Wrestling a Tornado: Overcoming Writing Challenges Read online

  I have had several ideas given to me on a silver platter simply by walking around and processing fairly mundane daily events and sightings in my life.

  When I wrote “A Dream Gone Wrong,” which was first published in the magazine Old Trout, I was reading a lot of Poe and Emily Dickinson while I was working on my tax returns.

  After weeks of simmering in my mind, words and images became so strong and powerful that I felt compelled to sit down and write. It took about fifteen minutes to get it down on paper.

  A poem was born. “A Dream Gone Wrong” was soon published.

  Four years later, I eliminated one of its verses entirely and tweaked several sentences in the first verse before submitting it to an online magazine. The magazine also accepted my poem for publication. Every poem that I write has a different growth and completion pattern. They change shape as I learn and grow.

  I think that struggling writers can relate to these two verses in “A Dream Gone Wrong:”

  She filled out code 711510

  on IRS tax form 1040 C

  that read: “If line three records a profit

  the IRS agrees

  that your dream has come true

  with taxes due by April 15

  just as the tiny baby buds on trees

  are just about ready to bloom.

  If line three equals zero

  Emily, dear friend

  you are declared a fraud

  according to your records,

  it’s time to suspect that your dream

  has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

  Do you equate money with writing success? I love to see writers and artists do well financially but there is danger in measuring success with money. For a large part of my writing journey, I had been basically broke on purpose because finding the time to write was more important to me than financial success. Time was my most precious possession because it takes time to develop as a writer. How much time are you willing to devote to your writing? How much money does your writing have to generate before you feel successful? Do you appreciate the time that you have or are you wasting it instead of using it to write? Are you caught up in the consumer culture? If you are spending your time buying things that you want instead of paying attention to what you need to do in terms of writing success you are not going to make much progress.

  Timing Is Almost Everything

  Photography has taught me a lot about how important it is to quickly respond to inspiration whenever and wherever it taps you on the shoulder. When I was living in Nashville, I was continually learning about the different plants and flowers that were native to the region.

  As I walked through a field one day, I spotted a cluster of dainty mystery plants sprouting huge soft downy globes of milky white seeds perched high atop long slender deep green stems. I experienced my usual “wished I’d brought my camera along” angst and thought about returning to photograph them the next day.

  Fast forward to the next day. I grabbed my camera and headed out to photograph the striking plants. Huh? The wind had beaten me to them. The tiny white seeds comprising those dandy over-sized spheres had been wildly scattered by nature’s firm hand. Spare strands of filmy translucent wisps remained intact but the bare plants that had been artfully revised by nature looked nothing like the striking delicate beauties that I glimpsed the other day.

  Though similar opportunities would present themselves in the future, I knew that the sunlight would never again shed light on those downy white blooms in exactly the same manner. Dozens of other changes would occur over time. The moment had passed. A creative opportunity had been snatched from my grasp.

  Lesson learned. What about you? Have you ever let a creative opportunity slip through your hands because you hesitated when you should have acted?

  What Doesn’t Kill You Can Make You Bitter or Better

  Internal motivation is what you need to keep going when external motivations such as financial compensation or critical acclaim is lacking. A small sampling of talented and accomplished writers who have had their work rejected includes:

  • William Saroyan tops the list at an unbelievable 7,000 rejection slips!

  • Marcel Proust

  • William Faulkner

  • Beatrix Potter

  • J.K. Rowling

  • Stephen King

  • John Grisham

  And finally, isn’t it comforting to learn the Margaret Mitchell’s classic tale Gone with the Wind was rejected almost 40 times before it was accepted?

  Rejection can be good for you. Use it to learn about error patterns that keep cropping up. If you send your manuscript to several publishers and there is a consensus amongst them regarding your work, it is prudent to listen to what they are telling you.

  Acceptance Letters Are Not Created Equal

  They are all good, of course, but some are more interesting than others. My most unusual acceptance letter was written on the back of a photograph featuring a rear view of a nude and completely tattooed woman who just happened to be the magazine’s editor. The publication was a poetry magazine that I had learned about in Poet’s Market.

  Reflect and Review

  The Situation:

  You’ve been writing for a few years and your work remains unpublished. Should you give up?

  The Solution:

  If early acknowledgment is essential to success in a creative field, then Vincent Willem van Gogh should have given up on painting because he only sold one painting in his lifetime even though his brother, Theo, was an art dealer.

  Run (or walk or crawl) your own race. Don’t compete with other writers. Give yourself at least five years to sift through all of the junk you need to scribble in order to get to the gems you want to develop. One of my favorite books on creativity and the will to create is Van Gogh’s Diary: The Artist’s Life in his Own Words and Art. I recommend it to writers who are feeling dejected and unmotivated. Van Gogh’s tenacity and will to create art despite external and internal turmoil, financial instability and lack of critical recognition is truly inspiring.

