tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73131300555343955032024-02-19T12:10:09.758-05:00Unshakeable HopeHeidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.comBlogger632125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-19329085818649452102015-01-20T18:26:00.002-05:002021-04-10T13:31:43.366-04:00A New Game Plan<br />
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<br />
We are in the throws of winter here in Virginia, and despite all the predictions for a warmer-than-usual and snowier-than-usual January, it has been brutally, arctic-ly cold, and not at all snowy. It's not at all what I expected, and I find myself wistfully thinking of green trees and warm sun, even while knowing when Spring comes, I'll be longing for snow.<br />
<br />
The fact is, even when you know a season is coming, it isn't always the way you envisioned. It's true for meteorology, and it's true for life.<br />
<br />
About nine years ago I began writing again. I didn't know what was going to come of it --quite possibly nothing--but I envisioned a future here. At the time, that future looked like novels and agents and a big publishing house. At least, that's what I wanted it to look like.<br />
<br />
Everything was different then. Blogging was big, especially among aspiring writers who found it a community to connect with each other, to dream with each other, to gain knowledge from each other. Agents were gods. There were no ebooks, no ereaders, no way to publish your own book for less than an arm and leg and your firstborn. There was little pride in self-publishing.<br />
<br />
My kids were young, and of the age where I had them all gathered in at night, eating dinner together, stories before bedtime, lights out before nine.<br />
<br />
I somehow thought that season of my life would be longer. All of it: the writing, the blogging, the community, the dream, the dinners, the quiet nights. Maybe until the kids even left for college.<br />
<br />
I went back to school, thinking it was more like a vacation to the bahamas during a snow storm --something lovely and different, but not something that would change the season itself.<br />
<br />
But somehow it did. Or the season around me changed while I was away. <br />
<br />
The kids grew, and life is immeasurably more hectic. I have a job that requires hours out of my day that used to be hoarded for writing. Blogging seems to be flailing among writers who have little time now for community that moves at the pace of paragraphs. I have a novel that is twisting me in knots, and unable to let me go. I rarely come here, but I long for it.<br />
<br />
Life is just...different. Not better or worse, but different. And I'm trying to figure out how to fit my dreams into it, how to file the edges of the dream into something that fits where I am in this season. <br />
<br />
Nine years ago, novels were the only form of writing on my radar. When I went to Pacific and met all these wonderful people churning out short stories, I admired them, and said I would never do that. It just didn't at all appeal to me. Then I worked with Pete. And all that changed.<br />
<br />
The fact is, I'm not sure novels are a thing of possibility for me anymore. Right now, anyway. I love them, but they are exhausting and time-intensive. My life has demanded a shorter view finder these days, and the shiny new ideas that are coming at me are short story ideas. They are smaller gems that offer a greater ability to flit about, try new things, be in different worlds and times and inside different souls. Something that feels incredibly freeing after being locked for so long in the main character of my current novel.<br />
<br />
Even more freeing, the release of the pressure to find an agent. Release from the pressure of finding a publisher. Release from the idea that to be successful as a writer, I have to hard sell myself and market my writing.<br />
<br />
Short stories... I don't know. Maybe I'll send them out, if they are any good. Maybe not. Maybe I'll just keep writing, tucking them away until a new season where publishing becomes more important.<br />
<br />
I never wanted fame. I only want to write. So... why not? Why not just write? And then... see where that takes me later, when I have time to find out. <br />
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<br />Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-22577323149382617612014-10-07T13:40:00.000-04:002014-10-07T13:40:03.658-04:00The Cost of Sacrifice<br />
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<br />
The other day, my daughter was talking enviably about a girl who'd made it big as a performer. She's been on TV, in music videos, commercials. We've had these conversations before - nearly every time she watches the Olympics or sees someone break big on America's Got Talent, or hears a story of a teen who publishes a book. It is always the sort of wistful, why-can't-that-happen-to-me kind of talk that leads to me talking about discipline and hard work and commitment.<br />
<br />
This time, though, the conversation was ripe to talk about sacrifice. This kid who is now famous, I told her, gave up pretty much everything in her normal life years ago. She stopped going to school and having friends so she could spend all of her time in a studio and at lessons and traveling. She gave up free time on weekends to work. She gave up eating whatever she wanted. She gave up privacy. Just a few years ago, her parents divorced because one supported (pushed?) this fame agenda and the other just wanted her to grow up a bit more like other kids.<br />
<br />
Would you be willing to give up all of that to be in her place, I asked. Would you give up your friends, your swim team, your band, your sleepovers with friends and Pinterest cooking parties and vacations? Would you give up Dad or me?<br />
<br />
It's a discussion we've had in our house a lot lately, this cost of achieving a dream. How much are we willing to give up to get what we really want?<br />
<br />
Going after what I want is something I've been wrestling with in particular over the past year. This week's question - how much are we willing to give up - has put a good perspective on it for me.<br />
<br />
I want to write. I want to be able to do that much more than I've been doing it lately, which is not enough. It always seems that life is crowding in on me, and in the back of my head, I've thought, if I really wanted this, wouldn't I make it happen?<br />
<br />
But the fact is, there are only so many hours in a day, and there is a lot that fills those hours.<br />
<br />
What would I be willing to give up to get what I want?<br />
<br />
I know a writer who realized she couldn't be a full-time writer if she had a mortgage hanging over her head. So she doesn't have a big house with modern luxuries. She lives a very minimalistic life so that she doesn't need another job. I know a writer who knew if she had kids, she would never have time to write, so she chose not to marry and have kids. I know people who have married and had kids, and still walked away from them to pursue their own dreams.<br />
<br />
Am I willing to give up my family and house? Absolutely not.<br />
<br />
When I think about what takes up my time, it is this. My kids. My husband. My home.<br />
<br />
I am forever doing dishes, doing laundry, cleaning floors, cooking and packing meals, running errands so there is food in the fridge, clothes that fit, band instruments that work. I carpool kids. Endlessly carpooling kids.<br />
<br />
I do a Bible study. I pray. That gets me through each day like breathing. <br />
<br />
I work. I work now because my oldest is looking at colleges and we need to pay those looming bills so that he has the opportunity to live out his dreams. <br />
<br />
What is there in my day that I could trade for a few hours of writing?<br />
<br />
Not even sleep. There's not enough of that as it is.<br />
<br />
It was good this week to look at what fills my hours and realize that there is hardly anything there I can sacrifice. Would want to sacrifice.<br />
<br />
For now, what steals the hours from writing are those things even more valuable to me than writing. My kids. My husband. My home.<br />
<br />
That realization gave me a few moments of peace. And then, I wrote a few lines in my novel, and went to bed.Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-6027249971276448172014-09-16T22:48:00.000-04:002014-09-16T22:48:12.157-04:00The Long Road<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
This summer my family took a vacation much different than our others. Rather than spending a week in a specific place, we drove. We put 3,600 miles on our car, 4,800 in an airplane, seeing parts of the country my kids have never seen. We wanted to see Yellowstone, we wanted to hit Mount Rushmore, but more than anything, we just wanted to see the west. With the wide skies, the red rocks, the gentle hills, the open roads with no one on them for miles -- this is all so different than where we live with our forests and traffic jams and slivers of sky.<br />
<br />
"Look at that!" we had to keep saying, nudging our kids out of their books and games. We had to constantly remind them, this isn't a destination vacation: the journey's the thing.<br />
<br />
It's something I am realizing is true of my novel, as well. I harbor a sense of shame that it's been in the works so long. Three of the last four years have been wrapped up in this book. <i>I should be done.</i> Those are the words that whisper in my ear constantly. <i>Why so long</i>?<br />
<br />
It's so easy to think that writing <i>THE END</i>, the destination of every novel, is the point.<br />
<br />
And then I wonder, why am I so desperate to get to the end? I have no deadline. I have no agent tapping her toe, no publisher checking the mail.<br />
<br />
I've done this before. I know what is at the end.<br />
<br />
The end.<br />
<br />
That's what's at the end. No more characters. No more chasing them through dark pages. No more laying at night wondering how they are going to survive, if they'll be okay. No more living in their world.<br />
<br />
Right now, I'm on their journey with them. I have one chance to do this. One chance to travel this road, have my heart break with theirs, feel joy with them, wonder what is at the end. Not just the end of the writing, but the end of them. One chance to have them to myself before sending them out.<br />
<br />
I know what it feels like to have the characters who have become like family to me arrive at their happy place, to be done with me, maybe before I am done with them. It's a moment filled with pride, and then days on end of missing them.<br />
<br />
I am on the journey. And if that takes a little longer than I thought it would, a little longer than anyone else thinks it should, I'm going to savor every minute.Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-50235277807057780622014-09-11T14:11:00.000-04:002014-09-11T14:22:51.866-04:00A Memory<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://msvrburton.edublogs.org/files/2009/09/photo-by-L-Jackson.jpg" target="_blank">(Photo by L. Jackson)</a></span></div>
<br />
In 1993, my husband worked for Dean Witter and spent time in the New York offices in the World Trade Center. He was there when the terrorists set off a bomb in the basement, sitting in the restaurant on the 107th floor, the building swaying with the impact.<br />
<br />
The power went out, and it took him hours to walk down the dark 107 flights of stairs, coming out into daylight with a thick layer of ash blackening him except for the small circle around his mouth where he'd held his handkerchief.<br />
<br />
It was serious, of course. It shook things up a bit. But the terrorist act was, on the whole, a colossal failure, and people seemed to move on without thinking too much about it. The ability for someone to hurt us, to really terrorize us, seemed remote.<br />
<br />
Maybe that is why, in 2001, it both shocked us, and at the same time seemed like an inevitability we'd somehow missed.<br />
<br />
We weren't in NY during the attacks on 9/11, and we are back in DC now, where I grew up, back where my father sat in his office overlooking the Pentagon and watched the plane barrel into the sides of it, into friends we hadn't yet made but soon would.<br />
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<br />
Not much is said outside DC about the Pentagon these days. There were not as many lives lost, of course, but also it seems there's a sense that it is less egregious to target the headquarters of national defense than it is to target a symbol of financial strength. Maybe that's not true, but it feels that way sometimes.<br />
<br />
For a long time, there was a huge, gaping hole in New York City. We saw it once, on a trip with our kids. We stood at the chain link fence, peering through cracks in the plastic at that hole - how wide, how deep, how empty it was.<br />
<br />
The Pentagon cleaned itself up. It patched the gaping black wound with marble white as a scar. There's now a memorial there, but it is as understated as it is solemn.<br />
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Everyone moves on.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/ddhqaon_mOY/Dedication+9+11+Pentagon+Memorial/vIBxunjSAtk/9+11+Pentagon+Memorial" target="_blank">(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)</a></span></div>
<br />
There used to be a big memorial march. There were prayers held on the mall. There were walks that led from the Washington Memorial to the place of impact at the Pentagon. Each year, the things we do to memorialize have gotten smaller. This year, in DC, there was a moment of silence.<br />
<br />
All we get now is a moment. And life moves on.<br />
<br />
We can't keep ripping the wound open. I know this. We can't spend this day each year tearing at the rawness of that day. <br />
<br />
But we should spend a little time remembering, and feeling a little less safe, each day a little less a given. Hug our kids. Call our friends. Say I love you. Say I missed you. Remember to laugh. Remember to pray. Remember to be a little more thankful for the little things that, were they to disappear, we'd realize are really the big things.<br />
<br />Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-50324658943635152102014-09-07T22:54:00.002-04:002014-09-07T22:58:56.642-04:00Chaos<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #660000;"> (I wrote this blog post sitting in the car waiting for my daughter just a little over a week ago. It seems fitting that I couldn't post it here until now... because things have been so chaotic.)</span></div>
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<br />
Sometimes I feel like life is blowing up around me. I wake to the house rocking and shaking, the toiletry items falling off shelves. I walk through a maze of bricks and upheaved trees and mounds of red clay, the driveway under rubble. Our kitchen and stairs are tracked with a thick white layer of dust that won't go away, no matter how often I vacuum and mop.<br />
<br />
I don't even live in California anymore. I live in a home being renovated. And while I knew it would be difficult, while I know what it will be is worth the what it is now, I can feel my heart clenching, my blood pounding under the stress of the chaos.<br />
<br />
Everything is chaos now. Not just the house, which has parts of the roof ripped clean off so that you can stand in a room and stare up at the stars at night, but life in general is void of the order and routine I thrive on.<br />
<br />
