Last Quarter Check In

I paid my quarterly taxes.  I've updated my spreadsheets. The air is cool and the leaves are turning.  So, it must be time for me to do my quarterly check-in.  You can see my updated Write Club chart on the left.  You'll notice some things are already done.

I finished submitting work to agents in August. It helped that I changed this title.  It started as submit Wish You Were Here to agents, but since that project is more literary than commercial, I decided to go ahead and submit some picture books and my mid-grade novel to agents to see what kind of response I'd get.  I also submitted some picture books to publishers.  In total, I've now submitted to nearly thirty agents and publishers, well above my goal of twenty.

Not surprisingly, then, my rejection goal is also complete.  This goal was a late add in, but I love the idea of celebrating rejections, so I wanted to track them.  Tracking rejections has inspired me to submit more work, go figure.  Since August, when I added this tracking to my list, I've submitted nearly 100 poems to journals and anthologies.  That's more than I sent the other six months of the year. I've gotten some lovely rejections and some acceptances already.

This morning, I finished my blog post a week goal.  NaNoWriMo is coming up soon, and I'm spending the month of October planing and outlining.  In November and December, I'll spend almost five weeks travelling for my other job, so I scheduled all my Writing Prompt Wednesday Posts.  I've got some fun pictures and prompts coming up in the next few months. I hope you'll stop by for inspiration every Wednesday.

I read my 1,000th picture book just a little while ago, so I've checked off that goal, too.

I'm on track to write a picture book a month for the next three months.  I have a long list of ideas, so I don't think that goal will cause me any problems.

That leaves three more: Christine, Poem a Day, and Year of Writing Dangerously.

Obviously, I won't complete Poem a Day this year.  But I've written many poems this year, and I'll continue to do so.  This month, I'm working on short poems (14 lines or less).  Next month, I'm working on children's poetry.  I've learned so much from this challange and though it wouldn't work for everyone, it's pushed me to explore new things with poetry.   If I weren't writing so often it might take me years to begin to explore some of the new things I've learned.  And 192 poems out of 277 days isn't bad.

I'll write more about Christine in a later post, as I'm still working through the resistance I've had to finishing this work.

The 365,000 words goal is easier to deal with.  I've been writing low word count projects this year.  I finished Wish You Were Here, I've written many poems and blog posts, I've written ten picture books so far and have a huge list of inspiration that will keep me writing well into next year.  I've completed a lot of work this year, but that hasn't equalled a lot of words.  I imagine I'll write at least 100,000 by the end of November, but the word count goal looks like another goal I won't meet this year.  And I'm okay with that.  Really. I've written 73,000 new words this year, even though this is the first year I've tracked my word counts, I'm pretty sure that's more than I'd written by this time last year.

What I really wanted was a way to quantify and make measurable the goals I have for my writing life.  I tell my husband all the time that he's got it easy in his job--other people generally give him tasks or ideas to work on.  All my work is work I assign myself, tracking goals helps make that work more measurable and helps me learn what's realistic for me.

I'm working on a creativity coaching class with Eric Maisel, and it's interesting to find that other people don't like the kind of measurable goals that I set for myself.  For some people, this type of goal setting leads to resistance.  But I've learned to appreciate setting and tracking specific goals, and when I find I'm resisting a goal, it gives me a place in my psyche and my processes to explore, so I can learn how to set more effective goals next year.

I'm already thinking about next year's focus.  After two and a half years of working towards a poem a day, that seems more like a daily practice now that I won't need to track.  I feel better if I take an hour or three to work on my poetry everyday.  I don't think I need a goal for that anymore.  I'll let my thoughts continue to percolate through the next few months as I decide what I need to do next year to push this writing career a little farther.

I hope you'll be thinking about your goals, too.  About what kind of goals work for you. About what matters to you.  About your life as a writer.  I look forward to hearing what you discover.


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I Feel Better Having Sung

When I told one of the poets I was meeting with at Antioch Writers Workshop that I aimed to write a poem every day, he shook his head.  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” he said.  “Poets need time to think about things.”

I wanted to say this to him, but I’ll say it to you instead.

One of the places where I might just write a poem today--the tiny deck

by my office trailer.  Image © Lori Gravley

First, I had a long nearly eighteen years where I wrote, at most, five poems a year.  I had plenty of time to think about things.

