Writing by hand

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivq2aGJDxiM&w=475&h=297] This post is #34 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

You don't need to convince people who use "journal" as a verb of the value of writing things down longhand. (Although some, you must convince of the the value of editing before taking things public.)

The Keyboard People can push back, though. "I can think faster than I can write longhand," they say, or "I can't read my own writing."

Both of these things are true for me, and yet I have filled two cubic feet with chicken-scratchings on paper anyway. Because despite what I carelessly tossed off many years ago, the point of writing a journal by hand is to write a journal by hand. Period. That your journals provide a "map of you" is a kind of bonus-extra, a by-product of the true point, which is spend time quietly with yourself, being exactly where you're at.

What can I say? You live, and hopefully, you learn. But in case it's still not clear, I suggest you spend more time walking, and less time looking at your maps.

xxx c

Death and taxes and love love love [+ a 50-for-50 video]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xQYImxa59g&w=475&h=297] This post is #32 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

I spent the morning today at the funeral service for a friend's father. I'll be spending the rest of the afternoon and evening preparing my stuff to take to my tax guy tomorrow morning.

Death and taxes. Yes, really.

While I'd been dreading them both, a weird kind of calm settled over me as I drove out to the West Valley. Maybe it was the spirit of my friend's father, showering love and happiness from the great beyond; by the sound of it, he was that kind of a guy, always full of love and a zest for life. Or maybe it was just so much sunlight everywhere, spilling onto everything. It's hard for me to keep feeling badly when the sun is shining, which is part of the reason I'm unlikely to move to the glorious PacNW anytime soon.

Anyway, the service ended up being terrifically uplifting: wonderful stories of a life beautifully lived, angelic singing from his eldest son. Which is good, because it also ended up being terrifically long, I'd forgotten that's how the Catholics do their celebrations. Lots of pomp, and lots of long.

But my favorite point of the show, and come on, it's a show, folks, was the sermon. Usually my least favorite part, owing to the bombastery of 90% of the priests you tend to run into, this one contained useful and uplifting words about many things, most strikingly, forgiveness. You hear a lot about forgiveness, blah blah blah, but you don't usually hear this: that Jesus talked about forgiving (an order of magnitude of forgiving), but he never said anything about forgetting. We are supposed to work on forgiving, and then leave the other party room for acknowledging and making amends. An incredibly loving and just and harmonious solution to the conundrum of life slamming you in the face repeatedly. My job is not to say "Oh, fine, it's all good" but to process and forgive. Process and forgive. (And, of course, if I'm on the other side of things, to acknowledge and make amends.)

It's a relevant subject right now because this 50-for-50 Project, for as wonderful as it is, is rousing all kinds of strange, old things inside me. Hurts from long ago blow up unexpectedly like ancient land mines, triggered by actions real and intents projected. Another reminder that there is no burying things, no hiding your garbage. You sit with it, you sit in it, you deal with it, and then maybe you get to move on.

For me, writing helps. It gets things out of my head and heart, even the long-buried, festering stuff. Not always pleasant, but life is not about pleasant, it's about living. Loving. Moving. Growing.

I'll let you know when I figure out what the taxes are for.

xxx c

When in doubt, be grateful

This post is #29 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

It was a difficult day on the horn of the hump.

On the other hand, 20 or even 10 years ago, it took much less than a day like this to unseat me. Keeping things in perspective is a gift of having looped around the mountain enough times. Even if you can't see as well or move as quickly as you used to, you recognize the view well enough to know you've been here before, and you'll be back again.

One of my favorite ways to stick a fork in a day that's less than perhaps everything I wanted it to be is to find five things about it that were pretty damned good.

Like...

1. We came within millimeters of $31,000.
2. My protruding tummy & I made it through Day 8 of the dreaded 30-Day Shred.
3. The overdue fines were racked up for a good reason and are going to a good cause.
4. I got an incredibly polite rejection note from Joan Didion herself.
5. I get a fresh start tomorrow.

Words don't always come easily, and when they do, some days they just don't sparkle like others. That's okay. You can always make a serviceable casserole from them.

Tomorrow.

xxx c

Photo by Julian Wasser, Time Life Pictures, Getty Images, via the Library Foundation of Los Angeles who no doubt licensed it properly for their ALOUD series, at which Ms. Didion is appearing this fall. I'll be in Detroit, goddammit, but you should totally go; I would.

