Recuperating - Book Style

I had surgery two weeks ago. Nothing major and I'm just fine, but my orders were to spend a good amount of time on the couch recuping. I laughed, because, as a writer, that's pretty much what I do all day anyway. Me and my laptop, recuping for the last five years. :)

I had great expectations for these weeks. Mandatory time on my bum, no laundry, no cooking, no running errands or carpooling kids. It was like a prescription for productivity! I was going to come home and write up a storm.

Only it hasn't worked out that way. At first, I blamed it on the anesthesia and pain meds still floating around. Foggy brain. The first few days I slept, and then graduated into reading, and then, as my head cleared, opened the computer.

Nothing.

Still foggy.

So I blogged a little. And read. And when my brain cleared all up and I stopped being tired all the time and my fingers were ready for typing... I still couldn't write. There's stuff in my brain, but it's like a jumbled mess of puzzle pieces. Too much work to put together.

So I read some more.

I've read a lot.

And I've decided I'm not really recuping from surgery. I'm recuping from school.

Some people call it a post-MFA funk. But I don't feel funk-ish. I'm not depressed about school being over (well, not too much). I'm not fearful I'll never write anything again. I'm not totally sapped of inspiration or ideas or motivation. My brain just needs a bit of recuperating... of filling up what was depleted through the intensity of the past two years.

I've been mostly reading books that didn't fit on my reading list - reading whatever strikes my interest. I read A Stolen Life, about the Jaycee Duggard's kidnapping and life in captivity. I followed that with Escape, the also true story about Carolyn Jessop's time in the FDLS and an abusive polygamist marriage and her escape. Cheery stuff, no? 

I kept in my non-fiction trend and read Devil in the White City, which is a book I bought my first residency at the urging of a friend and never found a place to put it on my reading list. So glad I finally got to it! Fascinating story. I've talked so much about it my family feels like they've read it, too.

As a Penn Stater, I've been eager to read the new biography of Paterno that came out right before my thesis was due, and I spent the later part of last week reading that. I don't know what I was expecting about that book, but I was surprised by it. It may be about a football coach, but I took away a lot of lessons about self-motivation and focusing on what is really important in life and career. I actually read this book with a highlighter in my hand. If I were still in college, I would have written these quotes out and hung them above my bed with my other motivational sayings.

I just finished Thirteen Reason's Why, my first fiction since I got home. I'm thinking maybe I'm just too old now for YA books. I want to like them, but I just don't get why people flock to this book and give it such high ratings. I get that it tackles the popular and sensitive topic of suicide, and to an extent bullying (if that's not too general a term for what the main character goes through), but I think there must be much, much better books out there on this. It's a unique and grabby hook, I'll grant you that: suicidal girl leaves behind tapes naming the people who pushed her over the edge, and what they did that caused her to kill herself. But I didn't like the execution of it, and it was painful to finish. I so wanted it to be better.

I'm now reading Gone Girl. I hear it's fantastic. Or totally awful. Depending on who you are. I've been told I have to get to the last chapters to decide for myself. I kinda hate that... that a book can be great until the end, and then have an end totally blow it for you.

I'm also reading Tenth of December, a new book of short stories by George Saunders, in hopes that my brain mush will regenerate into something more akin to a writer's. I'm thinking it's about time to just force myself to write, even badly, just to get in the habit again.

And no, self, blogging doesn't count anymore. :)

What are you reading?

An Every Day Kind of Love

All through high school and college I wore black on Valentine's Day. True story.

When I got engaged to the love of my life, I begrudgingly added tiny black heart earrings to my holiday wardrobe. After the wedding, I bought little red heart earrings, mostly because my husband was so outwardly enthusiastic about expressing his love and I didn't want to look scroogish about my own love.

Then I had kids. And Valentine's Day became a blur of red and pinks, of heart-shaped pancakes in the morning and chocolate hearts painted on the inside of their milk glasses and pink-frosted sugar cookies and cupcakes and lots of kisses and "I love you"s.

I suppose we could psycho-analyze why I almost never said "I love you" before I met my husband, why I wore black on the day of expressing that love, but really, who has the time or stomach for that? The thing is, I grew up in a great family, had good friends, an occasional boyfriend. I wasn't love deprived. I wasn't stingy showing love. I just didn't say it.

But now... I'm realizing there are all sorts of love, and lots of people to say it to without having it involve romance. It started with my kids, showering them with hugs and words, but now... well, the more you love, the more you love. It kinda grows and sneaks up on you and all of a sudden I've become overwhelmed with how many people I truly, deeply love.

I love my husband, madly, passionately, can't-breathe-without-you kind of love. I love my kids in the how-could-I-believe-I-ever-lived-before-you kind of way.

