Throw Your Clay with Great Force and Don't Wait 20+ Years to Follow a Childhood Dream...

A couple of weeks ago my good friend and fellow YA author Natalie D. Richards invited me to come along with her to a ceramics studio.

Nat's latest work in progress features a character who makes pottery or maybe he welds stuff (she's not quite sure yet) but she heard about this place where you could play around with a pottery wheel, and she thought that since she'd never thrown clay before, it might be a good idea for her to check it out--for research purposes. (We're doing a welding class next week.)

Anyway, I was game for it. I'd never thrown clay either. "It's supposed to be kind of difficult," Nat told me on the way there. And I could imagine that would be true. All visual arts seem difficult to me. 

Painting. Sculpture. Photography. Any kind of craft. Whatever. I'm fascinated by artists and visual arts but if there is a gene for that kind of thing, I don't have it. 

I am trying to stop saying that about myself. 

Over the past few months I went through the Artist's Way course again (see here for a fun intro) and it's been a major help in getting me through a difficult revision. It's also turned my life and house pretty much upside down. I had been sharing some of my breakthroughs and epiphanies with Nat, and I guess I got her intrigued enough that now she is going through the course and having her own fun breakthroughs. 

One of the things you do when you are going through the AW, is list things -- things you want, old dreams and new dreams, stuff you always wanted to try but maybe were afraid to. The author of the AW, Julia Cameron, is big time into artsy craftsy things. Doesn't matter if you can hardly draw a stick figure, she will have you painting and decorating and making totems and God jars. Weird as it all seemed to me at times, I just kept going through all of the tasks and exercises, because as JC likes to say, your child artist needs to play. 

The ceramics studio is called Clay Space and the artists running the class couldn't be more cool about beginners trying things out. Each student gets her own wheel and five big bagel sized hunks of clay (but we could have more if we messed stuff up, which, they assured us, we would.) I was the doofus asking five million questions, and the instructor Todd answered every damn one of them. Plus some questions I didn't ask. 

For example, did you know that "throwing" clay comes from the German, which means turning? Yeah. Me neither.   

(Nat is not Patrick Swayze or Whoopi Goldberg)

Todd sat at one of the wheels and showed us step by step how to throw the clay. You do it with great force. And there's important information about how to center it. And lots of instructions about how to place your hands and anchor your elbows and have bad posture, and what to do with your thumbs, and I can't speak for anyone else in the class, but all of those instructions flipped right out of my head. 

Art, when it comes down to it, is not something you can take notes on. You have to do it. 

When it was time to do it, I had no idea what to do. I couldn't remember one damn thing about throwing or centering or where to put my thumbs. But I was channeling Julia Cameron and playing. Also, I was drinking wine. I forgot to mention, you can bring a bottle of wine with you to Clay Space.

Nat was sitting next to me at her wheel and I was getting a kick out of the whole thing, making jokes about Patrick Swayze and Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost, and watching my clay collapse, or one time, fly the hell right off the wheel. 

Something strange: Nat kept making these bowl shaped things and I kept making longer vase shaped things. When I tried to make a bowl, it turned into a vase, and when she tried to make a vase, it turned into a bowl. I have no idea what that means about our respective personalities. 

(Bowls, by Nat)

(Vases, by Jody--with LOTS of help from Todd)

This all seemed to go on forever, and I hate to say I kind of got bored with it, but I guess I kind of got bored with it, so I took a lot of pictures with my phone and followed Todd around and probably bugged the hell out of him with questions. 

(a garden of broken pottery pieces)

Later, Nat and I sat at a table and she painted her bowls and I painted my vases. We walked outside and I went nuts over a garden of broken pottery pieces. Somehow I had not seen it walking in. I was all silly from wine and playing with muddy clay and I didn't notice at first that Nat was misty-eyed. 

"I loved that," she said. 

"I loved that too," I said. 

"No," she said, "I really loved that."

She was crying a little and I felt like a ding dong for not realizing it sooner. "What?" I said. "What's going on?"

She smiled and said that when she was a kid one of her cousins had gotten a pottery wheel as a present and she'd always wanted to try it but she never did. And here it was 20 something years later and she'd put it on her Artist's Way list, and now she did it. 

"Huh," I said. "Why'd you wait so long?"  

