M.K.B. Graham's Blog, page 4

Late-blooming geniuses

Have you ever known a bonafide genius? Have you ever aspired to be one?

I’ve been reading a book by Malcolm Gladwell—one of the most innovative writers I’ve[image error] ever come across. The book, What the Dog Saw, is a compilation of essays Gladwell wrote for the New Yorker. In one essay, he asks the question of whether prodigy is a requisite for genius—or whether genius can be a slower emergence of talent, something that can be cultivated, acquired, and nurtured.

Gladwell, a master of counterintuitive thought, got me thinking.

Gladwell points out rightly that throughout history we’ve seen geniuses of the ordinary kind. People like Mozart who composed at age five and Picasso whose talent was recognized as early as 13. Chopin. Lang Lang. The list of young geniuses is long and impressive.

But what about people like Helen Hooven Santmyer. She spent her life as a writer, yet it[image error] wasn’t until she was in her 90s, living in a nursing home, battling age and emphysema, that she found acclaim with the publication of her epic—and bestselling—novel And Ladies of the Club. All this work, a lifetime of practice, became a palimpsest for genius.

So is genius prodigy or the product of a hard, lifelong slog? I like to think it can be some of both. Every writer knows the lonely, laborious path required for success. It is a path fraught with doubt, discouragement, rejection—yet despite the obstacles, there is something irrepressible about the desire to write. Real writers can’t shake it any more than they can step out of their own skin. So they slog.

As a longtime, long-practiced writer, I must hope that Gladwell is on to something—that some measure of genius emerges through dogged work, patience, determination, unadulterated perseverance, and unending practice. That would make it all worth it in the end.

Perhaps a little talent and a whole lot of desire and perseverance, along with years of life experience, can turn ordinary writers into late-blooming geniuses. 

Illustration of Santmyer originally appeared in the Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada); Jan. 20, 1985, p. 21. 

The fight of the murble-bee

[image error]Murble: a cross between garble and mumble. As in: “With the covers over her head, she spoke, but her words were murbled.”

It is not a mistake. It is a new word. It is the sound I heard and the word I wrote. I invented it.

Kindle, however, thinks I’m wrong.* In fact, they keep sending me polite little messages that I have a “mistake” to correct in my book CAIRNAERIE to which I reply:

“I beg to differ.”

As an author, am I not entitled to invent words? Who, pray tell, is better suited to create new words than writers? Just imagine if Dr. Suess had been limited to “real” words. Or Ransom Riggs? Or Roald Dahl? Or J.K. Rowling?

New words are created every year—possibly every day—given the Internet’s ability to propel words around the globe in the blink of an eye. In 1975, the word “meme” didn’t exist. In 1976, it did—invented by Richard Dawkins.

(Hmm, Kindle, take note: An author invented a word.)

In his book, The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester details how the Oxford Engish Dictionary was written with the help of a mad professor confined to a jail cell. (It’s a terrific book, by the way.) The voluminous OED took eight decades to complete and required its editors to dig out where words first appeared in print.

That means that many words have beginnings. They are conceived, created and born at a specific time and place. Just because one reader doesn’t recognize a word doesn’t mean it’s not a legitimate word, does it?

But why does it matter?[image error]

Writing should be precise. When it’s imprecise, it sounds sloppy, as if the writer doesn’t really care about how it’s read. But precise writing gets at exactly what a writer wants to say. Precise writing draws a reader more deeply into a story by pulling the reader closer to the writer’s mindset.

For writers, though, sometimes the perfect word doesn’t exist.

So what is a writer to do? I say invent, imagine, create, shape, modify, morph.

Take the word ‘bumblebee,’ for example. Bumblebee—originally humble-bee—was apparently changed echoically (based on sound) to bumblebee to reflect a Latin sound. But bumblebees don’t bumble. They murmur with a little whirring sounds, like a tiny internal motor. The word bumble sounds—to me, at least—like a cardboard box rolling down a flight of stairs. 

If writers can’t invent words, well, then there’s something wrong in the universe. Imagination is the heart of writing, particularly fiction, and because language is fluid and changeable, authors should not only have a right but a duty to make it better. Above all others, writers should work to hone, improve, expand and improve our common lexicon. To prohibit authors from creating words is akin to keeping scientists from curing diseases or teachers from designing new methodologies or artists from introducing new genres.

