Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's not real...

All writing is personal. And sometimes the best writing feels awful. I cut my teeth on personal narrative, though I didn't know that's what it was called at the time. I've written lots of fiction too, way more than the occasional short stories published in rather obscure literary journals. I even have a novel in a box, where it will probably live forever. Once I became accustomed to "letting it all hang out" with my writing, I needed fiction less and less often. 

A longtime friend and I have a running joke that came from the movie Postcards from the Edge (based on a book by Carrie Fisher). Whenever we have an experience that causes extreme public or social embarrassment, we shake it off with "it twirled up." In this scene, the daughter accuses the mother of inappropriate behavior. Her response? "IT TWIRLED UP."

When I coach writing clients who are working on personal narrative or memoir (or blogs), I often tell them that hitting "send" or "publish" for the first time is going to feel terrible. It's going to feel like your skirt blew up in public and everyone saw your panties. You'll feel exposed and vulnerable. And then you'll get used to it, eventually.

In the past few years, I've written more fiction than I did in college intensives. More than the novel in a box. It was a panacea for feeling like I lost my sense of humor, the tongue-in-cheek voice I had taken for granted for so long. Shit wasn't funny anymore and I had no distance. A therapist suggested I write about everything, but do it in the third person. So I did. And it made me remember why I started writing fiction in the first place. 

With personal narrative, especially humor, hyperbole is acceptable and expected. But it's still oops-it-twirled-up honest. Fiction gave me the freedom to tell the story any way I wanted to, to end it any way I wanted to, and the distance I needed so that it wouldn't make me sad. I've heard other fiction writers say that their work has no basis in their own lives, that it's entirely made up, and I believe them. Sort of. I have fiction writer friends who openly admit their stories are thinly disguised events from their lives. Joan Didion's fiction was (though she's better known for memoir). So was Nora Ephron's, Heartburn in particular. 

In the spirit of twirling up, for every writer I've ever encouraged to push "send," I'm going to share a cringe-worthy (at least to me) snippet of a short story that was published several years ago in a now defunct literary journal. The story is called "Running Away." 

Following suddenly interested in running father to country club track. Watching him on the pay phone from a distance. Healthy, running 5Ks and marathons and away. From my mother, with her quiet cancer. From four daughters with their female neediness. Running away from same, same, same houses on a military base where class mattered less than rank. His poor farming family. An Irish mob of a family in a tiny New York town across the Saint Lawrence River from Kingston Ontario. From dirt and poverty. Weekday mornings in his officers uniform, snapping his collar, snapping at females and poodles and leaving behind a sickeningly sweet cologne cloud.

Weekends, already getting fat at age nine, I put shorts and sneakers on. Followed him out of the house in the early dawn. Ran several yards behind him, knowing he saw me and only that he didn't order me to return home. Running to catch up. Running the miles around the houses on base until he stopped. In the lot of the officer's club. There was a pay phone outside. He held up his hand, motioned for me to turn back, left me behind until he was out of earshot, picking up the phone, cradling the receiver with his back to me. I wait. Stretch. I know. I know everything.

I would prefer this story die with it's out of print, never digitized publisher. It's awkward and weird and I think I was 22 or 23 when I wrote it. But fiction? Sure. Why not? From the age of 11, when my biological father left my mother the day after Christmas to move in with his girlfriend and start a new and improved family, I told people my father was dead. That I never knew him (this is true, and he might actually be dead now because I haven't had contact in years). It was easier than the complicated truth, that he left our family while my mother had just begun treatment for cervical cancer, that the only thing that saved us is that he was in the military and thus forced to pay child support. That he wanted nothing more to do with us. This fiction was the part of me that admitted the hurt and the guilt of knowing just how long before the leaving that the moving on began. 

This is a story I will never be able to tell as my own narrative, but it can still be told. It is not something I still grieve over. I've had a lot of good experiences in my life with men, fathers of friends, that showed me that men can love their daughters even though mine didn't. My "daddy issues" are no worse than most. I stopped trying to replace him a long time ago, around the time this story was published, maybe even because it was published. 

