A Writer's Diary

I’ve been studying astrology this summer, learning how to read my birth chart, which I had drawn up  a few years ago at one of those computerized sites. The site spit out a reading along with the chart, but I’ve heard those can be impersonal and not exactly on target. The best person to read a birth chart is the person who was born at the moment those stars were in place.

So I’ve been memorizing glyphs and discovering my planets and houses and aspects and now, finally, I am writing out a full report on what the stars say about me. I’m synthesizing all the information (there is a ton of it) into a big picture. You would not believe how accurately the stars spell out the major events of my life. 

But this is a little bit beside the point I want to make. Which is, why am I doing this? What do I have to gain from it? How will it help my writing project? And before today I had to admit that this little hobby would not influence or help my writing in any way. At least not this story. Maybe in the future I’ll have a character who is an astrologer, but nobody like that is knocking on the door of my imagination right now.

Then, while writing my morning’s 1000 words, I found myself using the language of astrology in a long passage. I usually have trouble with love scenes, but these fresh metaphors allowed the scene to practically write itself. Must be Venus in my fifth house, which, for those of you not into astrology, is the house of joy in creating.

One of the most profound things I read this summer was a little comment about thinking: “You are not your thoughts.”

Understanding that idea freed me from years of needless suffering. Because I always assumed that yes, of course I was my thoughts, and therefore my thoughts reflected who I was and my reality. And why is that bad? Because I think some horrible thoughts sometimes. Especially at three a.m.

Or when I’m in the middle of a first draft.

Some random negative thoughts I’ve had lately about my WIP:

This is crap.

You aren’t a real writer.

You’ll never make it.

You don’t have what it takes.

You’re fucking this up.

Boy are you going to have a lot of revising to do.

This is the shittiest shitty first draft ever.

You will never be able to write to the standards of Harlequin so just quit trying.

And so on.

Before I understood that I am not my thoughts, I would have believed all that stuff. I would have soldiered on, because I have to write no matter what, no matter if I am the worst writer on the planet. But I would have been shaken. I would have doubted myself and this path I have chosen.

But now? I know they’re just thoughts, and I am not my thoughts. Thoughts can be helpful or harmful, and since I am not my thoughts, I can just let the bad ones go. I don’t have to own them any more than I have to keep the dirt of the day on me. I can take a shower. I can change my thoughts.   

In order to believe in the profound logic of “you are not your thoughts” there has to first be a belief that we are more than our physical bodies. I’m not necessarily talking God here, not as the world defines Her anyway. But I believe I have a spirit, a soul, a core light shining inside that is connected to everything else that exists. I believe it it greater and smarter and wiser and kinder and more loving than plain old “me.” I believe it guides me, or tries to when I’m not being stubborn and doing my human thing of making mistakes and suffering and going after fleeting pleasures.

So, there is a sort of faith involved in accepting that I am not my thoughts. That I am especially not my negative thoughts. But that’s okay, because I have faith. And even that’s not something I always had. But after years of meditating and yoga and fine-tuning my intuition, I believe. I have faith.

And faith keeps me writing those 1000 words a day no matter what thoughts pop up to stop me.

Was pretty simple to upload Paradise Fields into a thumb drive and take it over to Fed Ex. The guy there was so out of his depth with poetry chapbooks. He made me a sample copy and it was, you know, not normal. (Sort of like me.) I could have taken it home and worked on it and fixed all the little things that made it not perfect, but I just got a crazy rush of feeling and said “This is great, thank you. How much for 25 copies?”

And so it was done. For under a hundred bucks. Imperfections, irregularities, and all. This is such a personal little book for me. And I’m so pleased that I went ahead and did it. And I got to use the picture of the moon Tim took last year in Dallas for the back cover, which was especially sweet because Mike’s pic of the African moon is on the front cover.

It’s gorgeous and sunny outside. This morning, Al and I sat on the patio and had a cup of coffee for the first time since last fall. I can report that the Kindle is as easy to read in the sun as it is in the house;-)  

I’ve been in such a good mood all day. This morning I realized the scene I accidentally deleted yesterday was too long anyway…rewrote it this morning and lost half the exposition. It’s better now.

