Keep it Personal

If you read this blog you probably know that I write for a local blog here in Portland but did you know that I write two other personal blogs in addition to this one?  In addition to my love for all things reading and writing, I have a small passion for all things domestic.  On These Good Ideas I share (you guessed it) good ideas about all things that are happy and helpful for everyday life.  I share everything from new recipes to DIY projects to art and music finds.  The blog functions as a way for me to keep track of the things I want to remember and share them with others at the same time.  Multiple passions in life have a way of intermingling, don't they?  I have this little passion for design, but I notice that my design choices are often informed by my love of books and writing.  I am really into bookcases and decorating with books.  I also love to see pictures of typewriters and similar writing and reading inspired art.  Check out this picture I recently bought from 20X200.com:

I love this photo and I can't wait to frame it and hang it right over my writing desk.  Anywho, lately I've been thinking about personal writing.  I have most recently started a third blog, this time with my husband.  We are beginning the process of searching for a new home and (we hope) diving into the world of homeownership.  I do most of the actual writing for the blog and I've been working on keeping it really personal.  It is, after all, directly about my personal life.  I've come to realize that personal writing is not something that happens just because you decide to do it.  Really personal writing is something that you have to come into; it is a response to an emotional state that you have to find a way to get yourself into.  You have to really feel something about your subject or else it will come out dry and boring.  For most purposes I use free-writing to try to get into the right state of mind.  I find that if I write long enough, and more importantly without pressure to write certain things or in a certain way, I can usually get to the right place.  For blogging purposes, however, I've found a different tactic.  I find it really helps to imagine that I'm writing to someone.  Not a general audience but a specific person, anyone who might be reading and try to imagine what I would say to him or what I would write to him if he were the only one who was going to read it.  For the new blog I imagine that I am writing to my mother.  We live on opposite sides of the country and since she can't be here to help with the house search the blog is a great way to keep her up to date.  I definitely notice that when I stay in the mindset of writing to her my posts are shorter, clearer and easier to read.  I don't ramble as much, I just tell her what I think she would want to know and I write it just like I would write it to her.  I've been transferring this tactic over to my other blogs too and I hope it makes a difference.  Let me know what you think!

"Say It Like You Eat It"

I have recently submitted my application to the Masters Program in English at Portland State University.  For the second time.  There were a few different reasons that I didn't get in to the program last year, but among them, I believe, was a not-so-strong statement of purpose.  Not that it was a terrible piece of writing, but I was absolutely terrified when I wrote it.  I remember looking at those how to write a good statement of purpose articles online.  First of all, they wanted me to come up with some great story about why I wanted to go to grad school; something to get the reviewers attention and make them pick me above all the other candidates.  Well I didn't have some big story about why I wanted to go to grad school, I just wanted to go learn.  I wanted to be an English teacher and a Masters in English is a step in that direction.  What else could I say?  Second of all, these how to articles suggested that two months and ten to twelve drafts is a normal way to write a statement.  Multiple drafts I'm okay with, but I wouldn't be a very good English student if it took my two months to write ten to twelve drafts of a two page essay.  I started it the night before it was due.  Probably not the smartest idea, but mainly because as a result I was determined that I had to get it right on the first draft.  I remember specifically thinking that I just didn't want to make myself look bad.  Just stick to the basics, don't try anything fancy, there isn't enough time to worry about saying something stupid.  I think I succeeded in this goal, but the result was probably the most boring statement of purpose ever written.

Photo credit: Lindsay Brown

This year I didn't do much better on the time issue.  I sat down to write the morning before it was due instead of the night before, giving myself only a few extra hours.  This time, however, I sat down to write overflowing with emotion.  The application process brought back all the feelings of rejection, the feeling that I was misunderstood, that I hadn't presented myself properly.  I had continued taking graduate classes after I wasn't accepted last year and while I have definitely grown over the course of the year, I felt like this just proved that they should have let me the first time I applied.  I wanted to find a way to convey in writing that I have grown, that I have shown that I deserve to be in this program, but still that I am the same person I was last year.  I wanted to be honest, to be myself, and to not concede that there was any reason why I shouldn't have been in the program right along. 

So I decided to just write it all down.  Instead of sitting down to write a statement of purpose, I just sat down to write about what happened, why I wanted to go to grad school, how I had changed and how I hadn't changed, how I felt about not getting in last year, whatever.  I figured I'd end up with at least five pages, which I would then work down to a more appropriate two, but it turned out that I hit on some inspiration pretty quickly.  I got going on a train of thought and just kept going.  It turned out better than I could have hoped.

