April Davila's Blog, page 19

You Inner Critic’s BFF: Doubt

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how meditation can help us to deal with our inner critic. You can read that piece here, but in short, the idea was that we can train ourselves to recognize that hyper-critical little voice that pipes up when we’re writing so that we don’t let it derail us. We can simply notice its incessant berating diatribes and ignore it, much as we would a barking dog. Well, it occurred to me recently that your inner critic has a BBF: Doubt.

Doubt’s Doorway

We all know that rejection is part of being a writer. And we all KNOW that we shouldn’t take it personally, but there’s still that little voice in our head that pipes up every time we get another rejection letter, or a pass from an agent or a publisher. It’s that little voice that says: maybe you’re just not good enough.

In the past, I used to do my damnedest to ignore that voice and when it got too loud I’d soak it in alcohol until it shut up. But it takes a lot of energy to ignore and anesthetize doubt. Frankly, it’s effing exhausting.

At some point, out of pure desperation, I tried something different. I turned to face the doubt. There’s this concept in Buddhism called Right View. (I’ve blogged about it before in relationship to editing.) The idea is to try and see things as they really are. So I tried it. I asked myself: Is my doubt warranted? As a writer, do I have any skill at all?

The trick is, it’s hard to know. The first time I asked myself this, I really didn’t know the answer. So I asked another question: what’s the worst case scenario? Answer: that I am a terrible writer. The next logical question was whether I was ready to quit. The answer was an emphatic no. Instead I got to work on improving my craft.

To be clear, I had no evidence that suggested I was a terrible writer, but I figured even if I was a descent writer, I wanted to improve. I realized then that I wanted to always be improving.

Doing The Work

I bought books about writing – everything from Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing to Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and many in between. I took Novel Writing III and IV with Mark Sarvas through UCLA Extension and learned so much (and keep in mind, I already had a master’s degree in writing at this point). I read and studied novels like the one I hoped to write. And most importantly I kept practicing. I figured if I wrote every day I was bound to improve to some degree, just by sheer force of repetition.

And what do you know? I started to have some success. Of course, it was only then that I realized how very sneaky doubt can be. Just when you think you’ve got it licked, it reappears in its evolved form as Imposter Syndrome.

Imposter Syndrome

Tell me if any of this sounds familiar:

You get a story published in a literary journal and Imposter Syndrome says: “well, it’s just a tiny little journal”An agent wants to sign you and in your head it’s like: “she’s probably having an off day, she won’t be able to sell your book”Your agent sells your book and: “it’s not one of the Big 5 publishers”Your book sells thousands of copies: “if it’s so good, why didn’t it sell hundreds of thousands of copies?”You’re a NYT best-seller: “wait until you try to sell your next book, then everyone will know you’re a fraud”

Point is, that bitch is never satisfied.

A teacher of mine used to say that the things we tell ourselves are “real, but not true.” This has been so helpful for me because I can’t deny that I think these things (tried that, it didn’t work). The feeling of doubt is real. But when I stop and ask myself “is it true” what I come to is this: it doesn’t matter.

Remembering Why I Care

At this point, I write because I love writing. I love the challenge of figuring out a story and getting it on the page so that it matches what’s in my head. I love discovering things about my story as I go through the process and how, every time, those realizations point to themes I’m curious about on a deep level. I strive to be good at it out of respect for the art, and because the better my writing is, the better I can convey the ideas in my head.

The rest is all just frosting on the cake. Really delicious frosting.

And for the record, I’m still working on my craft. As of today I am half way through the online class series “Building Great Sentences,” taught by Brooks Landon of the University of Iowa. It’s available as one of The Great Courses and I frankly had no idea there was so much to know about sentences. Definitely check it out if you’re looking to improve your writing on a sentence by sentence basis.

And may we all be students of something until our dying day.

