’Tis the season, sort of. The shortest month of the year that always seems the longest is halfway done. Seeds ordered in the frigid January darkness have arrived and planting dates are marked on the calendar. What little snow we’ve had is melting into the three-inch tall green shoots around the pond. Pitchers and catchers report in four days (yay!). And I just registered for my first writer’s conference of the year. I know, I’m behind on scheduling, but I’ve never been good at planning too far ahead. If I try, life steps in to remind me how foolish are my best-laid plans.
As anyone who has ever attended one of these events knows, the wealth of possibilities offered to writers of all experience levels is truly astonishing. The sheer number of options, many of them genre-specific, others more broad – or fan – based. Enticing locations all across the country – the prestigious AWP Annual Conference & Bookfair is in Chicago this year, I could stay with my son and save the hotel bill (honest, he said I could!), but it’s in two weeks. I waited too long for that one. Love is Murder is another Chicago event I’ll get to someday. And overseas: Geneva, San Miguel, Surrey…out of my price range, but so intriguing. With a limited budget, I need to stick closer to home for now.
My first outing this year, as it has been for the past two years, will be the Mad Anthony Writers Conference in Hamilton, Ohio. Not particularly exotic, but sponsoring local non-profit group does a terrific job of packing a great deal of information into two days, starting with a Friday session called Murder & Mayhem. What more could a mystery writer ask for? I registered just under the wire to qualify for the early-bird discount and look forward to their expanded three-day schedule in early April. Mad Anthony’s become a tradition for a trio of us from my weekly writers group, gals’ road trip and all, that I know will be a great time.
The always-spectacular Antioch Writers' Workshop in July right here in my new home town of Yellow Springs is on my calendar as well. It’s a week-long event that never fails to overwhelm with the amount of information offered on everything from the finer points of fiction, to poetry, to snagging that elusive book contract.
Conferences and workshops are about so much more than the formal sessions. I often get as much benefit (dare I say more?) from meeting fellow writers and basking in the non-stop craft conversations that fill hallways, dining rooms and sometimes even a local bar. The spirited interaction is a great reminder that, even in the solitary work of writing, we are not alone.
Do you conference? When and where? I need to start planning ahead…
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Flow
I follow far too many writers’ blogs, spending more time reading sometimes questionable words of wisdom about the craft than actually writing myself. It’s a procrastination tactic I struggle with daily. But every so often, when the synchronicity of the universe presents the same topic from different angles in a variety of my perusals, I’m sensible enough to take heed. This week the universe wants me to focus on flow – starting it, maintaining it, appreciating it.
Most writers will agree that when they’re “in the zone,” everything clicks. The words do indeed flow almost effortlessly from brain to hand to quill/crayon/pen/keyboard. Psychics call it automatic writing, the sensation of another being controlling the instrument. I’d rather think it’s more an unleashing of deep-seated thoughts and emotions too often buried under the busy-ness of life, or the pain of remembering. It’s that possibility of pain that keeps me from tapping those resources, of letting go of fears of what my words may reveal, how they may be received by potential readers.
When I do manage to get past those emotional roadblocks and write from the depths of my being, my words have power. Hubby has told me on many occasions that he can tell when I write from the heart. If my personal in-house non-fiction reading computer geek can see it, so can more discerning readers. I need to tap that source more often, allow the words to flow unimpeded. But how?
Last night I finished my current study of Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers. She ends this slim but powerful volume with another Zen reference, urging writers to cultivate a “fresh mind.” Sher says, “The real work of writing is, day after day, to discover how to maintain freshness.” Even more compelling to me is the idea of “giving over the part of you that knows to the writing.” Giving over. Surrender. Release. Flow.
From a practical standpoint, author Johanna Harness posted a blog recently about her technique for priming the pump. She uses freewriting, figuring twenty minutes of uninterrupted writing, or about one thousand words, gets rid of the detritus and allows her to find that fresh mind. “I don’t know why it took me so long to realize I need to warm up with disposable words.”
Disposable words – there are few more frightening concepts for me in the writing world. I labor so intensely over each word choice that the thought of deliberately tossing any of them aside, of murdering my darlings, has always been heart-wrenching. It’s the main reason why I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo for three years. The month-long exercise encourages me to turn off the internal editor, get the thoughts down on the page, and worry about fine-tuning things later. In the case of freewriting, I may never use those particular words and phrases again, but it’s like opening a spillway, releasing the stale, stagnant water at the top and exposing the unpolluted springs below.