Summer is usually a bit lacking in constants, but this year has been worse. Three kids, three different schedules, three different sets of activities, and I find myself most often in the car, a hundred miles a day under my belt going no further than twelve miles from my house. Back and forth, pick one up, drop one off, trying to figure out where to fit buying more milk and eggs into the equation, nearly running out of gas because the gas station is not on the way to anywhere my kids go. And other people love this kind of craziness, but my stress levels are going up and the sight of more white cement dust and red mud tracked through the foyer is about to send my blood busting out the ends of my fingertips and tips of my hair, my face in a perpetual frozen state of The Scream.<br />
<br />
I think part of my less-than-loving attitude about all of this is that I'm not involved anymore. Summers are usually are time to reconnect as a family. During the school year, the kids are out all day, home only long enough to do homework and drop into bed, exhausted. But the summer is OUR time. Time when we get to go hang out at the pool together, do crafts together, obsess over tv shows together, go explore DC and the zoo and museums, have picnics, go to restaurants and laze over milk shakes and burgers.<br />
<br />
But now, I'm just the chauffeur and cheerleader. I'm the alarm clock in the morning, the laundrymat for their muddy, stinky, sunblock-smelling clothes. I buy the cases of water on one end of town and drop it off at camp at the other end. I fix breakfast and pack lunches and somehow try to squeeze in a homemade dinner that is well-balanced enough to replenish the kids' energy before they drop into bed.<br />
<br />
<br />
I am with my kids in some form all day, but I miss them. I miss when summer meant you got to kick off the high-stress, packed days of the school year and sleep in, hike along the creek, lay in the sun reading books, stay up late and watch movies together and build forts in their rooms and watch the glow in the dark stars on the ceiling until they went dim.<br />
<br />
I miss writing. I've hardly written at all this summer. This summer, when my novel was absolutely, positively, without excuses going to be finished. I haven't even read much. No time during the day, too tired at night, a few books started but not that made me want to finish them.<br />
<br />
All the magic has leaked out.<br />
<br />
And yet...<br />
<br />
I watch my daughter from the car where I am waiting for her. Her head is thrown back in laughter, surrounded by a group of equally giggling girls she hadn't known three weeks ago. She's found her place in the high school before the year has even started, happier than she's been in ages.<br />
<br />
My son bounds to the car, asking if he can go with the guys to buy balloons and back to a friend's to spend the next hour filling them because his drumline is totally going to demolish the brass section tomorrow at the afternoon battle. I agree, because percussion rules, and I know this.<br />
<br />
Parents stop to ask if I'll be there for the football game, if my youngest is going to help this year, too. Yes, I say, pointing to my youngest in the back seat, already decked out in her band helper t-shirt, a week early. We wouldn't miss it for the world.<br />
<br />
Summer will end and routine will come back. The house will eventually be finished, the dust settled, the multitude of cars cramming our drive gone on to another project. I'll find time to write again. I'll probably still be in the car too much. But that's okay. My kids are there with me - most of the time my oldest now driving. And we'll crank up the radio and we'll sing along, and we'll talk about books and kids at school and band and art and politics, and everyone will be talking all at the same time, and it will be chaotic, but I will love it. This is the kind of chaos I can love.<br />
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We will eat on the run again, but together, and we'll go separate ways one last time before the summer ends and school begins. But there's one weekend left - one glorious weekend where we all will be home, after the crazy summer schedules and before the still-crazy school schedules. Maybe we'll fire up the fire pit. Maybe we'll roast some s'mores. And as long as the garage has no roof, we might as well just lay out there and watch the stars. The real ones. And maybe, if we can find a sliver of time, we might just build a fort under them.Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-88977688152462382102014-08-04T16:44:00.002-04:002014-08-04T16:44:24.623-04:00In which I drone on about my own writing... but by special request<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Quite a while ago, my friend <a href="http://lcrourks.com/" target="_blank">Leigh Rourks</a>, a fabulous writer I met at Pacific, asked me to participate in a blog tour: a fun and easy
way to share your work and the work of others. The idea is to ‘hop on,’
answer some questions about your current projects, and then ‘hop off,’
passing the torch to a couple of new writers the next week.<br />
<br />
Of course, I went dark on the blog for a while, a mix of kids-home-for-summer, a new job at work, and using every scrap of free time to try to finish my novel. Also, vacation. The blog suffered. This is not unusual these days.<br />
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Also, the questions are so short and simple in appearance, but are deceptively difficult for me to answer well. <br />
<br />
But a promise is a promise, so here I am finally.<br />
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<b><span style="color: #3e454c;">1) What am I working on?</span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #3e454c;">A novel called LIES WE'VE TOLD. I began this under a different name several years ago, finished it up, put it away after I began school, and have come back to rewrite it the past two years.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #3e454c;">It began as a story I needed to tell, but every draft felt flat and lifeless, and while I was compelled to write and finish it (several times), I didn't <i>love</i> the book. Now, in this almost completely new form, with new plots and new characters and an entirely new beginning and end, I am in love with it. Passionately, unfathomably in love with it. </span><br />
<span style="color: #3e454c;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #3e454c;">The story is told from the point of view of Kat, an abused girl who shoots her father and then flees the state, and Jackson, a teen whose parents die in a car crash and who is taken in by Kat's family. When Kat learns her mother is sick, she returns home to mend broken bonds. Before she can do that, her mother is killed, leaving Kat the main suspect in the murder and the only guardian of a brother she barely knows. It is up to Kat to find out what secrets her mom had been keeping that led to her death, even as she is falling in love with Jackson, who might hold the key to what she really doesn't want to know.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #3e454c;"> </span><br />
<b><span style="color: #3e454c;"><span style="color: #3e454c;">2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?</span></span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #3e454c;"><span style="color: #3e454c;">Although there is a murder and an investigation, this book is not primarily a mystery. I'd shelve it with literary fiction, the emphasis really on the internal journey of the two main narrators, the crime and its fallout merely a way to propel that journey. In that way, I suppose, it is the crime and mystery that sets this book in particular apart from other literary fiction. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #3e454c;"><span style="color: #3e454c;">This was true of my previous novel as well. <i>Some Kind of Normal </i>was not a medical or science fiction, but it involved a lot of science and medicine. I like this blending of genres, this incorporating elements of other genres into what essentially is still just the journey of a character trying to figure out life. It also allows me to indulge in great amounts of research, which I find entirely fun.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #3e454c;"><span style="color: #3e454c;"><br /></span></span>
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<b><span style="color: #3e454c;"><span style="color: #3e454c;"><span style="color: #3e454c;">3) Why do I write what I do?</span></span></span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #3e454c;"><span style="color: #3e454c;"><span style="color: #3e454c;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: #3e454c;"><span style="color: #3e454c;">One of the
things I learned at school that has really stuck with me is that we
write to tell what it means to be human. I think this really is behind
everything I write.I definitely don't write escapist fiction, or stories you wish you could be in the middle of. They aren't full of romance, and they don't often have happily-ever-after endings. But they are about about people I hope you can relate to on some level, people who are in situations you might never be in, but who still feel real.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #3e454c;"><span style="color: #3e454c;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #3e454c;"><span style="color: #3e454c;">There is a piece of me in everything I write. It isn't always the most obvious thing in a story, but it's a thought, an emotion, something that gnawed at me, a seed of something in my own life that grew into something entirely different but whose heart is still there. </span></span><br />
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<b><span style="color: #3e454c;"><span style="color: #3e454c;"><span style="color: #3e454c;"><span style="color: #3e454c;">4) How does my writing process work?</span> </span> </span> </span></b><br />
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<span style="color: #3e454c;">Messily. And slowly.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #3e454c;">Everything I've every written has had its own unique process of developing. I've tried fitting it all into some neat process, but my stories don't work that way. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #3e454c;">Sometimes I outline. Sometimes I start with a character that I have no idea what he's going to do. Sometimes I start with a plot idea. Sometimes I write to discover what the story is, and then have to do a million revisions to hone it to what I finally figure out it is about. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #3e454c;">I always write, and rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #3e454c;">I write when I can. Most often late at night, but sometimes in the morning, if I don't have students to tutor. Sometimes in the afternoon when my kids are doing homework. Sometimes at the counter as I'm making dinner, lysoling the laptop as needed, just because the words are there, dinnertime or no. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #3e454c;">Sometimes, I have to stop writing and just mull it all over. The middle of a scene will grind to a halt, or be heading in the wrong direction, and I'll just shut the computer for a few days and turn the ideas around in my head, trying things out until eventually (and usually around 1am), it all clicks. Then it becomes a race to get it all down. </span><br />
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<br />
<span style="color: #3e454c;">I am passing this blog tour on specifically to <a href="http://sobremariquita.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Hannah Bissell</a>, another great writer (and poet extraordinaire) . <b>BUT...</b> if YOU want to do it, consider yourself tagged and please blog hop!! I'd love to see what you have to say, too! Let us know in the comments you're going to do it so I can make sure I swing by and read it. :)</span> Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-22094344133994496992014-05-20T12:28:00.001-04:002014-05-20T12:28:53.865-04:00The Last Three or Four Pieces<br />
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Anyone that's been following this blog (or knows me) knows that I've been working on a single novel for a long while. Oh - I've done other things in between, of course. Went back to school, wrote short stories, wrote some flash and some memoir, even published it. I'm currently working on another article requested by an online magazine. But the novel.... it is the novel that will not end.<br />
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I've lost count how many revisions I've done on this story. Nine total and complete rewrites, beginning to end, I think, besides the smaller chapter revision. I've changed characters, I've changed plots, I've changed the title. I thought I was finished two years ago and then decided I wasn't really happy with it. It was okay. But it was not great. I started over, from scratch.<br />
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It got messy. Not in a bad way. Maybe not messy so much as complicated. I tend to be a simple writer. Tell a story beginning to end, one narrator. This story is different. I have two narrators who each know a separate set of truths and facts. There is a gun that gets lost, then found, then stolen, then used, and someone knows why and by whom, but not the narrators. There is a key to a bank box, but no one knows what is in it except the woman who is killed. There is a cryptic letter. There's an alibi that makes no sense. There are lots of people who know things they aren't telling.<br />
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There are, in short, pieces of puzzle that look nothing like a complete picture. I've spent the better part of a year spreading out these pieces, like clues that don't seem to have an answer. <br />
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But I've now gotten to the end of the book, and I'm putting those pieces together.<br />
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It is glorious.<br />
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I admit I was a bit panicky for a while, not sure how it would all fit together. But now I can see the entire picture, and it's that same feeling you get putting together one of those 5,000 piece puzzles and seeing what it looks like and having in your hands just the last three or four pieces that will make it whole. That. <br />
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I'm still not done, but I'm closer than I've ever been. Closer than I was when I had it "finished" the eight times before, because this time I know it's right. This time, I let it get messy and complicated and it is so, so much better for it. <br />
<br />Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-64939160994617688042014-04-28T10:05:00.001-04:002014-04-28T10:05:46.618-04:00Life is Not a Sticker Chart<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A week ago I found this quote. I'm not sure it resonated with me so much as it hung around, clanking about in my head. It seemed right, mostly, I think, because it confirmed what I've most feared: I am no longer a writer.<br />
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From 2007 until 2010, I wrote nearly every day. I didn't make much money on it, and working strictly as a novelist, I spent far more time writing than I did submitting my writing. But I viewed it as my job, to work each day creating stories I'd hoped would one day launch a career. I called myself a writer.<br />
