300 Words

After many months I have recently ended my on-again off-again relationship with Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird.  For now.  I end it with sadness that it is over, fond memories and plans to repeat the whole thing again in the future at any time the inspiration (or lack there of) should strike me.  One of my favorite little tidbits from the book is Lamott's repeated prescription to write at least 300 words every day.  Just about one page of writing, 300 words is just enough to keep you moving through writer's block, inspiration block and motivation block.  It seems like such a reasonable expectation.  Just there, I'm already a third of the way done.

This week I quit my long-time job as your local neighborhood coffee slinger and worshiper in the house of Howard Schultz.  At the end of September I'll begin a new life as a full-time graduate student and writing teacher to college freshman at Portland State University (more on that later).  In the meantime I'm going to have a little bit of time on my hands.  You may know that my husband and I recently bought a fixer.  The house itself, as well as the blog that goes along with it, are sure to take up a good chunk of my time over the next several weeks.  But I don't want descriptions of garden photos and instructions on how to paint 1970's paneling to be the only writing I do during this rare era of freedom.

So for the next six weeks, and maybe beyond, I plan to fill Lamott's prescription (pretty much) every day.  Some of those days I'll write here.  As I mentioned, I'll be teaching writing for the first time this coming fall and there is a lot going on in my mind to that tune.  I also want to start keeping a journal of sorts about our new house.  It will be a good supplement to all the photos and memories that we will have of our first real home.  And then of course there is always the house blog.  I suppose any real content there will count, too.  So keep your eyes out for more here soon.  I'll let you know how it goes.

And just to illustrate how easy this is... I just wrote 370 words.

Beach Reading 2

We're off for another beach vacation this week, so I thought I'd share with you once again what I'll be bringing with me.  Amazingly enough I haven't actually finished all the books I brought with me last time.  I tend to set books aside when I get distracted by something else and sometimes it takes me a while to get get back to them.

This time we're trying to pack light so I'm being very realistic about what I can (will) read in a week full of hiking, snorkeling and other beachy activities.

I've still (yes still) been picking my way through Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird.  This book is amazing and I don't want it to end.  I pick it up and read a little any time I need to be inspired.  But if I just go ahead and finish it I can always just go back and read it again.

 

I've actually bought Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants before another beach trip a few years ago.   It happened, however, to be the same trip that I started reading the Twilight series so you can guess what happened with that.  I've never gotten around to reading it since.  

I chose Water for Elephants because I was recently tipped off that it is being made into a movie.  I've heard great things about the book so I figured I should hurry up and get on the wagon.  Check out the trailer:

Of course, I'll be bringing a few issues out of my big stack of unread Sun Magazines.  All the short stories, poems and interviews make for great beach reading (I highly recommend checking out The Sun at www.thesunmagazine.org.

By the way, if you want to know more about where I'll be spending my vacation go to www.maho.org.

See you in a couple weeks!

Beach Reading (and Writing)

For the next two weeks I'll be vacationing on the East Coast, taking some time to visit with family and friends and spending some considerable time on the beach.  While I plan to take this time off from "work" in the sense of writing that I am doing for others, I do hope to have a good amount of time for personal reading and writing.

I hope to use the change in pace of vacation to start getting in the habit of writing every day.  Essentially it's journal-keeping, but I hope to avoid the "here's what I did today and here's how it made me feel" form of the middle-school diary.  There can be great value in that kind of writing as well, but it has to be meaningful, not forced.  My biggest challenge with journaling is remembering that I'm not writing it for anyone; I don't have to make it interesting, it doesn't have to be about my life or myself or anything in particular.  This type of journal will be solely for practice in writing... essentially just to keep the pen moving.  I hope that doing this will help both my discipline to sit down and write every day and my writing itself. 

There is also a stack of books that I have been wanting to read or that I've started and haven't quite made it through.  I'm excited to have some airplane and beach time to finally sit down with these gems.  Here's what I'm bringing with me:

 

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott - I have been plucking through this book ever so slowly.  I think I am reluctant to read it too quickly because I'm loving it so much!  It is great inspiration for anyone who loves to write.

 

Why I Write by George Orwell - This book promises more great inspirations in politics and writing.  I have read parts of it, including Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language," which is was originally published in 1946 and is included as the last chapter of this book.  It is always a pleasure to see what the great writers have to say about writing.  Click here to read "Politics and the English Language" online.

 

Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories by Katha Pollitt - My sister gave me this book when I saw her in Denver in May.  It has been rare in the past few years to see my sister more than once a year, so since I will be seeing her again already on this trip it seems only right to take as stab at finishing this one.  I imagine that Pollitt's observations of life will be inspirational, but I also look forward to reading it as an example of a successful publication of personal essays.

 

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - A very nice local Portlander who I know from working at Starbucks gave me a 1971 paperback copy of this book as a (very belated) wedding gift.  It is in near-perfect condition and very much has that wonderful old book smell.  I've never had the privilege of reading anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, so I am really looking forward to this one.

