Category: writing life (Page 1 of 16)

Creative Writing: Week Two

April 9, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I told them that input could be whatever they wanted, so I have to refrain from being judgy about their choices, but after looking over their input logs from the first week, I think it might be time to talk about high-quality input versus low-quality input.

It’s a tricky subject because it reminds me too much of the snobbish position that certain kinds of literature are better than others, that comic books and video games are worthless, that pulp literature and Hollywood movies are for the unwashed masses, etc. etc. All that elitist crap.

I’m a “more/and” kind of person. A “yes” person. I like liking things, to quote Abed. And for too long, science fiction and fantasy were looked down on as “lesser-than” by the literary establishment, and I don’t want to contribute to that kind of judgment, a judgment more often born out of snobbery and cliquishness than actual merit and quality.

But. But, but, but…

There are certainly artistic avenues and byways my students could be exploring that they aren’t, and if they did explore those byways, they might find them rewarding and much more satisfying than what they are reading/watching/listening to right now.

I’m tempted, therefore, to maybe give them more required reading/viewing/listening/etc. Not a lot, but a few assignments each week that they have to engage with. “Read X by Wednesday and we’ll talk about it in class.” That kind of thing.

Yeah, I’m backtracking a little from what I said at the beginning of the term, but I think/hope it will help them see that it’s not about which art is “good” and which is “bad” so much as it’s a question of whether the art I’m inputting is expanding my life as a writer or limiting it. If it’s limiting/narrowing/same-old-same-old, then what’s the point? A kind of familiar numbness? The comfort of hearing my old notions parroted back to me? Inertia?

Or is it that they don’t know what else is out there? If I’m going to assign better input experiences for them, then I need to meet them where they are. Maybe something like the book recommendations John Warner does? They give me a list of their last five input experiences and I put together a list of five more to explore that are of a potentially better quality. It’s worth a shot.

We’ll be watching Richard Linklater’s School of Rock in Week Three, partially because I want to introduce the concept of going back and exploring the influences of those who influence you.

I feel like I’m only in Week Two and the year is almost over. These quarter-long classes we do at my school just don’t feel like enough time, especially this fourth quarter with senioritis hitting hard and Easter and all the random days off and schedule changes. There’s SO MUCH we could be doing in this Creative Writing class. If I am going to teach it next year, I’ll need to scale back my ambitions for the class considerably. At the moment, there’s too much I want to do and no time in which to do it.

I need to repeat my mantra from the beginning of the year: “Slow learning.”

We don’t have to do it all. We can leave a few chips on the table. We can do less. We can go deeper on the things that matter for us right now, not some predetermined schedule.

I need to remember that. I’m building a space for them to write creatively and develop ideas and skills. It takes time to build that space, and maybe we only start to build it together, and it’s up to each student to finish building it on her own (or with each other, after the last bell has rung on the school year).

Whenever I want to do too much, I end up regretting it.

For now, we’re looking at input. Better quality. Exploring influences. Finding the good stuff that will expand your imagination. Leaving the stuff that limits you.

I’ll go down this road with the students until I feel like we’ve gotten what we need. Then we’ll move on. Maybe that’s by the end of Week Three, maybe it’s by the end of Week Four. Maybe we stay on this for the rest of the school year — IF it’s yielding fruit and helping us all grow.

Otherwise, we can keep going down the road: going slow, but going beyond the surface of things.

The “Morning Routine” is cliche at this point, but it still works

April 3, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I hesitate to write about morning routines because I feel like at this point, all the gurus have spoken (often annoyingly), it’s gotten cliche to spout off about how important one’s morning routine is, and we’ve heard the advice ad nauseam so what more is there to say?

And yet, I have been thinking once again about why I’ve been floundering since mid-December, and the answer is crystal clear: It’s my faltering morning routine.

From early August until the end of November, my morning routine had been relatively steady (I even managed a modified version of it while visiting family over the Thanksgiving holiday), and even though my writing output wasn’t huge in that span, I was writing consistently and enjoyably. Life was in balance.

