SOLTuesday: What do you do to avoid writing?

 

What do you do to avoid writing? Is it something otherwise constructive, like cleaning the oven or mopping all of the floors? Or is it totally wasteful, like spending an hour playing Bejeweled on your phone, like I did today? I had intended to work on the final edit for one of my job memoir pieces, but instead, I took out my phone and started playing the totally addictive Bejeweled. Moving the differently colored shapes into groups of three to make them disappear and new arrangements to show up—why is that so addictive for me? Is it satisfying the visual part of my brain? Is it merely giving me something to feel good about as the groups of three, or sometimes four or even five, jewels disappear and new patterns emerge—and the points on the scoreboard mount? I began to wonder how the game algorithm worked. As I scored more points, was the game programmed to keep me playing, was it harder to leave when new patterns kept appearing? When I reached 1,389,950, I stopped. The writing part of my brain woke up and pulled me away to write this slice of life. 

 

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

SOLSC 30: A Plethora of And at Beginnings of Sentences

Many of you are teaching students to write. You should know that many professional writers are still learning to write, and some of them don’t know how to learn.

            I’m not in the camp that thinks you can’t start a sentence with “And.” Whenever I write, I start many sentences with “And.” But when I revise, those “And”s are often cut. Too many of them make reading feel choppy, bouncy. “And” at the beginning of sentences are what I think of as “first draft writing.” “And” is only necessary when there’s some ambiguity about how the sentence is connected to the previous sentence.

            Why am I going on about this? (When I first wrote that previous sentence, it started with “And” and I just deleted it.)

            I free-lance as a copyeditor for the magazine I retired from full-time work from. This morning I copyedited a very long story, and the writer liked to start many sentences with “And” and occasionally “But.” I took most of them out. But I had some questions for the writer, so asked him to look the piece over to answer my questions.

            I almost wish I hadn’t. He did answer most of my questions, but he also restored many of my deleted “And”s. I started to restore some of them. I sent him e-mail explaining why I had cut them. I even sent him a couple of sentences in his piece, one an example where “And” should be cut, the other an example where the “And” was needed. Then I asked the staff copyeditors whether they had this problem with him, and they said “yes” and “yes” and “yes.”

            I do wish I hadn’t been doing this work remotely. If we’d been able to talk F2F, perhaps I could have persuaded him to let those “And”s evaporate after he’d written them.

            And good luck to all your writing teachers.

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 30 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

SOLSC 4: Writing

I was telling a friend today who’s always only written for publication what the Slice of Life Community was like. So I wrote this to explain my relationship to writing, which is quite different from hers.

 

            At some point I realized I have often/always? been writing. There's a scrap of paper I'm having trouble finding right now on which I wrote as a child: "My name is Sonia and I am 5 and a half. There is a boy, his name is Mark and he is 4. The baby is Carla, and she is 2. Mommy is 30 and Mr. Jaffe is 31." (yes, at 5 I wrote about my father as though he was a stranger.)  I remember being 11 or 12, sitting in our car in town while my mother shopped, writing furiously in one of those black and white composition books about who knows what, because rereading it a year or so later, I was disgusted at my younger self and threw the notebook away. Did that a couple more times through high school, always throwing away. In 9th grade i wrote a very derivative short story about a girl who dressed up as a boy so she could do something interesting (this was a Western, she was a cowboy on a ranch; I had been reading Zane Grey). When she's injured, either falling off a horse or trying to rope a calf, the boy who's her co-worker, and who she has a crush on, has to take off her shirt and discovers she's really a girl. I forget whether they fall in love or she's humiliated and runs away.

            Started a diary again in college, which I kept up sporadically for a few years. But made the mistake of showing something I'd written to the young man (Jack) who I eventually married; don't remember what he said to me about it, but I read a letter he wrote to his best friend in which he made snide comments about it, so I stopped writing again. (A few years ago, after he died, I found a packet of letters he'd written to that friend, who'd returned them to Jack a few years earlier. Reading through them, I realized that in that period of his life, he was snide about *everyone* even people I know he liked and considered friends. And I also noticed that there was nothing else in the packet after a letter about having met me. I think he threw out all the later letters with their snide or less flattering comments about me — just the sort of sweet thing he would have done.)

            The summer before I got pregnant, I was reading Anais Nin's diaries and thinking, I want to keep a diary. This time I will really do it, and I won't throw it away if I reread bits and don't like the person I seemed to be at that time. So that's how my 50+ years of writing, sometimes a lot, sometimes not so much, in what's now called a journal came to be. And eventually I became a writer who occasionally gets published.

