Monthly Archives: May 2011

Photo Courtesy of Yu Ting Wong at Flickr

There’s something so weird about baking with yeast.

Add it to a ball of flour, sugar, and warm water, and in a couple of hours that ball has grown to twice the size it was.  You have to wonder what prehistoric genius came up with the idea of breeding little microscopic creatures in their dough. It was probably a happy accident.

It’s strange to be cooking when part of the process is ensuring that one of your ingredients is alive and happy (at least for a little while).  If you’re the sort of baker that keeps a sour dough starter around (I actually have two starters percolating at the moment, one for sour dough bread, one for sweet “Amish Friendship Bread”)  the goo bubbles and fizzes and moves and grows, and now and then you toss a bit more stuff in there to “feed” the yeast, so that magic little bugger can keep breeding and growing.

Your little yeast goo pot becomes almost like a pet.  And when that pet goo has grown to sufficient size, you take some of the goo out and you add it to some more flour to make a dough and you’ve got something delicious. Then you feed the leftover goo – so it the yeast within can start breeding again.

The fermentation, the patience, the making sure to feed and nurture your goo, all of that adds to the flavor of the final product.  Writing, especially long-form writing, is a lot like that.  You have to feed your story. You have to keep it alive, like the tiny microscopic yeast in the sour dough starter. You have to provide it the right environment – the equivalent to a cool dry shelf or spot in the fridge – and the right kind of food in order for it to keep growing.

And when it’s ready, you end up with something delicious.

"Portrait of an Apple as a Young Man" by Michael Krigsman

I have the utmost respect for teachers.

You see, I know what they have to go through. I know what they have to put up with. I’ve been there.  I barely survived it.

It takes a special kind of strength to be a teacher. That’s something that I never quite realized when I  left school with my pretty English degrees in hand and a desire to live the romantic writer’s life – and of course, I could always teach until I got on my feet as a writer.

Not so much, as it happens.  Teenagers are scary.

And I tend to come off as a know-it-all without meaning to.  Even one-on-one, I don’t seem to have the right touch.  I am told that I start to talk to people like they’re stupid – when I don’t think they’re stupid at all.

No, teaching is not for me.  And yet, that is always the first comment I get when people  learn that I have a Master’s Degree in English:

“So, you’re a teacher?” or “So you want to teach?”

The truth is, I wish I could. I wish I had that sort of inner strength and patience (or outright tolerance for pain) that it takes to be a teacher. I’d have health insurance, which would be awesome. I’d be making roughly three times what I make now and actually not have to worry how I’d pay my car payment and buy groceries in the same week. Unfortunately, that job is just not for me.

But to all those teachers out there who can teach: You’re amazing superheroes, all.

Motivation (By Debbi Redpath Ohi at InkyGirl)

There’s this thing that happens to almost every writer I know.

It’s the inevitable confrontation with the person who thinks that writing should be an easy job or that you should get a different, better paying “real” job.

In my case, it’s my mom who calls with the prospective jobs and/or entrepreneurial opportunities that, if I actually took them, I would 1. End up broke and living off of her again; 2. End Up Miserable; 3. (likely as a result of #2) End Up Fired; or 4. End up locked in a rubber room somewhere because I don’t have time to write and writing keeps me sane.

I don’t resent this. My mom means well, and generally, she’s an awesome person and I wish I could be as awesome as she is.  But see . . . I have this “making ends meet” day job that is awesome for several reasons, namely:

1. My Boss Is Awesome.
2. My Boss is willing to deal with my (often quite severe) social anxiety problems. Said social anxiety problems have been a significant handicap in other jobs in the past, and I don’t particularly want to give up a job where they are not an issue. Because when they are an issue, it tends to lead to a pink slip.
3. As long as I get my work done, I am allowed to write in my spare time. Said writing occasionally leads to me making other money, doing the thing I consider my actual, you know, career.

The other person who will drive me crazy is my grandfather, who knows that I have a small handful of completed novels but can’t seem to understand why I’m not already raking in the big bucks.

“You’ve finished that novel? Why haven’t you made it into a book yet?”

I try to explain the process, that a completed novel doesn’t necessarily equate a novel ready for publication.  The finished novel still must be polished.  Then it must be sent to beta readers.  Then it must be polished again, with a finer grain of sand, perhaps, like a rock in a polisher.  Each time, it becomes shinier and more beautiful, but only once you’ve gotten it as shiny as you possibly can will you send it in to be set into a piece of jewelery.

And of course, at that point, it takes luck and perseverance.  You have to find an agent willing to take you on. That agent then has to find you a publisher.

But it is not instant, or easy.

It’s not just writers that come across this.  It seems to happen to all people who pursue a creative career, sometimes even after they have found success. I know at least one fairly successful artist friend who complains that her father is constantly after her to seek out a job designing art for advertisements. A “real” job.

