Missing Mojo

 

Gonna try and rattle some bones and get my mojo back this week.  Photo copyright Lori Gravley. 

Writing about a writer’s block is better than not writing at all.

–Charles Bukowski

In a week and a half, I’ll be getting a new kitchen.  But first I have to move my kitchen into a small space, pack away lots of extra stuff, demolish the old kitchen, and paint the walls down to a bare white canvas. 

Yeesh, why did I plan this for November?  

But honestly, this wouldn’t be a problem most years.  I’d make writing my priority and the other stuff would get done in my spare time. Now, the sun is down, and I haven’t yet written a single word. 

It has nothing to do with the stupid kitchen or my failed marriage, or the shingles virus that is still making me feel uncomfortable in my skin.  

It has to do with my missing mojo.  I’m just not feeling it. I haven’t felt it all year.  I feel like I’m just phoning it in without really feeling committed. And, insert favorite expletive(s) here, I’m tired of feeling this way.  

I know that sitting down to work even when I’m not feeling it is one way to invite the magic back. Honestly, I don’t believe in writer’s block, but I think that what I have had this year is writer’s block.  

Which is just an easier way to say this:

·     I’ve worked too much this year as I’ve tried to get myself into good financial shape for my impending dissolution. 

·     I’ve had low-level depression this year as I’ve grieved but not been able to truly move beyond my 28-year marriage. 

·     My support system has been weakened by all the travel I’ve done this year.  I’ve only been in town for 14 of the past 44 weeks. Some of the travel has been personal, but much of it has been work, and some of that work has been conducting training solo, which means I’m alone in the evenings.  That can be nice, but this year it’s been difficult. 

·      I have worked very hard at my writing for the past eight years, and I don’t have much to show for it.  I’m feeling frustrated by the limitations of traditional publishing, but I’m also not sure I want to branch out into self-publishing. 

So, this low writing energy makes sense, but I’m not going through this whole month complaining every day about how hard it is to write.  To combat this writer's block I'm going to implement some new habits this week to see if I can find some joy. 

Routines, exercise, and limiting social media are three frequent recommendations for overcoming writer’s block, so I’ve taken those suggestions and put them into this week's plan.  

1.  I’m going to solidify my morning routine and add an hour and a half of writing to it. Here’s what I do in the morning: coffee, journal, yoga, meditate, get dressed.  For the next week, that routine will be coffee, journal, yoga, meditate, write for 1.5 hours, get dressed.

2.  I’m going to spend at least 15 minutes each day working on a new Pinterest board for the new novel and the new world. 

3.  I will not get on Instagram or Facebook until after lunch or 12pm, whichever is later. 

4.  I will take a short walk after lunch (and an hour of social media) and then I will come back and write for another hour.  

5.  Writing comes first, chores come later.  

6.  I will make a reward chart and track my successes in the above on paper.  

7.  I will listen to the voices in my head. I think I’ve got some hidden critics making it through into my writing time, so I’ll try to shine a little light on them this week, so I can respond to them appropriately. 

I’ll let you know how I do next Sunday.  Oh, and another note about how to overcome writer’s block.  Choose a different project and work on that for a little while.  I’ve been doing that already this week.  Thank you for joining me.  

Now, time to write.  

Giving Feedback

Giving feedback.  Image © Lori Gravley

I’m in a couple of wonderful picture book critique groups, and I’ve been critiquing for nearly 25 years.  I have a set of rules in my head, and I follow them.

In one of my groups, a member was feeling as if she couldn’t critique.  She didn’t know what to do or how to begin.  Leslee Anne Hewson shared two amazing resources.  The first is an overview of Critique Groups on Kidlit 411 which compiles links to a variety of resources.  The second is a list of Twenty Questions to Ask a Picture Book from Rachel Hamby.

These are wonderful resources, full of suggestions and things to think about, but they don’t focus on attitudes and mental approaches that can be the foundation of successful critiques.  Here are a few attitudes that it’s helpful for me to remember before I sit down to critique.

1.  It's the writer’s story.  It’s important to keep your critique partners intention for the story in mind when you review. Let’s say that a writer writes a story in rhyme.  You know rhyme is hard to sell, but you also see plenty of rhyme in the books you read. 

