Category Archives: Writing

A-Z: A Writer’s Alphabet

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MomsCover_v3.inddMy writer’s group, the Write On Mamas, has an anthology coming out in late April: Mama’s Write: 29 Tales of Truth, Wit, and Grit. (It would make a great Mother’s Day gift, by the way, and I would say this even if I didn’t have an essay in it.) As part of our anthology’s kick-off, we’re participating in the A to Z Blog Challenge, where more than 2000 bloggers post every day except Sundays for 26 days, until they have run through the alphabet, letter by letter. Our group is cheating smart–blogging in a relay fashion, where one WOMer takes one day, then passes the blogging baton onto the next, for the month-long marathon. Today’s official WOM entry is here, but I thought I’d cheer along from the sidelines by jotting down a quick and dirty Writer’s Alphabet. Join in with your own entries!

  • A is for Avoidance, which is the most time-consuming aspect of writing. It also leads to . . .
  • B is for Binge Eating, which is one of the worst ways to avoid writing.
  • C is for Children, as in, “Please go away so I can write about how much I love you.”
  • D is for Deadline, without which I would never get anything written. Or done.
  • E is for Everything, as in “Everything is copy.” (Thanks, Nora Ephron’s mom!)
  • F is for Friends, who will (a) buy your book; and (b) stop being your friends after discovering that you’ve used random bits of things they’ve done or said in your writing.
  • G is for Grammar Girl, a handy online resource, particularly if, like me, you were too young to protest the Vietnam War so instead boycotted Miss Dubinsky’s attempts to brainwash 8th graders into parsing sentences.
  • H is for Huffington Post, a to-die-for publication venue whose compensation plan may lead to actual death should you depend on HP income for your livelihood.
  • I is for Internet, which you should turn off if you hope to get any writing done.
  • J is for Journaling and wondering whether or not you should arrange for your journals’ burning or publication upon death.
  • K is for “Kill Your Darlings,” the process of eliminating your precious verbiage to which you are erroneously attached. (Not to be confused with actual acts of sometimes-tempting violence that could land you in prison.)
  • L is for “Like Me” on Facebook. Or as my friend Julie said when asking everyone to go online to endorse her son’s entry in some competition, “Thank you for ‘Liking’ Michael’s project. And if you don’t like it, thank you for lying.” Oh, and by the way, please “Like” the Write On Mamas at https://www.facebook.com/WriteOnMamas.
  • M is for Modesty, which you must overcome enough to do the social media thing, but not overcome so much that everyone hates you.
  • N is for Nattering Nabobs of Negativity, by which Vice President Spiro Agnew meant the anti-war press. But all writers know the real meaning of NNN: those damn voices that live in our heads.
  • O is for O Magazine, an in-my-dreams submission venue.
  • P is for Procrastination. Try to make it productive procrastination so you at least have a clean house.
  • Q is for Query Letter, as in, “Dear Editor, If I put in ungodly amounts of time and energy for this fabulous idea, will you pay me in actual cash rather than in the opportunity to build my platform?”
  • R is for Rewriting. You can’t do enough of this, unless we are talking about your first and only sentence, or if you suffer from severe OCD.
  • S is for Social Media. About which I still know too little.
  • T is for Twitter. About which I still know nothing.

  • U is for “Under-commit, over-achieve,” my favorite bit of writing (and life!) advice from writer and teacher Leslie Keenan. Another favorite is from Joyce Maynard: “Pretend every word you use costs $5.”

  • V is for Village, as in “It takes a Village”—to which the creators of our anthology, Mamas Write, can attest!

  • W is for Walking, a crucial step in writing! Clears the cobwebs, gets the juices flowing, coordinates left and right brain hemispheres, and helps the puzzle pieces fall into place—or at least ameliorates the effects of B.

  • X is for XXXing out, which “Track Changes” will magically do for you. (Caution: “Track Changes” may also make you want to shoot yourself.)

