Eric Witchey's Blog: Shared ShadowSpinners Blog , page 4

When Building Blocks Become Stumbling Blocks

by Christina Lay

Photo 150416348 © Juan Moyano | Dreamstime.com

Pronoun: a word that is used instead of a noun or noun phrase, for example he, it, hers, me, them, etc. (Oxford Online Dictionary)

Exciting stuff, eh? Normally, pronouns tend to be invisible words that carry their load without fuss; words like the, and, there. They are fundamental building blocks of the language that we absorb as we learn the language. They’re just there and we as writers don’t have to think about them much.  So what happens when new pronouns are introduced into the language? To further complicate matters, what happens when no one can agree on what those pronouns are, or if they should be used at all?

I’m talking of course about xe/xer, or ze/zir, or they/them when used to refer to a single person rather than a group.  I’m not here to argue about whether or not these new non-binary pronouns are necessary and deserve to exist. I’ll just go ahead and say that, yes, they do, assume you agree, and move on from there.

I personally prefer ze, zir because Z is a friendlier letter to work with than X. I have a writer’s bias on this.  Feel free to argue for xe/xer in the comments section if so inclined.

I have a suspicion that the incorporation of new pronouns might only be an issue for writers of a certain age.  I know my brain is rather calcified, but I’m willing to stretch and grow. You whippersnappers out there have had a chance to incorporate this addition to the language while your brain is still pliable. Good for you. For the rest of us, it’s a little more challenging.

A few years back, I took my first stab at writing a character who “chose not to gender identify”.  I craftily avoided the new, and therefore jarring, pronoun issue by avoiding using them at all.  I used the character’s name instead, or avoided sentence structure that required pronouns. I also used ‘the’ instead of a possessive like xer.  Imagine my dismay when a copy editor blithely tore through my manuscript, inserting he and him in my pronoun-less sentences and basically ignoring the fact that I’d clearly stated this was a non-binary character. Granted, my effort may have come off as rather awkward, but to have someone completely miss the point was frustrating, to say the least. Imagine what it feels like to bethe person whose reality is so easily ignored or swept aside.  Obviously, I never used that copy editor again, but I’m still grappling with the use of the new pronouns. 

Fortunately, there are more accomplished writers out there who’ve embraced the challenge, writers I admire, and they have managed to incorporate xe/xir or ze/zer so that they effortlessly fit into the sentences and barely jar this old brain at all. I’m guessing this is simply a matter of practice, practice, practice.  

My continuing issue comes not from the perspective of a writer, but from that of a reader.  The writers I referred to have adapted the new pronouns so that it only takes a few pages for the brain to absorb and accept the new words.  The problem is the greater question of what the pronoun means. For good or bad, the words she and he symbolize a host of preconceived notions.  When a writer pens, “She walked into the room” the reader’s brain is already busily sketching in details. Shemeans a woman, with certain feminine qualities.  Now, if the writer wants to stop the reader from getting carried away with their own image of the character, they will step in and fill in details. “She was a large woman with broad shoulders and short-cropped hair” will bring an abrupt end to the stereotyping a reader just can’t help doing in a vacuum. I know, this ‘filling in’ of details is part of the problem with she/he in the first place. Those little words place a lot of preconceptions on the person they are referring to, which is why xe/ze are so necessary.  But their use puts a lot more pressure on the writer to stop the auto fill that a reader is bound to do.

My problem as a reader is that when I read ze/xe, without the guidance of the writer, my imagination slips around like a fish out of water, desperately seeking a form upon which to land.  I know that we have 1. A person who 2. Is not male or female.  Everything else the writer needs to supply.

Example 1: I read a wonderful book by Rebecca Roanhorse called Black Sun, a fantasy based on South American mythos and culture which I highly recommend.  Roanhorse’s character descriptions are so rich and vivid that every character was distinct and clear in my mind. Every character, that is, except the one who was referred to as xir/xe.  Every time the person was on the page, my brain did the fish out of water thing, trying to figure out what this person looked like.  It didn’t help that the first time we ‘see’ the character, they’re wearing a mask. After finishing the book, I went back to find out if my discomfort was merely due to me exhibiting calcified brain syndrome, but I found that whereas every other character was described in minute detail from hair color to body size to what their belt buckle was made out of, this character “wore a long skirt the color of sunset”. They had “dark eyes”. They were referred to as languid and lithe and at one point, the protagonist thought “damn that lovely face”.  But there were no specifics. My mind decided the character was tall, for no particular reason I could find, and athletic, because of their occupation: assassin. Other than that, I wasn’t sure what to think and xe/xir gives me no further clues.  Actually, xe/xir tends to push back against how I want to fill in this sketch. My old brain wants to make them male or female.

Example 2: I’m part of a group that shares short excerpts from their work online each week. One of the writers in that group is writing non-binary characters, and again, she uses xe and xer seamlessly, as well as they/them for an individual.  I have to admit that at this point I don’t know what any of her characters look like. That might be because she’s chosen not to share those passages, but a result I’ve noticed, besides an airy sort of void in my head where a character’s image normally resides, is the complete ignoring of the obviously non-binary nature of the characters on the part of many of the participants in the group. These are all well meaning and skilled authors, but week after week, they persist in referring to these characters as she or he.  Part of it might be due to ignorance of what xe/xer means (a hard sell at this point in our social awareness). Part of it might be inattention. More to the point, I think the writer bears some of the responsibility here for not creating (or at least, not showing these particular readers) more vivid, 3D characters on the page.  I imagine those readers and commentators are experiencing the same slippery fish phenomena that I did, and perhaps because they’re not spending much time thinking about the pronoun issue, they default to he/she and then forget that they have no actual reason to think those characters are male or female. It’s an easy thing to do, given our ingrained habit as readers to engage our imaginations to the fullest.