To that end, I’m standing my ground and continuing the fight of the murble-bee. I’m sticking with “murble” in hopes that in 100 years when the OED is in its newest printing, it will read: “murble, first appeared in the writing of M.K.B. Graham.”

*(Apparently, a reader reported ‘murble’ as a misspelling. I venture to say this reader has little imagination, an oversized ego, or too much time on her hands.)

The persistence of memory

I’ve spent the past few weeks going through diaries and scrapbooks that my mother left behind. They are humorous, compelling, revealing. I am getting to know her as a teenager, a college student, a young married woman — the person she was before I was born.

In assembling her documents and those of dozens of other family members into some kind of order, my goal is to create a history that tells my family’s stories so they will not be forgotten.

It is interesting, exhausting, and surprising work that is full of fresh discovery. It is also essential.

Recently, I read Susan Orlean’s The Library Book — a book about libraries in general, the Los Angeles Public Library, in particular, and the 1986 fire that destroyed 400,000 of its books. It’s a fascinating, interesting read.  I learned a lot about books and libraries that I didn’t know. (Any bibliophile would enjoy this book.)

In her preface, Olean lays out her reason for preserving past histories. I’ll quote it here because she said it better than I could. (Emphases are my own.)

“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.”*[image error]

I love this passage. It resonates with me as I comb through my family’s past. And it inspires me.

Writers are especially adept at doing this, preserving memory. Words gathered into books is our best medium and our best platform for this deliberate act. Writing for the future is — in many ways — our mission. Of course, our purpose is also to stir curiosity, to stimulate thought, to spark imagination, to foster discussion, to entertain, to provoke, to amaze, and so on and so on and so on. But memory is always key to what we do. We want our words to linger, to sit and ruminate in other people’s brains.

To make a difference. To last.

As I pursue my family’s past and its “constantly refreshed future” and as I shape it into words and paragraphs and chapters, I have one goal in mind: To persist forever in someone’s memory.

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

The contradiction of spring

Without a doubt, my favorite season is spring. After a cold and often dank winter, spring begins to tease in February by giving us a significant warming spell. When we kept a garden, this was the time to get early peas in the ground, so that we could be enjoying them by early summer. It was a season of hope.

Here in Virginia, the weather between Feb. 1 and May 1 can vary as wildly as a two-year-old choosing his clothes for the day. February, March, and April have a hard time deciding what weather to deliver. Sometimes it is 70 degree days; other times we are treated to 20 degree nights with snow — mountains of it, occasionally. In fact, some of our biggest snows have arrived on the heels of a spring-like day.

Even when spring does finally come, it still comes with a kind of contradiction. The forsythia blooms yellow and then my[image error] lovely cherry tree presents blossoms that linger for up to a week unless winds and rains intervene to blow them away. In short order, the redbuds begin to pink. Tiny little finches turn bright yellow.

But with the blossoming comes the pollen. For a month now, I’ve been getting alerts on my phone for “high pollen.” I know, Weatherbug, I know — because my nose itches and the bench on my front porch changes from shiny black to a dull fuzzy grey.[image error]

I want so much to open the windows and let fresh spring air roll in to displace the cooped-up winter, but, alas, I can’t without risking that waves of pollen-laden wind will coat the interior of my house as it coats the exterior.

So, I wait for the right moment. That comes with rain that washes the air. Only then do I dare open the windows and let in the spring, thwarting the contradiction of spring and rejoicing that spring has finally arrived to stay.

A hoarder’s cluttered room …

Writing is a study in precision and nowhere is this more important than in the details that swarm around a good story. Details are like the last coats of paint on a new house, the finely sewn collar on a shirt or blouse, the delicate fondant icing on a wedding cake. They must be just right.

Not too much. Not too few. And certainly not too heavy or overwrought.

The right details turn a good story into a compelling one and as such, they can make or break a book. They can also take a good story and turn it into a hard slog for readers.

[image error]Every effective book requires two elements: good storytelling and good writing. Details are the link between the two that pull the whole together.

Adding details, though, should be done with caution. Overdone details — like too much jewelry — can strangle a story by overwhelming it. In fact, Coco Chanel’s advice on jewelry often applies nicely to story details: “Before you leave the house, take off at least one thing.”

Along the same lines, writers are often cautioned to “kill their darlings.” In choosing details, this is critical.

