Interrupted by Inspiration
A goal I’ve set for myself recently is to read through the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy—whether by listening to them on audio (I have the entire unabridged set of CDs) or by actually reading the books. Well, I’ve had trouble convincing myself to put the CDs back in the car after I got to about disk six of the first book (and they’d barely made it to Bree!), so I picked up the actual book to read before bed last night.
Things were going along swimmingly—I was actually picking up on details that would have been helpful to know a few weeks ago when I started answering LOTR trivia questions on Facebook. Then, suddenly, I was no longer in Middle Earth, but standing on the deck of a ship, observing the silhouette of an officer looking out into the night.
Yes, that’s right, in the middle of reading Aragorn’s explanation of the Black Riders, I was suddenly visualizing a scene for the second book of my historical trilogy. Needless to say, I tossed the book aside and picked up the notepad and pencil I keep right beside the bed for just such an occasion.
I only got two pages written, not nearly all of what I was picturing, but it’s a great start on a scene (I think poor Julia may have broken a toe or two). And not only was it fun to be writing something for the second book (although I try not to write out of sequence), it gave me some insight into the tension between William and Julia at that point in the story (where exactly it fits, I’m not sure, but I think pretty early on), so that I’ll be able to incorporate the possibility for it as I work on revisions of the first book.
This is not the first time I’ve been struck with a major bit of inspiration for a scene like this. Two and a half years ago when Rachel Hauck was in town doing some research for her Nashville-set books, we went to the Bluebird Cafe to listen to music. While there, I had a flash of inspiration for a scene in Stand-In Groom, which I was still trying to get finished at that point in time. Over the next two hours, I wrote on every napkin I could get my hands on—while still enjoying the music and the company.
Another time, when I was home in Baton Rouge for a family wedding, we all went to the Saturday evening Southern Gospel service at my grandmother’s church. One of my cousins and his wife (who live here in Nashville, actually) were doing a mini-concert after dinner. The tables were covered with white butcher paper. And I had a pen. By the time we left a few hours later, I had to tear off a 3-foot by 4-foot section of the table “cloth” to take home with me, because I’d been brainstorming possible plotlines for my newest idea, Ransome’s Honor (well it was actually Ransome’s Quest then—I thought it would only be one book).
Ever since I was in junior high school, I have carried some kind of notebook or journal to church with me to take sermon notes. With a mind as prone to wander as mine is, taking notes is one of the only ways to ensure I pay attention. Plus, to me, it’s a way to show respect to my pastor, who spent countless hours developing that sermon. But there are some Sundays when, no matter if it’s a great sermon or just so-so, I find myself suddenly jotting down notes on a story or character. For example: when I was in revisions on Stand-In Groom, I was also in the process of trying to find a new church home. I was visiting Christ Church Cathedral Episcopal in downtown Nashville, enjoying the service when, in a flash, I knew exactly what Anne’s spiritual conflict was.
I’ve written before about how the root of the word “Inspiration” is “Inspire”—meaning to take in breath. It reminds me of two lines from the old hymn, “Breathe Upon Us“:
- Breathe upon us, breathe upon us,
With Thy love our hearts inspire. . . .
Every writer gets inspired differently. In Of Other Worlds, C. S. Lewis wrote that writers cannot necessarily explain where inspiration comes from. (“When you ‘have an idea,’ could you tell anyone exactly how you thought of it?”) Some are inspired by art, others by music, others by drama, others by being in nature. There’s a reason why my tagline is: Inspired by Life . . . Molded by God. “Life” sounded better than “Everything.”
Getting flashes of inspiration is great—but if I don’t act upon that inspiration, if I just let it float in and float right back out again, I may be losing something special. Every single manuscript I’ve ever written—and a bunch that I began and never finished—started as a flash of inspiration . . . or at least as an idea inspired by something I observed. That’s why I have an “Ideas” folder on my computer containing documents with everything from one or two sentences to nearly full-blown synopses of story ideas I’ve been inspired with. Sure, I may never get around to writing them, but they’re there, preserved, should I ever get to the point when I’m in need of an idea to inspire me to write.