Copious amounts of "alone time"

This post is #28 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

I spend at least twice as much time puttering as I do writing.

"Puttering," as I define it, equals any non-hurried doing of any non-mission-critical activity. Tearing out serious articles in magazines to send to friends is puttering; reading them is not. (Unless you are reading just a snatch of something while brushing your teeth.)

Inserting photos in frames is puttering. Dusting them can be, too, I suppose, but by the time I get to dusting, it's moved beyond mission-critical to "necessary for avoiding health setbacks."

Cooking a little, but even more, rooting through your supplies to see what might be made. Labeling your file folders or your electronic cables. Sifting through a jewelry drawer or a box of DVDs to see what might be dispensed with. All of these are wonderful ways to putter.

Puttering is a way to burn off anxiety, to refuel creatively while still being just the tiniest bit creative. It is helpful if movement is involved, rearranging things is a favorite puttering activity, but not strictly necessary. All that is truly necessary is to create the environment one wants (quiet, soft music, singalong music; fans, breezes, incense) and solitude. Puttering alongside of someone else is possible, but it takes a very special someone. Mostly, puttering needs to happen alone.

It took a long, long time for me to realize how much alone time I need, or perhaps to give in to it. Since I have, I mostly wonder whether it will always be like this, or whether those needs will change. Whether I could change them myself, by becoming more productive, perhaps, and more structured in my doings, or by adding in meditation or upping my more aggressive physical activity.

For now, though, puttering it is. And copious amounts of alone time in which to do it.

xxx c

Refilling the well

This post is #27 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

We passed the halfway point in the campaign yesterday, quietly, without fanfare.

The achievements thus far have been remarkable. Raising $50,000 in 50 days during summer break in a crap economy is no mean feat; getting $4,000 ahead by the halfway point, in the middle of what everyone has told me was the inevitable dip, is beyond amazing. I'm grateful to everyone who has been pitching in so hard, both behind the scenes and out on the front lines of social media, just as I'm grateful to my own body for allowing me to push it so hard for this past month and change.

I can see the signs of exhaustion now better than I could seven years ago, the last time I attempted anything close to this magnitude. Back then, it was a show, hour-long, with music, that was a monster to get up on its feet. At one point during the process, I had a hysterical freakout/breakdown, after which my wonderful co-writer/producer stepped in and relieved me of some of the too-many duties I'd taken on. So far this time, the only crying I've done has been tears of joy over the insane goodness of everyone, and I find those tears both refreshing and restorative.

Still, it's hard. And my tendency when things are hard is to push more, even though I have my choice of proofs, both personal and familial, that this is a losing game. I also know that without physically removing myself from my own premises, it's really hard for me to not do just one more thing. Post one more something, email one more request.

I had grand ambitions for the 50 posts here on communicatrix during this campaign. I was going to have all sorts of interesting pieces about my writing life growing up, and lengthy, thoughtful essays on vanity, on aging, and other things that are almost inconceivably difficult for me to even think about attempting. Still hoping to get a hair piece up there before the shaving, but who knows? It's already a bad sign that I'm punning without intent, and leaving the damn stuff up there.

So here is my gigantically huge thought for the day: you are not a machine. Neither am I. The good news is that this means that we can't be replaced. The bad news is this means we cannot run nonstop. (Although really, can a machine run nonstop?)

Read. Putter. Go out and hang with friends. Take a walk or a little drive. Nap.

I'm saying that to myself as much as to you, and as much for the sake of my writing as the sake of my health.

And yes, I'll see you again tomorrow. Duh. What else?

xxx c

Poetry Thursday: Focus

This post is #25 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

One foot in front of the other.

This is how everything moves
from one place to the next.

From chaos to clarity.
From fear to love.
(And back. And back.)
From nothing to something.
(And back. And back.)
From empty to full,
from birth to death,
from blank to fin,
from impossible to done.

