Every Little Bit Counts

I belong to an email loop for my writer's group called Club 100. It sounds really elite doesn't it? Brings up visions of authors who have written 100+ books, right?

Trust me, it's nothing as glamorous as that. And if it were, I definitely wouldn't be on the list. I've written exactly 6 manuscripts and none of them are published. Or apparently publishable in their current incarnations. Which is fine. I've learned a lot from writing these books and I wouldn't trade the lessons of experience for anything.

Club 100 is a motivational email loop. The original goal of the group was for everyone to write 100 words a day. There is some solid rationale behind this goal. First, you are writing every day. The only way to finish a manuscript is to write. There are no short cuts. You must write that book in order for it to exist.

By writing daily you are building a habit. It's hard to sit in that chair and stare and the page or computer screen until intelligent words spill forth. But the more you write, and the more consistent you are with time and place, the easier it is to sit down and immediately shift from the worries of the day job, family, money, etc. to the story. This is an important lesson and one that took me years to learn. Now that I write daily I find I waste little time on trying to put myself in the story. Amazing!

By making a goal of 100 words you are taking what may be 400 plus pages and breaking it down into less intimidating numbers. As with any large project, a person can be overwhelmed when they focus on that end number. Then the negative self-talk and doubt creeps in. "400 pages? I can't write 400 pages! What the hell was I thinking? That's it, I'm packing up my toys and going home."

That type of self-talk is what keeps a lot of people from finishing. And without that finished manuscript, there is no chance of becoming a published author. Ever. But, if your daily goal is 100 words, and you consider that 100 words is less than one manuscript page, suddenly that book becomes a lot of little, bite sized goals that don't look so scary.

Here's the coolest thing about being part of Club 100. I started out with a 100-words-a-day goal and in the last 6 months I've been able to write 3 pages in the same hour that it used to take me to write 100 words! I'm hoping that over the next few months I'll be able to increase that to 5+ pages.

If you're an aspiring author of anything - journal article, non-fiction book on the zeitgeist of morality and higher education, or commercial fiction - this methodology of building the writing habit and breaking down the whole of your manuscript into small, daily goals will take you far.

Going After It with a Club

 I was thinking about the quotation at the top of my blog today. Jack London was a smart man. Right up there with Nora Roberts.

In an interview for Borders bookstores, Nora was quoted as saying there isn't a muse, that a writer can't sit and wait for the muse to be channeled. Writing isn't effortless. My personal experience certainly mirrors this sentiment. The days where I have waited for the muse to come knocking are the days nothing gets added to the page. Those are the days I find excuses to clean the oven, fiddle with the mending, reconcile the cheque book. Those are the days I do anything but get down to the business of writing.

Jack London said you can't wait for inspiration. I don't know if he meant those flashes of the perfect scene or the vibrant and oh so right setting. I don't know if he meant that niggle at the base of your skull when something you see, hear or smell triggers an emotion or moment in the plot. I imagine he doesn't mean those serendipitous moments that come to us all. What I imagine he means is that we can't wait for that lightening bold that says, "Here I am! This is what you are to write next. And it will be brilliant!"

Writing is hard work. All creativity is work. Joyous, torturous, wonderful work. But work nonetheless.At least it is for me. I won't be so arrogant as to speak for anyone else.

I love writing. I love birthing a story, nurturing it from a small, embryonic idea to a full blown plot with character arcs, story arcs, subplots, twists, turns and resolutions. That seed of an idea becomes a child and then a gangly adolescent, more mature, filling out but also awkward and full of grease. Finally, after what feels like years, the story becomes an adult and able to move out of the house to flourish or fall all on its own. This all takes work. A story, no matter how it may flow from the soul, is not born miraculously in complete and final form.

Ideas don't either. And if I were to sit and wait for that perfect idea I would always remain an untried, unpublished and ineffective writer. I would aspire, but never achieve.