Writing is how I choose to heal, whether the words are truth or revisionist history. I could have made the story end in a different way, made my father a different man. I could write it three more times and have three different trajectories. But I don't have to because it's out there and it doesn't matter anymore. All of this is to say: I hope you get to know what it feels like, even just once, to let it twirl up. 

Because we all want to write more better...

I used Grammarly to grammar check this post, because if everyone did, I wouldn't be a comma fucker.

I've been a writer since I could string together a sentence. I've been an editor, professionally speaking, for more than 10 years now. I love language, words, sentences, breaking rules, playing with subtext. These things make me happy. What makes me sad also makes me an asshole, a "Grammar Nazi," and apparently, a "comma fucker." I present the evidence, shared by a Facebook friend earlier this week:

So yeah, Finnish: "pilkunnussija" literally translates to "comma fucker," or someone who corrects little or meaningless things.

Over the years I have learned that most people don't like to have their grammar corrected (exception: writers handing over manuscripts for an extended and intentional bout of comma fucking). I still do it silently. I no longer read comments on news stories or web sites. I hide Facebook posts by people I care about because I just cannot with the poor spelling and grammar. I cringe at an erroneous possessive apostrophe. I've sent kind and gentle (my opinion) emails to local businesses with misspelled signage.

In my defense, I don't do these things to feel intellectually superior. I do them because I have a dream. It's a big one, but I cling with every fiber of my being. I dream that every single person in the English-speaking world will complete early childhood education with an ingrained understanding of the difference between "your" and "you're" (yeah, I'm so fucking hung up on this that I once declined a second date with a repeat offender texter). I hope to never again have to explain that the correct idiom is "dog eat dog world," NOT "doggy dog world" (yes, this is a real thing that happened). And someday, in this perfect world, I will never again have to explain to a college graduate the difference between active and passive voice.

Trust me, my own mistakes make me cringe just as hard. I rarely read magazine pieces I've written once they have been published, lest I discover that an editor missed a wayward comma splice, misspelled word, or (gasp) changed my correct language to something less than correct. This blog is full of mistakes. There is a post somewhere around here in which I used "to" instead of "too." I beg your forgiveness, but use this example to illustrate 1) I am not a perfect comma fucker and 2) The fact that I discovered this error in hundreds of pages of archives and still remember it proves that I am harder on myself than anyone else.

I could go on about how texting and social media and a failing public educational system has ruined language, but I don't even use proper capitalization or punctuation in IM or emails to friends, so apparently I don't care. What I do care about: Journalism. Literature. Why media outlets thought it was a fantastic idea to ditch proofreaders and editors to save their struggling print publications, which people like me don't read anymore because spelling and factual errors are too damn distracting. Why e-book publishers charge for editing services, yet every single damn book I've ever downloaded for less than $2.99 (or free) was so full of grammatical inconsistencies I couldn't even tell if the writing was actually good.

Written communication matters to me and maybe I'm tilting at windmills. If so, I'll be quixotic until I draw my last breath. Call me pilkunnussija. Or comma fucker. Just spell it correctly.

*This post was sponsored by Grammarly, for which I received a trial period (but since I was hooked at "context optimized synonyms," I'd be telling you all about it anyway).

Writing about writing again, but sometimes confessions are necessary...

“I hate writing. I love having written.” - Dorothy Parker

I bought this from The Rumpus.

I can’t tell if this is too “inside baseball” because many of my friends are writers. We do what writers do: 1. Talk about writing. 2. Procrastinate. 3. Repeat steps 1 and 2.

I AM working on a second book. It has a shape and a focus, but I tend to be “all or nothing” about my projects; if it can’t be perfect, then I don’t want to make the effort. And there are so many important things that need doing. Earlier this summer, I realized I forgot to watch The Wire. So I watched all five seasons in about a month like it was my second job. Then I had to start watching Luther, because Idris Elba.

I put off buying an e-reader forever. I LOVE BOOKS. How could I betray my beloved READING EXPERIENCE with an electronic device? Then I bought a Kindle Fire and it made me feel like I could live without paper forever, even just for the thrill of thinking of a book I once read a million years ago and being able to download it at 1 a.m. and read it. Instant gratification. Writing is not instant gratification. Unless writing a Tweet, which is extraordinarily satisfying. I have written almost 8,000 of them, which in sum total is a book-length work, albeit a boring one.

