The Writer Pie

Yesterday, I went 12 rounds with Crohn's disease and lost badly. By 6:30, I climbed into bed with Dynamo Boy, who is now reading a bit . . . and he read me two books, and then I read him six books. I didn't make anyone dinner. My children foraged. I read this book in its entirety in three hours, which, I have to tell you, impressed Dynamo Boy. 'Cause, you know, 416 pages is a really high number. LOL! And sometime around 11:00, I fell asleep, certain in the knowledge that today I was going to wake up and it would hurt to breathe. Which . . . yeah, I was right.

So I woke up today, said prayers, did laundry, came down to blog, and now . . . have opened a work-in-progress . . . . and started grinning. And I also read this. Which pretty much sums it up.

I don't know what makes one person finish a book and another quit. Or one person do this pretty much every day of their life. I don't know why expressing myself in the written word still delights me, or why I like to tell stories. I don't know where my ideas come from--and presume that like having auto-immune disease, it's just how I arrived on the planet.

I do know that persistence is a part of the pie.

I constantly change my percentages above. [If you want to create your own pie chart, you can do it here.] There are days when I read a lot of really not-so-good writing when I think, "You know, you can't discount that talent thing." And there are days when I see someone work hard. Like her. And I know she has talent, but damn if hard work isn't a big part of it. And willingness to be open to evolving. There are times in my own critique group when I just SEE firsthand how it's a lot of work. And evolution. And Ah-ha moments!

But today, for me, it is persistence. I get up and do this even though I hurt, because it is what I do. And more than that, who I AM. Maybe my pie chart is all wrong. Maybe it should just be: Writer = 100%.

Thoughts?

Character

Massive ah-ha moment this morning at 6:36 a.m., courtesy of Genius.

It's only taken me, what? 1, 197 posts to figure it out.

You see, from the outset of this blog, my writing blog has really been my life blog. Long-time readers know I do not prepare these. I wake up, continue my affair with Mr. Coffee by lusting after the brewing pot, sit down . . . and write the first thing that pops into my head. It's a routine I have. Now, long-time readers will perhaps find it frightening that I THINK all this stuff before sunrise, but there you go.

But though I occasionally blog about a book I loved or about an author, or about something else, it's mostly about how I process the world as a writer. It's about how being a writer is part of your genetic code. It's who you are.

But Genius's post really got me thinking that writing is in a lot of ways about character. More than how you process the world, more than who you are creatively. If you persist, it says something about you. I love his post!

Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's courageous, or even particularly special. It's something I do, you do, lots of people do. But there is a certain persistence, belief, dreaming, determination, fierceness, faith, discipline . . . all of it that go into being a writer.

And maybe that is why my online friendships and my writing friendships are so dear to me. It's not just that they 'get" my eccentricities. It's that oftentimes, there are traits in those people that are familiar to me.

Thoughts?

A Simple Question

Writing.

Choice or calling?

Discuss.

**********


All right . . . I pondered this from yesterday's post and some general crabbiness yesterday over some editing stuff. There are days, simply, when writing is my job. It may be a job like yesterday, when I wear my slippers all day (and for the record, I went out for lunch in my slippers . . . because I can--I'm rebellious that way). It may be a job I commute precisely 8 seconds for. But it's a job. I field phone calls, I work, and have a "boss" (myself . . . though I also, ultimately, have editors and I am responsible to them too--therein lying my crabby moment yesterday). Some days . . . it feels like a job.

MOST days, it is a job I adore. When checks are late, when I am struggling with this or that . . . it's a job I do because, frankly, I don't think I am capable of working in an office anymore. It's been fourteen years. I am too set in my routine. I don't want to give up the slippers. So even on days when I think my job kind of sucks a teensy-weensy bit, I am grateful. Mostly.

But there is most definitely a quality about the job that people wax poetic about (we're writers after all). It is fate, what we are meant to do. People say they would collapse and die if they couldn't write. You know the drill. So . . . choice or calling?

For purposes of this debate . . . I was FULLY prepared to say "choice." [And just so we don't get hung up on that . . . we all CHOOSE . . . we have free will.] Until I looked up the definition of calling at Webster's.