Then December hit, Christmas prepping and end-of-semester-grading took over my life, and the morning routine was decimated. I tried to get back on track in January, but to no avail. I couldn’t get to bed on time, and in the morning, sleep felt more important than writing, so I would snooze until it was time to get my kids ready for school.

And now, here I am in April, and I’m grumbling about how out of sync I feel, how paltry my creative output has been, and how, frankly, depressed I’m getting.

It’s the lack of a morning routine!

I’ve known it the whole time, but for some reason I had convinced myself that perhaps my life was too unpredictable to commit to a regular morning routine and I’d be better off sneaking my writing in whenever I could, doing my art whenever the small snatches of time presented themselves. Planning didn’t seem to be working, so I would be more spontaneous.

But spontaneous is just another word for not getting shit done. Without a rhythm, without a routine, I never was able to find those snatches of time. My output nosedived.

Here’s the thing: it wasn’t that planning didn’t work. It was that I had given up on committing to the plan. I wanted my sleep (I still do, of course). And I figured it was too hard to get to bed at 10:00 p.m. My life wouldn’t let me. I had to face reality. Blah, blah, blah.

But what I was facing wasn’t reality. It was my own resignation in the face of a challenge. I had given up and soothed myself by saying it was pragmatism.

It wasn’t pragmatism. It was a reluctance to make changes. To turn off the screens and go to bed even if there were other things I wanted to do. The real reality is that we have to make choices, and from December to April, I had been making the choice to stay up later and not wake up early to do my morning routine. This was a choice I was making. I didn’t have to read one more online article after 9:00 p.m., but I did. I didn’t have to watch a second episode of that TV show, but I did. I didn’t have to put off my paper-grading all day so that I had a stack of them to grade at night, but I did.

These were choices. They still are choices I must face each and every day. But if I want to establish my morning routine again, then I must make different choices. Some things, yes, are always out of our control. I can’t control when my child has a nightmare and needs me to sit with him in his bedroom. I can’t control those nights when we get home late from visiting family and I have to stay up late to make the lunches and wash dishes.

But on typical nights, those normal nights when I have more control over my choices and time, I can start making the choice for the morning routine — the routine that gives my life balance and structure and health — over the choice for one more episode, one more article, one more paper to grade.

If it’s at all interesting to others, my morning routine consists of waking up at 6:00 a.m. and immediately doing stretches in bed to help with my back problems and muscle stiffness. Then I get up, drink a glass of water and take vitamins, and then begin walking around the house for exercise. While I walk, I usually pray. If it’s light enough outside, I might walk outside, but usually it’s too dark for that.

After my walk and prayer time, I do my Julia Cameron-style morning pages in my notebook, and then I do some creative writing, either fiction or nonfiction or poetry, whatever feels right and I’m most excited about.

By this time, I have to get ready for work, so I shower, pack the kids’ lunches, eat breakfast, and head to work with enough time to grade papers for thirty minutes before my first class period starts.

This is the ideal morning routine for me. In this three-hour span, I’m able to exercise, pray, reflect, write creatively, eat breakfast, and make progress on my teaching job, so that by 9:00 a.m., I have accomplished all the important things I need to accomplish for the day related to my health, my spiritual life, my art, and my job.

After 9:00 a.m., if I’ve done my morning routine, whatever else gets accomplished throughout the day, I can feel good knowing I did the things I needed to do to make myself feel whole.

Maybe some of the gurus would say my routine is too ambitious, and that’s why I fell off the wagon.

Maybe.

But over the years, I’ve trained myself to become more and more of a morning person, and as I get older, I know that by the time the afternoon hits, I’m too tired both physically and mentally to be effective at my creative work. The best time for me is the morning. Before the day has had a chance to drain me. So I need to get several things done in the morning because my health, my spiritual life, my art, and my job are all things I need to keep in balance for an ordered, satisfying life.

And if that means I need to wake up at 5:30 a.m. and go to bed at 9:30 p.m., then maybe I need to start making the choices that will allow me to do that. But it all comes down to choices, to what I value, and where I focus my time.

Not everything is under my control. Life will have bumps and setbacks.