Even before that, I had years where at most I wrote fifty or sixty poems.  I hoarded poetry. I was afraid I wouldn’t have anything to say.  I didn’t feel inspired.  I was afraid what I wrote wouldn’t be any good so I didn’t write.  I thought poetry was a gift, and I didn’t want to be greedy. 

Pardon my language, but fluff that. Poetry is what I live in.  Lines show up all the time, and I ignore them. Images burn in my eyes, and I turn from them. Poetry is everywhere.  I think it’s the way we (I) experience the world, but we (I) work hard to shut it down and act normal. 

But fluff that.  No, I don’t write a poem every day now.  Some days, I’m too inattentive.  Some days I fill with all sorts of useful things like doctor’s appointments and spin class.  Some days, I’m too weary from the world to raise my head from my arms.  But most days, I try to write a poem and some other words as well. 

I have years that I let slip by without words.  I can’t get them back, but I can capture the ones that are here now, and sometimes, when there is nothing in the here now that shows up to inspire, the past waves its puny hand and says, “Hey, here I am.  You missed me then, do you see me now.”  And I do. 

If I sit to write and there is no inspiration, well, I have a computer file labeled inspiration and a list of links with the same name.  The world is wondrous and strange (and so is my life) so I can usually call something up.

Do I write a good poem every day? Nope.  But on good days, I write a poem and the day is better for it.  And some days, those poems sing, sometimes the songs are silly, sometimes they are dark.  Sometimes they sing in someone else’s voice. Sometimes they sing wonder, sometimes despair.  But every day is better with a little music in it.  And the future is for judging how good the music is.  I appreciate having a voice in the now. Croaking or crooning, I feel better having sung.

So, no, the poet I spoke with might not think it’s a good idea for him to write a poem every day. Indeed, it may not be a good idea for you to write a poem every day.  But for me, it’s a practice that brings magic to my life, even on the days when the poem doesn’t get written.  So, for now, I’ll write every day that I can.

100 Poems

Graffiti in Dumbo, New York.  © Lori Gravley,  2013.

Today I updated My Write Club total, and though it’s less than I’d planned, I typed "100" into my total poems written for the year.  It’s less than I planned, but more than I’ve ever written by the beginning of May.  It’s less than I planned, but more than I would have written if I hadn’t been trying for a poem a day. 

It’s less than I planned, but it’s encouraged me to write in new ways, to try new forms, to write down the thoughts and connections I make instead of storing them in the dark caverns where they might get lost or wither before I can unearth them and bring them to light. 

100 poems.  And in those poems--three picture books, travelogues, complaints, sonnets, spare little William Carlos Williams poems, American Sentences, and celebrations of little and huge things. 

100 Poems. That’s something to celebrate!

Resource Sharing: Jane Yolen’s Poem a Day

One of the inspirations for my poem-a-day practice is Jane Yolen.  In Dec. 2014, I saw a tweet from her offering me a poem a day, delivered to my email inbox.  I signed up.  Since then, I’ve been getting her words everyday, usually before I wake up. 

Today’s poem was a beautiful evocation of rain in Scotland with an epigraph by Tess Gallagher.  In many of her poems, you can hear the children’s poet.  In others, you can hear the grieving widow.  In still others, you can hear the writer playing with language, playing with prompts, struggling with words.  What’s more, she shares poetry resources: websites that have prompts and poems and forms I hadn’t heard of. 

I love the grown-up poems I get from Poetry Daily, American Life in Poetry, and Poets.org, but it’s inspiring to get a poem every day from the same author.  An author with over 325 published books.  An author who could sit back and relax but who, instead, shares a poem with those who request it every day. 

She’s been doing this for over five years now.  Through loss (her husband) and pain (her back), she’s been sharing her work with me across the ether.  I don’t pay her for it (though she does ask that I buy one of her books or borrow one from the library each year).  That’s an easy price.

So, thank you Jane Yolen for your generosity and for the daily inspiration.  Though I’m not yet ready to send out a poem a day, I encourage you to write to Jane and accept hers.  You'll find the directions in the tweet above. 