Also got arty and made a new story collage. It’s hanging right above my desk and I am in love with it. Got some new story info, too.

Last week, I bought a new notebook. The kind I use to draft novels. I wasn’t sure why I was buying it, because no new story was knocking on the writer door in my head. But the impulse would not be denied. After some internal discussion, I’d passed the chocolate Easter bunny display without putting any of them into my cart, but when I got to the stationary aisle, I couldn’t pass up that notebook.

Okay, fine, I thought, and tossed it in, even though I have other things I need to be doing with my writing time right now. Polishing a synopsis. Querying agents. Revising a chapter and another book. And morning pages have been serving me well. I’ve still got room in THAT notebook. It’s just that…I wanted to write something new.

I only realized this after the notebook sat on my desk prompting me for a few days. I haven’t written a start-from-scratch book in a really long time, November of 2008. I finished that book (Traveling Girl) last June ’09. Since then, I’ve stripped and substantially revised two books. And then revised them some more. And now it’s time to send them out. I’ve got a third that just needs a little bit of attention and then it will be ready, too.

But I’m tired of revising. I need a new project and the writer inside opened her door and grabbed that notebook, even  as dutiful me went about my everyday chores. 

What would I write about? I asked the notebook after it sat reproachfully on my desk for a few days. Then I remembered… I’d had a tiny seed of an idea a few months ago, written it down, and tacked it to my bulletin board. Couldn’t remember what the idea had been, so I checked the note: “Woman stuck in snowstorm” was all it said, but as I read those words I saw my main character. I saw her dilemma. I picked up the new notebook and wrote the first scene.

Then, I had to get ready for work. As I packed books into my bag, I thought of the next scene. I saw it like a movie reel. I was almost late to class because I had to run to my desk to make notes. In school, as I walked from one class to another, I got a third scene. It made my heart beat faster. Really? This was my new story? I liked it!

I’ve got three characters, conflict, setting. This all happened overnight. I can’t quite believe it. I’m writing  a new story, and all it took to get me started was a blank notebook.

While taking a mini-break from the WIP, I kept writing daily, filling (so far) two 70 page notebooks. Personal journaling was the first kind of expressive writing I tried, and exploring my place in the world has always been a huge part of why I love to write. Writing doesn’t just allow me to vent, it also teaches me stuff.

I’m in this earth school to learn, and the best way I know how to do this is by writing out the lessons. In poetry, in stories, and sometimes, in concentrated programs designed to heal the body, clear the mind and soothe the soul.

In late December, my back started bothering me. In late January, as it got progressively worse, I finally went to the doctor. The news was not good, looks like its permanent damage to a disk, but my writing program (along with my doctor’s advice) helped me zero in on what I need to change to lift the physical pain. What and also HOW. Amazingly, I’m clearing away ingrained habits to make way for better alternatives.

Change is so difficult for me. Particularly when I’m in physical pain, I tend to want to curl up and go into a sugar coma while watching back to back episodes of The Good Wife. But with this new writing commitment, making physical changes in the way I cope with pain is just one part of my evolution. I’m also getting emotional and spiritual support and guidance.

Every time I decide to do some deep personal work, I’m amazed at how much junk my ego throws in my way every single day that I just usually don’t even recognize. This time is no exception, and none of it would be happening without the writing, which is not meant to ever be seen by anyone but me.

What a reversal in attitude from my usual “need to get this novel published” mentality. 

Sure, publication would be nice. It would  be great to win a contest, snag an agent, find an editor who loves my work. But even without all those worldly rewards, I am just so happy to be writing. It heals my life, inside and out, every single day.

One of the pleasures of growing older as a writer is finally being able to make sense of why I do it at all. Finally I see the pattern and the meaning, although the pattern resembles one of those roundabouts they keep designing for intersections and the meaning is less shiny than I’d imagined.