"I don't know," she said.  

THE END

Tune in soon for Part Two: Jody and Nat Weld Things 

 

Happy Nat is Happy 

 

 

Lexuses and Coffee Tables and Designer Handbags and other Wants I Didn't Really Want but Wanted anyway (also how I know it's time to read The Artist's Way again)

I am not much of a wanter of things. Ask my husband. I drive him crazy before birthdays and Christmas.

What do you want? he asks me, and usually, I shrug and say: Nothing. Or sometimes I will say something like, Well I just got a kinda expensive haircut, so that can be my present.

He ends up buying me stuff and I admit I like what he buys me. Nice cushy slippers. A fancy tablet. A vacuum cleaner that roams around the room on its own (I suspect I may trip over it and crack my head open, but that is a post for another day.)

This post is about wanting. Wanting things. Wanting dreams to come true. Wanting to craft a certain kind of life for yourself, especially when the life you are leading seems to be slipping away or it's a life you've fallen into or it's a life that's veered off on a different path from what you once upon a time envisioned.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be a writer. I also wanted a nice stable family and home life. For a long period of time I did not know that I could have both. I sort of plodded along, giving up writing for family and then daring to think that maybe I could still be a writer too.

Cue New Agey-style sitar music, light an incense candle, plump up a pillow on the floor, and sit in a lotus pose upon it, because I'm gonna tell you a secret:

You can have what you want. 

The trick is you have to be able to verbalize the want. You have to imagine that you can have such a thing.

This is much harder than it seems on the surface.

Go ahead, right now, make a list of what you want. Objects. Dreams. Watch how a voice jumps in to say it's silly or crazy or impossible or selfish.

Seven years ago my family moved from one state to another. I left behind a teaching job I loved and dear friends and a much-adored house. I turned forty that year and the combination Move/Possible Mid-Life Crisis was a jolt to my system. I'd always been writing, but the writing had become a hobby that slipped slowly down my to-do list, until some weeks it wasn't on the list at all.

I moved into a new town where I knew absolutely no one and the kids were in school all day and I didn't have a job outside the house and the house was old and drafty and uncomfortable, and I realized I was uncomfortable.

I wanted something.

I wanted to call myself a writer again.

I found this book called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, and no offense to Artist's Way followers out there or Julia Cameron fans, but I started reading the book and immediately mocking it in my head. Julia Cameron talks about stuff like rediscovering your inner lost creative child and how you need to play and take yourself out for artist dates and let the Creator speak through you and other whack a doodle stuff like that.

It's a twelve-week course. With exercises. Like listing what you want.

Julia Cameron says you don't have to believe in it for it to work.

I didn't believe a damn word of it, but after much pooh-poohing, I wrote a list of wants, things I didn't even really want all that much. A new coffee table? Who gives a crap, but okay. I'll put new coffee table on the list because I don't like the one we have.

A designer purse. Hmm. Why not?

Our van was breaking down at the time, the fanbelt literally falling off whenever you made a left hand turn in the rain. A new car would be cool. How about a Lexus?

Here's something bizarre. I never showed anyone the list, but that year a neighbor gave us a coffee table. One of my brothers gave me a designer purse for Christmas. My other brother passed on his old Lexus to me.

I wrote more lists. I want a yellow kitchen. (done. That was easy. I bought a couple of gallons of yellow paint and painted the kitchen myself.) Ditto the herb garden and the row of asparagus plants and the new windows to keep the house warmer.

I want a published book on the library shelf. 
I want to speak at writing conferences. 
I want to go on a book tour. 

Once I started, I couldn't stop. The list scrolled out. I wanted more and more.

When I wasn't wanting, I was working. Painting the kitchen and planting the herbs and asparagus. And I was writing. I was writing like a maniac.

Over the next two years I wrote three novels and a bunch of short stories. I wrote articles and started this blog. In September, 2013, six years after I made the Want list, my book Thin Space could be found on library shelves.

I don't know what happened but somewhere in there I got pretty much everything I wanted-- (except for a dining room table. I don't know why I put that on the list.)-- and I was grateful and happy and humbled and honored, but I was also incredibly busy and the new life I'd crafted--the one I had always dreamed of having--became normal and then somehow became meh and even, at times, bluh.