1 : a strong inner impulse toward a particular course of action especially when accompanied by conviction of divine influence
2 : the vocation or profession in which one customarily engages

Okay, so I have number 2 down. And number 1? While I don't hear angel's choirs or anything . . . it is an impulse. A strong inner impulse. It's how I see the world. I see it as a writer.

Now I'll take this one step further . . . .

What about people who dabble? Can they ever do it like those for whom it might (or might not) be a calling? Is there something about the "divinity" of it that demands your soul?

Okay . . . discuss.

Nothing

Today, I woke up in giddy delirium. I have nothing to do.

Oh, don't get me wrong. My to-do list is immense. I need to switch out all the children's and my summer clothes for winter (I believe given the freezing, damp week we have had, that any hopes of a return of warm weather have vanished), assemble two sets of bookshelves, clean Demon Baby's room, vacuum upstairs and down, and assorted other housework . . . but I don't have to GO anywhere. I don't have to dress beyond my furry slippers, yoga pants, and sweatshirt. I don't even have to brush my hair. I can plop down with a cup of coffee and . . . write (in between household chores). No children need to be taken anywhere. Though I do have to put up with the whining patient who is now well enough to be bored but not well enough to go out in this weather (for any non-Facebook friends, I spent all of Thursday with one sick child at the hospital).

And that's how I know. I'm a writer. Because given the choice between . . . well, you name it--the sky's the limit--on a RARE "nothing" day . . . I would rather spend it in fictional worlds with fictional people, making stuff up . . . than anything else. I am sure I will play "restaurant" with Demon Baby. I am sure I will putter.

But in the end, I have a date with some characters. And nothing makes me happier.

Thoughts?

Traits

When I was 22 and in my first writers' group, I considered, in order of importance (from most important to least) these to be the most essential characteristics of a writer:

Talent
Intelligence
Imagination
Life experiences
Intellectual curiosity
Work ethic

Because I was not particularly interested in being published, what didn't make the list were any traits like persistence, or self-belief. I wrote. I sometimes shared. That was it.

When I was 32 and just starting to get published, I had a whole new perspective. I would have ranked the traits as:

Imagination
Talent
Work ethic
Life experiences
Intellectual curiosity
Persistence

Twenty+ books later, it's a whole new world in how I view it. Here we go today:

Openness (to growth and learning)
Humility (goes hand in hand with number one)
Drive (replace work ethic, but similar--the reason I call it drive is my work ethic is dictated sometimes by a Demon Baby and motherhood of 4)
Talent
Intellectual curiosity
Flexibility
Persistence

I see now that growth comes from humility, which comes from working at it enough so that you have something to work ON as you learn . . . .

Some of this stuff can't truly be quantified or ranked. But my views have definitely changed. I used to think I could peg the people who wouldn't make it by their lack of drive. Now I can see that you can be as driven as you want, but if you don't stop for teachable moments, you're just trying to drive a piece of useless machinery.

I also know a LOT of people rank talent way lower on the food chain and feel persistence makes up for that. I don't. I have read too much stuff, much of it bad, to not realize talent is part of equation. Note that I don't think it means you have to be the next Hemingway. Just a servicable amount of talent is fine. The more, the better . . . but it's an ingredient.

So . . . how do you rank 'em today? And if you want . . . share how your rankings have changed over the years?

Empty

So I was in D.C. overnight from Friday to Saturday. I spent all day Friday alone, in the National Gallery with iPod headphones on to discourage anyone from talking to me. I toured all the exhibits with my own personal soundtrack. First Vivaldi. Then the soundtrack to Once. Then the soundtrack to Road to Perdition.

And I thought of nothing. I emptied myself exhibit to exhibit, almost physically letting everything go. I WAS the music and the paintings and the sculpture. I went and saw dozens of Degas statues. I looked at Warhol. I walked through an installation about boundaries.

And when all was said and done, without any effort, I resolved the final plot point in Magickeepers II. I outlined the rest of the book (due this week). I wrote in pen in a notebook--words and plot points and snatches of dialogue--and everything came full circle.