Where does your inspiration come from? What’s the most unusual place you’ve gotten a flash of inspiration and had to immediately write it down?
Do We Over-Analyze Our Writing?
As I posted Saturday, I printed the entire 450+ pages of my first draft of Ransome’s Honor to start getting down and dirty with the revisions. I’ve been trying to do the second draft all on the computer, but it just isn’t working as well as I’d hoped. So, with critiques and hard-copy in hand, I hope to be able to really get some progress done toward a more finalized draft.
In the read-through, I’m looking especially for areas that can be cut: descriptions that aren’t woven into the action of the scene, scenes that start too early/end too late, and scenes that—while I love them—aren’t really important to the forward progress of the story.
My crit partners were trying to explain to me this weekend a color-coding technique they learned in the early-bird session at the ACFW conference a few weeks ago. Y’all know me—Visually Oriented Gal #1—I thought maybe this would be a great idea.
But then, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered: do we over-analyze our writing?
One of the main complaints heard around the publishing industry about MFA/MA Creative Writing programs as well as writers’ conferences is that they have a tendency to homogonize attendees’ writing. By attending so many conferences or by adjusting our writing to ensure our theses pass committee, we start losing our voice, the unique way we structure language and tell a story just to “fit in.”
Take this argument with a grain of salt: I am still an unpublished author, who is relatively new to the submission game. And yes, I have an MA in Writing Popular Fiction from one of those afore mentioned programs. But in recent years, I have gotten to the point where it’s hard for me to pick up a CBA-published novel and read it for pleasure. Why? Because it’s just like the last CBA novel I picked up and read—at least within a genre. I have grown to prefer reading older books (before about 1970 back through classics) because they weren’t as concerned with craft as they were with just telling a good story. The author’s unique voice, unique turn of phrase, unique way of telling the story is at the forefront—not some preconceived notion of what “good” writing is.
Yes, I do believe that we need to analyze our writing to make it as strong as possible. We need to show, not tell. We need to use active language instead of passive. We need to make sure our dialogue zings and narrative zips. We need to make sure that each scene serves to move the story forward . . . WITHOUT sacrificing the unique way in which we write.
If we start worrying too much about craft, it can create major issues for us as we’re in the process of writing. I ran into this problem my first year of graduate school: I was so worried about everthing my mentor had told me I needed to change in the chapters I’d submitted to her, I got horrible writer’s block because that was all I could think about whenever I sat down to compose. I couldn’t think about just writing the story—I was too worried about craft. But when crunch time came and I had to have a complete manuscript, I finally shoved all that aside and just wrote. Sure, it needed major editing and revisions afterward, but it was written.
There is no magic bullet, no miraculous tonic that can ensure our books are going to be publishable. There is no mathematical formula that can be used to determine the correct ratio of narrative to dialogue to introspection to action that will guarantee a writing contract.
I’m willing to try this color-coding way of looking at writing . . . and I’ll probably learn quite a bit about how I write. Will it change how I write? Probably not. Will it help me make my story tighter and stronger? Probably. Is it going to guarantee that I get published? No.
You know, sometimes I really miss the way I was able to write before attending my very first writing conference—writing just for the joy of writing, for the sheer pleasure of spending time with my characters in a setting of my own making. Was it publishable writing? Not by a longshot. But it sure was fun.
WOO HOO–Still #1
Hey Fightin’ Tigers,
Fight all the way!
Hey Fightin’ Tigers,
Win the game today.
You’ve got the know-how,
You’re doin’ fine!
Hang on to the ball
As you hit the wall
And crash right through the line.
You’ve got to go for the touchdown,
Run up the score,
Make Mike the Tiger stand right up and roar.
[ROAR!]
Give it all of you might
As you fight to night
And keep the goal in view:
VICTORY FOR L.S.U.!
T – I – G – E – R – S — Tigers!
