Image by Gerhard Gellinger from Pixabay ​

​As a creative writing professor, one of the things I often see students struggling with is making the transition from using writing as an escape from the world's trappings to allowing writing to become the bread and butter of their lives. Many people still live under the mistaken impression that creatives must starve for lack of career opportunities, but there are so many avenues to make a great, creative living. The big things that can stop a creative career from happening have more to do with what goes on inside the artist than what's available in the world. This transition from hobby writing to professional writing is both a doorway and an obstacle to a creative career. 

Most school programs don't build in much information about how to navigate this, so I thought I'd share the most recent version of what I tell my students when they come to the place where the pressure is greater than the joy.

There's something wonderful and terrible about going to school for the creative thing you love. More so in making a profession out of it. 

The wonderful is that you can completely immerse yourself in the work that matters most to you, develop your ability to make that work more authentic and of greater quality, and build a community of people who care about pursuing their craft.

The terrible thing is that suddenly this creative play that has always been a way of escaping the drudgery of life is now the drudgery. It is the stuff you must do, not just the stuff you choose to do. In school, it's the stuff you must do for grades. In career, it's the stuff you must do so you can eat and keep the lights on. 

One of the hardest things about going to school for writing or any art is that for the first time you must find the balance between these two. 

Sometimes you're going to turn in work that isn't your best. In a deadline-driven world, that will always be true. But one of the best ways to get your work closer to your best is to find a way to have fun with it, even when it's required. 

Art is rebellious and personal and universal and wondrous and scary all at once. When you're finding yourself under enough pressure that it stops being fun, notice, give that a nod, and look for ways that you may be able to let some of the adventure back in. I recommend artist's dates (see Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way) and rebellion. By rebellion, I don't mean jumping in a tie fighter or heading off to the Hunger Games. I mean look for something else that you can safely put off in order to have a little fun, something that is not your writing. Maybe it's laundry day. Take yourself to a coffee shop and write instead. Live with the pressure of not having clean underwear for a couple days instead of the pressure of not having freedom to write spontaneously, when you want to. 
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Or look for an idea in the world that drives you mad because people seem to think this is how reality works, but it's not - write a bit that rebels against their misconception. This can be satire, fiction, whatever. Just something that gives you that subversive satisfaction that you're doing something you're not supposed to. 
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Of course, that has to be balanced, too, because walking around in dirty clothes for too long has its own bad consequences, but you see what I mean. 
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Look for ways to keep writing an adventure, or you'll grow to hate it. It gets easier to maintain the balance the more practice you have, but we all need to refresh our sense of wonder now and then.

Stories start as a scratching, a tapping, a dripping faucet - something that niggles at us as we go about our day like a shadow that keeps shifting in our periphery. At least, this is how they start for me, and for most of the authors and writing students who've shared their processes with me. Something, whether beautiful or problematic or curious, will not leave us alone. 

So we turn our heads. We look in the direction of the shifting shadow and see a bit of a shape to it, and we write down what we see. 

Sometimes this leads to the next thing and the next thing. Those times are gifts, when the story reveals itself to us in full, continuously, as we sit with it and open ourselves to the words that bring it into the world.

Most times, we have fits and starts. The scratching creature gets skittish and scurries away the moment we've turned our attention toward it. We have a line or two, a page or two, and don't know where the little beast went or how to follow. We look for its tracks in the rooms and landscapes of our minds, and along the way, we see what it saw as it ran. 

Sometimes, we find it that same hour we started searching. Other times, it takes weeks, months, or even years. There are traces of story that started in me over 20 years ago, back when I was in high school, and I'm only now picking up their footprints. In the time since they first tickled at the edge of my conscious to now, I've written many, many other stories. And even in these, I've come to dead ends and missing trails at different moments along the journey.

Some of us call this writer's block. I have come to think of it as not being ready for the story, or for the particular part of the story, that we're writing. 

Stories are one of our most ancient containers for truth. When we didn't understand nature, or cruelty, or love, or time, we made myths to contain these truths so we could hold them up to the light and examine them outside ourselves. This helps us navigate the complexities of our own experience. 