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 4 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

 

August Golden Shovel #20

The writer stares at a blank white window, a

Reminder that she must write 1,000 words today. She’s a novelist

With five books, each one starting as empty screen. Who

Knows if this one will finally coalesce. She turns

To another window, sees gray clouds bunch on the

Horizon. The air vibrates, anticipating a feast from tables

Of nimbostratus. Raindrops spell words on

The glass, jolting her fingers to keyboard and a new history.

 

source: A Novelist Who Turns the Tables on History

Essay #1: What Am I Writing About? or When Will I Write?

Essay #1: What Am I Writing About? or When Will I Write?

            Since 2017, I have attempted to write an essay a week. I have usually gotten through January, and the first year I may even have gotten to early March. Then life intervened, or something. Anyway, I never, repeat, NEVER wrote an essay every week for even half of the entire year. So why will this year be any different?

            It’s not that I don’t have plenty to say, and many topics I would like to opine on. Part of the problem is deciding which idea will get and keep my attention this week. Part of the problem is a terminal lack of discipline. Dorothy Brande, in her 1934 guide “Becoming a Writer,” had two exercises: one put you in touch with your imagination, the other trained discipline. Of course, I failed totally on discipline. That exercise involved picking a time EVERY DAY when you would stop whatever you were doing and devote 15 minutes (only 15 minutes) to writing.

            Okay, maybe at the age of 77, I can attempt, one more time, to learn discipline. So what time of the day will become my writing time? When can I know that I can have 15 minutes without distraction to write? 8 p.m.? (But what if I go out in the evening? There are many groups I am part of.) 10 a.m.? (After breakfast, before I start my four-days-a-week freelance work? Followed by stretches and exercises?)

            Okay, let’s say 10 a.m. Every morning. Right after breakfast, before brushing teeth, before stretches and exercises. Write, brush teeth, stretches and exercises, whatever comes next.

            This will be my first essay. I’m leaving the original title, and adding what the essay became as a secondary title. I’m a week behind, but no punishing of self. Wish me luck.

 

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Over on Facebook, there is a page called #52Essays Next Wave, moderated by
the incomparable Stacie Evans. Join us there, to write, to read, to comment helpfully...

Blogging A-Z: I Is for Imagination

            Jack used his imagination to keep himself from being bored. At the gym, he would tell himself stories, usually stories that happened to him or that he knew about other people. But he would improve the stories, make them more intriguing, more humorous, more dramatic. Sometimes he would play with these stories from his life so much that, he said, he sometimes couldn’t remember which was what really happened, and which was the embellished version.

            I often suggested he write his stories, but he never did. That, I believe he thought, would turn it into work. He has always written for pay. Writing for the fun of it, which I do a lot, did not appeal to him. So his stories exist now only in the e-mails he exchanged with friends and family. He engaged his imagination in choice of words, in choice of detail, rather than in making things up. Mostly.

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April’s writing challenge is to blog every day, with each post beginning with a letter of the alphabet from beginning to end. We skip Sundays, except for April 1, so as to have 26 days in the month.

SOLTuesday: Dreaming and Writing

I am part of a reading series called Big Words. (The audience at one gathering votes for the “big word” or phrase that will be the prompt for the next gathering.) This month’s Big Word is “Five More Minutes.”

            I thought I had an idea, and a week before the reading (which is tonight), I started writing. But it just wasn’t coming out right. One of those ideas that sounds good in theory, but maybe I just don’t have the skill to make it be what I wanted it to be. What to do?

            A couple of nights later I was having a hard time sleeping: lying awake, dozing for a while, snapping awake again. In one of those snap phases, I had the image of a young man named Charles Fletcher, who lives in the 1950s in one of those classic red-brick apartment buildings in Queens, New York, and has a mild crush on an older woman who lives in his building, who has three children. Hmmm, what could I do with that?

            The next day, I had a few hours between meeting friends. So I took my laptop to a nearby library, sat down, and wrote a story. Sent it to my writers’ group, who gave me excellent feedback (way too much setup; doesn’t really end), and yesterday did a revise.

            No time to send it back for more feedback. I will just take it out and run it past the audience tonight. I hope they like it.

            Should I post the final version here?

Essay #8: Catching Up

            I had such hopes for this year. I’d write every week for Vanessa’s 52 Essays in 2017. I’d write every Tuesday for the Two Writing Teachers’ Slice of Life Tuesdays and daily for their March Slice of Life Daily Challenge. I’d write every day in April for the Blogging AtoZ Challenge.

            Well, I have no discipline. I got through Week 7 for the essays. I missed only four days in March (posting twice a few days when I missed the actual dailiness). I wrote 10 blog posts for the blogging challenge, but posted only seven. I have managed 20 of the Tuesday slices of life, which is half the number of weeks so far. So Slices of Life get most of my attention—or maybe just what I’m in the habit of doing; this is my third year on that project.