I’ve often said that a good book is like an intricately woven tapestry. Every detail must be woven carefully into the welt, blended by color, by exact tightness, and by a solid and carefully planned relationship to the whole. Details should neither be overdone nor underdone nor attached haphazardly. Too few details and you have a book that is not grounded, that will float around like a wayward balloon. Too many and you have a hoarder’s cluttered room where you must watch each step so as not to trip and fall.

 

 

 

Tiptoeing into the marketplace …

Anyone who knows me, knows I’m not a fan of marketing. In fact, I’m terribly cynical about advertisers and all their tricks to get me to buy their products.

Yet …

Yet, I understand the need to stand out in a marketplace that is as crowded as it has ever been. In the book world, that’s a tall order.

To that end — and with the kind encouragement of some people I respect — I’m trying my hand at advertising CAIRNAERIE for the first time.[image error]

Conventional wisdom says that when one publishes a book, it should be accompanied by a blazing advertising campaign to get the word out and boost sales. I was, however, quite hesitant to do that at the outset. It was more my style to let word of mouth — not a means to scoff at — and see what happens.

Part of my reticence was because I’m not a self-promoter. In fact, I’m the kind who would rather be seated in the back — and certainly not on the podium. Another big insecurity for me was that I was self-published. I’ve seen too many self-published books that were not quite up to snuff, and in case my book didn’t pass muster, I — quite honestly — didn’t want to embarrass myself.

Recently, however, I attended a lovely bookclub whose welcome was as warm as it could be. As a writer I felt enormously affirmed and encouraged. I’ve also been watching my ratings and reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. They have been positive. I’ve sold more than 2000 books already, and I’ve garnered 4.7 stars on Amazon and more than 100 ratings on Goodreads from readers I’ve never met.

And that’s important. You can always count on your friends, but if strangers like my book, well, it must have some value. After 20 months on the market, it seems that the verdict is in. CAIRNAERIE is worthy of at least a little promotion, so here I go tiptoeing into the marketplace with a single 10-day Facebook ad.

If you see it pop up on your Facebook page, let me know.

A master of friendship …

Yesterday I learned that my friend, Sandy, had died.

She was older than I was and far less accomplished than most. In fact, she had spent her seven decades as one whom society used to describe as “mentally retarded.” She had no advanced degrees, no career, no fame or fortune — all those descriptors we add to obituaries that make us believe that a life ending had been worth living in the first place.

[image error]photo©McKeadlitLLC

Sandy had none of that. Yet she was my friend, and like only a handful of other people in my life, she had an enormous impact on me because her solitary expertise was something that I was not very good at.

Friendship.

As the eldest of my siblings, I was the most restricted by my parents. It was a mixed blessing. As an introvert, I didn’t especially mind, but — in life’s rearview mirror — I realize how much those restrictions denied me the opportunity to develop close relationships. I’m sure my parents didn’t realize this; my mother in particular who was herself an introvert.

I did have friends, especially when I enrolled in college, but most of them I held at arms length. I rarely, if ever, let anyone get close to me.

After college, another friend — who made it her mission to befriend me — taught me an extremely valuable lesson: To have a close friend, one had to be a close friend. For me it was a novel discovery, one I took to heart. One reinforced by my friend, Sandy.

I first knew Sandy through my church and through her mother, who cared for her daughter for almost 60 years. Her mother arranged the flowers for my wedding and for our church. Sandy always referred to herself as Sandra, but I always called her Sandy. I don’t know why.

Long ago, Sandy befriended me.

Every time I saw her, she would reference our high school days. I was the editor of the newspaper; she was enrolled in special education courses. I didn’t know her well then, yet that was her frame of reference. She frequently perused her high school yearbooks, looking at the faces of all the people who were her friends. There were many; many who never even knew it. They were Sandy’s friends nonetheless.

When I moved back to the city where we both grew up, she got my phone number and from that time on, called me regularly. I was one of many blessed with her short but friendly phone calls. Often she would ask if I had heard from this person or that, or if I knew that so and so was ill, or that so and so had died. For a woman with limited mental capacity she had an enormous capacity for friendship.

Every year I took her a birthday present. It was easy to remember because she shared the date with my eldest son. Often I missed getting there on the exact day and would have to tell her, yes, I’m coming but not sure when. I hoped it was always a nice surprise for her when I showed up unannounced with her birthday gifts in hand, sometimes weeks or months after the event.