But what if a story has a truth to tell that we don't yet know ourselves, as its writer? 

Here are some things we can do when we realize our story has outrun us:

• Take a break. This is a timeworn strategy, but worth remembering. If we step away for awhile, we might gain perspective that will open the dams again and let the story rush back through.
• Research. Even if your story is not history or science driven, even if it is in your home town on the same timeline as your life, you don't know everything about it. If you did, you wouldn't be writing it in the first place - we write to explore a problem, to get resolution. Look at the medicine, the geography, the different expectations of genders and ethnic groups, the urban legends, the "normal" of your story's world and people. 
• Is there a character you don't like? Read blogs and memoirs by people who have similar traits and learn what it's like to be them. These characters you dislike often have something to teach you, but they won't tell you your secrets knowing how much you hate them. Find a way to care about them, even just a little, and see how they suddenly explode into complex, breathing souls. You can still write them as unlikable, but now they will be multifaceted and believable, more capable of illustrating the core of the story.
• Is there a character you love too much? Oh, dear, this is hard. But we have to let them hurt, and we have to let them hurt because of their own flaws. If you work to hard to protect your character's image, no one will believe them anyway, and this perfect character, just like your villain, will stop talking to you. If you can't love someone, warts and all, they know better than to show you their warts. 
• Work on multiple projects at once. If you've taken a story as far as you can without doing the research and work above, it helps to take out other projects and give them more of your energy. In May, Joli Jensen wrote a fantastic article in The Chronicle about how to manage multiple projects according to your schedule and energy levels. Remember, in cases where deadlines aren't involved, it's OK to shift between which projects receive your strongest commitment when your A story goes silent on you. 
• Treat your stories like friends. Stories, like people, sometimes need space. Keep coming back to check on them, but respect the relationship. You can have more than one friend at a time, but it's unlikely you'll be engaged in deeply focused, intimate conversation with more than one or two of them in the same moment. Enjoy the time you spend with each of them, and invite the others over in their turn. Maybe one will teach you something that grows you enough to understand the truth in the others that you weren't ready to receive when it first came to you.
• Examine your demons. Even though most of my characters and their circumstances are not much like me, I often find them facing similar internal challenges to mine. Sometimes when I'm stuck, it's because I need to do some soul searching of my own before I can write a character honestly through their flaw. If you think this might be the case, I recommend doing some guided journaling. Many 12-step programs use the tool of a "fearless" personal inventory that can be adapted to addressing our demons as writers so that we can write our characters honestly as they address theirs.

What about you? Do you have other strategies for making yourself ready for the story that wants to be told? 

I am planting. I've added golden dewdrops (the flowers are purple - go figure), purslane, Texas sage (not edible), to the back yard. Really, it's just a patio, but it's open to a large green space with a view of trees and the dilapidated golf course that stretches through my neighborhood. In the front, I've decided I'm up for a challenge, and planted gardenias. My husband's grandmother used to grow them, and he misses the smell. He lost his eyesight in 2016, so there's some significance to this. I also added an orchid because my friend Dawn says they're ridiculously easy, and I want something pretty out there if it turns out I'm not ready to level up to the high demands of gardenia bushes.

I am planting. I started teaching screenwriting in December, and so I am writing screenplays now. Short ones. I've written a few scripts before, but now I need to pull them into my wheelhouse rather than treating them as side adventures. Over the past three weeks, I collaborated with a colleague to write an 8-page script that we hope the film department will produce for the festival circuit. I am sending out my most polished novel to agents, and I am writing short things - poems, flash, threads of story for a novel with an ensemble cast. 

The soil is fertile now, but it's been a long winter for us - three years of increasingly fallow living as we journeyed through my husband's illness. He has Type 2 diabetes, and a year after losing his eyesight, he lost his kidney function. Everything extra fell away from our lives, along with some of the essentials.

Our weekend adventures - we used to take meandering road trips. 

Living in our downtown home - we have moved to a suburban townhouse.

My daughter - she moved in with her dad when the stress of living with terminal illness affected her too deeply to stay.

