Lacey Louwagie's Blog, page 31

For You and For Many

My biweekly post is up on Young Adult Catholics, and it’s an examination of (surprise, surprise!), the power of words. In related news, I attended an online community meeting last night with some folks who are interested in revitalizing the blog, which has fewer posts and writers currently than in days gone by. I look forward to seeing how that will unfold.

5 Ways Marriage has Improved my Writing

I was terrified of getting married. I’ve always placed a high premium on my independence, and I think part of that was to protect my writing. Relationships take time and energy — and any time and energy given elsewhere is time and energy taken away from writing. I’d seen relationships where one’s significant other actively interfered with their beloved’s passion. In college, a writer friend of mine was dating a girl who scorned his writing, making it something he had to do almost in secret. My sister dated several men who were “jealous” of the devotion she had to her passion, horses, because it meant time spent away from them. When my mom got married, she gave up her horses because there wasn’t a place for them on my dad’s farm. Being single allowed me to avoid this quagmire of competing passions.

I also had a semi-conscious belief that intimate relationships were a liability in my dream to become a writer. I thought loneliness was part of my calling. It was not for me to engage intimately with others, but to observe; to ponder; to record. If I got swept up in a love affair of my own, so much of my creative energy would go in that direction, and I wanted that energy for writing. (There’s a belief that sexual energy and creative energy exist on the same chakra, and perhaps being raised Catholic contributed to my idea that celibacy was the best life path if I wanted to devote myself wholly to my creativity.) If I got caught up in my own life, it might wipe clean the dozens of lives I imagined in my head, each of them providing a different outlet for all the things I wasn’t experiencing on my own. If I was close to someone to whom I could pour out my soul, how many pages in my journal would be left empty? I wanted to live many lives, not just one. And so I held back from living my own, from carving out a singular path that would close off other options, and thus, close off a bit of imaginative possibility.

When Ivan and I were still dating, we watched Phoebe in Wonderland, a movie about a little girl with Tourette’s syndrome and OCD tendencies whose family, especially her mother, struggles to accept her illness. The mother in the movie is a writer — and as the movie progresses, we discover that a significant part of her internal struggle is caused by the tension she feels between her responsibilities as a wife and mother, and her desire to write. Ivan asked, “Are you afraid having a family will interfere with your writing?”

I said, “Yes.”

We didn’t speak of it further than that, but the fact that that fear was out in the open meant that I no longer faced it alone. And after the dust settled from the wedding and the honeymoon and the move, I found that the opposite of my fear has come true. Marriage allowed me to focus more on my writing than I’ve ever been able to before because …

Two people means two incomes, which means if I make a little less money per week because I’m doing a little more writing, the lights will stay on and I won’t starve.
Two people means shared chores, which also frees up more time for writing. I still do a fair amount of dishes and laundry, which offer prime daydreaming time.
My husband has dreams of his own. As the co-founder of Coppergoose.com, and as someone who works full-time in addition to pursuing his own business, he needs time while he’s “off” to devote to developing the site. This benefits my writing in two ways: First, seeing him pursue his passion goads me into giving the same sort of attention to mine. Second, when he’s wrapped up in Coppergoose work, it’s a prime time for me to get some writing done. In particular, he takes a half-day off every Friday to devote to Coppergoose. I’ve begun doing the same, using that time to focus on research and development related to my writing, something that was usually on the back burner so that I could use all my writing time for actually, well, writing.
He’s an additional reader, which means additional feedback. I often read acknowledgments by authors in which they mentioned a spouse as a first reader and valued critiquer, and I always hoped that I could someday have such a marriage relationship. Last week, Ivan finished reading my most ambitious novel, then gave me 45 minutes of “big picture” feedback that I’m still mulling over — and he brings the novel up occasionally when additional feedback strikes him. He’s not another writer, which means his feedback is pure reader feedback. This is a good compliment to my writers’ group feedback, which comes from their dual perspectives as writers and readers.
Most importantly, I now live with someone who cares about me reaching my dream as much as I do. Ivan doesn’t often ask me what I’m writing, and he doesn’t give me the kind of accountability that my writers’ group or my writer friends do when they ask about progress on specific projects. But he does ask me, particularly when I’m stressed or overwhelmed, “Are you getting enough time for writing?” Fortunately, the answer has not been no yet — but I know that if it ever is, I’ll have someone to help me correct that.