And the doubt
that pools around you
as you pause
to catch your breath

And the voices
that whisper
of hazards ahead

And the fear
that seems to color the air
a sickly shade of gray

All vanish
when you focus
on putting one foot
in front of the other.

xxx
c

Image inside the frame by Alissa Walker, from a photograph she took on one of the many trips she's taken doing just that. You can get it in a luxurious, desktop-sized image of inspiration with a $15 contribution to the 50-for-50 project on IndieGoGo, through September 13, 2011.

Writing had better be its own reward

This post is #23 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

Writing pays, but not in the ways most people think it does.

You can be paid well to write commercially, for example, ads, screenplays, gossip, but what you are really being paid for in most of these cases is your ability to provide infrastructure. You give good meetings, good ferreting, good deadline. You excel at a particular type of traveling, of winnowing, of synthesis. You can produce on demand, at a certain speed. You mimic voices well, you correct the off-key sounds of others even better. When I wrote ads, most of my time was spent doing things peripheral to writing itself (and most of what I wrote felt like a poor payout for the time invested, but that's another story for another blog post.)

Writing with no immediately commercial prospects requires just as much non-writing time. Because on top of the reading and walking and thinking and processing (not to mention editing and re-writing) required for all writing in some amounts, non-commercial writing requires that you put some energy into finding the means to support yourself outside of your writing. Also, the payout is different. It's continuous, and (I think) considerable, but in no way does it look like "winning" to most of the go-go world. It will not make you rich. It may not even earn you accolades.

I will be 50 very, very soon. If history is any indication, I will be 60, 75, 90 even sooner. Age is the only thing about me that moves quickly; the rest of me is slow. I am not a hare, and it was exhausting strapping that fluffy-tailed jet pack to my crusty tortoise body and pretending to be one.

I am also not better than a hare. Apples and oranges, although some of those oranges have some pretty juicy swimming pools and vacation homes. Which, I might add, they're generous enough to share with this here apple.

Years after I retired my jet pack but decades before I am (hopefully) done living, I have had to make my peace with my pace. I have had to learn to love the rewards of my path, and to examine my envious longings for those paths, over there.

Whatever path you are on, get down with it. There is reward enough to be had, even if it is not what you first see as such.

xxx c

Image inside the frame by Heather Parlato, from a photograph she took on a recent trip to paradise, aka the Central Coast of California. You can get it in a luxurious, desktop-sized image of inspiration with a $15 contribution to the 50-for-50 project on IndieGoGo, through September 13, 2011.

Epistolary you

This post is #21 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

One of the best ways to get better at anything, writing included, is to do it every day.

It's the main reason I decided to start blogging seven years ago. After writing and producing my two-person-show-for-four-people, I'd tasted the joy that is creating something personally meaningful for public consumption, and I was hooked. I'd continue to scribble in my journal as necessary, but knowing I was writing out loud, even to a barely-there public, made me reach a little further every day toward a higher and higher baseline of excellence.

But before the blog, before the show, there were letters. All my life, there had been letters, as my doting paternal grandfather pretty much demanded them. We wrote volumes to one another, back and forth: Chicago to Ithaca, Chicago to New York City, Chicago to Los Angeles. (For as much as he and Gram enjoyed having me back home for those six years between coasts, I think he was always a little wistful about the corresponding lack of correspondence.)

It was an early-seeded habit that served me well, for it kept me writing, writing, writing during those years when the rest of my outward-facing output was overtly commercial and sadly lackluster. It held the thread of who I really was underneath all of those ads and "obligations" and bullshit until I was finally ready to pull my head from my ass and recommit to real writing. It still does: while I may not be ready to speak my peace in public, in private, in the letters (now called "emails") that no one but the recipient sees, in the Wave blips I trade back and forth with my friend (and wallpaper contributor) Dave Seah, I am fully myself, in all of my mess, process, and confusion. And while great, honking swaths of it is pure mess, because I am sharing, because I am trying to push a thought outward to be seen/heard/understood, I am also getting better at writing. Which is really just another form of talking, only with less wear and tear on the vocal cords.

If you want to write but don't know where to start, if you want to write more or more eloquently or more persuasively or more humorously, write someone a letter. Every day. You can call it an email, although if you are wise and generous like my friend Patti Digh, you will also write an actual letter every day, which you can call a "thank-you note." Because there is always someone to thank, just as there is always something to be grateful for.