I can embrace the concept of freewriting better than the other technique offered by many writerly blogs, that of journaling. For some reason, journaling triggers memories of self-absorbed teenage angst poured out to Dear Diary. Semantics probably, but if it helps me get past my hesitation, I’ll take it. Freewriting, as Harness points out, is disposable. I don’t keep it in leather-bound volumes for the ages. If the occasional spew seems worthy of further consideration, I can save it; however far too often in my experience, the words have lost their luster by the time I return to them. Disposable indeed, but therapeutic, and useful at the time. I’ve even adapted the practice for my critical writing class, more to teach my students not to fear writing than to encourage narrative flow, but again, useful.
Sher ends her essay with, “What is the best way to write? Each of us has to discover her own way by writing. Writing teaches writing. No one can tell you your own secret.” For me, freewriting teaches writing, and done regularly, may help reveal that secret I can’t or won’t see otherwise.
How do you prime the pump and tap your hidden reserves?
Most writers will agree that when they’re “in the zone,” everything clicks. The words do indeed flow almost effortlessly from brain to hand to quill/crayon/pen/keyboard. Psychics call it automatic writing, the sensation of another being controlling the instrument. I’d rather think it’s more an unleashing of deep-seated thoughts and emotions too often buried under the busy-ness of life, or the pain of remembering. It’s that possibility of pain that keeps me from tapping those resources, of letting go of fears of what my words may reveal, how they may be received by potential readers.
When I do manage to get past those emotional roadblocks and write from the depths of my being, my words have power. Hubby has told me on many occasions that he can tell when I write from the heart. If my personal in-house non-fiction reading computer geek can see it, so can more discerning readers. I need to tap that source more often, allow the words to flow unimpeded. But how?
Last night I finished my current study of Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers. She ends this slim but powerful volume with another Zen reference, urging writers to cultivate a “fresh mind.” Sher says, “The real work of writing is, day after day, to discover how to maintain freshness.” Even more compelling to me is the idea of “giving over the part of you that knows to the writing.” Giving over. Surrender. Release. Flow.
From a practical standpoint, author Johanna Harness posted a blog recently about her technique for priming the pump. She uses freewriting, figuring twenty minutes of uninterrupted writing, or about one thousand words, gets rid of the detritus and allows her to find that fresh mind. “I don’t know why it took me so long to realize I need to warm up with disposable words.”
Disposable words – there are few more frightening concepts for me in the writing world. I labor so intensely over each word choice that the thought of deliberately tossing any of them aside, of murdering my darlings, has always been heart-wrenching. It’s the main reason why I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo for three years. The month-long exercise encourages me to turn off the internal editor, get the thoughts down on the page, and worry about fine-tuning things later. In the case of freewriting, I may never use those particular words and phrases again, but it’s like opening a spillway, releasing the stale, stagnant water at the top and exposing the unpolluted springs below.
I can embrace the concept of freewriting better than the other technique offered by many writerly blogs, that of journaling. For some reason, journaling triggers memories of self-absorbed teenage angst poured out to Dear Diary. Semantics probably, but if it helps me get past my hesitation, I’ll take it. Freewriting, as Harness points out, is disposable. I don’t keep it in leather-bound volumes for the ages. If the occasional spew seems worthy of further consideration, I can save it; however far too often in my experience, the words have lost their luster by the time I return to them. Disposable indeed, but therapeutic, and useful at the time. I’ve even adapted the practice for my critical writing class, more to teach my students not to fear writing than to encourage narrative flow, but again, useful.
Sher ends her essay with, “What is the best way to write? Each of us has to discover her own way by writing. Writing teaches writing. No one can tell you your own secret.” For me, freewriting teaches writing, and done regularly, may help reveal that secret I can’t or won’t see otherwise.
How do you prime the pump and tap your hidden reserves?
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Echoed in the wells of silence…
~ Simon & Garfunkel
A growing trend in many of the writing blogs I follow seems to be toward compiling soundtracks to write by. I can imagine only a few things more detrimental to my writing than being surrounded by music. For me, silence is truly golden.
