Writing

It’s just occured to me that my joint professions are arguably two of the most aggravating in the world.

By day, I teach elementary school. Listen to some people and you’ll think this is a dream job — six hour work days, heaps of vacation time, and no “real work” to speak of. Ask those same people why they aren’t teachers if it’s such a dream job, and the atmosphere shifts in a hurry. There are days — such as today — when I sit at my desk with a head cold, my throat swollen so I can barely swallow, let alone speak, 20 kids shouting in the background, a pile of lessons I’m supposed to be teaching but can’t as they require my voice, and the knowledge that — in spite of the fact the kids are gone as of lunch time — I’ll be here until at least 5:00. These are the days when teaching, to put it bluntly, sucks.

But it’s not enough for me to teach, oh no. I have to be a writer too. So after my (ha ha, six hour) work day, I’ll be rushing home to finish editing a freelance article and try to find some more work.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

I was thinking about this last week (and again right now, thankfully after the kids have left, as I wallow in silence and take a break for lunch). Why do I teach? That’s a subject for another strand. So why, then, do I write?

1. It’s a compulsion. It’s a sickness, much like obsessive compulsive disorder or schizophrenia. I know it’s not helping my stress levels, but I’m compelled to do it. Every time I stop, I find myself plucking away at the keyboard again, or better yet writing stories in my head as I go about my daily life. My favourite is when I start narrating my own movements (eg: She walked to the front of the classroom, head pounding, wishing she’d stayed in bed).

I used to think I was crazy, but I’ve since discovered I’m not alone in this. And so my new theory: writers write. If you’re a writer, whether or not the world happens to agree with your categorization of yourself, you write, whether you want to or not. Plain and simple.

2. Creative people in general are prone to depression and insecurity. Now, I’m aware that this is a huge generalization, but I’m also aware it applies to virtually every artist (in any form) I’ve ever know, and I’ve known my share. The end result is that as a writer, I crave recognition — not so much fame and fortune, but just a steady stream of people telling me that I don’t suck.

3. It’s an outlet. Words are safe. They contain your anger, your fear, even your joy — emotions you feel so strongly you’re afraid they may consume you or, if you let them spill over into the world, someone else. (I can just imagine my frustration and aggravation with my elementary class emerging from my eyes as a giant dragon, stomping around munching children while I look on in horror). But you channel these things into words, and all of a sudden these emotions aren’t dangerous anymore — in fact, they can make you smile, laugh, or shake your head. They have been contained.

4. Another generalization: artists have that touch of craziness that refuses to lie down. We don’t know when to quit. And it’s a good thing too — how many stories are floating around out there of famous writers who faced hundreds of rejections before finding their niches? (Sometimes I wonder about those hundreds of publishing houses. If they even remember the name, I bet they kick themselves every time they hear this). Writers have that combination of insecurity and sheer bravado that keeps them pushing on, even as they doubt themselves and their abilities. I think that’s why I love talking to writers so much — we all go through such extreme ups and downs, but we feel them. We never stop feeling them.

You know, it’s sometimes a cold and cynical world out there. And like everyone else, I question what I do. But when I sit down and let the words flow to the page, I suddenly realize how very lucky I am to have this gift of writing — and the insanity to pursue it.

Now I just have to figure out why I teach….

CARYN
http://www.carynscorner.bravehost.com

I’m the author of four teen novels. Over the last few years I’ve spent countless hours pouring over my computer, trying to create the next “perfect story,” hoping it will become remotely successful in sales. I have managed to do that to an extent. I haven’t become rich and famous with my work, but I have sold copies and have had a lot of positive feedback from readers who have enjoyed my books. That I think has merit.

For all of you struggling writers out there, I know what you are going through. In today’s publishing world, it is tougher than ever to become noticed. In fact, it is getting to be almost an impossible task. Without the representation of an agent, the chances of having your book published by a big name company, is nil. Statistics have shown that 98% of all manuscripts go unread or are tossed in the slush pile. So why bother writing at all? I have asked myself this question countless times, and always come up with the same answer, because I enjoy it.