But the morning routine — for me, at least — really does work as a tool and structure for making my art. I’ve noticed a huge plummet of happiness and artistic fulfillment since I floundered in my morning routine. And in just the past two days, since I’ve been trying to reestablish that routine, I’ve noticed a huge upswing in my mood and ability to get creative work done.

Reminding myself that the morning routine really does work, and that it’s worth making different choices at night, may be cliche to write about, but I wouldn’t have had the energy or time to write this blog post without my morning routine.

I’ll take the cliche every time if it means I get to make my art again and keep myself whole.

Creative Writing: Week One

March 24, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I’m teaching a Creative Writing class for the first time in several years, and this week was our first week. I’ve got fourteen students — high school kids — and we started the week watching a movie, coloring, and eating candy (an idea I blatantly stole from Lynda Barry... sorry for being a thief, Professor Lynda!).

It was great, though. Super chill. Fun and relaxing. A big part of this class is about having fun and being playful, so watching a movie and coloring felt very playful and kid-like. These are teenagers, so sometimes they want to act grown-up and mature and be sophisticated adults, but there’s also this yearning for childhood and play and fun (something often sorely missing from their busy, over-stuffed lives), so by giving them permission to have fun, to be a kid again, to be silly and do something “just because,” I’ve (hopefully) given them permission to also be creative.

We talked a bit about what it means to be creative, and my biggest message on this is that creative means “to create,” so any time they are making something, they are being creative. Doesn’t have to be “original” or “special” or even “good.” Just has to be making something.

What that something is, I’m leaving up to them.

(One student asked if she could make jam every week, and I said, “Um… okay? But maybe write, like, a poem and stick it on the label?” It is a creative WRITING class after all; I feel like some writing should be in there somewhere…)

We also spent some time decorating our writing notebooks and choosing “guardian spirits” (via Austin Kleon), and I told them they had to do some “input” every day and that a big chunk of their grade will be based on how much input they take in week after week.

Input includes reading poetry, fiction, non-fiction, essays, comics, watching movies/TV, listening to music, looking at art, and having new experiences. When I told them they had permission to watch a bunch of movies this week and count it as their “homework” for my class, they all got very excited and couldn’t believe their luck. I also got very excited. I can’t wait for them to spend their week watching movies and getting ideas and having fun.

I’m very big on fun these days. We take things too seriously, acting as if writing stories or reading books or making art is some kind of excruciating task that tortures us. If reading a book is torture, you’re doing it wrong. And if writing something that came out of your imagination is laborious and unfun, then also: doing it wrong. This is art, kiddos. Not work.

So, we spent some time talking about how to have fun, and then I tried to do things all week that were fun. We went on walks. We listened to Japanese soul music from the 1970s. We made blackout poetry. We spent an entire class period inputting things into our brains: some students watched a movie, others read novels and poetry. I too read a book during that time, and listened to some synthwave music.

Their assignment this weekend is to keep doing their input, everyday. I’ll check their input logs on Monday.

I also asked them to spend thirty minutes to an hour doing some idea-generating. I gave them a list of twenty different activities to try, including playing the “What If?” game, making a list of titles, and listening to music to see what images and ideas flow from the songs.

In some ways, you could look at this first week and say, “She didn’t teach them anything! They just goofed around!”

And you’d be right. We did goof around. We did silly things. Playful things. Fun things. I gave them some advice about writing, but mostly, we just played. Because if they’re going to be writing creatively, they must first be playful. They must first be given permission to have fun. It’s a permission they were craving.

This first week was the giving-permission week: “Yes, you can play. Yes, you can laugh. Yes, you can make jam.” (Just maybe make a poem or a clever line to go with it.)

Going forward, we’ll learn some craft; we’ll learn techniques. I’ll give them prompts and exercises. But I’ll also continue to give them space and time and permission to have fun.

Don’t Call It a Resolution

January 4, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I’m hoping to blog more in 2024. I have an idea for a series of posts about board games, and since this term I’m teaching British Lit, Short Fiction (which will mostly entail reading short SFF stories with my students), and Creative Writing, I figure I’ll have a few things to say about writing, literature, and the fantastical as it pertains to my work in the classroom.