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For two years after that, I was a student, but still, writing every day. It felt more like work than writing ever had before. I had deadlines and revisions and people to please.<br />
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In the year since, life's been more a roller coaster, as I've added a "real" job - one with scheduled hours and a regular paycheck. I poked around a couple different projects, trying my hand at some non-fiction and flash between the novel I was working on. I submitted a few stories. But it's been sporadic... weeks of obsessive writing, then days, even weeks, without.<br />
<br />
I felt guilty about this. The mantra among published writers is that you find time to write, no matter what. If you have a job, you get up a 4am to write. If you have kids, you stay up until 1am to write. You find time. And for years, this is what I've done. (Well, not the getting up at 4am. That is just crazy talk.) <br />
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The past few weeks have been exhausting, though, and not just work-wise and family-wise, but just emotionally. By the time I shut the work computer, carted my kids around, cheered them on, cooked dinner, tucked them into bed, I sat with my novel open and stared at it, then chose instead to read. Or watch TV. For years I barely watched any TV, but these days, the hours between 9:30 and 11:00, it's about all I can manage. And then, I've actually be going to bed rather than stay up another two hours to write.<br />
<br />
The last few weeks, as I've struggled through a single chapter that has proved to be a bit difficult to wrangle, I've not been writing much.<br />
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The words of my husband last year kept reverberating in my brain: If you don't get paid for it, isn't it really more a hobby than a job?<br />
<br />
Then I read this: "You are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer."<br />
<br />
I let that sludge around my heart, every time I turned on the TV, every time I chose to read rather than write. I knew every time that I was making a conscious choice not to write, making a conscious choice to be a person who dreamed about being a writer but not really being one. This is, after all, the thing that is what writers pride themselves on - sacrificing personal time to persevere as though this were a second job.<br />
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Then I thought of my friends who love to scrapbook. They don't do it every day. Sometimes not at all for a month or two at a time. But they are scrapbookers. And my friends who knit, even if they only do it for stretches at a time, they are knitters. And the bikers, even if they only ride in warm months, are bikers.<br />
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Who is to tell us how to label ourselves, or tell us what name we are worthy of? Is there some star chart I don't know of where we get to put stickers on each day we write, and you only get to be a writer if there are a certain number of stickers per week? Seriously, peeps, is this the kind of regulation and guilt we need heaped into our lives?<br />
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So while I might not answer the question, "What do you do for a living?" with the answer, "I'm a writer," I am most definitely a writer. Even if tonight I choose to turn on the TV.Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-30916459516281921282014-03-31T22:32:00.000-04:002014-04-01T09:18:22.190-04:00What I Would Have Written if I Could HaveLast week I spent an unexpected 8 days sailing the Caribbean on a catamaran. With barely time enough to get flights and pack, my husband and I left our kids and the winter that would not end for a week in the sun with friends. It was crazy, spontaneous, glorious... and a world away.<br />
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With no phone, no internet, no connection to anything on land, I discovered that the constant buzzing in my head began to still, and for the first time in a very, very long time, I found quiet.<br />
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Still - 8 days without social media left a few things unsaid, so here they are - the statuses I would have put on facebook had I had facebook on the boat... my vacation in a nutshell.<br />
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*******<br />
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Thursday 3:30am: Momentarily I wonder, as my alarm goes off, if anywhere is worth going at this time of morning.<br />
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Thursday 7:30am: In Miami. I'm down to short sleeves. I decide getting up in the middle of the night was totally worth it.<br />
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Thursday Noon: We literally walk out of the Charlotte Amalie airport, across the street, onto a beach, and into a boat. Best commute ever.<br />
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No Internet. Don't send help.<br />
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Dolphins off the bow! I'm told this is a good omen. As if the 84 degree weather, turquoise water, Asian shrimp, fresh mangoes, and rum punch waiting upon arrival weren't enough.<br />
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First Sunset. Not too shabby.</div>
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Daily routine established: Wake up. Snorkel. Breakfast. Snorkel. Sail. Snorkel. Lunch. Sail. Anchor. Sunset cocktails. Dinner.<br />
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It's been three days since I've had a pair of shoes on my feet or seen a clock. I'm strangely okay with this.<br />
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First time setting foot on land. Off to see the petraglyphs, which, as it turns out, are writings on stone. Who coulda guessed? Also, this stone wall reminds me of Robert Frost... good fences make good neighbors. Wondering who, two hundred years ago, needed a wall between them and a neighbor.<br />
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As seen on a school near the dock. Obviously schools in the Caribbean keep their standards reasonable.<br />
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Holy Mother of Honey!! That is a bee's nest!!<br />
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My favorite fish so far is a Sergeant Major, but I can never remember the name so I just call him Captain Morgan.<br />
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Hunting for shells in the Conch Graveyard.<br />
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Not a surprising discovery: I am as ungraceful on water as I am on land.<br />
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Serenity Now!!<br />
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Whales!!! We've gone all Ahab on them and are on the chase!<br />
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Drinking mojitos, watching the sunset, dancing around the deck to "Happy."<br />
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Dock Rock: Looking drunk without the alcohol.<br />
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Dingy Damp... this is a thing.<br />
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I've decided I could live in an aquarium. Not the building. The actual aquarium.<br />
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Bay-to-bay in a dingy in the black of night - never have there been so many stars! <br />
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Pelicans off the starboard side! If you want to live, jump in my mouth...<br />
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Turns out I can't read my Nook with sunglasses, and I can't see without sunglasses. Good thing the boat is FULL of hardback books!! I've been buried for two days in The Climb... a book about Everest. Because nothing says enjoying the Caribbean like people dying of frostbite.<br />
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I never ever ever get tired of this.<br />
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Or this:<br />
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Our last day.. .we've anchored for the night. I've finished The Climb and traded it for Lost at Sea by Patrick Dillon. It's a book about two boats that went missing in the 80s when they sunk. I've been told now is a safe time to read it.<br />
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Sitting in the bay with the chatter of the radio like white noise and suddenly we hear an SOS. A literal SOS. And a Coast Guard report that a sailboat is sinking not far from us, and help is needed. Must be time to head home.<br />
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Heading home. Goodbye beautiful water.<br />
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<br />Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-36982288705206106332014-03-17T12:33:00.000-04:002014-03-17T21:24:24.078-04:00Six<br />
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<br />
A little over three years ago, I finished writing what we'll call my second novel. We'll call it that because I've written other novels, but I don't care to number them because they were not that good. They were my practice novels.<br />
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Anyhoo, I finished this one that I thought was pretty okay. And I queried it, fell flat, went to grad school, and now am rewriting it.<br />
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It's been a long time since I first finished it... a lot has happened since then. I mean, I still have the same husband and the same three kids, and I still live in the same house, so maybe nothing quite life-altering, but I <i>did </i>go to grad school, and that was pretty significant. And my kids turned into teenagers, which is a little like not having the same three kids. Also, I got a job that didn't involve my own children, laundry, or making up scenarios in which I need to google things like interrogation techniques and the genetic susceptibility of certain diseases. And I've written about 800 <i>other </i>pages. It seems like a long three years, anyway.<br />
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Last year, I started this novel from scratch, a new blank document, new plot twists, new scene development. I've pecked on it for the last eight months or so, going full-throttle at times but mostly fitting it in between my other obligations. There has been this sense of failure hanging over it, I think, that's made it feel like I am more finishing it for myself, to say I've done it well, than with the thought that anyone would want it. After all, I <i>did </i>query it once. <br />
<br />
But today I was wondering about all those queries. I couldn't really remember anything about the responses except for two of them, and one of those I remember specifically responding to the material. So I went back to find that email, to find out what she didn't like about it, wondering, I suppose, whether or not I'd fixed that element.<br />
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The folder contains all the lit mag submissions from last year, so I was flying past them, and suddenly I was back in 2009 and my Some Kind of Normal queries, and I though, <i>Wait a minute! Where are all the queries for </i>this <i>book??</i> It turns out there were only six. SIX! I only queried six agents. And then... I gave up?<br />
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It's funny how time has changed my memory of all that. I remember the querying as a colossal failure, when in reality, I knew the book wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, and I took the six rejections to be confirmation of that.<br />
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But as I look back - three years past - I'm encouraged. Three of the six said outright they were very impressed by my writing... writing which I hope is so, so much stronger now. One gave a very detailed explanation of why she was passing, which mostly went to the motivation of the main character coming back to her hometown, ending with this: "You really write so well, and I hope you will revise."<br />
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This is all good news on several fronts. First, it means possibly I don't stink as a writer. Secondly, it means possibly this book doesn't stink. Thirdly, it means I have not already saturated the agency world with a past manuscript of this same basic story.<br />
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Which over all adds up to the fact that it might be worth finishing this, not just for me, but to see if there is hope <i>out there </i>for it. And there is the tiniest part of that makes me feel like a writer again, and not just a person who writes.<br />
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I know a lot of you are in this same boat... wrangling a book that feels like it will not come under submission - is either not finished or you feel is just "pretty okay" but not great - or fighting your way out from under "submission/query hell."<br />
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Do not let doubt steal your motivation.<br />
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Do not let the lack of time dictate whether or not you will finish.<br />
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Do not let the rejections of part of the world keep you from stampeding the other part of the world.<br />
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Do not let yourself be your own worst enemy to success.<br />
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And when you feel like giving up, remind yourself that there is someone out there saying, "You really write so well..." Let that be the voice you listen to.<br />
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<br />Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-7708119238475161582014-03-05T13:49:00.000-05:002014-03-07T15:04:30.190-05:00"Touch It Every Day"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
If there's anything an MFA student likes more than a glass full of alcohol, it's a lecture full of double entendres. This little gem was doled out in my second year, when I was in the throws of learning short stories and panicking over my thesis. The admonition, of course, was that we needed to be in our work at least a little every day. But this was school; there wasn't a minute I didn't feel like I wasn't "touching it."<br />
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Fast forward to this past year, when I've taken on a new job, gone full-throttle into a new direction that has left much less time for writing than my glorious past years. I plow through the novel; I put it down. I tinker with some shorts; I put them down. I go through long droughts where I am tutoring long hours of the day and running my kids around the other waking hours, and I never even open my word processor.<br />
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The problem with this is more insidious than just not getting words on the page every day. The problem is I lose interest in my story. I feel far away from it, and the farther I feel, the harder it is to pick it up. I stop thinking about it when I'm not working on it, which means that when I do pick it up, I don't know where I'm going and I spend more time staring at the computer rather than actually writing.<br />
