The Cost of Sacrifice

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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?

But the fact is, there are only so many hours in a day, and there is a lot that fills those hours.

What would I be willing to give up to get what I want?

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.

Am I willing to give up my family and house? Absolutely not.

When I think about what takes up my time, it is this. My kids. My husband. My home.

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.

I do a Bible study. I pray. That gets me through each day like breathing.

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.

What is there in my day that I could trade for a few hours of writing?

Not even sleep. There's not enough of that as it is.

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.

For now, what steals the hours from writing are those things even more valuable to me than writing. My kids. My husband. My home.

That realization gave me a few moments of peace. And then, I wrote a few lines in my novel, and went to bed.

The Long Road

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.

"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.

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 should be done. Those are the words that whisper in my ear constantly. Why so long?

It's so easy to think that writing THE END, the destination of every novel, is the point.

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.

I've done this before. I know what is at the end.

The end.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Life is Not a Sticker Chart

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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?

Then I read this: "You are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer."

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.

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.

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?

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.

"Touch It Every Day"

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And it works.

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.

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.

Here's my encouragement to you who are floating... touch it. Just a little. Every day. It works.

Little Grain of Sand Things

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.

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. One day....

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.

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.

Instead, I got a night of total tech obsessions.

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.

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!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Girl Who Was Hungry

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.


"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."

"How many carbs do you think are on that plate? I bet I can calculate the carbs on this table faster than you."

"Yay! Food with lots of fat! Fat slows the absorption of carbs! Fat is a diabetic's best friend!"

"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."

"Your pump is purple! That is so cool!"

"Your pump is blue! I love it!"

"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!!!!"

Yeah. It's pretty hilarious. Sometimes it's like a code no one else at the table gets.

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.

"What's it for?"

"It makes me feel full. I never felt full before. I used to just stop eating because I saw other people stop."

That was the oddest thing I'd ever heard. She never felt full? How could you not feel full?

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?

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.

And slowly I realized... I was hungry all the time. And I realized that maybe wasn't how everyone else felt all the time.

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.

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.

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.

Mind. Blown.

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.

This is all so complicated. Much more complicated than it sounds, because everything is connected.

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.

Add into this not being able to feel like you've gotten enough to eat.

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.

And here... suddenly here is the key.

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.

It sounded like a miracle.

Do I hear angels singing?

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.

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."

So I got a prescription. And a healthy dose of skepticism.

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.

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.

I am not hungry. I didn't even remember what not hungry felt like.

I feel like... like me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why NaNo's Not for Me

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.

But it will not be me.

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.

Before anyone else asks me whether or not I'm up for this, here are my reasons why I won't be NaNoing.

1. I write consistently on a normal basis. 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.

2. I write slowly. 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 never 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.

3. Stress is not something I need more of. 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.

4. I have a job now. 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.

5. It is November. 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.

6. I would be setting myself up to fail. 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.

7. I am on the eighth or ninth draft of this novel. 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.

This is not to say I don't enjoy a good challenge. On Sept. 15, Brit challenged me 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.

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. :)

When Words Are Dangerous

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.

Lately I've been listening more. And thinking.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Words matter, and no one should know this more than writers.

I've read two article this week that have been banging around in my head. The first was this one about an author whose YA book Eleanor & Park 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.

The other article is this one, 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.

Both of these articles are well worth reading. And thinking about. And comparing.

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.

What Sucks About Being a Writer

I'm not talking about the hard work of writing. Writing itself has its frustrations and difficulties, like any job, but I'm not talking about the putting of words on a page.

I'm talking about being a writer... being in this business of publishing. If you ask around, I think most writers would say the rejection is about the worst aspect, and I wouldn't disagree that rejection stinks. No one likes to have someone say no to them. But before the no, there has to be the asking, and that is what I hate the most.

The begging.

Let's face it, that's what it is. We beg agents to take a look at a manuscript. Beg literary magazine to deem our work worthy of page space. Beg publishers to offer contracts, beg reviewers to take the time to read and rate our work. We beg fellow bloggers to participate in blog tours, beg fellow authors to blurb us and tout us. We beg fellow writers to read and critique our novels, even when we know how precious their time is and how much time it takes to do that. We beg friends and family to buy our books, to spread the word, to give us stars on Amazon.

Some people have PR to do that work, but there is still begging done on the part of the author, and that reflects on them.

It's as though we are standing in the midst of a swirling storm of talent asking others to find us worthy.

Maybe this sounds melodramatic. Some of you love the marketing aspect of publishing. Some of you are really good at it. I am not. I think it's because I always know there is someone out there with a better plot, with a more poetic way of writing. There are so many great writers, great books out there; who am I to say, "Pick me!"?

