, only to become stifled when the doubts creep in:

"You can't write about that. What will people think?"

"Who cares if you're a mother? You don't know enough about motherhood. How are you going to make the story realistic? You're going to look like an idiot."

"Worst. Idea. Ever."

This is my Inner Critic speaking, of course, the one who can always be depended on to tell me the worst about myself, about my writing, about my ability to do anything other than dream of being a writer. The way I see it, I have two choices when that Inner Critic comes out to play. I can take everything he says to heart and quit or I can kick butt and take names. In other words, I can fight through the self-doubt, finding inspiration from writers like Plath: everything is writable if the writer has the guts.

And I do.

What I'm trying not to do

When I plan a story, I tend to get bogged down in the details. I panic if I don't know things like the names and ages of all the characters, their hair and eye colors, their backgrounds, their jobs, the kinds of cars they drive, where they live, whether they like Chinese food or Italian, if they favor their right or left hands... You get the picture. Often, by the time I've sorted out the details and sat down to write the story, I discover that I'm frustrated or bored or no longer interested in pursuing the idea. I've set aside quite a few projects because I'd allowed myself to get so wrapped up in the small things that I completely lost my desire to write the story; my inner perfectionist had taken all the fun out of the process, egged on by my inner critic and my inner procrastinator, both of whom tend to work hand in hand to keep me from writing.

Now, details are important, there's no doubt about that, but I don't feel they're as important in a first draft--despite what my nefarious inner mob would have me believe. So with my current project, my plan is not to plan. I mentioned in a previous post that I have the beginning of my story, know what happens through much of the middle, and have an idea where I want it to end. That's it--and that's considerably less than what I usually have at this point in the process. I'm not even entirely sure right now what my main character's name will be. I have an idea of course, and also a vague notion of what she'll look like, but I've decided not to let myself stress about having every little detail set in stone before I begin writing. I'm not even going to outline this time, which is something I normally do. This project will be an experiment in which I attempt to free my mind and write organically, to just let the story spill out as it wants to rather than force it into being what it's not. It's the first draft, and first drafts can always be fixed; telling the story is the most important part at this stage in the process. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.

What's your writing process? How do you handle the details?

It's all about perspective

Often when I write, all I can see are what I perceive as flaws. I'll think that the writing doesn't flow as it should, that my dialogue sounds stilted, that my characters are two-dimensional, and, perhaps worst of all, that my idea just isn't any good--that it's boring, redundant, or unbelievable. I don't even know for sure how many stories I've started and then abandoned because my inner critic told me that my writing was just no good.

Recently, however, I was going through some boxes and unearthed a hard copy of a novel that I had started about a year ago. It was yet another in that long line of stories that my inner critic convinced me were going nowhere. I admit that I began reading it with trepidation: I wasn't sure I wanted to know just how bad it was. I read the first paragraph. To my surprise, it wasn't bad at all. In fact, I found it engaging, and aside from some sentences that I would probably structure differently had I written them now, overall, I found the story idea to be sound and--dare I say it?--interesting. Setting the story aside for all that time had give me the perspective I needed to see that, although some revisions need to be made, the idea itself is sound. Perhaps more importantly, I learned that my inner critic, while sometimes helpful, is not always right.

These may seem like simple lessons, and perhaps they are. However, every writer knows that her inner critic is powerful, and making a discovery like this one returns to the writer what she thought she had lost: her confidence.