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Characters in a book are not that different than real people in your life. The less time you spend with them, the less you know them.<br />
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So the past few weeks I've made a vow to "touch it every day." Even if that means just opening it to see what I did yesterday. To read one section that's been bugging me. To add a scene, or just a few words of description. To change a line of dialogue. To cut a few words out.<br />
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When I'm tired and worn out and brain dead, I remind myself I don't have to engage in a full-on relationship with the manuscript. I just have to touch it.<br />
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And it works.<br />
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Now, when I'm not writing, I'm thinking more about it. I'm finding that when I open the manuscript up, I have more to say. I know the characters a little more intimately. I know what is missing, what they'd say in a situation. I've been thinking about the scenes, about what is missing, about where to go.<br />
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I know some of you are writing machines, but others are in the same boat as I am... floating a little between the full-on writer life and writing as we can between the other pressing things in life.<br />
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Here's my encouragement to you who are floating... touch it. Just a little. Every day. It works.<br />
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<br />Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-23804086411986419142014-02-06T13:00:00.000-05:002014-02-06T13:00:02.405-05:00Enough<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Today begins the Olympics. I am the only one in my family who really cares about this, especially in winter, so I began my campaign for their enthusiasm (or, frankly, just a bit of tolerance for my own enthusiasm) by using our family movie night to introduce the kids to the movie Cool Runnings. They didn't remember what a bobled race was, or know who the Jamaican bobsled team was, and with both in the news recently, I figured it would be a fun and sneaky way to get them interested.<br />
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It worked. At least a little. They laughed. They oohed and ahh-ed and asked a lot of questions as they watched the real footage of the bobsleds hurtling down the tube of ice. We went on the internet and found out more about the original team, and about the team going this year. We looked up the bobsled schedule. They are intrigued.<br />
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But while the movie is funny and informative and inspiring, my favorite scene is a quiet one, the night before the big race, where the main character, a young man desperate for a win, confronts his coach who he just discovered had once been disgraced by cheating. "Why?" he asks. "You already had two gold medals." And the coach answers:<br />
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<b><i>"I had to win. You see, I'd made winning my whole life. And when you make winning your whole life, you have to keep on winning... A gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you're not enough without one, you'll never be enough with one."</i></b><br />
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That's resonated with me since the first time I watched the movie so many year ago. Not because I've been after gold medals or hoped for the Olympics or anything quite so literal, but because it's really a message for life - for anything we strive for.<br />
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Lately I've had a lot of people asking me what I'm working on now or when I'm going to be done with my current novel. A couple of times, when I've answered that I'm working on the same novel I went into my MFA with three years ago, they say, gaped mouth, "<i>Still?</i>" Yes. Still.<br />
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Let me be clear: I love these people. I absolutely love that they are asking. I know they are asking because they want to read my next book, because they liked my last one, because they want me to be successful. All of these things in their heart are good.<br />
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But I... I can't help but cringe when I hear them, when I have to say, "Yes, I am still writing the same book I was writing three years ago." Because saying that makes me feel like I've failed along the way. I can't deny it. I am a slow writer. I have rewritten this book over nine times because I want to get it just right, and I haven't felt good about that until now. I am distracted by my family, who will always take first place in my time. I have less time now that I am tutoring most days, all day. Even with my best intentions, sometimes at night when I carve a bit of time to work on it, my brain is mush and I just want to watch 30 minutes of TV and go to bed. <br />
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And in that late hour, when I stare at the screen, either pouring words onto it or struggling to find the words, I wonder, "Am I enough without this?"<br />
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Do I have to keep publishing, keep finishing books, win awards, to be enough?<br />
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And while there are times, especially when I am having to say, "Yes, the same book..." that I feel like I am not, most of the time, I am. Because being a writer doesn't make me worthwhile. Having a publishing credit, heck, even having a Pushcart Prize, wouldn't make me more than what I am right now. They are wonderful things, to be sure, but they are not my worth. I don't want to someday say:<br />
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<i>"You see, I'd made publishing my whole life. And when you make publishing your whole life, you have to keep on publishing... Having your book published is a wonderful thing, but if you're not enough without it, you'll never be enough with it."</i><br />
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Fill that in with whatever it is that drives you each day. <br />
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I'll finish this book. I'll probably write another. And another, I hope. I don't know if anything I write will ever be published, but I'll keep writing, because I love it, because I want to, but not because it gives me any worth.<br />
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When I watch the Olympics, it is not the gold medals that most draw me. It's the stories. It's the people, their lives, what they've overcome to get there that grab my heart. It is often the underdogs I root for. And sometimes, the fact that the competitors even make it down the track or the hill in one piece, manage to finish a routine even if they fall, makes me tear up. I want each one of them to feel in awe that they are even there.<br />
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Sometimes when I'm writing, I feel like that. Without the publishing, without the awards, I'm just writing, and I feel pretty lucky to be doing it.Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-50057462784278618852014-02-03T18:36:00.000-05:002014-02-03T18:37:01.331-05:00Things That Matter<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It's been over a year since I turned in my thesis and unofficially finished grad school. I'm not sure what I thought would happen after that, but this year was not it. I barely had time to breathe after my advisor signed off on my stories before I ended up in a flurry of medical worries. Last December I spent running from doctor to doctor, ultra-sound to MRI to biopsies and, in January, just days after returning from my thesis presentation, surgery. <br />
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I might have harbored dreams of surgery recovery that involved the required off-my-feet recoup time being blissful non-stop writing time, but that didn't happen. Instead, I slept. And watched bad TV. I researched some literary magazine and submitted my short stories to a few, and played with a few beginnings of new novels that didn't go anywhere. I job hunted for a job that wasn't there.<br />
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I thought I'd have time. I thought all this time I'd spent writing and reading for school would suddenly be open time I could do amazing things with. Turns out, time is like a hole in the sand near the ocean. You can scoop out the water that's in it, but more water will keep pouring in and filling it. <br />
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Finding the time to write became harder the harder writing became. I second guessed everything I wrote. Instead of hearing my own voice, I could only hear the voice of my advisors, whispers that kept my fingers hovering over the keys rather than pummeling out words. With all the demands of the day, was it worth it to stare at a screen for hours on end, only knowing I'd end up deleting it all anyway?<br />
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I wrestled a lot with the purpose of writing. Why was I doing it, anyway? While the piles of ideas stacked up in a folder, scraps of characters and plots and themes, none of the stories really mattered in the scheme of life. They were just stories. And I wanted what I wrote to matter.<br />
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After graduation ceremonies in June, I returned to a tutoring job with an online tutoring company working with college and grad students on their essays. I love it - best job I've ever had - but it doesn't pay much more than working at fast food and I don't see the same students over and over, necessarily, and I wondered a lot: Am I making any kind of real difference?<br />
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I suspect most people at some point ask themselves, Am I doing something that matters? <br />
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Stories themselves matter, I know. They matter because they help people see from another point of view. They help people empathize and broaden the scope of their thinking. They provide escape and enjoyment in what might otherwise be a life burdened with demands and worries. Stories let people know they are not alone.<br />
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I know all this, and yet, every time I sit to write, I wonder, "Is this worth it? Am I writing something that matters?"<br />
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I don't know the answer to that. But I keep writing. I keep at it because I love it. Because I am compelled to. Because I think I have a story to tell, if only to myself.<br />
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And when I get frustrated that I have no time to write because I am running my kids to band concerts and helping them with homework and cooking dinner and answering a million questions that fly at me every time I sit to write and cleaning clothes and tutoring some panicky college student through a med school application essay, I think, "This matters. All of this. Investing in people always matters."<br />
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The truth is that no matter what we do for a living, what fills the hours of our days, what really matters is how we do what we do, and how that impacts people. People matter. <br />
<br />Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-36050895434541684862014-01-07T15:09:00.000-05:002014-01-07T15:09:06.711-05:00The Freedom to Read: A year in reviewIt seems like most of the posts I've written over the past year have been about recovering from the MFA program in some way or another, like going through grad school was some concussive whack to my head and ever since, I'm just trying to figure out how to live a normal life again. It probably sounds that way because, to a great extent, it felt that way. Everything went back to normal, but I was not the same. It wasn't getting the degree so much as just the overwhelming experience of it, the constant "on" of reading and writing that both energized and depleted me. Grad school was like meth: while on it I felt this incredible sense of ability to do huge amounts of things. After it, I crashed.<br />
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After turning in my last bibliography, I felt a sense of freedom I hadn't in a long time. I could read anything. Anything I wanted. Good stuff, bad stuff, YA, non-fiction. I found myself <i>not</i> reading books solely because I knew I <i>should</i> read them. I should read this because the author is a friend of a friend? Not reading that! I should read this because all good writers read this? Nope. Not reading that either. <br />
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I also had the freedom to not finish whatever I didn't like. Isn't it funny how you never care about a freedom until you don't have it? Before this year, I rarely started a book and didn't finish it. If I started something, I always felt obligated to finish, and always hopeful it would turn out to be better than the first 100 pages. At the very least, I'd be able to say I'd finished it. This year I probably stopped reading more books than I have in the rest of my life combined. I'd read three pages and think, "This is not that good. I'll try something else." I'd read 100 pages and think, "This is not getting any better. I have 25 other books I'm interested in." I have left a slew of discarded stories in my wake this year, and I don't even feel badly about it. <br />
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But the ones I did read and finish... Wow. They are not the kind I'll read and forget. They are the kind that keep popping up in my head, stories and ideas and visuals and feelings they left me with that have become part of me. They are the ones I talk about, even a year later.<br />
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Here are some of my faves from this year: <br />
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<b>Devil in the White City (Erik Larson).</b> I think about this book all the time. I think about the history of the World Fair, the science of electricity, the horror of a serial killer. The details of it, the imagery it evoked, creep up on me in the weirdest of times. It's the kind of non-fiction that rearranges your brain, changes the way you see the world and think of history.<br />
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<b>Flawless (Scott Andrew Selby).</b> I listened to this one on tape as I walked last spring, so I don't know if reading would have the same power, but this one, like <i>Devil in the White City</i>, changed my brain, the way I see the world and history. It is a crime caper, a heist worthy of a movie crammed with stars, but it is real. It happened. And I think about it all the time, even nearly a year later.<br />
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<b>Tenth of December (George Saunders)</b>. It's hard to believe I'd written off short stories as boring before last year. This is the most unique collection of stories I've ever read, and several of them still haunt me.<br />
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<b>The Divergent Series (Veronica Roth). </b>I didn't like it. I couldn't put it down. I thought it was derivative. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I decided if you can't stop thinking about something and can visualize it so completely when you close your eyes, it must be pretty good after all.<br />