A friend of mine has just published a book. I found out that a mutual author friend is feeling a bit badgered by her PR, to read, to blurb, to promote. He doesn't have the time to do that, and he resents the pressure to be her cheerleader when they aren't really great friends, when he doesn't love the book, when he himself is overwhelmed by deadlines. I feel for him. But I feel for her, too. I know how hard it is to get a book out there.
 
I actually don't mind the rejection (when it's polite, of course, because no one feels good about getting torn apart for what they do!). I don't mind someone saying, "This just isn't for me."  I get that. We don't all have the same taste in reading, and if someone doesn't like the way I write, doesn't like my topics or my characters, I'm okay with that.

It's the asking I hate, the way it makes me look desperate to be loved and accepted, as though having someone say "yes" to my writing is the only thing that validates it.

There's no way to get around this, of course. We write to be read, and we can't be read unless people know it's there to read.

The first obstacle, of course, is to having something for people to read. :)  In that endeavor, off I go to write.

Life after an MFA

This week I climb on a plane and head to Oregon for the last time. Even though I officially finished in January, my thesis presentation over and my diploma in the mail, the cap-and-gown hooplah isn't until this weekend.  On Saturday, despite having my Masters for over six months, I will finally walk across the stage.

It's a strange place to be in in my life, this place between finishing and graduating. I will walk across the stage and get my hood along with all my other January cohort, but also with those who have spent the last few days giving their presentations, just now finishing. They are excited and on the thesis euphoria, the way I was in what seems like so long ago. I, on the other hand, have long ago come down off that mountain high.

A few months ago a prospective student emailed me, asking about the program at Pacific, about the teaching and the students, and, finally the money question: "What do people from Pacific do when they graduate?"

I told her the truth: Anything they want to do. Everything, really. Some go on to write novels and travel on book tours. Some go on to work on literary magazines. Some actually start their own lit mags. Some publish stories and poems, some go on to get PhDs, and some go back to their jobs as computer programmers and teachers and retail clerks.

I don't know what I thought I would do. Slip back into my pre-school life, I suppose. Go back to writing the way I had been before. Finish the novel. Submit some of the stories from my thesis. Blog more, catch up on publishing news. Just... the same stuff.

Instead, I slid back a decade, to those years before blogging and writing, when life was consumed by being a mother and wondering how we'd make ends meet. I did laundry by the ton, scoured the bathrooms, cleaned the floors, filled the pantry with food, cooked new recipes, went on field trips with my fourth grader, watched TV and made crafts with the kids, took them on hikes through our county parks, explored our woods, took the dog to the river every day to swim. I fill my days with full-time motherhood.

And a few hours a day I pour over employment options. The kind that comes with a paycheck. With student loans looming and the government sequestration and cuts affecting our family, I need an income a little better than the floundering writing world provides.

It is, in equal parts, invigorating and soul-sucking.

I am exhausted by not writing, by the lack of sense of purpose that comes from putting words on a page. It breaks my heart to not be able to write: to stare at the page and wonder if the story in my head will be worthy of the education, will do justice to my advisors, will provide an income. To have those worries and stresses freeze the words before I can put them on the page.  It breaks my heart to worry that time spent writing is time wasted, time I should spend doing something more practical.

I miss most the community. I'm afraid that if I say, "I'm not going to write now. Now I'm going to tutor college students and edit other people's novels," that I am letting down a host of people who believed I could write. I worry what I will do with this blog. I worry about how I will tell everyone who knows me as a writer, who views me through that lens that says, "She is part of my writing circle." If I have spent not just the past two years but the past seven years of my life identifying as a writer, will people know I am still the same person if I don't focus on writing now?

A friend was joking with me about the coming graduation speech. "I hope," she said, "they do not go on and on again about how important and in demand a degree in humanities is. I hate the way they always say CEOs have realized people with good communications skills are more valuable than any other degree." She's right. Maybe companies with good paying jobs do want someone who can communicate well, but they still want that business degree, or math, or engineering, or graphic design, or heck, even a degree in library sciences. I have yet to see a job description pleading for someone who can pen a novel.

One of my advisors warned about the post-MFA funk. I laughed at him. I said, "Why would there be a funk? I still am reading and writing. I am still in constant contact with my friends from Pacific. I still get to email you. All I'm missing now is the stress of deadlines."

But it's not the same. And he knew that. And while maybe not everyone goes through this, not everyone who graduates finds themselves adrift in a sea of indecision and lostness, I, despite my best intentions, find myself lost and without direction.

And somehow, this is okay.

I am redefining my life, and that's always okay. I will always be a writer, but that itself isn't what defines me. I am a mom. A wife. A child of God. This is what more defines me than anything else. Where writing fits in is maybe still left to be seen.