It wasn’t always this way. When my kids were young, I could lose myself in a book while they romped and the television blared. Now I’m so easily distracted almost any noise is a frustration. I’d love to join the throngs at the local coffee shops, laptops nestled next to the crumpets and hot beverages, immersed in the act of putting words on the page. But I could spend hours in such surroundings with only a paragraph or two to show for my efforts; it’s too much fun to people-watch and eavesdrop (what? don’t tell me you don’t do listen in – how else do you get story ideas or write great dialogue?)
I’m still reading Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers – it’s my bedtime companion, giving me words of contemplation to still the bustle of the day. In one of her brief chapters, she addresses the notion of silence by quoting author Bill McKibben’s forward to an annotated Walden: “Without silence, solitude, darkness, how can we come to any sense of our true size, our actual relationship with the rest of the world?” Sher details a Chinese poet Wang Wei who identified three levels of silence: physical, spiritual, and the silence of mystical meditation. “When thought stops, words halt, and we move through light toward absolute stillness,” Willis and Tony Barnstone wrote when introducing Wei’s poetry. Sher finishes her essay on silence with, “Stillness shrinks us to our own size, empowers us to acknowledge our pain, lends us the air into which this pain can, momentarily, evaporate.”
“Absolute stillness.” “Mystical mediation.” Those are the places from which my best writing springs, evaporating from the depths of my mind only to solidify onto the page. I can’t find the words if my brain is flooded with noise, no matter how beautiful the music may be in other circumstances.
A soundtrack for my writing? The soothing sounds of silence, when my thoughts can take center stage, is enough.
A growing trend in many of the writing blogs I follow seems to be toward compiling soundtracks to write by. I can imagine only a few things more detrimental to my writing than being surrounded by music. For me, silence is truly golden.
It wasn’t always this way. When my kids were young, I could lose myself in a book while they romped and the television blared. Now I’m so easily distracted almost any noise is a frustration. I’d love to join the throngs at the local coffee shops, laptops nestled next to the crumpets and hot beverages, immersed in the act of putting words on the page. But I could spend hours in such surroundings with only a paragraph or two to show for my efforts; it’s too much fun to people-watch and eavesdrop (what? don’t tell me you don’t do listen in – how else do you get story ideas or write great dialogue?)
I’m still reading Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers – it’s my bedtime companion, giving me words of contemplation to still the bustle of the day. In one of her brief chapters, she addresses the notion of silence by quoting author Bill McKibben’s forward to an annotated Walden: “Without silence, solitude, darkness, how can we come to any sense of our true size, our actual relationship with the rest of the world?” Sher details a Chinese poet Wang Wei who identified three levels of silence: physical, spiritual, and the silence of mystical meditation. “When thought stops, words halt, and we move through light toward absolute stillness,” Willis and Tony Barnstone wrote when introducing Wei’s poetry. Sher finishes her essay on silence with, “Stillness shrinks us to our own size, empowers us to acknowledge our pain, lends us the air into which this pain can, momentarily, evaporate.”
“Absolute stillness.” “Mystical mediation.” Those are the places from which my best writing springs, evaporating from the depths of my mind only to solidify onto the page. I can’t find the words if my brain is flooded with noise, no matter how beautiful the music may be in other circumstances.
A soundtrack for my writing? The soothing sounds of silence, when my thoughts can take center stage, is enough.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Verbalizing my voices
I don’t like reading aloud, especially my own work. When I write well, the voices in my head speak the words onto the page in soaring language, dulcet tones of surpassing beauty and emotional oration – at least that’s what I like to believe. If I read them aloud, as writers are exhorted to do at every turn, my vocal chords strangle the language and trample on the emotional vibrations. Such desecration pains me every time it happens.
I rarely enjoy listening to anyone read aloud. The first sentence I hear is overwritten in my brain by the second, which is overwritten by the third, until the fourth grasps for tenuous connections to earlier phrases and fails to communicate the author’s meaning. I’m subconsciously distracted by efforts to put the audible into words on a mental page where they can be studied and absorbed. In a book, I can see complete paragraphs at a glance, follow the flow of words from one thought, one phrase, one sentence, to the next, and see the discrete parts as a glorious whole.