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<b>Spook (Mary Roach).</b> I read several of her books, but this was my favorite. I can't imagine how I could have laughed more in a book about death. Every high schooler should be required to read her writing. She makes science fascinating and interesting and funny and relevant. I don't love biology, but I couldn't wait to read her book about the digestive system. You can't ask more of an author than that!<br />
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The best book I read, though, is one that isn't due to come out until later this year. I've read that one three or four times. It is the kind of fiction I wish I could write.<br />
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I don't know what this year will bring. I have about 100 books on my Nook and to-read shelf. I'm trying to be better now about finishing ones I start, mostly because I'm reading my son's AP English reading list with him, and I know he doesn't have the option of putting them down if he doesn't like them. In the last month we've read <i>1984</i> and <i>Brave New World</i> together. I love reading the same thing as him so we can talk about them. I've missed the talking-about-books aspect of grad school. :)<br />
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So tell me about what you've read this year that sticks out, or what you plan to read in 2014. Anything I should add to my list?Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-83299088413649194112014-01-02T10:05:00.002-05:002014-01-02T10:10:17.330-05:00Little Grain of Sand Things<br />
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There was a time when New Year's meant a flood of glamorous invitations for my husband and I. You know the kind - the swanky hotels with the pricey dinner and dancing and midnight toasts; the black tie parties, the high-above-the-city or floating-on-the-ocean kind that made my heart yearn for just one night without changing diapers or wearing sweats.<br />
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We never went, the cost seeming a bit extravagant or the idea of a babysitter too scary. There was always time for that when the kids were older, I told myself. I shelved the idea with all its glitter and promise onto the same bucket-list-shelf as going to Time's Square to see the ball drop. <i>One day.</i>...<br />
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What no one says is that the bucket-list is not written in stone. It is as changeable as we are, and while I might feel a twinge of regret for never having seen Times Square on a New Year's Eve, I don't wish to do that now. After an exhausting fall of keeping up with my hectic teens, starting a new job, and escorting my husband to a dozen embassy and business events, I desperately wanted some down time. The idea of standing in the freezing cold for hours on hours crammed like sardines, no bathroom in sight, sounds horrible. By New Year's Eve, I just wanted to stay home next to a fire and spend time with my kids. Honestly, I had no energy for getting all dolled up and dancing and being perky.<br />
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But I did want time with my family. Time that wasn't running around, in the car, in a stadium, in an auditorium, in a waiting room. Just time to reconnect and have fun without the pressure of homework and time constraints.<br />
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Instead, I got a night of total tech obsessions.<br />
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My mother-in-law had gotten a tablet for Christmas, so she enlisted my son to help her set it up and install apps and figure out how to use it. From about seven in the evening to nearly eleven at night, I don't think they looked up once. My father-in-law enlisted my husband to help him with something on his iPad, and they never looked up. My eldest daughter, who'd gone out babysitting earlier, came home around 9:30 and upon seeing the lack of interaction, took out her phone and began to text and search Pinterest. I had a puzzle out and tried to enlist the help of my youngest, but in her excitement and determination to stay up until midnight, she wanted to watch the countdowns. It didn't take much TV hunting to realize New Year's celebrations are not G-rated TV anymore. She settled on a movie.<br />
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And I... I worked my puzzle, gave up trying to have conversations, and realized that this would never be one of those nights everyone looked back on and said, "That was a New Year's Eve to remember!"<br />
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The thing is, it doesn't take a black-tie affair or a pricey dinner with confetti or - as it seemed on TV, a ton of alcohol - to make a memorable night, but it does take interaction. We could have played some crazy board games, made a huge tent in the living room, built a fire in the pit in our backyard and told ghost stories under the stars. We could have made the sugar cookies we'd planned all month to make, turned our fingers blue and red and green with the icing and sung loudly and off-key to the radio. We could have written down our favorite memory of the year and talked about it. We could have written our biggest failures and fears and tossed them ceremoniously into the fire. Instead, everyone buried their heads in a screen.<br />
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I've become more sensitive these days about technology. When I take time off of work and writing to have coffee with a friend and she checks her phone every time it dings and tweets, I feel slighted. When I am in the middle of a conversation with my husband and he picks up his Blackberry to answer an email, I feel devalued. When my kids come home and immediately attach themselves to their technology rather than talk to me, I feel like the housekeeper and cook rather than a mom.<br />
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My husband reminds me this goes both ways. That I have, for many years, buried myself in my computer. This is the trap of being a writer and working from home. I have ill-defined work hours and a difficulty in breaking away from a chapter when the writing is going well.<br />
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But I'm trying. I've curtailed my facebook use significantly. I rarely blog. I close my computer from the time the kids get home until homework is well underway and we can work together in quiet. I'm not perfect. I still can't just sit and watch a movie with the family without doing something else, but I've begun to substitute crocheting for surfing the web. I'm working on it, anyway.<br />
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Our family does a lot of things together. We love being together. We eat dinner most nights all together, and those dinners are full of talking and laughing. We take day trips often, vacation occasionally. We build memories all the time. But in the day-to-day, it is harder to make those memories and easier to get sucked into technology. So this year, I'm making a plan to get myself out from under that, with hopes that my family will want to follow. <br />
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I want to sit and listen to my daughter practice guitar. Not just half-listen as I do dishes or work on writing, the way I usually do, but really sit and give her my undivided attention. Sing with her as she plays. Create a project with my youngest; paint with her or teach her something new. Cook dinner with my kids rather than just for them. I want to build a sand castle with my kids like I did when they were too little to do it themselves. To get out of the beach chair and out from behind my book and get sandy and wet and create a masterpiece. Instead of wasting the day at home, I want to use the kids' teacher workdays to go to a museum in DC we haven't been to before. Replace a few of our Saturday movie nights at home with a game. Turn off my phone when I'm out with the kids, and when they come home. Ask them to turn off theirs in the car. Treat my family's updates on their day with the same interest as I do near-strangers on facebook. Ask more questions. Look at them when they answer. Pray for them. Pray with them.<br />
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I don't really have a bucket list. We will probably do enough grand things this year to fill a scrapbook. But what I need to mind is those little grain-of-sand things that fill our hours that either say, "You don't matter much to me," or "You are the most interesting thing in life right now." I love my computer. I love my phone. But in the scheme of things, the people standing in front of me are the ones I value the most. Maybe it's time I showed that.<br />
<br />Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-31310952317281894172013-12-18T14:45:00.001-05:002013-12-18T14:45:54.729-05:00Hobby Vs. Job: Should there be a distinction in fiction writing?<span style="color: #990000;">I wrote this post some time ago, after graduating and floundering a bit with what new project to begin. I never finished it and found it when I was culling my posts this week. </span><br />
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Every so often I find myself at the beginning again. Like life - and especially this writing thing - is a big circle that just keeps spinning. If it weren't so darn frustrating, I'd look at it as a chance to start fresh, be anything I want to be, write whatever I want, make a new name for myself.<br />
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I have nothing locking me into adult literary fiction. I could write serial middle grade. I could write young adult. I could try a mystery series or focus on short stories for a while.<br />
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The obvious question is, what do I feel passionate about writing?<br />
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Except maybe that isn't the obvious question. Maybe the obvious question is what sells?<br />
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Ah, the rub for those of us whose inclinations are not towards sparkly vampires and serial killers and other editor-salivating tomes.<br />
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Jolene Perry wrote a blog post last week [okay - a long time ago by now!] about <a href="http://jolenesbeenwriting.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-book-you-have-to-write.html" target="_blank">writing the book that is calling you</a>. I completely agreed with her - that one should write the book you feel inside is demanding to be written. You should feel passionate about it. That love shows through, right? Makes for an irresistible book?<br />
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Well, maybe I agree that that is the best way to <i>enjoy</i> being a writer.<br />
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On the other hand, I keep coming back to the same dilemma every time I round the corner of the circle again... Is writing a hobby or a job for me? Does that distinction matter?<br />
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Book Riot had an article Tuesday [again, a few months ago!] titled, <a href="http://bookriot.com/2013/02/12/ten-things-you-didnt-know-about-books-and-authors-you-had-to-read-in-high-school/" target="_blank">"Ten Things You Didn't Know About Authors You Had to Read in High School."</a> One of those things? <b>Louisa May Alcott wrote <i>Little Women</i> for the money. And it made her miserable. </b>Yes, you read that right. She didn't want to write Little Women and Eight Cousins and all those other books that made her famous and a favorite author to pass from mother to daughter. She wanted to write "lurid pulp stories of revenge, murder, and adultery." Or, as Book Riot so elegantly says, "smut and violence." But she needed money. So she wrote what sold.<br />
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And heavens to Betsy, it made her famous and beloved.<br />
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And miserable, according to Book Riot, but let's leave that phrase alone for a minute.<br />
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(Also, as an aside, let me muse on the idea that if she lived today, she would probably make much more by writing "slut and violence" than chaste family stories...) <br />
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If Alcott had written pulpy indulgent stories, we probably wouldn't have those in our libraries. Her name would never have become known worldwide. I would not have grown up with an entire bookshelf devoted to her books that used to by my mom's. <br />
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The fact is, if we are writing to make a living, to put some money in the bank or shoes on the kids (I love when my family plays any game with dice, my husband always shakes the dice and yells really loudly, "BABY NEEDS NEW SHOES!" before throwing them. Just a random thought...)... if we need to make money, we have two choices:<br />
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We can write what sells, or we can sell what we write.<br />
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That makes it sound simplistic. We really have to do both. But hopefully you get my drift. Because I wrote like three other paragraphs trying to explain what I meant and then erased them all because - seriously - three paragraphs to explain 12 words?? Ugh!<br />
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In short, tons of people go to jobs every day that they hate. Tons of people go to jobs that they love and still have to do things they don't like that much. If writing is a hobby, I have a right to want what I'm writing to be fun and come naturally. But if it's a job - if I want to treat it like a real profession - does that mean I need to let go of seeing it as just what I want to do and the heck with the readers and agents and publishers and what they want? Do I need to try to write what sells?<br />
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But then, who the heck knows what sells? Not every big seller is a YA book, although the movie industry might have us believe that.And not every sparkly vampire book is a best-seller.<br />
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I don't want to be miserable, of course. I wonder sometimes what made Louisa May Alcott decide being miserable but writing and selling was better than not writing but doing something else that made her happy. And I think in the end, if we write what we hate, most of us would end up with pretty crappy books.<br />
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For now, I'm plugging away at a novel that I have no idea whether or not will garner any interest. It won't end up a trilogy or some other big money-making creation. I won't end up writing any others like it. It's a Christian, murder, literary fiction book. Where in the world does that even get shelved?? My biggest fear is not that the writing in my book isn't good enough. It's that the story isn't good enough. That the story I want to tell is just not that interesting to enough people to make it marketable... to an agent, a publisher, to a large enough audience of readers. What if I shoved it more readily into a genre? If I went all full-on Christian with it? Or made it more a crime thriller? What if I crammed that book into something I really don't want it to be?<br />
