It Came From The Fictional Side

I have recently been attacked by novel, (they lurk in dark places and jump out on me when I least expect them. While walking. Ironing. Innocently doing dishes, once or twice in the type of situation where they SHOULDN'T) and I’m feeling the consequences. Things I had planned to do, that I had lots of time to do, now highjack me out of the blue.

Take today for instance – please! – I sat down to work on the novel and realized I had to take the cat to the vet and had a short window if I wanted my son Robert to go with me. Not that Robert is much help, mind. The poor thing has inherited my sense of direction. Which means every time we go somewhere together it’s an adventure. Indiana Jones type adventure. Only instead of dodging Nazis and reading Latin or Greek (that would be easy!) we’re dodging weird drivers (WHY do they love the blind spot, anyway?) and trying to figure out why the GPS wants us to do a U turn in the MIDDLE of the highway.

This, however, is easier than when I go alone. Because when I go alone the combination of no sense of direction and TOTAL lack of visual memory hits. I end up on a side street having a panic attack because not only do I have no idea how to get wherever I was going, but I know I’ll never ever ever get back home.

So I had a limited amount of time to go out. Meanwhile, my younger son having called to ask for money for a field trip next Saturday (to see Othello, in Denver) I had to stop by the ATM – which was fine. For emergencies, I – of course – put the phone in my purse, after charging it.

So far so good, right? Except that I got to the ATM and couldn’t remember my – newish – code. So I reached in purse for my phone, because my husband might know it. And the phone wasn’t there. Right...

Get to vet. Drop off cat, ask to use phone. And realize I don’t know husband’s (newish) phone number at work. No problem. I’ll call his cell phone. Only the only cell number I can remember is my younger son’s who isn’t answering because he is in class. Finally Robert remembers cell phone number. I call. A puzzled husband gives me code.

Get money from ATM. Come home with son who by then needed to go to college. Come to my office to put money in envelope for younger son. Have message from CoffeeTimeRomance and More asking if I was doing the blog after all. Look at date. Yipes. How did it get to be the ninth? Oh, yeah. Was writing.

Phone, BTW, still plugged in, on desk.

Get blog in, tell lady I’ll be gone for an hour. Run to school. While there remember was supposed to get a form this week. Well, it’s still this week, right? Try to remember name of form. Inexplicably gone from head. End up playing charades with TWO counselors before they figure it out. I can tell they think I’m a lunatic. I can’t say “sorry, it’s this novel. I remember all their names and what they had for breakfast ten years ago. I just don’t remember my own middle name.”

Get form. Come home. Organize husband picking up cat from vet. Try to work. Realize about to miss date for return of interview questions to another site. Return interview questions. Try to work. Oh no, time to make dinner...

The above would not be nearly so frantic if the novel didn’t fill up my mind and push out anything unrelated to it, including deadlines, routines, food, and bathroom breaks. Because it behaves this way, though, writing a novel is a succession of crisis I try to ignore long enough to write.

How is it for you? And how do you cope with it? And does anyone have any idea where I left my brains?

A State of Chaos

At any given time, my life is in a state of chaos. This is not how life is supposed to be. And yet, looking around, I don’t see where it’s all that different for the rest of you.

What do I mean by this? Well, for the last 2 months – at least – I’ve been trying to finish a book I’m writing on spec. However, I really needed to write these proposals. Then this thing called Christmas intruded. Then there were various illnesses – not mine – and the great grades crisis. Events and emergencies swirl around me, sometimes sucking me out of my – I say it is, and you can’t doubt me! – zen like state, to make me do something about them.

Why do I say this is not how it’s supposed to be? Because it’s not how books are. This, of course, is because we lie for a living. And we have to. Anyone writing life as it really is would end up in the remaindered bin, if he got sold at all. In fiction, people want to see a story that has clear lines. (Not that I don’t try to reproduce this real life effect, by creating two or three secondary plots, so that there are other things going on. In past decades, they didn’t do that, hence the much shorter more linear – and better selling – novels.)

In turn, of course, these plots teach us that life is supposed to be orderly and make us really frustrated with our messing lives. Well, make me really frustrated.

