Lacey Louwagie's Blog, page 17

Out of Whatever I’m Doing, into Writing

“For me, writing is an appetite, a joy. Even when I don’t think I want it, even when I think I have nothing to say, it seduces me like the first really balmy day of spring: I want out of whatever I am doing and into it.” – Julia Cameron, “This Writing Life,” The Right to Write.

Writing Book Review: The Right to Write by Julia Cameron

The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life by Julia Cameron


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Writing–and this is the big secret–wants to be written. Writing loves a writer the way God loves a true devotee. Writing will fill up your heart if you let it. It will fill your pages and help you fill your life.”

In the midst of the huge learning curve that has been the publication of my first independent work, it was incredibly gratifying to be reminded of the reasons that I write — not for publication or attention or fans (although those things are all lovely!) but because of the way it nourishes my soul. The Right to Write was recommended to me by a good writer friend when I posted a wishlist of books relating to Writing as a Spiritual Practice, and this was a really lovely start to reading through that pile.

I recently described Paulette Bates Alden’s book, “Crossing the Moon,” as “nourishing,” and I can only use the same word to describe “The Right to Write.” My writer’s soul drank up Julia Cameron’s encouragement and affirmation like South Dakota soil drinks up rain in its drout years. Each essay contained wonderful advice and beautiful reminders about the things we know, deep down, about our writing: that it matters to us, and even to the world, regardless of who sees it or how they react to it. I appreciated its focus squarely on writing as a process rather than a product, and its ability to separate the two without denigrating either one. In some places the essays felt a little meandering or even self-satisfied, and yet, this is a style that “works” for a book about letting writing flow to you and through you. And despite that, this book is not “rough” in any way — one can see the creative whir beneath the finished product, and yet the finished product is still, indisputably, polished.

I haven’t yet done any of the writing exercises (“initiations”) at the end of each chapter, but I feel confident that sinking into them when I’m finished writing from “A Year in the Life” will give me an even deeper appreciation for this book.

View all my reviews

Time for Writing

“The lies we tell ourselves about writing and time are all connected to envy, to the fairy tale notion that there are others whose lives are simpler, better funded, more conducive to writing than our own.

“The trick to finding writing time is to make writing time in the life you’ve already got. That’s where you’ve got leverage. Stop imagining some other life as a ‘real’ writer’s life.

“‘I used to maintain that I never had any time to write,” Laura remembers. ‘I wanted to write and I resented not writing but I also felt safe. It was threatening to make time for writing, but making the time has changed everything. I now not only have time to write but I seem to have time to do other things as well. Frankly, I think I was depressed and writing got rid of my depression.’

“Taking the time to write in our lives gives us the time of our lives. As we describe our environments, we begin to savor them. Even the most rushed and pell-mell life begins to take on the patina of being cherished.” – Julia Cameron, “The Time Lie,” The Right to Write

This morning for the first time in a week, I had to skip the prescribed “Morning Pages.” My husband’s car was in the

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dougbels...

shop, and my dog needed to go to the vet, and that ate up the time I usually give myself before work. I felt a little resentful about it because I had thoughts that wanted to be written. In just a week’s time, it seems my psyche has come to expect this outlet. (I’ve been asking myself to remember my dreams so that I’d have something to write about first thing in the morning, and last night I had a vivid airplane dream. I have a fear of flying that is at odds with my love of traveling, and usually my airplane dreams are nightmares. In last night’s dream, nothing scary happened, which seems significant.)

What Laura says in the quote above really resonates with me, especially what she says about being safe and the fact that going after what you say you want is threatening. I have this problem more with submitting my work than with actually writing it, but the same principle applies. I feel resentful about not being published, but I keep pushing the steps that would take me toward publication away. It is threatening because each attempt to publish brings with it a (very high) risk of rejection. But the risk of doing nothing is probably higher if being published is something you want.