And while some might wonder if a writing degree then was worth the money, I still say yes. A resounding, reverberating, screaming yes. Because this two years was more than just writing. It fundamentally changed who I am, who I know I can be. It gave me experiences and friendships I could never have otherwise had. These things are priceless. 

So this week I will graduate. I will fly to Oregon, I will hug my friends. I will don the cap and gown, walk across the stage in heels I bought eight months ago just for this event. I will bend at the knees so they can put the hood over my head. I will get pictures of me in the trappings of graduation. I will toast with champagne. I will know that I most certainly will write in the future, but maybe not in the ways I thought I would. Or maybe in the ways I hoped. I will know that who I am is much more important than what I do, and this two years has helped make me who I am.

A Matter of Trust

Why is it so hard to trust our instincts in writing? Is it because we secretly believe there is some trick, some fool-proof method to writing that, if only we were privy to it would lead to our certain success, but without it we are doomed?

I question everything. My words, my sentences, my plots, my characters. I find myself wanting to thrust my chapters in others' hands and ask, "Is this okay? Does this work?"

It's been nearly six years since my critique group formed. For a long time we exchanged work every time we finished a chapter. Chapter by chapter, page by page, I worked off feedback. I think really I just needed to hear every few pages someone say, "This is going great!" so I had the confidence to keep moving forward. Because, inevitably, even with all the critiques and comments and correction, that was what my group almost always ends an email with.

Then I went to school and worked with Pete as an advisor and everything was always NOT working. I'd think I'd have something down, I'd send him the 20 pages or so, and he'd email back his extensive comments which I'd always interpret as something along the lines of, "See all that stuff you thought you were doing? It isn't working."

And he was always right.

If I'd left that way, I guess I'd have reason to question my ability to write, but I didn't. By the end, Pete told me I was ready to strike out on my own. That I had the tools and ability I needed to write well. He tried to say I could trust myself on my own.

I didn't believe him.

I've been leaning on people so long, depending on others to tell me what works in my writing and what doesn't, that I've paralyzed myself.

I realized that this weekend when I was re-working the opening chapters of my old novel. After two years of working on that thing, and a year in a drawer, it felt stale and old and tired. I love the idea of it. I love the characters. But the writing just wasn't me anymore, so I began with a blank document. And what ended up on the page was first person present tense.

Ugh.

I'd written this in third person past before, kept it that way, for a very specific reason. This book was too personal - too close. There are some nasty things that happen to the character, awful things she sees, and I, as the author, needed distance. I needed to not be in those dark places with her.

But now - I can see the piece is better for being in her words rather than mine. Seeing it through her eyes makes it more powerful.

But as the words spilled out, all I could think was how first person present is the kiss of death for writing. How many contests I've seen that complain about the over-use of it. How some agents have said flat out they hate it, won't look at queries for stories written that way. And the flood of doubts came back.

I thought about emailing my critique group. But I knew what they'd say: "Go for it!" They are adventurous and supportive that way. And they implicitly trust that I can pull off anything.

I thought about emailing Pete, but that felt weak. Like returning to an old crutch. I googled the topic, found out there are a huge amount of great books out there, including Hunger Games, are written that way. I'd totally not noticed that was in first person present.

I thought about emailing Pete again. Pete is brutally honest, and I knew if he thought it was a bad idea, he'd say, "Stay away from that," the way he's told me to stay away from writing about dead babies for a while. And if he said, "Go ahead, be bold and try the scary way," I'd trust him that it was okay.

I am pathetic.

The only thing that saves me from being the most insecure writer in the world is that I didn't actually email anyone. I finally said to myself, "Heidi, you are pathetic. You've been writing your whole life. You went to graduate school for two years. You have a pack of people behind you that you KNOW would say you can do this. You know that many, many books get published and are wildly successful in first person present. You are not doing it because it's a trend or because it's easy; you are doing it because it's what the story needs, despite all your insistence otherwise. You need to stop asking everyone's opinions and just trust yourself. Just write."

This isn't to say I won't have other eyes look at it when I'm done. I'd be a fool not to have my critique group read it. But I realized this weekend I need to stop expecting someone to hold my hand through the process, encourage me along the way. I need to just do it. Trust that I've gained enough experience and wise advice along the way to just write.

Am I the only one? Do you have others read what you write as you write, or do you save it all up until you're done?
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It's Not What You Think It Is

Twenty years ago I got a harsh lesson in writing: an author is not in control once the writing has left her hands.

I was in a poetry class in college at the time, and had been doing very well. The professor loved me. The class took to my poems well. Until one of the last assignments, when I turned in a poem about a relationship with my then-boyfriend, written as an analogy to a carousel ride. The poem was metaphorical, to be sure, but not cryptic. There were lines that made very clear - or so I thought - that this was about a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship about to end.