I asked my sister to read my statement and she responded with something amazing.  She said that she liked the way I told my story.  I hadn't even realized it, but I had a story after all.  Maybe it wasn't a story about a life-changing event that made me want to go to grad school, but it is my story.  I think in any piece of writing you have to tell the story.  In a cover letter you have to tell the story of why you came to want the job and how you are qualified for it.  In an essay you have to tell the story of your subject.  Even in story writing, where this would seem obvious, maybe we have to remember that we're not just sitting down to write a novel, we have to tell the story.

I am currently about halfway through my first reading of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love.  I say first reading not because I plan on reading this particular book multiple times but because yes, I really haven't read it until now.  In case you were wondering.  I bring this up because of a moment in Gilbert's story that I would like to channel.  She is in Italy and trying to explain some complicated emotions to an acquaintance:

...I'm still having trouble figuring out how to talk.  Giovanni smiles and says encouragingly, "Parla come magni."  He knows this is one of my favorite expressions in Roman dialect.  It means, "Speak the way you eat," or, in my personal translation:  "Say it like you eat it."  It's a reminder -- when you're making a big deal out of explaining something, when you're searching for the right words -- to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman food.  Don't make a big production out of it.  Just lay it on the table.

This is my process.  It's the only way that I can write really successfully.  I can't sit down to write a cover letter or an essay or a statement of purpose.  I have to sit down with the intention of telling the story; I just have to get it all out there, say it like it is without worrying about the purpose that I'm writing for.  Sometimes this requires lots of editing later, picking through pages and pages trying to find the good stuff.  But a lot of times it just seems to work itself out as I go.  Either way, like my good friend Lindsay says about writing and life: you have to trust the process, whatever that may be.  If you do, good things will come.

A Good Idea

My mind hasn't been with this blog for the last couple of weeks.  I think that the Phil and Danny interview was on my mind for so long that when I finished it I automatically switched gears.  I could once again focus on things that I had been putting off because I was (or felt that I should have been) working on the interview.

During these past few weeks, however, I forgot one lesson.  I haven't been writing because I've been focused on things other than what I normally write about.  But I should have been writing all along; just writing about what was on my mind.  So from now on I'll be taking my own advice.  And for some of the things that I write that aren't compatible with this blog, I've started another.  Check it out at www.thesegoodideas.blogspot.com.

Don't worry, I'll still be sticking around here, too.  I'll just have to start working on this kind of inspiration.

A Month Later...

No one ever said that being a writer would be easy.  Vacation may not have been best time to try to build a writing habit.  Especially on a vacation with family there is always something to do and someone to talk to and never as much free time as you imagine there will be.  In just under two weeks we hopped from Portland to Rhode Island, New York City, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, North Carolina and back to Portland.  We saw sisters, best friends, family friends, aunts, uncles, grandmothers and parents.  Needless to say there did not turn out to be a lot of reading or writing time.  On the beach in North Carolina, however, I did manage to sneak some time for One Hundred Years of Solitude and a little bit of writing.

I am still picking my way through One Hundred Years of Solitude and I am loving it.  It is a beautiful story of the rise and fall of the Buendia family over the course of, appropriately, one hundred years.  What is surprising me, and pleasantly, is the whimsical quality of the story.  The superstitions and beliefs of the isolated culture in which the Buendias live defines truth in the novel.  It is fantasy and reality in one package and it is exciting to watch the development of the small culture with changes and discoveries in science and world knowledge.

I am also still slowly enjoying Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, and am currently inspired by her thoughts on character description and dialogue.  It makes me think that I should have done more writing while I was with my family or that I should begin paying closer attention to the array of characters that I encounter so frequently at Starbucks.

While on the beach my thoughts were more on description, and of course the natural focus was the rolling waves, the shadows that the seagulls cast as the fly and fight their way along the shore, long lines of pelicans parading over rooftops, white crabs with huge eyes that scurry fearfully trying to blend in to the sand and fishermen with their poles stuck in the sand who may or may not have been compensating for something depending on how important it seemed to make them feel.  Additionally, a common theme was that writing doesn't just appear out of nowhere... you have to actually do something.  I feel like often when I am not writing it is because I'm waiting for some great idea to hit me so hard that it's all I can do not to write it down on the side of a coffee cup or a napkin or my arm if it's the only thing that's handy.  I'm starting to get that it doesn't always work like that.  Maybe it did in school after weeks studying a topic or days of research and agonizing over a subject, but that's not the same as pulling something out of thin air.  You have to do the work and the work means pages of pages of worthless writing before something great starts to flow.  I'm still working on that.

Next on the reading and writing agenda is more reading and more writing... But isn't that always the goal.  This week I'll get Mockingjay, the third and final book of The Hunger Games trilogy in the mail.  Of course I won't have any trouble getting through that ten times faster than I've read anything recently, but just maybe after that I'll get on a role.