Jill Barnett once stated that some of her books were born out of a desire to learn something about the craft of writing. She learned her craft by experience. Not by waiting for inspiration. Like Jack, Nora and Jill, I don't want to wait for fickle Lady Muse. I want to write. I want to refine my craft and bare open my soul. I want to go after inspiration with a club!

Too Much of a Good Thing

It's been hard to stay focused on the writing these last few weeks. Which is making me grumpy. Really grumpy. I have about three stories floating around my head and I want to put them all on paper, but I get confused with which details belong to which story.

So I tried a technique I learned from my writing coach. I sat my characters down and one by one I started asking them about themselves. Very Gestalt of me, yes? Actually, it felt more Freudian but that's a conversation for another time.

As I asked these characters about themselves, I tried to ask them about the people in their lives and about what brought them to their story. Slowly I compiled a list of characters, some of their pertinent history along with some extraneous details I wasn't sure were going to make it into the story, but helped me to get to know these people just the same.



Then I started a mind map with all the characters, a color for which story thread they are involved in (romance plot, suspense plot, secondary relationship plot, etc) and began to detail through color and symbol which story they belonged to. In doing so, I have also mapped out the beginnings of a turning point diagram. Who would have thought this could have been so doable? Certainly not me.



I'm still grumpy. I still don't have much time for writing. I do feel better about getting some of those ideas out of my head and on paper. My brain feels less cluttered and I can get back to Jason and Mallory. 

15 Minutes

 Why is it that whenever I try to organize my home office, I seem to create more of a mess? I've been tasked with clearing out the office so we can move on to the next phase of our renovations. But I'm procrastinating. I don't know if it's because I can;t stand the thought of having to uproot all my books and set up in a temporary space for the next couple of months or if I really just have too much crap and I'm at a loss at how to deal with it.

I didn't use to be this bad. There was a time in the not so distant past that there was never a stray paper in the house and everything had a place of it's own. Since we started renovations six years agoI haven't been able to find my stride. The house is in this limbo state and has been since we bought it. Most things don't have a permanent home so things have piled up and chaos has finally become my good friend. This is one friendship I really want to let go.

So in an effort to get this monkey off my back, I'm going back to a method that worked for me in the past. 15 minutes.

The theory is that when things become chaotic, or when faced with a task you do not want to do, you set a timer for 15 minutes and work hard for those 15 minutes on a specific task and then you stop. You can do15 minutes a day, 15 minutes every hour, 15 minutes every half hour. Whatever works for you. Just remember to take a break from that task and do something you enjoy. That's the reward for the 15 minutes of work.

Funny thing, this works when I'm not in the mood to write. I sit my butt in my chair, set the timer and start writing. Eventually, I'm past my 15 minutes and my fingers are fighting to keep up with the scenes in my head. That's my reward. I get such a high from being able to finish a scene, a chapter, an entire book. No other accomplishment compares. Though I'm hoping getting my home into fighting form and keeping it that way comes in a close second. I'll keep you posted.

Inspiration Unplugged

I had the most amazing weekend. Husband and I left the congestion of city living behind and spent three days at a cabin on an out of the way little lake.

There is no internet at this cabin. Cell phone coverage is spotty and there isn't a landline. No cable or sattelite TV. There is one TV station that has signals strong enough to break through the tree coverage, and even that reception is hit or miss. All of this forced us to unplug and enjoy the quiet and solitude.

I want to say I missed my internet community of friends while I was away, and on some level I did miss being connected. One another level I was pleasantly surprised with how much energy and time I had to be and to create. I did bring my netbook with the intention of writing (not to play Angry Birds, though Husband believe's that was the netbook's sole purpose), but I also gave myself permission to not write. I gave myself permission to just be - I state I have not been in for some time.

The combination of being unplugged along with the lack of expectations freed up some of the blocks I've had with the story. All day Sunday flashes of scenes and plot twists danced from my subconscious to my conscious and I felt compelled to pull out the netbook and capture everything and everything poured out faster than ever. I think I need to unplug more often.

