Writers Unbound

I’ve loved literature since I could read. Then I learned how to write, and there was no stopping me. I produced a prodigious amount of sappy poems through my adolescence, then moved on with all the maturity of age to college papers.

And I got stuck there.

Oh, I wrote some great papers. And I took as many creative writing courses as I could fit in and I loved them. I sweated words out, terrified that I was somehow immature, still sappy, unable to recognize the abysmal quality of my own poetry and prose. Then I erased and sweated new words out, even more terrified that I was being untrue to myself, fawning to a teacher whose style I could easily imitate, letting myself be molded into some kind of writer I would hate being.

I survived, I got good grades, I got compliments, I graduated. My Mom got sick, and I stayed home with her and Dad for that year after my college graduation. I debated going for my Masters, going for a job, going for success as an amazingly young and mature writer, or going for the man I had wanted to marry for 8 years. (We met when we were 14.)

Dear Reader, I married him, and I have never been sorry. But a funny thing happened; actually, it had been happening that whole year in between college and marriage. I didn’t write. I couldn’t. I wanted to, but I produced nothing…

I was in a strange haze. I had accustomed myself for the last four years to writing for my teachers: producing poetry, short stories, essays, research papers with the goal of getting a good grade. Sure, I tried to be true to myself, too, but I know if it came to a choice of getting an A and compromising my voice a little, or getting a C and saying what I wanted, how I wanted, I would choose the A.

It’s not all bad to write in order to please someone else. I needed to learn a certain control over my expression. The difficult part comes when the control is removed and the freedom replaced. Having been trained to please and appease for those years, it was impossible to immediately produce stuff that was challenging, true, individual, and open.

In fact, I am still learning to produce what I feel and know from my gut and not what I feel from that fearful, placating part of my mind. I love approval. I love a pat on the head, and that’s what every good grade felt like to me. Now I look for things to replace the big red A on my papers: a comment, a place to fit in, a positive response. And I look for ways to get those marks of approval, even if the methods don’t suit my real, long-term goals.

This is a battle for every writer. I am starting to win mine more than lose. But I still wish I could get an A for every post I put up…

Writing poetry - whether or not you’re a poet - is one of the best ways to strengthen your expression, cull your dead words, and become more aware of the sound and flow of your writing.
Even if you are a poet, getting started can be difficult.

Guardian Books hosts a Poetry Workshop each month. Here’s the summary: “Every month, our poetry workshop is hosted by a different poet who sets an exercise, chooses the most interesting responses and offers an appraisal of them…” Past poets include Sean O’Brien in February, David Morley for January, and Jean Sprackland for the last month of 2007. Matthew Francis was the poet for March’s workshop; he received submissions until April 27 and will, I assume, soon post his short list and responses. I don’t see a new workshop listed for April/May, but I’m hoping that’s just a delay on the part of the WebMaster.

I took a little time to go through Francis’s workshop for March. His first instruction is simple: Complete the sentence, “When I think of summer, I think of…”
Easy enough, and not exactly inspiring yet. My list was lack luster and predictable at the beginning: grass, playgrounds, vacations. (For some reason I went straight to summers as a child, not summers now, as an adult. Hm.) But, as Francis said, I started thinking of things “very personal to you, the sort of associations that not everyone else would have, while others may be general experiences that nevertheless wouldn’t occur to many people.” Thing such as Read the rest of this entry »

I am amazed at how many writers don’t spend time reading. I’ve been that kind of writer before, and I produced mainly shallow, meaningless stuff I kept regurgitating and rephrasing from a shallow, meaningless pool of my own snot.

Some writers (usually not very good ones) are afraid that if they read, they’ll lose their own voice and simply become mimics. I say, better to mimic a great voice than to coddle your own not-so-great one. Of course we want to grow past mimicry. But let’s be honest, guys, we’re not all great writers. I know my prose isn’t sparkling; about 95% of the time it’s muddier than it is anything else. I get wordy. I use the same examples over and over. I get preachy. I irritate myself sometime.

So if I’m ever going to grow as a writer, I had better start being a good reader. My own voice might get squished sometimes. You might notice choppy sentences. Or fragments. Or perhaps I will become verbose, dangling word after word before you, throwing down metaphors like peanut shells at a roadhouse restaurant, stretching each point out to the very limit of human attention until all you want to do is reach through the computer, grab my wordy neck, and shake it until I spit out the point, the meat, the only thing you started reading the stupid sentence to find out.

Whew. At least it won’t be boring.

So read! Get a book! Sit down. Find time. Make time. Carry a book in your purse, or briefcase. Keep a couple in your car. Use your lunch hour. Listen to audio books during your commute. Turn off the television and pick up a book. Read a chapter every night before you go to sleep. What the heck, read two chapters! Get books into your life, somehow, some way, every way.

And your own voice? The one you sit down and hope will speak to you? The one that hides behind excuses before it finally comes out? The one that’s a little weak, a little timid, a little confused still? It will grow in the company of many clean, strong voices. It will stretch out. It will expand. It will still be yours; it will just be better.

