A Writer’s Diary

Two of the profs I share an office with on Monday and Wednesday are also writers. One’s a young poet with a first book almost completed and the other’s maybe about my age. She’s writing a novel, too. We were talking the other day about why we would do such a thing as write when it’s so difficult to find the time, and almost impossible to be well published. We agreed it was a compulsion, not a choice.

I’ve always wondered if writing is a sign of a mental problem–for me specifically, not for other writers. I mean, really, why would I want to do something for which I am routinely rejected? And for so long? I’ve been writing for 40 years. Trying to publish a novel for 30 years. Well, off and on, between kids and marriages and degrees and teaching jobs, but still. Why haven’t I given up?

Any sane person would have let it go by now. At least that’s what I tend to believe in my bleaker moments. And then this morning I came across a passage in Thoughts Without a Thinker. Turns out that any kind of creative act helps us transcend mere ego. Channeling emotion into art helps us to “evoke a state of being in which self-consciousness is temporarily relinquished.”

Creative types, says Buddhist and M.D. Mark Epstein, routinely “dissolve into the act of creation.” Since Epstein is a psychiatrist, I think what he’s saying here is that I’m not crazy. When I’m writing, I’m actually doing something worthwhile. For my soul, if not my wallet.

Harlequin’s category romances have specific word lengths, different for each category. They like writers to adhere pretty much to those standards. And they count actual words, not 250 times number of ms. pages like some other publishers.

The series I’m targeting wants 55,000 words. I have 50,000 as of this morning. What I can’t figure out is if I already added 5000 words (I have been tracking) and I needed 7000, why am I still 5000 short? Admittedly I am not a math whiz, but this is ridiculous. I have to stop cutting!

It’s okay. I can still meet my March 16 goal of 7000 words and a revised ms. It’s just that I might have to revise it again, looking for any opportunity to enrich the love story so I can plump it up by another several thousand words. People tend to think writing romance, especially category romance, is easy, but trust me, it’s not. It’s fun, and it’s an exciting challenge, but it’s not easy.

Being an Aries, I am not a patient person. I like things done yesterday. For example, the WIP. But life has a way of slowing the impatient down, even when we really want to speed up. I can only hope the universe knows what it’s doing. After all, I am not getting any younger…

Two things slowed my work on the WIP down the last few months: work and my back. I’m dealing with it, but wow have I had to practice patience, sometimes on a minute by minute basis. I am enjoying my classes, and fitting daily exercise into my schedule is long overdue, but it would be nice if the day would just cooperate and have more hours in it.

And yet. I’m getting it done. Little by little, I’m whittling away at the WIP. 1,420 words today! Finally, I am at the part in the ms. where I’m adding those scenes I wrote last weekend. So the words will be piling up more quickly after this.

One of the courses I’m teaching this term is British Literature. Right now we’re with the Victorians. The Norton Anthology doesn’t have Dickens’ novels, so I’m out of luck there, but I knew I needed to teach Darwin and reading him made me think about the end of century outpouring of gothic horror novels that we still reference today.

Bram Stoker’s vampires are still hugely popular. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein had a good hundred year run. And although Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson is the only one of these three in my text, it was the book that sparked the idea to do a lecture on Monster Lit.

Not sure but think I just coined a term. Bit irreverent, but I like it. 

There had to be a connection between Darwin and all those monster novels–I could sense it. Just told that the bible is not the final word on the meaning of life, that in fact life is a random system of chance and struggle, how would writers of the time feel? Put the turning of a century in there, plus the French and Industrial revolutions, the new fields of geology and astronomy, and people were way overwhelmed. Terrified, even.

So what’s a writer to do?

Terrify them more. Write out their worst nightmares. Take the idea of evolution and turn it upside down, make it devolve. Recognizing our deepest fears, turning them into stories, works on a gut level. People loved those books, still do. I think my Monster Lit lecture will be a hit. Anyway, I’m having fun working on it.

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Meanwhile, the revisions are moving along too. I’m pretty sure I’ll make my deadline of March 16. And then it will be time to query.

This weekend, I wrote 25 pages of longhand, pretty much finishing off the book, I hope. Now it’s just the typing that remains. Wish I had a secretary…

Read through my WIP this morning again and figured a few things out. And it’s only 9:30! Of course I woke up at 3 a.m. and what else are you gonna do at that time??

As I suspected, I’m not going to be adding 7000 words by filling in little scene details. Yesterday, out of 10 pages, I got 100 new words. Still, this ms. did need one more pass. It reads smoother now. And I found a couple of holes where I can write real scenes, good scenes, that just might get me my 6000 or so words still needed.

Let’s see, 250 words a page divided by 6000. 24 pages or so. One of the holes could be a chapter. The other one is only going to be a 4-5 page scene. Okay. Can do. And the best part? I am going to write those babies in longhand first. Got a new notebook just ready to roll.