I am also bringing the past three issues of The Sun Magazine that I have been wanting to catch up on.  The stories in these magazines are phenomenal and promise to be excellent airplane and beach reading.

Check out The Sun and read parts of current and archived issues at www.thesunmagazine.org

I hope that with all this I'll have some great recommendations for reading and writing endeavors when I return.  Happy reading (and writing)!

Taking the Time to Write

Yesterday my mom asked me about Joyce Carol Oates' writing style.  While I happen to be quite inexperienced with her writing, I was explaining to my mom what I know about her writing habits and the habits and writing styles of other prolific writers.  This got me thinking about the amount of dedication and time that writing, whether as a career or hobby, requires. 

In The Midnight Disease, Alice Flaherty describes writers who suffer from hypergraphia, an uncontrollable compulsion to write usually caused by high temporal lobe activity such as temporal lobe epilepsy and bipolar disorder.  People with hypergraphia write constantly and extensively.  For example, Lewis Carroll, who is believed to have had temporal lobe epilepsy, wrote 98,721 letters from his late twenties to his death at sixty-five.  Flaherty also talks about "normal" but prolific writers, such as Joyce Carol Oates, who do not have abnormal temporal lobe activity, but who write almost as extensively as writers who do.

It's not easy to put that amount of time into writing.  For me, the difficulty is putting aside all the other things that need to be done, or could be done.  There are always dishes to do, mail to sort, stuff to look at online or out the window.  A long day working at the job that actually pays is always a good excuse.  In Bird By Bird, Anne Lamott describes writing constantly, every day, even when she was working full time.  This is what is really hard, the commitment to just do it, just keep going.  Lamott follows the advice of her father, who was also a writer:

"Do it every day for a while," my father kept saying.  "Do it as you would do scales on the piano.  Do it by prearrangement with yourself.  Do it as a debt of honor.  And a commitment to finishing things."

I have friends who write, too and I think we all have the same trouble with it.  One has been writing for years, has even been published.  She tells me, "I'm going to start writing again," and weeks later she's still telling me the same thing.  Another says to me, "let's go somewhere and just sit and write" so we go to the park and we sit and we talk and we people watch with our notebooks and pencils in the grass beside us.  I think that there is value in the desire to write and in the intention to write, but at some point you actually do need to just sit down and write.

See also:  The Inner Manic

Topic Block

Can you have writer's block if you haven't even started writing? What if the question is how to begin writing? or where to begin? or what to begin writing about? Whenever this question arises in my mind, my answer is simple: start anywhere. Just think of something, anything, and start writing. This tactic can have surprising results, as evidenced by the author E. L. Doctorow:

Well it can be anything. It can be a voice, an image; it can be a deep moment of personal desperation. For instance, with Ragtime I was so desperate to write something, I was facing the wall of my study in my house in New Rochelle and so I started to write about the wall.... Then I wrote about the house that was attached to the wall. It was built in 1906, you see, so I thought about the era and what Broadview Avenue looked like then; trolley cars ran along the avenue down at the bottom of the hill; people wore white clothes in the summer to stay cool. Teddy Roosevelt was President. One thing led to another and that's the way the book began, through desperation to those few images.

I also like Anne Lamott's advice:

Start with your childhood.... Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O'Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just start getting it down.

I find this helpful in academic writing, too. I just start writing about whatever I find interesting about the subject matter, and before long a topic begins to form. The most important thing, as Anne Lamott points out, is not to worry about how "good" the writing is. I remind myself that I am not committed to the words on the page, that they are changeable and that I have that power. I try to remember that there will be time to revisit it later, to sort the good from the bad and to rewrite if necessary. I repeat my simple mantra, again and again each time my writing begins to slow: just keep writing. just write.

The Why of Writing

According to the National Endowment for the Arts 2004 Reading at Risk Survey, personal writing was the ONLY literary activity that increased between 1982 and 2002.

The question of why we write is one that I will likely revisit often. There is a wealth of opinions out there and I can't seem to stop coming across them.

"The Artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived on thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since."

William Faulkner (The Paris Review Interviews 1956)

How many titles would the average person recognize but not be able to match with an author? Worse, how many stories would we recognize without even knowing so much as the title? So few writers are recognized. So few win awards. So few make any real money. Do the few who find success really even matter?

"The more the public is interested in artists, the less it is interested in art. The personality of the artist is not a thing the public should know anything about. It is too accidental."

Oscar Wilde (Mr. Oscar Wilde on Mr. Oscar Wilde 1895)

So, unless you know that you have something to contribute, unless you are the successor of Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer and Faulkner, maybe there is no point in writing at all.

"But I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do - the actual act of writing - turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward."

Anne Lamott (Introduction to Bird by Bird)

Well said.