Battling through Writer's Block

I hate to use the word battle. 

I want to be the kind of writer who takes joy in the process and approaches the day's writing as Play. The Julia Cameron Artist's Way writer who pampers my Artist-Child Within by taking myself on solo dates to museums and collecting pretty stones and making collages of exotic travel destinations and  setting up altars to my Dreams and decorating my work space with objects that bring me happiness.

(For the record I have done all of those things.)

And it makes sense on some level that treating your work as play can quiet the editorial voice in your head and counteract your innate perfectionism, 

the perfectionism that ends with you writing and rewriting the same sentence over and over, treading water in the same scene for weeks, unable to move on because it's not RIGHT and what if you can't finish this revision and what if you can't write anymore period and who cares anyway, and

what is the point of this story again? 

But all of this nonsense was leading me into the same dead end place that it's always led me. Exhaustion. Crankiness. Self-pity. Plus, it's boring. 

So, after a while, I realize again what I always realize, which is that I write because that is what I do and sometimes thinking about it as Play (and palm tree collages and glossy stones and coconut scented candles in the office) is just not going to cut it. 

No. Some days it is a battle. It is a War of Art.  It is you sitting down for your day's work. No excuses. No whining. No fiddling or procrastinating. No striving toward perfection. 

And not getting up until the work is done. 

(For the record: I have reworked 20 pages of my manuscript this week. And today I will rework 5 more.) 

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 

 

 

In Which I Excavate My Life and Discover the Secret of Time Travel

My quest to clean out my office, which led to a shedding of unread books from my bookshelves, which led to a shedding of pictures I never liked and knick-knacks that serve no point except to gather dust, which led to a giant Goodwill-designated pile on my dining room table...

which led to my decision to get rid of my dining room table-- that quest continues.

Over the past week I have taken three carloads of stuff to Goodwill. Fake plants and no longer used glassware and lamps and end tables and clothes and shoes and more books. Each time I am afraid the Goodwill volunteer is judging me and judging my stuff and one of these trips he's going to say, No more, lady. We're through taking stuff from you. 

If that happens, I will have to find another Goodwill.

I've been wandering around the house, shining a spotlight on things I haven't looked at in years. Instruments the kids no longer play. Candlesticks I don't use. An ugly wall hanging that matched better in an old house and never looked right on the wall in this new house, and yet it's been hanging on the wall anyway for seven years. 

Yesterday, my goal was to clear out my office closet and that morphed into emptying the entire linen closet in the hallway and discovering that we own nine extra pillows and multiple sheet sets for double beds. (For the record, we don't have double beds.) 

I am excavating our lives. 

Opening drawers that I never open and peering into closets. I am finding old pieces of my life and hurtling back into time and sometimes I like going back, and sometimes I want to slam the door and forget what I've found. 

Why do objects hold so much power? 

Why does one glimpse send me into a tailspin of emotion? 

Why did I hold onto these things? 

How can I let them go? 

Yesterday I found a viking ship collecting dust on my closet shelf.

I see the viking ship, and I am like Harry Potter dunking my head into Dumbledore's Pensieve. I fall under the surface of the "viking ship as object" and SEE

my little boy, age 3. Insatiably curious and talkative and brilliant and every day wanting to know everything and asking me a never-ending stream of questions until I think I might lose my mind.

I see a book from the library on Vikings. I see me reading it to my little boy and I see us making the viking ship. He paints the boat and I make the 26 tiny toothpick paddles and fit the whole thing together. 

I see us at the counter in a house we lived in several houses and several states ago. My little boy's sister is sitting on the floor playing with a drawer full of plastic bracelets. While I stick the flag onto the viking ship, she slips the bracelets on her arm and then holds her arm out and admires herself.  

All the while Scooby Doo is on TV or Zooboomafoo or Reading Rainbow. 

I am home alone with these two little kids and we have just moved from out of state and I know no one and I want so much to be a good mother, the kind that reads books to her kids and makes elaborate crafts projects with them and cooks them nutritious meals and answers every single question they have. 

And NOT the kind of mother who feeds her kids hotdog chunks and puts the TV on all day, who craves adult conversation and sometimes hides in the bathroom to have five minutes of quiet away from incessant little voices and plastic beads and Scooby Doo laughing like the idiot dog that he is. 

The viking ship is a stunning achievement of mom and son bonding and enjoyment and love. 

And at the same time, it is a symbol of extreme motherly boredom and stunted blunted creativity that has no outlet except in meticulously crafting 26 oars out of toothpicks like a obsessive compulsive loon. 

When we are finished making it, my son and I, his little sister looking on with wide eyes and draped in plastic bracelets, we place it carefully on a shelf in his bedroom. It moves with us to another house and another house always displayed in my son's bedroom until somewhere along the way, after another move, my son is doing a purge of his own, and says he doesn't want the viking ship anymore. 

He does not remember making it, except in only the vaguest sense. He does not remember being three year old. And his baby sister does not remember draping her arms with plastic bracelets. 

I put the viking ship in my closet on a high shelf because I am cannot bear to part from it, because I cannot bear to let go of the memory of Scooby Doo and hotdog chunks. 

I cannot bear to part with a long ago self and place and life. 

Yet.

Or maybe ever. 

In Which I Do a Social Media Detox, Quit Reading Books, and Rediscover My Loathing for My Dining Room Table

Week Four of The Artist's Way is a killer.