According to my horoscope, this Saturday will be my luckiest day of the year. I can’t imagine how. I have a ton of schoolwork–tests and papers to grade, lectures to organize. Al will be away visiting his folks. So I’ll be home alone, buried in work.

How is this lucky?

In a perfectly ordinary way, I can see that I live a lucky life. I love my husband, like my job, and am passionate about my particular creative outlet. Saturday, I’ll find time to write. That’s lucky right there.

I believe we make our own luck. We find the time to write or we don’t. We tell our stories or stay silent. When opportunity knocks, we let it in the door.

In the last few months, I’ve had some interesting opportunities with my writing life. Contests come to me through writer’s groups I’ve joined, and each time, I have the perfect entry. This latest competition is a members-only thing for DWW. I have a couple of things already written I’d love to submit. There isn’t even an entry fee. Why wouldn’t I send my work out there?

Maybe entering these contests is a way to help myself get lucky. Then again, maybe I should buy a lottery ticket, just to cover all the bases.

300 words today. But they were good words, necessary words. My critique group this weekend helped me see where I need to expand on scenes already written. They couldn’t get a picture of my hero. I had so much dialogue but very little description of how my heroine sees him. Which is crucial, because how she sees him shows why she’s attracted to him.

So after realizing they were right, and that I’d have to go back to a scene I’d already checked off my list was a bit discouraging given my self-imposed deadline of March 16. But today I finally did it, with a little help from Eckhart Tolle.

Tolle says that the main thing in life is to live fully in the moment, every moment, so that spirit can express itself through you. He calls it “consciousness” but same thing. What is it that is holy and sacred inside of me that wants to be born anew every minute of the day? That’s the purpose of this life, to be a conduit for whatever it is inside that wants to express itself. Secondary to the soul’s purpose are personal goals.

I realized this morning (after a rude student sort of ruined my day yesterday, which is what made me reach for Tolle in the first place) that my soul, my consciousness, my spirit, wants to write. It doesn’t have a deadline. It wants to write the best possible story it can, right now. And so, I did it. I sat at my desk with notes in hand and made those changes, adding a mere 300 words. But the soul, right now, is satisfied.

“What I loved to do was to read, to write, and to make books–really, if I was honest, to the exclusion of practically any other activity.”

Another quote from Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project got me thinking about making books. I keep meaning to make myself a hard copy of Paradise Fields. According to Rubin, it takes 20 minutes on Lulu. Feels these days like I really don’t have 20 minutes to spare. Maybe at spring break.

Been moving ahead on the other book project. Slowly. There’s this thing at my writing group where we write out a writing goal we want to meet in a month. You put in a buck and if you meet your goal, you win the pot. (If more than one person meets their goal, they draw names.) I never signed up for this before. The money is not huge, maybe $5 or $10 at the most. And I am good with self-imposed deadlines.

But this month, I thought, what the hell, and I wrote out: “Add 7000 words, finish revision.”

It was only after the meeting that I realized I’d have my spring break the week before our next meeting, which will help me meet my goals. Although I am working steadily, I have only added about 700 new words. I probably added more, but I took some other ones out. And so it goes.

“If you can’t get out of it, get into it.” Great quote from The Happiness Project that feels like the story of my life right now.

I recently got out of two huge time commitments: I resigned as secretary to the board of my writer’s group and I quit my twice-monthly book club. Why? Mostly because I can’t quit my job, I don’t want to quit writing, and I had to find time to really “get into” both.

Then there’s physical therapy, vegetarian cooking, yoga and my not-so-secret pleasure: reading. With my lit heavy teaching schedule (Keats this week! And Alice Munro!) I just couldnt’ fit in the book club’s reading choices. Not if I wanted to read for pleasure, books I choose just for me. Like The Happiness Project and Becoming Jane Eyre.

BJE is the best book I’ve read this year. As a writer who always wonders where other writers’ inspiration comes from, I loved Sheila Kohler’s take on the Brontes, especially Charlotte. And I wouldn’t have had time to read it if I’d tried to keep up with my book group.

I didn’t quit all my groups. I still have my romance writer’s group once a month. And my small critique group once a month. Also, I didn’t quit DWW, just resigned from the board. All so that I could clear the decks and get this final polish finished. Worked on the first chapter today. Another chapter tomorrow.

Yesterday I figured out a couple of things I need to do to get my 7000 words. (I got 1000 from the expanded love scene). First, I need to deepen and expand my main characters’ encounters. Not just the love scenes, but any scene I can exploit to show them getting closer. I also figured out (from my study of Jan Hudson’s structure) that I can add a bit more from the hero’s POV. Also add a bit more of the family thread. 

Giving myself six weeks to do this final revision. Meanwhile, new book ideas are knocking on that door in my mind marked “story.”