Last week, while on vacation, I spent one mid-morning watching tv with my younger two children. They channel-surfed between PBS, the Disney Channel, and the Cartoon Network with the navigation of a highly trained professional. I was extremely impressed with their efficient use of commercial time to 1) find other shows not on commercial break, 2) sharpen their persuasive skills for toys they just had to have (toys that, conveniently, were being advertised at the same time), or 3) declare their absolute state of starvation, only to be remedied by the resumption of colorful characters bouncing around the screen, resolving this and that.

One show, though, struck me as having a rather thoughtful script writer. I am going to guess that it was Clifford, the Big Red Dog, but I cannot be certain. The main storyline was this: well-balanced happy Character A kept a journal, while not-as-happy Character B did not. Character B stole a peek at Character B’s journal and was mortified by what she read. Offended and upset, she shunned her friend for most of the show.

When the show reached the final showdown between A and B, happy Character A calmly explained that journal writing was good for so many things, but it was never meant for anybody else’s eyes. Character A said (and I paraphrase loosely): writing is a way of cleansing the mind and clearing the path for understanding. It’s not that what is written is the truth in another person’s eyes, or even my eyes, for that matter. It is the pathway to the truth. To interpret it literally is, quite honestly, impossible.

And then Character A suggested to B that she try it; it might help her better understand the powers of writing.

To imagine all of this was promoted in a show about a big red dog! Bravo, anonymous script writer. Bravo.

In nearly every workshop or presentation I give on writing, I ask my participants if they write daily. The responses, for the most part, fall into three categories:

• I don’t have time
• I don’t have anything to write about
• I don’t want others to read what I am writing

Now, these responses are from people who have chosen to take my workshops. There is initiative there to make a change; my heart shudders when I think about all of the people out there who believe so deeply in one of these three reasons that they don’t even venture out to see what this writing “thing” is all about.

I Don’t Have Time

I am always surprised by how much time I make for myself when there is desire or motivation to do something. The key is to stop looking for that big block of time that you might have once had when you were younger and responsible for little more than making your own breakfast and making your own bed. Big blocks of anything don’t exist in my life; I’ve stopped believing that great things will happen only if I had those big blocks. Instead, I piece my time together, and throughout the day it accumulates. Get up an hour earlier to write. Carry around a small notebook (Moleskine makes great little notebooks that slip in a shirt pocket, but an index card works just as well). Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way) suggests that you make a date with yourself at least twice a week, at 2-hour clips, to write, among other things. Time exists for things that matter to you; if you want to write, then write. It’s that simple.

I Don’t Have Anything To Write About

You are blessed with a unique set of eyes with which you see this world, a mind to interpret what you see, and a heart to feel the good as much as the bad. The combination of those three makes you like no other human being, alive or dead, and therefore gives you the right to shout out what you see, think, and feel. We sell ourselves short by thinking we do not lead extraordinary lives, but our very existence is extraordinary. When my father died in 1989, I bought my mother a journal and encouraged her to write through the pain and the hurt. She resisted at first, struggling with what to write about. She kept thinking there was some audience beyond herself that she needed to impress. Once she started writing for no one but her, she could not stop. She lived for 18 years after my father died, and she filled twice as many journals in that time. She wanted me to take care of them and, someday, cull the deeper thoughts and “do something” with them. When I started reading through her words, I discovered the depth of her love for family, her thoughts on politics, and her strong belief in living fully for the day. My mother was once a cafeteria worker, a mother of five, a widow, and a shopaholic. It didn’t stop her from viewing the world in a wonderfully unique way. Once she discovered that she didn’t have to worry about impressing anybody, she wrote authentically.

I Don’t Want Others To Read What I’m Writing

Believe me, like the character on Clifford, none of us do. Reading other people’s journal writing makes no sense, because it’s not meant for anybody but the writer. It is raw, unpolished, imperfect, experimental, parenthetical, extreme, ridiculous, among about a thousand other things. Leonardo da Vinci wrote backwards to discourage peeping journal readers. Others have resorted to codes, symbols, and hieroglyphs to ensure nobody reads their thoughts. I don’t worry about it. The benefits far outweigh the risks. Just keep the journal close to you, and surround yourself with people who respect you (and your writing). Encourage them to write as well. You might want to take the time to explain to your loved ones who might be tempted to steal a peek that you are not writing about them, or about their lives. You’re writing about yours, and for that reason alone, you ask that they respect your privacy.

We all find ourselves in situations where we want to do things but don’t follow through. I suggest you do this: go out and buy the cheapest spiral notebook you can find (most places have them for 25 cents or less in their back-to-school sales) and write about why you don’t write. Make that date with yourself and put the pen to the pulp. Write to an audience of one–yourself–and give yourself the right and the opportunity to rip those pages out and throw them away when your date is over. Chances are you won’t, but make the promise anyway. The important thing is to write–just for you.

