Tag Archives: writing

I like the rain

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Why do I do this to myself?

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When I was in New Zealand training for the second women’s team going to the World Ultimate Club Championships in Perth, Australia, we arranged several “training camps” for the members of all our teams (we had five: a men’s, two women’s, a master’s, and a co-rec squad) to actually play together. We had folks from all over the country, both North and South Island, who had no regular opportunity to do so before the tournament. The folks in Christchurch, or Wellington, or Auckland, knew each other pretty well; but the teams were a geographical hodgepodge. Some things we could do remotely, such as logistics and brainstorming plays. But team chemistry really means training and playing together.

And the weather was not cooperating.

The second camp, in Wellington in the winter, was a three-day event. Our time was limited. We didn’t have the option of re-scheduling. Scheduling the original dates had been hard enough. Those of us from out of town flew in on cheap Air NZ flights, and those from Welly hosted all of us — sometimes up to four or five guests — on floors and couches. Together, we contemplated our miserable luck with the weather.

It wasn’t just a little drizzle. This was a decisive, stay-put type of rain. It rained all night before the start of camp, and it was still raining the following morning. The fields were soaked. Nobody wanted to get out of the car, which was where we changed into our cleats, wincing internally about the instant we had to set foot on the saturated ground.

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One of my teammates was a kindergarten teacher in Christchurch. She was cheery at all times, something that appears to be a constitutional requirement of pre-K and grammar school teachers everywhere. As we huddled together in the cold and wet before warmup, she told us about a song she made her moody students sing when faced with nasty weather. “I like the rain,” she said, in a happy sing-song. “I like the rain. One, two, three, four…. I like the rain!”

I felt like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, but I kept my mouth shut — until we started our warmups. Up and down and around the fields as we moved more quickly, high stepping and doing cariocas, we chanted as a unit, getting louder as we went. Squish, squish, went our feet, our shoes entirely soaked and our socks as well, sending up sprays of mud onto ourselves and anyone running close by. The rain wet our hair and seeped through our clothes. “I like the rain,” we sang, then shouted. “I like the rain! One, two, three, four! I like the rain!” Our ridiculous behavior did not go unnoticed by the other squads, warming up on adjacent fields. In response, we reacted like any good kindergartners would, prancing and throwing our arms in the air, hamming it up for the crowd.

And a remarkable thing happened. By the time we reconfigured to start drilling our plays, we actually did like the rain.

Strength in numbers.

Some things, we really can’t change. We don’t have any control over traffic lights, if we don’t work in the city department that programs them; we can’t control whether our kids don’t feel well today or whether the grocery store has run out of the most inexpensive brand of butter, or whether our boss is in a lousy mood. Some of us have no control over the heat in our building; and we can’t control the weather. The only thing we have any say over, really, is how we relate to these things. But here’s the dirty secret: relating is contagious.

It’s a good thing, too. Because I’ve chosen to run in the mud again.

image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

In the next week, I start my first ever writing workshop. It means I’m going — on purpose — to share my work, and not just some finished product, but the bones of my work. It’s a prospect both thrilling and horrifying.

The beauty as well as the yuck of writing is that it requires sinking into my own head. Sometimes it’s glorious, and sometimes the field is soggy and I don’t even want to step out onto it because I know I’ll have wet feet for the next several hours. It’s cold, and my socks will get ruined.

I just need to remember, I’m not alone out there.

Strength in numbers.

One, two, three, four….

I like the rain.

Busy Bee: Buzzing or Making Honey?

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Writing about my writing is interfering with my writing. For that matter, I’m using writing to procrastinate from my writing. All this writing is really getting in the way of my writing.

Is this a case of having too many irons in the fire?

Or am I just buzzing loudly to cover up the fact I’m not actually producing anything (honey…yumm)?

Hard at work
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I’ve got reasons aplenty to call myself a busy bee lately. In the world of writing, I have two big ongoing projects of my own. I’ve had them for a while… that is, I conceived of them a while ago, and I’ve been using my deadlines like a slide, fun to visit and scoot down every so often. One of them is a fiction project. We’ve had quite the frenemy relationship. It started with love. We hung out together all the time. There was no other story I would rather have gotten to know. We shared secrets, hopes, dreams. Then things changed. The fiction did. Or maybe it was me. We didn’t know if we wanted to hang out together anymore. We didn’t recognize what the other had become. The atmosphere between us was tense, prickly. We didn’t know what to expect from the other. Now we periodically meet for coffee, but I never know in advance if the conversation is going to be civil. It’s hard to say what lies in the future.

The other is a memoir project that may also be a series of personal essays or creative nonfiction (it’s taking notes from the fiction project, which started as a novel idea, was reincarnated in the short story universe, and has been flirting with novella status since). I have great plans for that one. I’ve got the beginnings of some great material — provided (ironically, as we shall see) by my writing practice and some journal entries. Those plans include an outline (this is if it wants to be a memoir). That’s a good, concrete goal for a writer to have. Easy to measure success there. I’m sure I put it on the calendar no later than June.

