Category Archives: Writing Discipline

Keep Trusting the Process

28 Wednesday Nov 2018

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Debut Novel, Role of the Writer, Writing Discipline, Writing Life

≈ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago I printed the first 30 pages of my forth-coming novel, (tentatively titled) The Confessions of Adam, grabbed a pencil, and began reading and marking the manuscript. It has been two years since I’ve read it and I know that in January I will be getting an edited copy from my press. Adam and I need to reacquaint ourselves.

Well, I am now 180 pages in and my writerly, drafting instincts are in full gear. I’m ready to do what I’ve always done with this manuscript – write another draft!

Then I remember – er, my wife reminds me – 

This time it’s different. Joelle Delbourgo, and my publisher, Karen Porter, have both said that this manuscript is wonderful. So have my early readers. I must now trust a new editing process. And at this stage, the process has moved beyond my desk to the editing process of my editor. Sure, I can go through it, read it, and mark it up, but a rewrite before January would be foolish. What is happening is all part of the process. It’s just part of the process that I’ve not seen before. Our experience is rarely the first measure of reality. This is a process that’s produced millions of novels – the author/editor relationship. My team has grown. The process is now collaborative.

Let the process continue.

What Is Writerly Success?

17 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Role of the Writer, Writing Discipline, Writing Life

≈ Leave a comment

What is the measure of a writer’s success? Is it placement of a short story in a lit mag? Obtaining an agreement with an agent? A book deal? Is it less than these? Is it finishing a draft? Starting a draft? Developing a character or finding a plot turn? Is it simply finding the right word or sentence or voice in a snippet of dialogue?
I suppose it is all of these things – depending on the day and the ebb and flow of our work.
But for me these days, with all of life crashing in, success in writing seems to be simply sitting down each day and doing the work. Actually spending time writing each and every day. This is success.
So, let us not put undue pressure on ourselves. We are successful simply by producing sentences each day. And in this way we are successful should we never get a piece placed or a book contract. And let’s be clear, should those things come, we are not more successful. For our grandest arrivals don’t come independent of the steps taken along the way.
The crafting of sentences is our writerly success.

The Writers’ Workshop*

22 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer, Writing Discipline, Writing Life

≈ Leave a comment

Disclaimer: Like earning a writing degree, or attending a writers’ conference, joining or starting a writers’ workshop can be a terrific way to procrastinate and avoid the hard, solitary work of writing. However, assuming you’ve nailed this prerequisite and your writing discipline is in place, the writers’ workshop can be an irreplaceable addition to your writerly life.
In February 2017 I founded the Westside Writers’ Workshop. This workshop was started because a fellow writer, Andrea, wanted it. I was open to the idea because I was post-MFA and without a place to take my writing. Any workshop is an experiment, an unknown, a lark. It can disintegrate in any number of ways.
This one didn’t. The reasons for that are for another post. Let’s stay focused on you.
Here is what a writers’ workshop can do for you:
Distinguish the difference between solitary and alone. If you look up these two words you’ll find no profound difference. So I’ll create one. Writing is solitary work; however, it is not work that we should do alone – in confinement, without interaction with others. Humans are designed to do nothing alone. We are designed for relationship, for communal purpose. A writers’ workshop ensures we’re not alone in our solitude.
Offer reading writers. You need a group of readers to take your work to as you’re creating it. You need the reader’s feedback in order to finish a story. You also need writers to take your work to. You need people who are neck deep in the process as well, preferably who have gone further into the wild than you have, and who can act as honest judges and caring guides.
Provide essential deadlines. A writers’ workshop provides deadlines/submission periods/expectations. It is easy to drift in our solitude. We can work endlessly, never finishing anything, never achieving a pre-arranged milestone with our work. The workshop brings structure. It creates room for finishing work. Every creator needs a designed and tended place in which to work.
So be a writer. But don’t be a loner. Help other writers as you go. And they will help you.

*Note it’s not a Writers’ Group. It is not a place for loitering. Work must get done. Production is the goal. It is a workshop.