  Keep writing as long as writing is important to you.

  Writing & Revising

  How do you find your best genre? It’s essentially a process of elimination. After crashing and burning while engaged in my discovery process, I settled on one or two genres where I felt that I was writing to my strength instead of my weakness.

  Where do you find story ideas? Where don’t you find story ideas? They are everywhere. Observe what people are wearing, doing, eating and SAYING to one another. You might also want to pay attention to what they are not saying because that’s just as important.

  Red Is for Rewrite

  What should you look for when you whip out your red (or blue or green) pen and revise? Everything is important. Yes, it’s true that your ideas drive the story but you must also tweak sentence structure and proofread for typos, grammatical errors and poor spelling.

  Your story needs vigor. Does it have energy or are there passages that are dead and need to be weeded out? Are you only building visual images? What about sound? What about smell? Did you forget that humans smell, feel, hear and taste things?

  It can take two, ten, or 50 drafts before you shape your writing into acceptable form.

  During an interview published in The Paris Review (Spring 1958, No. 18) Ernest Hemingway confided to George Plimpton: “I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.”

  Revise carefully. Good writing is all about balance. There are times when a quest for perfection can suck the life out of a draft because perfection means different things to different people. Perfection does not mean that your draft is vanilla and bland. It needs bite. B-0-R-I-N-G is the deadliest writing sin. In some cases, revision might mean that you’ve taken out vivid and interesting passages because you are afraid of offending people. Are you draining the juice that makes your story succulent? That’s not revision. That’s censorship. />
  There are times when you have to stop revising. When I wrote literary reports in college there were times when I revised my drafts so often that when the paper came due I felt as if I was a hauling a huge boulder into class. What should have been a pleasure had become a pain and I felt as if I had an albatross around my neck. I couldn’t wait to fling my assignment—thesis and all— at the professor so that I could feel free to enjoy literature again. I actually felt lighter after I handed in my assignment.

  Tips for Writing and Revision

  Maintain your focus. Zero in on one major glaring writing problem and fix it before you start working on secondary problems.

  Slow Cook It. Schedule in at least one day of rest between major revisions so that you are feeling fresh and focused when you look at the new draft.

  Master your craft. Be certain that you understand the proper format and structure of works in the genre you are writing in. Poets should understand the difference between sonnets, triolet (TREE-o-LAY), haiku, ballads, epistles, and other forms of poetry just as screenwriters must understand the proper formatting of a screenplay. A user-friendly browser-based free scriptwriting software program is Raw Scripts. It is available at: http://www.rawscripts.com/. I’ve used it and I think it’s one of the most accessible scriptwriting programs that I’ve tried and I’ve tried quite a few of them.

  Tape it. Reading and recording passages on your tape recorder allows you to hear your mistakes. Listening to your writing instead of viewing it on the page can reveal weak areas that you might have missed while rewriting a passage the usual way. This technique is especially effective when you are working on dialogue because you will hear if your dialogue sounds natural or if it sounds stilted, artificial, and forced.

  Hire a Pro. I had a positive experience using the volunteer manuscript criticism service of The National Writers Association (NWA) when I first started writing. NWA allows its members to submit up to three manuscripts per year for a token fee of $10.00 each.

  Reflect and Review

  The Situation:

  You proofread and edit your work during the initial writing process.

  The Solution:

  Do you realize that what you are doing is stifling your creativity and wasting time better spent creating? I think the best solution is to find a competent person to proofread all of your first drafts so that you eliminate that task completely from your workload and feel free to focus solely on writing. Delegate the proofreading and move on with your writing journey.

  Playing with Words

  Smart people keep a dictionary close by. The more extensive your vocabulary is, the more interesting and layered your writing will become. New words are born every day! Embrace them. They are shiny new toys for you to use. Keep your writing fresh by getting acquainted with those newly coined gems as you continue to find new uses for the old and reliable workhorses.

  If you prefer to use online dictionaries and other references, a good site to explore is refdesk.com because it contains a diverse group of reference sources such as online dictionaries, links to search engines, news headlines, facts of the day and other resources.

  Be certain that each word earns its daily bread and is productive. Using ten words instead of five to say exactly the same thing makes your writing fat and flabby. Keep it clean and lean. If you choose the right word to describe a person, place, or thing, your writing will be concise and focused. You won’t have to keep adding an exorbitant amount of words to make your weak description stronger.

  Unblocking the Block

  It’s lethal and horrible. Writer’s block makes me want to fill the #!!!### white space and write “I am a fraud” over and over again. Here is a peek at a recent conversation with my willful Muse:

  “Muse? Muse? MUSE! Where are you? It’s well past noon. Are you still asleep?

