This collection of short stories about written about real people in history is depressing. I hate these characters. They drive me crazy. I’m not the only one that feels this way, but it’s the craft that matters. The intricate beading of these stories inspires me. This week I’m weaving Act One of a novel together. The key for me as a writer is: what does the main character know, when does she know, and what does she not know. That’s pretty much fiction in a nutshell, even for YA, at least I think.

With my fiction, I tend to write forward motion and dialogue really, really fast. I can propel a story forward at a hundred miles an hour, but my reader is often left wondering what the context is, what’s the point, why should we care? I need to develop a unique interior voice a la Andrea Barrett so that my characters a) clearly don’t know something the audience knows or b) clearly know something that the audience also knows, or c) clearly know something the audience doesn’t yet know.

I’ve just confused half of the Internet. I feel your pain. It’s the difficulty, my writing teacher says, in writing a make believe world. Me as the creator of that world has to create everything, bring the characters to life, and then figure out what to give them and what not to give them.

Barrett’s collection is rich, but quite literary. So, those of you who need uplifting fare, don’t try this at home. The first story I read was The Littoral Zone, a backflash, flashforward waltz through a devastating affair between two scientists away from their families. Very uplifting. Ha! But the interior voice is impeccably strong. I couldn’t use that exact voice in my writing, but I know a fellow writer who lifted the inspiration into her historical novel with much success. However, the outline of this story screams hidden organization. The author must have sat for days thinking: what do these characters know and when and how do they tell each other or the audience? My brain explodes at the thought.

And now we’re working through The Behavior of the Hawkweeds, a short story about Gregor Mendel, but not really about Mendel, but about people around him, and how tragedy can strike at really inopportune moments and how it affects people. Again, the author must have sat for days thinking through this story, building and layering in the response and the theme and the response and the theme. It’s like fine strokes on a masterpiece canvas.

But for me, I’m not a huge fan of Barrett. I mean I admire her skill, her craft, her ingenuity, but I just can’t handle the depressing stories. Art lives in the hidden, the unconscious, the untold. I admit, I just really didn’t want to know any of what these stories told me about these people’s hidden and unconscious lives, but it made me think about what I’m putting into my books. Can the story be beautiful and soaring and still have these layers? I think so. That’s what Andrea Barrett’s book showed me. It doesn’t have to be always about the dark. There are multiple layers of light and I’d like to explore those themes in my writing.

Grade: A for craft, D for depressing

I tend to cluster my failures all up in a bundle and haul them around all day with me. They are the first to pipe up when I begin to doubt what I’m trying to do, if that particular client doesn’t respond to me in a timely manner, or if I generally am having a freak out session when I should be creative and artistic. Oh the failures. They are a lively chorus.

“Told you that wouldn’t work.”
“I always thought you didn’t know enough to do that job.”
“I doubt you remember how to write that piece.”
“It’s too big; you’ll fail. Just stop. Just give up now.”
“Isn’t this how Trish works, barely competent.”

And on and on and on and on. Until my brain is so full of this that I freeze and give up altogether. The threshold to my small creative act for the day is too high, the barrier has been raised, and I’m just not going to succeed. Why try? I usually go looking for chocolate about now.

We all fail. We all have really guilty consciences. We can’t even walk normally because the staggering weight of our conscience keeps yapping and pulling from our amnesia-riddled minds more things that we fail at. More situations when we didn’t treat someone right, we didn’t think good of everyone at that dinner, we did judge, we did try to take shortcuts with that project. We did hurry too fast and not think about what we were saying or doing.

But you know, there’s really nothing else for these failures to do. They can’t get up and help. They can’t erase themselves. They can’t even force us into a better place on their own. They are stuck with us. And I don’t think it’s a mutual arrangement.

I don’t think we’re stuck with them. I don’t agree that we have to carry around these failures all our lives. Sure, they’ll try. They’ll scream like banshees when you try to tear them from you. The screaming is not the tough part. The tough part is when you’re out there trying something new, completely naked without any failures to blame. Then whose fault is it?

Why do we get stuck here? Why can’t we remember what we already know. We’re going to be fine. We can do it. We can conquer, we can get past the barriers. It just takes some faith.

This is the best comfort I have. All my failures are gone and have been gone for some time. There’s no reason for them to be hanging around except to turn me back to faith. There is a God and I am not Him. That’s basically the gospel. No, you don’t have to “get religion,” you just have to believe that every single thing you’ve done wrong in your life is covered. “How is that possible?” I can hear people asking the question.