Part of this is a matter of growing and stretching that calcified brain, to be sure, but we as writers need to be aware of the reader’s potential struggle. If we don’t want our readers getting frustrated and thrown out of our stories, we need to be even more mindful of creating well drawn, vivid characters. If I as a reader know how they look, I don’t have to worry about it.  I don’t have to rifle through my character detail file every time the character speaks or stabs someone. Maybe the mysterious assassin was supposed to remain an enigma? Maybe, but they were a key part of the story, and I wanted and needed more.

Our responsibility as writers is not only to embrace the positive upgrade to our language that non-binary pronouns offer, but to do our part in bringing readers along. Characters who do not identify as male or female need not be vague, or mysterious, or less than fully realized. Yes, we’ll have to dig a little deeper into our well of descriptive powers, but in doing so, maybe we’ll hone our skills, broaden our perception of people in general, and stop relying so much on auto fill and stereotypes.  These are surely skills that will come in handy in real life as well.

Swimming Underwater

Cynthia Ray

Photo by Martin Sattler on Unsplash

All of the creative pursuits I’ve tackled over the years required lots of pricey supplies.   As a weaver I needed a loom, yarns, bobbins, and books. When fusing glass, a kiln was required as well as glass, frit, forms and molds. Painting involved studio space, paints, canvases, brushes and solvents. And of course, all of them called for books, lessons and workshops.

The great thing about writing is that it doesn’t require much to get started­.  All you need is something to write with (a computer or paper and pen, either will do) and an idea.  You don’t need a big room overlooking the beach, the latest computer or fancy software.  You don’t need elegant linen paper and fountain pens.  You don’t need to spend lots of money on exclusive workshops.  The library has a wealth of good books on the topic. So, begin with what you have at hand.  Sit down and write.  Simple, right?

However, as anyone who has written a book knows, simple is not easy.  Bringing the right words, the right characters, settings, and themes from the heart and head onto paper is a journey that should not be taken by the faint of heart.  It will bring you face to face with all of your weaknesses, all of your faults.  It will stretch you into places you didn’t think you could go.  It will also hone your strengths, and shine a light on the good.

Hearing about others struggles and triumphs in their work inspires me, whether it is reading about the lives of famous authors, or from my writer friends.  How did they work through the problems?  How did they slog through malaise and boredom without giving up?  How did they find the courage to write truth? How did writing change their life?  Where is their joy?  What is their vision?  How did they find their voice?  How do they discipline themselves in the work? 

One writer friend said writing is like breathing to her–she simply HAS TO WRITE.  My own experience is different.  It requires my willingness to dive deep and swim underwater for long periods of time, not breathing.  Or, it’s a bit like planning an excursion, mapping out all the highways and destinations, and then halfway through the trip, ditching the entire plan to cut a trail with a machete through an overgrown, snake infested jungle.  Therefore, every time I actually finish a story it is an astonishment, a surprise, a joy. 

Whatever your experience is, or how you get there, I’m wishing you the astonishment of completed stories.

Pandemic Slow Writing

By Lisa Alber

Last year around this time, Italy locked itself down during a Covid surge. I remember being startled by the news; the gravity of the situation hit home, but even then I didn’t get it. I was still in the this-is-quite-the-serious-flu stage. Hah, har-dee-har-har. Flu — that’s a good one. The U.S. wasn’t doing much (not that it ever did until now); the previous administration refused to quarantine Americans evacuated from an infected cruise ship. Meanwhile, I’d gotten laid off a few weeks previously, so I was mired in my own thing, barely paying attention. Covid was background static.

A year later, I read this article from The Guardian: Writers blockdown: after a year inside, writers are struggling to write.

“Stultified is the word,” says Orange prize-winning novelist Linda Grant. “The problem with writing is it’s just another screen, and that’s all there is … I can’t connect with my imagination. I can’t connect with any creativity. My whole brain is tied up with processing, processing, processing what’s going on in the world.”

Later in the article Grant says, “It’s just a sort of sea of greyness, of timelessness.”

So true. Introvert that I am, I still need to get out of the house — sit around in coffeehouses and pubs, not to mention actually feel some skin-on-skin hugs from friends and let loose a little now and then. I’d never realized how crucial outside life was to my creativity. Zoom get-togethers are a BandAid, and they help, but they’re not the same.

I’ve been writing, but I’m all over the place. Here’s what I’ve done in the past year:

Struggle with revising a novel called “Shadow Maiden.” Completely re-wrote the secondary storyline, then changed it back but with a different voice. Also, switched from first to third person. This went on for months last spring. All I wanted to do was get to the end of the first draft.Decide to write something completely different — a contemporary romance. Why? I needed something lighter and easier. I wanted to have some fun with my writing. Developed an idea, which promptly expanded itself into a trilogy in a genre a friend called “romantic suspense-adventure.” (Oh boy …)Sigh. Huge sighs. Sighs all over the place. Because WTeverlastingF am I doing complicating what was supposed to be a fun, light, and easy-ish experiment of a side project? Summer brought me the first draft of the first romance — almost. My excuse? I needed to complete the first drafts of the second and third romances to know how the first should truly end. But I struggled for a month with this decision, trying to end the draft, getting nowhere.Fallow, then in November into December, draft of second romance completed — almost. Same struggle to end the darned thing and failing. In the new year, I returned to Shadow Maiden to figure out where I was. Brainstorming. Finally had a revelation — which I’ve forgotten now — but I assume I wrote it down in my novel journal … Been switching back and forth between this and the second romance. A whole lotta nowhere.