But surprise or not, I know that I always left her presence uplifted. She put my own life in perspective and made me think deeply about the value of human relationships — something I was never especially good at. She helped me understand that this is where life occurs; it is not in the accomplishments, the accolades, or the degrees that we rack up.

It is in the people we touch.

Sandy lost her father years ago, but when her mother died in 2004, she lost her dearest friend and caretaker. She was heartbroken at their temporary separation. For the rest of her life, with the deep and genuine emotion that people like Sandy are blessed with,  she never let go of the acute pain of losing her mother. It was as intense for her after 15 years as it had been the day her mother passed. How many times she said to me, “I miss my Mom.” When I heard that Sandy had died, my first thought was how happy she would be at their reunion.

I don’t know what Sandy’s obituary will say. It won’t follow the traditional text because she didn’t live a traditional life. But I hope it will say that my dear friend Sandy was a master of friendship.

Because she was. And that was more than enough.

My atomic roots …

I grew up with the story of how my dad almost flew on the Enola Gay with Col. Paul Tibbets and the crew of the 509th Composite Group that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, Japan in August of 1945.

Dad … 509th … Enola Gay … Hiroshima … Tinian … Almost …

[image error]North Field, Tinian Island, 1945

All those words floated through my life like banners behind passing biplanes. As I grew up, the words came into sharper and deeper focus. Like my friend whose father was stationed at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and my cousin whose father worked on the Manhattan project — and another cousin whose sister was a Code Girl, I had a tenuous link to history that I barely understood — a tenuous yet unbreakable link that spurred my curiosity.

My atomic roots made me a daughter of history, so to speak, and gradually it made me a keeper of history.  Stories like these, as they coalesced and began to form a kind of web, taught me two things.

The first lesson was the compelling nature of history. How I wish I had better understood that as a child! If I had, I would have given myself extra years to explore the history so widely documented that touched my life. I would have had an opportunity to hear firsthand from those closest to that history. But so many have left us, taking their memories with them. That chance is gone. I am left only with what they left behind.

The second lesson is this: Contrary to some popular memes, focusing on the past does not make one less able to embrace the present and the future. Instead, it educates us how to step forward. One of my favorite quotes is from Sir Winston Churchill who said: “If the present ignores the past then there’s no hope for the future.”

There is wisdom there — and a call to action: To turn memory into written words.

I am beginning to work on a collection of family stories. These, like my atomic history, will touch other histories — of wars, of John Brown’s hanging, of the first bridge over the Big Muddy, and even of a face behind Ronald McDonald. Yes, really. These stories touch the significant and the insignificant, the remarkable and the unremarkable, the important and the seemingly unimportant.

No history, however, is truly unimportant. None.

While genealogy connects us to ancestors, it is those ancestors’ histories and stories that teach us and ground us. What I learn from my atomic roots will be thrilling and certainly thought-provoking. And I am determined to record them because history and its power to guide us ends with  memory — unless it is turned into written words.

The gift of September 11 …

Today’s post is an adaptation of a piece I wrote on the 10th anniversary of 9-11. It is worth remembering the day, but it is especially important to remember what happened afterwards. 

The sky was an exquisite shade of blue that morning. Nothing hinted at the immediate future — or the malevolence that had taken flight. In the city, New Yorkers boarded subway trains, sipped on cups of coffee and greeted colleagues. In Harrisonburg, students shuffled toward their 9 o’clocks. It was a beautiful day.

[image error]Until 8:46.

The news came in pieces. One student in Godwin Hall’s computer lab heard classes were canceled. Something had happened. As a friend drove her home in his convertible, she reveled in the gorgeous day. “I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation until I saw my roommates. They were stone-faced. One said, ‘We can’t get in touch with Katie’s dad.’ That was the hard part. All the phones were down.”

Everyone was glued to a television screen somewhere, in offices, homes and residence halls. We were the reluctant audience to a tragedy. Everywhere a collective gasp rose as disbelief gave way to reality. The World Trade Towers were crumbling. Then the Pentagon. And a plane went down in rural Pennsylvania.

We had touched tragedy before, or at least brushed by it, but this felt different. This was aimed at America, and it had penetrated deep into our collective American heart. Together we shuddered at the sights and sounds. On campus, the president received the chilling message: “He, I feel, is lost and probably not to be found.” Everywhere students craved information about parents, siblings, friends who they knew were too close to the fire. In the end, we would learn our community had lost four of its own.