The Writer Has Two Printers
For the last fifteen or so years, I have always had an ink-jet printer–which has been wonderful, since, as I’ve mentioned, I like sparkly stuff, including colorful stuff. Well, in the spring of 2006, I was faced with the need to print two copies of my master’s thesis manuscript, Happy Endings Inc. With the price of a new black ink cartridge for my HP 6122 Deskjet around $45-50, knowing I’d need at least two cartridges to print two copies of 337 pages at “best” quality, I decided to see if I could find an inexpensive laser printer for this purpose.
I went to the online outlet for my dad’s favorite store, Fry’s, and found a refurbished Brother HL-2040 laser printer for only $90–with a $10 rebate! Needless to say, I snapped it up, because the rebate made up for the shipping cost.
I’ve used the laser printer more than the color printer over the last eighteen months. It’s been nice to have the option of printing in color or not—but never moreso than today.
For the last twenty minutes, I’ve had both printers going steadily, printing the full manuscript of Ransome’s Honor so that I can get down and dirty with working on revisions. I’m printing the first sixteen chapters with all of my crit partners’ comments and markings on the color printer, and the remainder of the first draft that I haven’t worked on revising yet on the laser printer (and the laser printer, printing 2/3 more pages, just finished, while the color printer is still going!).
Oh, and I had to go to Staples to pick up a ream of paper and I looked for a pen with sparkly purple ink. They didn’t have any sparkly ink pens, but I did pick up a couple that were labled as “vibrant” purple. So as soon as the inkjet finishes these last couple of pages, I’m digging in!
Fun Friday–2007 Ig Nobel Prizes
In keeping with humans’ seeming necessity to spoof everything, the Annals of Improbable Research have announced the 2007 Ig Nobel Prizes in preparation for next week’s real Nobel prize announcements.
Past recipients of Ig Nobel Prizes include a device designed emit a shriek only teenagers can hear to break up groups loiterers, a study into how woodpeckers avoid headaches, a birthing machine that uses centrifugal-force on pregnant women, and Britain’s official, six-page document detailing how to make the perfect cup of tea.
This is the first time I’ve heard of these awards, and I really like them. They’re better than the Darwin awards, because they’re for people actually going out and doing something productive, if seemingly silly. As a writer raised by two scientists, I’ve not only been taught to question things to find out how they work, I think outside of the realm of “normal” a lot of times, and it’s nice to see awards for creative thinking—even if they are tongue-in-cheek.
Here are this year’s winners (from the Guardian newspaper):
Medicine: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, for their report in the British Medical Journal, “Sword Swallowing and its Side-Effects” [Who knew sword swallowing could hurt your throat?]
Physics: L. Mahadevan of Harvard and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Santiago University, Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled
Biology: Johanna van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, for a census of the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds
Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanilla essence from cow dung
Linguistics: Juant Manuel Toro, Josep Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Barcelona University, for showing that rats cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards
Literature: Glenda Browne of Australia, for her study of the word “the” and the problems it causes when indexing
Peace: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, for instigating research on a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other
Nutrition: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup
Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taiwan, for patenting a device that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them
Aviation: Patricia V Agostino, Santiago A Plano and Diego A Golombek of Argentina, for the discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters
Sparkly Stuff
I went to lunch with a friend from work this afternoon. We’re both the kind of people who can multitask while carrying on a conversation. So as she was talking (about our mutual obsession with Vincent d’Onofrio), I was filling in the tip amount and signing the credit card receipt.
Suddenly, I interrupted Lori with, “Ooh, the ink is sparkly!” Of course I immediately apologized for interrupting, adding, “I get distracted by sparkly stuff.”
Some of you who know me may find that statement somewhat odd. I dress casually—wearing jeans to work almost every day of the week; I wear only a few pieces of understated jewelry; I don’t drive a flashy car; and I’m not someone who thinks the person with the most “bling” on in the room is necessarily the most interesting.
After a little self-analysis, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not necessarily sparkly that distracts me so much as unexpected details. Who expects to be signing a credit card receipt at Red Lobster in aqua ink with glitter in it? But now I’m determined to find out if they make a pen with purple sparkly ink.