Even those who are the most supportive of our creative careers can’t seem to wrap their mind around one particular thing:

Not Doing it is Not An Option.

I write because I can’t not write.  When I’m not writing, I become even less functional as a human being, which speaking for my usual state of “functional” is really saying something.  Writing quiets the little people who like to run around playing havoc in my brain so that I can concentrate a little better.  Writing makes the faerie on my shoulder shut the hell up.  Use whatever metaphor you want to use, but the simple fact of the matter is: I can’t not write if I want to continue to be.  And writing fiction as a career is all I’ve ever wanted to do and all I will ever want to do.

Everything else is just a paycheck, and if the paycheck can come from a source that can understand or at least put up with my personal brand of insanity, then I’m sure as hell not going to give that blessing up.

Image by freakgirl via Flickr

So. I’m 31 today.

It seems so surreal.  To be, you know, supposedly grown up and all.  I always thought that by now I’d have everything figured out.  Of course, I also thought I’d be a bestselling novelist and have all of that guaranteed success that everyone always seemed to promise me just because I was ridiculously intelligent, somewhat talented, and at least moderately attractive.

But you know, I’m sort of glad I haven’t got everything figured out yet – because if I had, what would I do for the next fifty or sixty years?  And if I’d been instantly successful with a normal job immediately after college, would I have the drive to write that I do now, or would writing stories have been pushed away and forgotten: something silly I did as a kid?

That’s one thing that being a bit hungry will do for you.  You have to be good, because you have to sell those stories, you have to win the bid for this editing contract. By gods you may not care one whit about the mating habits of the miniature purple-speckled fleebeedoo, but you’ll write the best damn article about it you can if that’s what is selling.  You need the money, and the only way you’ll get it is to be good at what you do. So you work hard and you hone your craft and you learn what you need to learn to get better.

Being a writer has always been my dream. And now here I am. A writer.

I’m also still very uncomfortable with this whole “adulthood” nonsense.  Sometimes that seems like one of those words that everyone uses, but no one really knows what it means.  There’s always this sense from some that it means you are “complete” somehow.  That it’s some mythical endpoint that you reach and you’re done with all the growing.  But you’re not. You keep growing, you keep learning, you keep on going down that road.  You’re never “complete.”

So, hello 31.  Nice to see you.  I haven’t figured everything out yet, but I might get there eventually, say, in another half century or so.  Maybe more.  Maybe never. I’m not grown up yet.  That’s not something you get to be until you cross the finish line. Until then, I think I’ll just sit back and enjoy the ride.

When I have an idea that I love wholeheartedly, and I first start applying words to the blank page, they come easily.  It’s almost a euphoric period of nonstop keyboard-clicking where I can average over 1000 words in an uninterrupted hour of work, where the characters cooperate, the path for the plot and any subplot threads are as clear as the markings on an interstate highway.

This is the honeymoon. Everything is perfect and new, the weather is balmy and tropical, the sex is great . . .

Then reality comes crashing in like a hurricane, obliterating the pavement and any road signs, getting your characters stuck in cement-like mud where they don’t do anything but get angry at you for letting them get into this state . . . the excitement of the new story disappears.

Sometimes it’s gone for good. This is generally a pretty good indication that your wonderful idea wasn’t so wonderful to begin with, especially if the honeymoon period breaks fairly early in the story.

But one of the first things I had to learn when I turned seriously toward writing as a career, and something that was learned only after finding myself sitting on a massive pile of uncompleted manuscripts, is that you can’t let go so easily. You can’t give up on a story just because the honeymoon is over.

First, you have to learn to distinguish between ideas that were weak to begin with and the ones that deserve to have you pick them up again.  Generally, for me, this is a distinction between reading over what I’ve written after a few days break and my inner critic exclaiming either:  “Oh gods, this is awful, I’ll never be a real writer” or  “Oh, I wrote that! I’m awesome! I’m gonna be a gazillionaire!”

Sometimes finding the excitement again can be as easy as scouring Google’s image search database to create a collage of images representing characters or settings.  (“Oooh, yeah, Phoebe would totally rock that outfit.” or “Oh, these woods are just how I imagined the forest behind Sam’s house!”)  Collages and artwork are, for me, the marital aides of fiction writing. But making the story feel sexy and exciting again doesn’t always work.

Sometimes it takes more effort. Sometimes you have to sit down and read and reread what you’ve written to find that magic highway of rainbows and glitter for your characters to travel. Sometimes you have to dig the holes and replant the signs, and sometimes you get those signs put back upside down.  Start writing again, and you’ll get there eventually.

Sometimes, in the worst cases,  I have to scrap everything but the initial idea and start over again.

But if the idea is strong enough, the excitement will return.

So what are your favorite ways of finding the excitement for your story again after the honeymoon period is over?