I once believed a great destiny awaited me as a writer: wealth and fame, or at least a reason to quit my day job. I thought my work would, like a Jane Austen novel, make people laugh and think about stuff and admit that domestic life and romance are utterly fascinating.

That didn’t happen.

It doesn’t happen to the majority of writers, but even after I learned this hard lesson I persisted well past the point of reason with a firm belief that eventually I would publish my books. Maybe not to great acclaim. Maybe not to the tune of a living wage. But still, I could publish a book. It happens all the time, to many, many writers. Why not me?

Eventually, I did publish a book. Not the book I thought I’d publish. Not in the genre I adored, not in any of the ways I’d imagined it would happen. But it did happen—and for one reason alone. Me. I did it. I made my writing dreams come true by sheer force of will and determination. Oh, and hard work.

So my pattern has been to keep going even when it seemed like I’d never stop circling the same old roundabout and the meaning is that if I pay attention to when I should yield and when I should move through, I always see something new.

This probably has something to do with the absolutely gorgeous and note-perfect Unaccustomed Earth, but I have an idea, a whole plot really, perfectly formed in my head, for my next writing project. A short story, hence the relationship to Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest collection, which I just finished this morning. 

Am always surprised when, at the end of one writing project, the next one starts to float into my head. Happens every single time. So good thing I have a rough outline figured out about how to do the “murderer revealed” scenes. I finally got the idea at the end of typing in the last notebook. I’m done with notebooks. I know the rest of the story. Now I just have to type it into the computer. This weekend will be a good time to make some serious progress as Al is out of town, visiting his parents.

And then Traveling Girl will go into a drawer to cool off and I will be on to my new story. Now that it’s clear I’m going to write it, I realize I’ve been thinking about it for a few months now. Considering and discarding the idea of putting it on paper. I’ve decided. I’m going to write it.

There’s a point I love in writing just about anything, but especially when writing a novel–when something important to the story, something that changes the story and ups the stakes, something that’s been floating around in the unconscious part of my brain for weeks, breaks through into full consciousness.

That happened today. Yesterday, I had my pen in hand and the sentence that started this big revelation came to mind, but instead, I thought “No, that’s not how the plot needs to go.” It was a sentence that came fully formed, based on one of those images I cut from magazines last week.

That idea, from the image, was still in my head this morning, so I thought about it a little bit more. And after a couple of minutes, even though I’d already written another scene where this one would go, I wrote it down anyway. From partly conscious but ignored to fully aware to the page.

And suddenly there’s a whole other layer of story to work with, and I see how it will move the plot forward, how it will help develop and challenge the characters, how it will reinforce conflict and theme. It’s so fun when this happens, because it lets me actually see the way I receive story. The key is to be open to everything and not be too wedded to any idea of plot that’s already there.

One thing I forgot to say yesterday is that all that hard work I did a few years ago not only paid off with 2008 writing income, but that I expect the rewards to continue for years to come. We writers only have to pay a certain amount of dues before we reap the benefits. For anyone spending a good chunk of years putting in the writing hours and seeing no payment, it helps to know that what seems like working for free does eventually earn income.

Because of contacts I made and writing I did years ago, I have two ongoing and steady sources of writing income.  I expect these sources to continue to earn for me years down the line. Any writer can work to set up a similar situation by simply landing a staff magazine job and writing a book.

(Okay, not simply. I said it was hard work. Really hard work.)

I know I make it sound easy, but in truth, I worked long and hard for both of those things to happen. Now that they have, I can afford to take things a little easier.

The first source of income is my steady Publishers Weekly paycheck, the second is book sales. In addition to those sources of income, I’m still being paid for public speaking commitments set up to support my book.

I really believe that all the pitches I made, all the queries I wrote, all the writing schemes I hatched, every bit of it helped me to get where I am today. Even if the editor said no, even if I never landed the contract or won the competiton, I was still putting out that “I’m willing to work” vibe. That “I’m willing to do what it takes” message. The universe heard and responded. It will respond to you, too.