It’s this same flaw in my otherwise logical, focused mind that leads me to want to include all of the “sparkly” bits of research I come across—whether it’s how a Regency dinner party was served and what they ate, the minute details of a character’s costume, or using period-authentic nautical terminology, which none of my readers will understand.
I get distracted from the forward progress of the story by the “sparkly stuff.”
When I was in high school, my tenth grade English class coined a saying that stuck with us for the next two years: “That’s so brown ink.” This meant something was stupid, ridiculous, or beneath us. Why? Because when our teacher read the instructions for the standardized state assessment tests aloud to us, he found it amusing that only black or blue ink was acceptable. “As everyone knows,” he said, “only the uneducated use brown ink.”
But now, twenty years later, I ask: what’s wrong with brown ink? or purple? or green? or aqua with sparkles? Sure, they can be harder to read, don’t scan/copy well, and aren’t “standard.” But they sure are fun.
I guess what I’m saying is that the sparkly stuff, the brown ink, is wonderful . . . in its appropriate place. But too much sparkly stuff becomes overwhelming, too bright, too distracting.
So I’m going to go to Staples tonight and try to find that sparkly purple pen. Then the next time I’m working on revisions, I can mark all of the details that are there just because I got distracted by them and get rid of them.
Well, most of them, anyway.
What’s in Your Five?–Writing-Craft Books
I keep hearing about this phone plan where the customer can make as many calls as they want (“free”) to five designated people. I use my phone so rarely, this isn’t a draw for me. But I started thinking about top fives. Who would I have as the top five people I call most often on my phone? Let’s see . . . Mom, Dad (they only have cell phones, so no single number to reach both of them), my grandmother, my friend Pam, and my friend Corie. These are the people I speak to on the phone most often—and sometimes it’s only once a month. (We all love e-mail!)
So, I was sitting here tonight trying to figure out what to blog about, and I looked to my right and then to the shelf directly above my computer and I thought, Out of all these writing craft books, which would I rank as my top five? (Anyone dare to venture a guess as to what the #1 book will be???) So here they are, my five favorite books about the craft of writing (or what it means to be a writer):
5. On Writing by Stephen King. While I’ve never read a single one of his novels, and have really only enjoyed a few movies made from his stories (The Green Mile, Stand by Me, and The Shawshank Redemption), he has so many wonderful insights into what it means to be a writer that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this “memoir.”
- . . . write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you’re very lucky . . . more will want to do the former than the latter (pg 47).
4. The Christian Imagination, Leland Ryken, ed. This is a collection of essays that was assigned as a textbook for my senior-level literary criticism class in college. But lest that frighten you off, I will tell you that if this book had come to me in a different way, it still would have had a great impact on my life and how I view writing and the imaginative arts from a spiritual standpoint. The essays cover a myriad of topics, from literature to being a reader to being a writer and more. And it includes some great quotes about the topics from famous authors and literary critics.
- . . . in a sense, I know very little about how [Narnia] was born. That is, I don’t know where the pictures came from. And I don’t believe anyone knows exactly how he “makes things up.” Making up is a very mysterious thing. When you “have an idea,” could you tell anyone exactly how you thought of it? (C. S. Lewis, qtd. from Of Other Worlds, pg. 108)
3. Writing the Romantic Comedy, by Billy Mernit. I purchased this book my first semester of grad school, because one of the things I wanted to do was to add more humor to my writing. (Yes, can you believe that the person who now writes “Inspirational Fiction . . . with a Sense of Humor” didn’t have it a few years ago?) But the treasure I found in this book was discovering how to truly structure a romance—or any story really—in addition to the keys to characterization, plot building, pacing, and structuring conflict. I highly recommend this to any writer, whether your writing a romance or not, whether your story is humorous or not.
- A [writer’s] resistance to getting into the “personal stuff” is absurd. It’s got to be personal, if anyone’s going to care about your story, and theme is the arena where your personal experience, attitudes, and insights come into play. Experienced writers understand that what’s universal comes out of what’s most personal—out of a fiercely personal, passionate point of view. Just as we relate to characters who have strong wants, we related to writing that’s strongly felt (pg. 89).
2. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art, by Madeleine L’Engle. I’ve mentioned this book quite often. Again, it’s one that was assigned reading for an undergrad class, but I’m so glad it was. This is a volume I can pick up and open it to any spot and just start reading and glean some kind of inspiration from it. Yes, she does tend to get a little metaphysical sometimes, but as a fan of her stories and an admirer of her writing, I’m so glad she took the time to write down her thoughts about what it means to be a writer—especially now she’s no longer with us.
- When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist . . . When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens. . . . We must work every day, whether we feel like it or not, otherwise when it comes time to get out of the way and listen to the work, we will not be able to heed it (pg. 24).
1. Stein on Writing, by Sol Stein. This should not come as a surprise to anyone who’s read more than two or three entries on this blog. A former crit partner, Cindy Woodsmall, introduced me to this book by quoting from it in the crits she’d send back on my work. Finally, I had to just break down and buy the book—and I’m so glad I did. I’ve never read a single novel Sol Stein has written. But as far as writing-craft books go, this one is my bible. I will warn anyone who buys it not to try to sit down and read it from cover to cover. You’ll never make it through. Instead, go through the table of contents and choose a chapter on the subject you need the most help with and read that chapter. You’ll find it immensely helpful.
- . . . writers provide themselves with a monumental obstacle to achieving skill. Ballet dancers practice technique. Pianists wear down their black and white keys with hours of daily practice. Actors rehearse, and rehearse again. Painters perfect still-life objects at various angles, practice obtaining the best perspectives, experiment with color and texture, do sketches in preparation for oil. By practice one learns to use what one has understood. Only writers, it seems, expect to achieve some level of mastery without practice. . . . Life is short . . . the craft takes long to learn, the work is hard, but ah, when it is right, the writer’s triumph soars (pp. 12, 13).
Drawing My Writing
I’ve mentioned before that another area of creativity I enjoy is drawing. During the summers my sister and I spent in Baton Rouge with my grandparents, I used to sit for hours watching my grandfather draw and paint. I loved the smell of oil paints and the way that the images would take form under his hand—like seeing a story happening before my very eyes. He taught me quite a lot about appreciating shapes and images. And while I do use a little help in the form of existing images and carbon paper, the time I spend with pencil and paper sketching characters is very relaxing—and a great outlet for thinking about my stories even when I have writer’s block.
So I thought I would share a few of those drawings here. Some of them are the original pencil drawings, while others are some that I colorized on the computer.
Ashley and Robert. These are my two main characters from the “story” I wrote for about ten years. Even though I haven’t returned to this unfinished, massive manuscript (more than 200,000 words!), I do still think about these characters quite often.
The Five Girls. As Ashley and Robert’s story was waning, I was already starting to develop these five characters—five friends who grew up together and were moving into their late 20s/early 30s. A couple of them married early, but two of them, Bekka (far right) and Hannah (second from the left) became the main characters of my first two completed manuscripts.
Bekka & Andrew. Bekka (of the Five Girls above) and Andrew are the main characters of my first completed novel, What Matters Most.
Hannah & Stefan. I have drawn more images of these two characters than any others I’ve ever written about. I’m not sure if it’s because Hannah is the character who is most like me or if it’s because even though the manuscript (The Best Laid Plans) is complete, I never felt like I finished their story.
Kevin & Zarah. These are the main characters of my third complete manuscript, Love Remains, which was inspired by a “what if” situation that arose in learning a guy I worked with had been in the Army and stationed at White Sands (where my dad worked) my senior year of high school. Here’s another sketch of them.
Eomer & Lothiriel. I’ve mentioned before that the only true fan-fic I’ve ever written is the romance of my favorite LOTR character, Eomer. So here’s my idea of what Lothiriel, mentioned only in the Appendix, looks like.
Julia, William, Charlotte, Collin & Susan, Mdsm. Charles Lott. I have so many sketches of these characters, mostly for costume study—not only does it give me a good chance to study the different pieces/construction of their garments, but it gives me a record of the clothing I’ve given them, such as these two dresses for Julia.