I’m not about to advocate marriage as a “solution” to any writer’s woes (or as a solution to anything, really). Unlike many people, I don’t see being alone as the worst possible outcome, but being with someone to whom I’m ill-suited. I still think that the single life provides particularly fertile ground for writing, especially if you have the self-discipline to make the most of that freedom and alone time. I was incredibly fortunate that, before Ivan, I had friends who stayed up past their bedtimes to read my drafts and who asked, “When am I going to get another Lacey story?” So while I don’t advocate marriage for the sake of writing, I do know this: writing can be lonely. If you have people in your life who truly care about you reaching your goals, who see writing as a worthy pursuit even if it’s just “for the sake of writing,” who ask you when your next draft will be ready or whether you’re getting enough time for writing, keep those people in your life. And if you are going to balance an intimate relationship with your dream of writing, you could certainly do worse than having it be with one of those people.

The Book is Here … but What if They Don’t Like It?

I got my box of contributor copies of Hungering and Thirsting for Justice in the mail yesterday, so I promptly sent an email to all the friends and associates I thought might be interested in knowing about it. Interest was especially piqued amongst those who know me mostly in a Catholic context. My former boss at the Writing Center at The College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University let me know she’d pass the word on to the English and Theology faculty and get a copy for the campus libraries. And the priest from my home parish told me he’d order three copies, and send one to the bishop.

I fought the urge to respond, “But I don’t think the bishop will like it!”

Our publisher has been wonderful in backing us even though the book expresses, sometimes quite strongly, some views that are not in line with official Catholic teaching. And of course, now that the book is out in the world, I must deal with something I don’t have to deal with so much when my manuscripts stay on my computer: people are actually going to read this (I hope!), and not all of them are going to like it.

That fear has been niggling at me for the last month or so, as the reality of publication came closer and closer. I’ve always wondered if I’ll be one of those authors who doesn’t read reviews of her work, and it’s certainly tempting. But I’ve also realized that I already deal with the fact that some folks don’t like my writing on a regular basis.

Over at Young Adult Catholics, I’ve received negative or argumentative responses to my posts for almost as long as I’ve been writing them (my most recent, rather non-controversial post, is here). Some of them are reasonable, well-thought-out disagreements, but more commonly, they are a line or two implying that I’m a horrible Catholic, with no real invitation to continue a dialog past that point. There’s one particular commenter who seems to read my posts for the sole purpose of writing a snarky line or two in the comments. It’s gotten to where, when I see there’s a new comment on a blog post, I cringe before I open it, preparing for an attack. When it’s a supportive or even reasonable response, I breathe a huge sigh of relief and bask in a moment of profound gratitude.

It hurts, and it’s scary. Even in the midst of mostly positive remarks, it’s the negative ones that stick with us. But I keep writing because I need to. I keep writing because, I believe, other people need me to, too. I think the best thing about books and all the other written media out there in the world is that it makes us feel a little less alone. And as a progressive Catholic at a time when the Institutional Church is fondly reminiscing about Pre-Vatican II days, you can get to feeling pretty alone.

I continue to write out of gratitude for all the brave writers who have helped me feel less alone by putting their words on a page or on a screen.  I continue to write so that I, too, can remind people that we’re not alone. This means that I’ll continue to open myself up to reactions from people who don’t like what I have to say. That’s the price we pay for hitting “post” or for opening our mouths. It’s important to keep doing it anyway.

My Changing Reading Tastes and What It Means for My Writing

Over the past year, I’ve noticed a distinct change in my reading preferences. While Young Adult and speculative fiction (even better, both!) used to be my genres of choice, now I find myself more compelled to read memoir and other non-fiction genres. And while I used to regularly read literary fiction, now I sometimes bypass the general fiction category at used booksales altogether. It’s not that I’m not interested in realistic human stories anymore … it’s just that, if there’s a book about something that could actually happen … I’d rather read a book by someone that it actually happened to.

While memoir has always been on the margins of my reading tastes, I’ve hypothesized several reasons that I have a renewed interest in it now.