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Superb Meteors and Sleepy Planets

Recently, while my son was on his spring break, we took a little road trip, just the two of us, up to Northern California. He was curious to see Jack London’s Wolf House after it played a role in one of the Percy Jackson novels he’s been reading.

Jack London’s Wolf House

For those of you who aren’t up on your Jack London (or Percy Jackson) trivia, the Wolf House was Jack London’s dream home. He began construction in 1911, just outside the small town of Glen Ellen, and finished it in August of 1913. By all accounts it was spectacular. But the day after it was completed, it burned to the ground. All that is left are the stone foundations (which London, who had lived through the great quake of 1906, had paid to have built extra thick and strong).

While Jack apparently had every intention of rebuilding, his wife wrote later that the disaster left him devastated. When he died suddenly in 1916, the reconstruction had not begun and his wife decided to leave the ruins and focus on a new structure (built completely of stone, even the roof tiles were adobe) for herself to live in.

A Superb Meteor

As we wondered around the museum I noticed a quote from London:

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of a man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

He lived large, seeking adventure and writing about it and I’ll admit, I had a little twinge of regret. Because I’ve chosen a life that, while not devoid of adventure, is much more stable. Over the years I quit smoking, drinking and doing drugs. These days I meditate and do yoga on a regular basis. In my head, Jack London was snickering. I was missing the whole point of life and what kind of writer could I possibly be if I wasn’t throwing caution to the wind at every turn?

This idea nagged at me throughout the day as my boy and I walked the grounds of the Jack London State Park and later, as we drove across the Gold Gate Bridge into San Francisco. It was still nagging at me the next day when we set out to walk past Union Square, through Chinatown, up to Coit Tower and over to Ghirardelli Square where we got ice cream.

Sleepy Planets

As I was sitting in the sun with my boy, drinking a fantastic chocolate milkshake, I noticed another quote on the window of a cheese company:

The only reason I workout is to live longer so I can eat more cheese and drink more wine.

Yes! This little shard of wisdom was credited to Ricky Gervais and it got me thinking. Jack London died at age 40. (40!) Yes, he managed to write dozens of books in his life, but think of the dozens more he might have written if he hadn’t ate and drank and smoked himself to death. Ricky Gervais is almost 60 and still cracking people up.

These days, the only people I hear echoing London’s live-fast-die-young mentality are rebellious adolescents and drug-addled individuals looking to excuse their own bad behavior. (I say this with love, having once been both adolescent and drug-addled.) I remember that feeling of passionate desperation, that sense of wanting to be a meteor flashing across the sky.

But there is wisdom in thinking past tomorrow. As writers, there is no pressure to do our best work while we’re still young. Unlike professional athletes and mathematicians, our work only gets better with age. According to this chart, we seem to hit our stride somewhere between the ages of 30 and 40. Sleepy planets (as London called those of us who have the gall to live past 40) have been around long enough to have some perspective on things and sometimes (if we gain some mastery of our craft) that shows through in our stories.

What’s more, alcohol and drugs do our writing more harm than good. Sure, some well-timed inebriation might spark and idea now and then, and yes, there have been a few writers who produced amazing work while out of their gourds on something or another, but writing is work and a clear head will always be more productive than one that’s foggy with intoxicants (or the pursuant hangover).

I’m 43 years old and only published my first book last year. I have so many stories I want to tell. I hope to be writing until the day I die and the further off that day is, the more books I’ll be able to squeeze out. So I take care of myself. And truth be told, I don’t miss hangovers. I don’t miss drunken fights or trying to remember which bar I left my credit card at last night. It’s much more satisfying to get up every morning and write.

Honing Artistic Discernment

When one is working to build a career as a creative professional, be it as a writer, painter, or drummer, one of the most important skills to develop is discernment – the ability to judge well. It’s not enough to say something isn’t working. We have to be able to discern why it’s not working so that we can then proceed to fix it.

Any writer who’s ever been part of a workshop has probably heard the feedback: “it just isn’t working.” And if you’re like me, that was probably the moment you started looking for another workshop to join because, really?, that’s all you’ve got?