A good partner won’t try to convince the writer to rewrite in prose. Instead, a good partner might identify places where the meter or rhyme seem strained.  After all, it’s clear that this writer intends the story to be in rhyme. In this instance, it’s also important to find the story and the character as well.  I may not write in rhyme very often, but I know stories, and I have a trained ear.  So, I wouldn’t ask the writer to rewrite the story in prose, but I would ask questions and make suggestion so that my writing partner can write the best rhyming story possible.  Not only by thinking about the rhyme but also by thinking about the story as a whole. 

One of the hardest but truest critiques of one of my rhyming stories was that my story didn’t seem to have the narrative power for a book.  If my partner had only been looking at my rhyme, she might have missed the fact that the story wasn’t living up to a book-length narrative promise.  Her comments, hard as they were to hear, honored my intent.  I had to go back into the story and reexamine the narrative and character arcs.  Those tough comments helped me see the weaknesses in my story that the fun rhyme were covering up.

2.  Look for what’s going well.  I have to start here. I graded papers for so long that sometimes the negatives can take over.  I become a walking red pen.  I have learned to find the good in the story first.  This good appears both in my overall comments on the story and on the line edits.  I note lines that make me laugh, lines that seem just right, and lines that inspire me.  I always begin my critique comments with justly deserved praise, both general praise and specific praise, since general praise can sometimes seem false and generic if not backed up by specifics. 

3.  Find the places of tension.  Most drafts have places that slip—the voice changes, the language gets too formal or too casual, the story moves away from what seemed to be its intent.  Identifying those places of tension can show the writer where she might go back into the story to make it better.

4.  Don’t feel like you need to solve the writer’s problems.  If you have a suggestion, share it, but if you see a problem but don’t know how to fix it, feel free to just identify it. 

5.  Be careful with line edits.  Line editing can be helpful if a story seems nearly there, but if a story needs more work or some big revisioning, then line edits aren’t really helpful.  You can point out grammatical habits and vocabulary that don’t seem to benefit the story.   You might focus on words that can be deleted, but for the most part, in my critique groups, we’re still working on the big questions:  audience; tone and voice; beginnings, middles, and ends; etc.  If the writer is working on revisions, line edits can just be a distraction.  In my groups, if I think a story is mostly ready and I only want line edits, then I’ll ask.  

6.  Know that the writer owns the feedback once you’ve given it.  It’s a gift.  If they don’t find it useful, that’s fine.  You did your best and your comments helped the writer see her story again.  You don’t have to worry that you’ll give bad advice.  You don’t have to worry that you haven’t been hard enough.  The whole point of critique is to help the writer see the work again.  What she does with that work once she’s read your critique are up to her. 

Celebrating Rejection

Image © Lori Gravley, 2016.

Yesterday, I celebrated my 245th rejection of the year. I'm a poet, and I count individual poems rejected, but over 40 of these rejections are from agents whom I've sent a number of projects this year--Wish You Were Here, Knowing, Banjo Picking Girl, and The Fisherman and the Whale to name a few.

But yesterday's rejection was the best yet, so I'm hoping that means I'm getting closer. It included such things as . . . "This is truly a lovely text" and "You're a great writer and I'm happy to read this." It also included some advice on how to improve the text.

I'm celebrating all my rejections this year, all 245 of them, and thinking about my goals for next year. I hope you're finding some time at the end of this year to celebrate your creative self and all you've accomplished this year. See you in 2017.

Hot and Cold: The Tension of Opposition

As I type this, Night and Day is playing in my head, and I start thinking about dualities, but this isn’t a post about dualities (that was a couple of weeks ago). It’s a post about the way my writer’s life seems to swing between extremes: desperate hope and abject fear.  Okay, that was a bit of hyperbole.  The fear and despair isn’t really absolute, but it can be paralyzing at times.  During those times, it’s hard to send work out.

For a long time, I thought the solution to swinging between these extremes was getting a “big book” published or getting an agent.  My friends with agents and big books assure me that this isn’t the answer, that the fear and despair still live at the far swing of the pendulum. 

Yesterday, I mused aloud with my writing friends as I was sending out a new batch of queries that maybe I’d chosen the wrong career.  My friends reminded me that I didn’t choose this, it chose me.  

While that’s not entirely true--I could just write and write and store my work in an empty trunk (okay, at this point it would probably be two trunks) and not worry about publishing--it is somewhat true.  I’ve always written.  It’s been a constant companion.  I told my 6^th grade teacher, Mrs. Hackett, that I was going to be a writer.  And I am.