The most busy I’ve ever been in my life was the summer before I went to college, when I was working three jobs, all of which I disliked. It was not a happy summer. I typically worked from 11 am to 9 pm, six or seven days a week, so in those few hours in the morning, I would work on my novel. I can fall into the trap of thinking, “If I had more time, I would write X …”, but if I managed to write that summer, I should be able to write any time. I still arrange my life to try to get MORE writing in; I’m still never writing as much as I WANT to be writing, but the point is to at least BE writing.

Like Laura, I also see a connection between writing and mood. The worst part about the depression I lived through as a teenager was that it took away my desire to write, along with my desire to do anything else. I wrote anyway. I don’t know if it helped the depression, but it at least gave me something to hold onto, to remind me of who I was before the darkness. Now, I give myself “breaks” between big writing projects, looking forward to the luxury of not writing. Usually, I start to get irritable after a month or two.

Writing makes my life better. Writing makes me a better person. And doing it now, in these few minutes while I wait for my husband to pick me up for lunch, is taking the edge off missing the Morning Pages.

Writing Toward the Horizon

“Writing is a lot like driving a country blacktop highway on a summer day. There is a wavery magical spot that shimmers on the horizon. You aim toward it. You speed to get there, and when you do, the ‘there’ vanishes. You look up to see it again, shimmering in the distance. You write toward that. I suppose some people might call this unrequited love or dissatisfaction. I think it’s something better.

“I think it’s anticipation.”

- Julia Cameron, “Begin,” The Right to Write

The Luxury of Mood

“It is a luxury to be in the mood to write. It’s a blessing but it’s not a necessity. Writing is like breathing, it’s possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.” – Julia Cameron, “Begin,” The Write to Right, pg. 1

Creative Process Blog Tour

I read about a “Creative Process Blog Tour” over at Susan Perry’s blog, wherein different creative types are answering a set of questions about their process in their blogs. (Susan Perry is author of Writing in Flow, although I first discovered her through Loving in Flow, which I read after I became engaged and started freaking about doing this whole marriage thing “right.”)

I was not officially invited to this blog tour, as Susan implies that she was, but that’s too bad. I’m inviting myself!

WRITING PROCESS SELF-Q&A:

1) What are you working on?

Right now, I’m preparing my novella, Rumpled, for release as an ebook and paperback at the beginning of March. I’m corresponding with beta readers about their feedback and early reviews, brainstorming promotional avenues, and going over the manuscript with a fine-toothed comb, generating new ebook and paperback files every time I make a change to the master. The real deadline and the real people waiting on the book’s release have me spending more hours per day in “writing time” than I’m used to, but I’m enjoying it — learning a lot and energized by the opportunity to do something different from what I’m used to doing with my writing time. It’s exciting to be taking this step.

Rumpled

With that said, I’m more of a writer than a marketer, and I need actual writing in my life. So I’ve been blogging a lot at Booklikes, journaling daily, and keeping up my blogging commitments here and at Young Adult Catholics. Still, I am absolutely itching to start working on a long-term project again, and look forward to returning to my second draft of my Rapunzel retelling when this big push is behind me.

2) How does your work differ from others of its genre?

I often think of my writing as existing somewhat “between.” One of the reasons I decided to self-publish Rumpled is because it exists in an awkward space between being a novel and a short story, and novellas don’t have a clearly defined market. Most of my writing falls along the speculative fiction continuum, whether it dabbles in magical realism or takes place in a totally imagined realm. Still, many people perceive genre fiction as being primarily “plot driven,” whereas I’m stronger in characterization and the actual weave of language. Stylistically, my work has leanings toward literary fiction, but I’m so irritated by literary fiction avoiding or downplaying the sci-fi/fantasy label that I embrace it fully. A lot of great literature has come from science fiction and fantasy, and I always consider my work speculative fiction first, literary second.

Although I often don’t go into my writing planning to tackle a certain theme or issue, I do use speculative fiction to explore the human condition, dwelling especially on issues of religion, spirituality, sex and sexuality, and gender.

I feel it’s somewhat arrogant to say that this is something that sets my work apart from others in its genre, since there are lots of great pieces of speculative fiction (that aren’t afraid to embrace the label) with brilliant character development and beautiful writing. I guess I just mean to say that I don’t feel totally defined by the conventions of genre. I read across many genres, and I think this keeps my writing from becoming too “stuck” in any particular formula.