  "Chill. Why don’t you just jot down your rant about how Red Bull should be sold in five-gallon containers? That’s pretty amusing.”

  “Hilarious. I can see that I am wasting my time. I am feeling a bit parched. Can you fetch me a can of Red Bull? Is it too early for absinthe?”

  “You are creative. Close your eyes. Now imagine you have the Green Fairy by its wings.”

  “Help!”

  If your Muse is like mine, I am guessing that he or she is not always there when you are ready to write. Then, WHAM! Guess what? The Muse is a tornado and you are going to get down and dirty with it as long as you continue to write.

  You cannot control a tornado so what is the use? Don’t give up. I can teach you a few tricks.

  Tips for Breaking the Block

  Ask for help from a stranger. No, I did not say “strange person” although strange people can be helpful at times, especially when you are looking for a character to write about.

  When you are really stuck you might want to reach out to a writing professional who is not a relative or friend because you will take the feedback less personally. Nurturing constructive feedback from a qualified stranger can really get the writing wheels rolling again.

  Speedwriting at 80-Miles Per Hour

  One of the best ways to get unblocked or to get started writing is to freewrite. The Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines freewriting as “automatic writing.” It is a pre-writing stream-of-consciousness technique in which you write very fast without censoring your writing and do not stop writing until the time limit is up. Writer Natalie Goldberg is my favorite timed writing guru. You should read her books on writing if want to use this pre-writing technique in your daily practice because she has a great approach to using this tool to generate fresh material.

  Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life by Natalie Goldberg really changed my entire perspective on writing practice. It is a great book choice for writers interested in an offbeat approach to writing.

  If you need prompts to get you started writing, you can always check out Toasted Cheese’s monthly writing prompt calendar at http://www.toasted-cheese.com.

  Some writers do not benefit from freewriting practice and really hate it. That’s okay. I hate it when people try to fit me into a box and I do not want to fit you into one either. Do not fight the feeling and do not feel that you have to do something you do not want to do just because other writers do it. If you have given freewriting a fair trial of at least 30 days of continual practice and it does not contribute to your writing in a positive way, then you should to seek out alternative methods.

  You might also want to consider using clustering or brainstorming techniques instead. Creating lists of related words or thoughts or organizing your ideas into an outline can also be helpful when you are feeling blocked.

  Write down potential themes and then jot down twenty words or ideas related to those themes and see where it leads you.

  Breaking Up

  Sometimes, it is best to walk away and do something else. I grab my camera when I am tired of writing and wish to shift gears by hunting down interesting captures. Shifting gear releases stress and I return to my writing feeling refreshed and receptive to the process. If you know how to draw, you might want to use your visual images to brainstorm ideas or create characters and settings that you can “see” in your mind and then translate the sharpest of those visual images into words.

  Inspiration can also come from art, music, fashion, films, nature and other interests. As you expand and explore interesting hobbies and activities, your writing will also expand in scope. A great place to find interesting words, names, and ideas is in the newspaper. For example, I recently read a story about a junkie who died of an overdose while residing at a seedy motel in New York. The motel was named The Paradise Motel. Isn’t that ironic?

  It is a good idea to keep notepads around so that you can jot down interesting names and ideas when you stumble upon them. You never know when you are going to need to use those unexpected gems!

  If you’re feeling completely lost you can also work your way out of writer’s block by asking questions about what you don’t know about
your topic and writing about what you do know about it. Keeping your focus on your topic will help you to stay on track even if you don’t know where you’re going at the moment. If you saturate your mind with details about your topic you will eventually work your way out of the forest.

  Finally, I think that there are times when you are just burnt out on writing and need to take a break for a few days or even a few weeks. It’s okay to take an extended break as long as you set a definite date to return to your regular writing schedule when your batteries are recharged.

  Other Ways to Break the Block:

  • Rest. You’re probably just tired

  • Read. The dictionary is a good start.

  • Listen to music.

  • Take a long walk.

  Circle the Wagons

  If you feel the need for feedback and support you might want to befriend other writers for feedback and possible collaboration on My Writer’s Circle: www.mywriterscircle.com.

  I have always gleaned a lot of useful and motivating information from Lee Silber's books on creativity and from his website. I highly recommend that you visit his website to sign up for his free newsletter: http://www.leesilber.com. You might also want to check out Teddy Bart’s website. Teddy’s insightful blog posts are on-target and uplifting: http://talentsurvivalguide.com.

  The Literary Life

  You do read daily, don’t you? I am talking about a book, magazine, newspaper, a blog, or anything in print. Try to remain open to reading just about ANYTHING that crosses your path! Believe it or not, a menu once served as a Muse for one of my poems.