Through my experiences as a writer, I have faced many challenges in this business. I have strived to find that “perfect publisher,” who will bring my book to life and hopefully create some sales. With four novels published and another in the works, I continually keep my prospects open. I know without an agent, the chances of me hitting it big someday is bleak. I often wonder if I should broaden my horizons and look for someone to represent me? An agent might be the answer, but finding the right one is another difficult task. With so many to choose from, a person must do your homework to make sure they are legitimate. That might not be so easy if you’re working alone. One website I have found to be helpful is, the Preditors and Editors page. They list alphabetically the good and the bad companies in this business, with an explanation as to why you shouldn’t deal with them. This has been a tremendous help to me. Even though finding an agent might be the answer, it’s just as difficult to have one represent you, as it is to be published with a big name company.

So is there really a light at the end of the tunnel? I certainly hope so. In the meantime, I will continue to write my books, submit them to smaller publishers, and make my meager living, until the day I feel brave enough to take that next big step.

www.freewebs.com/csrichard

Write a love letter to someone you care about (doesn’t have to be romantic). If you prefer, you can write it from the point of view of one of your characters. (From Writer’s Digest website for the week of 2-13-07).

Remember - this is a “warm up” exercise. Your writing does not have to be perfect; heck, it doesn’t even have to be spell-checked. Just start writing with the prompt in mine and see where it takes you. Try to write for at least 15 minutes.

The prompt for today was to write about an aspect of your life that is less than remarkable. (Idea from The Pocket Muse by Monica Wood)

I have become so accustomed to what I see on my commute from my home in the country to town where I work, I don’t see it as remarkable at all.

I live in a sparsely populated region and, consequently, I spend a lot of time driving. Granted, driving 20 miles one-way to town for work takes (depending on the weather conditions) less than 15 minutes if you know the roads to take. Most people would kill for my commute, but it really does get boring driving the same empty roads day in and day out.

The road I usually take to town was once the main highway through the state. Sadly, it has been all but abandoned to the counties to maintain, which means it has been mostly abandoned. Riddled with potholes, cracks and heaved asphalt, most of my drive to town is spent making sure I don’t wreck my pickup’s suspension, bend a rim or blow a tire. Driving under the speed limit would help, but I am usually in a hurry and no one is around to slow me down anyway.

Only about five miles from my house on this old highway is a tiny hamlet (population maybe 20 souls) with a +100-year-old school (still in operation), post office, and a bar/café/gas station/general store. I slow down to the posted speed limit when I drive through, out of respect for the residents – besides, if I did not slow down and someone saw me zipping through town, they would tell everyone I am related to or know. That is worse than a speeding ticket from a HP.

As I drive through to the other side of the little “town” I pass by a house and barn…then another house and barn…then a huge cattle operation with a house and barn tucked back behind a small rise. All three houses and barns belong to my husband’s uncles. All have cattle. All have horses. One has sheep and chickens. My husband comes from a long line of cattle ranchers. Cow people. Horse people. I am not so sure about the sheep and chickens. Those are probably 4-H projects of grandkids.

When I am not paying too close of attention to the road, the fields on either side are something to look at in any season. Now, covered in snow, there are snowmobile and 4-wheeler tracks in most of the ditches. But if one looks close, and I have, one can see fox, raccoon, partridge, coyote, pheasant, rabbit, and deer. In fact, the deer population is huge this year for some reason. Herds of 20 to 200 deer wander around harvested, snowed-over corn and barley fields scrounging for breakfast. Many times the deer are on the road, more often than not, the loser of a tangle with a car or truck.

All that and I am only about halfway to town.

Write about something you consider a “less than remarkable” aspect of your life in the comments or link to your blog or website so we can read about it.

I have often agonized over my lower-middle class status as uninteresting, uninspiring, and un-story like. In fact, I have walked away from writing for long periods because I felt I had nothing important or original to say. I have stifled my writing, my voice, my creativity because I was afraid I was not good enough. As is often the case, I am wrong because even the most mundane can be ‘good.’ Case in point: Tillie Olsen’s “As I Stand Here Ironing.” Talk about a mundane start to something far from mundane.