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As many times as I've turned that over in my head, I keep coming back to this: I need to finish this book the way it's screaming to be written, the way I write, and sort the career thing out later. In the meantime, I'll keep stacking those more marketable ideas up in the folder. Maybe one day I'll try my hand at one of those.<br />
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Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-81338925149488306682013-11-14T18:42:00.000-05:002013-12-05T08:27:08.817-05:00The Girl Who Was Hungry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A little less than two years ago, my sister came to visit. We are both type 1 diabetics, and there's a sort of sad hilarity in our conversations at dinner.<br />
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"I'm out of reservoirs for my pump. You have one I can borrow? I need tubing, too. And maybe an insertion set if you can spare one."<br />
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"How many carbs do you think are on that plate? I bet I can calculate the carbs on this table faster than you."<br />
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"Yay! Food with lots of fat! Fat slows the absorption of carbs! Fat is a diabetic's best friend!" <br />
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"This entire side of my abdomen is now over-saturated. I've run out of places to put the needles that will still absorb; I think I'm going to have to start sticking the needles in my feet."<br />
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"Your pump is purple! That is so cool!"<br />
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"Your pump is blue! I love it!"<br />
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"Did you hear about that celebrity that was diagnosed with diabetes and claimed it was type 1 and that she cured herself by not eating sugar? Bahahahaha!!!!" <br />
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Yeah. It's pretty hilarious. Sometimes it's like a code no one else at the table gets.<br />
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Two years ago, though, she pulled out a new drug to shoot up before dinner. Something called Symlin that her endocrinologist told her every T1D should take now. I'd never heard of it.<br />
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"What's it for?"<br />
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"It makes me feel full. I never felt full before. I used to just stop eating because I saw other people stop."<br />
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That was the oddest thing I'd ever heard. She never felt full? How could you not feel full?<br />
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After she left, her words stuck in my head. In the afternoons, I realized I was always famished. Like eat a horse and the saddle with it kind of hungry. I'd eat lunch, and feel like I'd eaten nothing. The entire day from lunch to dinner was a struggle not to shove everything in the house into my mouth. I'd been that way for so long, I thought that was normal. Wasn't that everyone's afternoon? Isn't that what vending machines in office buildings are for?<br />
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But now I was thinking about it. And I realized that when I put dinner on my plate, it had nothing to do with how hungry I was, but how much I thought a reasonable portion should be. I didn't get seconds most of the time because I didn't think I should. But I rarely left the table full. I mostly left the table thinking I could eat an entire new plate of dinner if someone placed it in front of me. Or not. But probably I could if it were there.<br />
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And slowly I realized... I was hungry all the time. And I realized that maybe wasn't how everyone else felt all the time.<br />
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It's easy to think we are always at the pinnacle of science and medicine. Sure, we don't have a cure for many diseases, but gosh look how far we've come! Look how much we know! I thought we knew everything about T1D except how to cure it. In reality, we are still, every day, learning things.<br />
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Just a decade ago, the thought was to cure T1 diabetes with pancreatic transplants. If diabetes is caused by the pancreas breaking down and not working, you just replace it, right? When the transplanted pancreases also stopped working, some smart scientist discovered that the pancreas doesn't just break down... it is attacked by a person's own immune system. The immune system, for some unknown yet reason, sees the organ as a foreign object and attacks it. Put in another one, and it'll attack that, too. The problem isn't even the pancreas... the problem, it turns out, is the immune system.<br />
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In light of this sudden awareness that I was hungry all the time, I began researching this new drug my sister was taking, and I found out something mind-blowing. A scant few years ago, scientists discovered that the pancreas, contrary to popular belief, actually makes TWO hormones... insulin, and something called amylin. This second hormone, amylin, is the hormone that helps your body use the insulin it produces better and more effectively. It keeps the liver from dumping excess sugar into the bloodstream and helps keep the glucose from the digestive track from building up in the blood. Beyond that, though, it slows the digestion of your food and sends the signal to the brain that you feel full.<br />
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Mind. Blown. <br />
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When type ones lose their beta cells, they not only lose the ability to produce insulin, they lose the amylin as well, and over time, like a frog in cold water set to boiling, you forget what it feels like to feel full. Food goes in the mouth and through the stomach like water, barely stopping to fill it up. You brain doesn't get the signal that your stomach is full. And all that glucose from the food (not just sugar foods, but everything from milk to vegetables have glucose in them) rushes straight into the bloodstream, where the insulin cannot possible work fast enough to catch up.<br />
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This is all so complicated. Much more complicated than it sounds, because everything is connected.<br />
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Type 1s don't make insulin, so they have to take it in the form of shots (or through a pump). That insulin, over time, makes many diabetics gain weight. (This is controversial, unfortunately. Science has shown it to be true, just ask the NIH, but insulin manufacturers and many doctors and websites resist this idea.) The more weight you have, the more insulin your body tends to need. The more insulin you take, the more weight you gain. It is a vicious circle that I've found screamingly, cryingly, depressingly true.<br />
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Add into this not being able to feel like you've gotten enough to eat.<br />
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Over the past five years, despite a five-day-a-week gym membership for two years, despite walking miles a day for the others, despite kettlebells and zumba and small-portioned meals, my weight kept going up.<br />
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And here... suddenly here is the key.<br />
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A synthetic hormone called symlin that mimics your natural amylin, that will make me feel full, slow the glucose into the bloodstream so that the insulin I take has time to work, makes the insulin work better and blocks the liver from dumping glucose so that I take less insulin, so that I can finally lose weight, so that my blood sugars are more even and low.<br />
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It sounded like a miracle.<br />
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Do I hear angels singing?<br />
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I began hounding my endocrinologist. My endocrinologist was frustratingly resistant to symlin. He didn't think it was effective. He didn't think it worked. He thought it was far too expensive. He told me if I wanted to lose weight, I should walk more. He told me my blood sugar averages were fine, even though they'd gone up above the acceptable range. He disregarded my research. He wouldn't listen to my reasons. He shooed me out the door.<br />
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This went on for a year. Finally, last May, I parked myself in the chair and said, "I want Symlin. It is my money, and my body. I want the chance to have what your body makes naturally. I think I should have the chance to at least try it, and see if it works. And I'm not leaving until I get it."<br />
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So I got a prescription. And a healthy dose of skepticism.<br />
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Three months later I went back. I'd cut my insulin use by a whopping 30%. My blood glucose averages (taken by a test called an HbA1C), which had peaked at 7.5 - a whole point above what is considered decent control - were down to a near-non-diabetic 5.5. I'd dropped 17 pounds. My doctor was speechless.<br />
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I feel fantastic for the first time in years. I have energy. I am not falling asleep at 2pm every day in the middle of work or struggling to stay awake while driving. I hardly ever have to correct a high blood sugar reading.<br />
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I am not hungry. I didn't even remember what not hungry felt like. <br />
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I feel like... like me. <br />
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Today is World Diabetes Day. It is Type 1 Diabetes Day. We, as type 1s, are suppose to help others know what it is like living with diabetes.<br />
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Yes, it is shots. Yes, it is counting carbohydrates and being careful of what we eat. Yes, it is the danger of heart disease and kidney failure and amputations and blindness, but less and less of that as knowledge increases and medicine catches up. Yes, it is pricking my fingers ten times a day to check my blood sugar. It is all of this.<br />
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It can be feeling hungry. All the time. Not because we have no self-control. Not because we crave the foods we shouldn't have. It is because we don't have the hormone you have that tells us we are full. It's because we don't have the hormone that let's our stomachs fill up as we are eating.<br />
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I may not be a celebrity who is able to somehow, miraculously, reverse the damage done to the pancreas and make myself not diabetic anymore. But a little science on my side goes a long way to making me feel like I am.Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-89723432581452897002013-11-01T15:50:00.000-04:002013-11-01T15:50:04.262-04:00Why NaNo's Not for Me<br />
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<br />
This is that time of year people lose their sanity and sign up for the monster novel writing rush of the year. Kudos to you! The idea that one could, during holiday season nonetheless, write something like 2,000 words a day - every day, unless you want to heap the extra unwritten words on the next day - frankly astounds me. you, you crazy writers you, you amaze me.<br />
<br />
But it will not be me.<br />
<br />
Not last year, or the one before that, or the one before that. Not this year, and not any future year, unless I am invaded by the soul of Stephen King or Danielle Steele or some equally prolific writer.<br />
<br />
Before anyone else asks me whether or not I'm up for this, here are my reasons why I won't be NaNoing.<br />
<br />
<b>1. I write consistently on a normal basis.</b> I think NaNo is a great motivation for people who don't write all the time - who need some external push, something to strive for and a community to write in. It gives a reason to sit the butt in the chair every single day. We all need challenges sometimes. That's why I recently did one with a few of my writing group friends. I need the challenge that comes with accountability to push forward when I am letting my fears keep me from going forward. But mostly, I am a writer. All the time.<br />
<br />
<b>2. I write slowly.</b> Honestly, every other reason somewhat hinges on this. Some people are fast writers. Some people can be fast writers for a short time, if they need to be. I can <i>never </i>write fast. Never. If I manage 2,000 words in a day (I think I've done that three or four times in my entire career), it is because I had hours and hours to write. And I pretty much knew what I was going to write. But on average, 1,000 words is a really great day for me. And I've discovered that those days add up if there are enough of them strung together.<br />
<br />
<b>3. Stress is not something I need more of.</b> My life is already more stressed than I want it to be. I am going in more directions than I'd like. I like being busy, and I like having purpose, but I don't like when that starts interfering with being the best me and mom I can be. Having an artificial deadline hanging over my head is something my blood pressure doesn't need, especially when the daily goals are already beyond my abilities.<br />
<br />
<b>4. I have a job now.</b> I know, I know - probably the majority of people doing NaNo have a job. On top of parenting, I mean. I have been spoiled for the last fifteen years. Raising my kids has been my number one job, and that takes up most of my waking hours. Writing is something I consider a job, but not one I have to answer to anyone about other than me. Now I am adding 20-30 hours of work, and I think I am not as talented as the rest of you who have figured out how to juggle parenting, writing, and a job. I bow to your awesomeness. I don't know how you do it.<br />
<br />
<b>5. It is November.</b> Hello? Short month, six weekdays off for my kids and husband, still high school football/marching band season, holiday in which we are hosting not only extended family but also half the British embassy. I'm not sure I'm going to make it even without the NaNo.<br />
<br />
<b>6. I would be setting myself up to fail.</b> I am a slow writer, I am busy and stressed. I am a pathetically slow writer. All this is established. The thing is, I can look at this kind of challenge and know that I am defeated before I begin. If I missed one or two days, making those up would become utterly unmakeupable. And there is no way I could not miss one or two days.<br />
<br />
<b>7. I am on the eighth or ninth draft of this novel. </b>I do not need a ton of rough pages. I need some really, really good ones. Ones that will be the last I write on this novel outside of very minor edits.<br />
<br />
This is not to say I don't enjoy a good challenge. On Sept. 15, <a href="http://heidiwillis.blogspot.com/2013/09/sometimes-you-just-need-marriage.html" target="_blank">Brit challenged me</a> to write 100 pages in 45 days, and I wrapped that up yesterday with 107 new pages for my now well-under-way novel. It was about half what NaNo would be, with 15 more days to write. But I did it - every day at least a little. And 45 days later, I have some pages I am really proud of. <br />
