Writing Woes, or Writing Whoas…or Merely Woeful Writing?

As I mentioned last week, I was on Craigslist browsing for a handyman. But I just happened to look up people who were advertising themselves as writers for hire.

I was not disappointed.

Keep in mind these are real, actual ads. For writers. These are direct pastes. I promise I have not changed a single word here or made up any of this. I’d link to them directly, but I’m sort of afraid they’d trace me and come after me. If they can dangle modifiers, mangle phrases and butcher sentences this badly, what would they do to me? So I will leave you with a few, word for word, that are apparently from the same person or group. I put the titles in boldface. I’m not going to comment after, because that seems like gilding the lily. Or spitting on the skunk, in this case. Also, I simply don’t know what to say. Perhaps you are left less speechless than I am and can shed some light on this:

You will become most popular student in your class:

If you are average student in your class and you want to be popular student in class. You have many projects to do. But you are not able to accomplish your project. Then we can help you. We will make fabulous and attractive projects for you, so that your project will become the best in your class. And you will become the most popular student in your class. You will feel good by seeing our projects.

Just you can be enjoying good night sleeps:

Just you can be enjoying good night sleeps: If you have so much writing works to do. Or have so many projects to complete. And by these reasons you can't complete your sleep then we can help you. We can do your work. We have a team of professional writers. They will accomplish your work, so that you can complete your sleeps. By our help you will never compromise with your sleep, because we will complete your work. You can sleep stress free.

We will save your time: (We will save your time:)

We know that time is so important. If you have so much works to do. But at the same time you have to complete you assignments or project. Then what will you do? We know that projects and assignments are so time consuming. So at that time we can save your time by doing your projects we can accomplish your assignment or projects. And you can complete your other works. So by our help you can save your time.

  

our qualified writers can solve your writing woes:

We have qualified writers. They can easily solve your problem. They can easily accomplish your work. It is so essay for them. If you are suffering from your writing woes, then we can help you we will solve your problem. We will feel happy by seeing our work. You will never disappoint with us. We always had done a fantastic job. Our customers always feel happy with our work. They never feel any complaint with our work.

Often audacity, not authentic talent, confers fame on an artist. ~Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Down the Line

It was a dingy little storefront in a questionable part of town with a blue neon hand over the door. All it said was “Palm Reader.”

“We have to go!” my adventurous high school friend said. So of course we did. The medium looked like the lady down the street, only more tired, like this might be the end of her second shift. And she wasn’t named Madame-Somebody or Serenity or Natasha or even Lilith. It was something like Mrs. Palmer.

I refused to pay the full $20 for something I didn’t believe in. So Mrs. Palmer read half my life for ten bucks. No kidding. On-sale palm reading. Half my life for half the money.

Here is what you don’t want happening when a palm reader looks at your palm: she looked upset. She sort of had an upset-looking face, anyway, but I’m certain it got worse. More frowny.

And she told me something sort of negative. Then she said she was feeling tired and not very psychic, and she gave me a coupon to come back. I didn’t even get my full half-a-life. Of course I didn’t go back, either.

Much later, I was sorry I didn’t. The negative thing not only came true, but it came true in a big way. In fact, it could be said that it became the bane of my life for a long, long time.

Last weekend, my more adventurous friends exclaimed, “We have to go!” So of course I did. It was still $20 after all these years. Ironic that at my age, I paid for the whole life this time. But here’s the weird thing: I was a little nervous. Silly or not, I was scared that my palm, my fate and my life were tainted somehow.

Instead, this happier-looking palm reader—named Bree—immediately announced that I was a writer. “It’s like you have to write,” she said. I found myself looking at my clothing to see if I had on anything that might give it away. Not a hint. Then she told me that I’d been through some bad stuff, some of which she described so accurately that I felt shocked and raw. How odd it feels to have a stranger tell you your secrets!

But then she told me I’d changed course, and now I was back on track. She predicted some good things. Very good things. “The lines in the hand change, you know,” she said. Did she make that up? I don’t care.

When I was young and smart, I viewed the life I hadn’t yet lived through the safe, logical theory of black and white rules. Now that I am old and silly, I view life through the reality of experience—experience that tells me life is wild and colorful and risky and full of broken rules. I no longer worship logic because I no longer want to explain everything. Life is much more fun with a little mystery. The question is no longer, “What do I believe?” The question is now, “What makes me happy to believe?”

This does. Having adventurous friends who go to see palm readers makes life better. I love knowing even at this age, I have a new hand.