I still write ideas down in a paper notebook. I also have Evernote on my phone, laptop and tablet. I can’t say that technology has made be more productive (probably the opposite), plus instead of just a notebook full of brilliant ideas mocking me from the depths of my shoulder bag, the mocking comes from multiple sources. I have Tetris on my tablet for some stupid reason. A feed reader of informative blog posts and articles to attend to. I’ve watched 50 episodes of Shin Chan on Hulu in the past three months.

All of this side business (bullshit) means that my notes stagnate, angry, unruly, unattended to: “Hey, um, so…think you’ll get to work on me this weekend? You know, ‘cause you said you were excited about it and all, but here we sit—how long has it been? A month? I know you’ve got all that television to watch and those naps to take and, well, I’m sure that fascinating thing about your ex-boyfriend from a million years ago really needs to get written for your blog. I’m sure all of that takes precedence over, say, the possibility of a review in the Times before you turn 80. Whatever.” My notes are a sarcastic bitch.

It probably doesn’t help that I want my second book to be mine-all-mine, not advice, not for anyone else, my Didion book. And I decided that 45 would be a good age to publish this unwritten masterpiece, which is not right now, but later. Except this one doesn’t want to wait and it isn’t going away. But I push back. I’ve been on central time for three and a half years now and I still can’t get used to prime time television starting at 7 p.m. I have a day job that requires a lot of reading and editing, and it pays the bills, so if I feel like watching four hours of television or staring at the ceiling instead of writing, hey, at least my bills are paid.

Weary of covering my ears and humming every time a new thought surfaces, I set a schedule. I resolved to sit down and use the 5,000 words of notes I have accumulated, turn them into 60,000 words of brilliance, and I will do this for 10 hours a week. Last week, I wrote for one hour (not counting day job related writing or navel-gazing blog writing or Tweets or vaguely insightful Facebook posts). I know it’s bad when things I hate take precedence over my writing schedule: Laundry. Vacuuming, which I do monthly when my dog is at the groomer so she won’t go mental when she sees the Bissell Pet Vac (as in "good for sucking up pet hair," not "good for sucking up pets," but dogs think what they think). Financial paperwork that I don’t care about (someone else can figure out how to roll over my 401(k) into whatever stupid savings thing that won’t cause me to have to pay taxes). Did I already say laundry?

I have coached writers. I know what I am supposed to do when my brain wants to scrub the bathtub and organize the linen closet before I can sit down to write. Those are the thoughts I should ignore. I should sit in front of a blank page and let the words come. I should deactivate my Facebook account. I should stop reading the amazing ideas of others and start writing my own. Physician, heal thyself? I used to think it was weird to see doctors smoking cigarettes or eating fast food, but maybe it’s not weird at all. Maybe it comes down to a choice: Help others or help myself.

So, first step. I will forget the “what ifs.” What if this person gets mad because I wrote a thinly veiled description of a thing that happened a long time ago? What if people judge me? What if I don’t have a second book in me? What if I fail? Then I will find the rational part of me that hates the fact that I am never satisfied with my last great achievement and convince it to hunker down and get to work on a chapter outline.

I’m telling you these things because I need you to know that I am not fragile. You can expect things from me. I won’t flinch, make excuses, or fall apart. This is what we do, my friends. This is what we do, having written. Let's all write like motherfuckers.

An imaginary conversation with Elizabeth Wurtzel...

I "get" difficult women. I know a lot of them. I've worked for some and am related to several. I am one. I appreciate the stick-to-her-guns fuck you mentality of not caring (at least, appearing not to care) about what people think about you/her/us.