And the professor and half the class thought it was about sexual abuse of a young girl by a father.

Even as I write this, I am laughing, because that idea was so preposterous it left my head spinning. They sat in class for 30 minutes discussing this poem and the deeper meaning to it, when I could find NOTHING within the poem itself to lead someone to believe that was what it was about. When, at the end, I told them it was not about that at all, they STILL didn't believe me.

I got an A+ on that poem, and resolved never to write poetry again.

One could hope fiction stories are different. Most are not cryptic, nor do they lend themselves to requiring people to seek deeper meaning in them. But if I've discovered anything in the last year, other than the fact that I write pathetically slowly, it is that a book is not the sum of the words on a page: its meaning lies, to a great extent, in a combination of what the author brings to the page, and what the reader brings.

This is a hard truth for writers.

We want to be in control of what people are reading, of what they are thinking as they read. Mystery writers especially try to control the thought process - throwing in hints here and clues there while all the while also writing glaring neon arrows to lead the reader down the wrong path in hopes of surprising them.

But most writing does this to some extent. Water for Elephants, for example, deliberately sets the reader up to expect one ending and then delivers another. Authors like Suzanne Collins and Chris Cleave set out to write books with a message on war or immigration or the harshness of life.

But no one book is ever read the same, because no two people come to that book with the same experiences and perspectives. What resonates with me in The Things We Carry may mean nothing to you. What grabs my interest in The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time might not carry any significance for you. I read and love Mennonite in a Little Black Dress for probably very different reasons than my Mennonite friend will.

And what I've learned is that this is okay. It is okay to write a story and let that story take on a life of its own. How great is it that people can read my words, and find themselves in it?

I am currently working on a short story for my residency in January, and it contains four different characters with radically different political points of view. It is just a story to me. I wanted to write something that stretched me, that put some controversy between characters, creating conflict. I remembered a teacher once telling me long ago that the most interesting stories often are where very different people are trapped together and have to deal with each other. So that's what I did. I threw four radically different people into a room with violence ensuing outside while a person lay dying inside, threw a little politics and religion in the mix ... and waited to see what would happen.

I expect some of the critiquers in workshop will be able to see this as merely a story and not a political statement. It is just a story to me. I really am not making any point at all in it.  But some, I suspect, will focus on just one point of view that supports or attacks their own point of view and take issue with that. Some will see themselves on one side, some will see their own angry debates with friends or family, some will identify with the hopelessness, some with the rage, some with the loneliness, some with the compassion. Some will make rash judgements about me and what I believe.

For once, I'm not just begrudgingly accepting this. I'm embracing it. I'm writing for it. "Come, read," I want to say, "and find yourself in here somewhere."

As long as they don't think it's about child molestation, I'm okay.

What The Heck Does One Do with an MFA?

I get asked this all the time. In various forms. Sometimes it's just as simple as, "What are you going to do when you get your degree?"

The answer is, I have no idea.

The obvious path is writing and publication, but while this program has definitely made me a better writer, we all know a writing career isn't as simple as just writing well. There's a little luck, a little timing, a little connections, a ton of perseverance, some creative magic.... it's just much more complicated than writing a book, even if the words on the page are good ones.

I could teach, of course. That seems to be the other obvious way to go. I think people assume that the only good any liberal artsy masters does is open the opportunity to teach at the college level. And I've considered this. A lot. I taught for years before having kids, and always thought teaching college would be a great challenge that I'd like. But I don't know that teaching positions open up that often, and within commuting distance of where I live, and in writing specifically. It might be easier if I got that degree in English, and then I'd be qualified to teach Chaucer and American Lit and all those classes that are considered English but not creative writing. But I didn't. Because I don't love that. I love writing.

I could edit for a publisher or a magazine. I could tutor.

After that, I start coming up with ideas like Walmart Greeter and McDonald Fry Technician.

And actually, I do know people who got their MFA in writing and kept working at Walmart or kept driving public transit... because they said those jobs offered not only a decent reliable salary and benefits, but also gave them tons of material to write about at night. Maybe the best jobs for writers put us in contact with real people who are characters.

I don't know what I'm going to do once I move my tassel from one side to the other. I hope I'll write. Preferably books. And get paid to do that. Isn't that the dream?

But if a great book deal doesn't fall in my lap (ya know - after lots of blood sweat and queries) and pay off student loans for the next ten years, I'm okay with working a different job, even if that something else isn't related to my degree.

I will keep writing, because I can't imagine not writing. I hope I keep getting better. I will never regret the two years and pocket full of money I spent on this degree. I have loved every minute of it. I am a better writer and a better person for it. I am blessed to have had this opportunity to do it.