There’s a definite correlation between beginning my relationship with my husband almost three years ago and my interest in non-fiction. Although I’d been in love before, this was my first “serious” relationship, and I was hungry to see how other real people navigated this terrain. Not even six months into my marriage, I’m drawn to memoirs about lifelong partnerships and both successful and failed love. There are a lot of people who know this road better than I do.
I’ve also had a pretty strong shift in my internal world in the past several years. Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that I’ve made a shift out of my internal world in the past several years. While I used to prefer to hide in my own imagination and would often choose its sanctuary over my real life, I’ve since become much more integrated into the real world. My reading taste seems to reflect this, although it was about two or three years behind my shift in consciousness.
For a lot of my life, I’ve needed or thought I needed to escape for one reason or another. Although everyone needs an escape once in a while, myself included, I’m much less prone to it these days. I think it’s because I like my life, and so I seek to read books that help me understand it more deeply, rather than that help me get away from it.
It may be that my genes are finally catching up with me. Although both my parents enjoy a good novel (especially a good sci-fi novel), they’re also strongly drawn to non-fiction. My dad devours biographies, while my mom, a nurse, seems to crack open books about health far more often than any of the hundreds of other books on her shelves (although she listens mostly to fiction audiobooks).
I may simply have OD’d on fiction. Although I’ve been picking up non-fiction about subjects that interest me (mostly religion and feminism) for years at used book sales, I haven’t actually read all that much of it. I often asked myself if I ever would get around to reading all that non-fiction when novels were so enticing to me. Well, perhaps I was more prescient than I thought, and I now find myself quite well-stocked for my increased non-fiction appetite!

While I still try to read across genres, and actually set something of a reading “schedule/system” to guarantee variety, I do wonder how or whether this new attraction to non-fiction will play out in my writing. Of course it makes sense to write within the genre that you read the most in — but right now, I have very little interest in writing non-fiction aside from journaling, blogging, and responding to requests to write articles. Still, the first book with my byline is not a novel but a collection of true stories from young adult Catholics — in essence, a collection of short memoirs. And my own short memoir-esque piece about being bisexual and Catholic is currently set for publication in two separate collections.

So although I have no immediate plans to write heavily within the non-fiction genre, I find myself wondering what might emerge after all this has settled in several years. I’ve always loved reading retellings, for example, but didn’t write my first retelling until about seven years after I began reading them, and it was a very loose retelling at that. Now, I’m working on a retelling of “Rumplestiltskin” with plans to retell “Rapunzel” during NaNoWriMo and, eventually I hope, “The Little Mermaid.” Does this mean a non-fiction book will be beating at the edges of my brain about ten years from now? I guess I’ll just wait and see, and enjoy all the writing and reading in the meantime.

Book Review: Self Promotion for Introverts

Self-Promotion for Introverts: The Quiet Guide to Getting Ahead by Nancy Ancowitz

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think I would have gotten more out of this book if I had my own copy. Instead, I had it checked out from the library on interlibrary loan, so I couldn’t even renew it … which meant I had to sort of zip through it, even though there are a bunch of exercises you’re supposed to do, which I didn’t do (although I tried to do a few of them mentally). The author is a career coach, so I think she tried to translate a lot of the exercises she does with clients to the pages of this book. And while I think they’d work better in a coaching context where you could get feedback, this is a decent alternative for those who can’t afford or don’t have access to coaching.

What I really wanted from this book was some guidance on promoting myself as a writer, and “Hungering and Thirsting for Justice.” There was a lot that was relevant, but the way it was written just had me thinking more about career development than book promotion. And I actually already do pretty well in the career development area; I’m a decent public speaker, I interview well, etc. I’m the kind of introvert that does well in social situations if the roles are really clearly defined — as they often are in work situations — but I really despise “in-person” networking. And reading this book doesn’t make me inclined to like it any more, although it does help me remember that there are a lot of alternatives to that that I can excel at as an introvert, like social networking.

So, I’m glad this book exists, even if I didn’t really get what I wanted out of it. I still wouldn’t mind getting my own copy someday so that I’d have time to work through some of the exercises as they relate to the marketing side of my writing career.

Some useful resources from the book:

Help a Reporter Out: This site is based on the idea that everyone is an expert at something. Reporters use the site to find quotable subjects for their stories. You can sign up to get alerts and see what reporters are looking for — and respond if it’s something in which you have expertise.

SheSource.org: A repository of women experts.

One Person/Multiple Careers by Marci Alboher: Another book for my long “to-read” list!

View all my reviews

Don’t Write Until You’re Excited?

The September 2012 issue of Writer’s Digest features an interview with Chris Cleave, author of the best-selling Little Bee. When asked for his advice to writers, he says this:

“Make sure you’re excited about your work. When you research a story, it should feel like life and death. And when you come to writing it, it should feel like, It will be devastating for me if I don’t make this story as exciting as I know it can be. You should get up every day and think, If I’m not super excited about the 2,000 words I’m going to do today, how can I make it so I am super excited? It should never feel like a chore. If it ever gets boring, the reader can tell. You need to put the pen down and change something, and not come back to the desk until you’re excited about the line or chapter you’re about to write.”