  • Y is for Youth, which is wasted on the young but might eventually make its way into your memoir if you were far-sighted enough to keep a journal.
  • Z is for Zyzzyva, a literary magazine. When you google it, as I just did, you will also discover that Zyzzyva is a genus of tropical American weevil and the last word in many English-language dictionaries. Hence Zyzzyva’s tagline: “The Last Word.”

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What’s your last word (and first 25) for your alphabet soup of writing?

 

 

 

 

Best Laid Plans

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Water spill

I sit down to write after watering and fertilizing the droopy, yellowing plants. I have been in a bit of a drought myself lately, but rain is in the offing, and today is the day I have promised myself to move from avoidance to the keyboard. I have deliberately left the Internet off so I won’t be tempted to fall down the rabbit hole of email, Facebook, and depressing headlines. I have put five discs in the CD player, hoping to feed myself with music instead of the crackers and tea I obsessively consume to fuel my procrastination and self-doubt. I have set the kitchen timer for just an hour, following the advice of a writing teacher: “Under-commit, over-achieve.”

On my way to the computer, I see that water is streaming from the saucer of the pot I have just doused. It pools on the oak surface before cascading down the bookcase, onto the books and framed pictures— Ally’s 18th birthday party, the professional shots of my daughters at their most beautiful. Only the photo of them as little girls in the bath together remains dry.

Shit. If I catch the spill now, I can prevent the rot and warp of delay. So I mop it up hastily, removing a few books, swiping at the glass protecting my daughters, hoping the water has not seeped into too many hidden places.

Fetching another towel for a final sopping up around the edges, I am tempted to throw in the towel on the morning’s writing. I try to convince myself that the rot and warp of delay, the seeping into hidden places, is the fertilizer of writing. Which it is. But it is also the avoidance that takes me too often into a parched landscape where nothing grows.

So I write this before the timer rings.

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Anybody else have days like this? Anybody not have days like this? How do you recover?

 

Line a Day for Five Years

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One Line a Day, Five-Year Memory Book

Of the many kindnesses bestowed on me during my cancer detour last year, one stands out. My friend Mary, also a therapist who aspires to write, brought me a small aqua book with “ONE LINE A DAY” embossed in gold letters on the cover.

“This way you won’t be overwhelmed by the blank page,” Mary said.

We had often commiserated over our tortured relationship with writing: our avoidance of it, the ways in which life intervenes, how hard it is to find just the right groove between feelings so raw they burn a hole through the page and one’s psyche versus feelings so repressed our attempts to capture them in words are devoid of life. We shared feelings of fraudulence, futility, fatigue. We knew the misery and mercy of dinner to be shopped for and prepared, the wish to turn off the computer and drown ourselves in West Wing reruns. We knew how to rally one another, to persevere with a slim thread of belief in our own gifts and dreams because the other believed so whole-heartedly in them.

“Just one line a day,” Mary continued. “Anyone can do that.”

But what jumped out at me was the volume’s subtitle: “A FIVE-YEAR MEMORY BOOK.”

Five years! If Mary believed I had this kind of time ahead of me, I could begin to retrieve myself from the choking fear that cancer evokes of being dead and buried.

Since then I’ve written every evening in my aqua book. Mostly just mundane stuff—how my neuropathy rated on a scale of 1-5; Obama’s poll numbers; the little things I’d accomplished (or not) that day. There really wasn’t enough space to go any further than that. But restriction brings freedom, as my yoga teacher always reminds us when she urges us to open up a little more space by breathing through a constricted pose. The same is true of writing—being confined to a line a day freed up space to write more than I’ve written in a long while. The foreshortened time cancer threatened also brought an urgency that freed my mind from neurotic clutter.

And so I have lived, a line a day, breathing in each new morning, writing it out each night. “Five Years” permitted me to envision a future I feared I might not have.

Last night I closed out Year One. Tonight I begin in the second spot on the page for October 29.

Year Two. And then more to come. What a gift.