Be More Constructive With Your Feedback Flight Of The Concords GIF from Bemoreconstructivewithyourfeedback GIFs

The feedback of “it just isn’t working” often jives with some internal, quiet voice in the writer’s mind that agrees, but can’t pinpoint what, exactly, isn’t working. Pair that ambiguity with the hard work it takes to persist in rewriting and what you get is a piece that gets labeled as “done” when it still has potential to be much better.

As writing professionals, we need to be able to recognize what isn’t working. Not only for giving feedback to other writers at workshops, but for when we’re editing our own writing. When we get that nagging sense that something “just isn’t working” we can either blindly keep rewriting in the hopes that we might stumble across a version that works (which may or may not get you there, but will definitely take a lot of time). OR we can practice figuring out what isn’t working. Discernment is a skill we can develop.

Getting Started

I had a meditation teacher once who told a story about hitting a very low point in his life. He didn’t know what he wanted in a relationship or work or anything. He felt like he didn’t even know what he enjoyed anymore. His own meditation teacher suggested he walk to the store, buy two types of apples, eat them, and decide which he liked better. The next day, he would buy the preferred apple and a third kind and again, decide which he liked better. He was to do this until he had tried every apple the store had on offer, until he knew what kind of apple he preferred. Then he would have one thing he knew he enjoyed.

Talk about baby steps.

But I think about this story a lot. I think about him tasting each apple, comparing it to the other one he bought, thinking about what he liked or didn’t like about each one. Sometimes just allowing ourselves to have strong opinions is an important place to start.

Discerning Story Preferences

A while back I wrote a post about how I have no qualms putting a book down if I don’t want to finish it. I had just begun to embrace the fact that I had strong opinions. It took me another three years to write a follow-up post about WHY I put books down.

That was me starting to be more discerning. I no longer stopped reading because a book “just didn’t work.” I actually started thinking about WHY a book put me off.

These days, I don’t allow myself to ditch a book until I understand exactly why I want to. And despite my handy little list of four reasons it’s not always easy to elucidate the exact reason I’m not enjoying a book. So I keep reading and inevitably, the thing that was bothering me on a subconscious level begins to irritate and annoy more overtly as I go along.

Sometimes the writing is really good, so it takes a full 100 pages for me to realize something as simple as “I really don’t care if the protagonist gets that raise/boyfriend/necklace/whatever.” I would categorize this under: uninspiring stakes. Other times I can tell in about 5 pages what I don’t like about a book. In those instances the culprit is usually poorly written prose. If I’m confused by the author’s wording more than once in the first five pages, I put the book down.

Your Own Work

Perhaps the most important time to have strongly formed opinions about writing is when you’re talking about your own pages. When you get notes from an agent or editor, there will be things they suggest changing.

You will likely agree with some of those notes and bristle at others. But if you want to ignore a suggestion from someone who’s job it is to help you improve your manuscript, good reasons are going to help the process go much more smoothly.

For instance, imagine your agent wants you to cut a scene that s/he thinks is too gory. Your first instinct is “no.” But then you think a little about why the scene is important to you and you tell your agent: “it needs to be gory because later, when the protagonist goes to the house…” Then your agent knows your concern and s/he can say: “but it I can’t sell a romance novel with that kind of gore in it. Can you tone it down?” To which you will have to decide if you’re willing. The point is, the discussion is based in reason, rather than just a gut feeling of something “just not working.”

Form Some Opinions

So, dear artist, I would encourage you to start forming some strong opinions. They’re important. If you’re not sure where to start, maybe pick up a collection of short stories and do the apple exercise – comparing one story to the next until you have a favorite in the collection and clearly understand why you prefer it.

At the very least, don’t let yourself, or anyone else, drop that “it just isn’t working” bit on you. Dig deeper. Figure out why. Your stories will be better for it.