But, the thing is, I would write whether I was ever published or not. I have a job that pays the bills, but I think the world needs my work.  I think that there are children whose lives might be a little brighter if they could spend time with my characters.  I think there are poets who might find some truth in my words.  I think there are parents and teachers who might see the world and their charges a little differently through my picture books. I tell stories that I would like people to hear.

So, I write, and I’d like my writing shared with a broader audience, so I vacillate between extremes.  I’ve learned that when I’m feeling hopeful, I should send my work out to as many agents and publishers as will read them. 

Yesterday, I felt hopeful.  Did you know Kate DiCamillo was rejected by 45 agents before she finally got representation?  So I sent two picture books and my completed verse memoir out to a total of eight agents. 

Today, I got the nicest rejection from an agent I'd sent my work to earlier this year. The agent said that though the project wasn’t right for him, I should continue querying agents.  That encouragement was enough to keep my on the hopeful side of the pendulum for a little while longer. 

So, I’m headed back to my spreadsheet to send the book out to four more people.  Wish me luck, and good luck to you.  I’ll keep hoping.  I’ll keep working.  I hope you’ll do the same.

Responding to a Rewrite Request

Image © Lori Gravley

I’m always rewriting my work—from small edits to larger revisions.  For me, this is where my work as a writer begins to feel like work: learning to see my poem as it is on the page and responding to it in ways that make the poem better.

Just reading that last sentence makes me shiver.  I realize that I’m surrounded, psychologically speaking, by my projections.  My husband very rarely comes into focus for me as himself, he’s often seen by me as who I think he is, the same for my children and my friends.  I’m working on this.  Yoga and meditation help.  Compassionate Communication helps. Getting older and becoming more aware helps. 

In revising my writing, the helps are the same.  Being patient, sitting with what is, being aware of common patterns, and running my ideas through wise guides help me see my work as it is and not how I expect it to be.

So does the list of revision thoughts I’ve compiled from feedback I’ve gotten through the years.

What’s making me think of this now when I'm immersed in planning my next novel is the feedback I just got from an editor.  He asked me to remove the I-ness from a poem.  My first response was, of course, the nerve.  But I slept on it and woke this morning to give it a try.  It was easy to remove the I and the new poem was a better poem.  I’ve added *examine the I-ness* to my list of revision strategies, it joins other useful tactics that I frequently apply when I revise my poems:

--inspect the articles and conjunctions,

--kill your darlings (find the poetic word or vocab word that sticks out in the poem and delete it),

--look for the form (is it organic or is it leaning toward a sonnet, a ghazal, couplets?)

--break the line, space the line,

--write to the turn (find the turn in the poem and then pay attention to what leads up to that turn and what happens after it),

--explore cutting the first and last lines,
and now --examine the I-ness.

Update: The advice he gave must have worked.  My poem, "Late Summer Song," will be published online at the beautiful e-zine Plum Tree Tavern. 

I Drink, Er, Write Alone

When I wrote this, I was writing alone from the beautiful Polano Serena in Maputo, Mozambique, but I've written alone

all over the world, from Yellow Springs to Pretoria to Bangkok to Cedarville. Image © Lori Gravley

Tonight, I have George Thorogood in my head, if a little altered,  “I write alone, with nobody else.” 

In the song, there’s the image of a tough Thorogood sitting at a bar, nursing a beer or a whiskey or both.  For me, when I travel, it’s me in the evenings with a computer, my iPad, and a sparkling water.  At home, it’s likely to be me in the late morning or early afternoon with a tea instead of sparkling water. 

Somehow, being around people makes me feel both connected (though I’m not) and alone (though I’m not).  It’s an interesting way to feel more human, half a world away from hearth and home or just down the street.  The waiters smile at me, but they don’t bother me unless I catch their attention.  I settle into the work while people speaking many other languages go on about their business (or pleasure) around me. 

I love working this way. Not all night, but for part of the night, I’m a part of something, the swirling energy of a hotel or coffee shop. I’m also separate.  I don’t know anyone.  I don’t have to talk to anyone.  Other people feed me and bring me drinks.  And I can focus on the work.

I write alone, but sometimes, I do it in a crowd.