What to write about when you don't know what to write about

well, there's always what's been going on during the week.

The job you quit, for example, the one where you shelved 500 books every day, a dream job for a writer and reader, the meditative routine of sorting books and finding books, the never ending circulation loop, the quiet,

and the job you started, 

at another library where you won't have to shelve much at all, but instead, do the kinds of things you thought you'd be doing in the first place. Helping patrons pick out books and doing searches through the catalog, checking in books, a conversation with a little girl about what she is reading that spirals you back for a moment to your own childhood,

and the rush back and forth between both jobs, which overlapped for a few days, the writing conference you helped plan, late nights of sorting folders and counting lunch selections and tallying up money, fielding the last minute registration questions, and then the day itself, one moment of quiet in the back of the auditorium when you remembered why

you do this. Write,

except first, you have to clean the entire house because you're putting it on the market and there might be a buyer stopping by to walk through it IN TWO DAYS, which means deep deep cleaning, digging through closets and under beds, trying not to get sidetracked by a folded note in an old sixth grade backpack, a stuffed bunny once loved, tossed on a shelf, gathering dust, 

and finally finally finally

the book you've been working on for nearly two years, the seemingly endless picking your way through scene by scene, sometimes sentence by sentence, getting stuck and somehow getting unstuck, the ever-present fear that maybe this one won't sell either, but suddenly a flash of excitement: 

You understand what it is now. 

And for today, anyway, that's all you need to keep going. 

In Which I Return (briefly) to My Dream Job

When I was fifteen, my dream job was to work at a department store and sell perfume. I have no idea what that was about. I don't even like perfume. Maybe I thought it sounded like easy work--lounging behind a glass counter, arranging bottles, spritzing people...

The jobs I ended up with were so far away from that perfumy vision, it's laughable. I chopped whole chickens in half at York Steakhouse. I scrubbed pizza pans at Papa Gino's Pizzeria. I flipped steaks at Ponderosa. I busted my butt waiting tables at TGI Fridays and Perkins (jobs I still have nightmares about). At the end of my shifts, let's just say, I did not smell like perfume.

When I was in grad school, a friend of mine suggested I apply for a job where he worked, a bookstore. This sounded like a cool gig. I knew how to work a cash register. I wouldn't have to wear a grease-spattered polyester uniform. I had what I thought was an extensive knowledge of books.

What I didn't have was much experience with bookstores, unless you count bopping into one of those Walden Books places at the mall every Christmas to pick out a yearly calendar. Up to that point, I was a total library fan girl.

But man oh man, the first time I stepped foot into the Davis Kidd Booksellers store in Memphis, I swooned. 100,000 + books. Bookcases upon bookcases. Tables piled high with stacks. And more books lining the walls. Comfy chairs. Cozy nooks. Pillows.

Oh! a book-loving, nerdy, poet-writing grad student could get lost for days in a place like that. I loved everything about working at Davis Kidd except for one rule: we were not allowed to read on the job. I confess that I did. Unpacking boxes of fresh new books and arranging them on the shelves, geez, how could you not stop to read the blurbs on the backs?  Or thumb through the pages. Or, um, read a couple of chapters?

My co-workers were the coolest people, fellow book lovers, many with advanced degrees or students like me (like I?) See, if I were still working there, I could ask any grammar question, and someone would know the answer. This was before the internet, before you could ask your phone any question in the world and get an almost instantaneous answer. No, children, before the internet, before smart phones, you had to just sit around and wonder what the answer was.

Or, you could call Davis Kidd Booksellers and a clerk would tell you.

I'm not lying. We got calls like that all the time.

We also hosted story times and author signings. We chatted with customers about the latest bestsellers, classics, and forgotten gems. People browsed around, listening to music and sipping coffee.

Bookstores, sadly, tragically, are struggling, and many are going out of business. It's hard to compete with the low prices and convenience of Amazon. And more and more people are downloading books on e-readers. I'm not knocking this practice. But I do so hope that we'll still have places for book-loving people to gather and browse.