<br />
So I won't be NaNoing this month, but I know what it takes to do that, and I am impressed by those taking that challenge. I can't wait to see what you come up with, how this month challenges and changes you. I hope you get a novel out of it. Or the start of something good anyway. Check in every now and then, when your eyes are blurry and your fingers sore, and let me know how you are doing. :)<br />
<br />Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-39414670014236674092013-10-21T11:35:00.000-04:002013-10-21T11:35:19.277-04:00To Star or Not to Star... The Goodreads DilemmaI've read some books I really didn't like lately. Even one I put down. For good. I almost NEVER do that.I'm not sure if I'm becoming more critical or my tastes are changing or I'm just not good at picking out what I think I'll like to begin with.<br />
<br />
In the past, I've kept a running list of the books I've read online, mostly at Goodreads, but I'm finding myself conflicted now about how to do this. I am both a reader and a writer, and while I know the value of a good, honest review, I also know how much a writer pours their heart into their books and how subjective opinions are.<br />
<br />
I used to give good, honest reviews. Ones I would have liked to have read if I was wondering whether or not to buy a book. I was never harsh or personal about an author, but I didn't flinch from saying a book was definitely not for me because of the way it was written.<br />
<br />
Then I was published, and that brings a burden of its own. I don't want to be the writer that is critical of other writers. I hate when authors bash each other, publicly calling each other out as phonies or hacks or undeserved millionaires. Jonathan Franzen and Stephen King have earned poor reputations for publicly denouncing the quality of other writer's books.<br />
<br />
(Which made me wonder if semi-famous writers like Ann Patchett or even lesser-famed but well-established and talented writers like Therese Fowler review books in public forums? Certainly they read!)<br />
<br />
I also realized how sensitive some writers are about low ratings, and how
mean people can be about something that maybe just isn't their own
taste.<br />
<br />
If I don't like science fiction, but I try one because everyone is raving about it, is it fair to give it only two stars because I think the plot is outlandish? If I have a pet peeve about casual sex in books aimed at thirteen and fourteen year olds, is that fair to hold that against the book?<br />
<br />
Harder yet, reading books by people I know. Between the faculty at school that I adore, the great students I studied with that are putting out their own books now, and you great blogging peeps, I am reading more and more books by people that are personal to me. And not all of those books are up my alley.<br />
<br />
I've sat more times that I liked to admit staring at the Goodreads screen wondering what to do. Do I just unlist a book I didn't like, so I don't come off looking like a critical nincompoop? Do I just mark it as "read" but give it no rating or review? Do I give stars but no review? Do I lie?<br />
<br />
I have done all of these. Not outright lying... I can't do that. But I have fudged. I have said what I loved about a book - all true - but not mentioned that the things I didn't like overshadowed what I did. I have said, "This wasn't for me, but there are things about it I can see others loving." It's both honest, and lying by omission, but right now it seems the best option.<br />
<br />
I don't know if I'll come to a resolution I like, but I'm curious about you. Do you review books publicly - on your blog, Amazon, Goodreads, Library Thing, or some other site? And what do you do about books you don't like?<br />
<br />
And, as long as you're here, what's the best book you've read lately?<br />
Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-74729778800895765762013-10-10T12:07:00.000-04:002013-10-10T12:07:45.405-04:00Do the Work. Even if It's Work.<br />
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I now have a few hundred tutoring sessions under my belt, and I can say that I am pleasantly surprised at how much most of the students really want to learn. Where my instinct is to just correct and edit, I am required to actually explain and work through examples with the students, and I thought they might balk about it, but mostly they don't. They really do want to know WHY a comma should go here, but not there.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, there <i>are</i> the students who come who don't want to work. Who want me to do the work for them. And not just on editing, but on the actual writing.<br />
<br />
I can't tell you how many times I've said, "I can help you generate ideas and clarify your position. I can help you outline and develop a strong thesis statement. But I can't actually write this for you. You have to do that hard work yourself."<br />
<br />
And it is hard. I know that. For some people, having ideas are very different than putting those ideas down on paper into words that flow and have meaning and structure. But still, that is their job as a student. Do the work. Even if it's hard.<br />
<br />
I've come to a part in revising my novel where I've hit a snag between the old version and the new. The old version is one point of view, the new is two, and trying to shift some of the story into someone else's eyes has gotten tricky.<br />
<br />
Yesterday I realized that the chapter I was writing in a new point of view had lost all the magic of the first version by putting it in another character's eyes. All the zing? Gone.<br />
<br />
My impulse was to just ditch the idea of alternating chapters and let the girl take this one, even though she had the last chapter, and the chapter after it. Or make on long, long chapter with her. I wasn't looking at that as the easy way out... I just thought it would work better.<br />
<br />
But it didn't feel right. It felt like I was reneging on a bargain I'd made myself when I began revisions. I closed the computer and began to turn it over in my head. How can I keep this chapter in her POV without losing the need for alternating POVs?<br />
<br />
If I kept this chapter as it was, I could add another, new chapter, in the boy's POV before it. That's a seemingly easy answer, of course, except there isn't anything that needed to be said between the last chapter and this. Time-wise, they bleed into each other.<br />
<br />
I couldn't just throw in something random. It had to mean something. The whole point of the male POV is to offer the reader pieces of the puzzle the girl doesn't have. Something the audience knows that is important, but that she doesn't. A tension thing, really. So this newer chapter would have to have that. And what else could I throw in that wouldn't seem like I was just throwing it in?<br />
<br />
I twisted so many things around, my brain hurt. It felt like work, this figuring things out.<br />
<br />
But I did. Finally. After hours, I figured out a chapter for him that would throw a huge wrench in the plot - and strengthen a part of the book that was already a bit weak.<br />
<br />
Win win!!<br />
<br />
Could I have done something easier? Absolutely? Was taking the harder task on of fixing it right worth it? I sure think so right now.<br />
<br />
Sometimes, I have to tell my students, "Do the work. Even if it feels like work."<br />
<br />
It's good advice for me, as well. Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-13108190712365461582013-09-30T10:45:00.002-04:002013-09-30T10:45:39.338-04:00The Family That Reading Saved<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">(This is a photo from <a href="http://www.humansofnewyork.com/" target="_blank">Humans of New York</a>. It melts my heart!)</span></div>
<br />
My teenage son and I were standing outside an audition room earlier this month with another mom and son, waiting for orchestra placement. My boy was talking up a blue streak about what the audition had been like, what they'd asked him to do and how he'd bumbled through some parts and aced the others, and what he'd do if he made it and what he'd do if he didn't, and his words came out like this sentence, in long, unstopped, unpaused thoughts, and the mom looked over at me and said, "Does he always talk this much?"<br />
<br />
I had to laugh, because the answer to that is yes. And I have two other kids that do the same. Talking on top of each other sometimes, so that I have to hold my hands up and say, "I know I have two ears but I can only make out one of you at a time!" There is a constant stream of conversation in our house that doesn't even end when I turn out the lights and say, "Goodnight! I'm going downstairs now!" Sometimes they keep talking, even louder, so I have to yell up the stairs, "I'm downstairs. I can't hear you anymore. Go to sleep!"<br />
<br />
The mom sighed a bit and looked over at her not-a-word-said-yet son. "I can barely get anything but one word answers from him."<br />
<br />
It's a blessing, I know. This conversation overload in our house from two teenagers and a pre-teen is not the usual fare in a lot of homes, and I soak up every minute of it. <br />
<br />
There was a period where that wasn't as true. When my son was in fourth grade, something shifted in our relationship. It was no longer cool to be close to your mom, to hang out with her and act like you liked her. He developed more commonalities with my husband, and I could see the guy thing edging me out. While I knew that was normal, was indeed preferable, I didn't want to lose him altogether. So I handed him a Harry Potter book.<br />
<br />
Harry Potter is my thing. My husband has kindly gone to the movie with me as they came out, but that was really an act of selfless love. He didn't read the books. He didn't care about the movies. When I gave my son the books, and he devoured them like I did, we had something in common no one else in the family did.<br />
<br />
While I made dinner, he sat at the counter and talked about the books with me, excited about the triumphs, sad about the losses, in awe of the magic of it all. By the time the sixth movie came out, he'd finished the series and went to the movies with me in place of my husband. When the last movie came out, he was invited by a friend to go to the midnight opening show, and I heard him say on the phone to his friend, "That sounds awesome, but I want to see the last one with my mom. It's kind of our thing."<br />
<br />
We've had lot of other books since. He skipped the YA books altogether and jumped into my old reading list: early Michael Crichton, the entirety of John Grisham, the Left Behind series, <i>Animal Farm. Ender's Game. Fahrenheit 451</i>. With each book, he sat at the counter at dinner and talked to me. When carpooling got quiet, I'd ask about what he was reading, and that would start a flood of conversations.We talk about the stories, but also the issues they bring up. Justice and politics and faith and science. <br />
<br />
In middle school, my daughter entered that phase of "I don't really have much to say." I handed her Harry Potter. Then, <i>The Hunger Games. To Kill a Mockingbird. Animal Farm. The Princess Bride. A Wrinkle in Time.</i> And the same phenomenon happened. We talked. All the time. And even now, when she gets quiet and withdrawn into that 13-year-old self-conscious world, all I have to do is talk about a book, and she is back.<br />
<br />
Once, in the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I sat in a college room full of students from all over Virginia discussing why we read. And one person said something I'll never forget: "We all come from different backgrounds, different schools. We love different things. But we ALL read Romeo and Juliet in ninth grade. That is something we all have in common."<br />
<br />
There are a lot of reasons why we should read, but this is my favorite. To connect to others.<br />
<br />
I worry sometimes that if I take time to just sit and read, I am neglecting more important things that need to be done. The laundry, the dishes, meals, shopping, volunteering at the schools, cleaning. But then I remember how books saved my relationship with my growing kids, and I think, What could be more important than that? <br />
<br />
<br />Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-74573285926572002242013-09-26T12:11:00.001-04:002013-09-26T12:11:51.496-04:00When Words Are Dangerous<br />
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<br />
It is banned book week. I'm not sure how widely this is known outside the writing/library circles, but within that community, it is definitely shouted about. Which is why, even as an author, I tend to stay quiet on the issue. It occurs to me that when there is a lot of shouting, there is not a lot of listening.<br />
<br />
Lately I've been listening more. And thinking. <br />
<br />
This is what I think: we have become a society in which we scream a lot about free-speech and tolerance and acceptance, but in reality, we only want free-speech and tolerance and acceptance for the things for which we agree.<br />
<br />
People like to throw the word censorship around because it is a heavily-loaded word. It reeks of Nazi Germany and book burnings and the red-scare McCarthyism that kept so many Americans from speaking what might be controversial. We pride ourselves on freedom; that is what this country was founded on - what our flag stands for - and to say that there is somewhere here a censorship on books seems entirely un-American.<br />
<br />
But censorship, really, is just drawing a line in the sand. It is saying there are things that are right - either beneficial or neutral, and things that are detrimental or dangerous. I think nearly everyone draws a line somewhere. The problem is that we don't all draw it in the same place.<br />
<br />
The thing is, words are powerful. They can be dangerous. They can offend. They can enlighten. They can rouse a person to do something he never thought of doing before, to say things they might not otherwise have said. People don't like to admit this, but it's true. The power of words is both good and bad. Let's be mature enough to at least admit this. This is why books and authors and poets are banned in other countries - because their words are powerful enough to cause others to rise up against the government, against the status-quo. This is why teens are committing suicide after posts on social media become reality in their heads.<br />
<br />
Words matter, and no one should know this more than writers.<br />
<br />
I've read two article this week that have been banging around in my head. The first was <a href="http://www.omaha.com/article/20130925/NEWS/130929202/1735#grace-minnesotans-cancel-rainbow-rowell-s-book-visit-after-parents-complaints" target="_blank">this one </a>about an author whose YA book <i>Eleanor & Park</i> has received some pushback by parents over the language and content that they called "pornographic" and "sexually explicit." I haven't read the book, so all I know is what the article said.The author of the article says that the real profanity in the book is the B-word and P-word: Bullies and Poverty, that we need to read these themes, even if they are ugly, because they are real.<br />
<br />