As a teacher (in a past life), I often felt as Mr. Sedaris eloquently expressed here:

“My students were middle-class kids who were ashamed of their background. They felt like unless they grew up in poverty, they had nothing to write about…I felt sorry for these kids, that they thought their whole past was absolutely worthless because it was less than remarkable.” – David Sedaris, from an interview in January Magazine.

Write about a less-than-remarkable aspect of your life. (From The Pocket Muse by Monica Wood)

So much for posting on Friday. Getting back into the habit of writing on a regular basis can be difficult – at least it is for me. It did feel good to login and just write for the 15 minutes, though, today. I need to remember how that feels and try harder to keep tapping away at the lappie until – how does that go? I just do it.

The writing prompt from the other day stayed with the ‘senses’ working with the sense of sound. Here is my response – it took me about 20 minutes and I still have more I’d like to explore when writing about sound. Remember, the responses to these writing prompts can be raw lists of thoughts, random blather or whatever comes to mind.

Lately, I prefer silence – or the absence of sound. After spending as much time as I do in a noisy, busy office, then going home to a noisy, chaos-fueled home, a little “absence of sound” is very much welcome.

I thought for a long time about this post over the weekend, and if I had to choose a sound to write about, I think I would choose the sound of snow. Snow has a sound; you just have to listen carefully for it.

Dogs and horses running through snow sounds muffled – underwater, almost – like the sound has to push through unaccustomed density. Even my old dog, who will be 11 this summer, takes on a puppy-like attitude, shoving her face deeper and deeper into the snow to sniff whatever is under there, then comes up licking her chops and goes back for more. She leaps from snow bank to snow bank – fwumph-fwumph-fwumph – as if she has never experienced snow before and is surprised something so clean and white could be that cold.

Snow falling in wind has a sound, too. It swirls and dances, creating waves and drifts in the yard. Piles itself into frosting-on-a-cake peaks and valleys adorning barns and fences and trees.

Snow falling on the roof of my house – if there is enough of it – is insulating, at least in my mind. With a heavy layer of snow curving over the eaves, banking up under windows, blocking doors – I feel as though we should hibernate. Turn off the TV, the radio, the computer, the lights – and sit quietly, as though a seed buried just below the earth’s surface, covered in snow – and wait for spring.

If I could, I would listen to the snow fall all day. And I can. It has not stopped snowing since Friday night.

When I think of writing I always envision the actual process of putting words to paper. The blinking cursor on the screen followed by a trail of letters and the steady click of the keys, as my fingers dance in rhythm with the mind running full gallop across the bounds of my imagination. Writing birthed by words.

However, like any birth, the process doesn’t actually begin there. Rarely have I ever just sat down at my desk, opened a document and started typing. An idea has to be on fire (usually too fearful of being lost) for me to be able to skip the ritualized process of consulting the muses and heading straight to print. And did I mention my muses require romancing?

Enter the other arts, stage left please. They all affect the way I write. The actor whose voice and mannerisms I just can’t seem to shake, the book which encouraged me to not only enter their world, but to create my own, and the artist whose painting not only inspired a background but left a palette for my mind to play with. Yet no other art medium can touch me the way music can. Of all the arts, it is the workhorse I rely upon.

Music has become part of the birth process, propelling me forward into the labyrinth where writer and story merge. With it I can manipulate my mood, allowing access to a variety of emotions within seconds. It also has the ability to heighten my focus, forcing the muse to dance, and dance some more with the tiny flick of the continuous play button. Not to mention the benefit of sound keeping other distractions at bay.

When sitting down at my desk selecting my musical accompaniment is the first step of my process. I then open the document and let the pages breathe. The cursor needs time to blink while I play a game of computer solitaire. (Or a few. Some may call this procrastination. I call it getting into the right mindset.) Once my mind has turned into the appropriate amount of mush and the cursor appears good and mad, blinking with such taunting insolence that I feel I have no choice but to silence it with the continual rush of keystrokes, the story swallows me. The process is then complete.