This Saturday, Nov. 30, is Small Business Saturday. Author Sherman Alexie put out a call to fellow writers to support their local independent bookstores. Shop. Volunteer to work. Hand sell books. So, that is what I am going to do.

You can find me at my favorite bookstore in Columbus--Cover to Cover Bookstore.

Please come out and say hello. I promise I will not be reading on the job.

Take this Job

Happy to announce that I am already making headway on one of my resolutions this year: Number Two, “earn money.” The job also met all of my criteria (there was no running around like a maniac or catering to needy people or leaving my house or changing out of my bathrobe). A friend of mine who heard about my plight to earn money and who runs a freelance editorial business, asked me if I’d like a job proofreading an article. Oh, I could so do that, I thought (picturing myself in my bathrobe reading an interesting article). I got the bathrobe-wearing part right. The interesting part, not so much. (Although, I will stress here that what my friend does for living is pretty interesting) It was the actual article that stumped me. Apparently it was written for a scientific journal on a topic that had something do with engineering? Or computers? Or maybe math? I know it may seem strange that I don’t know what the subject was of an article I “read.” But there you have it. I wish I could quote a line or two to give you a taste of it but I’m afraid I might choose something in the engineering and/or computer and/or math field that would give away the possibly ground-breaking analysis.

Here’s what I did get out of this job: 1. a new appreciation for the English language and wonderment that I could catch punctuation and grammatical errors even though I literally had no idea what I was reading; 2. a little bit of money.

The money, I’m not scoffing at. It was the first money I’ve earned in four years. The check’s displayed on the refrigerator now so I can daydream about the possibilities for spending it. Take the hubby out for lunch? Buy a couple of books? Get half my hair colored? Deposit it in son’s college account to chip away at the new car sized bill? Ah, the possibilities are endless.

Earning money (no matter how paltry a sum) after such a long time does feel good and it got me thinking about other ways I’ve made money over the years.

My very first job was working at this restaurant in the mall called York’s Steakhouse. The manager tried me out in several different positions—as a hostess, on the line dumping salad dressing on salads, and finally at the meat station, where at last I found my true calling. The restaurant was set up so customers would take a tray, give their order to the order-taker, then make their way down a line getting the components of their meal until they made it to the end and paid. The meat station was last and most important because the person running it had to call out steak orders to the cooks but if the customer had ordered chicken, the meat person had to pull whole chickens off the rotating heated rack and cut them in half in one swoop of a knife cut. It was crucial that this was done in one swoop, the manger told me, and I had to practice with the knife, slicing down between the bones on the chicken’s back so it would fall into two equal hunks. Turns out I had a talent for this. Also I had a good French accent; strange because I never took French and also strange that the restaurant made the meat person call out orders in French. I don’t remember any phrases except for something like “sala-ma-jay,” which means allegedly, “in the dining room.”

I still think of my time at York Steakhouse fondly, by which I mean that I do not think of it fondly. It set me on a track of other fun restaurant jobs:

1. a two-week stint at a bad pizza place (I put my two-weeks' notice in on the first day.)

2. a two-year stint at another of those food tray restaurants, Ponderosa, where I did every job at one time or another except operate the dishwasher (Girls weren’t allowed).

3. a dismal run at Perkins, a job I still have nightmares about (In the dream the sociopathic hostess continually seats customers in my section and I can’t get water out to them fast enough. That was the rule: give customers water.) At Perkins I learned that the after-church evangelical crowd is very big on handing out religious tracts instead of actual money as tips; how GENEROUS of them!

4. a crazy summer at TGI Fridays where I ran around in a short skirt and collected flair for my suspenders. (One skill I learned at Fridays that has stuck with me: how to balance four large beverage glasses in the palm of one hand.)

I’m happy to report that my job history includes more than food service. I also worked at a bookstore; manned the jewelry counter at a department store (Odd, because I really don’t like jewelry.); and worked as a legal secretary at a law office before the use of computers was widespread (I remember typing out forms in triplicate on a typewriter, bottles of different colored “white” out at the ready.)