More:
Paul Combs at Suite101 provides a list of books every writer should read. A great list to start on if you’ve been slacking in book life and don’t know where to begin.
And here’s a rather different perspective on reading from the accomplished writer of Word Munger.
And from Stuart Evers, a post supporting writers who read: in particular, writers of contemporary fiction reading the same. He doesn’t buy that “lose-my-own-voice” argument, either.

Good morning, fellow Writers. I’m happy to be at Writers Unbound and eager to keep making it a rewarding resource. I won’t take up much space introducing myself; you can read about me here if you’re interested. I’ll be tweaking the site a bit: stay tuned for a survey so you can let me know the topics most pertinent to you. I’ll also be sounding a call for guest bloggers and sponsoring contests (with prizes, yes!) as we get things rolling again.

For today, tips on our most important asset, drawn from one of the best books I’ve ever read about time management and productivity (and I’ve read a lot): Dan Kennedy’s No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs: The Ultimate, No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take No Prisoners Guide to Time, Productivity, and Sanity. With a title like that…

• Understand your per hour rate.
  If you don’t know what your time is worth, you won’t use it well. It’s easy to waste minutes and hours when they don’t matter in terms of dollars and cents. Set a goal for what you want to make each week and then divide by the number of hours you’ll be working. There’s your hourly rate; simple, eh? The not-so-simple but most important part is using those hours, every moment of them, in a way that helps you make that amount of money.
• Avoid meetings, conference calls, trivia, and other time-wasters.
  Easier said than done, but it’s possible. Once you know how much your hour is worth, it becomes much easier to say no to the stuff that distracts you from the real work. During your working hours, with every opportunity, ask yourself if it will make you money or waste your time. If you’re not sure, then it is probably just wasting your time.
• Make yourself difficult to find.
  If you work from home, as many freelance writers do, you can make yourself nearly impossible to find to other writers, to editors, to job possibilities. But what about to your spouse, your kids, your neighbor, your Mom who calls in, your dog who needs to be walked? It’s important to have a workspace at home and make it as off-limits as possible to potential interruptors. You can still love ‘em; just let them know you will be available later.
  If you work in an academic or office environment, you have to make an appearance and keep a certain amount of hours in your office. While there, though, make sure you look busy; don’t just sit back in your chair and stare at the ceiling for ideas. Get your computer going with your office program open and some words on the page; get your files and notes out on your desk; close your door; put your cell phone away; have a big clock handy. When people stop by, you can encourage them to move on by starting to type again, shifting through your files, looking at the clock, or kicking them in the butt.
  Okay, maybe not that last one.

More:
Read this article: 12 Ways to Beat Procrastination. (Don’t wait until tomorrow to read it.)
From Steve Pavlina, read how to Triple Your Personal Productivity.
Finally, but best, click through this Time Management for Anarchists movie/slideshow by Jim Munroe at nomediakings.org.

In my last entry, I whined about scheduling issues. Some of you were kind enough to leave comments- - thank you!

In an attempt to realign my priorities and deal with these types of issues more pro-actively, I did a little research. Sue LaPointe of Working Writer, Happy Writer wrote a great ebook which I recently reviewed, and it had a few great tips. I think that Freelance Switch may have also touched upon this solution.

Time for some realignment.

What do you think of the practice of letting some of your lower-paying clients go as your business booms?

Do you have any other tips for aligning/scheduling your work?

I am having  hard time making some scheduling decisions this month. I have a client who could potentially take up all of March, which is fine, as the pay also meets my March income goals. However, it is most likely that that pay won’t come until April, leaving my March income very skimpy.

That’s difficult. Do I look for additional March projects in order to round out my March income, even though, in reality, this client should take most of my March time to meet the deadline? Or, do I go ahead and devote March to this client, meet the deadline easily, but not meet my March income goals.

It’s very likely going to be choice three: do both, therefore working myself into a jello heap, imposing on my family time and  burning myself out.

Good times.

I’d say that pieces of my young life were craptastic enough for a memoir, but probably not craptastic enough for a bestselling memoir. Recently, though, all you need to do to fix that is” embellish” a little. “Embellishing” your published works are all over the news.

• A couple weeks ago I posted about a mother and child who embellished an essay to win Hanna Montana tickets.
• Of course, we all know about the James Frey mess that happened a couple years ago.
• Turns out that Misha Defonseca’s memoir  ”Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years” was totally fabricated. You can read about it here, in an article that the Boston Globe appropriately entitled “Den of Lies.”
• …And today’s news of the fake: Penguin-published author Margaret P. Jones admitted that “Love and Consequences” was pretty much made up.

So, what’s with all the fakery?

First of all, the James Frey debacle should have raised some red flags for other memoir-fabricators. Obviously, that’s not the case.