I read Elizabeth Wurtzel's memoir, Prozac Nation, when it came out. I was in college. It spoke to me. I even saw the movie. It didn't speak to me. In the late 90s, I (still in college) read Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. You probably heard me cheering about it at some point. I read her second memoir, this one on addiction, a few years ago. I don't remember a lot about it, but I know I identified on some level. I've never met Lizzie (but in my mind I call her Lizzie because I follow her on Twitter and that's what she calls herself and I think if we met in person she'd be cool about it), but in the past couple of years - since she's popped up again writing pieces for The Guardian and New York Magazine - I've been paying a little more attention. She seemed to drop off pop culture's radar for a bit, and I had the sense that she had gone through something similar to my own (hate to call it mid-life because I know I'll live past 80) crisis. A loss of voice. And these pieces, varied as they were, attempts to find her voice again. Kind of like I've been doing for a while now. Except a lot more public. And with comments. On the internet. It feels like an odd question to ask about someone who wrote a book in praise of difficult women, but I also wondered why all the hating on Lizzie?

She's a little bit older than I am, but I consider her a sort of contemporary. And when I read her most recent piece in The Atlantic, "I Refuse to be a Grownup," I promised myself I wouldn't read the comments. Then I read the comments, or the first 20 or so. I wished I knew her in real life so I could tell her that she's doing the right thing, this writing she's doing to get her voice back. And this is the most "back" I've seen her since the 90s.

If you know me personally, you probably know that I rehearse conversations in my head (and come on, you do too, right?). On my way home from work, during that cursed/blessed worst Austin traffic drive time, I had one with Lizzie. It went something like this:

Me: Hey, so good on you for the Atlantic piece. I hope you didn't read the comments.
Lizzie: (leaves her sunglasses on, which is fine because I am kind of the sophomore to her senior in this scenario) Nope.
Me: I mean, I don't know who has time...but the one from the "TL:DR what's the point?" guy...he didn't even read...
Lizzie: I don't read the comments. I don't care what people think.
Me: Hey, that's really great...so, you of you. There was that one "psychologist" who comment-diagnosed you with narcissistic personality disorder and that isn't even a thing anymore; it's not even in the latest DSM...
Lizzie: (icy silence)
Me: I wanted to tell you that I get it. I hate that you have to see criticism all over the freaking internet when you're just being honest, I mean who isn't a narcissist? What's wrong with not wanting to grow up? For those of us who choose not to get married, not to have kids, to remain emotionally...um, I want to say... immature? Why do people care so much?
Lizzie: I don't. So I wouldn't know.
Me: I wanted to say that I'm on your side. Write all the crazy. Just write. Let the haters hate and do it anyway, even if it's just for lines like "I wish people were judging each other a great deal more, and more carefully, but they are not. Knowing this, I have no trouble being myself. It works well. I will die screaming." BECAUSE ME TOO, LIZZIE, ME TOO.
Lizzie: Calm down. (exhales vapor from her e-cig)
Me: OK, so I'll let you go, but just one more...
Lizzie: No.
Me: DidyoutotallyfreakoutthatChristinaRicciplayedyouinthemoviebecauseherforeheadOMGherforehead...
Lizzie: No.

And that was it. She probably wouldn't like me in person. Nor should she. I wanted to tell her about that one time I was on Prozac because my best friend died when I was 23 but it didn't work and how my mom is a therapist and told me the worst thing with mental health issues is to "be in the system" so I always made sure I saw private shrinks, off insurance, sometimes under assumed names, and I think talk therapy is overrated and that most people think I'm younger than I really am too because I don't really have responsibilities, but I do have one cat and one dog just like she does but the cat has hated me for 14 years now and also sometimes I am ridiculous too. When people grossly underestimate my age, I assume it's not based on my appearance, but on my behavior. I don't behave like a person who has the weight of other people's problems on top of my own, rather, I behave like a person who thinks her problems are the only important ones. And, BAM!, right back to narcissism.

Hate her or don't. Hate me or don't. I have had worry. I have had grief. I have had despair. None of these things permanently damaged me. Not even a line on my forehead (yet, but totally fine when it does happen, because it will). So to the critics, to the commenters and trolls, to anyone who cannot follow her stream of consciousness while she reaches for the voice she might think she lost by detouring to law school and relationships and doing things other than writing - pay attention. You're not. She is. And she says it better than I:

"Nothing is more bracing than not being concerned about what other people think. I have no idea why anyone cares. Trust me: No one is looking. I know: I am looking. People are self-involved."

p.s. If you don't know who Elizabeth Wurtzel is or if you were in a coma in the 90s, here are all the Tumblr posts in the world tagged with her name. Enjoy.