Every single day.

xxx c

Stealing time

This post is #20 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

One of the small details that I love about the WriteGirl program is that at the beginning of each season, each WriteGirl mentee gets her own journal to write in.

The mentors get one, too, but it is that special attention to the girls receiving something just for them, just for writing, and often for the very first time, that really digs at my heart. I grew up with my own room and my own desk inside of it with my own drawers full of things to write with, in, and on. I had a door that closed and parents who let me do just that, shut my door and let my mind and my pen wander for hours at a time. Carving out the time and space for writing, devoting resources to writing, are part of what makes writing happen.

These days, I design my life to give me the most possible time and space for writing. When my medium-sized desk wasn't providing enough horizontal space for me, I got rid of my couch to clear room for a massive table. I live alone, an incredible luxury, and I work for myself, so I can write whenever I feel the urge (and even more importantly, when I don't). Soon enough, I will be re-introducing a good deal of travel for work into the mix, but even then there are airports and airplanes and luxuriously ALL-MINE hotel rooms: still plenty of ways to steal some room for myself to write, even if the circumstances aren't as plushly ideal as they are here at communicatrix home base.

There were times when there wasn't as much time nor as much room. Or when there might have been, but I chose to fuss about the details that weren't exactly right: a pen that was too draggy, a journal that didn't lie flat enough, a "private" area for writing that wasn't private enough.

What I know is that as a grownup, there's almost always a way to provide myself with the room necessary to write. At my most determined there was a stretch of days where I'd committed to morning pages and a road trip at the same time. So every morning, at the ass-crack of dawn, I roused myself from sleep before my partner woke up, took my crappy spiral notebook into the motel bathroom, and used the closed toilet lid for a writing desk. You do what you must to do what you must.

A girl who is still at home, however, surrounded by noises and people and obligations she has little control over, that girl needs help stealing the time to write. And so the notebook, a physical emblem of the worthiness of her writing, and creating space and time for it. And then the weekly meetings with her mentor that say "this writing is important, this time is important, and you are important." Hopefully after that follows the habit, ultimately rendering stuff like This Particular Notebook/Space/Time irrelevant, until she can write on stolen paper and stolen time, in the midst of chaos, maybe with earplugs, at someone else's dining room table. Or, if she needs a wee bit more privacy, on someone else's closed toilet-seat cover.

She will do what she must to do what she must, and eventually, she will change the world as surely as she has changed her own life.

xxx c

Image by debs-eye via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Poetry Thursday: the spaces in between

This post is #18 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

Are you still worried
about that participle
you left
dangling?

That inelegant phrase,
that wobbly metaphor,
that questionably situated adverb?

Never fear, fellow traveler.

There is no "done"
when it comes to ideas on a page
and not even "almost"
will work better than
"awful with a beating heart."

Besides, nobody loves
your beautiful words.

They love
the way they feel
in the spaces
between
them.

xxx
c

Image by Leszek.Leszczynski via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Writer lemonade

This post is #17 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

A few years ago, I was invited to do a reading at a friend's series called "In the Flesh."

Because I am a gigantic thrill-seeking hambone who lives for the high-wire of small theater, I jump at every opportunity to perform live, including this one. It wasn't until later that the full impact of what I'd agreed to sunk in.

You see, "In the Flesh" stood not only for the act of reading live and in-person, but doing a reading of sexy material. About sex. A subject which, despite all of my cursing and bravado and forthrightness, I have never felt comfortable writing about.

Did I know this when I agreed to the gig? I did. Perhaps you do not hail from an alcoholic family and therefore lack my experience in advanced denial and holding two completely conflicting notions in your head at once. It's magical, I tell you! You would not imagine the nutty, sitcom-like situations you can find yourself in!

Anyway, there I was, a couple of days before the show. Too late to back out, too chickenshit to talk about sex with the class. So I did the only logical thing: I decided to sing about it.

For years now, I'd been noting the more unusual search terms that had brought people to my blog, and posting them every now and then in a semi-regular, semi-comic way. What I'd kept in reserve were the questionable, the adult, the outright perverse ones. I pulled them up from the text file where they'd languished, weird and dirty-like. And suddenly, they spoke to me, in rhythm. Then melody. I sang pieces of it over and over, rearranging them here and there, until they magically came together into what I dubbed "The Dirty Keywords Search Song." I enlisted the help of a friend who played guitar and owed me a favor, he met me at the venue (on his way home from a flight, adding a rockstar, cosmopolitan touch), and if memory and the video documentation serve, we brought down the house. Even after a top-flight lineup of very talented, very funny writers. Including Nina Hartley, who gave me a big hug afterward and said, "You funny."