Earlier this month I picked up Shady Grove by Jerry Garcia and David Grisman, a 13-track compilation of acoustic folk songs and ballads that Jerry and David did between 1990 and 1995. A few days ago, I heard Jerry and David do “Bag’s Groove, Take 1″ on the Dead channel on Sirius Radio, and they took me to new levels with a certain spirit and soul that seeped through the speakers and spoke to me. There was a real depth to what they were doing, and I could sense that their playing was something more than two guys getting together to strum guitars and banjos and mandolins. A purpose existed for this music.

I was right. When I bought Shady Grove, I immediately turned to the liner notes, and John Cohen, one of the original members of the New Lost City Ramblers, wrote poignantly about the passion each had for the ballad, the folk song that captured a deeper, more genuine spirit of the traditions of American music. On separate coasts in the early sixties, Jerry and David pursued relentlessly that soul of America.

This got me thinking. What do I pursue?

Some of us pursue the origins of our ancestry; others pursue our collections, ranging from Dead concerts to stamps to first editions; still others pursue that return to innocence, our spiritual births, our origins of balance. More than a few psychologists have professed that we live our adult lives striving to return to our Querencia, or home, the place that brings us complete and unconditional comfort and the feeling of invincibility.

I wonder if Thoreau had this last group in mind when he wrote about the “masses of men leading lives of quiet desperation” in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” from his Walden collection of essays.

I can probably say that any one of these (except for the collecting of stamps) fits me to some extent, at various times in my life/year/month/day/moment. But that’s just the problem. I flit back and forth between them so frequently that none of them get the attention necessary to sustain momentum, growth, progress toward that specific pursuit.

That’s why I feel pretty good about the choices I’ve made this new year. I’m pursuing the yoga and the walking with an ever-strong pace that is strengthening with each passing day, where I can say I was committed to this small choice. And there’s this virtual walk I’m planning for this spring/summer; that will be fun.

But is that enough? Maybe I am the desperate man Thoreau speaks of when I believe that I should be pursuing something greater, something nobler.

I dig deep, deep down inside of me to see what I pursue. . . .

Remove the road blocks, the obstacles, the lesson plans and endless (but wonderful) family commitments, and I’m left with this:

I pursue the absolute, pure expression, through writing and various art media, of who I am as an artist, as an individual, so that I may leave my mark on the world as I witnessed it, lived it, wished it to be.

I write this with confidence because I had a piece of writing rejected recently, and at first, I was upset about the rejection. The feedback was that the work of fiction “crossed over” into the nonfiction genre and made it too essay-ish. Initially, I thought about how I might change it, what I might do to make it more amenable to this specific audience. In other words: what can I do to satisfy my audience?

I’ve written previously that the good writer is sensitive to her audience and needs to consider what is expected of the piece. But we can’t apply that general statement to all writing. In my work with developing the concept of the metalogical writer, I’ve created a graphic where the focus of the piece can shift to the author, the audience, or the piece itself. As authors, we decide what is best for our piece.

If you were to graph out all of my published works, I am sure you’ll find that the large majority of them were for somebody else, some audience I whored myself to with my writing. Very, very few of the pieces I’ve had published were Pure Rus: uncensored, with a focus on me and a style that I wanted for that particular piece for my particular reasons. These are the pieces that were written with what I would call “artistic intent,” where the artist knows her voice so well that she isn’t afraid to use it, even if it goes against the mainstream genres. When we do this with intent–use our voice and select our form–we need to make critical decisions about how far we will compromise our gift to give the masses what they say they want.

This rejection made me smile. I write for me first now. There was undeniable “artistic intent” when I wrote that piece, simply because that is the style I chose to connect with my readers. So now, I’m going back to Cold Rock and a few other pieces, revise the parts that I think need work, and then publish it. I’m no longer compromising who I am as an artist for the sake of giving the masses more of what they are already getting.

If I can’t pursue my individuality in this fog of conformity, then what’s the sense of writing anything at all? If I can’t claim my voice, my soul in my work, what’s the difference between these pieces and the work I’ve whored in the past?

Really, folks. Pursue you. Whether it’s in your photography, your yoga, your writing, your anything: pursue you fully in all that you do. It’s the only way to let the world know that you were really here at all.

Well, well, well. Much to share.

Finished reading A Simple Plan. I think I mentioned that in an earlier entry. I bring this up again because I am thrilled with what I learned from Scott Smith’s style. Concise. Powerful. Each word matters.

More than that, though, I realized something about Story. You gotta want it, man. You really got to get into the type and work from the inside out. It’s the only way to make your writing Pop. What I mean, I guess, is this: There can be nothing driving but the story. You aren’t writing for an audience (at least not directly), you aren’t writing to win a contest, you aren’t even writing to publish.

You’re writing to bring some thing to life vibrantly, vividly, using 26 letters in black ink on white paper. Talk about your challenge of a lifetime. And you get only one chance. How else can you do it if you’re not inside the story, inside the pen, in the ink, on the page, shouting out to your reader, “You are simply not going to believe this. But I swear. I swear to God. This is the absolute truth, even if none of it ever happened.”