It goes to show that sometimes creativity requires a lack of agenda and schedule. Sometimes the brain needs to be left alone. When the story is hitting the wall, perhaps it's time to unplug and play in the sandbox of life building sandcastles.

The Wall

It was fantastic! The story was gelling, the characters working with me instead of arguing incessantly with each other and fighting my every thought and request. Images were dancing across the page - lush gardens heavy with plot twists and turns, the rich perfume of creativity gliding through the air and enveloping the computer monitor. It was a perfect writing moment, harmonious and brilliant.

And then it happened. That thing all writers dread. The garden dried and withered to dust and I was left with nothing more than a hard and barren courtyard hemmed in on all sides by walls. Tall, slippery walls. You know the type. You can't scale them. You can't jump up and grab the top and muscle your way over them. They block the sun and keep you prisoner there in that dry, barren place. Empty. Helpless. Alone.


Days crawled by and still the words didn't come. I was stuck in that desolate shell of a garden, no relief in sight.

I looked about my home office and my gaze settled on a picture of an almost forgotten moment. The 2001 RWA national conference in NYC had been of those moments in time where everything moved in slow motion, with precision and ease. All the pieces fit, all the colors blended and my drive to write was reconfirmed over and over again. The picture was of one of my writing goddesses and myself just after she gave an informal chat at the hotel bar. It was in that moment that she shared some of her writing successes, her writing schedule and the things she would do to overcome writer's block - consistency and going back to the time when you and the writing were a single entity and all was right with the world.

I visualized a day everything was humming along - how I was sitting, what music was playing, whether I had my water fountain on or not. I imagined the emotions that flowed through me as the story had appeared as if by magic from my fingers to the screen. I set a timer, turned on the music, made sure the fountain was full of water, sent forth a silent prayer and breathed.

Then I closed my eyes, placed my fingers on the keyboards and invited, no begged my heroine to tell me what she was about to do next.

Slowly, painfully so, letters formed words, words sentences and sentences mated to become coherent thoughts. By the time my timer went off an hour later there were complete pages on my monitor. 10 of them to be exact. I went back and read, cringing at the stilted thoughts. It was rubbish. All that work for nothing.

Then I looked again, and there just beneath the rubble was a vine. A small and tiny vine barely peeking above the cracked clay at my feet. Life! I followed that vine, nurtured and encouraged it for about another hour and was rewarded with tiny, fragile flowers of story. By the time the boy came home from work I had about 4 pages of something worth keeping and some loose ideas of things to come.

I write this in my blog so I can come back and remember that I don't have to wait for fickle Lady Muse to visit me. No, I can chase her, grab hold of her ankles and laugh at her shocked look as I dive head first into a story she keeps telling me can't be written without her. Take that, Lady Muse!

Soundtrack Friday - Anniversary Edition

Tomorrow I celebrate 17 years of marriage. I usually joke that it's been 17 long, hard years, but the truth is it's mostly been good. Even through the lean years marriage has been good to me. To us.

Last year I took the husband to see one of our favorite bands, Rush. They were on top of their game with their Time Machine tour and are always the band to see for great music and amazing entertainment, like this video that was played at the end of the concert. Ah, good times.

I was at a loss at what would top last year's Rush concert and the delayed but amazing U2 concert back in July when I realized bigger isn't always better and sometimes small and intimate is the best.

One of our favorite blues artists is Susan Tedeschi. We saw her at a jazz/blues fest up in Saskatchewan before she cut her first studio album and have been following her musical career ever since. Several years ago we were lucky enough to see her perform at the Minnesota Zoo. The amphitheater isn't a huge venue and if it rains there is no shelter. But there are no bad seats and you feel like you and the band are close enough to have a chat over cocktails. Aside from Rush, it is this concert at this small venue we talk about most often.

When I heard Susan and her husband Derek Trucks were going to be performing once again at the zoo, and the evening before our wedding anniversary no less, I knew I had the perfect gift. So tonight the husband and i will be heading to the zoo to hang with Susan. Happy Anniversary, husband. I love you.