Our brains can’t comprehend it. There is no scientific method to prove it. That’s why it’s faith. That’s why it’s a relationship between me and God. There was a sacrifice for me. For my failures. That’s how I walk, try again, keep going, and drown out the unpleasant failures that attach themselves to me and will not let go.

There’s no other way around it. Folks try to meditate to clear it from their brains, they use psychedelic drugs to numb it, some even torture and murder innocent children to drown out what they can’t bear to hear. (We talked about that case on Monday.)

Failures are not really your friend. Sure, they remind you that you are human, they spur you on to bigger and better things, but they can also numb you to real life. They remind us that we are not God. It’s what “Know thyself” actually means. Know your boundaries, know that you are but mere mortal. But don’t hide in your failures. Get strong.

Have faith.

Believe.

Get up and try again.

 

Often it doesn’t come from simply studying and practice, but from having the right attitude going in. Most athletes rely heavily on mindset; we saw evidence of this in the recent Olympic Games as incredible feats of skill and style were displayed. It’s not just about practicing those styles and skills over and over. That’s actually the work.

The attitude comes first. If I believe that I can’t do something, my studying and practice won’t help me much. I will be studying and practicing but still putting off the tough decisions: actually rewriting, actually painting the blank canvas, actually turning on the digital camera and focusing on something.

A quick reminder today that what you focus on will stalk you. Are you focusing on how you can’t rather than how you can? And lest this sounds a bit woo-woo, I’m talking about things you already know you should be doing, not things you are still deciding if you should be doing. You took a new job, started a new business, put everything on the line, and suddenly find yourself withering on the vine.

Be constant. You can move forward while you ask for guidance from God, the universe (whatever works for you), but you have to do the nitty gritty with the mindset that you are going to succeed. It’s a fine line.

For me this spring, I’m attempting to rewrite a novel, something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time, but always found myself to be not constant with the nitty-gritty of it. I’ve tried it a half a dozen times in the last decades, but always fell short. I always had an excuse for it not working out: not enough time, too much work, too many distractions, office wasn’t clean, too much laundry, but recently, it has been made quite apparent to me that what’s blocking this effort is my constancy. My decision not to give it the mindset it deserves.

It’s back to that fine line. How many other folks decide to write a novel and put everything they have into it and it doesn’t work out? A lot. I know many of them. But I know more folks who actually did the nitty gritty and it worked. They sold their first book, their second book, and and just sold their ninth or tenth book. They had the same decision as I do to make. “Is this what I want?” And then for me, I check to see if it’s what God wants. And then there is nothing left in the way.

Many novelists wrote their first novels early in the morning or late at night on their own time while working full-time jobs. Many novelists wrote their first novels multiple times, shelved their first novels, and then started new novels and sold those instead. My first three novels are still sitting on shelves. My fourth novel I am going to do something with this year. And then I may go back to those first three and see what I can do. Oh and finish the fifth and sixth novels I started in 2008. Yes, I really have started and stopped.

That ends right now. With the help of a novelist buddy also revising her first draft (not her first novel either; she just sold it last week to Random House), I’m going to be constant. No more excuses.

So, what do you really want to do that you have started and stopped and still find yourself longing to return to? Is there really anything in your way or is it you? Could you trust yourself with this dream and just commit to seeing it through?

Photo by kevenrushforth

Surprisingly, the reading deprivation experiment is over and I am not cowering in a dark hole muttering to myself. I actually feel really good. Really REAL. I had a great week without books. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but wait, let me tell you what I got to do instead!

1. Went to the beach for the afternoon and didn’t do anything but watch the water, watch Todd out on the sand as the tide rolled out and watched Todd run as fast as he could back to the car as the tide rolled in. Watched people, dogs, babies, felt the sun warming my face and neck. That was fabulous. The weather was so nice in Seattle that everyone was out and about washing cars and mowing lawns and bbqing dinner.

