It Doesn’t Look Like Work

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It doesn’t.

And sometimes, it’s not. I have times when I really should be writing, but instead am, say, on Pottermore (SkyNettle11176, Gryffindor, 14 1/2 inch Holly with Phoenix feather reasonably supple).

My husband knows when I’m slacking, and so does my agent and writing group. They’re also the only people who know when I’m working so hard my eyes are bleeding.  The rest of the time…writing is something that people know I do, but they don’t know (or care) when. Only my close friends really understand why I’m such a crap mate. I don’t have time to remember birthdays properly. I hardly have time to remember my shoes. When I’m on a roll, I’m leaving parties just as everyone else arrives. I’m saying goodbye and thanks for dinners when I’m still swallowing my dessert.

For something that doesn’t look like work, and sometimes isn’t, it sure takes up an awful lot of time and thought.

I think, really, that I’m working all the time. But I don’t think, really, that anyone is going to believe me…

The Wild Inside

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Here I am, playing with the puppy after my writing time. He’s learning that if he hangs out with me while I write, we’ll play after I’m done. He may look little…but he’s got very sharp teeth. As he lay on his back today, biting at his nylabone as I teased it in and out the reach of those teeth, I had a thought. I thought of all the people who had done the same thing, over the years, with their puppies. And then I thought back, to what it must have been like when dogs were new things, and it was a bit of a chance to try and domesticate them.

I imagined a young man, teasing a bone in and out of his wolfish puppy’s mouth and looking, as I did, at those strong jaws and long canines. I thought of how valuable a dog would be to him, as a hunting aid and as protection. But what a gamble it must have been…with wolf packs waiting to welcome the dog back, it was a huge investment of time and trouble for what could turn into either a waste or a danger.

And I thought, too, of how soppy my Labrador will probably grow to be. He’s not going to do much hunting – we’re vegetarians. Will he even be able to recognise when we need protection? It’s a delicate balance, wanting a wolf-like creature, but not wanting them too wolf-like…just wolf-like enough.

Inside me, too, is a hungry wild thing. It is intensely ambitious. It burns in my stomach and beats on my heart. It wants to explode stories into being, it wants to hurl them at the stars. It’s not easy, sometimes, to do the crafting of the work, to make it fetch and carry the reader through, to make it polite and follow the rules.

I don’t want it to be wild, and go off into the woods and be useless. But I don’t want to civilise it too much, either. When no one is looking, I sharpen its teeth.

It Comes Back

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Where does the writing go, when it leaves us? It does leave us, that’s for certain. Some days, weeks, months, years even, we can’t write a word. We sit and wish for it, and nothing happens; and if we force it, dreadful things drip out of the printer…things we wouldn’t let a dog see, let alone our agents or editors or writing friends.

Perhaps there’s only so much writing that can be done at once on the planet, and we have to share it around. Or maybe we need those fallow times, those yearning years, in order to do the work when it comes back to us.

It does come back.

I’m writing this at Easter, on Good Friday, that great dark Christian feast of the slain man-god. Today is all about being reviled and rejected. Today is about being found wanting, and no-one coming to help you, and being spindled and thrown away.

But it’s also about faith.

I have no idea why we have to go through the dark days of want and worry. But I do know one thing…the writing will come back. Believe in it and in yourself; and watch, and wait.

 Here’s Some Easter Inspiration – Click here to listen

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Running it Out

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It’s nearly midnight and I really should be asleep. There’s no guarantee the new puppy will sleep through the night and I have (of course) lots to do tomorrow. But I wanted to share something with you before I close my eyes.

I just finished watching Moneyball, a very good baseball film. We watch lots of baseball films in our house…and we have quite a little baseball library, too. 

I love baseball. There’s something about the moment where one person is under the falling ball/batting with the bases loaded/pitching for the last out.  If he catches it/gets a hit/strikes out the batter, he’s a hero. If not, he’s a total schmuck. It reminds me an awful lot of the writing life. Sooner or later it comes down to that…you and the great game. Will you score, or will you strike out? 

I was too terrible at baseball to play softball in the long American summer breaks, but I had to play in school. Our PE teacher soon learned to frisk my glove for books. He was always urging us to run out every ball. I was placed far in the outfield, where my total absence of athleticism could do the least damage, but even so, a hit ball sometimes trickled my way. ‘Run for it!’ he’d scream.

Honestly. The other fielders were way faster than I was and could actually throw the ball once they’d caught it. Running after a ball I knew I couldn’t throw and taking it away from worthier teamates seemed stupid . 

‘Why didn’t you run out the ball?’ the red-faced coach would demand. 

‘I didn’t think I could catch it.’

‘Try! Run out every ball, even if you don’t think you’ll win it. One time you will, and it will all be worth it.’ I can see the poor man now, labouring to explain the concept. In vain, I’m afraid. I never, to my knowledge, ran out a ball. 

That said, have a look at this Martha Graham quotation. 

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action; and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. You must keep that channel open. It is not for you to determine how good it is, nor how valuable. Nor how it compares with other expressions. It is for you to keep it yours, clearly and directly.