Some losses have measurable value. Others spread their bleeding emptiness through every layer of our being. 

In January, we were blessed by a generous friend who gave Felix a kidney. While this hasn't brought back his eyesight, it's stabilized everything else. Felix is healthy and beginning to enjoy cooking and small adventures again. He and my daughter have laughed together a handful of times this year.

Without the 3-7 weekly medical visits involved in kidney failure, or the 30-mile drive (120 miles for two round trips daily) to and from my daughter's magnet school, I am left with time.

​And a heap of compost.

​Dead things that have collected in my soul over the past three years. 

Sometimes, the smell overwhelms me, and I lay in bed and cry at all the loss. 

​But on good days, I sew handfuls of my decomposed life into the soil, and I write, and I wait for the gardenias to bloom. 

So here we all are, a week and a half into NaNoWriMo. Do you have 16,670 words written? I don't. I think I have about 3,000 words. And I feel successful AF. Here's why, and some things that might help if you're feeling less than successful today:

• Like kids, not all novels grow the same way. They learn to walk, talk, climb, and consider consequences at different times. There's a general expectation for these developments, but even kids who don't fall into the norms charts have something very special to offer. I once worked with a five-year-old whose piano teacher had given up on him at the age of two when he was able to transpose sheet music to a new key in his head and play it instantaneously. She said he was more advanced than she was, and she had nothing left to teach him. Why did I work with him? He didn't know how to interact with other five-year-olds. Let your novel grow at its own pace. If that means you don't have the same word count as you expect, figure out what you do have and rely on that strength to grow your draft. Wait till revisions to worry about the other stuff. 

 

• I knew from the beginning that I'm not a word count writer, so I didn't try to write by word count. My goal for this month has been to find entry points into a story that was too big for me. I've found three entry points already, and these characters' individual stories are growing beautifully. While I don't have 16,000+ words on the page, I do have some of the biggest challenges of the book solved already. On November 1, I did not. What do you have today that you did not have on November 1? How can you build the rest of the month around the way you do write instead of the way you don't?

 

• Jessica Wunder, one of my writer friends, says her goal this month is to keep pushing the story forward. She knows she lets herself nitpick, so she's forcing herself from scene to scene, and this is getting it done. I am the opposite. My novels don't grow from point A to point B. They are more like cell division: one cell becomes two, become four, become eight, and so on. The different bits grow simultaneously, so I grow my work by going back and expanding what exists. How does your work grow? Forward? Backward? By prompt? At the cellular level? If it's not growing, it may be because you're expecting a kind of growth that isn't natural to you or your work. Pause and consider when growth spurts have happened before. What do those look like? How can you create similar conditions for your writing now?

 

• Another writer friend, Leslie Salas, says she always leaves something unfinished at the end of a writing session. If she doesn't complete the scene, her brain will naturally pick at it while she's away from her writing, and it takes less time to warm up to the work the next time she sits down. If she finishes a scene, she makes sure to get a few sentences or questions into the next one before closing up shop for the day.

 

• If you're stuck, there are a few things you can do to take the pressure off and get unstuck. One is to step away from the work. Take a walk, bath, drive, whatever. But do something that gives your brain a break. If you're stuck because you don't know a character or setting or some other part of the book, open a new file, one that will never show up in the novel, and brainstorm. Write out scenes you don't intend to use. Write an interview with your character, or with three characters that aren't important to the book, but who know your character - one who likes them, one who doesn't, and a third of your choice. Ask yourself what scares you about the story. If nothing scares you, that's the problem. You're writing safe. That will bore you and the readers. Find a theme or idea that scares you and let your character wrestle with it. 

 

• Sit down next to another writer and be anti-social. Instead of visiting with each other, write. There's nothing like hearing another writer tapping away at their keyboard to get you motivated to tap away at yours.

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These are just a few things that I've found that work for me in writing in general, not just for Nano. If you have more tips to add to the comments, please do! 