So why all the fake memoirs? Possible reasons, simply off the top of my head here…

• Memoirs are “in,” fiction is much harder to crack.
• Fiction is not as respectable. ?
• Naive new authors don’t know any better.
• This version is much cooler than what really happened.
•  Mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money.

 Sidenote: Parts of the book “A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” have been called into question, however the publisher and author stick by this book and no claim has been made that it is totally fabricated.

Such issues are nothing new. In the 90s, Mayan Rigoberta Menchu was accused of falsifying portions of her autobiography.

So, what’s the deal here?

I was recently blessed to come into contact with Leo Babauta, who runs a very successful blog, Zen Habits. He started up a new writers blog, Write to Done, and allowed me a guest post. I also interviewed him for About Freelance Writing.

In a recent post at Write To Done, Babauta suggests that one copy the style of other freelancers. He advocates reading great copy (stories, whatever) and then making it your own.

I was also able to get a review copy of Christina Katz’s Writer Mama, which I will also cover at About Freelance Writing shortly (I’m on the last chapter). Christina echoes Leo’s suggestion. She advises those who are looking to get into magazine print to break down the articles of your target publications. For example: how many subheads are standard? Does the author use humour or is the copy completely serious? Does the word count seems standardized across issues, features and departments, or is there some give and take? You are then to use your investigation in crafting your submission.

Finally, I’m thrown back to my undergraduate years, when one of my favorite professors lectured on Ben Franklin and assigned his autobiography. It happens that Franklin taught himself to write by carefully dissecting great works, studying their pieces, and then attempting to reconstruct the text as the original author had. Talk about self taught! Sure enough, Franklin’s autobiography is a piece of precise writing that accomplishes its purpose without self-aggrandizement.

Study the masters. Choose a muse and find out what it is that draws you to that muse. Take the pieces that you will from them, and make those pieces into your own work and styling. Now, go write!  

Happy Thursday. Read these blogs. (Short and to the point, right?)

• Writer Beware: “Literary scams, schemes and pitfalls.” Got a question about a publisher or agent? Wondering if you’ve been scammed? This is a great place to start looking.
• Grammar Girl: Study up! My personal recommendation for better grammar? Add a second language to you repertoire.
• MFABitch: “A litblog for all those bitches who survived their MFA.” I’m guessing if you weren’t a bitch going in, you’ll become one before you get out?
• GalleyCat: Rhymes with allycat (which is mynickname, no stealing!) Keep up with the ups and downs and superdowns of the publishing industry.
• Workerette. I read this blog but don’t communicate in it much, but don’t let that fool ya- it’s really a good read for working mothers (ie writing mums like myself).
• Well, let’s not leave off working men- check out Men With Pens. They recently dived into Why Your Novel Isn’t Written Yet. 
• Indigenous Issues Today. Ok, so this is a personal interest of mine. Simply replace this suggestion with your own personal interest. The point here is to read a blog about something that interests you- not having to do with your work!
• Meagan Francis. This is a local(ish) writer whose columns I tend to read. She also has a book out.
• Inkthinker. Follow this freelance writer’s quest for 100,000 in one year. (My husband, the tax accountant, is frowning over there at her goal. Hope she doesn’t let ‘the man’ take too much of it!).
• Plagiarism Today. If you’re a writer, you need to have a clue what plagiarism is (and what it’s not, which comes a little harder for some apparently).
• The author of Write For Cash has a PhD in feminism. Sounds GREAT to me!
• Here’s one that will make you LOL: Nice Mommy, Evil Editor.
• Last, but certainly not least, Mom Writers Lit Mag.
• Bonus Blog: Like books? Who doesn’t? Visit The Bookstacks.

Happy reading, don’t forget to bookmark!

Good morning readers and writers. It’s Writers Work Wednesday. Let’s get some dollars going.

• Avalon sure is friendly to potential authors. Their ”want list” is almost always updated. They’re currently putting the call out for a guide on travel to Honduras.
• Are you new to blogging? You may want to see if you can get on board with the Families.com blog network.
• Veteran writers based in San Francisco may want to check out this posting.
• Tech and custom car blogger needed. Be sure to bookmark this board, it’s great because it tells you how long ago the job was posted.
• Here’s a magazine I would read: Mexico Xpatz is seeking freelance writers. I’m burned out on writing about Mexico right now, so I won’t compete with you! (I’ll just subscribe and read you later!)
• Habitat Magazine is looking for journalists.
• Novelists: Twelfth Planet Press has put out a call for novellas numbering between 20,000 and 40,00 words.

 Another thing I want to bring up this Writer’s Work Wednesday is this wonderful book I’m reading that WILL get you motivated to query magazines and GET ASSIGNMENTS. I’m not even done with it, yet I CANNOT wait to recommend it to you: Writer Mama by Christina Katz.

Christina takes you through the process of becoming a writer for magazines, from beginning to end (and beyond). One book has never generated so many ideas for me before. I am reviewing it for About.com Freelance Writing, and carefully crafting my review. But don’t wait, get it today!