In the past year I’ve written close to 200,000 words when you include the revision writing. Nothing to sneeze at, yet it all feels half-assed and way too slow. I’m stuck in the dreaded middle of three projects. If I were writing an essay about what I did during my pandemic lockdown, I’d called it “Failure in the Middle,” which is the name of an essay I read just last night, which brings me to the reason for writing this post: I’ve decided to lean into my slowness, since this is where I’m at right now. I recommend a book called The Art of Slow Writing; Reflection on Time, Craft, and Creativity by Louise DeSalvo. What a comfort!

DeSalvo says, “I’ve learned that often the toughest stage comes just before the biggest breakthroughs.” In fact, she calls the feel-like-a-failure middle moment, the “insight stage.” Talk about putting a positive spin on it! But I’ll take it. I’m owed some major breakthroughs when I get my brain back, post-pandemic. Fingers crossed. Meanwhile, I’ll keeping touching the fiction most days and accept that I’m slow right now.

Oh, and continue meditating with the Calm app.

Beginners and Experts Check ALL the Boxes, by Eric Witchey

Beginners and Experts Check ALL the Boxes

Eric Witchey

Conference seminars are both wonderful and horrible.

They’re horrible in that the emotionally and cognitively complex thing writers do can’t be taught in 60-90 minutes, if it can be taught at all. I often begin my conference teaching with a line something like, “I can’t teach you to write. I can show you some tips and tricks I have learned, but only you can teach yourself to write.” Another version of this statement is, “Practice!”

The seminars are wonderful in that writers can glean bits and pieces of craft while hobnobbing with other writers in a joyful, high-energy environment that reinforces the value of an activity that is too often painful and solitary. At a conference, enough joy and knowledge can be had to keep us going for a while.

This morning, I was preparing the little catalog blurbs that describe seminars I’ll be teaching at a couple conferences this year. The online form I had to fill out asked the question, “What level of writer will benefit from this seminar?” The check-box choices in the drop-down were:

BeginnerIntermediateAdvancedProfessional

I tried to check them all, but the system won’t let me check them all. You can only check one.

Silly conference.

I’ve been teaching conference seminars since 1995, so I fancy I know a little bit about the dynamics of the environment. This exercise in preparation reminded me of a couple things I think are very important for all writers to keep in mind. Certainly, they are important for conference coordinators to keep in mind.

To sell out a seminar, put “marketing” in the title.Corollary One: Hardly any writers at the conference are anywhere near ready for marketing seminars.Corollary Two: To kill the attendance of a craft seminar, put it in the room next to a marketing seminar.Every writer in the room knows something the other writers do not know, including the teacher.If you label a seminar as for professional writers, mostly amateurs will attend it.If you label a seminar as for advanced writers, mostly beginners will attend it.If you label a seminar as for intermediate writers, mostly beginners will attend it.If you label a seminar as for beginning writers, a few terrified first-time conference writers and several professionals will attend it.

I have a musician friend who describes this phenomenon as follows.

“Beginners who want to play professionally skip practicing scales. Professionals who want to learn to play better, practice scales.”

Another friend, an advanced Aikido practitioner, recently told me this.

“Beginners want to practice intermediate throws. Intermediates want to practice advanced throws. Masters want to learn to walk.”

So it is with writers, and there’s absolutely no reason it should be otherwise.

Yes, the immediate response to this odd practitioner’s paradigm is that everybody knows how important it is to focus on the basics. That leads to an odd fallacy of thought. I know I’ve caught myself thinking this way. Have you? The fallacy, thought or spoken in tones of confident pride or righteousness, goes like this, “They should focus on the basics first to grow faster.”

Except, they clearly do not.

Conjugate with me:

We do not.

He, she, it does not.

I do not.

Objective consideration suggests I should suspect that even after 25 years of conference teaching I still do not.

Instead, we reach endlessly for the skills that are beyond our grasp, and we do it from the wobbly foundation of haphazard skills we’ve cobbled together. Why should they focus on basics and build a solid foundation on which to add layer after solid layer of skill until they are masters of their craft?

Uh… Oh, God. I have to go back to college and start over. I’ve wasted decades of my life. Pardon me while I go cry.

Okay, I’m better now.

Recently, I had a chat with a new and inexperienced (from my frame of reference) seminar teacher. She said she’d been taught to require students to “prove me wrong.” I decided she needed a few more years of experience before we’d have a meaningful exchange of pedagogical ideas.

Here’s the real take-away. In my humble opinion, the responsibility for providing a step forward to conference seminar students is entirely the teacher’s. The burden of proof falls completely on the teacher. Additionally, if everybody in the room knows something the teacher does not know, then a really good teacher behaves more like a guide than a teacher. If the concept the guide is presenting is actually a core, dramatic principle that can be recognized and executed in text, the guide’s job is to lead the seminar in a way that allows the participants to discover the concept for themselves. If that discovery has already happened for the participant, or happens in the seminar, the guide’s job is to open new vistas of exploration.

In short, the guide’s job is to make sure that no matter what level of development a writer has, or thinks they have, the combination of the concept with the participation of the group will lead anyone who attends into new discoveries. If the guide does this well, the “advanced” and “professional” writers might even discover concepts, tricks, and techniques the seminar leader has never considered.