Inspiration here, there, everywhere...

While I love my Kindle (the instant gratification got me), I'm still on the fence about buying books. When I moved to Austin, I culled my five bookshelves down to one bookshelf full of favorites and first editions. I love to run my hands along the spines, turning them over in my hands, flipping through paper pages and reading my notes in the margins (yes, I like to underline things and write in my books). Sure, I can keep thousands at my fingertips with my Kindle Fire, but I cannot bring myself to get rid of these last shelves, these paper memories, these literary giants that sit side-by-side in tidy rows. Vonnegut lives here. Hemingway lives here. O'Connor lives and lives and lives again.

I stumbled across this Etsy shop recently and fell in love with the inspired illustrations with quotes from literary greats. I want to buy them all, hang them so they can be seen from where I work most often (living room, couch, laptop).

These two are my favorites, but it was so hard to choose. F. Scott Fitzgerald makes my heart beat faster. T.S. Eliot makes me want to spill all of my secrets. Jane Austen makes me want to write letters that I'll never send.

I went to Barnes & Noble earlier this week with a friend and we ended up sitting on the floor of an aisle in fiction, leafing through paperbacks (even as we looked up e-books on our phones), pulling books from the shelves based on covers alone, putting our faces close to the open pages and inhaling the paper and ink and wondering if we're going to be the last generation who knows what book stores smell like. Will we someday try to describe it to younger people, our reading glasses perched on noses twitching as we struggle to bring the sense memories back, wishing we would have bottled it way back when, closing our eyes as we remember what it felt like to turn the paper pages? I think yes. We writers love our books. We writers are going to have to be curators of paper museums, preservationists of ink smudges, storytellers of the printed word.

Housekeeping? Housekeeping.

After waffling back and forth about whether or not to archive my old blog and start a new one (it felt like throwing away a lot of memories), stop blogging altogether (but I have sooo much material waiting to be loosed upon the world), or do "something" with my existing site to make it fun for me again (it felt so clunky forever and I had gotten in the habit of heading over to Twitter or Tumblr when I have something to say), I picked door number three.

This is my toe in, re-introduction, new beginning, the opening of the floodgates (I like that one the best). It's been three years since I've blogged on a regular basis, and I want to thank my friends Angie Mizzell, Aleigh Acerni, Doretha Walker and all of the blogs in my reader (so many) for inspiring me and inspiring me and inspiring me once more. I've been testing the waters for a long time and I'm ready to get my hair wet (and if you know me well, you understand that this is kind of a big deal because me getting my hair wet in a chlorinated kiddie pool is equal to most other people diving from a high cliff into the ocean).

If you're reading this post in a reader, you are probably confused. Click over to my blog and see the "something" I did with my site. I'd love your feedback, even if you just want to throw out the spirit fingers (Angie). And since the actual work on my part was choosing a designer, let me add that Carrie of CarrieLovesDesign.com is responsible for all of sexiness up in here.

So with renewed vigor and enthusiasm, let the navel-gazing commence! 

Today I enjoy the view...

Inspired by creative and talented writer friends Angie Mizzell and Janet Lee - because their work and words have given me reason to hitch up my creative britches and get to writing more than they know - I'm sharing my own writing space(s).

My "home office" (and the desktop where my iTunes library still lives):


Even though I do most of my writing on my laptop - and occasionally handwriting in a notebook - so I'm often here:


Or on my back deck, here:


It's the words, the inspiration, the motivation that comes from knowing someone else is struggling to make those words matter, just like you are (or should be). Once those words are out there, we tend to forget how they came together. I want to remember and live for right now, not upon publication, not when the check comes, not later, now. I want to enjoy the view.

Musing on my muse and writing mojo...