I always read Writer’s Digest with a pen in hand, and in the margins next to this paragraph, I drew a big question mark. I think I disagree with Chris on this one. While I think it’s definitely a good idea to try to psych yourself up and to get excited about what you’re going to write, and to examine your piece closely when it does start to bore you, I don’t think it’s safe to leave the work alone until you are excited about it. Nor do I think the reader can necessarily tell where your enthusiasm has waned. I’ve often had the rude awakening of reading back over work I wrote full of excitement and inspiration, only to find that it’s no better (and is sometimes even worse) than scenes I’ve written where each word felt like it had to be wrenched out of some quicksand pit in my mind to be put on the page.

It’s fairly common for writers to experience a “lull” mid-story, when the initial excitement has worn off and the momentum of the end being in sight hasn’t begun. One of the biggest challenges facing new writers is getting past this and finishing their stories. Many writers who lose their “excitement” over a work in progress end up starting something new that feels more exciting; until that one becomes boring, at which point there’s another new beginning; until soon you have file drawers full of half-finished manuscripts with none of them anywhere close to being ready to see the light of day.

So my modification of Chris’s advice would be this: If you’re not excited, see whether you can do something to get excited (brainstorm ideas in your planning notebook, take a walk to mull over your story, read over a scene that you’re really proud of, journal about what made you want to write this story in the first place). But if you can’t get excited, write anyway. The last thing we writers need is one more excuse to abandon our craft.

What Makes One Catholic?

My biweekly post is up on Young Adult Catholics. This time, it’s some of my musing on the question of what it really means to be Catholic. I wasn’t able to answer that question adequately in the exploration, but some of the comments do a pretty good job.

Blogging and “platform”

In the September issue of Writer’s Digest, there’s an article by Nina Amir encouraging writers to “blog their book” — to post a blog with bite-size book content over time to develop a readership and, eventually, attract the attention of publishers. The article has a “hit two birds with one stone” approach, claiming you can “build your platform” AND write your book at the same time. Although she admits this works better for non-fiction, she encourages fiction writers to give it a try, too. I started wondering whether I should be posting more of my actual writing here, rather than just writing about my writing. Over at the She Writes community, Meghan Ward writes a counterargument, backing it up with the fact that books and blogs are different mediums and don’t easily translate one to the other, and that once you post something on the Internet, it can be easily stolen or plagiarized (that argument worries me less and seems a little self-centered … if it’s so hard to get noticed, why would it be any easier for someone who stole your work to succeed in your place? Without your passion for the subject, I suspect they’d give up before they became rich off your material.) Ultimately, Meghan echoes the more “tried and true” advice of using your blog to supplement your book, to build your platform, without actually using the exact same subject matter or narrative arc.

All of this has me reflecting on this blog and my “platform,” whether I even have one or not, and what my purposes are, ultimately, for writing here. Initially, I opened this blog because I felt I didn’t have the skills needed to build a website from scratch, and I wanted there to be a URL I could direct people to where they could see samples of my writing and that I did know a thing or two about word-smithing. So credibility was the one goal. But another goal was accountability. When I quit my traditional job to do freelance work full-time, I wanted it to be an opportunity for me to take some other big risks, too. I wanted to be published. I wanted to feel like a real writer. I imagined that if I stated my goals on this blog, the added sense of accountability would keep me persevering, even if only a couple of my friends were actually reading it. Until I had real “progress” to report, I filled space here with what I was learning about freelancing and info about opportunities for submissions and reflections on writing.

Ultimately, I did meet a lot of my goals — writing for publication, writing for a real audience, being recognized as a writer by the outside world. And now, it feels a little too “navel-gazy” to keep tracking my progress in that kind of way on this blog; I’m not sure the rest of the world really cares when I’ve sent manuscripts off, and what the results were; now, it’s more important that I just keep track of those things quietly and post here about them only in the breakthrough moments (a “good” rejection, or an acceptance).

Although I like having a place where I can reflect on my experience as a developing writer, I’m not enough of an expert on writing for “writing” to be a suitable “platform”; I know there are hundreds of writing blogs out there with real credentials, written by best-selling authors or by agents and editors who work with or for the big, established publishers. When I started this blog, what I had going for me wasn’t my expertise, but my inexperience as a newbie who was still (and is still) figuring this all out, a sort of, “If I can figure this out, you can too” approacah.