 Not all those who wander are lost. ~J. R. R. Tolkien

Relearning the Art of Pretend

           When I was growing up, writing fiction was easy. It was almost all I wrote. I hadn’t yet learned that “you have such an imagination” can be (and often is) used as an insult. I hadn’t yet grown up in a science- and technology-driven world where creating something new only counts if it makes money. I couldn’t write creative nonfiction yet because I hadn’t really lived enough to have much to write about. And even if I’d been able to think of something, I hadn’t yet lived enough to possess the long-term perspective necessary to knit life experiences into a cohesive, meaningful whole.

So in the past few years I’ve mainly written creative nonfiction, and from what I hear my fellow writing friends say, I suspect I’m not alone.

Odd that I catch myself feeling like it’s somehow wrong—like lying—to make up a pretend character. When I thought about this, I finally realized it feels like something even worse than this. It feels like—horrors!—playing. Loafing. Goofing off. Because writing fiction is fun.

When I was a little kid, I wasn’t always thrilled with the playground. Any type of free play was welcome, but team sports often meant I couldn’t play what I wanted. Some sports felt like one more way to be bound by somebody else’s expectations, and in this case the expectations came from a whole team at once. Those rubber playground balls became an ironic metaphor for something I was told was good, but which proved to be both painfully hard and elusive.

But I will never forget the feeling I had when the teacher announced we were going to write a story or poem. Any of those messages was like throwing open the doors to the REAL playground. I was free in the truest sense—free to romp within the world of my own making where I felt at home.

It was admittedly a weird world. While some parts of my life were absolutely ideal, others left me feeling helplessly trapped. Within the realm of creativity, I was able to move where and how I wanted to go without anyone else defining me according to whatever it was they wanted of me at the time. It was like a pleasant dream. In the world of fiction, I could make everything the way I wanted it.

Odd, then, that when I sit down to write fiction these days, it feels awkward at first. I find I must give myself permission to “play.” The hardest work comes in freeing myself—not just from all of the pressures and obligations and restrictions of everyday life that always lie in wait when I’m trying to set aside time to write—but also from the pressures and obligations and restrictions I’ve placed on myself through the years. One of the things that binds my writing hands is the worry that the characters I create won’t be authentic because they aren’t real. What I find is that once I get going, my characters don’t feel inauthentic at all. They are more so, in fact, now that I’m old enough to understand depth and nuance. I’m old enough to have learned, over and over, how complex everyone is, and it’s that very complexity that gives characters their depth and breathes life into them.

As the bindings loosen, I’m encouraged in the endeavor not in spite of my age, but because of it: I’ve lived long enough to know that truth often can be stranger than fiction, so who says any departure from truth can’t be believable? And why not explore a little strangeness? The nice thing about creating a world is that in fiction, people are willing to suspend belief.

We even accept obvious gaps in logic if the story is good enough. So what if Harry Potter had to go through a year as a Triwizard Tournament contestant just so he could touch the bewitched winner’s cup rather than be transported much earlier in the semester by a more ordinary item? We didn’t mind suspending a little logic because we showed up for the thrill of the ride and not the restrictions of anal-retentive logic. In fact, most readers love the idea of being suspended in fun, because reading fiction itself is the act of playing. As writers, by freeing ourselves to have fun and take a wild ride, we free the audience we’ve invited to bring with us.

Once I throw open that rusty door after all these years and cast off the heavy accumulation of chores and worries and roles and expectations clogging my gears—the world out there (or maybe I should say “in” there) feels like that beloved playground all over again. All I have to do is buy myself the proverbial ticket to go there and have fun.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.  The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. ~C. G. Jung

Still Digesting

I recently got some great news: I was selected as one of six finalists in the Reader’s Digest 100 Word Essay Contest! Let’s just say there was so much whooping and leaping that pets fled in fear.

I grew up assuming it was normal to have a copy of Reader’s Digest sitting on the kitchen table like a centerpiece, and I’ve dreamed of being published in that sacred little tome for well over thirty years. I remember only too well lugging my dad’s electric typewriter from his scary basement lair up two flights of stairs to prepare some submissions for their “All in a Day’s Work” and “Laughter is the Best Medicine” sections. Said typewriter was impressively large and encased in mustard-gold plastic with a handle for easy transportation like a Samsonite suitcase, if one had packed 60 pounds of scrap metal and a ribbon that sagged in the middle for a vacation to Writerville.

It wasn’t exactly a fun vacation, either. I had to set the whole thing up on my furry red bedspread with my beloved Webster’s New World College edition close at hand because I didn’t have a proper desk. Mistakes were such an ordeal to correct that the whole process was absolutely agonizing for a poor typist like me. The resulting piece usually looked like a minefield of tiny White Out explosions, like a small war had taken place on the page. Which it had.