Quote and Comment, Butler

17 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Quote and Comment, Writing Discipline

≈ Leave a comment

In her essay “Furor Scribendi” Octavia Butler wrote: “First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”

This is the truth of writing, the unglamorous, dull truth.
When I got out of bed to write at 5AM this morning it was not inspiration that lifted me from my slumber. It was brute force, the decision again today to push myself down the path of habit. It is in this – taking action, establishing routine – that we get work done. I don’t believe in The Muse. Work is not mysterious. It is cause and effect. Here we have the craft of writing, not the art. Oh, and one more thing. Inspiration comes during perspiration. Inspiration is not the fuel that starts the effort, it is a residue that comes, sometimes, in a flash of delight. It is a gift.
Now, get to work.

My Big Writerly Lesson for 2017

10 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer, Writing Discipline

≈ Leave a comment

I am happiest as a writer when I’m neck deep in the throes of creating a book-length manuscript. I already knew this. I found it out while I was writing my first novel. Here’s the revelation for 2017:

I am a mess when I’m between projects.

I am out of sorts. I am a wondering vagrant. I am like a bear roaming from campsite to campsite in search of some morsel. I think I have a concept for the next novel and when I start trying to form the idea I find that it’s flat, empty. No delight. It’s like sand through my fingers. So I pack it in and move on to the next idea – the next possibility that might, just might, hold the excitement that I so desperately want to recreate.
It has gotten ridiculous. Not only am I jumping from idea to idea – metawriting for months on one of them – but I’m circling back and revisiting ideas thinking, hoping, digging, imagining there will be fire there when before there was barely a spark.
This is new territory for me. This is my first stint between long-form projects. I have no idea what to do, how to act. I don’t even know how to think about my writing in the midst of this. I feel useless. I binge on chocolate and episodes of The West Wing.
I’ve lost my way.
I know what you’re thinking. That I must fight through it. It is part of creating. I must put my head down and keep trudging through the woods. That I’ll find the next project in time.
You’re right. And this will have been part of the experience.
I’m still miserable.

The Energy of Experience

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Role of the Writer, Writing Discipline

≈ Leave a comment

It is that moment when you are emotionally moved, when you are shocked, in awe. When damage is done or redemption is realized. The epiphany, the dumbfound, the fear and delight – sometimes small, sometimes large. Sometimes public, often private.
Take note, for these are the turns in which the writerly aesthetic lives.
To observe in such moments is human. To realize that the observation is material to be creatively mined, this is writerly. This is the skill – to learn to harness, capture, and form the energy of experience into craft.
Here are a pair of examples:
I have a fellow writer who recently wrote a poem about a drunk driver hitting a tree in his front yard in the middle of the night. For most people this is a story you tell over coffee with friends. Everyone is amazed and this spurs a series of stories of drunken tragedy. But for the writer, this is an experience that can only be properly dealt with by being set down in language.
Another fellow writer recently wrote a poem about sitting on an airport bus and receiving an email that he’d just been fired. This is more private, but is it less violent? Not as he tells it. Not as revealed in short, stark lines.
In both cases we are escorted past what happened and shown the residue of truth we might otherwise miss.
We fail our craft when we are like all other mortals, when we let our experiences simply come and go. Let us do the work of shining our spotlight on such moments.
Our readers will be the richer for it.

The Problem of Journaling – Solution #2: The Travel Journal

01 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Role of the Writer, Writing Discipline

≈ Leave a comment

Whenever I travel – whether its a long weekend getaway or a trip outside the US – I cease my daily creative writing routine (for the most part) and instead spend my allotted time each day scribbling in my travel journal.
There is a delight in carrying a notebook as you tour a distant town or coastline, stopping occasionally to write your impressions or to sketch your surroundings. What you have with a notebook is not a camera or a map, but instead you have a tool that expects you to develop a skill. The skill of interpreter. You are not simply taking, you are leaving something behind – a record. You are interacting. You are a writer.
In my travel journals (I’m on my second volume now) I have an etching from Henry Thoreau’s grave, a page of signatures of Mexican orphans, a drawing of a southern Irish countryside, and (tucked in the back) a chart of common fish caught off the gulf coast of Florida.
Of course there is a practical value to keeping a travel journal as well. I know that it was on August 4, 2011 that we drove from Carmel down Highway1 to Big Sur. I also know that on the weekend of July 13, 2014 we discovered the quaint beauty of Westerville, Ohio, the home of Otterbein College.
Travel journaling causes you to develop new writerly muscles. And it later serves to aid the memory.
Who among us could not benefit from a bit of both?