A side effect of this is that I’ve found if I don’t take art classes, my writing dries up. Why? Are the brain areas linked? Quite possibly. But, more than that, I think – explaining why just doing art at home is not the same – it makes me shut down the words and follow verbal-visual directions to what I’m doing. This, by itself, rests the mind and brings me back, refreshed to my work. Mind you, I still have to fight the cats and the kids for writing space afterwards, but at least my mind works.

This having to fight life to write is so pronounced that all sorts of people have developed superstitions surround it. The idea that the moment you try to write reality attacks or you cause a hurricane of events around yourself, or whatever, seems to infect most writers at one time or another.

So, the writers out there how do you tell the winds and the waters "be still?" Sometimes it’s amazing to me that anyone manages to create anything at all. Do you as readers ever marvel at it? For everyone – do you think working outside the house would help? Do writers and other artists feel this effect more strongly because our production is not essential except in the monetary sense?

Sound off while I go into my office and try to finish three proposals! I’ll be back intermitently.

Writing in the Time Warp

Perhaps not as much as with Dave Freer at the moment, but sometimes I wonder what I expected when I became a novelist. I know I had some vague idea – when I was very young, say, Junior Highschool – that writers were very important people and therefore I assumed that they had important-people trappings.

My dad talked about writers with far more respect than he reserved to doctors, engineers of anyone else. Writers were, in fact, superhuman as far as he was concerned. And I assumed these rare achievers had ... well, prerogatives. Secretaries, a research staff, people to fawn on them and bring them coffee. This seemed logical given the effort that went into producing books.
By the time I was in highschool, though, I’d heard enough grumbling from writers – in prologues and afterwords and in interviews – to surmise they were one-man operations, sometimes with staff.

But I still didn’t "get" it. I thought, you know, you write a story once a month of so. For this you need inspiration, so you travel a lot and take picturesque walks, and you do an awful lot of looking romantic while sitting in a coffee house. Okay – that’s not true, exactly. I’m being sarcastic about the motives of my younger self, but that’s more or less how I viewed it, absent the heavy dose of sarcasm.

Of course I always envisioned having a family of some sort or at least a home but I assumed, perhaps with more excuse, that the day to day issues of family care would be lifted off my shoulders by menials.

With more excuse? you ask. Why, certainly. You see, almost anyone with my level of education and in a professional or even semi-professional career in Portugal would have a cleaning lady and – at least while the kids were little – a nanny of some sort. (If the grandparents didn’t take the kids for the day.) Later on there would be after-school tutors to help them in any project/subject they were having trouble with. At the level of income/success we’re at as a family if we lived in Portugal we would have just that. (The pay offs, even at the material level are myriad, though. I’m not implying I’d have lived better there. Trust me when I say I’m not stupid and there’s a reason I live here. Someone said in a blog I was reading that going to Europe be prepared to take two "levels" of pay off your lifestyle, because that’s how daily life would translate. I’m sure there’s some mitigation at the highest ranks and in some European countries, but in general that’s my experience in Portugal. Hotels "better" than the ones we can afford here are considerably less comfortable and "cater" less to our whims, etc. This is not an argument, just my experience. However, human labor is cheaper in Portugal and therefore having cleaning ladies and such far more feasible.)

So imagine my surprise if I’d ever been told there’d be days like this. Younger kid has project due at school, so he was working all day every day over the weekend, then after school yesterday. He came down with some form of laryngitis late last night. Cue in the argument over whether he HAD to go to school today. He said he did, but since my last flue started at the throat I wasn’t sure. By the time it was decided it was past midnight. I then had to get up at seven to take a note to his chem lab partner (actually to attendance, to pass on to her.) Then when I got home I found his mandatory volunteerism forms would also have to be turned in today. (No, I’m not without appreciation of the irony of the concept, but I prefer not to dwell on it, since I’d rather not get sick all over the keyboard. It’s a sick concept and if we’re lucky it breeds cynicism. If we’re not lucky it breeds a perverse idea that people are supposed to work for no pay when authorities tell them to. What it does NOT do is encourage people to care for other people. That is at best done by educating empathy, not by mandating – mostly – make work.) So, back I go with the forms. Somewhere along there I ate lunch, then spent the afternoon (as the kid got up and tried to finish his project) fielding questions and trying to help when his computer went belly up (which it’s doing a lot now.)

In the middle, between all this, I tried to do a little work on the proposal that was going so well yesterday and that I couldn’t wait to continue. I think I did a page, which is pathetic, but pretty good considering.