3) Why do you write what you do?

Because it is the thing that wants to be written, I guess. I find that I usually have to read a certain kind of book for years before it has sunk into my subconscious deeply enough for me to attempt something of my own along a similar vein. I’ve found that what I’m obsessed with reading usually leads to a similar writing project a few years down the road, by which time I’ve often moved on to a different “reading” obsession. I started reading fantasy heavily about two years before I wrote my first fantasy novel; I read retellings for about twelve years before I wrote one; I was drawn to post-apocalyptic/dystopia and science fiction and fantasy with religious themes about eight years before I tackled them myself. These days, I’m reading a lot of non-fiction, and wondering where that might take my writing several years from now.

Right now, I’m very interested in retellings, with about five ideas that I’d like to put to paper at some point. Certain stories have stayed with us for thousands of years because they speak deeply to what it means to be human, and I find delving into them to be as satisfying as creating something totally from scratch — all plots and themes have already been written, and everything we add is just our own “spin” on a few basic plots and themes. It’s that “spin” that makes something uniquely your own, not the plot or themes per se.

Always, I write about the questions that I wrestle with, that I think all humans wrestle with — how we make meaning of our lives, how we decide what is important to us, how we come to believe what we believe and how and why those belief systems change. These themes come through after I’ve begun writing rather than before, although sometimes I’ll have an idea of the theme I want to explore when I start a new project. Although I rarely write realistic fiction, my real-life concerns infuse my speculative fiction, and much of my characters’ emotional realities are based on my own experiences.

4)  How does your writing process work?

I try to write something every day, or at least five days a week. My writing thrives on routine, so I have difficulty working on long-term projects while I am in a period of personal transition — moving, getting married, changing jobs. In those times, I often have to pull back from the “life of the imagination” to fully process my own life, and I funnel my writing energy toward journaling rather than stop writing during that time. When I’ve got a good routine in place, I try to blog two to three times per week, journal at least once a week, and work on my long-term project (usually a novel) two to three times per week. Setting up a schedule helps me move forward even when I have multiple projects on the go, and it lets me tend to the “outward facing” aspects of writing (blogging, book reviews, marketing, etc.) as well as the writing I need to do for my spirit (journaling).

I don’t like writing first drafts, so I try to get through them as swiftly as possible. I find that NaNoWriMo works well for this because I can get the whole first draft on the page in one month rather than dragging that excruciating process out over a year or more. For me, the magic comes in the process of revision, of having something more to work from than a blank page. I don’t mind that it takes me a year or more to revise something I wrote in a month, because I find the revision part of writing so rewarding.

Just this week, I have started doing Julia Cameron’s “Morning Pages” (filling three pages longhand before doing anything else) because I am currently reading her wonderful The Right to Write. I haven’t seen whether this is a habit that will stick or how it might affect the rest of my life, writing or otherwise. I’m always, always seeking ways to get more writing into my life.

A Year in the Life, Week 42 – The Bridges of Madison County

This week’s exercise in A Year in the Life asked me to think of a place I had lived, and then to think of a feature that place was famous for, using “The Bridges of Madison County” as a title style guide. Although I was supposed to imagine that I was going on an excursion to study this phenomenon, I ended up writing mine as though I were giving advice to someone coming TO the area on an excursion.

I wrote about snow in Southwest Minnesota, where I grew up and then lived in again for a couple years before I got married.

 

The Snowdrifts of Lyon County

The challenge is that they are both pervasive and elusive. o see them being born is a thing to behold, if, in fact, you can behold anything at all. If you’re in your car when it happens, you will be lost in paralysis in moments, nausea or sobs rising in your throat, your hands trembling against your grip on the steering wheel. Your legs will tremble, too, till you’re afraid they’ll simply spill all over your brakes and gas pedals. The whole world is white, and you must pray to stay alive, to make it into visibility again or to crash into the ditch rather than an oncoming semi.