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Writing As Meditation

Lately I’ve been blogging some about how mindfulness has helped me become a better writer, but saying I practice meditation is like a restaurant saying they serve food. Allow me to explain and to share how I’ve come to treat writing as meditation.

Insight Meditation

Insight meditation is the practice of attempting to see things as they are, in the present moment, without judgement. That’s it. I sit quietly, eyes closed to minimize distraction, and simply notice what I can notice. To give myself something to focus on (and come back to when my mind wanders), I use an anchor. Sometimes it’s my breath. Sometimes it’s the sounds in the room.

What I notice most often is that my mind is racing. I settle my attention on my breath and almost immediately I realize I’m planning dinner. So I come back to my breath. Then suddenly I’m caught up in a memory from when I was eight years old. Back to the anchor. Re-focus. Begin again.

The idea is not to try to keep thoughts out, but rather to notice what thoughts arise, acknowledge them, and then let them go. One of the hardest parts is the “without judgement” bit. Being kind with myself is a big part of the practice. It is both very simple and very challenging.

I often get asked about chanting, visualizations, candles, and special sitting postures. While there are meditation traditions that embrace these things I don’t personally use them in my practice. I do use a bell to mark time if I’m leading a meditation, simply because I like the sound of it. But I always keep in mind that it’s decoration, not essential to the practice of mindfulness.

Writing as Meditation

When I’m writing, I try to treat it as I do meditation. I make the writing the anchor. I start typing and I notice that, all of a sudden, I need to move the laundry along. But instead of mindlessly getting up to move the clothes to the dryer (which would totally derail my writing) I simply notice the thought arise and let it go. I come back to the anchor (my writing) and keep going.

And what about that little voice in my head that likes to tell me that everything I write is crap? If you’ve ever had the experience of writing a sentence, deleting it, writing it again, deleting it again, you know what I’m talking about. When I’m more mindful of the thoughts running in my head I notice the impulse to erase and rewrite. I can give a little mental bow to that inner critic, say “thank you for your opinion, you can f*ck off now” and just keep writing.

Once I get in the flow, that part of my brain stops pestering me. In fact, that’s what flow is. It’s the quieting of that inner chatter and a complete focus on the task at hand. Hours can fly by and often do. It takes practice. And the more I practice, the more easily I can get into that state of flow where my creativity flourishes.

Side note: that inner critic is a glorious editor. I would never banish her forever, only for first drafts. Once I’ve got a draft down and it’s time for editing, I let her run like an ostrich across the savanna. For more on that check out this post I wrote about Right View for Better Editing.

Quieting the Monkey Mind

In a recent podcast interview on the Ezra Klein show, George Saunders (author of, most recently, “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain“) talks about treating his writing like an anchor in meditation and how “rumination falls away” when he’s writing. He uses a phrase often used when describing our buys brains: the monkey mind – always swinging from one branch of thought to the next. He talks about how writing can quiet that monkey mind.

In the interview, Saunders shares many insights on the intersection of mindfulness and writing. It’s definitely worth a listen if this is something you’re interested in (and if you’ve read this far, I’m assuming you are), but the part I’m specifically referencing begins around minute 11, in case you want to jump right to it.

Write On

Meditating for a few minutes before I begin writing is the best way I have found to find the flow of my writing. It’s a sentiment that I hear over and over again at A Very Important Meeting. People who have never meditated before, or who have never used meditation to quiet their minds before writing are floored to realize how the two practices go so well together.

If you feel you could use some guidance, please consider yourself invited to A Very Important Meeting. I’m also thinking about recording some short meditations so that I can make them available on my website here. Drop me a note in the comments if that’s something you’d be into.

Happy Birthday to “142 Ostriches”

With a heading like that, it’s kind of hard not to picture 142 ostriches each celebrating their birthday. Did you know ostriches grow to their full height of about 10 feet in their first year? Now you know. But that’s not what I’m celebrating. I am, in fact, raising a metaphorical glass to the one year anniversary of the publication of my debut novel.