The Problem of Journaling – Solution #1: The Commonplace Book

18 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Creative Process/Craft, Writing Discipline

≈ Leave a comment

I keep a notebook next to my computer on my writing table. A simple, black, Moleskine, ruled 80 page journal – they come in sets of three.
Into this notebook goes an entry for every day. During my daily writing I sometimes start by making a note, but at some point during that day’s writing session I always turn to it and scribble.
I write my frustrations and hopes about my work, approaches I’m considering, things about life that are distracting me or making it hard to write. I often jot in the top margin what time I started writing or a reminder to revisit that page later to review important notes.
If I go to an author reading this is the notebook that goes with me so that I can capture ideas or comments that come during the evening.
The Commonplace Book is a working journal. It is a place, at my elbow or under my arm, where I can park whatever is standing between me and the work I’m trying to get done. I’m in my 17th notebook. Some days there is a page, other days a line, but it has become essential to my creative process.
Sidenote: The Wikipedia entry on Commonplace Book is surprisingly robust. The history of this tool is richer than you think.

The Problem of Journaling

04 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Role of the Writer, Writing Discipline

≈ Leave a comment

Every time I hear or read the praises of journaling my anxiety goes up and I feel I’ve lost out. The over-achievers that harp on journaling, the die-hards who swear by it – they say that the practice of daily journaling yields riches of life and craft that cannot be summarized.
I’m 49 years old. Am I going to start keeping a diary?
There is something attractive (albeit a little strange) about those few of you who have kept a diary since the day you learned to write and have an entry for every day since the first day of second grade. You can go back and read what your childhood mind was thinking on any day in 1976.
But what about the rest of us? We all agree that journaling is important for a writer, but the idea of beginning to write a daily entry seems self-absorbed, pointless, and above all, mind-numbingly boring.
Then several years ago I heard about the practice of specific, purposeful journaling.
Here a few very good examples.
The Reagan Diaries. Ronald Reagan began keeping a daily journal the day he entered the White House and stopped the day he left. It is said to be in simple chicken-like scratches and full of misspellings. And highly personal at times.
The Genesee Diary by Henri Nouwen. Nouwen needed some time away from the rat-race and so he entered a Trappist monastery in Genesee, New York. The book has become a classic on solitude – and marked the beginning of what became Nouwen’s legacy as a monk and a beloved teacher and writer.
Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. Here we have a journal that became a classic of American travel writing – and that provides a first-rate primer on how to write as a contemplative and transient observer.
In the next two posts I will offer a couple of solutions to this problem of journaling. There are two types of journaling that I’ve incorporated into my writing life without turning the practice into a part-time job. These are keeping a Commonplace Book and a Travel Journal.

Failure of Feelings

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by in Role of the Writer, Writing Discipline

≈ Leave a comment

There is a grit, a strength of will, a determination inherent in the work of writing that has NOTHING to do with art, inspiration, or the wonder of making story.
The discipline of sitting down to write must not be predicated on “feeling like it.” Our feelings can’t be trusted to guide our actions when it comes to getting work done.
Our feelings are not our ally. If left alone in the front seat, our feelings will drive us to a premature and fattened ruin.
If I did what I “felt like” doing, I would sleep till 9AM every day, get up and go out to breakfast, come home and read for a couple of hours, take a nap, go to dinner with friends, stay out late carousing, and return home to crash and do it all again. There would be no productivity. No accomplishment. No craft. No tending to the soul.
Well wrought fiction doesn’t come from inspiration or a great idea. Good fiction is the result of putting your butt in the chair to write when there is no inkling of desire and no likelihood of progress.
It doesn’t matter how you feel.