So, what is the point of this long rant, other than belly aching, which I confess I’m doing. My point is the same as last week, with illness. We tend to look at books and think we’re reading optimal work. We tend to imagine someone – say Pterry – working in his office, with the door shut and maybe music playing. We never wonder if a chapter was pounded out while he was dealing with a terminal cat having seizures next to his desk and requiring medicine. Or if he had to drive his daughter (some years back) to her choir concert, between one paragraph and the next. And yet, it’s far more likely the books we read were written that way than that they were perfected pieces dropped from the sky. All these interruptions and multitasking are more likely for writers – I think – than most other professionals because we work from home. Also, more and more, we’re required to keep an eye on promotion and an eye on agent/editor relations, and an eye on field rumors, leaving us the mythical fourth eye to actually look at the writing.

Right now half of you are saying "Well, that’s why you re-write and proof read." Noted. And of course. These posts are often not proofread – due to time constraints – so you all know how much I need that. BUT the rewriting and proof reading, too, go on under these conditions.
So, is any work ever perfect? Probably not. But it happens. In between all the rest. Someone said that life is what happens while you’re dealing with other things. The same could be said of your life’s work – what really commands your passion. It happens between other tasks, disasters and events.

I often hear newby writers say they’re waiting until – fill in the blank – retirement, vacation, the kids move out, they get a promotion, whatever before they write their big book. The book will never happen. How do I know? I have a collection of tomes on my bedside table. The sort of hard cover book you don’t want to drag around while cleaning or washing dishes. I’m going to read them as soon as I have a free afternoon/a day off/a week away that I’m not working in. Only those things get filled with family outings, shopping for books, or just napping on the bed with the cats.

Imperfect and sometimes frustrating as my writing is, I do it when I can. Because it’s what I love, so I make time for it. Even when it’s shuffled amid all the rest.
So, what are your strategies? What would be your ideal writing day? What are your main frustrations, trying to write if you do? And if you’re not a writer, how do you see the life of your favorite author? Do you think he/she is above this mere mortal fray?

Time Management for Female Writers

(Warning, this is tongue in cheek. Male writers are not to feel slighted!)

I once heard a highly successful male writer thank his wife for taking care of the children, while he shut himself away in a room and wrote. She brought him his meals and cups of tea and made sure no one bothered him.

Believe me, every female writer I know would like a wife!

There are tips on the internet to help writers manage their time. Here Michael Stelzner makes suggestions. And here Annette Young talks about planning your writing day.

As a mother of six I used to think, 'When all my children are in school, I'll have time to myself'. I had one year where they were all in school. During that year the youngest broke his arm so severely he needed therapy to regain use of it. So I spent a lot of time driving him to specialists and appointments and doing his therapy with him. Then the following year, the eldest left school and went into part time work and study and I spent my days driving her to and from work and the train station to get to college. And how could I resist therapeutic coffee and cheesecake when she and I would have a D and Ms (Deep and Meaningful conversations)?

Meanwhile, I was still trying to find not only a room of my own to write in, but the mental space in my head to tap into creativity. Washing, cooking cleaning, driving kids to jobs, music lessons, tutoring and sport. Here are some tips wise women have passed along to me over the years.

Where possible, buy clothes that don't need ironing. If it is winter, only iron the collar of a shirt, the rest will be hidden by the school jumper.

If it isn't dirty, don't clean it. (Don't laugh. I used to vacuum the hallway, just because it was between the living room and the bedroom).

When the kids can be trusted in the kitchen, teach each of them to cook their favourite meal. If you have three kids, that's three nights of the week when you don't have to cook.

Learn to say 'No'. If you're a competant person, people will thrust responsibility on you, president of the school committee, treasurer, tuckshop convenor, run a stall at the school fete. It never stops. At some point you have to decide, I've done my share. Let someone else do it now.

And the last one is really important. At some point in your life, things may get too much for you. (Moving house, coping with illness in children or elderly relatives, stress on top of stress). Don't run yourself into the ground trying to please everyone all the time. Be your own best friend. Best friends can be honest with each other, they have their friend's best interest at heart.

So be kind to yourself. Imagine what you would say to your best friend if they were going through what you are going through. Now, give that advice to yourself and follow it!

How do you juggle work and family, and still make time for your writing?