But my happiness doesn't depend on following a certain path. Whatever God has planned for me, wherever he places me, I will find peace and joy in knowing I am where he wants me. Right now, that's in grad school. In two years, who knows?

For now I'm content to take one day at a time and cherish it.

Sometimes You Have to Fight For What You Want

Am I Confusing You?

I don't get around to blogs as nearly as I want to anymore. If I hit them all once a week I'm doing well these days, but I had to check out Patti Nielson's post today entitled "The Phone Call." And while it wasn't a phone call from an agent, it was a great blog post posing the question, how much information is necessary to dole out to a reader right away?  If you want to know how that relates to a phone call, go read the post!

I've been thinking about this lately because in one of the packets I sent to my advisor this semester, I included a prologue to my book. I know that prologues are not in vogue with agents these days, but they do always say, "Figure out where your story really starts and begin there," and my story really starts ten years before my character comes back to her home town. And also, I wanted to avoid the opening scene being a girl driving back into town reminiscing.

So I started the prologue by dropping the reader into a scene, just like I've seen agents say readers want. There is immediate conflict, immediate action, immediate drama. I liked it.

I sent it off to my advisor with the question: Does this work as a beginning to my story?

Her answer, because she is just this wise, was "I can't tell you that." And then she proceeded to ask me all sorts of questions to help me answer my question myself. It's a Socrates thing, I guess. Which is totally working for her, because the things she ask teach me - not just about this particular book (which is what would have happened if she just said, "Yes. By all means make this your prologue!"), but she's made me think about beginning any book, and what needs to happen in those opening pages.

While she does say the scene absolutely needs to be in the books, she also pointed out that it didn't necessarily need to go first, even though that's where it fits chronologically. (I'm learning a lot about this from her... how to fit all my character's history in with vivid scenes that don't feel like backstory.)

But also, you not only have to hook a reader in the opening pages, you also need to not lose them.

Don't introduce too many characters we can't keep track of.

Release information on a need-to-know basis. Only include what is necessary to know; don't clutter the scene with information the reader might think is important that actually isn't.

On the flip side, if the reader needs to know something, give it to them! Don't drop them so suddenly into a scene that they don't know where they are or what is happening. Not that you should take away the suspense factor, but you shouldn't leave them confused either.

This is what she said:

"You want your prologue [or first chapter] to pull the reader in by raising questions that we really want to get answered....What you don’t want it to do is leave us wondering, sentence by sentence, what is going on here? In other words, you should be in control of what questions will arise in the reader’s mind."

I think for me the only way I can check if I'm doing this right is asking someone else to read the pages for me, and then asking them, "What do you think is going to be important here? What do you wish you knew? Were you confused by anything you wish I'd clarify?" 

It's a delicate balance, I think, between giving the reader enough information that they aren't confused, but little enough to entice them to read more.


As a reader, how much lack-of-information are you willing to tolerate at the beginning of a book, and how long will you read before you need the blanks filled in?

What I Learned from Disney About Writing

So last week I truly took off. No computer. No internet. No emails, texts, facebooks, or tweets. For seven days I went cold turkey.

Of course, it didn't hurt that I spent the week here:

Yeah. My family and I took off for warmer climates to thaw out from the winter and get to know each other again. And ride a few rides. And eat... a lot.

It was an amazing time to just spend with the kids without books and computers and deadlines and homework - theirs and mine. We talked a ton, laughed even more, and though I thought being off-line would possibly kill me, I loved it.

But there's no getting away from writing when you're a writer, even if it's only in your head. Looking around at Disney World is a education in vision and persistence, and what Walt Disney did with his small kingdom could be a lesson for us writers too.

So here's what I learned:

• Cleanliness is important, whether it's total lack of trash in the streets or spelling errors in a manuscript. People will judge you on it.
• Pick at least one thing (a setting, a character, a subplot - or a castle or tree in the middle of the park) and make it extraordinary.
• Market yourself wherever you have the opportunity. There was a joke on the jungle cruise, as we headed into a dark tunnel: "You never know where this will lead. Of course, it's Disney so it'll probably end in a gift store." 
• Details make a difference, even in the places you think few people will notice.
• Don't be afraid to keep revising something if it has a kink in it.
• Be passionate about what you are doing.

I'm sure I'll think of more later, but my brain is sunburned. :) I missed you all last week. I'll try to catch up in the next days.

MFA Monday: Nixing the Flashbacks

One of the requirements of the correspondence semester is to read 20 books (in my case, mostly novels) and write critical analysis of some aspect of craft in about 12 of them. This is the majority of my work besides writing (or in my case, revising) and so this is where a huge amount of learning is supposed to take place.