I don’t have an outline yet.

In addition to the big projects, I’ve been keeping loose and limber by working on my journal and my writing practice. But last week I noticed something funny about those latter two items.

I was doing writing exercises to keep myself from having to buckle down and actually work on project A (the fiction project). This was actually inconvenient because there was a REAL deadline looming for that one: a competition submission deadline that I used as a motivator and benchmark. Apparently, it wasn’t motivating enough. Or, and this is more likely, I permitted myself to fail.

As for project B, the wannabe memoir, I found a new writing book about memoir and creative nonfiction at the bookstore, which I’ve allowed to lead me astray. How convenient that project B is a memoir project, possibly creative nonfiction! And how convenient that I can now read about memoir, rather than actually write one. It’s so informative!

This malarky has been going on for longer than the past week, but I only recently appreciated the humor in the situation.

The good stuff
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It’s tantamount to refusing to do my English homework because I’m too busy doing my math homework. Pffft! the fifth-grader in me says. I’m doing homework — you can’t accuse me of procrastinating! I’m getting stuff done over here! I can cross things off my list!

Problem is, it’s not the really important stuff.

I’m not making any honey, and that’s sad. I’m doing a lot of buzzing, and sometimes it’s hard to hear myself think above the drone.

I’ve got to be careful. There’s a difference between buzzing and honey.

Which is all to say, it should be clear by now that I’m using my writing to procrastinate from doing my writing, and the writing is really getting in the way of getting any writing done.

Speaking the language

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Writing is like learning a foreign language: you have to practice to become fluent.

People think that learning a language is about vocabulary. Or that it’s about grammar, or having the correct/native accent. These are all desirable, but not the most crucial thing.

We’ve got to actually speak it.

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It sounds overly simplistic, I know. How do you learn a language? You speak it! But it’s true. Ask anyone who has ever tried to learn another language–I’m not talking about folks who have grown up multi-lingual, which is a different experience–and they can assure you that reading grammar rules are of limited usefulness in actual human interaction.

It’s hard, too. We’re stuck speaking it before we’re any good at it. Especially in the beginning, we work arduously to put sentences together that bear almost no relationship to a grammatical construct, and may make absolutely no sense when taken literally. The other difficulty is that we have to learn what other people are saying to us! It doesn’t help to be able to ask for directions and then not understand the answer (I should know; this is my experience with French).

Writing is like that, I think. We start writing before we know whether we’re any good. We don’t have the vocabulary. We haven’t mastered the grammar. Our accent and style fluctuate and often resemble nothing like what we are trying to emulate.

Sometimes this is really nasty. We may know how bad we are, or we may believe that we’re terrible; either way, we’re prone to a serious attack of writer’s block, and I have suffered from both causes.

Then, we’ve got to engage in dialogue. We have to find other people to look at what we’ve written and tell us about it. It’s the only way to get better. Writing without readers is like talking to ourselves. It gets boring, and it makes us look crazy. But people often (usually?) read our stuff while it’s imperfect, frequently a draft. Egad! Does it make any sense?!

This is why I’ve begun to love writing exercises. Or writing practice, if you prefer the yoga approach.

I try to write every day. Sometimes this takes the form of a journal entry. Sometimes it’s just me whining to myself about my life. Sometimes it’s a thought that caught my fancy, and I’m not sure where it goes; or a beautiful-sounding phrase; or new knowledge I’ve come across; or a book that I’m currently reading that really, REALLY wants feedback. (It does!) Sometimes I go for structure, and pick an exercise I’ve found in a writing book, and write for twenty minutes. Most of what comes out is free association.

A lot of the time, I don’t feel inspired while this is going on. I feel like my prose is clumsy. I’ve re-read passages later that I was actually proud of at the time of composition, and wondered whether I was lucid while writing. Egad! It doesn’t make sense.

But here’s the thing. No matter how reluctant I might be to actually pick up my pen (I do these the old-fashioned way), by the time I’m finished, I’m in great form, and usually have stirred up at least another half a dozen ideas that I want to continue writing about. In fact, I WANT to continue writing! Something, anything–sometimes even the very thing I’ve been free associating about.

Writing exercises loosen my tongue–so to speak.

Writing begets writing. It’s easier to do once we’ve already been doing it–just like speaking a foreign language is easier to do once we’ve been talking for a while.

I speak to practice being a better speaker.

I write to practice being a better writer.

It’s the only way to become fluent.

Boxed Thinking

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Several days ago, when I was feeling stuck about something, I texted my friend S. We have a recent history of being very existential with each other. I asked him: “I’m trying to think outside the box. Any suggestions?”

He replied, “Don’t think just do.”

Urgh. I’m very good at thinking.

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I was a very strict kid growing up. I suppose a lot of kids have a streak of this sort. I was bossy with my younger siblings, and I had a black and white view of the world. Things had to be a certain way, and I knew precisely what that was.