2. Watched fabulous storytelling on dvd. Finished the 14 episodes of Firefly, that 2002 cult classic that everyone talks about and I had never watched. It was fantastic! The writing was so strong (good for Jane Espenson; she’s just so talented and Joss Whedon, who thought the whole thing up). And started season 5 of Entourage, which has so many twists and turns I can’t keep up. And then watched the Academy Awards (hoping both Sandra Bullock and Meryl Streep would win; Bullock took it and I’m really happy for her). LOVED Michael Giacchino (composer from the movie UP) and his exhortations to kids (I include myself in that) around the world watching to trust that “you’re not wasting time being creative.” LOVED that. Took it for myself. I’ll be using that a lot in the upcoming months.

3. Decided on two major goals in the next two months. The “not reading” thing cleared my brain until I knew exactly what I wanted to do the MOST. Cleaned out my office, got my taxes assembled and sent to the CPA, hired a new CPA for 2010, and wrote and wrote and wrote.

4. During the week of “no read, just listen” as I like to call it, my pastors preached two amazing sermons about just that. Since it’s Lent, and the Upper Room message in John that Jesus gave to the disciples has been reviewed over and over, they’ve come up with different themes to focus on that represent the many rooms of that Upper Room: belief, love, growth. It was exactly what I needed to hear. I was so glad I had not filled up my brain with anything else so I could hear it. Pastor George talked about unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence and that this is what Christ brings us to over and over through our lives. You can see a video of Pastor George and Pastor Renee talking about it or listen to a podcast of the sermon here.

5. I have become more real. In case some of you aren’t aware, real is my word for 2010. It’s an Ali Edwards idea to pick a word for the year and I found it really interesting that she reprinted her post today on the subject of being real (a republished article from her AEzine newsletter from April 2008). It has to do with scrapbooking, but I found it particularly relevant. Read it here. I feel different than I did a week ago (probably the relief that I’m done not reading or the relief that I made it seven days without reading) and I feel stronger, better enabled to handle the creative goals I have in front of me. I feel good.

If you’re wondering what I’m talking about (lots of new visitors coming in from other places today), I am working my way through Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way, a 12-week creative recovery program. Last week, week 4, requires the recovering creative to not read so as to open up other areas of life that might be buried under other people’s words. If you’re curious about Artist’s Way, check it out on Amazon here.

On deck for this week, some more book reviews, as I’m completely behind on my 48 books for 2010 updates. And some discussion on bad beliefs about failure and being artistic that I’ve been thinking about over the past month or so.

A lot of fundy religious survivors describe being numb. I liken it to PTSD a bit. Others say it’s emotional trauma, spiritual abuse, emotional manipulation, but I’m not here to argue semantics. I want to describe how me not reading for a week has helped me wake up from numb.

We all go numb whether we’ve been in a fundamentalist patriarchal cult or not. Life numbs us because, well, life is hard. I don’t care if you’re living in Africa or North America. Life is hard. Each of us has things we face that make it so. So we go numb. We don’t let things touch us. We dive deep into our denial by reading too much (me!), working too much, focusing on redecorating and redecorating our homes, entertaining, becoming the perfect hostess, becoming the perfect mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend. The list goes on and on and on. I’m not impugning anyone here. I’m stating facts. This is how we stay numb. We focus on something so hard that we forget about other things.

Religious fundy folk do this with perceived sin. Just as Michael Pearl laughs at his critics when one of his followers tortures and murders their seven-year-old daughter for mispronouncing a word during homeschooling (read here), fundy folks focus in on what other people do to such a degree that they can be numb. And not usually strangers, but usually ones they love. Their own daughters, their sons, their siblings, their parents, their neighbors, their churches. This disturbing trend only comes from life being hard and them not wanting to pay attention to some of that. It’s a human thing, too. Look at Rwanda, look at the Balkans. Look at history.

Well, I’m waking up this week just a little bit more from numb and I tell ya, I can picture myself burrowing back down into denial again really fast. Thank goodness God only allows me to wake up as much as I need to. If I woke up all the way in a day, I would harm myself. That’s the issue I have with the New Age movement. They don’t temper it. They throw their arms wide to whatever comes and people frequently exchange the old numb for a new numb.

I am not interested in exchanging anything for anything, except peace where there was unrest, truth where there were lies, and constant where there were hits and misses. I want to be awake with God. I want to listen to His voice and I want to follow Him. For those who are really not comfortable with my semantics, I’m talking about a force that LOVES us. I want to wake up to that force, I want to be with it, listen to its message, and do what it tells me. That force to me is God. I’m sorry to use such grating terms. I know even that hurts a lot of people. Exchange whatever words you need, but listen: God, the universe, LOVE, that force can contain your awakening so that you will survive it. I believe that.