And what a year it’s been.

I was lucky, actually. I got to have my book launch party before everything shut down. I even did a couple of readings. But then the sh*t hit the fan and the second half of my promotional tour got canceled.

Through March, April and May I kept telling myself (and everyone else) that “canceled” really meant “rescheduled.” As soon as all this pandemic business died down, I’d get those events back on the calendar. I wrote this post about how to launch a book during pandemic. I tried to stay positive.

By June, it became pretty clear that things were not getting better. The venues that had canceled my spring events began to reach out about doing virtual events. One by one, I actually did readings with almost all of them. I slowly stop telling everyone that I’d get back out on the road to promote this book and started to accept that this what my debut book launch was going to be.

Disappointing? A little. But only because I really like meeting people, and traveling, and hanging out in book stores. And I can’t deny there was an upside. I zoomed (is this officially a verb yet?) with probably a dozen groups that I wouldn’t have met if the event had required me to buy a plane ticket. So… mixed bag.

Happy Birthday

And here I am. One year later. (Well, officially, tomorrow is the one year mark. Roll with it.) And what I feel more than anything on this, my book’s birthday, is grateful. I’m proud of my debut. I love the beautiful cover Kensington came up with. I’ve heard from countless people that the story touched them in a deep way and that is a magical thing.

Going forward, I’m waiting to see what the cover of the Russian edition looks like (coming soon, I’m told), sales continue here in the states (a big thank you to everyone who bought a copy – and if you haven’t yet, you can click here to buy it on BookShop.org) and there are rumblings about the film adaptation (which I can’t really talk about yet).

So stay tuned, follow me on Twitter or Instagram if you don’t already, and maybe I’ll see you when I get out on my tour for book #2. Cheers!

Right View for Better Editing

I’m so excited to share with you all that, two weeks ago, I graduated from a two-year mindfulness meditation teacher certification program. It was such an honor to study under Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, who have loomed large in my life for the last fifteen years as figureheads of the mindfulness community. As we wrapped up, they asked us all to think about our intentions for how we want to teach. For me, the answer has come into focus in the last few months: I want to share mindfulness with my writing community.

Mindful Writing

Meditation has changed my life in countless ways, yes, but one of the areas where it has had the greatest impact is in my writing. It is no surprise to me, when I look back on recent years, that my writing really took off when I got more serious about my meditation practice.

I’ve thought a lot about this because, as we should all keep in mind, correlation is not necessarily an indicator of causation. But when I really picked it apart, I found I could actually quantify the ways in which meditation has improved my writing.

I can name 7 ways (and counting) that mindfulness has helped me become a better writer. There’s no way I can address them all in one blog post, but over the next few months, I plan to write a little about each. (If you’re feeling impatient, consider signing up for my day-long Mindful Writers Workshop on March 27.)

Today we’ll start with the idea of “Right View” and how it can help us improve our editing.

Right View

Right View is the place where all mindfulness meditation practice begins. It’s about about seeing things as they truly are, not as we want, wish or imagine them to be. Only once we accept things as they are in the present moment can we begin to know what actions (if any) to take.

Okay, you say, that’s all peace and rainbows, but how does it help me edit my work?

Because we can’t edit a sentence/paragraph/chapter/story if we can’t first see what is actually on the page, as it is, without the imagined overlay we bring to it with our minds. This is Right View.

An Exercise

Try this. Imagine a kitchen.

Picture the details. The appliances, the colors, the finishes, the floor. What does it smell like? What is the light like?

Got it?

Okay, so if in my manuscript I write that my character “strolls into the kitchen” and starts arguing with her mother, in my head I’m seeing this:

But that isn’t what’s on the page. What’s on the page is “the kitchen.” For you, “the kitchen” could be this:

or this:

You can see how the different kitchens lend themselves to different moods and probably affect whatever scene is about to go down.