The other article is <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-soto/childrens-literature-writing_b_3989751.html?page=1" target="_blank">this one</a>, written by the author of the American Girl of the Year books in 2005. He wrote, without the language and the "sexually explicit" content, about a family living in what is a well-known, dangerous neighborhood that wants to move to give their daughter a better place to grow up. This author was hounded by journalists and politicians because he shed a light on the more unsavory side of Chicago inner-city.<br />
<br />
Both of these articles are well worth reading. And thinking about. And comparing.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, I think it's also good advice to stop the screaming just a minute and listen to someone else. Really listen. And think about where they've drawn their line, and why. And maybe, just maybe, if you listen to them, they'll listen to you. And then there might actually be a conversation.<br />
<br />Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-24225606371634097442013-09-16T11:17:00.003-04:002013-09-16T11:17:37.099-04:00Sometimes You Just Need a Marriage Counselor<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<br />
<i><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4853">"We
are like a married couple who has been through the gauntlet and need to
return to simpler times to fall back in love. That's us with writing. We
must fall back in love. We were in love before for a reason....let's
find it again." </span></i><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4853">(an email from Brit Lary)</span><i><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4853"><br /></span></i><br />
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4853"><br /></span>
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4853">Brit was one of the first writers I ever "met." She was in an online writing group I joined right after I began writing in earnest, and I knew right away she had a gift far above the average level of talent in that group. We eventually broke off and created our own group with a few other fabulous writers we met online, and have been together as both writers and friends through the last six years.</span><br />
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4853"><br /></span>
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4853">Those six years have brought a lot of changes in our lives. Our writing has ebbed and flowed, other pressing needs have crowded in, personal tragedy and huge life challenges have carved new paths for both of us, but we have remained steady friends. </span><br />
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4853"><br /></span>
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4853">And this week, when I was struggling with writing and melancholy and the ever-cliched writer's block, Brit was there to listen. When I wrote to her and said, "I don't know if I can keep doing this... Maybe this has just been a hobby all along," she reminded me that writing is suppose to be a love affair. That I need to stop listening to the voices in my head telling me to do it this way or do it that way, that the market is looking for one thing and publishers are demanding another. Just... fall back in love with writing the way it was when we both started.</span><br />
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4853"></span><br /><i><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4840">I
have been considering "stripping" my writing....instead of worrying
about what sales, what doesn't, who are less talented and successful ... and just
write. Strip the rest away. </span></i><br />
<br />
<i><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4840"><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4842">Get
our groove back. Don't study statistics, or the latest trends, or the
Amazon rankings or NY Bestselling list......just
write what you love to write. You, and I, will find ourselves
happier...looser.....relaxed.....and that is when the best stuff
happens. </span></span></i><br />
<br />
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4840"><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4842">She isn't the first to tell me that. It probably isn't even the first time <i>she's </i>told me that. But it was what I needed to hear at exactly the time I needed to hear it. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4840"><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4842">And she is right. I've been "married" to writing for a long time now, and I've lost that loving feeling. I've gotten tangled up in the hows and whys and technicalities of it, and I've forgotten how to just "be" with it.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4840"><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4842">She offered me a challenge - a 30-day, write-and-read-a-thon for both of us, to find our love with writing again. To write without thinking about how awful or cliched or crappy or hackneyed the writing is. To write without wondering if it will sell or how it will be critiqued. Just to fall back in love with writing.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4840"><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4842">Both of us writing, reading, keeping each other accountable day after day. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4840"><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4842">2 pages a day until the end of October (we revised it to a 51-day challenge), 20 minutes of reading a day (the kind that's just for fun), and - as an extra incentive to our mental-health - a bit of exercise thrown in for good measure. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4840"><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4842">Phew!!</span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4840"><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4842">I'm excited, actually. It all feels possible again. Write the words. All of them. Make them better later.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4840"><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4842">I am so incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by so many great people - friends and readers and fellow writers. I have a gigantic support group if I'd reach out and ask, and I am so grateful for that. Yesterday, it was Brit who was the one who saved me, who brought me from the brink of giving up, who has, as she always has, believed in my writing, believed I should not give up. She is like my writing marriage counselor. :)</span></span><br />
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4840"><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4842"><br /></span></span>
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4840"><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4842">You know how Wikipedia defines challenge? A thing that is "imbued with a sense of difficulty and victory." I love that! </span></span><br />
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4840"><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4842"><br /></span></span>
<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4840"><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4842">What are you challenged by these days? And are you seeing how victory is there waiting for you at the end?</span></span><br />
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<span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4840"><span class="yiv9519291985Apple-style-span" id="yui_3_7_2_1_1379330862186_4842"> </span></span>Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-74328761515395027542013-09-03T11:11:00.002-04:002013-09-03T11:11:50.417-04:00Imagine Amazing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Today, the kids tromp off to school again, freshly sharpened pencils and neatly stacked paper and backpacks that have yet to be scarred and dirtied by the dragging through buses and shoving in lockers. They have new clothes, shorter hair, bright eyes. It's the best thing about the first day... everything is new.<br />
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I'm not one of the parents jumping up and down about school. I love so much about summer. I love not getting up at 5:30am. I love not packing lunches. I love lazing around a pool or floating in the ocean or long family car trips. I love late nights and family movies and Wii bowling tournaments. I love not having to harass anyone about homework. I love the lack of stress. Mostly, though, I love having my kids home. I love taking them places we don't have time to go during the school year. Seeing museums and zoos and hiking through the woods with them. I love the way they talk to me about what's on their minds. And talk. And talk. And talk.<br />
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I grieve a little when they go back to school and I lose them for almost all of their waking hours.<br />
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But I thrive with schedules, too. I loved being up early this morning and having everything done by nine, and getting to sit at my computer to write and tutor. I love being able to tutor for hours at a time, instead of a small chunk here and a smaller chunk there. While I miss my kids and all the busyness they bring to my day, I do like having quiet time to write again. It's been so long since I've worked on my novel!<br />
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Maybe the thing that I love about this fall is that everything is not new. For the first time since my oldest started kindergarten, we have the same school schedule as the year before. The kids are involved in all the same activities, mostly on all the same days. Rather than the pains of learning a new routine, we are sliding back into an old one... something comfortable. They have new teachers, of course, and I have new tutoring and editing jobs, but overall, the broader things are like slipping into a favorite sweater. <br />
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Last night, as I kissed each kid goodnight, we mused about what possibilities the year would bring. How can they possibly imagine what amazing things might happen in the next ten months, what amazing people might be in their lives?<br />
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It's not that different for adults. Who is to say the kids get all the amazing chances and changes? I hope in the next ten months I am finally finished with this novel - finished, polished, off to an agent. I hope I meet new people in the blogosphere to call friends. I hope I get another short story published. I hope God does something huge in my heart. I hope I am important in someone else's life. I hope I make a difference somewhere.<br />
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It's true that every day is the start of the rest of your life. It doesn't have to be the beginning of school, or a birthday, or New Years. It can be any day. It can be today.<br />
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What amazing thing do you hope will happen this year? I'll bet whatever it is, something more than you can imagine is on its way. Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7313130055534395503.post-15105340258867677132013-08-19T10:45:00.000-04:002013-08-19T10:45:59.660-04:00She plans to dream...When I was a little girl, I used to sneak into our attic and curl up on my sleeping bag under the rafters with a pad of graph paper and draw my future home. In my head I had pictures of it: a stone-front mansion perched on the cliffs of Maine overlooking the Atlantic ocean. The inside would be cavernous, all high-ceilinged and warm-wood.<br />
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I drew floorplans, where every room took the shape of a rectangle, where the second of three floors consisted entirely of a library which I envisioned as one of those magical, two-story rooms with mahogany shelves and ladders and spiral iron staircases and a massive fireplace to read in front of and leather couches with white fur blankets slung over them to cuddle up in on cold night. <br />
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Looking back, I can see how utterly uncreative I was, that house all boxes and 90 degree angles. But I had my priorities right. And as I grew older, that library grew to be my writing room, a large mahogany desk taking center stage by the windows overlooking the cliffs and outstretched ocean. There would be a typewriter on that desk - one of those old black manual ones with the mother-of-pearl keys - and a banker's lamp, because nothing seemed cooler than a green-hooded lamp.<br />
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When I met the wonderful writers that became my first critique group, we talked about flying in from around the globe to meet somewhere, spend a weekend in a writer's heaven. It was a grand dream... grand enough for my Maine house. So that became our running joke - that we would meet there, at the Maine house. We'd write all day, and in the evenings we'd sit around and drink wine and talk about books and writing and all the things the people we saw everyday only vaguely understood. And I knew I'd need to put a porch on that deck for us all the sit out and enjoy the fresh air. So I imagined that porch into my dream.<br />
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More than a home, my dream became being with those writers, somewhere away from the traffic and superstores and raging suburbanites. And then I went to residency at Pacific. And I realized it wasn't just a dream. At least, not the house.<br />
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Every night, every lunch, every walk across campus I'd revel in the conversations of other writers. Late at night, we'd sit in our dorm living room and talk about oxford commas and diagram sentences and argue the value of certain writers. We talk about our writing, about careers, about dreams and dream crushers. It was a little slice of paradise.<br />
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A friend recently posted a poem on facebook called <a href="http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2013/08/07" target="_blank">"Plans," by Stuart Dischell</a>. If you want to read it, you can find it <a href="http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2013/08/07" target="_blank">here</a>. It begins:<br />
<br />
<i>She plans to be a writer one day and live in the City of Paris,<br />
Where she will describe the sun as it rises over Buttes-Chaumont.<br />
"Today the dawn began in small pieces, sharp wedges of light<br />
Broke through the clouds." She plans to write better than this<br />
And is critic enough to know "sharp wedges" sound like cheese. <br />
She plans to live alone in a place that has a terrace<br />
Where she will drink strong coffee at a round white table....</i><br />
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It made me think of my Maine house, and of my dreams, some of which have come true and others of which are still waiting for their day. Maybe I will never own that stone home on the cliff overlooking the ocean. Maybe I will never have a library that looks like something one would find at Cambridge. But it never hurts to dream it could still happen.<br />
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And in the meantime, I'll revel in the fact that I have what is most important about that dream: the friends who will gather with me - around a fireplace, a dorm room, or an email chat group - to drink a little wine, debate the merits of grammar rules, discuss books, and commiserate about how awful/awesome it is to be a writer. But mostly, how awesome.<br />
<br />Heidi Willishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18420802651029097379noreply@blogger.com7