I bring this up now for two reasons.

First, I'm trying to raise money. A LOT of  money, $50,000, in case you hadn't heard. And one of the ways I'm doing that is by offering incentives, to make it fun for people to give and participate, and to show my commitment to this thing. The entry-level incentive is a pack of MP3s, and, well, I thought it was high time that "The Dirty Keywords Search Song" got the full-on treatment. So I went back and re-recorded it the way I did that very first time, three years ago, to give as a practice track to my guitarist friend. I enlisted the help of Pace & Kyeli to add some nifty backing vocals because I was completely enchanted with their doo-wop skills when I saw them displayed in service of the World-Changing Writing Workshop.

And then, because you've gotta have a video to sell stuff, I made a video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGBeKebx00E&w=475&h=386]

(I have to use the old, Flash-style embed on this blog, so if you can't view it, you can click here to see it all modern and HTML5-style.)

Note: the MP3 will sound much nicer because I also got my good friend O-Lan to remix it for me all professionally and stuff. But the raw mix sort of works for the video, so I left it raw.

You can get this as an MP3, along with other assorted tracks, for a $5 donation. Or it comes bundled in a fabulous value pack with all this other stuff like wallpapers and a cross-stitch pattern of the Writer's Motto for a $25 donation.

But there's a second reason I made this video and am sharing it here: crazy shit happens. Things break, they don't go as planned, they don't come together. And if you are a little unsure of your skills or a control freak or both, it can be dispiriting. Your nice plan, all derailed by crazy shit!

The thing is, the very best stuff can come out of the derailment. The first draft that disappeared in a power outage almost always results in a better, tighter draft tossed off after all the long processing you had to slog your way through. The terrifying hospitalization yields a miraculous bloody epiphany which turns into a stage show and a talk and a whole new, happier life. There's a longstanding literary tradition of turning lemons into lemonade which I finally, FINALLY get because it takes conflict to have resolution, and we all need to make sense of something in a scary world gone mad.

Speaking of which, there's a third reason I needed to do this: because it scared me. And if you're not terrifying yourself on a semi-regular basis, I can almost guarantee you're not working hard enough.

xxx c

Edit, edit, edit

This post is #16 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

The reason you get tired of going online is not because there is not enough good stuff, there's plenty of it.

You just can't see it because there's too much bad stuff.

Too many people writing too much because they are desperately afraid that if they do not, they will disappear from view. (It's also why there are too many things on a page, too many things dropping down over what's on a page, and too many pages.)

It's okay to write less and to write better. I'm sorry if anything I've ever written (or said, or done) has led you to believe otherwise.

Do less with more, always. And walk away from people who don't.

Me included.

xxx c

Writing trite

This post is #14 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

I was a fairly highly-paid copywriter for some some big brand names, but it wasn't until I started horsing around on the Internet that I actually got good at writing the evanescent stuff.

Blurbs. Bios. Short "about" squibs. And above all, comments and tweets and emails.

When people throw out that rhetorical question of how I manage to get so much done, they usually do it on the heels of some stupid little throwaway bit of nothing that quietly appeared somewhere. I get that, when I've been moved to make a remark like that, it's usually been in the context of something small built upon a whole lot of other somethings small. Many, many pieces of small that together have made up a mountain I can not only see but that I can trust. Seth Godin reputedly responds to every single email he receives. I was startled (not to mention delighted) by the first reply I got, but it was the steady-and-sureness of the replies that led me to know, like, and truly trust him.

Yes, big things are dazzling. But so are many, many small things: the thank-yous and comments and @-replies; the thoughtfully-written FAQs; descriptions, captions, and something beyond a snap of the "like" button. The mundane touches that no one else sees, that arrive sans fanfare, assure us that someone is there, that someone sees us, that we're not out there alone, whistling Dixie.

Bonus-extra? The more you do them, the better you get at doing all of it.

xxx c

Portrait of the blogger as a young adhole by her brilliant and very patient first art director, Kate O'Hair.