Merry Monday–Great Movie Costumes
I never got around to posting this over the weekend, so we’ll just make it Merry Monday.
This was a really hard list to come up with, because there are so many movies I don’t have on DVD that I really like the costumes in. You will notice, no doubt, that all of these are either fantasy or period pieces—those, naturally, are the ones we notice the costumes in most, because what the characters are wearing isn’t anything like what we see on a day-to-day basis.
This is by no means a definitive list. Nor are they necessarily my “favorite” of all times. But these are the ones that came immediately to mind as I was thinking about this topic.
10. Elizabeth. With the sequel coming out soon, I decided it was time to rent this film, as it received so much critical acclaim. Well, I wasn’t overly impressed with the story—in fact, if I hadn’t been working on screen captures from several other DVDs on this list, I probably wouldn’t have watched it all the way through. But the costumes were beautiful.
9. Somewhere in Time. Time-travel stories always make interesting movies as it gives the filmmakers the opportunity to contrast “modern” day (in this case, 1980) with historic (late-Edwardian) costuming. They also used Christopher Reeve’s increasing level of dishevelment to show his downward spiral as he attempted to go back in time, and then at the end, as he attempted to return.
8. North & South (Jakes). When this miniseries premiered in the mid-1980s, it led to my love of the American Civil War. In Book 1 (North & South) and Book 2 (Love & War), costumes were used not only to contrast the different levels of society (the wealthy northern industrialists vs. the working class abolitionists; the plantation owners vs. the slaves), but also the effect of the war, especially on those in the south. And, whether blue or gray, there’s just something about a man in uniform . . .
7. Anna and the King. I mentioned movie this a while back when discussing settings. In addition to the settings, the costumes were wonderful—again using costume to show the difference between West (Anna and her child) and East (everyone in Siam).
6. Titanic. When this movie first came out, I was sewing much of my own wardrobe. I’ll never forget the proliferation of patterns for dresses based on the costumes from this movie. And, I’ve been on a late-Edwardian kick recently—the style is much like the Regency style, but with a lot more color and sparkle.
5. My Fair Lady. I don’t actually own this on DVD, but the costumes are so wonderful, I was able to find all these images online. In addition to the little black dress she wore in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, photos of Audrey Hepburn in the costumes from My Fair Lady are some of the most iconic images of her.
4. Much Ado About Nothing. No, this isn’t the version that most people are familiar with. This is the version that the BBC did in 1984. The sets weren’t great, but the costumes were beautiful.
3. Persuasion, Master & Commander, and the Hornblower series. These films help me out so much in visualizing the uniforms and costumes as I work on the Ransome series (even though these are all pre-1812, when the uniform codes changed slightly), so I had to do two images:
Able Seamen, Midshipmen, Marines, and Lieutenants
Commanders, Captains, Commodores, and Admirals
2. The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The images here hardly begin to show the attention to detail in the costumes. Especially with everything that’s shown in the behind-the-scenes features.
1. The Star Wars series. In the original three movies, each character has an iconic costume that we always associate them with. In the newer trilogy, there are so many costumes, it’s almost overwhelming. But they are worthy of the distinction I’ve given them here.
Honorable mentions go to: all of the BBC period pieces made since the mid-1990s including all of the Austen adaptations, all of the Jane Eyres, Jericho of Scotland Yard, Miss Marple, Bleak House, etc.; Portrait of a Lady, An Ideal Husband, Gosford Park and Age of Innocence; De Lovely and Pleasantville; Shakespeare in Love, Man in the Iron Mask, and Ever After; Gladiator, 300, Narnia, and The Chronicles of Riddick; and, of course, Pirates of the Caribbean.
Ready to WRITE–Engage!
What are the differences between a hobby, a job, and a career?
A hobby is something we do in our spare time—when all of our responsibilities are, for the moment, completed—for entertainment purposes. We pursue hobbies based out of our interests and talents, but they’re activities we do just for pleasure and relaxation.