Until I was empty.

That's what Oldest calls in when she plays violin and "leaves it all" in the practice room, lingering there on the Steinway piano, on the music stand. In the walls. She leaves it all there, I suppose, all her stress and angst and anything else.

When she picked me up from the train, we talked about it. I mentioned to her that I read a fabulous article on Terry Gilliam in the new Vanity Fair. The article is acutally about Heath Ledger, but it is the brilliant Gilliam who frames the story of Ledger's last days. The brilliant director whose art is so often misunderstood in Hollywood.

And I wonder . . . do people who aren't poets and writers and filmmakers and musicians get this? Oldest thinks not. When you create art you inherently give a tiny piece of yourself away. Lingering on the page or the practice room, this intimacy with audience. Does someone feel with way after a long day balancing the books or selling insurance?

I don't know. But I know that there is something about creating art or music or words . . . that empties the artist.

I try to leave it all on the page.
Thoughts?

Feet to Floor

I have shared before that for a year after Demon Baby's birth, the doctors thought I had M.S. In fact, had they been a betting lot, I think they would have put money on it. I would sometimes lie in bed and forget that I had it. And then I would get up and put my feet on the floor and collapse. It was that simple. I couldn't feel the floor, and what I could feel was this vague buzzing in my feet, like pins and needles, only worse.

For a year, I lived hobbling from piece of furniture to piece of furniture. The M.S. medicine they wanted me to take didn't allow for breastfeeding, and so I refused to take it. I was, in a word, "noncompliant." Except that my neurologist, a really great guy, knew it . . . so it wasn't like I lied to him about it or anything. Anyway, over the course of a year, it went from no feeling my feet, to up my calves, to the top of my thighs. Each month, I'd go and he'd stick a pin in me. "Can you feel this?" "Nope." "This?" "Nope." Until finally the "OUCH!" was way up at the tippy-top of my thighs. I remember that office visit. Because I thought . . . this could be really, really bad.

During this year, maybe because it came on so late in my life, I never really accepted that this was my life. I just didn't. And then one day, I woke up, I put my feet to the floor. And I didn't collapse. And little by little, I got better.

I suppose, once in a while, I worry it might come back. But it rarely crosses my mind. Because that person who couldn't feel her legs wasn't REALLY me. I never processed and absorbed and "owned" my legs having this. That was why so many mornings, I would wake up and fall to the floor. I just would forget in the night. How can that be? I don't know. It's the way the human mind works, I suppose. But I would, I swear, forget.

I remember when I had Oldest Daughter. I was driving somewhere, and got this whole "Raising Arizona" thing in my head where I thought I left her in her car seat in a parking lot. I looked in the back seat, and there she was in the car, cooing. Then I pulled over and sobbed. I was a VERY NEW young mother. And at the time, the man I was married to constantly questioned whether I was a good mother. And I thought my mind could trick me. That I could "forget" her. And that terrified me.

Except that I was BORN to be a mother. And really, from the first second I held her, she has been imprinted on my soul. And after yesterday with Demon Baby, a tub of Cheetos, a tube of blue toothpaste, and light tan carpeting? Much as I would LOVE to forget I am a mother, it'll never happen.

There aren't too many things like that. Being a mother, perhaps. And being a writer.

I don't ever wake up, put my feet to the floor and "forget" I am a writer. Ever. In fact, it's more likely I will wake up at 3:00 a.m. with a story in my head that I am DREAMING about. Or a line. Or a word. It's how I process the world. How I look at things. It's who I am. What I am. And no amount of trickery can change that. When I get disgusted with my work in progress, or I get sick of waiting to hear about a manuscript on submission, there are times I think, "Screw it. I'm just not going to do this anymore." But I can't. Just as I will not "forget" Demon Baby in a parking lot.
Though yesterday, I was willing to sell him to the highest bidder.

Thoughts?

I Get You

The last post had a consistent theme. Writers seem to flock to writer blogs because other writers "get" that key part of you in the way nonwriters don't.