Some cool jobs:

1. editorial intern at Memphis Magazine (I got to fact-check the article on the 100 Prominent Memphians. For that I spoke to Al Green. And the school superintendent who later became the mayor who later, apparently, went insane. Also Fred Smith (the guy who started Fed-ex)'s secretary.

2. managing editor at Memphis State’s literary magazine. (I got to read a lot of bad writing submissions and send out form rejection letters. Ah, Karma.)

3. English teacher at a public high school (Go Kirby Wildcats!!) and English teacher at an all-girls college prep school (go lady Hutchisons!) and teacher of gifted and talented students at an awesome performing arts school in Lexington, Kentucky. (This was such a great job and such a great place, I probably never would’ve left, except we moved.)

For the last four years I have been concentrating solely on writing. For the record, I did make some money selling a handful of short stories. Gratifying, but very little in the ultimate scheme of things. (Just did the calculation and it works out to roughly 400 dollars a year over 12 years.)

Not much but it sure beats stabbing chickens.

Procrastination

Every day I have the best of intentions. I’m going to sit right down at my computer, fortifying cup of coffee beside me, and begin. Open up my file (whatever project I happen to be working on) and GO. But first, I really should clean up the breakfast dishes. I can’t have them sitting out all over the counter. And I need to check my emails. That laundry piling up in the hallway—I should make a dent in it. Just throw in one load. Oh. And what are we having for dinner tonight? I should put something in the crockpot. Get THAT out of the way. Who’s on Facebook? Ha ha. That’s funny. Someone posted a clip of a guy singing about his sister getting attacked. Wait. That’s not funny. Is this a sign of the decline of Western Civilization? Jeez. Now the laundry’s finished. I need to throw it in the dryer.

I think you can see where I’m going with this. Next thing I know it’s nearly lunchtime, I’m still in my pajamas and I haven’t written a single word.

Ah, procrastination. It’s a pitfall most writers continually battle. How do I know? Because I have read dozens of books by writers about writing, and every single one says something about the challenge of motivating yourself to write. I used to wonder about all of this working-yourself-up-to-write business. What’s so hard about writing? It’s not like you’re painting houses, or grilling steaks at Ponderosa, or washing two hundred pizza pans at Papa Ginos (all jobs I’ve actually had, by the way). I don’t know why I put off writing. And I don’t know why there are days when I slog through each painful word. All I do know is that when I don’t write, I feel really horrible. Which is usually enough motivation to get myself going.

Here are a few other tricks of the trade (gleaned from all those writer books on writing) that I wish I had known 15 years ago:

1. BIC—Butt in Chair. As in, put your butt in the chair and write. Some people think you need to be inspired before you can start writing. I’ve learned that if you sit and write, the inspiration will come. It always does. I have no idea how this works. It’s magic.
2. Set a word count. Stephen King says he writes eight pages a day every day. I believe him. But (and correct me if I’m wrong here, Stephen,) I don’t think he has to make dinners or take forgotten lunches to school or clean toilets. Eight is too much for me. I write six. And I take one day off a week.
3. Find an accountability partner. I email my word count goal to my best writer friend every day. At the end of the day I check in with her and tell her if I’ve done it. It’s amazing how this simple thing keeps me on task. When I first started doing it I realized that it didn’t even matter if she read my emails. Just telling her what I was going to do, made a difference. I guess I’m one of those need-a-deadline people.
4. Finish each writing session in the middle of a thought/sentence. It’s cool how easy it is to get going when all you have to do is complete the last sentence from the day before. And you’re off!
5. Don’t blog. Ha ha. (Just realized blogging is THE perfect vehicle for further procrastination.)

Must sign off now. It is noon. I have not started on my writing goal for the day. But my laundry is finished. My counters are cleared off. I am out of the old pajamas and ready to put my BIC.