Telling envy where to get off

This post is #13 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

One of the fledgling writer's least favorite and most persistent sidekicks is envy.

Oh, hell, forget "fledgling"; try "living".

I'd like to think it's a necessary artistic tool to keep me humble or even to spur me onward to greater heights, but the reality is that for most of my productive life, envy did neither, it just hung around like a stale funk, stinking up the joint.

Which is why I first met the worldview of one Bonnie Gillespie, a prolific and excellent writer (who, in my opinion, is nowhere near as well-recognized as she should be), with more than a little skepticism. How could you write so much and so well and for so long and for not nearly enough and not hate someone's guts?

But she doesn't. Trust me, I've tested and prodded and snuck up on her from all kinds of angles. Ladyfriend may have her other demons, but she is seriously, genuinely envy-free. As is her husband. Who is an actor.

Here are Bonnie's words on the subject, which sometimes accompany her delightful, helpful emails courtesy of a magical rotating signature:

Any time I see someone succeed I am happy, for it affirms my belief that I live in a world where success is possible.

How great is that? Pretty great! So great that it resides in my permanent quote file. And now, thanks to Bonnie and my friend Dave Seah, who came out of illustration retirement to render it as a desktop wallpaper, it also resides on my desktop. Just adjacent to my other, smaller desktop, which holds Tsilli Pines' gorgeous rendering of my personal-mantra quote by Beverly Sills.

You can own them both, along with this by Austin Kleon (and more to come!) for a modest donation to the 50-for-50 Project of just $15. Only until September 13th, 2011. After which you will have to deal with your envy and your impatience and all of your other demons on your own.

xxx c

Image inside the frame by Dave Seah, illustrating a quote by Bonnie Gillespie. You can get it in a luxurious, desktop-sized image of inspiration with a $15 contribution to the 50-for-50 project on IndieGoGo, through September 13, 2011.

Poetry Thursday: Keep writing

This post is #11 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

When what you write makes you cry,
keep writing.

When the words are coming slowly,
or too quickly,
or not at all,
keep writing.

When the stories won't tell themselves
the way they showed up in your head,
dammit,
keep writing.

When you are tired
or bored
or sad
or angry

when you are freshly dumped
when you are floating on air

when you are wicked
when you are good
when you are stuffed
when you are starving
when you are sure
there is not one more thing in the world to say,
keep writing.

You are not here to be significant
or meaningful
or even great—
you are here because the pen
cannot do it without you.

So pick it up
and park your ass
and write
and write
and write.

xxx
c

Writing small

This post is #10 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

I am as guilty as anyone when it comes to thinking that writing has to be big or important or perfect.

Or just long. I mean, seriously, have you read this blog?

But if there is one thing that Twitter has re-taught me, it's that small can be good: in fact, I consciously used it to retrain myself to fashion pithier sentences, and while I use it less now, it certainly helped. Gretchen Rubin keeps a one-sentence daily journal; she finds it a simple way to stay in touch with the things in her life that would otherwise fly away, never to be thought of again.

My grandmother, who would never in a million years have called herself a writer, wrote some of my favorite things. Usually, they were little add-ons to my grandfather's lengthy letters, he had no problem calling himself a writer. Just a sentence or two, often about something mundane, but always full of love and her own goofy, gentle character. Of the many artifacts they left behind, one of my all-time favorites is this fascinating travel journal she kept during the last years of their heavy, international travel, in the 1950s and early 1960s. My grampa used to needle her about recording the crazy minutiae she captured, prices and times and "steak dinners." But I love them because they are real, and in her hand, and as they occurred to her in those moments. These are the things she wanted to record and keep.

If you call yourself a writer, it is always wise to carry a little notebook around in which to, well, note things. I favor Field Notes these days. (Not a paid advertisement! Just a fangirl "howdy!")

But even if you do not, it might not be a bad idea to carry something around to note things which occur to you, or to record things that are happening, like steak dinners, and where you took them, and that you rested, bathed and dressed just beforehand. You of the Future might be fascinated by the very details You of Right Now take for granted.

xxx c

Stories everywhere

This post is #9 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

One of the things that learning to write teaches you is to find the stories everywhere.