I Love a Challenge

You might have guessed that since I’ve done and won that crazy exercise in writing intensity NaNoWriMo for the past seven years (only won six) that I like challenges, and I do. 

I like the community.  I like knowing I’m not alone.  I like visual updates.  I like competing with people I’ve never met, and I like that I’m working toward a very concrete goal.

 So, to support my other writing goals this year, I’ve signed up for a few challenges. 

I’m not sure where I heard about the 12x12 challenge.  The goal is to write a picture book a month for twelve months.  It’s the only paid challenge I’m in, and the updates on picture book writing and the community of writers make the few dollars a month I pay to participate well worth it. Out of that challenge has come the 1,000 picture book challenge which I’ll write about in a later post. 

 

A sweet thing about the challenges I'm doing this year is that
I can track them at My Write Club.  I love visual tracking!
And I can add as many challenges as I'm crazy enough to sign
up for.

I’m in another online challenge from the Facebook Group Ten Minute Novelists, the 365,000 Words Challenge.  I’m a part of the Hemingway group, aiming for 250,000 words this year or a little under 700 words a day.  We post our words on a spreadsheet, and we can see how others in our group are doing.  There’s an active Facebook page here, too. 

But perhaps even more motivating are the challenges I’ve set for myself. You can see some of them on the My Write Club screen shot above.  

Challenges work for me. It’s the end of January.  I’ve written 34 poems, seven of which have become (the start of) a non-fiction picture book; I’ve written over 25,000 words; I’ve sent my manuscript to 12 agents, gotten 2 lovely passes, one "no thanks" from a query without pages, and (yippee) one request for a full.  I’ve sent out 21 poems.  I’ve published 8 blog posts.  I’ve read 82 picture books. 

Sometimes, as a challenge goes on, I have to readjust or I find the challenge no longer suits my aims.  I’m okay with that.  I find when I challenge myself, I get more done and I’m better able to narrow my focus by knowing what I don’t want to do.  Having challenges and groups who are facing the challenges with me helps me focus when I put my butt in the chair to get the work done and makes this solitary work a little less lonely.

Poem a Day--Beyond the Personal

I’m sure you won’t be surprised that I do research to write some of my poems.  My verse biography of Christine clearly needs research even though I came to the project with much knowledge.

If you’d told me when I was first writing poems that a satisfying poem could be written from research, I might have scoffed.  Though I loved the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning and appreciated Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology, I hadn’t thought of the way a poet created a world like the ones these poets built. 

Even though I wrote poems from different points of view, (most notably "American Girls" which was published in Nebo and nominated for a prestigious award) I wrote that poem from the direct inspiration of a radio story on NPR.

At that time, the thought of using research to write a poem seemed at odds with the confessional and nature poets I read.  Now, I know a number of books written from the same sort of research and exploration that I undertake regularly to find inspiration for poems.  Drea Brown’s Dear Girl, a short verse biography told from the perspective of Phillis Wheatley; the award-winning verse biography of Sylvia Plath, Your Own, Sylvia, by Stephanie Hemphill; and Myrna Stone’s Cassanova Chronicles are all recent books based on research.  The poet immerses herself in the world of an historic figure and then tries to imagine that world for a new generation. 

I have a curious and unsettled mind, so when I find it hard to draw on daily images for inspiration, I usually have a question on hand that I’d like to explore a little more. It doesn’t take much research to find just the phrase to unlock a new poem. 

Try it. Choose someone from history, someone small that you’ve heard only a few things about, and see what you can discover.  See if you find those perfect few words to light the match that will glow into your next poem, or maybe even a book.

Or go to a historical museum, read the placards and interprative displays and write a poem. 

Or next time you see one of those historical markers on the side of the road, stop, read it, soak in the atmosphere, and write a poem.  

A small section of my bookshelf with my research materials 

for Christine

Listen to the radio, read the newspaper, immerse yourself in the world.  Then write the world as only you can. And if you write a poem from a news story, remember that you can submit to Rattle: Poets Respond by Friday of each week about a news story you read and responded to that week.  

If that doesn't work for you (as it sometimes doesn't for me) go back to your daily life and find inspiration there. Or the dictionary. Or a news story. Or try a new form. Whatever works to get the words on the page.  Happy writing.