I love my Pacific friends, who are all amazing in unique and wonderful ways, who have laughed and cried and stressed and listened and complained and rejoiced and walked on the beach and drunk coffee at Maggies in the morning and wine at night with me. I love my advisors, who invested so much of their time and selves into me and my work. I love the directors of the MFA program, who are never without a smile, an answer, an encouraging word.

 I love my friends here who spend hours with me over coffee or lunch, spilling their tears, trusting me with their deepest heart's cry, filling my day with stories that make me laugh hours later, letting me be a part of their lives in that same way. I love the bloggers I've met online but never met in person, who comment and email and sometimes even call, who have become personal to me despite the most impersonal way of meeting.

I love the people in my small group at church, who open their lives and hearts and love Jesus and pray with me and for me.

I used to think saying I loved lots of people - in all these different ways - diluted love, watered down what it meant - but I've come to see it only makes it more powerful.

I was beyond fortunate to get to read a manuscript this winter of a book coming out in 2014. It is, in essence - a love story. It is the story of a man and woman who meet, fall in love, think they will have the perfect life together, and then life around them falls apart. But their love remains.

It isn't a romance. It's just... their life. But there were places I was so overwhelmed by the power of love in it that I found myself unable to breathe, my chest tight, my heart pounding, feeling as though if I read one more word I would explode into a million pieces. I had to put it down a few times, get up and walk around, find my breath again. But I could never stay away for long.

Life should be like that. Overwhelming, breath-taking, unable to contain kind of love. I think sometimes the only reason it isn't is because we don't let it.

And don't think for a second that this black-clad pessimist isn't the most surprised by this realization.

Happy day today - not just because it's Valentines, but because you are loved, every day.

Finding Your Place

 (My daughter in her younger days)

My daughter is currently struggling through her pre-teen years. While my son seemed to sail, untouched, through middle school, my daughter is like the poster-child for stereotypical made-for-movie 7th grade. There are cliques and popular kids and snotty kids and bullies. There's name-calling and gossip and enough meanness to make the bus ride your proverbial hell.

She craves belonging. She wants the right clothes, the pretty hair, the perfect skin, the athletic ability and smooth social skills that make it seem so easy for everyone else. I can't tell if she wants to stand out in a good way or just blend in, but what she doesn't want is to be a target. She doesn't want to be different. There are times in life when uniqueness is prized, but not in middle school. Not among her classmates, anyway.

She can't believe that I understand this, that I, too, struggle with this same thing. Since finishing up school, I've begun looking for a home for some of my stronger short stories. Lit magazines are something I've never really explored before. Until the last two years I probably had never even cracked one open.

But now I am reading, both the fiction in them and the guidelines for submission. Nearly every one says, "Get a feel for what we publish before sending in something. Make sure your work fits in. We strongly suggest you read a few back issues of our magazine before submitting."

I get it. You don't want to send a horror story to a family-oriented parenting magazine. But lit mags... I mean, mostly they just publish run-of-the-mill literary short stories.

What does it mean to fit in? Do I have to stop writing like me, in my own voice and style, and start conforming to the masses? Okay, I've read a bunch of stories now and what I can tell is that none of them - across the board - are like mine. I find them snoozy, mostly. Lots of narrative, little action, little dialogue. There are a few truly unique ones out there, but not just a little unique - I mean radically experimental.

But none like mine.

And shouldn't that be good? Shouldn't it be the way agents for novels are crying out for unique voices, for something that sounds different?

So why isn't it?

I don't have the answers, anymore than I can answer my daughter why it isn't okay in her school to be unique.

What I tell her, every day, is to be true to herself. Not to be what others want her to be, but to be who she is, wholly and entirely.

It's good advice for life. I hope it's good for writing, too.

Book Club Skypes and Other Humbling Things

Years ago, when I was writing Some Kind of Normal, I dreamed of what it would be like to be a published author. To say the least, those dreams were unrealistic. Hitting bestseller lists, traveling on book tours, seeing my book on every bookstore shelf - maybe even in the hands of a stranger in an airport. Being the book of the month for some big book club.

I knew they weren't realistic dreams, but they were fun, and sometimes, in the grueling, lonely long hours of writing when nothing on the page seems to come out right and in those long months of rejections by agents, dreams are what you need to keep you going.

Life as a published author hasn't been quite the way I hoped - at least not continually - but it's certainly had its moments. I hit a bestseller list on Amazon for a few weeks. That was a buzz! I signed books in Barnes and Nobles. I saw my novel on a shelf recently in a bookstore a few miles from my home. I've had strangers approach me in public places or email me to say they've read it and loved it. I've had book clubs choose to read it.

And this past month, I was asked to join a book club in Canada via Skype. I can't even begin to say how cool that was.