I have walked a different way this week than usual because I didn’t read. Just think of what wonders we’ll see when there is no more death! Ponder that!

What are you awakening to? Does it hurt? Can you allow LOVE, the universe, God to contain that pain for you so that you are safe? Trust a bit, don’t just hide in a book.

Photo by yury (Turrimeta Beach, Sydney)

Intrigued?  Read on to find out how I got to “see” this photo.

So hubby is helping me with this “reading deprivation” experiment and set out a pile of nuts for the squirrels this week. It’s been a few days and they (nor the massive raccoon who lumbers through our backyard each week) have not yet discovered the stash. The cats that run wild in our neighborhood haven’t either. I told him he would regret it when we have a backyard zoo (we should charge admission!) and his reply was that we already have a zoo, so what does it matter if we add more?

I think it would matter. But it’s fun to sit and wait, watching the pile to see the lucky squirrel that finds it. It has definitely captured my interest lately. I am seeing the interchange of animals in my backyard with new eyes. I am noticing new patterns, new details. And lest you think that’s affected my productivity; it hasn’t. I’m more productive than ever. I finished an essay I’ve been working on for two months. I’m writing fiction with vivid strokes, day dreaming or dreaming in my sleep. Whatever this “deprivation” period is to accomplish, it is working. I feel rest and peace and comfort that my creativity is coming to life after a tough three years working full-time.

So what else is there to see?

It’s on Flickr. I’m obsessed with Australia lately and simply typing it into Flickr gives me amazing results that frequently cause the daydreaming to start up again with a vengeance.

Anyone else wanna go here?

Photo by yury (Sydney, Australia’s North Beaches)

Photo by msdstefan (Smoky Cape Lighthouse, NSW)

Check out photos by both of these photographers and ooh and aah along with me. It’s like waking up a bit more after viewing each picture. It’s a dreamland even my mind couldn’t create on its own. The Creator’s most beautiful places (all over the world, not just Australia) and we get to see them. There is a lot to see out there too.

What new things can you find to see today? This can be anything that you haven’t seen before or something you’ve seen often but have not looked at in a new way in a long time.

I wear scarves year round. Thick, bulky sweater and cashmere scarves in winter and thin, lightly spun scarves in summer. I like the warmth in the winter and the coolness in the summer. Even in 100+-degree Corfu and Rome, I still wore my scarves. It’s a comfort thing (I’m prone to drafts as soon as I get in the shade) and it’s a style thing. I like the touch of a scarf.

Today the sun is still determined to peek out of those clouds; after going to bed early last night because I was ill, I wake up renewed this morning, don my comfy Helly Hanson sweater-coat, my bulky sweater scarf, and creep downstairs to write my journal while the world wakes up.

No reading makes me aware of these comforts. I’m more appreciative of a mug of hot chocolate, a faux fur blanket over my lap as I write, a comfortable leather couch you can just sink into, and a warm house that will barely need any heater help today at all.

My mind is resting, but wide awake. I focus better without all the reading this week. I wrote 1,000 words on a very important essay yesterday and stayed focused the entire time. I was just “on.”

My to be read pile grows with each passing day. But I am learning my rhythms. I am learning my particular bent, my proclivity to read rather than to write or to feel. It is interesting to me to watch this.

I don’t think I will stop reading, but I think I will contain reading. I have learned the power of depriving myself of my “emotional crutch” in order to accomplish what I keep putting off.

How about you? Do you think your reading spills into too many areas of your life? If not, how do you contain it?

When one can’t read, one can listen.

Listen?

Just like our September 2009 trip to Glacier Bay, Alaska, (picture above) when they turned off the boat, turned off all the music and noise, and just parked us in front of a glacier so that we could hear it calving (small chunks busting off and dropping into the water). The sound was deafening, but stark. I realized then that my ears are out of practice. I have too much going on and just need to listen.

What do I hear when I listen? I hear the sound of the heater (the sun is just out, so the heater will shut off soon), and I hear the whistle of a train passing through the valley below. I hear the airplane high overhead, disappearing into the clouds. I hear the swoosh of cars as they drive by on the road behind us. I hear the silence buzzing in my ears.