It is one of the most terrifying experiences in the world.

Not so if it happens while you’re safely tucked away inside, inside anywhere. From there, it’s magical if everyone you love is safe, to look out and see a white landscape constantly rearranging itself like dunes in the desert, like something from Alice in Wonderland–you look away and suddenly nothing is what it was just moments before.

So here’s how to plan your trip–make sure to arrive a good six hours before he blizzard does. You run the risk that nothing will come of it after all, but this is a minor risk, far less risky than waiting for a sure thing and getting trapped in it. Then, stay someplace safe with a mug of hot chocolate, and watch the magic unfold.

If you can’t take the time off beforehand and don’t want to risk getting caught–and trust me, you don’t–venture down as soon as SafetravelUSA downgrades the road conditions to “fair” from “difficult” or “hazardous.” Don’t delay! These snowdrifts will be gone as soon as they’ve appeared.

Make sure to bring your camera and drive the Hwy 23 corridor between Granite Falls and Pipestone, paying special attention to the area between Pipestone and Marshall, Buffalo Ridge. This is one of the whitest, scariest places to get trapped.

You may be disappointed, knowing this, as you look to the left and right, at white mounds glistening and already starting to melt, dingy from children’s dirty boots tramping up and down them. If you are really lucky, you may encounter a wall of snow along both sides of the road that a blow literally had to slice right through, like blowing a mountain up with dynamite to carve out a road.

See if you can find snowdrifts that allow children to climb onto the roofs of their houses, or children sledding down snowdrifts instead of hills (when I was a child, I didn’t even know that most people used hills for sledding.) Find snow drifts that are carved into forts, tiny faces poking out of tunnels. For the full effect, pull onto a backroad or two where the plow hasn’t been through recently, and enjoy the fear and exhilaration of letting your car burst through as many snowdrifts as you can. But get the number of a friendly local farmer who will hook his truck or tractor up to your car and pull you out if you need to be rescued.

Try not to be disappointed by how quickly it will all disappear– use it as a reminder of how he world always has the capacity to change overnight.

 

 

 

 

A Year in the Life: Valentine’s Day

My A Year in the Life journaling book has prompts in the back for holidays, in addition to the regular weekly prompts. I decided to do the Valentine’s Day one, which was to imagine that Puck had sprinkled fairy dust on me so that in the morning I would fall in love with the first thing I saw. Since my cat Phoebe is often nearby waiting for breakfast, I wrote a love letter to her. It wasn’t hard at all, because I am already quite in love with her.

Oh my darling, darling Phoebe –

how I love the way you regard me when I open my eyes, and the soft, self-satisfied “chirrup” you make when I say something to you in my “kitty voice.”How I love the way you roll onto your back as I approach, thrusting that protuberant belly into the air, the way you splay your paws so I can rub it like a lucky statue’s bald, bronze head, like a balloon I rub furiously enough to build up static to make it stick to me.

And oh, how you stick o me! The way your claws get snagged on my jeans, the couch beside me, my desk chair. How you frantically jerk them backwards, panicking, how you squawk and scold me when I try to gently remove them by pressing them backwards until they are unhooked. And then, how you glare at me, certain the whole situation was my fault, or perhaps Joker’s, if she was walking by.

Oh, Phoebe, how lovely that you never make mistakes, that your misery is never, no never of your own making. How I love to serve your every need–pets, food, laps, a warm body in bed. How can I help but love someone who knows so well how to love herself?

Your adoring admirer,

Lacey

 

Life as a Writer

“Our writing life, our life ‘as a writer,’ cannot be separated from our life as a whole.”

- Julia Cameron, The Right to Write

Young Adult Catholics: What if Jesus Hurts My Feelings?

My latest post is up at Young Adult Catholics, which examines Jesus’ seemingly unnecessarily harsh response to a question Peter asks in Matthew 15; Jesus’ response: “Are you still so dull?” (Matthew 15:16).

And while we’re on the topic of Catholic writing, here are some reviews of Unruly Catholic Women Writers that just came out:

From the San Francisco Book Review
And Baltimore Magazine