That’s why I want to check all the boxes. It’s also why, in spite of 25 years of seminar teaching, I go to beginner-level seminars, intermediate seminars, advanced seminars, and professional seminars. Everybody in the room knows something I don’t know.

-End-

Goodbye 2020

By Cheryl Owen Wilson

At the end of each year I write an annual newsletter always beginning with a poem.   In the poem I attempt to encapsulate brief historical incidents of the closing year.  Then there are the paragraphs detailing the yearly events of each of our children, and grandchildren (14 and counting).  Thus, it has become more of a newspaper than a newsletter.  Our kids smirk and comment that it’s the best fiction I write, because I always attempt to make it positive with a few smiles and laughs thrown in.  I’m certain it’ll come as no surprise how difficult it was to pen the year of 2020.  

I’ve also included one of the paintings I completed last year.  There are many analogies you can draw from the dark tunnel and fleeting glow both escaping and held within by the trees.  For myself I thought it appropriate for this blog and the poem because I found myself following any flicker of light/positivity throughout the year, much like the firefly’s I chased as a child.  What were the firefly’s you chased, or caught in the past year?  Will those brief flashes of light last through the new year?  What are their patterns and how have they changed you?

Belated Holiday Cheers to One and All

Twinkling lights were hung in abundance while Santa’s appeared everywhere,

as the Spirit of Christmas stirred us out of our COVID infused despair.

We unwrapped gifts by computer screens filled with the faces of loved one’s near and far. 

We adapted from usual routines, but it was not the same.  It was actually, quite bizarre.

Yes, we finally reached the season of rebirth, and good cheer

As the end of 2020 came to roaring end, and WOW! WHAT A YEAR!

From the contentious avalanche of politics, to a global pandemic,

It will go down in civilization’s history as a year most prophetic.

One with hurricanes and fires, too close to home, as Mother nature asked us to take heed,

But when we had to STOP, didn’t we all marvel at her beauty as she could finally–breathe.

Yes, we zoomed and we rationed and we even hoarded toilet paper.

Who knew when buying it I’d feel like I was in the scene of black-market caper?

Yet despite it all, “Some Good News” became the norm.

Thank you John Krasinski, for your show, our heart’s it did warm.

Small packages, of gifts, or food magically appeared outside front doors, and it was understood,

a simple symbol of love, kindness, and solidarity in our small neighborhood.

In May we tracked Space X Endeavor traveling along its steady course.

When it returned safely, we marveled at its technology, and its force.

In July we Oregonians watched the Neowise comet streak across the sky.

It’ll be another 6,800 years before she comes by again, to say “Hi”.

Then as the year drew to an end, scientists once again, came to the rescue of humanity.

With a vaccine in hopes of allowing us to reclaim our masked, social-distanced, sanity.

But before we close the door on the year, let’s send off those no longer among us.

With a bit of fanfare, grandiosity, and justly deserved fuss.

To  the man with the perfect English accent, Mr. Sean Connery,

for me agent 007, you will forever, and always be.

To Kobe and Gianna Bryant who left us way too soon.

I hope you’re shooting baskets together over a glorious, sparkling moon.

And Ms. Helen Reddy, you sang “I am Woman hear Me Roar”.

But it was “Angie Baby” that kept me swaying on the dance floor.

“Oh Golly Miss Molly”  Little Richard did keep us rockin’.

Now he’s showing heavenly beings how to “Keep a Knockin’”.

Chadwick Boseman elevated the ground breaking Black Panther to new heights.

Now he’s starring under the marquees of heaven’s bright, starry lights.

Finally a thank you beyond measure to Ms. Ruth Bader Ginsberg-RBG.

Without you’re intelligence, tenacity, and strength where would women’s rights be?

Now as I close my annual discourse I want to leave you with some cleansing thoughts,

no matter what this past year has wrought, not matter its costs,

when we got up each morning the sun still shone, and the stars still came out each night.

Summer still followed Spring, and after darkness always came the light.

Friends still called to see how we were doing,

and children learned much from their school lessons on zooming.

So let us go into this new year with a renewed attitude,

By embracing an overwhelming sense of the simple nature of, gratitude.

An original Painting by Cheryl Owen-Wilson “Firefly’s Dance”

Isolation, Joie de Vivre, and the Mystic Rose

Cynthia Ray

Today I’m working on final edits for my novella, and feeling the impact this year’s isolation has had on all of us.  Some writers love to work in coffee shops and cafés, but I have never been one of them.  I am in awe of their ability to focus in the midst of so many distractions, but I prefer to write alone, in silence, without any music playing in the background.  Even so, at some point, I need to take a break from my cave of solitude, stroll over to the coffee shop and visit with people, or walk around the neighborhood, interacting with folks walking their dogs, doing yardwork, or sitting on their porch. 

Those happy connections revived me, and that energy aided my creative process.  Unfortunately, that is no longer possible in the same way. People walk across the street when they see someone walking towards them. The coffee shops have roped off the tables, and serve coffee to go only. While waiting to order, we stand six feet apart on little taped squares, our facial expressions hidden behind masks.

Over the last few months of this isolating pandemic, I came to appreciate how profoundly merely mingling with people aided my creative flow.  No only my creativity, but how much those interactions contributed to my feelings of well-being and joy.  Life flows like a river between us, yet most of us are unaware of this continual stream of connection.   I didn’t realize how deeply I would miss those simple exchanges, and how much I would long to see the smiles behind a mask, or touch a stranger after a meaningful conversation. 

