On Writing Deadlines, Commitments, and Balance

      
         When I revamped this blog back in May, I set an unofficial goal for myself to write a new post every two weeks. I chose this goal for two reasons: 1) It’s a well-established tenet of blogging wisdom that keeping a regular schedule and posting a new post at the same time every week or so builds an audience, and 2) a bi-weekly schedule is less demanding than the weekly schedule I kept during the first two years of this blog, from 2011-2013. (In 2013, when my professional priorities changed, I cut back on the frequency of posts.)

            I am proud to say I kept to this bi-weekly schedule from the end of May to the end of July.

            However, I missed last week for a good cause.

            When ye humble writer is not writing, he serves as a humble faculty member at an online university. Once a year, the university holds a graduation ceremony—a true physical affair with all the pomp and regalia. For most faculty members, it’s the only chance we get to meet our students face to face, as they live in widely different parts of the country and even abroad. For students, the ceremony of walking across the stage and receiving a diploma is so important that they will travel great distances to do it. (This year, we had one graduate from the Virgin Islands.) It is a privilege and an honor to attend this event, but it is also long and exhausting.

            That’s where I was last Saturday, and that’s why there was no blog post.

***

            As a rule, I don’t like it when writers make excuses: “I can’t write today because my dog died, I have to do the laundry, my computer crashed,” ad nauseum. Excuses are just that: excuses. The harsh truth is that writing is a business (unless you intend it to be a hobby): clients must be attended to, readers must be fed, and obligations must be met. Extenuating circumstances arise—the car wreck, the illness, the military service—but, barring these or other catastrophic events, writers should get their work done and submit it on time.

            I failed to do that last week. For that, I take full responsibility. Whatever consequences may arise—disappointed readers, disruption in building the audience—are mine to bear. For any who were looking forward to last week’s post, I apologize.

            And yet, they are consequences I chose to face.

            Another harsh truth is that writing is a demanding, arduous task. Yes, it can be fun, but it is always work. One of the most crucial choices a writer must face consists of how to balance writing with other obligations, such as work and family. There is no value in being the writer who spends every free moment chained to a keyboard and cranking out a word count if doing so leads to loss of health and vital relationships. Writers must make choices in how they spend their time. Some things must be sacrificed, including, at times, the writing itself.

***

            When I wrote my previous post of July 22, I mentioned my long-ago professor’s words of warning that studying writing only can be debilitating to writers. I would expand this warning further: Living only the so-called “writing life” can be debilitating to writers. It is not good for us to immerse ourselves so totally in the words of our imagination that we lose touch with other human beings and leisure activities, that we forget what it means to be in this world. If we can’t fully live in this world, we can’t create meaningful worlds for our readers.

            So, go outside. Enjoy the sun. Go for a swim. Call a friend. See a movie outside your genre. Live.

            Your muse will thank you.

Art credit: https://openclipart.org/detail/234997/push-back-time

One Writer’s Journey: Writing and the Intersection of Everything

            One of my college professors gave me a strange piece of advice: If I wanted to be a professional writer, he cautioned me, I should study something other than writing. His reasoning: Writers need something (other than writing) to write about, and too much focus on one thing can lead to a myopic view of the world.

            At the time, I thought such advice was mad. I wanted to write comic books for a living; why did I need to study anything else? However, I kept his words in the back of my mind even as I went on to devote most of my studies to writing—majoring in English, completing a master’s in English, attending numerous workshops and conferences.

In time, I began to understand what he meant: Writing can be an insular world. Writers spend all day inside their own heads. They hang out with other writers, talk about writing, and perpetuate the sense the writing is the center of our universe—almost our god.

***

            However, a singular focus on the craft of writing isn’t necessarily bad. When I was young, I watched adults around me struggle through jobs they hated. I decided I didn’t want that. I never wanted to take a job or choose a career just to earn a paycheck. Money alone has never been sufficient motivation for me to do anything (though lack of money has been). 
            I chose a different path by focusing on things which interested me, things I enjoyed doing, and things which challenged me intellectually and emotionally. I found all of these things in writing—and it happened almost by accident.

***

            I grew up reading comic books and watching science fiction shows such as Star Trek. They sparked my imagination by showing me possibilities that didn’t exist in the so-called real world. I wanted to be a super-hero or a Starfleet officer! Since those careers did not exist, I turned to the creative process behind such characters.

            Like most kids, I first wanted to be an artist. Armed with only a pencil, typing paper, and markers, I got pretty good at copying the line work, figures, and shading of certain comic book artists (Neal Adams, Dave Cockrum, and John and Sal Buscema were favorites) and created my own characters. But when it came to studying art in school, something didn’t click. Learning to draw fruit, the folds in clothing, and the same figure doing different things (smiling, dancing, running), was too much like work. I wanted to do something fun.

***

            Learning the craft of writing hasn’t been fun (at least as I defined the term then), but it has engaged me in wholly different ways. I love the structure of writing—how an outline can lead to the basic building blocks of a story yet leave room for improvisation. I love the way writing looks on a page or screen—neat and ordered formats remove all doubt as to where to put the page number and allow me to concentrate on the most important thing in writing: ideas.

I also became enthralled with writing scripts. I write something down, and a character in a story says it. I describe a scene, and an artist brings it to life.

Early collaborations, however, did not go well. As I wrote numerous scripts which will never be drawn, I became aware of my own limitations as writer. I created a Star Trek-like military, but had little clue what being in the military was actually like. (Fortunately, my brother and father both served, so I learned somewhat from their experiences.) I cleverly called my science officer a “geometeorologist,” but had no idea what a geologist or a meteorologist would do in the context of an alien planet, let alone someone who combined both fields.