If it’s important to the story that you see the kitchen as I see the kitchen, I need to give more details. Not EVERY detail, but enough that you begin to see what I’m trying to convey.

The trick is, as I’m editing, my eye scans right over the words “the kitchen” because in my mind, I know what it looks like. I am bringing a whole room full of imagination and overlaying the words “the kitchen” with pale wood cabinets and brick colored tile. If I want that to be what you see, I need to get those words on the page.

Editing

Currently I’m editing a draft of my second novel and I’m finding this insight very useful. I try to see exactly what is on the page. Thinking about Right View, I try to notice every generic placeholder phrase and ask myself if a detail or two wouldn’t help paint the picture more effectively.

For instance, in the opening of my story I had written that “it was raining.” Blah. Dull. What kind of rain? Was it a drizzle or a flood? I played around with it a while and landed on: “Fat, unrelenting drops pummeled the earth leaving divots in the mud.” Perfect? I don’t know, I’ll probably revise it again, but it’s a whole lot more illustrative of what I saw in my head when I set out to write the scene.

And I would not have taken the time to rewrite the line if I hadn’t been able to really see what was on the page and ask if it was what I was seeing in my head, if it was REALLY what I was trying to convey.  

Red Flag Words

You’ll notice in the example above I started with the phrase: it was raining. I find the word “was” to be a red flag word. It’s one of those words that I really look for when I get to this final stage of editing. I’ll even go so far as to do a word search for it to help me see it (because it really can be invisible).

She was sad. It was late. The car was fast. The dog was ugly. These are boring, uninteresting sentences that actually tell us very little. Ask yourself what you actually see when you imagine her being sad. Write that.

To be clear, you’re never going to get every instance of the word “was” out of your writing, but if you look at your draft and think “it’s perfect” do a search for the word. If it pops up five or six times in a paragraph, you could probably do some editing.

My list of red flag words also includes lazy verbs (walked, looked, loved, thought) and colors (blue, red, yellow). If you have your characters “looking” a lot, consider some more interesting verbs (peering, gazing, staring). Likewise, search for colors and ask yourself – is the dress blue? Or is it saphire, or maybe cobalt? You can see how a specific blue paints a more specific image.

Take a Break

One of the best ways to see your work clearly is to take a break from it. When I finish a draft I print it out and stick it in a drawer for as long as I can. I try to give it a whole month while I move on to another project. This allows my brain to forget all the imagined details so that when I come back to it I can give it a “fresh” read and hopefully catch all the places where I need to add more details.

A break, combined with some mindfulness practice, is the best way I’ve found to really see what’s on the page. So in the name of mindfulness (and better prose) I invite you to join my partners and I at A Very Important Meeting. We start each writing session off with a ten-minute meditation. It’s a great way to introduce the practice into your writing routine. And it’s free. And the people are great. Seriously. It’s worth checking out.

Fist Bump Buddha says: time to get back to our writing.

An At-Home Writing Retreat

I just wrapped up a COVID-style, week-long, at-home writing retreat and (just to push how many hyphenates I can fit in one sentence) I got a s*it-ton of writing done.

It was kind of last minute. I was lamenting, to my husband, how slow my progress has been on this draft. I work on it (almost) every day, but there are so many distractions in the house lately, what with the kids home-schooling. I’ve had trouble really digging in, finding my flow.

The Logistics

My husband works in the film industry, which has serious ebbs and flows. As it happens, his work load is light right now as they wrap up post on a film, but his schedule is pretty unpredictable. Projects tend to pop up and need his attention (like, all of his attention) with little warning. So his response to my lament was pretty much: go, do it now while I’m able to cover everything else.

Of course, going anywhere for a writing retreat right now is fraught. So we decided I would hide out in the guest house. We have a folding table back there. I carried back my chair and my laptop. I created a little stockpile of snack food and coffee. I set an auto-responder on my email.