A job, by definition, is a specific task or responsibility done by assignment and/or for pay—something we are expected or obligated to do. By connotation, a job is something that we do to pay the bills.
A career is, technically, another word for our job—but it’s a field, a specific occupation, we’ve pursued based on our interests, skills, and talents. It’s what we want our life’s work to be.
One of my hobbies recently has become crocheting. I also enjoy drawing, reading, and watching movies.
In 1992, when I dropped out of college, I had to get a full-time job. From then until 2006, I worked in four different jobs, the longest being ten years as the executive assistant/office manager of the retail advertising department at Nashville’s daily newspaper. I was good at my job, got a promotion, enjoyed some of the people I worked with, was involved in department- and company-wide committees/task forces, and was a “go-to” person when the publisher needed a PowerPoint presentation or when HR needed a department liaison. But it was just a job. Even with as long as I worked there, I knew it wasn’t my life’s work. I didn’t want to do it for the rest of my life—or even another five years! It allowed me to pay my bills and was, for the most part, flexible enough to allow me to finish college and grad school.
In May 2006, I started my career—the first step as a copy editor at a small publishing house. This job is the one that I look forward to doing. It fulfills me. Even when it’s at its most stressful, I’m willing to stick it out because this is what I’ve always dreamed of doing: working in the publishing industry. Getting books into readers’ hands.
So where does writing fit in?
Until 1989, I didn’t consider writing to be anything other than a hobby—a necessity, actually, to keep myself centered and sane. 🙂 Then, at LSU, I tried majoring in Creative Writing, thinking that would be my career path—either teaching or working in the publishing industry. But things didn’t go well, and I dropped out. Writing once again became a hobby as I moved into the “job” world. But the call to pursue a life-work wouldn’t leave me alone, so I went back to school. In that process, I discovered that both writing and becoming an editor were what I was being called to pursue as my career. I’ve succeeded in moving into the editor career . . . and I’m actively pursuing the writing career.
Which brings us to today’s letter . . .
WRITE
Effort. Writing isn’t easy. I’ve already discussed the importance of learning the craft, of studying and constantly working to improve the strength of our writing. At the conference last week, James Scott Bell said something I’d never heard put so succinctly: there are a lot of people who want to write, but there are a lot more who want to have written. They don’t want to put the time in to sit at the computer for hours and hours composing the story, then twice or three times as many hours editing and revising and critiquing. This is when everyone who wants to “be a writer” learns whether it’s truly their life’s work, a job, or just a hobby.
Enthusiasm. Whether you’re pursuing writing as a hobby or a career, I hope it never becomes just a job for you. Sure, there are going to be some times when we don’t feel like writing, but to follow the “write every day” advice, we force ourselves to do it. But we shouldn’t approach it with the attitude of, “I have to write one thousand words today.” We should try to develop the attitude of, “Wow, I get to do what I love doing today, and I’m going to have fun doing it!” If you’ve lost your enthusiasm for writing, if it’s become just a job, a responsibility, maybe it’s time to take a break from it. I did this after completing my second complete manuscript. I finished it in early November 2002 and all through the holidays, I not only didn’t want to write, I wasn’t sure if I would write again for a long time. Then, on December 30, I was scheduled for an MRI. As I lay in the tube listening to greatest-hits-of-the-eighties radio station trying not to think about the close quarters, I was suddenly developing the entire plot structure for a new novel in my head. As soon as I got home, I committed the synopsis to paper and started writing. I completed that manuscript in four months—while working full time and taking three undergrad classes. If you’ve lost your enthusiasm, please step back from writing. Take a break. Refresh yourself mentally and spiritually. Pursue some other interests for a while. Don’t let writing become just a job.
Engage! On Star Trek: The Next Generation, this is what Captain Picard always said when he wanted the pilot to start the engines and go. This is what I now say to you: ENGAGE! Go write. Go read a book on craft. Go get your proposal sent out to that editor who requested it at the conference. Go read a book in the genre you want to be published in. Go critique those chapters from your crit partner. Go find out why you have a passion for writing and pursue it with every fiber of your being.
KayeDacus.com 