Writing super-heroes seemed easier because I could just make stuff up, but even then I had no idea how to pace or end a story. I was further dismayed when people read my scripts and told me all my characters sounded alike!

Clearly, I was missing something.

One thing I've learned from my journey is that writing does indeed go hand in hand with other things--with everything, in fact. Garrison Keillor said it best and with his usual wit: "Nothing bad happens to writers. Everything is material." Everything. 

My professor was partially correct: If you want to write, study writing, but also study everything else: politics, religion, philosophy, human behavior, geology, biology, history...everything informs your world and the worlds you create.

Art credit: https://openclipart.org/detail/277036/ink-muse

On Emily Dickinson, Untold Stories, and Becoming What You Despise

There’s a moment in the film A Quiet Passion in which the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson is confronted by her sister, Vinnie. Emily has gone on a tirade over her brother having an affair, but Vinnie prefers not to judge because "we're all human." Instead, Vinnie warns that Emily is becoming what she most despises: bitter, judgmental, rigid. Realizing the truth of Vinnie's words, Emily breaks down and sobs painfully in her sister’s arms.

How did Emily become what she despised? After all, she lived the life she chose. Never married, she had no husband to boss her around (a palpable reality, the movie suggests, in 19^th century America). She lived all her days in her father’s house, where her family became the center of her universe. She wrote 1,800 poems, many dealing with death, loss, and eternity, but published only a few in her lifetime. (Her sister, Vinnie, discovered the rest and published them after Emily’s death.) The film portrays Emily as an independent-minded woman who refused to conform to the expectations of her as both a woman and a Christian in her puritanical era: She refuses to kneel before a minister (male, naturally) who tells her to turn herself over to God. However, Emily does fear loss—the loss of loved ones through marriage or death—and, in her final years, she becomes a recluse, refusing even to leave her room or socialize with the guests invited by her brother and sister.

***

The film and Dickinson’s life in general resonate with me because I can draw certain parallels between her experiences and my own, both as a writer and as a human being. I’m currently going through one of my “reclusive periods” when I spend a lot of time alone. Many of the social structures I’ve come to depend on in recent years—church, a writer’s group, etc.—have either disappeared or become less satisfying. I feel it’s time for something new to enter my life, but I don’t know what.

I write a lot, but, like Dickinson, very little of my work has been published. (There is hope that this will soon change.) Much of my writing is personal—stuff I do not wish to share. Yet I hope it gets out some day and in some form, as it reflects who I am and how I view my place in this world. It reflects how I’ve been shaped by the events of my life—the good, the bad, the bizarre, the vulnerable, the inexcusable…the human.

If I’m being perfectly honest, I want my readers (and my friends and potential lovers) to be more like Vinnie than Emily. The film portrays Lavinia “Vinnie” Dickinson as loving, friendly, and non-judgmental, but not docile—she readily confronts her elder sister over Emily’s bizarre and sometimes selfish behavior. Vinnie, too, never married, but remained outgoing and sociable. As noted above, it was she who found her sister’s life work and saw to it that it was published—an act of love and loyalty all writers can appreciate.

But if I have any readers at all, that would be more than wonderful. Intelligent, discerning readers—like Emily—could generate interesting conversations and correspondence, perhaps leading to a shift in how I view the world or how they view it. Perhaps that shift is the “something new” I’m looking for.

***

So, what is it I despise becoming? Let me answer this in a roundabout way by saying I loved my father, and I’m sure he loved me, but he had trouble expressing it. Like many men of his generation, he did what he was expected to do: work and provide for his family. Did these roles make him happy or bring him fulfillment? I cannot say because he never said.

I work hard, but I have no family to support. His life taught me a lesson that family can be more trouble than it’s worth. I’m sure that’s not the lesson he wanted to teach me, if he wanted to teach me one at all. But it’s the lesson I took from his silent forbearance.

Dad held few opinions or thoughts on many subjects, or at least few he cared to share with me. Yet I’m convinced he maintained a rich inner life. I would catch him making gestures as if he were holding a conversation with some unseen presence. I do the same thing. Yet I was not privy to his inner world. I think my brother had more success in penetrating it; he shared common interests with Dad: cars, the military, police work. My strange and esoteric interests (comic books, rock ‘n’ roll, stories) didn’t fit into that frame of reference.

Yet there was a time when we came close to sharing a connection. I was writing a series (never published) about a Star Trek-like military of the future. Rather than relying on the model I’d seen on TV, I decided to interview him about his real military experiences. Over dinner at Rax’s Roast Beef in St. Joseph, MO, I peppered him with questions about how things worked in the Missouri Air National Guard, to which he devoted 41 years of his life: what people in various ranks did, who reported to whom, etc. In my young development as a writer, I did not know which questions to ask to generate thoughtful, open-ended responses, and he did not provide me with much to extend our conversation further. He answered my questions directly as I posed them. In the end, I gained a lot of information but little insight.

So, I fear living as I perceived him to be: dwelling on my own island, isolated, unchallenged, uncurious—safe but not sound, free to let my opinions take root without being pruned. I fear I will become an untold story: the strange person nobody knows—the Scrooge, the Emily Dickinson.

Stories should be told, and, without some degree of strangeness, there is no story.

Photo credit: https://openclipart.org/detail/190081/island