If that’s not running out every ball, I don’t know what is. I might not have listened to my poor PE teacher on the baseball field, but I certainly have taken his wisdom on board in my creative work. 

Get in the habit of keeping the channel open and doing your work the best you can. Run out every ball, even the ones you don’t think you can catch. One day, you’ll surprise yourself and feel it hitting the palm of your glove. 

 

A Change Will Do You Good

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There are some things about being a writer I really love. First of all, and as you know, I love not having to get dressed in order to do it. I love BEING a writer; I went onto campus for a quick meeting and was running late and couldn’t find my sandals, so I went barefoot. Nobody blinked an eye; writers are allowed eccentricities. And, perhaps best of all, you can write anywhere. Including, on a day like this; the garden, which is where this week’s photo is set.

With me, but stubbornly refusing to be in shot, is my writing companion, Dotty the cat.

Big changes are about to happen to Dotty, though she doesn’t know it yet. Tonight, the new puppy comes home. A labrador.

Well, she’s been having territorial problems and our garden and house have been invaded so often that she’s had to go on antidepressants, to stop her from grooming off all her fur. The dog will keep her company while we’re gone and also will protect her from invaders. But I don’t think she’ll realise that when the puppy arrives this evening.

It’s hard to recognise when we need to change. Yesterday I talked to three writers who didn’t really want to change; either what they were writing, or how they were writing it, or how they thought about it. And it’s true that you can only change things so much before you lose the reason you wanted to write something in the first place; but I don’t think that’s the only reason we resist changing our writing.

I think we fear the death of something we’ve created – even if it’s only a phrase we love that everyone else thinks we should cut. There’s a little death in every change; but there’s a little death in every growth, too. The seeds I plant this week will have to die in order to make a plant; if they remain seeds, they’ll die anyway, from rot. The writer who wrote The Saint Who Loved Me is no longer with us – the me I was ten years ago, before I had my daughter, is gone. But that writer could never have written Drawing Together.

Often the changes we resist are the changes we know we need to make. Having a friend or an agent or editor tell us that we need to change something doesn’t feel like news, it feels like a finger pressing on a bruise. We know…we know all too well that it needs changing. We know so much it hurts.

Today, I’m asking you to push yourself a little harder to try and change something you know needs it badly. After all, another wonderful thing about writing is that you can always change it back.

Want some help from Mimi with your own writing project? Click here…

Get Into the Groove

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I’ve been reading a dog training manual. I’ve been reading it as if it is the sole text on which I am to be examined for an life-changing certificate of achievement. It is 8 days until the puppy arrives and I am already starting to change my daily routines, to leave time for letting him out in the morning and for Andy to do the morning walk. I’m already planning to go to my office for two/three hours five times a week, rather than for six/eight hours twice a week.

Babies, whether human or canine, like routine. So does your writing.

When you set a regular writing time, something magical happens. All the ideas that come to you randomly (while in the middle of a busy supermarket, or just as you are about to pick up a friend to go out to dinner) begin to come to you during your writing time. It’s as if your muse learns when you will be available, and begins saving itself for when it has your full attention.

This means that your word count goes up; meaning that you have more to work with and to edit. You also begin to enjoy your writing time more;  because it’s not quite so painfully slow, it feels more like play. And all this means that you can finish earlier, and give yourself more time to, say, walk the dog, or go to the movies, or make something delicious to eat.  Your writing begins to work better in your life, then.

I’m not the first writer or writing coach to tell you this, I’ll bet. Flaubert advised being ‘regular and bourgeoise’ in your daily habits, Dorathea Brande talks about this extensively in her seminal 1930’s writing guide, and Stephen King, in his wonderful On Writing also encourages it. I think the reason we sometimes hold back is that we are culturally conditioned to think that regular writing is somehow of less value than spontaneous writing. If this is your fear, consider the words of Peter DeVries, ‘I only write when I’m inspired, and I make sure I’m inspired every morning at 9am.’

When’s the next time you’ll engage with your creative practice?

And Crash! The Spinning Plates Did Fall

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My whole life is a balancing act: work/family, faith/doubt, writer/teacher, writer/friend, writer/mother (I think I’ve already said that one). I’m just about to get a dog, so soon I can feel guilty about not spending enough time with the cat, as well.

But in the contemporary world of letters, there’s another kind of balancing act – creating/promoting.

You may notice (at least I HOPE you noticed) that I’ve been gone awhile. That’s because time has been particularly crunched lately. In the last four weeks, I’ve externally examined for three universities, spent two weeks in the American Midwest, attended a wedding in Wales, hosted my writing group/ a dinner party/and my long-term guest, and did my various volunteer roles. Plus my job and writing my book and looking after my daughter.

Something had to give – and it was my outward-facing authorial dialogue with the world.  Much better to ease up on promotion than not to have anything to promote. The writing has to come first! I did the MA with someone who was so good at self-promotion that I thought, at one point, she was going to land an agent before she’d written a word. But she never did actually write her book…

I wish I had her talent at that…but I don’t. And when time gets particularly tight; when the plates are all falling off my spinning sticks, I still have to find time to write one sentence. And then another. And then another. And then another 500 or so.