I will admit, I was skeptical. I read all the time. A lot. I read a lot. I'm sure to some extent it has made me a bit better of a writer, but I'm not sure it's been any kind of significant amount better. It's one thing to read and identify which writers you think are good, and another entirely to be able to understand what it was that made them good and how you can do that yourself.

And I stink at critical analysis. Really. Ask my undergraduate teachers. I could write fiction like the dickens, but ask me to write about someone else's fiction, and I was a mess. I think I always assumed you should find some deep, hidden meaning in a book, some great thematic elements in an author's body of work, which as a writer I thought was a bunch of hooey.

But our assignment is not to write academic scholarly papers. It's just to write about what we learned about how an author manages to do something really well, or not so well, in a novel. And it turns out, when I take away the stress of making it sound smart and scholarly and just write about what I got out of it, I can write a lot.

And it's been through that writing about others' works that I'm learning. A lot. Tons. Mind-blowing stuff. So much, that I'm tempted to make writing about novels a part of my routine, even when I'm out of school, because taking the time to identify specifically how an author has mastered some aspect of writing is enlightening in the most remarkable of ways.

Case in point: One Day, by David Nicholls. This was the first book I read for the semester, and the first paper I wrote. I set about to write about the unique use of structure in the book: the fact that the book is written in chapters that take place one day a year, one year apart, over the course of 20 years. It seemed the logical choice to write about, because it's such a huge, noticeable part of the book that the title even references it.

As I wrote about how that structure worked for him and this story, I realized that one of the major hurdles the author had to overcome was capturing in each chapter what had occurred to the characters in the last 364 days of their lives. Major events happened in those times. New jobs, new boyfriends, marriages, babies, travel, deaths. The important events of their lives didn't necessarily happen on the one day the book highlighted, so how in the world did the author manage to catch the reader up on what had gone on? And as I examined that more closely, I realized, he managed to do it nearly completely without the use of flashbacks.

Holy cow.

If you are a writer, think back through what you've written and see if you can pinpoint places where you've had to use flashbacks or backstory to catch the reader up to speed, or fill in information from the past they need to know for the current story. My guess is that most of you have.

I know I have, In fact, my entire first chapter, as Kat comes back to town, is full of filling in what the reader needs to know about why she left. I thought that was important. That IS the story. Without knowing why she left, the reader won't care how hard it is for her to come back, and what it is she needs to reconcile. So even though I knew there was backstory, I justified it.

Until analyzing how Nicholls managed his need for backstory.

For example, when Nicholls wants the reader to know that Emma is now in a long-term relationship with another character named Ian, he doesn’t recap that information. Instead, he works it into the current situation. One example of this is a day several years into the relationship of Dexter and Emma. At the end of the previous chapter, Emma is still love-struck with Dexter, who is dating another girl. When we leave her, she is alone and pining for him. In this next chapter, however, we open the scene with a previously minor character named Ian, who is waiting in a restaurant for his date, and is musing about his luck in getting here. “But the best, the very best thing about Sonicotronics was that during his lunch break he had bumped in Emma Morely… Date number two and here he was in a sleek modern Italian near Covenant Garden.” For writers, this is a great lesson in use of back-story. Nicholls manages to relay the events of the past year without lapsing into traditional flashbacks. 

There is a huge realization, too, of how much information is needed. Which is, in fact, very little. Did Nicholls see the whole year in his head? Did he see how they met, and how Emma slowly came to fall in love with Ian, and how she managed to start getting over Dexter? Very possibly. And very possibly, for a while, the author thought all of that was important. But the fact is that it isn't. We readers don't need to know that. All we need is to be caught up to speed, fast, and in the present.

Letting go of the need to tell everything is the huge hurdle writers face. It goes along with the idea of cutting that I struggled with last week. When we write, every word is necessary. But as we revise, we should be able to sift the important from the filler. And most of the time, flashbacks can be filled in with a sentence in the present that brings a reader up to speed without sending them through a time warp to the past, breaking the magic of the present. A critical aspect of writing, even in literary fiction, is to keep the story moving forward, and back-story does the opposite.

I'll end with an example of one such flashback I cut from my own first chapter. It was hard to cut, because I thought it was so important to spell out the relationship between Kat and her step-father, and to reveal the past with her biological father. On this one I didn't need to do much more than cut. Everything I needed was already there. The flashback only slowed the forward motion of the scene.

Three miles more and she turned into the housing development where her mom and Dan lived. She’d never come to think of him as Dad, even though he’d offered that title up to her once.

“You can call me Dad, if you want,” he’d said on the day he married her mom, kneeling in front of her and smoothing the bridesmaid dress she’d worn.  She stared at him defiantly and he’d stood up, smiling in that forced way adults do when they’re trying not to show their true feelings.  “Or you can call me Dan.  How about that?  It’s less formal than Mr. Dan, anyway.”