Let’s stay with the senses as a prompt for writing. This time write about a sound. Use onomatopoeia, adjectives, adverbs, etc. to convey what the sound means to you or what you think of when you hear it. Try to write for at least 15 minutes.

(Provided my daughter is released from the hospital this afternoon, I should be back yet today to post. Post your response to the prompt in the comments or leave a link.)

Regardless of what is going on, remember to write. It helps.

The prompt for the other day was taken from creativewritingprompts.com:

“Describe how you feel right now using your sense of smell. If you feel frustrated, write about what your frustration smells like. Use vivid words. Don’t skimp on adjectives.”

Since right now I am sitting next to my daughter’s hospital bed, I can tell you I “smell” all kinds of things – and yes, many of them are frustrating. My 7-year-old daughter has influenza and because I was unable to get her temperature down and keep it down over the past few days, my friend and medical professional at our local clinic sent us to the hospital, “toots sweet.”

I smell antiseptic, floor wax, antibacterial soap, urine and freshly laundered bedding – and while separately, each has their own distinct smell and evokes their own set of memories or emotions, the combination is sickening. Hospitals are supposed to be about healing and recovery, but because my first memory of a hospital was of my grandmother’s death when I was seven, I think I always connect that memory with the smell.

Hospitals all smell scarily similar regardless of location. I have been in several different hospitals for a variety of reasons – some of them for my own personal health – and I have never been able to get around the smell of a hospital.

I am exhausted – completely sleep deprived as I have sat up for the past three nights with my daughter as she coughed, wheezed, and barfed her way to the dehydrated point of no return. Her little veins were so shriveled from lack of fluids that it took four needle sticks, two different nurses and finally the experienced hand of a veteran anesthesiologist to tap a vein that did not collapse with a prick of a needle.

My daughter is sleeping now – her fever has subsided, broken under repeated bombings of Tylenol, Motrin, IV fluids, antibiotics and whatever else can be pushed through the needle in her arm. When I reach over to check her forehead, it is finally cool to the touch – and I can smell, although faintly, the menthol and eucalyptus smell of the Vicks Vapor Rub I used to help ease her labored breathing.

The only smell that is anywhere near redeeming is the bouquet of yellow and white daisies with baby’s breath in a yellow smiley-face mug. They smell like springtime. If hope has a smell, fresh flowers and spring would be it.

Getting back into a writing “groove” after taking a few days off can be frustrating, so let’s write about frustration. The writing prompt for today is taken from creativewritingprompts.com. It is number 9 on that web page:

“Describe how you feel right now using your sense of smell. If you feel frustrated, write about what your frustration smells like. Use vivid words. Don’t skimp on adjectives.”

Remember – this is a warm up exercise. It should not be “perfect,” whatever that is. Just write whatever comes to mind for at least 15 minutes using the prompt. Good luck – and I’ll be back to post mine later!

The writing prompt from the weekend was to write two lists: one of beautiful things and one of ugly things. Here are mine:

Beautiful
Smiling children
Sleeping children
Running horses
Deer in the trees
Snow on the prairie
The smell of wood smoke
The smell of impending rain/storm
White twinkle lights at Christmas time
The first crocus of spring
Fall leaves
An eagle soaring on wind currents

Ugly
Butchering
Abandoned/falling down houses
Waiting rooms (hospital, clinic, etc.)
Sickness
Dirty dishes
War
The smell of dead animal (decay)
My messy desk
Dirty foot prints on a clean floor
Dying trees

What did you come up with for beautiful and ugly lists?

Sometimes my life gets in the way of my writing. Time slips away - projects take longer than expected, phone calls interrupt, family and friends require care and feeding - and somehow days go by without spending any time on what I love (and sometimes hate): writing.