I had no idea how deeply those small, seemingly insignificant interactions with others acted on my psyche– how essential they were, affecting my energy, my joie de vivre, and even my desire to sit alone and write.  Now, it’s like having an arm cut off, and yet continuing to reach for something with the missing limb, continually jolted into painful awareness of what is no longer there.

It will be impossible to take those simple connections for granted again.  Without enough direct contact, we wither like a plant kept in the dark.  We humans are resilient creatures though, and find ways to be together in spite of all.  We sit six feet apart and visit, we Zoom, talk on the phone, FaceTime, hang out on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.  It’s nice to be together in that way.  Still, that longing to wrap friends in my arms, heart to heart, and feel their unique presence, continues as an ache in my soul.   

In her book, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, Toko-Pa Turner speaks of having an invitational presence and how transformational that can be. She says:

“Simply put, it is to clear an opening in our hearts for the other to take shelter.  When your presence is hospitable, the other can become their essential self in your company, even if just for a holy moment. One of the greatest contributions we can make to our communities is to hold this welcoming presence for others, without any presumption that they give something in return or conform to our expectations, without giving into the temptation to change, fix, or solve their questions for them.” 

The saving grace for me, during this time of isolation, is coming to feel and know how truly connected we are, whether we are aware of it or not. Through this invisible, yet unfailing connection, it is possible be present with others, even across distances. I have become more aware of our interdependence and connection during this time, when I must draw deeply on inner resources. This geometrical figure, aptly named the “Mystic Rose” illustrates this. Every point is connected to every other point, and it works with any number of points.

The Mystic Rose

My hope, wish, desire, and prayer for this coming year is that we can make this invisible connection visible. That we can once again fully embrace each other, sans distance, with a new found appreciation for how much we contribute to each other’s happiness in a real way.  All of us.

Mindfulness, 100 Days of Starting, by Eric Witchey

[image error] 100 Days of Starting

Mindfulness, Destructive Goals, and Implicit Hierarchies

Eric Witchey

In my last installment on this page, I described my new goal-tracking calendar and how it related to gold stars from my childhood. Tuesday of this week marked 100 days of working with that tool, and I have to say it is going well. I have managed to award myself 100 gold stars.

Woohoo!

Let’s not get too excited. The goal was entirely about consistency in “starting.” The goal statement is “I will write and exercise a minimum of five minutes each every day.” I can, and do, as much as I want. The goal is only about consistency in starting. Even on a day off, I can do 5 and 5.

For many people, five minutes is nothing at all. For others, it is much harder than it sounds. For a few, it will be respected as amazing success at consistently doing something trivial. As my father used to say, “Eric, everything depends on where you stand when you look.” Regardless, my 100-day experience put me in the frame of mind to say a few things about goals and goal setting.

Once upon a time, after my father threw me out of the house and a brief stint in construction in Colorado, I joined an itinerant troop of fire alarm salesmen working for U.S. Safety and Engineering Corp. I had the dubious distinction of rising in the ranks until I managed, mostly by luck and the passion of child who had experienced bad burns, to become the national champion salesmen in an organization of about 3000 salesmen. That’s another story. The point here is that at 19 years of age I found myself in the odd position of teaching others to sell and giving motivational speeches.

Life happened, and I realized I was a writer and needed to go to college. To get into college, my quest took me through many jobs. I sold art, furniture, equipment, and more furniture. Additional successes led to teaching more people to sell and to more motivational speeches, including one very strange and notable speech to a group of people raising money for The World Hunger Project, which is yet another story.

Eventually, I managed to get into college. There, my training in setting measurable, attainable goals served me well.

In most of training sessions during my questing years, I either had to, or chose to, teach goal setting. “It’s very hard to hit a target you haven’t set up,” was one of my mantras. Even all those years ago (40 plus at this writing), goal setting had been standardized by the many generations of hard-working, financially successful people who came before.

We were taught, and I taught, that a goal was a challenge to the self. It had to be realistically achievable. It had to be measurable. It worked best if it was set in a social context (accountability), etc.

Fast forward to where I am now and my life as a writer and communication consultant in many different contexts, and I hope I’ve gained a little bit of wisdom. I have experienced what I’m about to say in academic environments, high-tech companies, furniture companies, selling alarms, state and federal agencies, fiction writing groups, and literally dozens of other environments in which groups of people join together in setting goals.

People naturally start comparing themselves to one another in the context of public goal setting. Competition develops when goals are public, and the competition is only productive for about 10-20% of the participants.

Many people will look at what I just wrote and think, “Well, they shouldn’t compare themselves to others” or “Well, the rest of the people don’t want it bad enough.” Okay, maybe the thought is some other variation on these concepts. “They need to work harder” or “They need to set more realistic goals” or “It’s a Darwinian system and they are not best adapted” or some other self-validating statement that identifies the person with the thought as in the top of the tribal pecking order. It has always amazed me at how easy these kinds of statements roll off the tongues of the people who identify themselves as striving for “success” or “excellence” or just working their way toward the top.

These thoughts essentially turn goal setting into slightly disguised race or contest in which everyone wants the same thing and begins at the same starting line with the same educational, mental, physical, financial, and social equipment. If you are a company trying to make money, that’s good. If you are an artist trying to develop an identity of personal craft and place in the dialog of the art form, maybe not so much.

Let’s assume, as a thought experiment and for the sake my illustration of personal experience, that this kind of insular, hierarchical thinking is actually only represented on one side of a normal distribution. If the identification of self as striving for success is one end of the curve, then identification of self as failing to strive is the other end of the curve.