We all floated in a state of disbelief, like the moment when a roller coaster peaks and then propelled by a reality as powerful as gravity, we plummeted. We were breathless, lightheaded, as we descended into tragedy. As a nation, we recoiled.

And then we reacted.

I, like most mothers, took stock of my children. I drove to pick up my middle-schooler. I’m not sure why, but it felt like the right thing to do. I have often thought of the mothers and fathers, the wives and husbands, the children who had said goodbye at breakfast that morning. What did they do? Students reached out to each other. The world was suddenly insecure. With every step we took, we were searching for normalcy, for explanation, but none came. There was no reason.

College students — who had only been 8 to 11 years old that fateful day — had watched the tragedy through children’s eyes, but the vision still stung. Their remembrances are telling: “I was homeschooled that year and watched it all happen. My sister’s friend died on the plane in Pennsylvania. When you are that age you can remember it all, but you can’t do anything about it.”

“My dad was at a conference. There were a lot of pilots attending and I remember seeing them all cry. I was very concerned for my family’s safety. I wanted to take a self-defense class.”

“School was canceled, but wherever we went people were crying and sad. I did not understand the significance. I was very confused. The attack made me more aware of the world and how much power the U.S. has and how many enemies we have.”

“I remember staring at the blue sky all day long and being afraid of it. It made me feel less invincible.”

“I was beginning 6th grade, and my nervousness about making friends and not getting thrown in a locker by some mustached, pre-teen 8th graders was my priority at that point. I do remember the moment I discovered the towers fell. My teacher tried to break it to us easily.  ‘Something happened in New York today,’ she said, her voice trailing off. The stuffy classroom was silent and for a few minutes, we sat stunned, confused and scared. After regaining some composure, our teacher flipped on CNN, and we spent the rest of the day watching things unfold in a city many of us had seen only in pictures. It was a surreal experience, a bad dream, something intangible and truly unable to grasp.  How does an 11-year-old comprehend the loss of 3,000 lives? How could we understand the destruction of a skyscraper, or the plumes of smoke that covered people in ash as they ran from Ground Zero? Ten years later, I’m not sure I’ve fully wrapped my mind around it.”

On campus, students gave blood in massive numbers. They held hands and cried together. There were no Republicans or Democrats that day, no blacks or whites, no liberals or conservatives. Just us.

Oscar Wilde wrote, “Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”*  What happened in the aftermath of September 11 was exquisite. As smoke cleared over Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, tragedy united us. We were one nation. We rose up together, wounded but resilient. We were not separated by our differences but united in our sorrow. All of our disagreements, both petty and important, sank to the bottom of our consciousnesses. We were hit by a sudden clarity of what bound us together — our freedom and purpose as a nation.

If there is a legacy that we as a nation should cherish from the tragedy of September 11, it is this: What separates us should always be secondary to what unites us. Every one of us — all ethnicities, all political persuasions, all religions, all classes — should strive to recapture and hold on to the unity that was so pervasive in the weeks and months following September 11.

We will never forget the date. It is seared into our American heart just as Pearl Harbor had scarred our collective heart 60 years before. But the farther one moves from tragedy, the softer its impact becomes. Like grief, it fades. Gradually, our unity splintered. Too soon we allowed our politics and religion and divergent points of view to eat away at our unity. Too soon we were caught up in differences of opinion that really don’t matter at all when they are held up against the immensity of what we found when we lost so many.

Martin Luther King once wrote: “We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.”* If we as a nation learn to subjugate our differences beneath our common identity as we did after September 11, we honor those who died that day. With their loss we were all diminished, and we must never forget the inestimable value of what we lost — and what we gained.

If we can rekindle, breathe life into the unity that we knew immediately after the towers fell, if we can place in permanent and proper perspective the value of each American above our own special and petty interests and opinions, then we can keep the gift from September 11. If that happens, those lost … will have died to create a world better than the one they left. Their lives, their deaths, will shore up the bedrock of a nation like none other: a nation that rushes to give blood, to aid neighbors, that shares its wealth and knowledge, that has as its foundational principal the inclination to lift each other up.

Monuments built at Ground Zero, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa., will long tell the story of those we loved and lost on that fateful morning. But monuments no matter how beautifully crafted, no matter how grand or expansive, do not sufficiently honor those who died. The only honor that will approach their sacrifice is if we unite to change the world. Our national unity, the precious and seemingly fleeting glimpse that appeared following September 11, must be reignited and stoked, in as much as we hold up a brilliant bright light for a dark world.