(my humble thanks to the great Chief Bromden for that last thought…)

I know, I know. It’s all contradicting everything I’ve always taught and believed, but it’s true. If you write to bring that story to life and use all the elements at your fingertips–I mean really use them, then all those other things: audience, awards, and publications–they’ll come to you anyway. And if they don’t now, they will when you’re dead, when they realize just how genuine and passionate and ahead of it all you really were.
So that’s why I call this Revisions and Re-Visions. Last night, near midnight, I was on the elliptical trainer at the gym, and the rewrites to my book Cold Rock came to me somewhere around mile 2. Great stuff, I believe (but nobody but my buddy SK will hear of it; I think I’ve reached the point where I need to talk less and write more).

The rewrites focus on the majors: character development, stronger plot, reality-driven. I’ve already started. I’m shooting to wrap up the rewrite by the end of December. Then we’ll see where it stands. I have a good feeling, though, that by adopting this inside-out process, I’m going to make it Pop.

The other Revision–or re-vision, is simply about my own renegotiations with what my vision is in living fully and balancing my writing and my teaching and my photography. It’s who I am. Like I was mentioning to one of my friends yesterday at school, you have to let your art out. You have to be in love with what you do all the time.

You got to live life from the inside out. Just like I got to write about it. . . .

It really is that simple. Now if we could only convince ourselves of it.

Those of us who are writing novels or blogging daily in the month of November are facing the home stretch; many of us are being asked many of the same questions, so I thought that I’d address some of them here…

Q: Will you finish?

A: Of course we will. It’s what we do, we crazy writers. We set a goal to write 50K in one month, and we do it. We never said it was going to be pretty (although some great things do happen when you write 50K in one “sitting”).

Q: Is any of it good?

A: It’s all good, if you ask me. It’s a vomit draft, and therefore it serves its purpose to have words on a page to work with. This activity, this exercise in writing, is making the clay–lots of clay–to spend a whole year molding into something worthy of sending off for representation.

Q: What happens after you finish?

A: You take a breather–at least I do. Last year, I took off two weeks before I just had to jump back in and start working with what I had just written. Some people take a longer break. I think that there is another nationally sponsored revision month (maybe March) where you spend a certain number of hours in the month revising what you wrote in November. I can’t wait that long. It took me a full year to revise Cold Rock, which was last year’s Nano creation.

Q: What’s this final week going to look like for you?

A: It’s going to look a lot like the screen on my laptop. Virtually every possible minute will be spent on this draft to make sure I make the November 30 deadline. That means night time sleeps turn into short naps whenever absolutely necessary. It means lots and lots of coffee and very little sugar (causes too many quick crashes, which is devastating for any artist). It means I send my internal editor on a week-long trip to the Bahamas so that he doesn’t try and stop me from finishing.

In a nutshell, it means insanity.

And I love every minute of it.

:)

Now that “In the Living Years” is published and off the docket, my plate has been cleared to finish the final revisions to Journey to Cold Rock, the novel I wrote last November during Nanowrimo. I wanted to finish it much earlier in the year and have it sent off (and under contract, and published, and bringing in tons of money in royalty checks…), but alas, that was just not meant to be (thanks in large part to the “Living Years” piece–but that’s okay….it needed to be written, at that time, in that way…). I do want to finish it, though, before October 1, when I start gearing up for the big Nano Show in November….

So I’m now immersed in rewriting the climax, where the protag needs to be more aggressive in taking ownership in dealing with his past. The challenge has been in merging the old text (which, for the most part, I love) with the new (which gives the protag more control over his destiny). I don’t want to delete too much of the old, but I have to let go of some of it to make the scene work effectively.

Which leads me to this:

Yesterday, during a 5-hour workshop in cultural proficiency, I was sharing with a great friend of mine (KC) what this experience has been like working on this final scene. I drew (I always draw diagrams when I talk—God be with you if we ever go out for a drink…) a circle inside of a circle, and inside of that circle, I drew a bold dot. In my mind, I was thinking, bullseye, center of the zone, the core.
“That,” I said to KC, is where I was last night as I was revising Cold Rock.”

She looked at the diagram and said, “You were the sun?”

And that was just when I had one of those moments where the world washes over you in a giant watercolor brushstroke, and find yourself on somebody else’s canvas.

“The sun?” I asked. “You mean, like the big bright ball in the sky?”

“Yeah. Center of the solar system. All that.”

I looked back to the diagram and saw it. Last night, I was the sun. I could not have been closer to the core of the origin of creativity and of life. She was right.

I then focused on the circles around the sun, and I started identifying the planets by their rotation around the sun (this, though, required a little help from our in-house astronomer), and KC asked:

“So where are you now?”

How perfect was this analogy? I looked at the diagram one more time.

“Oh, I’m definitely venus right now. Definitely.”

She smiled, and I knew that we had stumbled on what I am certain will be a most brilliant and long-lasting analogy that will be so overly used by yours truly for weeks, months, oh hell, YEARS to come.

me :)

oh–and just in case you are wondering….I’m mercury right now!