I had a period of adjustment after moving to Austin in January during which I couldn't (or wouldn't) write unless it was work-related. I wouldn't even unpack the boxes marked "home office," just set up my home computer on my desk so Time Warner could hook everything up the first week I got here. My notebook from last year lived in my shoulder bag, but I hadn't been able to write anything but "[fill in the blank] suuuucks" for months.

Every time I logged into my blog, I found good reasons not to write anything. I read old blog posts and they either (a) made me sad or (b) reminded me of when I used to be funny. I also read old blog posts that are still up on the site of the magazine I used to work for and they either (a) made me sad or (b) pissed me off. I also read some of my old essays and wondered if I'd ever get my writing mojo back. Did I accidentally kill my muse? Did I drive her away during one of those weeks last year when I repeatedly told her to "fuck off" and wouldn't get off of the couch? Did I forget to bring her with me to Austin? Did she just get sick of me altogether?

It's taken me a few months to realize all of the above is both bullshit and necessary. I needed some "off" time. I just moved halfway across the country, away from my friends and family and the home that I loved. It's been less than four months. What I really needed to do is cut myself some slack. So I did.

I also decided to put away the 2008/2009-barely-written-in Journal-O-Negativity. I went to a great store here in Austin called Wanderland and bought myself a new notebook and some nice pens. Earlier this month, I started from scratch, writing again. Not just writing again, but writing in a notebook. Not just writing in a notebook, but writing every day. I went back to my 15-year-old "inspiration" notebook. I re-read Writing Down the Bones. And I gave my permission to be my 20-something year old writerself, just stepping out into the world of sharing very personal information, understanding that not every sentence I write has to be brilliant, and even if I'm just writing about how I don't feel like writing, just write anyway to get the pen moving.

It worked. A couple of weeks ago, I unpacked my home office boxes. I threw or gave away anything that reminded me of negativity in my past (why did I pack that crap anyway? Bad juju...). I hung up my inspiration board over my desk. I created my writing space. A new writing space, one that makes me happy every morning when I come downstairs and see my little office in the space where most people have a dining room table. I've nearly filled a third of that new notebook I've had for less than three weeks. Is every word brilliant? Absolutely not. Most of it is crap. But I'm writing again, which also means I'm seeing the world in a different way, which also means I know that one's muse never leaves for good. Mine is lurking around here somewhere; I know she's close by.

Note to self...

“The true self is a disturbing character, healthy and occasionally anarchistic, who knows how to play, how to say no to others and 'yes' to itself."
~ Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

I just needed a little reminder.

Today's inspiration: Author Meghan Daum, the E! True Hollywood Story on Rachael Ray, the Washington Post's special section on feminism & art, finishing The Glass Castle, being in the middle of Then We Came to the End, very short stories, and TAL's new web site.

What matters is saying yes...

When people ask me how to get their articles/essays/books published, how they can get a job like mine, how I get my ideas, or how they can write for a living, I never know what to say. I spent a long time not working on my own projects and resenting and being jealous of the creativity of others. A couple of years ago, I read the following quote:

"Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a f***load of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but, Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes."
~Dave Eggers, The Harvard Advocate

Now every time I hear that little voice in my head telling me I can't do something as well as this person or that person, or that it's going to be a long time before I'm the next Joan Didion, I respond with a simple "yes." Forget everyone else and focus on your own. Eggers is right; it is a lot of work. But it's worth it.

The best metaphor for being a writer...

“The best metaphor I know of for being a writer...is in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, where he describes the book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (i.e. dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where the writer is trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the writer’s bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebro-spinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention.”
~David Foster Wallace talks about writing Infinite Jest, 1997.

Foster says that the damaged infant metaphor is perfect because “it captures the mix of repulsion and love the fiction writer feels for something he’s working on.” You do not have the same level of freedom as other people, yet you seldom resent the responsibility you must carry because of the love you feel for the child/writing. When you do resent it, Foster says, “you hate it - hate it...because its deformity is your deformity.”
I understand feeling like the work is always in progress. I understand feeling that there are not enough hours in a day to make the work stand up and do its own thing. You want other people to see/read your child/writing and see the beauty and perfection, not the deformity. You spend more time taking ugliness and imperfection and dressing it so that it flows and is beautiful than you do actually writing.

This I understand.