So last night blogging friend Lynn Simpson Skyped me from her group in Alberta, Canada, and we chatted.

I'd like to say I felt like a rock star, but really, I felt like myself - a bit overly-talkative, embarrassed, and completely inadequate to be a part of their night.

They asked great questions, seemed like a great group of people... I wished I was there with them, talking to some other author via Skype.

I'll make a confession - it's been three years since my book was published, and just that long since I've read it. The editing and proofing process made me sick enough of my writing at the time that I haven't had the heart to go back and read it again. And I realized, as I was getting ready to chat with the book club, that I had forgotten some of the minor character names and minor plots. So I took out the book and read it.

And cringed.

Three years, a graduate school degree, two more novels and a handful of short stories later, my writing has really changed, and I could see all the weakness of this writing, could see why agents rejected it, could see places that were just rough.

I felt almost apologetic about them reading it.

I didn't hate the whole thing. There were places I really loved, things I did really well that I haven't since done as well. I cried through most of it. I marveled at a few turns of phrases and scenes and dialogue. I love those characters with all my heart.

But still... if I wrote it today, it wouldn't be the same.

And I have to be okay with that. I certainly don't want my first book to be my best - for my writing to go downhill from here. I want to get better. One lady said, "That was really great for a first book," and I loved that comment because it is how I feel. It's not some literary groundbreaker, and I won't win big awards for it, and I hope it's not the best thing I'll ever write, but it's pretty good for a first book.

But what I did realize talking to them is that I loved writing that book. I wrote it because I was passionate about it. I was passionate about diabetes and stem cell research and finding faith when it seems like questioning God isn't allowed. Just answering their questions, I found myself excited again about all those things.

And that is what I've been missing. Writing from that place of passion. I can love my characters. I can love my story idea. But it hasn't been that same level of passion that makes me stop people, corner them and talk to them for hours about how the real world could be changed by what I'm learning as I write. I'm not sure how to get back to that place, but I'm working on a new novel now that I hope will be that way.

For now, I'm loving the women in that book club who took their time last night to talk to me, to tell me what they loved about the book, the characters they fell in love with, how they'd guessed where I'd drawn the line between fiction and real life, who read so carefully and treated me like a honored guest. To me, they are the rock stars.

"Forget the Reuben; Focus on the Ninjas."

Ben Percy is one of my favorite teachers at Pacific. He gives some of the best craft talks - always focused and organized and intensely practical.

Something he said this January has been meandering around in my brain as I'm starting back at the beginning of my novel. "Forget the Reuben; Focus on the Ninjas."

I guess out of context it doesn't make much sense. :)

He was talking about indelible images - those images and scenes we see so clearly in our heads that we want to transpose into words. The trap with seeing things so clearly in our heads, though, is that not everything we see is that important.

The idea of being specific in writing doesn't mean we need to choke the reader with details. A story should rumble along at a nice clip until you get to the place (or places, in a longer piece) where you need amplification to slow things down, go deeper and grow the tension.

In movie terms, when the camera lingers on a detail, the director is saying, "This is important."

But how often in writing we misdirect out readers! We slow down, we linger at the places and on details that aren't important.

For instance, he said, in a detective story, you don't want to stop and spend two pages on describing the detective sitting in a deli eating his reuben sandwich. Do we need to know how high the meat is piled? Do we need to know the way he wipes the sauce from his cheek? Is it important we know the delicious combination of tangy and savory flavors erupting in his mouth when, two pages later, a Ninja is going to bust through the door?

The Ninja is what's important. And if we give equal weight to the sandwich and the Ninja, we are doing a disservice to what is important. We are leading our readers astray, asking them to focus on the things that don't matter and then leaving them wondering why they just slogged through so much information.

Forget the Reuben; Focus on the Ninja.

I think we all have our ticks - things we like to linger on and indulge our writerly selves with. For some people it's character descriptions. For others it's setting.

Every time I write now, I think, "Is this important to the story?" Is it important to describe a character to a T - that a character has a bulbous nose and dark hair and feet the size of a clown's? Is it important that the curtains in the kitchen are yellow with tiny daisies embroidered on them that flutter like a ghost when the window is open? Does my reader need to know the contents of the dinner plate?

Not to say specific details aren't important. When you can name something specifically rather than generally, that's always a good idea. ("Cars crammed the lot of the Shop N' Save" rather than "Cars crammed the lot of the grocery store"), but when they aren't crucial to a scene, but we shouldn't linger on them, add so much detail that a reader wonders if this needs to be remembered. It dilutes the power of the images and scenes that are important.

I think this isn't just writing, either. Don't we do this in life? Focus on the things that don't really matter, give them equal weight with the things that do? I worry equally about the cleanliness of my house and the surgery I have scheduled this week. I spend more time on facebook than talking to my friends face to face. I spent more time on this blog post than on my novel today.