Observing these systems of communal goal setting over the years, I have seen that the systems always generate temporary “success” for a few people based on the metrics presented. Even if people are allowed to set different metrics for themselves, the metrics tend to homogenize or hierarchical over time. Either people start using the same metrics, or some metrics become more “respected” than others. The result is always competition and comparison.

I just finished NaNoWriMo. I failed, but I won. I didn’t get started until the second week, and it took me nearly 10 days to hit the NaNoWriMo stated goal of 50k words. However, the end of the month found me 8k words short of my personal goal of 100k words. I won, but I failed.

And I got an email from a friend who was feeling inadequate because they “can’t write that fast.”

After offering to show them how, I wondered if that was useful. Almost all the words I wrote were about discovering elements of a story I’ll eventually tell. All their words at their pace on their project might be part of a draft they are building methodically. They may not need to change what they are doing at all. What they are wishing is not that they can do what I did. Rather, they are wishing they could do what they do at the pace I appeared to hit. They are kind to assume that what I did is equal to what they do in quality. I doubt that it is.

A good goal-setting instructor in corporate America would say, “We need to measure different things for these two individuals.”

Of course, that is correct. It is ridiculous for both individuals to measure progress in their writing and their current project by the same metrics. It is equally ridiculous for two people to measure their success by the same metrics. People don’t begin life with the same cultural and societal currency.

What tends to happen in these public goal-oriented systems is that a sort of standard for measurement develops. A few highly productive people occupy the top spots. They slowly come to see themselves as the “hard working” people in the group. Conversely, the people who “fail” to occupy those lofty seats begin, sometimes slowly and sometimes not, to feel their inability to perform at the higher levels. Eventually, those “failures” drop out of the system. New people come into the system. Occasionally, a new person has a life configuration that supports their movement into the upper echelons as defined by the de facto standards created. Occasionally, life conspires to knock one of the standing elites out of their position. They fall, but their beliefs about themselves as a “top producer” don’t necessarily fall. The system will, however, slowly organize itself to define their fall as some failure on their part. I actually once heard a woman say, “She’s a loser now.”

When I asked why, the woman gave me a sharp, professional glare and said, “She should have known better than to have a child at this point in her career.”

The woman who had a child did, after the appropriate amount of time for the company to avoid being sued, get fired for failure to perform. Loser…

This stunned me, but I have since seen the equivalent over and over and over.

While working with a writing group managing their productivity incentives, I watched this goal-setting cultural hierarchy unfold again in a weekly ritual. The de facto standard of excellence and comparison became the number of stories put through the group, and that was in part my fault. Observing the slow stratification defined at each end by poles occupied by a person who easily produced multiple stories a week and a person who had physical and familial obstacles that made a story every six months a personal accomplishment, I began to see the damaging shifts in tribal attitudes.

Fun Fact: The people at both ends of this spectrum eventually ended up with multi-book publication deals. Also, we changed the system before too much damage was done to the writer identities of the slower producers and early development writers.

Observing this weird social dynamic for maybe the hundredth time in my life, it finally hit me that public goal setting that does not serve the health of some late-capitalism corporate entity’s social Darwinism can be very destructive. In arts settings, it is terrible in that measurable executable goals don’t always support discovery in random endeavors.

In the writer’s group I mentioned, we set up a system in which one trusted person kept a logbook in which personal goals could be set. If they were achieved, whatever they were, the individual was rewarded equally to all other individuals who achieved their goals. If the goal was not achieved, the person was encouraged to reconsider and reset their goal for the next cycle.

In this new system, accurate gauging of personal circumstance and possibility was rewarded.

Fast forward another fifteen years, and I joined an online group of goal setters and discovered the old corporate system. By then, I had learned to set my writing goals in terms of committed time to allow maximum flexibility in exploration. I had also learned to keep my goals private for several reasons. First, I had the experiences I described above. Second, I have often been lucky enough to have the life circumstances to allow me to be a high producer, and I have seen the damage comparison has done to people who have very high desire combined with life circumstances that keep them from being high producers. In seeing that, I have recognized that low producers are still producers, and they are sometimes amazing in terms of quality and contribution. Third, I have been unlucky enough to experience periods of high desire combined with life circumstances that made me a low producer. The negative, self-imposed suffering of those periods of time pushed me to reset my expectations in order to find peace of mind and a path out of the problems of those periods. These three elements taught me that, by extension, anyone at any moment can rise to new heights and fall to new lows. Cultural programming combined with systemic hierarchical values can cause them to believe they are special and growing into deserved rewards while they are rising. This leads to the belief that others aren’t enough in any of several ways. When falling, it leads them to believe they, themselves, aren’t enough in any of the several ways. Rising or falling, the beliefs are a lie.

In the new group, I made it clear that I would only describe my personal goals in terms of hours spent relative to my current baseline. My goals sounded like this, “This week, I want to add 10 hours to my total production time” or “This week, I’m going to keep my production time the same” and even “This week, I’m going to drop five hours in production time.”

By doing this, I tried to manage my world, to monitor my productivity, and to kept my activities from feeding the implicit hierarchy and inevitable comparisons that develop from posting of absolute numbers like word count, stories mailed, stories created, etc. Mind you, I do track all that in my personal logs. I just don’t share the numbers for the reasons described above.

The person running the group is, and continues to be, a friend and someone I respect, but I was pressured on several occasions to present absolute numbers. After the third time, I dropped out because my methods did not fit or serve the tribal norm of the group.