Yet the literary world insists on oral presentations. We’ve all been witness to an esteemed author whose written words are a joy, but who when faced with reading to an audience is a less-than-stellar performer. That’s what reading aloud is – a performance. For the solitary author, accustomed to toiling away in relative silence, the experience of speaking in front of a gathering is often as personally painful as it is to the listeners. We are writers, not performers. We stumble and stutter and mangle the precious words we slaved over, the careful sentences crafted in hours of intense labor. This repeated pointless sadomasochism can only destroy a writer’s spirit.
In One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers, author Gail Sher writes eloquently of the argument I’ve only vaguely been able to articulate over the years in classes, workshops, and writers groups:
“The written word also has a ‘look.’ It’s ‘build’ is alchemical, even as a woman’s build. In its timbre (mental ring) as well as its juxtaposition with other words, there is a resonance that can be squelched in speech. Though we may pronounce a word similarly, its silent sound is like ‘a white bird in snow.’ (Poets are sometimes loathe to read their poetry aloud, as if something precious will be lost sharing that version.)” (140)
I heartily agree.
Of course writing for performance is another matter altogether. Dramatists such as Shakespeare or modern screenwriters such as Aaron Sorkin offer language that can only be appreciated in its oral form. For the rest of us, leave our words on the page where they form the intended neural connection with devoted readers focusing on the work literally in hand, not the tonal vagaries of an uncomfortably positioned pseudo-performer.
I rarely enjoy listening to anyone read aloud. The first sentence I hear is overwritten in my brain by the second, which is overwritten by the third, until the fourth grasps for tenuous connections to earlier phrases and fails to communicate the author’s meaning. I’m subconsciously distracted by efforts to put the audible into words on a mental page where they can be studied and absorbed. In a book, I can see complete paragraphs at a glance, follow the flow of words from one thought, one phrase, one sentence, to the next, and see the discrete parts as a glorious whole.
Yet the literary world insists on oral presentations. We’ve all been witness to an esteemed author whose written words are a joy, but who when faced with reading to an audience is a less-than-stellar performer. That’s what reading aloud is – a performance. For the solitary author, accustomed to toiling away in relative silence, the experience of speaking in front of a gathering is often as personally painful as it is to the listeners. We are writers, not performers. We stumble and stutter and mangle the precious words we slaved over, the careful sentences crafted in hours of intense labor. This repeated pointless sadomasochism can only destroy a writer’s spirit.
In One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers, author Gail Sher writes eloquently of the argument I’ve only vaguely been able to articulate over the years in classes, workshops, and writers groups:
“The written word also has a ‘look.’ It’s ‘build’ is alchemical, even as a woman’s build. In its timbre (mental ring) as well as its juxtaposition with other words, there is a resonance that can be squelched in speech. Though we may pronounce a word similarly, its silent sound is like ‘a white bird in snow.’ (Poets are sometimes loathe to read their poetry aloud, as if something precious will be lost sharing that version.)” (140)
I heartily agree.
Of course writing for performance is another matter altogether. Dramatists such as Shakespeare or modern screenwriters such as Aaron Sorkin offer language that can only be appreciated in its oral form. For the rest of us, leave our words on the page where they form the intended neural connection with devoted readers focusing on the work literally in hand, not the tonal vagaries of an uncomfortably positioned pseudo-performer.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Stop SOPA
No post this week in support of the effort to stop SOPA
http://blog.siteground.com/stop-censorship/
http://blog.siteground.com/stop-censorship/
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Please punch my validation...
If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. ~ Douglas Adams
With the inevitable life review ushered in by a new year, I’m reminded all too strongly that I can’t expect my life to change if I don’t change my attitude. The insanity of continuing old patterns of behavior yet looking for new outcomes looms large, and while I talk a good talk about changing my habits, when it comes down to actually performing, I stumble.
Instead of writing or tending to any of the several projects stacked in file folders on my desk, Iwasted invested twenty minutes or so this morning taking an online personality test of sorts, this one called PersonalDNA. The results didn’t surprise me: empathetic, introverted, trusting, preferring experiences over things and small groups of close friends over large crowds. My assigned label of “considerate experiencer” is a bit odd, but I suppose the site needs to offer something unique.