What do you want for Christmas? my husband asked me a few weeks ago.

Nothing, I said.

I've been writing, and it's so hard. I read reviews of my book and I believe only the bad ones. The book I am writing right now sucks.

But this morning I was sitting in my warm yellow kitchen and I pulled out The Artist's Way again. I read the beginning and immediately started mocking it. What a load of absolute hooey, I said to myself.

And then I started making a list.

Journaling the Junk Out

Every morning for the past three years (give or take a handful of days when I was traveling or sick) I have written what Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way calls Morning Pages. Julia says it best (and truthfully, I haven’t gone back to reread her description) but her basic point is that to free up your creative self, it’s essential to get the gunk out of your head each morning before going to work. By gunk, I mean whatever stuff is floating around in your mind—anxieties, snippets of dreams, a to-do list for the day ahead, stuff you’re upset or angry about, a dumb conversation you’re rehashing. Whatever. She suggests that you write three pages longhand. This is writing you’re never going to show anyone. You don’t even have to go back to read it yourself. I think she says you can seal it in an envelope if you want to. But once it’s down on paper—all that blather clogging up your brain—you can start to write, your creative juices truly flowing, nothing holding you back.

I’ll admit I was skeptical the first time I read this. But I tried it, because, what the hey. It’s writing. At first I treated my morning pages like a journal. The act brought me back to my teenage diary years and I found myself recording the stuff that had happened the day before. We had just moved to a new town. I didn’t know anyone. I had quit my day job. After a while there really wasn’t anything “happening” to write about. But I kept writing my morning pages. I took seriously what Julia said, and tried to empty out my head, not worrying about quality or even if I was making sense. Just warming up my fingers on the keyboard. (Here’s one rule I broke: I type my morning pages. Sorry, Julia, I’ve been typing forever—even when I was thirteen I used an old typewriter that dinged when it was time to slide the carriage back.)

A lot of what I wrote about that first year was how I didn’t think I could write. Or the worries I had about never being published. I think I’ve got pages and pages of boring conversations I had with our realtor (we had moved but still couldn’t sell our other house and it was killing me—this two-house ownership thing, and then the furnace broke in the other house and then it was spring and someone needed to mow the overgrown lawn three hours away—all silly and meaningless issues that at the time kept me up at night stressing). But here’s the thing: writing that stuff down did make a difference. Once it was out of my head and on the page, it really was gone. At least for that day. And I could focus on whatever project I was working on.

Lately my morning pages have become more of a book journal. I still start with the junk clogging up my brain, but most days I quickly move on to the scene I’m working on that day. What’s happening? What are the characters thinking? What problems am I having? This kind of journaling is how I discovered the worst plot hole of all time—one of those, what the heck was I thinking there?—kind of things. But writing it out, just putting the problem into words, must’ve helped my subconscious mind work on it. Within a few days I woke up with the answer blaring at me as if it had been there all along. And I wrote about that epiphany in my morning pages too.

I can’t ever imagine not writing them. First thing in the morning, before I read my emails and scroll through the inane news of the day, while I drink my coffee, I’m writing my morning pages. Today’s was a long rant about how every single one of the candidates I’d voted for yesterday lost. Except a bunch of judges who had no one running against them. But once I’d gotten that pathetic mess out of my head, I was able to jump into the latest scene of the novel I’m working on.

Looking for a way to get your creative juices going? Tomorrow morning, first thing, write your morning pages. And here’s another shout out for Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. A must read for the struggling writer-within

Breaking through Writer's Block

As far as writer’s block goes, this one wasn’t so terrible. I was only paralyzed for a week or so. But it was just enough for all the old self-doubts to come crashing back. Why am I doing this? What’s the point of writing these books that no one is ever going to read? What if I can’t write after all? Blah blah blah.

But I’m here to say that I pushed past it. At least for today. The answer, big shocker, was to write. Now I know that sounds counter-intuitive. Writer’s block implies that you can’t write. Like your fingers are in little casts or something or your brain has frozen up and no words will materialize out of the ether. But I had to learn the lesson once again that it wasn’t that I couldn’t write, it was this paralyzing sense that I couldn’t write right. I was so caught up in trying to work out my story that I lost sight of the fact that it doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be put down on paper.