The stories around you. The stories you are living. The stories that involve you, and the stories that involve other people.

And when you really dig in, you start developing a strange ability to see the world through different lenses: the lens of nostalgia, the lens of need, the lens of want. A photo of a group of people on a roof becomes more than a time-capsule display of a skyline or a series of funny hats; it's now a doorway into any world you want, a vehicle to start talking about love, about fear, about heat, about anticipation. About togetherness, aloneness, boredom, sorrow. About men and women, about black and white, about rich and poor, about summer and winter, about work and play.

Once you know where to look, everything is a story. And every story is a beginning.

xxx c

It's a long, long way to 50

This post is #8 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

The first thing I thought when I shut down this shindig for that first night, almost a week ago, was, "WOW. If we can raise almost five thousand dollars in one day, what can't we do?"

The second thing I thought was, "SHIT. We've still got over 45 thousand left to raise. What the hell was I thinking?!"

So you see, I have some work to do in more than one area.

* * * * *

Boy, do I wish there were shortcuts. My dirty little secret is that I wanted to wake up last Monday, the very first day of the campaign, and see that we'd done it. That somehow, in the middle of the night before we'd even officially started, some mysterious Generous Benefactor had stumbled on this little project and found it in her rich little heart to kick in the full $50K.¹

In other words, some 25-odd years later, I'm still a sucker for fairy tales, for lottery tickets, for the urban working-girl myth of the Unidentified Limo Encounter. (Well, okay, maybe not the lottery tickets.)

But it is not true. There is no limo. There is no mysterious, wealthy deus ex machina who will come to rescue us. This is both the good news and the bad, naturally: we may find ourselves mired in whatever, but we have the wherewithal to dig ourselves out. Even if someone else did the miring, we can dig ourselves out. If you don't believe me, I'll see your skepticism and raise you one WWII vet who did a looong stretch in a Japanese POW camp. After he floated across the Pacific in a raft, fighting off sharks.

Besides, if there is one thing I have learned in my almost-50 years, especially those 11 days of it back in 2002, in the IBD ward of the Cedars Sinai Hilton, it is to never, ever wish away time. If you dread that exam on Thursday, remember: dreading is your privilege. There are a few people somewhere who are grabbing at their last breaths, just wishing they had some horrible Organic Chem exam to dread. They'd give that Jell-O on the tray, there, and the butterscotch pudding next to it, for the privilege of worrying about your Organic Chem exam for just a few hours.

* * * * *

In selecting the "perks" for the 50-for-50 campaign, I had to make some hard choices. The fundraising platform for this project only allows for 12 levels of giveaways. Which is widly frustrating. I can come up with 12 giveaways between the moka pot and the toilet.²

I finally decided that while it would be incredible to have a few Deus Ex Moneybags come out of the highly-polished, burled woodwork to give me and my churning bowels a rest with some gigantic pledges, it would be even more incredible if we raised this money by ones and twos. For the coffers to fill up with requests for $5 MP3 packs and $10 cross-stitchery and $15 wallpapers made by all of my wonderful friends, like the Tsilli Pines creation illustrating my favorite quote (by Beverly Sills!) you see just above these messy, heartfelt words.

Which is why there is a small and finite number of high-end perks and a pretty much infinite number of low-end ones. The gift we give to WriteGirl will be huge; $50,000 is a not-insignificant chunk of their annual operating budget. But the gift we can give to the world is infinite by comparison. That $50,000 will be gone well before the end of the year, but showing those girls that they mean something will not. Leaving one more example of "nobodys" making a difference will not. Demonstrating how community bands together to pull the next ones up will not.

This will not work without widespread sharing. Even if it works, i.e., we manage to raise the whole $50K (which I happen to believe we will), the project doesn't really do its job unless the most people possible feel like they can make the most awesome things happen, too.

There's a lot of room in the world for this kind of hope right now. Let's get to work, shall we?

xxx c

¹Other things I wished for over that first weekend, in no particular order: for the humidity to dry up; for the liquid that bubbled up into my aunt's ground-floor rec room to be just water; for AT&T's sucktastic network to let up long enough to allow me to send and receive a text within 50 yards of the place I was staying; for my ride to the wedding to show up NOW, please; for French fries, oddly enough; and for the bride and groom to truly live happily ever after.