The irony of this seemingly benign entertainment hit me only a few minutes later, as I mulled my continuing penchant for procrastination. Why had I spent that time answering ambiguous questions in hopes a computer program could tell me something new about myself? Once again I was looking for outside validation, this time in the nebulous “personality” arena as opposed to my usual anxieties over my writing. I’m always waiting for someone else to tell me I’m on the right track, that I’m worthy of – something, anything. That insidious need for approval is holding me back and I’m tired of it, but I can’t seem to break free.
I fill my desktop with aphorisms like “What other people think about you is none of your business” and “You wouldn't worry so much about what other people thought if you realized how seldom they do,” but I remain mired in self-doubt. Awareness of my crippling dependency on the acceptance of others doesn’t make my escape any easier, although I maintain awareness of any addiction – and that’s what this is, an emotional addiction seeded in the murky past – is half the battle. Unfortunately, the other half, the skirmishes I face every time I send out a short story only to have it rejected, or turn to a friend for counsel only to be brushed aside, don’t seem to diminish even as that awareness grows. Such dismissals only reinforce the niggling voice that says I’m not good enough.
That voice echoed all night and kept me awake more than usual as I replayed an evening spent in another search for validation of my feelings. After a weekly writers group, I’d only half-jokingly demanded Hubby provide answers to a vexing relationship issue I’d faced. He likes to fix things, so he tried, but ultimately we both knew the solution had to come from within me. His validation was accurate, and not unexpected, and offered with love. But I still needed someone to tell me what I already knew. I simply don’t trust my own judgment enough to ignore naysayers with private concerns and personal agendas.
Hubby knows me better than anyone else does, and certainly better than any online quiz. I should listen to him when he tells me to believe in my “considerate experiencer” self as much as he does.
His is the only validation I really need, while I figure out how to accept my own.
With the inevitable life review ushered in by a new year, I’m reminded all too strongly that I can’t expect my life to change if I don’t change my attitude. The insanity of continuing old patterns of behavior yet looking for new outcomes looms large, and while I talk a good talk about changing my habits, when it comes down to actually performing, I stumble.
Instead of writing or tending to any of the several projects stacked in file folders on my desk, I
The irony of this seemingly benign entertainment hit me only a few minutes later, as I mulled my continuing penchant for procrastination. Why had I spent that time answering ambiguous questions in hopes a computer program could tell me something new about myself? Once again I was looking for outside validation, this time in the nebulous “personality” arena as opposed to my usual anxieties over my writing. I’m always waiting for someone else to tell me I’m on the right track, that I’m worthy of – something, anything. That insidious need for approval is holding me back and I’m tired of it, but I can’t seem to break free.
I fill my desktop with aphorisms like “What other people think about you is none of your business” and “You wouldn't worry so much about what other people thought if you realized how seldom they do,” but I remain mired in self-doubt. Awareness of my crippling dependency on the acceptance of others doesn’t make my escape any easier, although I maintain awareness of any addiction – and that’s what this is, an emotional addiction seeded in the murky past – is half the battle. Unfortunately, the other half, the skirmishes I face every time I send out a short story only to have it rejected, or turn to a friend for counsel only to be brushed aside, don’t seem to diminish even as that awareness grows. Such dismissals only reinforce the niggling voice that says I’m not good enough.
That voice echoed all night and kept me awake more than usual as I replayed an evening spent in another search for validation of my feelings. After a weekly writers group, I’d only half-jokingly demanded Hubby provide answers to a vexing relationship issue I’d faced. He likes to fix things, so he tried, but ultimately we both knew the solution had to come from within me. His validation was accurate, and not unexpected, and offered with love. But I still needed someone to tell me what I already knew. I simply don’t trust my own judgment enough to ignore naysayers with private concerns and personal agendas.
Hubby knows me better than anyone else does, and certainly better than any online quiz. I should listen to him when he tells me to believe in my “considerate experiencer” self as much as he does.
His is the only validation I really need, while I figure out how to accept my own.
Wednesday, January 04, 2012
My mistake
As I warned earlier here and here, I’ve now spent the past two weeks reevaluating my online presence and, by extension, my writing life. So much of my time on the ’net has become a myriad of not-so-subtle forms of procrastination, taking me away from actually putting words down on the page. Add to that friend base, build that platform, follow that blog roll, comment/review/submit to contests that often have little or no relation to my writing interests.