For Brit Lit this semester, my focus is on monsters. We’ll start with Beowulf, then The Tempest (and perhaps A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth too), and finally Shelley’s Frankenstein. What makes something a monster? Are monsters made or born? How does our idea of the monstrous change over time?

Mostly I wanted to teach these three texts, so I created a driving question to link them all. But mostly, I just wanted to read them with my students. I’m curious to see their reactions, especially for Beowulf, which is always a harder sell in an all-girls school. I mean, I’m a woman and I love Beowulf, but when I’ve taught it to young women in the past, it’s been a mixed reaction. The only major female character is a monstrous fen-hag, and the other women in the story serve as peacemakers and such (to solidify alliances and end blood-feuds), so I get why for some of the young women I teach, there’s not much to engage them.

But I’m hoping some of them will come to love the action, the world-building, and the overall spirit of the poem. I myself read it in high school (part of it anyway), and I’ve loved Beowulf ever since.

I’m not making any kind of resolution to blog everyday or anything. Not that such a goal is bad; I’ve attempted every-day blogging before and it was great. But I can’t meet such a challenge this year, nor do I really want to. I’m more focused on staying consistent with my fiction writing and increasing my word count in that realm. But I still like blogging and don’t want it falling dormant. Thus, my commitment to a more regular blogging habit for 2024.

Maybe once a week? Maybe once every two weeks? Maybe several times a week? I don’t have firm plans as of yet. I’m waiting to see how these first few weeks of January shake out, how much time I can actually find to blog more frequently, and how easy it is to find topics to write about. As I mentioned earlier, I have plans, but maybe those plans aren’t tenable. Time will tell.

One of my biggest goals/ambitions for this new year, on a personal level, is to finally start playing more of the board games and role-playing games that adorn my shelves. We have an entire closet filled with board games we’ve (mostly) never played. This is so frustrating! I LOVE board games, and yet here in my very house there languishes a collection of sundry entertainments and diversions of which I have never availed myself. This is madness!

I plan to correct such mismanagement by taking one game out each week and learning to play it. I may play it with husband or friends, or I may play solo, but either way, I’m committing myself to playing the board games in my house. Carpe diem and all that.

I’m going to try blogging about the games too; I just need a snappy name to call this “regular” feature. (I have “The Things That Shaped Me” feature which I should also get back to, but maybe I’ll call my board game excursion “Cabinet of Curiosities” or something of that sort… which I know is already a tag on my blog, but this will just make it more official.)

Anyway, I’m not calling any of this a “resolution.” I make New Year’s resolutions, and I’ve already made a few in other realms of my life for 2024, so I’m not opposed to resolutions in general. But I’m not making a blogging resolution this year. Nothing that firm. This blogging commitment is more of a New Year’s inclination. An urge to blog more. Let’s see how it shakes out.

Working Writer

November 14, 2023 / / 0 Comments

I chose this title on purpose because “working writer” could mean a writer who makes her financial living AS a writer (which is probably the most common way we use the term), or it could mean a writer who has to work a different job to pay the bills (I’ll admit, this interpretation is my own invention). There’s the “working writer” and there’s the writer who works (another job).

A recent article in Esquire raised the question of whether it’s ever been harder to make a living as a writer, specifically a writer who writes novels and/or fiction, and the answer, not surprisingly, is that yeah, it’s pretty hard these days. Most fiction writers don’t survive on their book advances or royalties and thus must take to writing for TV or holding down teaching jobs.

As always, these types of articles completely ignore independent publishing and fiction writers who forgo the traditional publishing world. Not that every indie writer makes a living from her writing either, but there are many who do, and they never seem to get much ink spilled about them in these trad-focused think-pieces.

Despite this gaping hole, the article does raise some larger economic and even philosophical questions that I’ve been wrestling with myself for several years. It’s no secret that I quit my day job to become a freelance editor and author, and that the financial precariousness of that situation was something I didn’t find tenable for the short term (and maybe even the long term). It turns out, I happen to like getting a paycheck with regularity, and I like knowing that I can get health insurance without too much trouble either (though currently I’m on my husband’s insurance). I like knowing that I don’t have to write to survive. It takes a lot of pressure off the writing, keeping it fun and light. More play than work.