Diving In To My DIY Writing Retreat

Then, Monday morning, I started writing. I wrote all day, went into the house for dinner, then went back out. I crawled into bed at the end of the night and then got up and snuck back out there before the kids even woke up.

I wrote for 12-14 hours a day. It sounds crazy, when I write it out like that. But something kind of magical happens when I get into the flow of writing. Hours fly by.

Sometimes I would sit back for a coffee/Oreo break and think: what have I even be doing? But the stack of marked-up pages on my left were gradually being flipped face down on my right.

In five and a half days I managed to get through the whole draft and damn does that feel good. Not only did I get about two month’s worth of work done in one week, but I dealt with a lot of larger issues, the kinds of things that you really only catch if you read over a big chunk of the manuscript all at once.

Making Time

Carving out big chunks of time for a writing retreat is so critical when you’re working on a longer project. I’ve blogged about a few of the different ways that I’ve managed to do this over the years (check out 5 Ways to Find (or Make) Big Chunks of Time to Write), but this was the first time I’ve done it at home.

On the plus side, it was free. Yay free! It was also very comfortable as I had my own chair and slept in my own bed. It was also nice that I got to see my family at dinner. Previous retreats I’ve done have been pretty isolated and a little human interaction was actually very grounding. Also, on Saturday, my daughter made me an Oreo cake (see above – very on theme) to celebrate my week of hard work.

The only real downside of staying home was that I didn’t have as much freedom in my schedule. Our guest house isn’t big enough to have the desk set up and have the Murphy bed down, so I couldn’t take naps and I was conscious of waking the family if I came into the house too late, so I kept a pretty normal schedule. I guess too that I was a little self conscious about how gross I can be on retreat. I made an effort to shower and change clothes and stuff, which (if I’m being honest) I don’t always do when I’m on a writing retreat.

But all in all, it was a big success. The results speak for themselves. I have a few final notes I need to research, a few little things to loop back and address, but I’m getting very close. Can’t wait to share it with you all.

Longhand For Writers

If you follow along, you know I’ve been hosting daily writing groups at A Very Important Meeting. If you’ve attended any of my recent meetings, you’ve probably heard some discussion of writing longhand.

On the downside, anything written in longhand is difficult to share. Before handwritten work can go out into the world, it must be translated into text. This means you either type it up yourself (ug), pay someone else to do it (because, you know, as writers we have all this extra cash we don’t know what to do with) or try to use some form of dictation software (which I think might actually be a viable option at some point, but I haven’t found a version that works for me yet).

In November of 2019 I took on the NaNoWriMo challenge of writing 50,000 words in a month and, just for kicks, decided to do it longhand. It was a new project idea and I thought that working away from my computer would free me to be more creative and keep me from editing myself. I just wrote. And it worked. I hit the goal and ended up with about half (two-thirds?) of a novel in a beautiful stack of scribbles.

I knew I would have to type it all up later, but I figured when I did, I would edit along the way and end up with a pretty good “first” draft on my computer. Well… it didn’t really work like that. I did type it all up (that was how I kept busy when the pandemic hit and I couldn’t really concentrate), but I edited very little. So now I have a crappy first draft that I’ve written twice. It’s hard to feel like that’s not wasted time.

I’ve heard rumors that Lauren Groff writes whole drafts longhand, throws them away, and then types them up from what’s in her head. This version of writing a first draft longhand actually makes a lot of sense to me.

Because what I’ve learned about writing things by hand is that it’s great for generating ideas. Scenes take shape more completely in my mind with light and gestures and all the things that build a world. I remember things better when I write them out. I feel more creative with a pen in my hand. When I get to a point in my work that I’m stuck, I find the best way to get unstuck is to pull out my journal and start writing about my writing. Works every time.

But whenever I’ve tried to pull something from my journal, to type it up for public consumption, it falls flat. I don’t know why or how that’s the case, but it’s happened enough times now that I should probably stop trying.