Submitting meant more carefully typed envelopes and stamps, followed by ages of waiting. Endless waiting, since I didn’t get a response.

It took over thirty years. For me it was worth the wait. Please consider looking for it in the June edition.

Walking the wire is life. Everything else is waiting around ~Karl Wallenda of the Flying Wallendas

One Stop on the Writing Process Blog Tour: Where There Be Dragons

Many thanks to Sioux of Sioux’s Page for including me in The Writing Process blog tour! It was begun by Margo Dill, who passed it to the incredible Donna Volkenannt, who formerly took first place in the global humor category of the world famous Erma Bombeck Writing Competition and who this year won honorable mention in the global human interest category of that same contest. Sioux summed her up so well that I can’t add a thing except to say that everything Donna does and is has a kind of grace to it.

Donna then passed it to Sioux, who is a fierce spirit who can do pretty much anything (and then act later like it was nothing at all). Her wit is of course sharply, impishly wicked-clever, but it’s tempered by such generosity, kindness, and modesty that both she and her art are hewn into legend itself. As if that weren’t enough, she is a 2014 winner of the Saint Louis production of the national Listen to Your Mother event and will perform May 10 (YES, she performs, too) at the St. Luke’s Institute for Health Education at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

So here were the Writing Process blog tour questions:

What am I working on?

A young adult novel. Also some other stuff, such as possible submissions to various upcoming Chicken Soup for the Soul titles. 

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I’m not going to answer this question exactly the way it was intended. Instead, I’ll say that my last creative nonfiction piece differed in that it turned out not to be the piece I wanted it to be. Sad, but true. I don’t think bad early drafts necessarily make us bad writers. I think not knowing they are bad does. That’s why I think a lot of writers perpetually do battle with both sides of that most fearsome of two-headed dragons: self-assurance vs. self-doubt. We’re led to believe that self-assurance is everything, but it can only get us so far. If it takes over too much, we’re liable to write stuff that isn’t our best. But when the latter rears its ugly head, the piece is in danger of never getting written in the first place. Odd that it doesn’t matter if someone accepts the piece or not—somewhere deep down we have to know it’s the best we could do, and it’s only when I’ve reached that point that I feel like I’ve slain the dragon. The greatest weapon in this battle is objectivity, which is why an honest critique group helps so enormously. Sometimes there’s only so much they can do, however, so some pieces are better left to sit a while. The aforementioned piece turned out not to be appropriate for the publication I had in mind, for example, so I may put it away to marinate. Sioux is so generous of spirit that she says things fall out of me. They don’t. They do often fall out of an old file where they’ve been marinating—and sometimes pickling—for a long time. The irony! Sometimes if I can forget the piece enough, I can later read it from the most objective place possible.

Why do I write what I do?

I try to capture a message that’s important to me, and I try to capture it in a way that I hope will somehow resonate with others. I think people who are interested in any kind of art in the first place have a need to make sense of the world. 

How does your writing process work?

Usually I have an idea of both the beginning and end before I ever get started, and writing is the process of making the journey. Being able to make the journey at a time when I can lose myself in it to the point that it feels like it takes over and writes itself is, of course, the eternal goal. And the confoundingly tricky part for me.

Time to pass this illustrious award to:

Lynn Obermoeller of Present Letters. 

Lynn is one of those other people who can do just about anything and make it look effortless. She is also incredibly gracious. She is a deeply conscious and fearless soul who never hides behind pretense. (Why do I keep envisioning knight imagery?) She is disarmingly honest, and it’s that very quality that makes her characters complex, fascinating and delightfully vivid. She is also a whiz at plotting.

Lisa Ricard Claro of Writing in the Buff. 

I’ve never met Lisa in person, but her blog and writing are first rate. She blends wisdom and warmth with incredible grace. Her clever wit is legendary. She does a wonderful job of walking the line between being approachable and being the soul of professionalism. I can’t wait to read her upcoming book.

Thank you again, Sioux!

If you are not discouraged about your writing on a regular basis, you may not be trying hard enough.  Any challenging pursuit will encounter frequent patches of frustration.  Writing is nothing if not challenging. ~Maxwell Perkins, editor

And, in honor of World Down Syndrome Day, here is a conversation I overhead at Target between a young male employee with Down Syndrome who puts carts away and his male boss:

Employee (after the boss said he was going home soon): Don’t forget to hug me before you go!

Boss: Well come here and let’s hug you right now, then!