            But I’m going to try to get back into the essay challenge. Only 11 weeks left in the year, so unless I write four essays a week from now to the end of the year, I’ll never catch up. But writing is better than not writing. Writing always tells me what I think. I often don’t know otherwise, or don’t remember. If I don’t write it down, I can’t remember it.

            This has always been the case with my brain. Tell me something, and really, it does go in one ear and out the other. I might remember a conversation being interesting, or fascinating, or boring, or annoying, but the details of why are lost in fog. Unless I write them down.

            Many years ago I saw someone on a subway platform wearing a T-shirt that read: “Writing is thinking, not thinking written down.” I want that T-shirt.

            (Is this an essay? It is because I say it is.)#52essays2017

Catching Up, II

On Sunday, I attended a Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon in Brooklyn(link). Nandi Kaye led us through a mental, then we wrote, then we wrote some more and we had a physical writer warmup. Here is what I wrote.

I

I remember because that is all I have left. Someone once wrote, "Death ends a life, but not a relationship...." Death ends the accumulation of new memories, while the old memories remain as fresh or as stale as they want to be. Memories hide in the weeds of my forgetfulness, they jump out to startle me as I lie abed. Memory cannot wrap arms around me, cannot kiss gently, or passionately. Memory rouses grief and mourning, but forgetfulness erases life, us, me. Memory wants me to forget loss, to move on, to move ahead. But memory also anchors me to the moment of death, with a rope stretching, stretching, stretching without breaking.

II

Happiness comes from my pink hair. Jack loved my pink hair. When strangers say they love my pink hair, I feel 50 degrees warmer. I glow. I feel connected. My pink hair is the magic token I've looked for all my life. My pink hair is the guardian angels protecting me from despair. My pink hair is punk, is rock and roll, is a happiness drug. My pink hair matches all of my favorite clothes, well, almost.

 

Here's what the workshop did with my stories

So what we were supposed to do in the workshop was read our stories aloud, but in the following sequence: paragraph 1 from first story, paragraph 1 from second story, paragraph 2 from first story, paragraph 2 from second story, etc, interweaving the paragraphs from each story so we had an 8-paragraph story of 400 words. What was so curious to me about this exercise was that when I wrote the stories separately, each narrator was a completely different person, yet when the grafs were interwoven, it all sounded like the same "I." And similarities in the stories I hadn't noticed shone through: abandonment, language. 

I don't know whether this exercise would work with children, but it might well work with high schoolers.

 Untitled (so far)

            I don’t know who I am talking to. I don’t know whom I am talking to. Mrs. McHenry knows if I should say “who” or “whom.” She marked my 10th-grade papers for grammar. Never spelling. I’ve always been good at spelling.

            We drove into Dubrovnik from the airport. The winding road up the coast offered glimpses of the blue Adriatic, diamonds of sunlight floating on the surface. Thank god they drive on the right side of the road here.

            The cardboard sign I made for when I sit on the street is perfectly spelled, but I’m not sure of the grammar. “Im lost in New York City need to get to Richmond, Va. for my mother’s funeral. Please help.” Should I put a comma in there somewhere?

            At the hotel I let Dominic talk to the desk clerk. Dominic seemed to inhale languages as soon as he stepped off the plane. I watched him chat up the clerk in his baby-Serbo-Croatian. The clerk laughed, shook her head, repeated some word several times.

            I lost everything when my boyfriend took my suitcase. I didn’t notice. I’m napping at his friend’s apartment. Not really napping. I smoked a joint right after breakfast, well, it’s not a joint, it’s crack.

            At lunch in the old city, inside the medieval walls, Dominic told me the clerk almost didn’t give us a room because she thought he was  Serb. “There’s no Serbo-Croatian language anymore,” he mused. “She said I need a dictionary to translate from Serbian into Croatian.” I didn’t know. I was a typical American, monolingual and condemned to stay that way.

            I don’t notice when he takes the suitcase. I don’t notice when he doesn’t come back. I don’t notice when his friend says I have to leave. I notice when he pulls me up from the chair and pushes me out the door. I notice I don’t have my suitcase. I notice when I pawn my pearl necklace so I can eat dinner. I notice how cold it is on the street.

            Dominic led me up to the top of the wall, where we walked until we could see the water. I tried to imagine the war, when Dubrovnik was bombarded. Dominic said, “Wait here,” so I watched sunlight drip into the Adriatic, the bright fade to glow, the shades of blue deepen to navy. The stone wall chilled in the dark.