Writer’s Block is really about perfectionism. Julie Cameron says in The Artist’s Way: "Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things…Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop… It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough.”

But how do you let go of the crippling feeling that what you’re writing is crap? Answer: write anyway. Quantity not quality. I don’t know who said that. Probably Julie Cameron in The Artist’s Way. (If you’re a writer and you haven’t read this book, go buy it. It’s THE manual for creative people.)

So that’s what I did the past few days. I wrote. Just a bunch of blather. Questions I had about my book. Worries I had about plot holes big enough to drive a tractor-trailer through. Pages of boring backstory. I wrote over 3000 words and kept going. And somehow, miraculously, the process took over and I felt better. It didn’t matter anymore what I was writing, just that I was. In Bird by Bird (another must- have writer manual) Anne Lamott says that whenever she’s stuck she writes about school lunches. She doesn’t know why this helps. It’s simply the act of getting something down on paper. You start talking about the smelly tuna fish sandwiches you ate when you were in second grade or the lukewarm chicken noodle soup spilling out of your thermos and the next thing you know you’re off on some weird tangent that turns out to be the kernel of your next story. Try it. Really. It’s cool. If nothing else you might get new lunch ideas for you kids.

Okay. The second key to my breakthrough is another big shocker: reading. I read a great book, a truly amazing, impossible to put down YA novel that reminded me what the point of it all really is. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff won the Printz Award in 2004.

Don’t know how I missed this. It’s about a fifteen-year-old troubled girl who goes to live with her cousins in England. While she’s there war breaks out and the kids get separated from each other. The book becomes a kind of post-apocalyptic journey as they try to get back together. But this explanation doesn’t do it justice. The girl’s voice is funny and snarky and thoroughly original. There’s a fantasy element too—because the cousins can read minds and understand animals. And it’s a love story. Which seems weird, because we’re talking about two cousins, but somehow it works and you want so much for these kids to find each other again. I literally could not put it down, and I read the whole thing marveling at how brilliantly it was put together while at the same time being caught up in the story and just loving these characters. I finished the book and instead of feeling despair that I will NEVER be able to write this well, I was inspired to write anyway.

Imagine what an awesome thing it is to be able to capture a story and put it out into the world so that even one reader has a life changing experience or even just a couple hours escape into another world.

Hey. It’s enough to keep me going for another day.

Searching for a Mentor

Here's something I wish I knew fifteen years ago: how helpful it would be to have a mentor--a kindly, wizened writer to take me under her wing and guide my career. Okay. I never found that person, exactly. But in some ways, over the years, I have. My first few years, unfortunately, were spent floundering alone. I was the perfect mix of arrogance and ignorance. I thought I knew everything about writing (I had majored in it, after all! I had won awards! What could someone teach ME?)

A lot, as it turned out.

My first glimpse of a mentor came in the form of meeting other writers at conferences. No, none of these people ever took me on as a project, but just seeing real people, real women like me, living a writer's life, was important. They showed me that being a writer wasn't some unattainable, magical, crazy dream. These women were like me--they had husbands and children and went grocery shopping and ran errands. They weren't strange characters living in turrets ala Emily Dickinson.

I asked these writers how they worked--nuts and bolts about inspiration and revision and craft. They had different methods but I found that there were things that I could apply to myself and my own work.

Which led me to reading about writers. There are tons of books out there on writing, some more helpful than others. My favorites are: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, (hilarious and God, I wish I had read this book 15 years ago); On Writing by Stephen King (even if you don't like his books, you will find helpful advice on the craft of writing); anything by Natalie Goldberg (very New-Agey but so inspirational); and The Artist's Way by Cameron (also New-Agey, but this book literally changed my life with its ideas about creativity and inspiration).

So I never found my in-the-flesh guru. But over the years I have learned so much from a community of other writers--those I know personally and those I know only through their books. And now I am extremely grateful to have found a writing partner--a woman who is roughly at the same stage I am who reads my drafts and give me much-needed advice. I met her in line at a Port-a-potty at a writers' conference. Which just goes to show--I don't know what. Be open to meeting writers. Be receptive to learning new things.

Writing is such a solitary activity. Never close yourself off from reaching out. You might find a mentor. Or maybe you'll just make a new friend.