It’s no wonder that there’s a glut of writing blogs on the Internet–bloggers are all writers, after all. But there are also the blogs that offer a subject-matter platform instead–the child psychologist who has published parenting books, but who blogs about developmental psychology rather than writing. If you look at where and what I’ve actually published, Catholicism and sexuality seem to be my niche, but speculative fiction is my passion. Although the majority of my fiction does grapple with the same issues as my non-fiction, I get enough opportunity to blog my thoughts about religion at Young Adult Catholics. I could blog about speculative fiction, or the subgenre I love the most, which is retellings, and I would love the excuse to think and write more about fairy tales. I probably will, inevitably, since after wrapping up my second draft of Rumpled, I plan to plunge into planning my Rapunzel retelling, which is slated as my NaNoWriMo book for this year.

Here are a few things I do know: I’m not really interested in blogging for the sake of establishing a platform. Although there’s something validating in finding publication, my deepest passion still lays with my unpublished work. And I will continue to blog here, regardless of the direction in which this blog continues to evolve, because I like to do it, without getting hung up on whether it’s really serving any “purpose” to my career. Ultimately, that’s why I’ve been writing all along.

The Book is Out!

After mentioning Hungering and Thirsting for Justice so often in passing on this blog, I’m proud to say that it’s finally available for pre-order! Books will ship on September 15.

Hungering and Thirsting for Justice is a collection of ten true stories by young adult Catholics in their twenties and thirties. All of them address different social justice issues, including immigration, GLBTQ rights, the death penalty, abortion, women’s rights, and more. But these are not “sermons” about why one should believe a certain way. Instead, these are stories about how real people have been affected by these issues, and how their journey toward justice has been impacted by and intersects with Catholicism.

This is not a book that puts people or complex moral issues into easy categories. I don’t expect all our readers to agree with our writers, and I don’t think our writers expect that, either. I do hope that this book contributes to an understanding that real people are at the heart of “hot button issues” that get reduced to sound bytes in our culture, especially in an election season. And I hope that this book helps those who struggle to reconcile or integrate their stance on justice issues and their faith background to see that they are not alone.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.” – Matthew 5:6

My rigorous new writing schedule

I always do my best and most productive writing at times when I have a set routine, which is one of the reason I do so poorly with my writing when I’m going through big transitions. Now that my life has evened out sufficiently after the wedding, move, and new/shifting jobs, I’ve formalized my schedule even more — it helps me not to feel like there’s no way I’ll ever get it “all done,” and so far, it’s increased my writing productivity. It looks like this:

Mondays – I blog here. (This has been a staple of my “schedule” for a while, since I noticed that if I didn’t have a set time to do it, I wasn’t very good about posting regularly to my blog.)

Tuesdays – Every other Tuesday, I write for Young Adult Catholics. I used to cross post links to everything I wrote there, but I haven’t been as good about that lately. My most recent posts have been about praying at work and Natural Family Planning (The NFP post is currently the “top post” for the blog).

Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday – I work on my fiction. For now, that’s my Rumplestiltskin retelling.

Friday – I buckle down and work on studying my craft, preferably for two to four hours. This includes reading my back issues of Writers Digest and The Writer, reading books helpful to my writing, and working through the training modules on Scribendi (available to editors only). Currently, I’m reading Self-Promotion for Introverts by Nancy Ancowitz, in hopes that it will help me feel more comfortable with book promotion.

Thursdays I usually don’t write at all because I spend four hours traveling and eight hours working.

So far, I’m finding that the schedule makes me more productive. I think it’s partly because I thrive under routine, but also that it lends a sense of urgency to my writing, especially when it comes to my fiction. I’m worst about procrastinating when it comes to fiction writing because there’s no immediate audience and because it demands the most creative energy from me. But I want to finish my Rumplestiltskin revisions, and knowing now that I only have three days a week to do that (four when I’m on an  “off” week for the YAC blog) is a great motivator. It reminds me of how people often, paradoxically, get the most done when they’re most busy. The most busy I’ve probably ever been was the summer before I went to college, when I was working three jobs to save up money for a trip to Disney World. A lot of things suffered during that time (probably most of all my mental health), but my writing didn’t — because I knew that one hour in the morning before I left for work was the ONLY time I’d get for writing all day — and I took it.

And I like that this gives all my different writing “muscles” regular exercise. Since it’s a Monday, I’m blogging here — but since it’s also a holiday, I plan to do a little bit of fiction writing and development, too. My husband is devoting the day to working on his website, so I have a long, uninterrupted alone stretch spreading out ahead of me. I wish I could spend the whole day writing, but I should probably pay some bills and get caught up on email, too. Still, writing first!