This makes sense to me since my best friend is here for a week. I took her to get her nose pierced, and held her hand while they took a big-a** needle and slid it through. She didn't flinch. I was making all sorts of facial distortions. Before they poke it through, they mark the spot. The guy marking it showed me, and I said, "Nope. she won't like it there." So he moved it. I said, "Yes, exactly." He looked at her and said, "Do YOU want to look?" She shrugged, then stood nd looked in the mirror, but I swear she would have done it even if he hadn't showed her the mirror. THAT is trust in your best friend, folks. I get her. I finish her sentences, she finishes mine. Or she starts to say one, maybe two words at most about something, and I just go, "Yeah." Forget finishing sentences, we don't have to TALK. One phone conversation recently, we went five for five of unfinished sentences off of a single riff of conversation that we each knew where it was going from point to point. She gets me. Oh . . . and she's a writer.

So I started thinking about why writers are different, and it dawned on me that the average person goes to work, comes home, and sometimes brings work problems home, but very often leaves that person--that compartmentalized person--at the office. Let's take being an accountant. Being an accountant is something you DO, not something you ARE. Now, you might, looking at my Oldest Son who adores math in a way I consider spiritual, LOVE math. Being a mathematical genius might be something you ARE. It might rock your world. But I still think being an accountant is something you DO with that love.

No so for writers. It's something you ARE. I take my writing and the voices in my head (don't commit me!) everywhere. In fact, I wrote this piece for URGE based on that very idea (and on a blog theme I've run a few times).

In the way that a scientist sticks cells under a microscope, I spend my time studying people. Thinking about why people do what they do--and how I can use it in a book. I study dialogue. I study people's faces when they lie. I study them when they grieve. I notice things. One of the reasons I am very proud of the first chapter of this book is that in the first chapter it was really the culmination of all my observations about what the Irish do when they bury their dead--and how odd it is that we "wake" our dead in a room, and sit around and say, "He looks good." Or "I like what they did with her hair." What is up with that? Cremate me, please. But my point is I feel like I absorb all of this "stuff" and then need a place to put it, words that let me make sense of it. Why can't I just leave it at an observation? Why does it need to be written? Other writers GET that. Normal people do not.

So I get you. At least I think I do.

Thoughts?

The Towel

A regular reader of this blog asked me if all writers wonder if they should quit. Just give it up, hang up their hat, or in the boxing adage, throw in their towel.

A few thoughts . . .

I used to think that being published represented the Holy Grail of writing. Now I realize that if you are driven as a writer, there is always "the next book." I used to think that if I ever got in a national magazine, like Cosmopolitan, a mention in a publication like US Weekly, that I would faint. That that was my new Holy Grail. But then that happened . . . and somehow, there was another goal. No matter where you are on the food chain, there is always something you want as a writer. Some angst. So just because someone is published, or unpublished . . . doesn't matter . . . in a sense, probably every writer wonders at some point or another, if this insane passion is worth the rejection, the waking up at dawn to write, the loneliness, whatever. About two months ago, when I was just down and tired and worried about people in my life, and driving 8 hours for a funeral and all the rest of it, I thought I would just chuck my career and go back to bartending. I just wanted to sling drinks and take a break. But I didn't.

Why?

As I tell kids in elementary school when I go to talk to classes about writing, being a writer isn't something you "become." It's something you ARE. There's no test to certify you as a writer. And those things like being published . . . even they aren't enough to "prove" you have talent. There are awards, like the Pulitzer . . . but there aren't enough of those to go around.

But being a writer is something you are. If tomorrow I said, "I am never going to write another word," I am convinced I would be certifiable in a week or two. It's not that I can't take a break from writing . . . I can. But what would I do with all this stuff in my head? All the characters? The snippets of dialogue? The great opening lines.

My first instinct was to look at the corpse.

I love that first line to The Roofer. What would I have done with that line if I didn't have a book to put it in?

I think the cure for wondering if you should throw in the towel is to delve yourself in craft, in the pure joy of making stuff up, in your world.

I don't know . . . that's my take. Anyone else?