Hope all is well with your creative work. And now that my houseguest is gone home, the marking is caught up and the chapter is off to the printer, I’ll see you soon.

 

On The Road – AWP Chicago

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I”m in Chicago. AWP, the Association of Writing Programmes, is about to start and I’ll be presenting there and minding Bath Spa’s stall. We’ve got a fabulous new low residency PhD we want to tell everyone about.

I’ll also be meeting and greeting, and chatting up colleagues, editors, other writers, other academics and various other kinds of interesting humans. The idea is to get up early so that I can write a bit, too, but there’s an awful lot of parties to get through. I’ll do my best and I’ll sneak away sometimes, too.

Most of my colleagues are either single or male… In the first case, they don’t have all that many domestic responsibilities and in the second case, they don’t have all that many domestic responsibilities. None of the other people coming are primary care-givers for their children. For them, trying to write during AWP is an insane goal…like trying to stay sober during AWP. 

But I gave up alcohol for Lent and I give up writing time nearly every day. This is a chance for me to pull all nighters, not in the hotel bar, but at my desktop. So far, with the train journey and this morning, I’m 4,000 plus to the better, and have rewritten all my lost data.

I’ll let you know how the week goes. 

Adventures In Data Loss

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It’s not easy, sitting still and not looking while a nine-year-old paints your face. She’s not overly careful around the eye area and she tends to drip a bit… You have to just breathe out, close your eyes and enjoy the ride.

I’m not one of those Americans that thinks ‘it’s all good.’ I think the relentless positivism we’ve been asked to assume over the past few decades is actually harmful. Cancer patients that don’t get better can feel they’ve not been thinking the right way, or praying hard enough…people can be exploited and not have the language in which to express anger with the conditions in which they work… However, I don’t think there’s any point in being miserable, either. Sometimes you just can’t control things, or you let things slip out of your control.

I have a whole little lecture I give about data storage, about how to save daily iterations of your novel and how to back it up weekly both on a data key and by emailing the files to yourself. But, like anyone else, when I get terribly busy, I sometimes get lax. This week I lost 5,ooo words of my new book.

It happens.

It happened before computers. Hemingway’s wife was bringing his stories to him, as a nice surprise, when she left them on the train. Hemingway was still mourning those stories, some twenty years later, as the best things he’d written.

But I’m not so sure. My 5K took me through some very difficult technical things; another shift in time for the entire main section of the novel… a shift in my narrator’s voice, as she recalls things from two years earlier…an explanation as to how and why her community lives the way it does…  I’m dreading trying to write it again. It might very well be worse. But it might be better, too.

And anyway, I didn’t sign up to this kind of life with the idea that I would have everything under my own control. I became a writer, much like I sat down for my face painting, in a spirit of adventure.  I think my face turned out fine, for an evening at home making pizza. I think my writing life is more interesting and exciting than if I’d kept doing jobs I didn’t like. Hang on, we’re still moving, and who knows where we’ll go…

Here’s a soundtrack for the blog, since it’s Friday night. Click to hear it. Hope you like it…

 

For more about positivism and the harm it can do, read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Brightsided. 

 

A Bit About Failure and Rejection

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Here I am at my most vulnerable. No, not because it’s the first thing in the morning and I’m not wearing makeup. And not because I haven’t yet got up and found my dressing gown. Because I have a book going out to publishers.

Right now, people will be reading my work and deciding if they ‘love it enough’ to read the rest. Some will but some, inevitably, will decide they don’t…

Writers have to deal with rejection. If you write seriously, you have to come to terms with failure. You will, nearly always, and almost completely guaranteed, fail with your writing. You may start something and not finish it. You may finish it but not like it. You might like it, but not get an agent to like it. Your agent might like it, but no publishers do. One publisher might like it and give you a measly advance or maybe several publishers will like it and you’ll get a large advance…but not get good reviews. Or maybe you’ll get great reviews, but not win that year’s big prize. Or maybe you WILL win that year’s big prize, but you don’t get a movie deal. Or the movie never gets made. Or it does get made, but it doesn’t get good reviews. Or the movie gets great reviews but it doesn’t win an Oscar. Or it wins an Oscar but everyone says that the book it was based on was rubbish…

There is no end to the ways in which writers can fail.

Right now, in the MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, students are competing for the Janklow-Nesbit prize. It’s a prestigious award that can start a writer’s career with a catapult. And the ones who haven’t been shortlisted feel as if they’ve failed. They haven’t even BEGUN to truly fail as writers…that takes years…

And what if all this failure makes you stop writing fiction? Rachael Bloom was on the MA a few years ago, writing about a subject very close to her heart. Her novel never did do what she’d hoped, and, eventually, she founded a charity about the subject; the Rhett Syndrome Research Trust UK. It’s an amazing charity that has raised money for ground-breaking research. Rachael uses her writing skills in fundraising, pr, marketing, etc. There may soon be a cure for this dehabilitating disease that strikes women and girls, thanks to Rachael. Some failure, eh?