Which brings me back to my trivial success. I do track my personal productivity numbers. It’s a habit that goes all the way back to those fire alarm days. I do know when my productivity goes up and when it goes down, and I knew that my numbers had tanked with the advent of Covid and political and financial uncertainty. My cool little gold star calendar arrived in August, and I decided that what I really wanted was to see how consistency in starting would affect my other productivity elements.

I chose two items: exercise and writing.

I chose to define starting as 5 minutes.

By starting to exercise each day, my body started showing significant changes. Mind you, most days in the beginning were only five minutes, and I’m 62 years old. After 100 days, I am able to do things I could not do 100 days ago.

By starting to write each day, my overall hours of writing jumped significantly. My numbers weren’t entirely bad in my slump. However, starting consistently every day led to sessions that were not part of my previous habits. More stories went in the mail. More hours showed up in my spreadsheet. More time was spent on my projects on top of the time I spent teaching, consulting, and supporting the work of others.

I am aware that I will fail. Eventually, there will be days where I’m just sick of it, or there will be a day when I’m too sick to get out of bed, or there will be a family crisis, or there will be. . .

A person I admire inspired to try this “just start” method. They managed 500 days in a row before they chose to just stop. I won’t share their reasons. That’s their story. I will say that having heard them, I expect a day will come when I share them. My day might come at 200. I might not get to 200 before I catch the flu or Covid, God forbid. The point is not the number or if it is good enough. The point is to be mindful of starting, and I use my gold star calendar as my little push. I want to light up my day with a gold star, and some days the only reason I touched a keyboard was so that that I could light up that gold star. That’s between me and the childhood compulsion for gold stars.

I’m still weak because I haven’t done 500 days. Wait, no I’m not. Wait, yes I am. Shouldn’t I be able to do ten minutes each? Shouldn’t I be able to add eating raw foods to my items? I need to do some research to see how many minutes Margaret Attwood writes every day. Doesn’t Nora Roberts write 8 hours a day? That’s what I should be doing. That’s a job, right? Marketing. I need to build my mailing list and my outreach program. I’ll add that. It’s just one thing. Five more minutes is nothing. Lots of writers do more than that.

No.

The only thing I need is to start today.

I no longer advocate sharing production numbers unless you find you are a person who needs to be surrounded by people competing for some winner’s result that requires each person to begin on a different starting line and run on a different track. I do, however, advocate paying attention to how often we start whatever it is we want to improve in our lives. Just tracking starts is enough to lead to improvements and progress. Tracking results privately keeps others from comparing themselves to us and us from comparing ourselves to others.

For all my creative friends organized into groups, I recommend incentive programs that support all members of the group as they are, where they are, and in a way that does not turn the group into a fire alarm sales competition.

-End-

The Origin

By Cheryl Owen-Wilson

Origin-a starting point. 

When the notion of writing, other than for my own pleasure, first sprouted I took many classes on how to begin.  One of those classes almost ended my writing pursuits before they even began.  In this class I was told to create a list of everything, and I do mean everything, about each and every character in my story.  After the task was completed I was to outline the entire story.  Then and only then, could I begin writing said story.  This type of writer is called a plotter.  Now, I know there are some of you who follow this writing process.  I’m not saying it doesn’t work.  I know it does, but it so happens it doesn’t work for me.  Not one part of it .  I’m what is known in writer’s lingo as a pantser.  In other words, I write by the seat of my pants.  An idea sparks and I’m off and running.  That process served me well as long as I wrote nothing longer than say five-thousand-words, but I soon found out how very lost one can get when you attempt to write that way while trying to birth a novella.

After two long years, in this year of 2020, I completed my fist novella ‘Bayou’s Lament”.  When completed the final word count was a bit over forty-seven-thousand.   So if my pantser method didn’t work for my novella, did I succumb to the mind numbing (for me) method of outlines, note cards and knowing if my protagonist’s sneeze was a lady like achoo within the folds of an embroidered handkerchief or a full on fog horn, call in the COVID medics, sounding sneeze? 

The answer is no.  I created no notecards, no outlines. Instead, I created short origin stories. 

Origin-a foundation, or a cause.

For instance I didn’t start with the usual hair color, height, and age.  I started at the beginning. The very foundation-I  started at my protagonist’s birth. “Veya Marie St. James was born on an island buried deep in the swampy marshes of southern Louisiana. She grew up mired in the superstitious beliefs of those who followed her mother’s cult.”  From there Veya came to life piece by piece until I did know she had to have black hair (identical to her mother’s), hair she died blond. (Cause-so she wouldn’t resemble her mother in any way), green eyes, etc. I found creating an origin story for each of my characters much more enjoyable than the one-dimensional beings I saw them as when I tried placing them in an outline. 

Origin-The beginning.

Bayou’s Lament features other worldly creatures.  I struggled with these being’s existence—their world, their how, their why, for some time.  Then I sat down and wrote their—beginning.  “In the beginning there be one Being with four legs, four arms and two heads all coming from out a’ one chest. It be like the Maker of All had but one body ta sew two Beings on to.”  From there their world flowed onto the page ever so slowly like the bayou surrounding their home. 

I now ask you to stop and think about your own origin story.  Each piece of your life.  Each event, each person, the places you’ve lived, the worlds you’ve been exposed to.  How has your origin molded you, informed you, created you?  Try applying some of what you learn to the next character you meet on the journey of writing your next story, and please let me know if it helps you along the way.