I’ve also been reading Gail Sher’s introspective One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers. Her words kept me grounded during the chaotic holidays which arouse such anxiety in me that I can’t write anything of substance. The focus of her slim volume is to guide readers to developing and nurturing a writing habit, something I had, briefly, during November’s NaNo sprint but lost again with the holidays. (digression: As a devoted wordsmith, I flounder searching for a better term for the hysterical upheaval which strikes from Halloween through New Year’s Day. For me at least, the period is certainly not holy or holly-jolly. But that is a musing for another time.)
Sher’s Four Noble Truths are plain enough:
1. Writers write.
2. Writing is a process.
3. You don’t know what your writing will be until the end of the process.
4. If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is to not write.
If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is to not write. I need that emblazoned over my desk, looping on a soundtrack, tattooed on my forearm. The only way to fail is to not write.
All the other mileposts, the gauges of a “success” that the writing community imposes on us all, are distractions from who I am. I am a writer. See #1 above: writers write. Not writers publish; writers blog to develop a platform; writers tweet; writers Facebook/G+/review others’ work on Amazon or Goodreads. Writers write. All those other things are distractions with limited usefulness.
Almost two years ago, after yet another of my sessions of despair over ever “making it” as a writer, my grad school faculty advisor asked, (and I paraphrase), “If no one ever saw anything you wrote, would you still write?” At the time, my “Yes” was grudging. Today it is stronger, yet it wavers with the emotions of life. Sher’s book strengthens my response.
I often quote Emerson’s “Life is a journey, not a destination,” coupled with Lao Tzu’s “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” I need to learn to see my writing in the same way. It’s a process, not a product. I think that’s why the continuous communal buzz to market/self-publish/sell-sell-sell has always bothered me. Far too much of what is rushed to market is ragged, immature, and worthy only of standing as a step on that journey. That’s not to discount its value; rather, to delineate between exercise and performance recital. Right now I’m on the rehearsal schedule for that future recital. I may never make it in the eyes of the publishing world, but I’ll grow and learn and write every step along the way.
Because I’m a writer, and writers write.
I’ve also been reading Gail Sher’s introspective One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers. Her words kept me grounded during the chaotic holidays which arouse such anxiety in me that I can’t write anything of substance. The focus of her slim volume is to guide readers to developing and nurturing a writing habit, something I had, briefly, during November’s NaNo sprint but lost again with the holidays. (digression: As a devoted wordsmith, I flounder searching for a better term for the hysterical upheaval which strikes from Halloween through New Year’s Day. For me at least, the period is certainly not holy or holly-jolly. But that is a musing for another time.)
Sher’s Four Noble Truths are plain enough:
1. Writers write.
2. Writing is a process.
3. You don’t know what your writing will be until the end of the process.
4. If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is to not write.
If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is to not write. I need that emblazoned over my desk, looping on a soundtrack, tattooed on my forearm. The only way to fail is to not write.
All the other mileposts, the gauges of a “success” that the writing community imposes on us all, are distractions from who I am. I am a writer. See #1 above: writers write. Not writers publish; writers blog to develop a platform; writers tweet; writers Facebook/G+/review others’ work on Amazon or Goodreads. Writers write. All those other things are distractions with limited usefulness.
Almost two years ago, after yet another of my sessions of despair over ever “making it” as a writer, my grad school faculty advisor asked, (and I paraphrase), “If no one ever saw anything you wrote, would you still write?” At the time, my “Yes” was grudging. Today it is stronger, yet it wavers with the emotions of life. Sher’s book strengthens my response.
I often quote Emerson’s “Life is a journey, not a destination,” coupled with Lao Tzu’s “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” I need to learn to see my writing in the same way. It’s a process, not a product. I think that’s why the continuous communal buzz to market/self-publish/sell-sell-sell has always bothered me. Far too much of what is rushed to market is ragged, immature, and worthy only of standing as a step on that journey. That’s not to discount its value; rather, to delineate between exercise and performance recital. Right now I’m on the rehearsal schedule for that future recital. I may never make it in the eyes of the publishing world, but I’ll grow and learn and write every step along the way.
Because I’m a writer, and writers write.
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