Then hubby comes downstairs to get snacks and we chat back and forth, he clinks pans together as he fusses in the kitchen upstairs, I focus on my writing, and begin to sing a song from our church service on Sunday under my breath. It’s entirely appropriate to my day and I’m glad that my subconscious remembered it.

Another plane breaks the sound barrier high above us and hubby clinks more pans. I realize he is putting away the dishes I washed the night before and I smile. Another car swooshes by, and I can see blue sky peeking through the clouds.

Practice: What do you hear today? What are you listening to?

I’m going into a week of reading deprivation. Why, you may ask? I’m trying to deprive myself of ignoring my worries by jumping into reading. I can hear so many of you venting your outrage. “But that’s what reading is for?” “I need my reading time, don’t make me feel guilty about it.” “Without books, I. Will. Die.”

I know. I know. I’m not going to make anyone else feel bad for reading. This is part of an artist’s recovery program I’m working through (on week 4) and this week I am being pushed to be more specific and articulate about my creative goals and what is holding me back. Thus, no reading. Instead, I’m to work on things more tactile: cleaning, organizing, (already started, my natural proclivity to such things is running just about a week ahead of this course) being artistic with fabrics, paper, visual enjoyment, independent films (watched a fantastic Indy film from 2007 this weekend called Sweet Land), strolling through junk stores, window shopping in Queen Anne and West Seattle, lots of writing that doesn’t have to be read or appreciated by anyone but me, even some baking. And of course, time with hubby just watching waves.

My Kindle will stay charged on my desk, my book piles will stay unread and stacked neatly, but I will check out for a week. Just a week. It sounds so scary, but I know I can do it. Of course daily reading that has to happen in the course of a work day will happen, but reading to escape . . . I just can’t.

I’ll keep you posted as the week goes on by talking about what I’m seeing, doing, experiencing. It should be fun!

Challenge: Rather than read every time you need to escape today, why not limit yourself to one reading escape session and walk outdoors and photograph what you see instead? Why not write every sound you hear in five minutes outdoors? Why not hang out on Flickr and just look at pictures? Type in your dream destination and let it carry you away. Is there a closet or drawer to be organized? Is there a floor to be scrubbed? But you CAN read. It’s just me that can’t for a week.

Author, historian, novelist, and professor, Dr. Susan Wise Bauer writes faster than I think. She edits faster than I write. She proofs faster than I can rephrase a sentence. I’m so glad God gave her this gift because her follow-up volume to History of the Ancient World continues the compelling story of the major nation-states side by side as they plod through the Middle Ages (now that Rome has fallen and all).

Bauer’s History of the Medieval World picks up at the conversion of Constantine and carries us until the First Crusade. The writing is the same running narrative interspersed with pithy interludes that we received in Bauer’s first, History of the Ancient World, and that had me chuckling in delight as I read it on my Kindle at the beach while the waters of the Mediterranean sparkled offshore. I read the bulk of the book while in Italy, finding it fitting subject matter in my exhausted state (we spent days hiking through the Balkans and the Greek island of Corfu). I was amazed as I read the end of Ancient World safe at home in Seattle, cozy under my cashmere blanket, to find out that the highlight of our Amalfi coast experience–a hydrofoil boat ride to Capri; an ancient island for royalty (way before Jacqueline Kennedy made it her oasis)–was the Roman emperor Tiberius’s chosen hideout, far away from Jerusalem and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Thus, I opened Medieval World ready to continue my journey through history, almost sad that this year in 2010 there will be no trips to Greece or Turkey or Europe. It is our rest year (you’ve got to save up for traveling sometime, right?) and I’m grateful to have Medieval World to dream over while I wait for 2011 and our grand plans.

I love history: Thomas Cahill, Plutarch, D’Abigne, Carlyle, Durant, and Gibbon. I had a difficult time beginning with Ancient World, because it was a format entirely foreign to me. But after finally digging in (and reading it to my heart’s content in Italy), I find I am quite enamored with Bauer’s view of the history of the world. I love tracking my way across the years with each nation-state and find I learn something new every time I read.

They say you fall in love with the books you read far from home the most. I can’t remember who said it exactly, but I remembered the exhortation before I left for Europe last spring. I did fall in love with Bauer’s History of the World series while on the Italian beach near Perdifumo, and reading Medieval World reminds me once again of all the fabulous places I’ve been . . . and the even more fabulous places I’ll go to next!

Grade: A+