[image error] Cosmic Birth, an original painting by Cheryl Owen-Wilson
https://mecovisions.com/

The Next Write Thing

by Christina Lay

Louis L’Amour once said he could write while sitting in the middle of a freeway with his typewriter balanced on his knees. I do not have that super power and unfortunately, I feel that the times we live in are comparable to having loud, recklessly driven cars zooming by all around us while we try desperately to focus on the work in front of us. Global pandemic, the world on fire, the rise of fascism, the fragility of democracy; all of these things are as distracting as a semi-truck tailgating your Prius on a dark and stormy night.

I told myself I really needed to write my ShadowSpinners article (due yesterday) well in advance of Election Day, but alas, in my ongoing state of agitation, I couldn’t bring myself to sit down and remember why I thought pronouns would make a compelling topic. This is also part of the writer’s dilemma. Not only do we have rioting and chaos outside our windows, it is sometimes hard to find value in what we’re doing. Where’s the relevance? Will this article help save the world or put out the fires?

Not likely. However, it might help me calm down, and it might help a reader or two pass some time in non-agitated repose.

In recovery programs, we have a simple suggestion when crisis hits or tragedy strikes and you don’t know what to do with yourself or how to move forward: Do the next right thing.  When my partner committed suicide ten years ago, my sponsor told me this, and it helped me move through the mire of grief and shock. The next right thing might be: eat something, brush your teeth, walk the dog, sleep. 

So what’s the next write thing when it comes to our creative endeavors? (See what I did there? Continuous lack of sleep isn’t all bad!)

Here are some simple suggestions:

Open your work in progress, and read through it. Look for spelling errors and typos. Take notes on any ideas that pop into your head.

When you reach the end, write a sentence. If that feels good, keep going, maybe you’ll get a paragraph down. Be okay with that.

Grab a notebook and jot down ideas or random thoughts. Doodle.

Compose a short and probably terrible haiku. Wax poetic about coffee, cats, or whatever brings you comfort.

Write down your dreams when you wake up. Last night I dreamt I ate a sock. WTF? Is thatwhat happens to the missing socks?

Pour all of your angst into a never-to-be-sent letter to (Insert Politician’s Name). Much, much later, go through it, remove all the expletives, and see if there’s anything worth salvaging. 

Read a chapter or two on your craft.

Re-Read a favorite work of fiction and pay attention to why you love it.

If you must check on the news, pay attention to the texture of the moment.  It is a curse to live in interesting time, but we might as well take advantage and be the observers society and history relies on.

Take a walk.

Plant some bulbs.

Make a batch of chili.

Keep it Simple: Accept that you probably won’t save the world today, and you won’t find the way to perfectly phrase an argument or present a truth that will convince all the bad people to behave nicely.  You might not compose beautiful sentences, or even coherent ones.  Just remember that first and foremost, you create for yourself. The need for self-expression is great in creative types and in difficult times, it’s important to let go of the results, and sink into the simple pleasure, or at least release, of doing.  If we keep on keeping on, maybe someday, what we’re doing now will make a difference, change a heart, provide relief, a laugh, a human connection.

Most of all, forgive yourself for not winning the Pulitzer prize this year. Forgive yourself for blowing that deadline.  We are writers, but we all also human, and we can allow ourselves to Keep It Simple, for now.

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Winter is Coming…

Cynthia Ray

[image error] Morning Fog Rolls In at North Beach C. Ray

Fall is a pensive time of year.  A time of endings, of retrospection, of turning inward.  Here in the Northwest, days of brilliant sunshine are interspersed with spells of gloomy gray rain or fog, a reminder of the coming long months of exile from the sun, urging one to soak up all the warmth possible as a ward against the pending dark.  My son used to love this funny old childrens song about Autumn that perfectly captures the urgency of preparing for winter.

Hurry, Hurry!

Rabbit twitched his twitchety ears on a twinkling autumn day, He could hear the North Wind whistle and he scampered off to say: Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, we must all get fat and furry, Not a moment to be lost, I can hear bold Jackie Frost.

Groundhog sniffed her sniffety nose on a snappy autumn day
She could smell the winter coming, and she waddled off to say:
Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, we must all get fat and furry,
Not a moment to be lost, I can smell bold Jackie Frost.

Squirrel shivered a shivery shiver on a shiv’ry autumn day
He could feel the North Wind’s fingers, and he scurried off to say:
Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, we must all get fat and furry,
Not a moment to be lost, I can feel bold Jackie Frost.

Black Bear blinked her blinkety eyes on a blust’ry autumn day
She could see the snow clouds gather, and she lumbered off to say:
Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, we must all get fat and furry,
Not a moment to be lost, I can see bold Jackie Frost. 

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Since hibernation for three months is not an option, I am preparing for winter by adding a bushel of books to my library (both kindle and paperbacks).  I will lock the door against the pelting rain, tune out the drumbeat of social media, turn on some classical music, choose from my eclectic pile of books, and snuggle down into my favorite reading spot.

Another important element of preparation for the impending gloom is ensuring that there is an adequate supply of comfort food on hand. How else does one get fat and furry?  Cookies, mulled cider, hot chocolate, gingerbread, and pumpkin spice mochas, of course.   What could be more comforting than cozying up in your favorite arm chair or couch, with a mug of your favorite brew, and a snack? 

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I will bake now, while I still have the motivation and energy to scurry about, and freeze everything.  It will be ready for the time when the relentless gray and early darkness has sapped all the will to live from me.  In January, when it is pitch black in the morning when I wake, and the sun sets at 3 pm, a time when I can barely lift a hand to open the refrigerator door, then, just like the squirrel who digs up a buried walnut, I will retrieve that gingerbread slice from deep in the freezer and toast it. 

Stay warm, my furry friends.