NaNoWriMo is fast approaching, and if you're a fiction writer who wants to get a novel out of your system, you may be wringing your hands over it. NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, happens every November as a communal push to get a novel on paper. The idea is simple: the average novel has 50,000 words, and November has 30 days. If you write ~ 1,667 words each day of the month, you'll have a first draft by the end of it. (If you want to know more, check out NaNoWriMo.org.)

I don't see myself as a word count writer. When I try that, it feels like I'm missing the relationship with my characters that I so love. I write to go deeper with people, to understand places I've never been, to open myself up to the possibility that I don't know everything. (More a fact than a possibility, but it's so easy for so many of us to forget this.)

And, I write out of order. The Former Lives of Buildings, the novel that I'm currently shopping around to agents, happens on four personal timelines of a character with memory problems, and was the first project where I fully embraced writing different threads of story and weaving them together in some kind of sequence later on. But all of my longer writing projects have jumped around as I've written them, leaving me to fiddle with scenes like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle during the revision process.

So, again, I don't see myself as that kind of writer, one who can just write the first 1,667 words one day and then sit down to write the next 1,667 words on the following day, for 30 consecutive days.

And, as a result, I haven't tried NaNoWriMo before. I have used the month to do a mad dash on revisions for novels, and that's worked well. But drafting a novel always seemed like a silly thing for me to try in this manner. 

But the world is crazy right now, and I need to create something while we're in the midst of all this destruction. I don't even care if I have a whole novel at the end of this. I just need to make something. 

So, here's what I'm going to do. The novel I've been researching for the past year has an ensemble cast spread across the globe, and it's felt too big for me to sink my teeth into all this time. But I've written a bit from this character, and a bit from that one, and I guess I have about 20 pages of bits. And that, I think, is how this book needs to get birthed: bit by bit. 

I'm going back to the classroom for this - I know consecutive, consistent word counts don't work for me. But prompts, the mainstay of the creative writing classroom, do. I am gathering articles, character prompts, inspiring photos, and other materials that can work as entry points to get at different characters in the book. Each day in November, I'll write from one of these prompts. I have a good feeling about this. I think it will give me all the threads I need to sit down and start weaving in the months that follow. 

What about you? Have you done NaNoWriMo before? Are you considering doing it for the first time? How have you prepared? How have you kept going in the midst of it? I'd love to hear about your experience.

​It’s been a year since my husband’s kidneys failed. I was prepping the conference room at HD Counseling for a painting workshop. People would start arriving in about ten minutes. My phone rang, and our friend Jen told me that Felix was waiting on an ambulance. They’d been seeing a movie, and he couldn’t breathe.

 It was so close to the start time that people would already be on their way to my workshop. I wouldn’t be able to cancel until everyone had arrived. Jen passed the phone to Felix. He didn’t want me to cancel. Jen promised to give me updates, and I promised I would meet them in hospital immediately after the workshop was done, sooner if he needed me.

For the next three hours, I served coffee and tea and painted with a roomful of lovely humans who were ready to pack up at any moment if Felix took a turn for the worse, and ready to keep me laughing and enjoying the process of creating for as long as he did not.

After cleaning up, I stopped by the house and grabbed the hospital essentials - toiletries for both of us and a week’s worth of strategically interchangeable outfits for me. My husband is newly blind. I don’t leave him alone in hospital. I followed Jen’s final text to his room number. Thanks to the painting session, I’d never been more at peace on my way to an emergency.

Over the twelve months since then, the shape of our lives has continued to change, funneling through dialysis clinics, our daughter’s high school programs and the very real needs that can push a teenager toward a confident adulthood or lifelong insecurity, moving house in order to nail down a more constant budget, the erosion of my stepdad's memories, the odd circumstances of the death of my Aunt Sandy, health issues in our extended family, issues with my own health, seismic changes in family structure.

It’s been a cataclysmic year for us.

I am worn down to my threads. I peck at a chapter here, a painting there. I forget thumb drives when I go on writing retreats, research themes too big for me (but that are somehow easier than sitting in the mottled present tense of what is my real life). I find myself drifting. Longing for beauty.