During school hours, kids had to be in school, unless they were sick. Similarly, one went to college. One played by the rules, and got a degree, so one could get a job. I didn’t much stop to consider what kind of job that would be. The occasions when I did bump up against concrete questions about future work were unsettling. I dunno — I want to be a writer. What’s this work business? I presumed I would be in an office. That’s where other people went to work. What would I be doing there? Office things.

When I graduated and was in an office – though not with any greater clarity about what I wanted to do there than before — I was amazed at the people outside the “office” at all sorts of working hours. Looking down from the windows of my building in New York City, I could see them, pausing at stoplights, crossing streets, going in and out of shops. I felt like I did when I was out of school sick. I was mystified. What were they all doing?

Years, some more school, and another serious job later, I was still amazed at this phenomenon.  When I quit and began keeping nonstandard hours and a schedule of my own devising, I found the quantity of non-office-bound people frankly astounding. In Montreal, my schedule regularly included time at either the central or a local library, at least partially during business hours. The people I saw weren’t all students.  Were they unemployed? I wondered. Stay-at-home parents? Job-seekers? Was everyone a writer?

In school we all liked to complain about the standardized tests we were stuck taking every year. But I was good at them. In high school, we griped about how SAT scores weren’t so much about actual knowledge as they were about how to take the SAT. But that didn’t bother me. A test, I knew from experience, was about what the teacher wanted me to know. Whether I agreed with it or thought critically about it was irrelevant. They weren’t scoring me on that.

I found this structure comforting. It wasn’t until recently that I took another look at the education system and began to see it as an arbitrary set of parameters that encouraged convergent thinking. No wonder I was having such a hard time playing Free Willy. Absolutely nothing in how I had learned to study or be good at things applied to creating work from scratch.

Or to creating from scratch.

It’s amazing how rooted I am in all sorts of conventions, and conventional thinking, even as I rail against the constraints of this mentality. It’s hard to break a lifetime habit.

Even now, as I’m spreading my wings, I find myself taking breaks to nestle down in small, familiar mental boxes.  Voluntarily, I’ve been thinking contained.  Constrained.

It’s amazing how a part of me feels happy there.

On tests, one of the answers for every multiple-choice question was always right, even if it wasn’t really an answer: “E — none of the above.”

My life isn’t a piece of paper, though. Where does that get me?

Sounds like an office.

Books don’t magically get written because I have a good resume. Blogs don’t spring to life because I show up to my assigned desk by nine AM.

Having a boss doesn’t increase the value of my work.

Time to stick my head out of my own self-imposed cubicle. It’s tough to get a view of the open road from in here.

Don’t think just do.

Wasted Time

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Recently, I’ve had some problems with time for my writing. It’s not that I didn’t have enough. I felt like I was wasting it.

I’ve been very busy, but most of the work was “non-writing” work. To make sure I got everything done, I was very organized with my time. I tried scheduling time to write, but it’s hard to block off a certain amount of time to “be creative.” Other than writing exercises, I had no output. The irony was that once my non-writing workload eased, and I had more time I could have spent on writing, I found I was doing many things but.

Mostly, I was reading.

And, get this: I was chiding myself for reading.

This was patently ridiculous. I’ve always been identified (and identified myself) as a bookworm. I tend to be in the midst of several books at once, and blow through enormous tomes at record speed. In this short space of free-ish time, I had been reading, and finished, one book.

I believe my non-writing productivity deserves some of the blame.

The creative life requires a gestation period. Art takes time to develop. It grows, sort of organically. We start with an idea, and need to nurture it. Natalie Goldberg, whose writing advice I adore, calls this “composting.”

The thing is, this work doesn’t actually look like anything productive from the outside. In my early days on the job as an editor for med ed materials, my boss told me that a legitimate chunk of this kind of work included sitting in a chair and staring out the window. This did not mean he wasn’t busy. It just looked like daydreaming.

The thing is, sometimes it is daydreaming. And it’s actually a good thing. See Goldberg. Also, famous writers of all stripes agree that in order to be a good writer, one needs to read.

But I was having a hard time accepting that I wasn’t writing. I called myself lazy. I had all these goals — how was I supposed to meet them if I was wasting time sitting on the couch with a book? Not always reading it, mind you.

I was getting a lot done on my non-writing list, though. And that was really the problem. It was as though I was running at top speed along a ridge, and my sudden free time was a plunge off the edge I hadn’t seen coming, because I was too busy charging ahead. I hadn’t been paying attention, and now I was in creative free fall.

My productive self was ready to produce something tangible. But I had been neglecting the intangible. I was just running — I hadn’t been composting anything.

That was what my reading brain was trying to do: find compost.

Unless we add the raw materials, nothing else will come out the other side. No tomato is ever going to grow in my plant pot if I don’t water it. Words don’t grow unless I water them with other words.

We need to be careful of the dichotomy of wasting time and productivity in the creative life. Some of the most tangibly productive things are stealing time, energy, and mental resources away from creative composting.

Sometimes the best use of our time is to sit in a chair, staring out the window.