But when I think about writing a WHOLE BOOK longhand and then throwing it away to rewrite it from memory, I just can’t get over the loss of all that work. I mean, yes, most of that first draft is crap. Like, 99% probably. But what about that 1%? Those couple of lines that landed right the first time?

Then again, there wasn’t a single line in the first draft of my first novel that remained untouched in the final draft. Not one.

Maybe when I do finally go back to that project I started for NaNoWriMo (the project that may or may not be my third novel) I’ll read through it and then throw it away and retype it from memory, just see what happens.

But for right now, I’m focused on finishing novel two. My goal for 2021 is to get it done. Done, done. Like, hand it off to the agent and let him run with it, done.

Do you write longhand? I’m curious to hear how other people shift between paper and keyboard? Or maybe you don’t. If you do, do you have a system for it, or do you just go with your gut? Do share.

The Best Books I Read in 2020

I read 68 books this year (and counting). Of those, 10 works stand out in my mind as being particularly great reads. These are the books that stayed with me, made me think back on them long after I’d finished them. They are the books I’m telling my friends about.

Here they are, in no particular order and with no regard to publication date. The best books I read in 2020:

Good Morning, Midnight

by Lily Brooks-Dalton

The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

The Only Good Indians

by Stephen Graham Jones

The Lager Queen of Minnesota

by J. Ryan Stradal

How to Be an Antiracist

by Ibram X. Kendi

The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir

by Wayétu Moore

Daisy Jones & The Six

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The Second Home

by Christina Clancy

How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

by Akiko Busch

Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

Would love to hear what you loved this year. Drop some titles in the comments below.

Braving the Personal Essay

I’ve always shied away from anything that could be counted as a personal essay. There was always this little voice inside my head insisting that nobody wanted to hear about my life. I could make up stories, fine, yes, but to share actual truth? Why would anyone want to read that?

But lately (read: during the pandemic) I’ve been drawn to personal essays. I find myself flipping through magazines in search of intimate stories about family, friendships, outdoor adventures, and overcoming abuse. It doesn’t seem to matter what they’re about. I crave these behind the scenes glimpses into other peoples’ lives. It makes me feel less isolated.

After months of reading other people’s stories, I started to think maybe I could try my hand at writing one myself. That inner critic immediately piped up reminding me that nobody cares, but I told myself that writing an essay did not commit me to putting it out into the world. Nobody even needed to know. I just wanted to play around a little in a space outside my comfort zone. Or at least, that’s what I told myself to get my inner critic to shut the eff up.

Giving it a go

Like a good little writing nerd, trying to quell my anxiety about trying something new, I went online and bought a book on writing the personal essay. I read some online publications and blogs on craft. I did my homework. And as I did, ideas started to come to me. The notebook by my bedside began to fill with snippets of memories that might be worked into a narrative.

And then one night, two weeks ago (at A Very Important Meeting), I wrote one. It was about deciding to become a runner after the birth of my second baby, when I was fifty pounds over weight and atrophied from being on bed rest for 4 months. The draft was rough, but compelling.

Then, last week, I wrote another. That one was tougher, as it brought me back to some emotional times I dealt with after college. That one is even messier than the first, but it came in at about 800 words and I suspect that, once I clean it up, it might actually be worth putting it out into the world.

Later for that

Right now I’m not worrying too much about publication. I suppose the next step would be to polish up the drafts I have already, but I’m also staying open to other ideas that float up into consciousness. And all this while prioritizing the new draft of my second novel.

In fact, the novel comes first. Every day I spend a couple of hours on it. But then, when I have time in the afternoon, when I can’t muster any more energy for the novel, if I can find some peace with the dust-bunnies and walk right past them to my desk, I’m writing essays.

It’s shifts like this that make me think I could write and write and write for the rest of my life and never run out of things to explore.

Has the pandemic changed what you’re writing? Or how you’re writing? Have you written any personal essays? If they’re online anywhere, drop a link in the comments below. I’d love to read them. Cheers.