And this is why we need art. This is why we need story. This weekend, my despair was so great I couldn’t sit alone. My husband was so exhausted from having his blood artificially cleaned and pumped back into him that he had no energy to distract me. So I gobbled up What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty. Someone had mentioned it after they asked what my novel, The Former Lives of Buildings, was about. My protagonist, Like Moriarty's, wakes in the hospital having forgotten important events. I intentionally waited until my own book was finished before reading Moriarty’s (I’m currently shopping TFLoB around to agents). Alice's forgotten years helped me forget my losses for a day.

Last week, I spent some listless time walking around Adjectives Market, a co-op type shop filled with vintage, upcycled, and original ephemera. Sometimes, when I can’t stand being in my own head, I think about which room I’ll paint next in our new place.

I’ve temporarily stopped offering workshops. I haven’t hosted Artist’s Way groups in months. I am still hosting my writing circle because I don’t think I will survive these waves of loss without  the collective writing experience for a few hours a month. But otherwise, I have let go of most of the peopling part of my art life.

But the part where I get to leave my life for a moment by living in the head of someone else - whether it’s my character or another author’s, the part where the overlap of red oil paint just past the edge of the white strokes of a bird’s feather, even the capture of real forget-me-nots in a drop of glass  on Etsy - these quiet offerings of beauty keep me breathing, in, out. They ask nothing of me across a year that has already stolen far too much.  Beauty asks nothing. It just exists alongside all the ugly and lets us notice it, or not.

Make art. We all need to breathe.

After taking a long break from blogging to finish out my time teaching in public school, I'm excited to revive my blog 100 Pots. I'll be adding new posts and reblogging some of my older ones. Here's my very first post, and the origins of my blog title. Enjoy!

A thousand years ago when I was an undergraduate student at New College of Florida, I had a quirky ceramics professor who lived in my backyard. The house I was renting with some other students had a guest house, and one day Bob and his wife showed up and moved in. Bob smoked cigars that gave of a mellow, spicy scent and did not let me into his 3-D design class, but asked me to join his ceramics class. I think it was an olive branch to be neighborly more than anything else. The design class had so much more to do with my work, and so many fewer seats than the ceramics class. I was mad, but, after all, he was my neighbor, so I accepted the invitation.

It turned out to be my most memorable college class. Bob gave his students the key code to the building, and a few of us would be there at all hours of the night. And he would be, too. We'd let the slippery clay spin between our fingers, rising, falling, a meditation. Then, if Bob was there, we'd join him outside for a break while thick cigar smoke fogged the night air between us. We learned how Peter Voulkos would turn a perfect plate and then slice it with wire and patch it back together, leaving messy cracks and sensual textures. We learned about Paul Soldner's collaging clay together until it could be nothing but art, not a craft, not a cup you would drink from or a bowl you would eat from. Their work demanded new esteem for clay. Their work concentrated on the beauty of the flaw.

The beauty of the flaw translates to all art. If a writer writes a perfect character, it better be a villain because nobody wants to root for a perfect person. We love the underdog, the broken, the tragic flaw.
In one of our class meetings, Bob told us about a professor he'd once had. The professor divided the class into two groups. The first group had to make 100 pots. Over the course of a semester that's about seven pots a week. That's a LOT of pots. But the number was the only requirement. The pots could be any size or shape, symmetrical or lumpy, it didn't matter. If they made their hundred, the members of this group would receive A's. The second group had the entire semester to make only one pot. But the pot had to be perfect, flawless, without fingerprint, wabble, variation in wall thickness, or any other mark that a human being had anything to do with it. If they turned in one perfect pot, the members of this group would receive A's.

Guess which group came closest to making the perfect pot?

So I'm writing my first blog post about the phrase that keeps me moving forward with my work when I'm afraid it won't come out perfectly. I hear it in my head, in Bob's lively, round-voweled voice: "100 Pots! 100 Pots!"

They will never be perfect, these words, but the more of them I write, the closer they will get. Bob was right. The ceramics class was exactly what I needed.


Image: Credit. Attribution-ShareAlike License.