That is what happened to me this weekend. Mentally, I composed my lists (one for beauty, one for ugly) from the writing prompt for the weekend, but I never managed to get online to post them.

But in the famous words of Dr. Phil: That’s O.K. (He wasn’t talking about writing, but it applies.)

And it is ok to walk away from writing for a while and live life. I hadn’t planned to walk away, but I did. And I’m glad I did, even though getting back in the habit of writing every day will be difficult. So I’m behind a little on my writing “assignments.” So what? There’s nothing like a little pressure and a deadline to get the creative muses fired up again, right?

I’ll post my lists tomorrow and get back on track with writing prompts for this week. I hope you had a great weekend - and unlike me, found the time to Write Anyway!

For the weekend, let’s change things up a little. Instead of paragraphs or poetry, let’s make a couple of lists. In the first, list things you believe are beautiful. In the second, things you believe are ugly. You do not have to explain why; it just has to be true to you. Try to come up with at least 10 items in each list. More is better, of course.

(I will be back over the weekend at some point to post my lists. I am going to use them in the future as “writing topics.” I suggest you do the same.)

The writing prompt for Write Anyway is from “The Writing Fix – Prompt Generator”. The objective is to take the topic and write for at least 20 minutes. What did you come up with? My response is below:

“What made them so interesting? Remember a unique classmate from your past. Write about him/her.”

I grew up in a very small town and graduated from a high school that – the year I graduated – was declining in enrollment (my class had 123 graduates – I don’t think there has been a bigger class in the last 10+years). The town and high school were small enough that any “new arrivals” of families and students was a big deal.

Fresh blood, if you get me.

The year I was a junior, a new student arrived. He was stunning. Tall, athletic build. Chiseled features. Glossy raven-black hair. Dark skin. Chocolate-brown eyes. The first day of school, he looked like he stepped off the cover of GQ magazine. (My lands, did they KNOW to but Jake on the cover?) Add those qualities to an intelligent mind with an artistic flair and most of the girls in the high school were ready to dump their boyfriend (even if he was the starting quarterback) just to go to the Homecoming dance on his arm.

The term “man-candy” was invented with this guy in mind.

He played football. He wrote poetry. He mixed well with the gear-heads and the jocks (which was rare). He was a talented artist (charcoal was his favorite medium). He had a true heart and was loyal to his girlfriend ‘back home’ and no matter how pretty the girl was who mistakenly thought she could tempt him away from her; he was steadfast in his faithfulness to his girlfriend.

I had a terrible crush on him.

The first few months of school that year I watched several of my classmates make complete idiots of themselves trying to date him.

In English literature class, the teacher paired us up (to this day I don’t know why she did that) to read and analyze “The Tell-Tale Heart.” He was even more handsome close up, and though I knew he was unavailable, my heart would skip beats every time he would look me in the eyes. I felt like he was staring deep into my soul and seeing me – the real me. That sounds corny and trite, but at the time, no boy had ever looked at me in a way that made me feel more feminine, smart, sexy, and confident. He did, somehow, and I liked the way it made me feel.

We became friends. We were not close friends, but when we had classes together, we conspired to work together on projects. In art classes, we tried to sit next to each other so we could bounce ideas off each other. When the PE classes went co-ed, we finagled to get on the same team or be partners.

I had made a new friend who set the standard for any man I dated after getting to know him. (This friend from high school is probably is the reason I eventually married the man I did.) And I think he sought me out because I was not out to break up his relationship with his sweetheart back home.

After graduation, I lost track of him. Every now and then, I wonder what happened to him. In my heart, I hope he went home to his girlfriend, became an artist, and raised sons to be just like him.

I miss him.

The writing prompt for tomorrow is from The Writing Fix - Prompt Generator.

“What made them so interesting? Remember a unique classmate from your past. Write about him/her.”

Try to write for at least 20 minutes. Remember - this does not have to be polished, perfect prose. Just write, even if the words stumble about or your mind wanders away from the topic. Write Anyway!

(I’ll be back tomorrow to post my response to the prompt. See you then!)