Are you a serious writer?

In Larry Brooks' blog today, he posted an article by Victoria Mixon on the difference between amateur and professional writers. (http://storyfix.com/). While I don't agree with all that's said, it is an interesting conversation. Perhaps my quarrel is with the labels: amateur and professional speak to me of money and there are plenty of serious writers who fit her "professional" category who are not making much if any money from their writing. So maybe it's better to compare serious writers with less serious writers.

In my experience as an editor and writing coach, serious writers love to write and are eager for feedback. While we love to hear that our work is great or inspiring or entertaining, we also know that it can be polished practically forever and get better and better, and we are interested greatly in that aspect of the craft.

Less serious writers, including some of my clients, just want to get published. They have a story, often an interesting one, to tell and they believe that it is, in its first draft form, as good as much of what gets published. In some ways, that's true. There's a lot of marginal writing that gets published although if one traces the publication route, it's often self-publishing through a press of the writer's own creation.

These less serious writers aren't interested in becoming good writers, they generally don't like writing much at all, and they have little interest in the editing process and are reluctant to spend much money on it or learn to do it themselves. They just want to get their story out there whether for fame or an ill-conceived notion of the money that is to be made from publishing.

It can be hard to work with those people as they have little understanding of the industry or the craft, as Mixon puts it, and frankly don't care. It's interesting to me that the art and discipline of writing has so many of these wannabes. But now that I think of it, there are all those poor singers who try out for American Idol or sell their unoriginal craft products at fairs and bazaars. As a proponent of everyone's right to be creative and to express themselves that way, I'm all for that. But to expect the equivalent of playing NBA basketball when you barely know the rules of the game seems a mite impractical.

journaling through the sirens

Every morning I write in my journal for 45 minutes or an hour. It's a spiritual, meditative, creative practice that I've followed for over a decade and my day doesn't seem complete without it, so much so that I'll get up an hour early on even the earliest of mornings to have time to do it. This morning, I was awakened at 5:30 by a housemate here in a beach rental. We had five minutes until the tsunami alert was going to go off and she didn't want us to be awakened in fear. We had about 30 minutes to evacuate to higher ground, to put our belongings back in our cars, after unpacking last night, and head up to the Catholic Church, which stands about 60 feet above the ocean.

I hadn't brought much or unpacked much so it only took two trips to my car but I made sure I had my journal with me. And once we got settled in the church, the others all wandered off to stand outside in the drizzle and watch the ocean and wait (90 minutes) for the waves to do whatever they were going to do. I opted instead to sit inside the church recreation center and write in my journal.

I mention this here because of a conversation I recently had with a friend. She was bemoaning my withdrawal from a social group we belonged to for a number of years, a group that met weekly. I was no longer attending regularly, citing other priorities. Writing is one of those priorities; in fact, it's one of the top 5 priorities for me and my life revolves around them. The others are painting, paid work, health and well-being, and family/intimate friends. I try to balance my life around those 5 as often as I can, giving them equal attention. Today my writing practice came first, even though it made me seem anti-social and isolationist to the others I was with. Fortunately, they know me. It was early morning and I needed to do what I always do. It was a way to feel grounded and safe in a situation that could have been problematic. It was also a way to live in to my writing commitment.

Getting your book out into the world

I came across the worksheet I created for a workshop last year. Thought some of you might find the questions useful in your work.

1. Describe your book project in detail (length, subject, genre, illustrated or text only, collaborators, self-publish).
2. Who is your target reading audience? (List all possible readers and markets; be specific).
3. Why are you writing this book? (List all reasons)
4. Estimate the number of people combined in #2 (e.g., hundreds, thousands, millions)
5. What is the current status of your book project?
6. What obstacles, if any, are you currently facing with this project?
7. What has been your writing experience before this book?
8. How would you rate yourself as a writer?
9. How would you rate yourself as an expert in your field?
10. How would you rate the originality of your book idea?
11. Are you a good self-editor?
12. How important (1 to 10) is it to you to have an excellent product?
13. Are you an introvert or an extrovert?
14. Do you plan to self-publish? What do you know about self-publishing today?
15. Do you plan to look for an agent or external publisher? What do you know about this process?
16. How important is it for you to have control over the content and look of your book?
17. What kind of time and money budget do you have for marketing your book?
18. What is your previous experience with marketing products or services?