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

A Different Way of Writing

I was recently asked to write for a local blog that shares news and information about the NW 23rd Ave shopping district in Portland.  I was given full reign to contribute to the blog in any way that I desired, so I decided to use the opportunity to try out interviews.  It is a completely new form of writing for me but one that I have been wanting to take a shot at for a while.  So far, it has definitely been a learning experience. The questions are the easy part - just think up some basic questions, silly questions, questions about the interviewee's impressions of and experiences on NW 23rd - but introducing the person is different.  How do you accurately represent someone's story in your own words in only a few sentences?  How do you do justice to all the interesting things about them without going over the top?

My guide has been an excerpt from Ken Macrorie's Telling Writing.  Macrorie's mantra: 

"All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth."

Good writing is honest and authentic, doesn't waste words and shares with the reader the experiences of the writer.  My first interviewee put my ability to write this way to the test.

I chose to interview Nick in part because I see him regularly and could set up the interview quickly and easily; but also because he is a musician, so I knew he would have something to share and would be comfortable sitting down and talking with me.  Nick has a great personality so my expectations were high but he managed to exceed them.  Before he answered a few written questions I asked him to tell me a little bit about himself, his past, and his recent move to Portland.  He was incredibly enthusiastic and genuine about his story and I felt like I had to find a way to convey the experience that I had talking to him to the readers of the blog.  What came to mind, however, were cliches, not the truth.

To find the truth, Macrorie suggest writing continuously for ten minutes without stopping.  I think the point is that when you can't stop to think about what you're writing your mind can't come up with the cliches and the "great thoughts" that you might otherwise resort to.  Without the time to think, you don't have anything to draw from but the truth.  So I sat down and I started writing about Nick.

It worked, it didn't even take ten minutes of continuous writing before real, honest statements about what I had learned began to flow.  I began to discover what was really important about my interview with Nick and what it was that impressed me about him.  I really only had a few lines to write, but I think that I was able to express what was important to him and to me.

Thanks to Nick for being my guinea pig!  Check out the NW 23rd Ave Blog at www.nw23rdav.wordpress.com and I'll be sure to share the interview when it posts.

Writing is Hard

Most of us would agree that writing is not easy. Someone was recently talking about the "struggle" of writing. I often use the word "agony." You have to find the best words to say what you mean; you have to make it interesting; you have to keep it organized; it has to make sense; you have to figure out how to transition to the next paragraph; you have to worry about whether your readers will get it; and so on...

Take this as a good sign.

One definition of a professional writer (a definition which much of their own testimony implies) might be this: one who finds ways to write in spite of, not without, the discomfort of writing.
- James Seitz

Experts on writing say over and over that a sure sign of an immature writer is one to whom writing comes easily. Immature writers write what comes to mind, assume that it's the best they can do, and are satisfied. Mature writers know that writing is hard, that they must struggle through it, even agonize over it, and that they may still never be fully happy with a final product.

Of course, this struggle is part of what makes great writing so great, and it is part of what does make writing so satisfying. To have worked through it, to have come up with something that you feel is worth something, or to have discovered something that you didn't know you had to say makes it all worth it.

The Inner Manic

What do prisoners do? Write, of course; even if they have to use blood as ink, as the Marquis de Sade did. The reasons they write, the exquisitely frustrating restrictions of their autonomy and the fact that no one listens to their cries, are also the reasons that mentally ill people, and even many normal people, write. We write to escape our prisons. - Alice W. Flaherty

In the first chapter of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain, Flaherty draws the connection between mental illness and writing. She notes that studies have shown that "writers are ten times more likely to be manic-depressive than the rest of the population, and poets are a remarkable forty times more likely. Even student poets not diagnosed with mental illness have more manic traits than students who do not write poetry."

Importantly, Flaherty makes the distinction between these writers and those who write for outer gain, for recognition, for money, for success. Writers with mental illness write for themselves, to release what is within, to feel that they are being productive, or simply because they must. Isn't this why we should all be writing?

This, of course, does not mean that we need to have a mental illness in order to write. But reading this makes me want to look inside a little bit and search for signs of my inner manic.

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.

The Things I Mark

I am on the lookout for inspiration.

When I read, I read with pencil in hand. I mark lines, record quotes, make note of thoughts. This is the training of a degree in English. But I've found that the pencil helps me process.

I have been looking for a way to record these inspirations. It is the notes that get lost. The marks stay in the books where I left them, but the recorded quotes, the thoughts and interpretations end up scattered. I've attempted notebooks, journals, lists. But the day I don't have the right notebook on hand is the day it falls apart.

It is possible that a collection of inspirations, instructions, quotes and thoughts would be interesting and useful to someone other than myself. So I'll share them. It will be a look at the writing process. The quotes of literary masters. The name of a good book. A new technique for learning. A helpful resource. An inspiring practice. An interesting fact. I will do my best to keep it relevant, interesting, insightful, meaningful. I hope it will be inspirational. For you and for myself.


These are the things I mark in pencil.