What struck me was a quote early on in the piece, from an author named Andrew Lipstein, who said, “‘If I’m not just supporting myself by writing, to those who don’t know the reality of it, it seems like it’s a failure in some way.'”

Yup.

See, if someone doesn’t support themselves with their art, then the wider world considers that a “failure.” We must monetize everything, apparently, and when we do, if we’re not making bank on it, then we’re somehow deficient in our talents and our art just isn’t very good. Money equals quality, obvs. If you’re only making coffee money on your art, then you’re a loser. That’s the message from our culture. We get it delivered from our earliest days when adults ask us as children what we “want to be when we grow up.” They mean our job, yo. What are we gonna do to pay the bills, and if we’re lucky, add some value to the world?

And listen, deep in my heart, if I could make a living from my writing, I’m not sure I would turn that down. I wrestle with the desire constantly. For one thing, I wouldn’t have to split myself in two (and three and four) to get all the things done I need and want to get done. Most days I’m split between teacher-self, writer-self, mom-self, wife-self, and human-with-a-body-and-a-house-self. If I could cut out one of those things, teacher-self would be the first on the chopping block. Not because I don’t enjoy teaching (I do at the moment), but because all those other things are non-negotiable. Yes, even writer. Without my art, I would not be whole. And my mom/wife/human self is just Who I Am. So teacher-self is the one optional thing, and thus, in a world in which I’m not worried about money, that would be the one to go.

But writer-self, as the Esquire article points out, is not as viable a way to pay the bills as other professions are. And while the article ignores indie publishing, I’ll say that even for indie authors, the vast majority of us don’t pay our bills with our writing either. So in that way, the article is right in the broad sense that writing fiction for a “living” is a hard row to hoe.

Still, the article’s obvious bias in favor of traditional publishing, and literary fiction in particular, obscures what could have been a much more nuanced and multilayered picture of what a “job” in writing fiction could and does mean in our current situation. It ignores pulp writers, and it ignores people who write and publish online at places like Substack or Royal Road. I don’t know all the ins and outs of such a picture and would’ve been curious to find out more. I’d like to know who exactly is making money from their fiction and how, and not just the MFA people who write for Hollywood, because that job is about as unlikely to me and the average fiction writer as is becoming the next George R.R. Martin.

What I hoped to learn from the piece was how ALL the myriad types of writers are trying to make ends meet and how the internet might be an asset or a hinderance (or at least a newer paradigm that shakes up the old world of publishing). We did get a bit about AI, and I have to say, AI flooding the market with books does concern me, even if those books right now aren’t very good (or violate copyright). And I appreciated the point about the Authors Guild not being able to collectively bargain. The fact that authors can’t unionize is shitty, and it just goes to show how our laws often make things harder for writers and artists to make a living with their work. The question of health insurance is another roadblock.

Still, I keep thinking about this idea of success being tied to income, and how my writing is only successful if I can monetize it and make a “living.” This is the mark of achievement. Any intrinsic value I might place on my art is meaningless in this framework, and if I can’t “cut it” as a working writer, then I’ve failed. That sense of failure lingers with me even as I’ve happily returned to teaching. Despite my happy return to the classroom, I still harbor dreams of making all my money from my books, and yet I continue to wonder if those dreams are coming from my heart or from what I’ve been socialized and conditioned to desire. Would I really be happier if I was a “working writer” as opposed to a writer who works?

The question is hard to disentangle from how we think about work and art and money. The fact that it’s so hard to “make it” as an artist says something about what our society values, and I’m afraid that message isn’t very comforting to those of us who want to make art.

Writing a poem with my students

November 11, 2023 / / 0 Comments

We took a rough draft poem and tried to add more imagery and stronger diction. This is what we came up with:

The wound of you
slices across my heart.
The gash runs deep and purple,
but eventually, it scabs over,
leaving a jagged scar and
a dull ache.

Will your loss kill me?

I’ve cried all my tears,
run dry like an empty desert.
My throat tightens, feels bloody.
Your memory gushes forth and
spills onto the starlit sand.
I lap it up, quenching my thirst,
savoring the sharp remnants
of you.

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