²BTW, if you're interested in helping out with the 50-for-50 Project by offering your own giveaway, we have a workaround: you can "sell" whatever it is on your own, via your website, email, etc., and then contribute the proceeds to the IndieGoGo campaign site on or before September 13. We'll help you promote everywhere else we can. To inquire about doing this, please contact me: colleen AT communicatrix (and so on).

Image © 2011 Tsilli Pines. Available in motivational desktop wallpaper size along with a gift-pack of other designer desktops for a mere $15 donation to the 50-for-50 project.

Soaking in writing

This post is #7 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

A common thread runs through the backstories of superstars, no matter what their fields of accomplishment: growing up, they spent a lot of time soaking in x.

Musicians grow up hearing a lot of music. Artists are raised amidst art. Men and women of science began as boys and girls of science, talking about something besides the weather or America's Most Wanted around the dinner table.

I grew up around writers.

My father and grandfather were writers, and they hung out around other men, and yes, they were all men back then, who were writers. On Saturdays, they gathered at a little coffee shop on the corner of Rush and Bellevue in Chicago's Near North Side to kibbitz and, in my writerly imagination, enjoy hamburger sandwiches and coffee, old-school style. And yes, to smoke, of course. Everyone smoked back then.

My memories of Dad and Gramps don't all have to do with writing, but a surprising number of the most pungent ones do. Most mental images of my dad have him looking down, either at a yellow, letter-sized "legal" pad (his paper since I first understood these things) or at some piece of reading material, the former on the floor, leaned back against the couch in the den that served as his bedroom during Divorced Dad Weekends, the latter in the tub. (As a side note, this may account for my fascination with the film noir Laura, whose writer-character we first meet in the tub, typing on a machine perched atop a board serving as a makeshift desk.)

I rarely saw my grandfather writing; I was an only grandchild until age 5, and he spent whatever time he and Gram were allotted with me fully engaged in some kind of merrymaking, talking, or (bless his heart) shopping. Often for books. But Gramps always had the study of my dreams: Mid-Century Awesome, with a massive and elegant custom wall unit of interlocking shelves, nooks, and whatnot for his books, magazines, files, and, of course, his typewriter return, which sat just to the left of his writer-writing desk at a perpendicular angle.

The ubiquitous accommodation of and proximity to writing made writing seem like the most natural activity in the world. It was not a matter of being easy or hard; it just was. One did it, and a lot of it, just as one did a lot of eating and sleeping and walking.

This might be the greatest gift WriteGirl gives: to let a young writer soak in it. The girls are given their own journals to write in. Then they meet with their mentors once weekly, at a coffee shop, quite often, to write, to do the exercises, but also to talk about writing, and all the work that goes into and around writing to support the writing.

The coffee shops are not O'Connell's but the ritual is the same: we are writers; let us spend time together, telling each other our stories.

xxx c

• Here's a Google maps picture of the old O'Connell's site on the corner of Bellevue & Rush
• Here's the wikipedia entry for T.R. Baskin, a film set in Chicago that shot some scenes at O'Connell's 

Room.

This post is #6 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

For most of my youth, I enjoyed the unbelievable luxury of having not only my own room, but my own bathroom.

On top of all that physical space, for the first five and a half years of my life, I was an only child, adding an extra buffer of psychic and emotional space around me.

I understand that a writer writes, period, sitting or standing, in peace or amidst chaos, by brilliant natural light or candlelight. Whatever it takes.

I also know that were it not for the unbelievable luxury of all that room, I would probably not have grown up to become a writer. Writers need room of some kind, either the kind they are given or the kind they stake out for themselves, and preferably both, and plenty of it. (And yes, I'm all for the actual, delineated-by-a-door-that-closes kind of room, too; after much futzing and fudging that line in various partnerships during my adult life, I've finally added it, in ink, to the list of non-negotiables.)

Yes, stimulation and input are important. Of course, it's important to read anything you can get your hands on, and to be taught to know the good from the bad. Please, accept that you're a person, fellow introverts, and learn to co-exist in space with others. Preferably sometime before I got the hang of it, in my 40s.

But nothing grows without room. Not ideas, not flowers, not love, and definitely not writing.

xxx c