Narrative tenses

A writer friend was describing her dilemma last night of trying to decide whether to tell her memoir stories in narrative past or narrative present. And it's an interesting problem. If you're writing memoir or fiction, or even non-fiction that makes use of narrative in story examples, it's a good thing to contemplate.

Compare these two examples:

When she walks in, I'm sitting alone in the apartment. Fred has just left. Our argument hangs in the air like beach fog and I wonder if she notices.

Narrative present creates an immediacy of action, drawing the reader into the scene more easily than the past tense.

When she walked in, I was sitting alone in the apartment. Fred had just left. Our argument hung in the air like beach fog and I wondered if she noticed.

 However, narrative present is hard to sustain and can become rather corny and inauthentic. Most longer writings (more than a scene) are best served by the narrative past.

When I wrote my memoir, I used the narrative present for very specific, dramatic scenes but I used narrtive past for the bulk of my story telling. This can be fun to experiment with for both fiction and non-fiction purposes to see the effects.

Finding inspiration

As I write more poetry, I'm becoming a collector of odd phrases, things people say as part of a conversation. I've always collected these as writing prompts for fiction, especially those that hint at a story behind. Now I'm also looking for the interesting turn of phrase, those that carry an emotional spark or revive a memory, or set me thinking

When I'm in the middle of writing fiction, especially a novel, it's my imagination that's hard at work to weave the tales of these characters and the process goes on a long time. But with poetry, there's a constant need for fuel, for inspiration. So I'm changing my detective habits and listening harder to the way others speak and think. It's fascinating. Here's a poem from a phrase I heard in Nashville.

Up Burnside on the 20


I’m a slave to transit fashion, the pretty blonde said,
And Mrs. Malaprop aside, I thought about butts in navy
Polyester grown wide from eight-hour shifts
Behind the wheel and baby blue cotton shirts tight
Across the spare tire created by doughnuts and
64-ounce caffeinated colas that keep the hands
Steady on the wheel in rush hour
With buttons that gape high over the breasts
And draw the eye away from the embroidered
Marilyn or Shawonda on the pocket,
Shirttails stuffed into those same navy 
Pants even though loose they would have brought
Some relief to the low-slung gut of Ted or Harvey or Mike
In the last hours of an evening shift out to Gresham,
And those military-style jackets cropped to the waist
That only look good on a few slim types in their youth
And I wondered who designs transit uniforms and why
There aren’t more styles for all those different bodies
Driving the bus

Poetry and grief

Last Tuesday night, as some of you know, I released my dear old boy Reinie from this life. Then I headed off to Nashville to lead a writing retreat. It was the perfect place to grieve. On the retreat we held silence most of the morning and again in the afternoon and I had lots of time to think and feel. We also had beautiful surroundings and that was another big help. But mostly what helped was writing poetry.

I wrote a long poem to Reinie, a requiem (you can find it on my other blog http://www.sobertruths.blogspot.com/) and fashioning something out of my feelings was really helpful. So helpful in fact that I also wrote a poem about an altercation I had with a friend this fall that resulted in a painful parting. Fashioning those feelings and expressing them in a coherent way again helped me work through the sadness.

It is certainly possible to express feelings in a novel or memoir. The writing of scenes with feelings is much more powerful but somehow the distilling process of poetry is perfect for that.

I made a commitment to write 100 poems by April 15, just a commitment to myself but one I'm eager to keep. The two poems mentioned here are 52 and 53 in that series.

How much more do you need to learn?

I recently volunteered to give an editing workshop at women's writers conference. I like sharing what I know about writing with others, helping writers get better writing out into the world. I had no hesitation about volunteering but I did stop and think when the organizer asked me if I'd be there all day. Commiting to being there means I need something to do. Will I find it interesting or helpful to sit through other presentations? How much more do I need to learn?

I'm not really a snob about these things and while I am fairly experienced as a writer, I can always learn a new trick or two, or hear an idea that's worth considering. But when I'm honest with myself, what I really need is just to read and write, not to listen. I think we can get caught up in believing that somebody out there has the answers that will make us more sellable, more publishable, when in fact it's honing our own craft, finding our own voice, developing our own style, and creating our own stories. It's really about writing and writing and writing and self-editing and polishing and writing more and then sending it out.

I did say yes to the full day. Maybe I'll go to the workshops and maybe I'll get a coffee and write all afternoon. Either way it will be good.