It is not pride or arrogance that should lead us, but the humble recognition that 2,819 individuals by their tragic deaths brought us all to our knees and to our senses. We are one nation. It is the great gift from September 11, and it will last as long as we cling to it.

*Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray   *Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

How to outwit writer’s block …

Talk to any writer or read any number of writing blogs and you will likely find one universal fear: the dreaded phenomenon of writer’s block — that moment when your brain goes blank and a great chasm opens up between your [image error]head and your fingers.

Thankfully, I can say I never have writer’s block. Never.

I’ve come close — what writer hasn’t — but it has never nabbed me. And I’ve figured out why. Today, I want to share some of the tricks I’ve learned to keep writer’s block at bay.

First and foremost,  I understand that I can write poorly . While that may seem counterintuitive, it’s not. Instead, understanding this gives me the freedom to write because I never worry about what I write. Why? Because I know I can change it. It’s that simple. I give myself permission to write no matter how the words turn out — and I give myself equal permission to delete text or to ball up a page and toss it into the wastebasket.
I write and think a lot. The act of writing — whether a masterpiece or something less inspiring — is the act of learning to write. Writing keeps the process flowing the same way that[image error] letting water drip from a pipe in cold weather keeps pipes from freezing. I write continually so that I don’t freeze up, so to speak. Even a little bit of writing works — or even thinking about writing. Practice makes you a better writer and thinking is an integral part of writing. The more I write (and think), the more fluid my writing becomes — and the less likely I’ll be stymied by writer’s block.
I write without inspiration. Writing is fun when you’re struck with a great idea — when a story conspires with time and place and opportunity. But I can’t depend on inspiration. Writing is not a flight on a magic carpet — as[image error] inspiration sometimes feels. Writing is work. Hard work. It is less like flying on a carpet and more like weaving one — slipping threads through the warp and tying off thousands of tiny knots one by one — letter by letter, as it were. If you don’t learn to write without inspiration, you’ll likely be struck regularly with writer’s block, mistaking it for lack of inspiration.
I manage my expectations. There’s not a single novelist who doesn’t want to pen the Great American novel or the next New York Times best seller. Not a single one. That usually means we are all prisoners of our expectations. When you learn about your craft and work hard at it, you can’t help but hope for success. I do, and you should. But as I’ve learned about the realities of the writing world, particularly the fickleness of the publishing industry, I balance what I expect with the reality of what I will receive in terms of affirmation and success. If you go into the publishing world fully informed, with eyes wide open, then realistic expectations will keep you focused and grounded. These can become great motivators. On the other hand, expectations that are unrealistically high — particularly those raised by agents, publishers or friends — frequently fall short. And nothing halts the writing  process faster than when unrealistic hopes built on unrealistic expectations come crashing down.
I cut myself some slack and occasionally take a vacation. Writing is something writers produce. It is not who we are. If you think so, you will eventually hit a wall and your writing will suffer. Think of  writing like you would think of driving a car or collecting the mail or buying groceries. Don’t think of it as life and death. You may feel like you live and breathe writing — and you probably do if you’re a serious writer — but the reality is that you can benefit from a change of scenery. When I get tired of working on a novel, I switch to short stories or essays for a while. It keeps me writing and lets me breathe. It feels like a little mental vacation. So if a writing project feels suffocating, give it a rest and step away for a time. Eventually you’ll begin to yearn for it again — and you’ll return refreshed. And on a related note …
I stop when the well is dry and let it refill.  Sometimes writer’s block isn’t writer’s block at all. Instead, you’ve simply exhausted the supply in your creative well. Think of creativity as an artesian well. Water from an artesian well bubbles up on its own, but it can be sucked dry. Sometime you need to wait until it refills before it will produce again. In other words, sometimes you simply need a break to let your creativity percolate and bubble. If you don’t believe me, how many times have you pondered a problem only to sleep on it and have fresh thoughts in the [image error]morning? Creativity is thought first — and sometimes thought needs to be refreshed. Take a break. Read something. Doodle. Take a walk. Take a nap. Eat candy. Anything. But give your creative juices time to refill. They will. I promise.
Finally, I think of writer’s block as a challenge not a hindrance. Don’t fear it! It is something to manage — just like editing or proofing or completing a project. Don’t allow yourself to suffer from it. Instead, challenge yourself to outwit writer’s block as one more step in the process of learning to write well.