Slice of Life, #29

            Communities of writers are wonderful and necessary. They nurture and provoke, engage and challenge. They can take many forms: writers’ groups, workshops, reading series, salons, open mikes (“mic” looks to me like it’s pronounced “mihk” and only came into use when “mic” was engraved on recording equipment in the 1980s; “mike” was the word before then). I am in several: a writers’ group I’ve been in for more than 20 years (and it’s been in existence for more than 30 years); a continuing workshop with an old friend focusing on short fiction, as well as the Blueprint Your Book workshop with Minal Hajratwala; the Big Words reading series; and the Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon and Open Expressions Harlem.

            Today the Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon met at the Brooklyn Workshop Gallery for an afternoon with featured poet Cynthia Manick. Cynthia led a workshop on character poems, with examples by Patricia Smith (“Medusa” was really powerful), Lucille Clifton, Carol Ann Duffy, and Cornelius Eady, and direct address poems, with examples Chris Abani. We then had the opportunity to write our own examples, with many amazing poems written in just 10 minutes. Cynthia read some of her own work. And then the open mike, with, again, many beautiful pieces of writing. And of course, the Two Writing Teachers, with their Slice of Life Story Challenge in March, and National Novel Writing Month, in November, which pushed me to finish the first draft of a novel some years ago (it still sits, with half a dozen attempts at a second draft, in a drawer).

            There are more out there. In April, National Poetry Month, there are at least a couple of 30 Poems in 30 Days challenges. I hope you are in more than one writing community; maybe you can join one in April.

            Write on!

 

Slice of Life, #17

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            Last night I went to the Big Words reading series. Founded by Stacey Kahn and Jess Martinez exactly three years ago, Big Words meets approximately once a month with readers writing to a theme chosen by the audience at the previous Big Words reading. Last night’s theme was All or Nothing.

            I was one of the readers (see Slice 11). When I started going to Big Words, it met in the back of CultureFix, a bar on the far Lower East Side, a long walk from any subway stops. Last summer it moved to Brooklyn, to a large upstairs event space at another bar, 61 Local, at 61 Bergen Street (this one has a kitchen, and a good one). I’d been to a couple of Big Words there and thought I knew the way. So I didn’t make a Google map. My mistake.

            Took the subway to the Barclay Center, but when I looked at the neighborhood map in the station, I couldn’t find Boerum Place, the street I usually walked down. But there was Bergen Street just a couple of blocks away, so that’s where I headed. But when I got to Bergen Street, the house numbers showed how far off I was. The first one I saw was 413. Oh, dear. And Brooklyn blocks are long. It took me 25 minutes to get to 61 Local -- but at least there was no wind, like Monday, it wasn’t very cold, and I could use the exercise. When my friend Stacie arrived, she explained that I should have gotten off at Borough Hall – oh, it was that B on the map that had thrown me off.

            My reading went well, there were many laughs, and I enjoyed my five minutes in the metaphorical spotlight (no mike either). Looking forward to the next Big Words, whose theme is Stories from Abroad.

Slice of Life, #10

            It’s taken me most of my life to realize that almost nothing is all good (well, maybe orgasms) or all bad (okay, slavery, genocide, serial killers). Most everything else has something both good and bad about it.

            Take retirement. While too many are forced into it by a layoff, or a mandatory retirement age, or illness or disability, retirement is usually seen as freely choosing not to work full-time, and that’s what I decided to do two years ago. Since then I have noted the pros and the cons.

            I am not a morning person. It can take up to an hour for my brain to clear and I can have a reasonably coherent conversation and feel like I am truly awake. So retirement was freedom from the tyranny of the alarm, the need to have breakfast, run out of the door, and get to the office on time to get my work done. Taken to its extreme, though, freedom can feel oppressive.
            I’ve taken to setting my alarm so I won’t sleep away too much of the morning. Take today:

• --radio goes on at 8:30
• --not really awake until almost 9
• --out of bed shortlt after 9
• --reading about Joseph Roth in a magazine in the bathroom until 9:45
• --stretch on bed (for spinal stenosis) while continuing to read about Roth until 9:58
• --start to read about Syria in the same magazine, return magazine to bathroom, remove J.’s bench from the bathtub, fold up clothes from drier and put them away, finished by 10:15
• --make bed, shower, dress by 10:35
• --eat breakfast, read the paper, to 11:35

            I'm not ready to "do" anything until almost noon. I don’t feel happy about this. Yes, I can lie in bed and doze on and off while listening to Morning Edition. Yes, I can read as much of the New York Times as I want to. Yes, I can read a magazine article that strikes my fancy, when it strikes my fancy. But there’s so much more I want to do (writing, reading, going to movies and museums, etc.) and need to do (errands, exercise, filing insurance claims, etc.). Even in retirement, there’s never enough time.

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            Is this a privileged whine? I know I am fortunate compared to many, especially those forced to retire and unable to find work they want and need. Maybe this “whine” will kick me into using my literally free time more productively.