You're not allowed to read. 

No books. No newspapers. No magazines. No backs of cereal boxes. Nothing. For someone who is pretty much a reading addict, this particular assignment fills me with horror. I make a living --(and I use the word "living" in a metaphorical sense) by writing books. So, reading books is my job. And telling me not to read books is like telling me not to breathe air. 

Side note: I am doing this course called The Artist's Way, a twelve week set of exercises that is supposed to help you rediscover your creative self. I went through the course seven years ago and as loony-tunes as it seemed to me at the time, IT WORKED. See here. 

The first time I went through Week Four, I thought I was going to die not being allowed to read for a week. But funny thing: back then I was not on Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram. I did not spend hours answering emails and reading blog posts and scrolling around online. Social media did not exist when Julia Cameron designed the exercises for The Artist's Way, but I have to think that when she says No Reading, she also means No Tweeting or Facebooking or emailing. 

The whole point of Reading Deprivation is to take a break from consuming other people's words, to control what we allow in. "Our reward," Julia Cameron says, "will be a new outflow. Our own art, our own thoughts and feelings will begin to nudge aside the sludge of blockage, to loosen it and move it upward and outward until once again our well is running freely."

Yeah yeah, whatever, Julia. Bring it. 

Last Sunday night I signed off all of my accounts. Goodbye Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and Instagram. Adios blog posts and Yahoo news. So long BOOKS.  My husband was out of town. When I talked to him on the phone, I told him I was ready for my week of reading deprivation. My prediction was that without my constant farting around online, I'd get a ton of work done on my latest writing project, which honestly, I had been slogging through and not enjoying all that much anymore.   

Also, I would clean the house.

Day One: 

Because I don't check email or read the crap news of the day, I feel peaceful and happy and oblivious. I clean the breakfast dishes directly after breakfast. I walk the dog. I write for most of the day. When my daughter gets home from school, she is greeted by the enticing smell of freshly baked chocolate chip scones. Yay! This is fun! I am Miss Productivity! 

I don't miss reading until I get into bed. It's my habit to read a book at night and to scroll once more through all of my various forms of social media. I am stricken. What do I do? 

I solve this problem by rereading the chapter about Not Reading in The Artist's Way and go to sleep happily. 

Day Two:

I have no idea what's going on in the world or what my friends on Facebook or on Twitter are doing and I am okay with that because after I finish my day's writing, I'll be busy cleaning my office. 

Later, as I am taking books off the bookshelves, I realize that I don't want all of these books. Some are books that I read and didn't like and never plan to read again. Some are books that I haven't read and admit I never will. 

And come to think of it, what about the books on the bookshelves in other parts of my house? The ones gathering dust in my bedroom? The ones on the shelves in the living room? The ones piled in the bathrooms and next to my bed?

I don't want some of those either. 

I make a vat of homemade lentil soup. My daughter informs me that she does not like lentil soup.

The aromatic sofrito base of my lentil soup

Day Three:

My dining table is covered with books.

My office is a disaster area. Thinking about what books I really want and don't really want has made me question everything in the room. Why do I have these curtains? These beads hanging in the closet that my daughter hung when this was her bedroom annoy the hell out of me. And I never liked this rug. It's ugly. 

Day Four:

I sneak a peek at email and realize that I am not as important as I thought I was. I suspect the worlds of Twitter and Facebook are rolling along just fine without me too. I am both saddened and relieved. 

My daughter's home sick from school. She's watching a Dance Moms Marathon. I have never watched this show and immediately begin to mock it. Three hours later I am still mocking it, while my ailing daughter snoozes on the couch beside me. 

I pull down the curtains in my office. I throw out the closet beads. I roll up the rug. I eat the hell out of leftover lentil soup.

I write my ass off. 

Day Five:

Daughter's home sick again and I am secretly happy so I can watch Dance Moms with her. I eye the cluttered dining room table with despair. In addition to books, I've now added pictures I've always hated, clunky bookends that I refuse to put back on my pristine organized bookshelves, various ceramic cats from that time in my life when I thought it would be fun to collect ceramic cats, stupid plastic plants that exist only to gather dust, and a bunch of shoes I haven't worn in years.

I don't want these cats.

I eat leftover lentil soup.

I realize that I don't like a lot of the things I have in my house. Some stuff's kinda neutral and pointless. A gift that's not my style. A thing that has no meaning or purpose. Other stuff has a halo of negative connotation surrounding it. Gifts with strings attached. Or worse, guilt. Ugly things I used to like but can't remember what the hell I was thinking. Plastic fruit covered with beads? Why do I have these things? 

That's it. They're going on the dining room table. 

I write and write and write. 

Day Six:

I don't like the dining room table. Truth be told, I loathe it. There. I said it. 

I have an epiphany. What has been blocking me in my writing project is that I have been holding onto an earlier version of the story. Once I decide that I can let it go, I feel a surge of energy and excitement. I know what to do now. 

The entire dining room is filled with things to give away, including the dining room furniture. 

My daughter and I are watching Dance Moms when my husband calls from the airport on his way home. 

"How was your week?" he asks.

"Pretty good," I tell him. 

Day Seven:

My husband and I walk around the house together expressing our loathing and love for a quarter century's worth of accumulated stuff. I head up to my office to tackle a file cabinet. My husband begins to excavate the basement. 

I work a bit more on my book. I love it again. 

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.