She continued to look at him without speaking, and he knelt back down again and took her hands in his.  “Look, sweetie. I don’t care what you call me. I love your mom, and I love you. I know I could never replace your father. I don’t want to do that. I just want to be a part of your family.”

She nodded and he smiled again, a more real one, and patted her on the head. She’d just called him Dan after that, not because he couldn’t replace her real dad, but because to her, a dad was a person who kissed you at night smelling of whiskey and one night left while you were asleep and never came home again. And maybe, just maybe, if she called him Dan, he wouldn’t be that kind of dad.

This is the revised version:

Three miles more and she turned into the housing development where her mom and Dan lived. She’d never come to think of him as Dad, even though he’d offered that title up to her once. Not because he couldn’t replace her real dad, but because to her, a dad was a person who kissed you at night smelling of whiskey and one night left while you were asleep and never came home again. And maybe, just maybe, she’d decided as a little girl, if she called him Dan, he wouldn’t be that kind of dad.

The truth is that I cut about six flashbacks, some long, others just sentences, without hardly any loss or adjustment necessary to the text. All those events I thought were important, weren't. At least not in detail.

If you're struggling with too much back-story or flashbacks, I encourage you to cut and paste a chapter into a new document and just start cutting them. Leave just the one or two sentences that are needed to relay the information, and cut the details, and see if it makes sense. My hunch is that, while you might miss the lovely details for a while, your readers won't.

The Unfairness of It All

When I was in high school, I discovered theater. It came by way of reading books, bringing the written word to life through reading out loud in forensics and eventually drama clubs. In college I moved to backstage, but when I graduated and moved to a small town in Texas, I discovered acting again.

It happened in a little community theater, run by a man with a passion and a large grant from somewhere. I'd been to one or two of the shows soon after moving. They were impressive. The building was gorgeous, the sets and costumes expansive, and the lighting state of the art. I fell in love.

And then, like fate finding me, they decided to put on the play, Prelude to a Kiss. This was soon after the movie with Meg Ryan had come out, and I'd identified so deeply with something in that script. It felt tailor made for me. I knew the part by heart before the director even asked me to audition. I looked enough like Meg Ryan at the time to be a shoo-in. That's what I'd been told, anyway. I was told, before stepping in the door, that part was mine for the taking.

And then... I went to the audition. And though I was exactly what the director thought he wanted, although I knew the lines and looked the part and could have breathed the character given half a chance.... there was only one suitable actor to play the male lead opposite, and he was old enough to look like my father.

At a good ten to twelve years my senior, and easily a foot taller than me, it was clear we weren't the ideal couple. The director nearly cried when he told me. I don't know if I cried or not, but I know I felt the unfairness of it all. I was the right person for this character. I was good at this. And all that was keeping me from my breakout role was a few inches and my young appearance, and a lack of decent men. I was crushed.

He promised me the lead in the next play, which I would go on to take, even though the role was completely not me, and I went to see the opening night of Prelude to a Kiss, which was passable but lacking in any real passion. And I learned that not everything that looks perfect works out perfectly.

I'm beginning to see that publishing is like this. Books and agents and editors are like that too. Sometimes, although separately each looks perfect, together they don't mesh.

Your book may be rejected - by agents or editors - but not necessarily because it isn't good. It may be perfect looking, well-written, interesting, timely, passionate. But for some reason you can't see, it doesn't fit. It doesn't fit the agent's tastes. It doesn't fit the book list the publisher is growing. It doesn't sit well alongside the others in their collection. It may look too old, too serious, too humorous, too southern, too slow... too something for today. Yesterday it might have been perfect, but something happened today that made it less so.

Life is unfair. It just is. Acting is immensely unfair. Actors get passed over for roles purely on the whims of height or hair color or body build. The face might be too round, the legs too long, the voice a tad too high or the ears a bit too low. It's random unfairness an actor can't even begin to control.

Writing, too, is unfair. The truth of the matter is that no matter how good your book is, it really may just be "not right." For this agent. For this season. For this economic environment. Maybe the next book will be a better fit. Maybe this book will be a better fit at a different time, or with a different agent or publishing house.

If you want to succeed, you have to accept that this is not a fair industry. And sometimes, when you most deserve it, you won't get it.

The question is, will you let that stop you?

Books Are Bumming Me Out

Literary fiction is just bumming me out. Can I say that? Can I admit that here among other writers, as a writer, as a writer of what some agents termed literary fiction?