Maybe Ben could just have said, "Focus on what's important." But I've heard that all my life, and isn't the Reuben/Ninja example just a bit catchier?

End of an Era: Choosing Happy

I've spent thirty days of my life on this beach in the past two years. I've walked out onto the sand, feeling it give under my feet, waves lapping at the toes of my boots, and feeling utterly grateful to find a life where I never expected it.

I started my MFA program in Seaside, Oregon, and ended it there, although graduation ceremonies closer to Portland in June will formalize it all. But I could walk across that stage in June or not walk, wear the cap and gown or hang at home in jammies, and the degree is still mine. I now have a master's.

I don't even know what that means, other than that now I can tell how awful my writing is. If there is ever a time when the adage "The more you know, the more you don't know," holds true, this is it.

It is, at the same time, awful, and awfully better.

I read 86 books in the last two years - most of which I really loved and would never have otherwise heard of. I wrote over two hundred pages of a novel, put it aside and wrote six short stories, rewriting them until my fingers nearly bled - and probably my advisor's eyes bled. He was too kind to tell me if he winced every time my packets came in, but I suspect.

The thing is, somewhere towards the end, I suddenly got it. Just... a year of slamming my head against the keyboard over these short stories, not getting what seemed to be basic elements, everything on the page looking awkward and clumsy, and suddenly it was if someone took the blindfold off my eyes and I could see what I was doing wrong, and how to do it better. I could see why it wasn't working, why my characters felt like puppets I was moving around rather than real people, why my stories bored me, why the endings never worked. It was the entire cliched light-bulb moment.

I'd like to say it just took a lot of writing, the proverbial practice makes perfect, but I have to give most of the credit to Pete, who gave my work more attention than it deserved, who didn't give up even when I kept making the same mistakes, who doled out words of wisdom when I needed them to keep going, and eventually, praise that felt hard-earned.

So I headed to Seaside with two purposes... to present my thesis in front of the faculty and student body - a 15 minute critical introduction and a reading of one of my stories - and a thesis review with my advisor and three other students who'd also poured over my work.

I was nervous about both, but they went exceptionally well - much much better than I expected - and for the rest of the residency, I felt like I'd taken some euphoric drug.

There was such opportunity to be sad - the ending of this all. Sad is what I do when things end. I'm not a huge fan of change.

But a few of us decided we could be sad, or we could be happy, and that choice was up to us. So we chose happy. Happy to get to spend this time together before going on with our lives. Happy to have finished and have writing we were really proud of. Happy to explore the coast, soak up rare Oregon sun, hang out late at night, drink wine, hover around a bonfire on the beach in below freezing temps, sing at karaoke, dance. We chose happy.

Deliriously happy.

 (These are two of my three closest friends from the first day of the program.)

(This is at Cannon Beach, one free afternoon when we headed over the hill from Seaside to have seafood at the cutest little cafe and wander the beach. )

(Jeanne and Beth and I, the last night... choosing happy over tears. The motto was No Tears Until After Dinner, but we didn't even cry later. How can you cry when these people who I didn't know two years ago are now such a big part of my life? And distance now is such a little thing...)

(Me and Katie at Karaoke... she brought Gangnam style glasses for the entire crew that were a huge hit. Every time I see Katie, it's like no time ever passed. We will be texting each other for many years to come.)

 

BONFIRE!!

It was below freezing on the beach, and if you stood too far from the fire, you froze. An inch closer and you actually felt your legs had burst into flames. It was awesome!

(Pete and Jack at the bonfire. Pete was my advisor for two semesters - practically a saint for that - and Jack workshopped with me for two residencies. These are some of my favorite guys!)

(Pete and I at the graduation dinner.)

So I'm done. What next?

I don't know. I'm taking it day by day. The first few days home I just caught up on laundry and groceries and cleaning from being gone. I spent the weekend with the kids, watching movies and playing Wii and talking. I read a book just for fun. I didn't worry about deadlines. I wasn't stressed. I just... lived. 

Today starts a new plan. I thought I was going to work on a novel again. During residency I was sure I would go back to Prodigal and do it right. But when I opened the computer, it still feels awfully muddied. Another novel - an old idea I fiddled with during my writing block phase a few years back - started brewing. But yesterday I had a short story pulling at me. Short stories are short term commitments. It might be fun to work on one just to get back into writing for me. It might be fun to look at magazines to submit to before diving back into novels and agents and the publishing industry. 

So. I don't know. And I'm okay with that right now. I'm feeling my way, but going forward. I'm sort of excited just to play around with all the tools I've gathered over the past years, see if what I learned stuck. 

I know why they call graduation commencement. One era may have ended, but the rest of life and this writing journey is just beginning.