I still don't know what constitutes literary fiction as opposed to genre fiction, or mainstream fiction, or commercial fiction. I've heard it joked (in that all-jokes-are-really-serious sort of way) that commercial fiction makes money and literary fiction doesn't. Some publishers say literary fiction emphasizes characters while commercial fiction emphasized plot. At some point Nathan Bransford argued that literary fiction was the kind of fiction in which plot happens beneath the surface and commercial fiction has more overt, in-your-face action. Or something like that.


I know some of you are thinking that literary fiction is the stuff that puts you to sleep and commercial fiction is the kind that keeps you up way past your bedtime.

Me? I've read enough lately to start thinking it's commercial if it ends happily and literary if it ends sadly. If you read something and it depresses the heck out of you, it's probably literary.

Just kidding. Sort of...

It's just that lately the books I've been reading are very much literary... and exceptionally well-written at the sentence level. They are the kind of books you could close your eye and point to a single random sentence and read it and say, "Wow! That's an amazing sentence!" The use of words, the vivid language, the seamless, delicate metaphors that are done so well you don't even notice them except that they completely enhance the story. They are beautifully written.

They are interesting, too. I do stay up too late reading. I took one to the gym yesterday to finish while I worked out, and I had to keep adding ten minutes to my workout so I could finish "just one more chapter." It was an awesome workout, by the way. And I finished the book.

They are well-crafted. They are interesting.

And they are depressing.

Not that I don't think every book needs to be joyful, or end happily. Heck, I used to make a point of writing stories that DIDN'T end happily. But after a string of .... a lot of books... I'm getting downright depressed.

When I brought up my new WIP on facebook some time ago, I asked my friends, "What do you want out of a book?"

And resoundingly, they said, "We want a happy ending."

Many of the books I've been reading have received high honors and accolades from critics, but from the general reviewing public, the resounding opinion is that the books end badly. They as readers are not satisfied by the end.

Which makes me wonder if literary fiction has the reputation of not being best-sellers because it's boring, or if the secret is really that people want happy endings, and they are just more likely to get that in a commercial fiction book?

What do you think? And how do you like your books to end?

AMAZING AMAZING AMAZING!!!

I had an interesting conversation over twitter with a mom of a diabetic last week. In a diabetes chat forum, the question was posed: Do you think there will be a cure of diabetes in our lifetime?

I was actually shocked to see that the resounding answer was no.

Have people waited so long, heard so many "We've almost got it," been so beaten down by the day to day dealing with poking fingers and shooting insulin that they've lost hope?

If you ask a group of people with cancer if they think there will be a cure, they will resoundingly say yes.

Why the difference?

Of course, after doing so much research on diabetes cures for Some Kind of Normal, I couldn't help but chime in. There are SO many avenue's being looked at right now, and we really are, truly, so close.

And one of the moms countered back: "Like what? Name one."

Me: "Adult stem cell research is already curing people in other countries."

Her: "I'd never let my son be immunosuppressed."

(Can I break here to say this is the main treatment for leukemia, and has been done successfully for many years with bone marrow transplants?)

Me: "Well, Dr. Faustman has found a vaccine that's worked on reversing type 1."

Her: "Have you seen the chemical in that? They're very dangerous."

Me: "It's a commonly used vaccine."

Her: "Well, they haven't gotten past the mice stage, and everything works on mice."

Me: "Actually, this is the only thing that's successfully reversed diabetes in mice."

Her: "My son is not a mouse."

Me: "Did I say he was? You brought up mice. She's past that and has had great success in the 1st human trials."

Her: "It's a long way from working."

I sighed, because what can you do with someone who doesn't WANT to believe? What I really wanted to tell her was that the question was whether or not we could find a cure, not whether or not she would like any of the cures they found.

Heidi the Hick passed on to me this morning this AMAZING video of a Canadian morning talk show segment in which the host and an actor previously battling cancer explore a lab where adult stem cells are being used to create new hearts (!!!) and produce insulin. The actor herself underwent adult stem cell therapy in which they extracted some of her own stem cells and tweaked them and now she is in a very solid remission. There was a shot of BEATING HEART CELLS!!  Did I say AMAZING!!!?

The host of the show literally had his jaw dropped the entire time. It is that incredible. It is that possible. We are that close to cures.

And they echoed the same thing I say all the time: Why isn't EVERYONE talking about this???

If you want to see the video here is the link. I don't know how long it will be up, but if it's not the top video when you click on it, find the link on the side for "Lisa Ray and Seamus explore stem cells." It was the best five minutes of the morning.

Here is another link I found from the same news program about the success of adult stem cell treatment in reversing MS in a patient. This is especially encouraging to me because I have a very dear friend in the early stages of MS.  Another great five minutes of time.

Because no matter how bad things get, or how long you've waited, there should always be HOPE.