Posts by Kathleen McCleary
Because my life is completely entangled with writing—I’ve written three novels, hundreds of articles and essays, and I teach creative writing to kids—I get a lot of questions about writing from students, friends, friends of friends, third cousins of former neighbors, and strangers. So here are some of the questions I get asked most often and a few I’ve never been asked but wish I had (with answers to them all):
How did you get your first novel published? Several key factors helped me get my novel published. 1. I wrote a good book. It’s far from perfect and not nearly as good as the books I wrote later, but it was a good story and it carried some emotional truth. It was the result of the hard work we all put in: Four years of writing early in the morning and late at night and on weekends, in my kitchen, on trains, on vacation, at college reunions, as well as several novel-writing classes, a critique group with other writers, and feedback from friends and acquaintances. 2. I researched agents thoroughly and followed instructions well. I only sent query letters to agents who were clearly interested in the kind of fiction I wrote (contemporary women’s fiction) and I followed directions exactly. If they wanted the first chapter and a synopsis, that’s what I sent. If they wanted a synopsis only, that’s what I sent. I didn’t send a full manuscript unless they requested it. 3. I picked an agent who loved my book and loved the way I wrote, not the most famous agent. 4. I was lucky. I finished my book and got an agent in 2003, before the onslaught of e-books and $0.99 price points for novels changed the publishing industry into the crazy mess it is right now.
What is the first book that made you cry? When I got to the part in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where the Witch’s servants shave the lion’s mane, I started crying and couldn’t stop and couldn’t bring myself to finish reading the book even after I stopped crying. What I learned from this: I was only eight or nine, but I learned that books are powerful enough to make you weep, haunt your dreams, and feel more real than real life.
Do you believe in writer’s block? Sure; I know it’s something real that real people experience so I don’t doubt it exists— unlike, say, the perfect haircut, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist. Have I ever experienced it? Not really. As long as I’m writing about something I care about, something I feel emotionally invested in, I can always get words onto a page. The times I’ve gotten stuck in writing fiction have been the times I wasn’t honest enough with myself to admit that I didn’t really care deeply about my story or characters.
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Flickr Creative Commons: Paxon Woelber
This past fall, I went backpacking for four days in the Canadian wilderness with a good friend. It will be an adventure, I told myself as we planned the trip, when I read online about the “rugged,” “challenging,” “demanding” trail. It’s good to get outside your comfort zone. The trail included “steep climbs,” and “boulder hopping.” I’m tough; I can push myself. It didn’t occur to me to question whether pushing myself was a worthwhile goal; it was what I always did.
What happened was that I did indeed push myself, to the point of absolute physical and mental exhaustion. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done; it is the scariest thing I’ve ever done; I would never do it again, and I’m beyond glad I did it. It was one of the few experiences in my life that really and truly shifted my understanding of myself in a profound and lasting way.
And the experience made me think that that is exactly what needs to happen for my characters when I write: I need to put them into situations that force them to confront some of their deepest fears and deepest insecurities and emerge changed. Notice I didn’t say emerge “better,” because that’s not always the case; sometimes living through a worst-case scenario alters people in ways both profound and tragic. But they need to emerge different, to be transformed in some way, major or minor, by their experience.
I play a game in one of the creative writing classes I teach for kids, in which I ask students to make up a character and that character’s greatest fear. Then I ask them to make up a setting. THEN I mix up all the characters and fears and settings and everyone gets new combinations and has to write a scene or story in which the character they’ve been given has to live through their absolute biggest fear coming true, in whatever setting they’ve been given. It’s a challenging and fun game, and I play along with the kids every time. In one of the students’ stories an old man terrified of cats finds himself in an isolated cabin in the Canadian wilderness filled with cats; in another a young woman with a deep and irrational fear of teddy bears is buckled into her airplane seat on a long flight behind toddlers who keep throwing their teddy bears into her lap; in yet another a woman who is terrified of failing at everything she tries in life makes a desperate attempt to make her mark on the world by engaging in an act of ecoterrorism.
Some things to think about as you get into your character’s story:
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Flickr Creative Commons: Theo Crazzolara
I’m a writer but I’m also a reader, and every 4-6 weeks my book groups (I’m in two) meet to talk about what we’ve read. Some of the discussions are brief—a cursory talk about the book, then a diversion into discussing our kids, our careers, our dogs, our aging parents, the Washington Nationals (I live near D.C.), world politics, and the many delectable treats to be found at Trader Joe’s. Other discussions can go on, literally, for hours as we debate the pros and cons and ins and outs of a book we can’t forget and can’t ignore.
Both my book groups are always searching for stories that lead to an immersive reading experience and good conversation, the kind of books you HAVE to talk to someone about as soon as you finish them. But I approach all our book group discussions as an author, too. What makes a book the kind of book people need and want to talk about? Is it character? Plot? Setting? Or is it some unfathomable alchemy you can only grasp occasionally, like seeing the northern lights? Whatever it is, I want to know, because I want to write the books that make people want to talk about them.
The books that have sparked the most animated conversations in my book groups over the past 10 years include John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, and Stoner, by John Williams. They’re wildly different books: Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) is about a young black boy in rural Mississippi on an improbable road trip with his drug-addicted mother; Rebecca (1938) is a moody Gothic romance about a young wife in Cornwall and her haunting predecessor; and Less (2018) tells the tale of a struggling middle-aged gay novelist who travels the world to avoid an awkward wedding.
In a completely unscientific study, I reached out to a few members of my book groups and stretched my own brain to remember what about these books captured us and wouldn’t let go. A few common threads:
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Flickr Creative Commons: John Dyer
Many years ago, the magazine I worked for decided to do a special issue on “Values,” and we chose a handful of key values and interviewed people who exemplified those values. Chris Fields, the firefighter who tenderly carried the baby killed in the Oklahoma City bombing out of the rubble, talked about COMPASSION; Cal Ripken, Jr. (who broke Lou Gehrig’s record for most consecutive baseball games played) talked about PERSEVERANCE; Mary Fisher, an artist (and later activist) who contracted AIDS from her husband, spoke about TOLERANCE. Everyone who worked on that issue, from the assistant photo editor to the sales reps, said something to me about how good it made them feel to be part of that project, what it meant to do something that felt meaningful and true.
And I find that the stories that resonate with me most in fiction—from The Story of Paddington Bear to the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the brilliant BBC series “Shetland”—are those with characters who exemplify strong values, who struggle to live by a code of conduct that rings true whether you’re a dwarf or a recently widowed police inspector. Figuring out the values that you want your work to convey can be as essential as developing plot or character or a climactic scene. A value system is an essential part of the fictional world you create, and it’s worth it to take some time to understand the values that matter in that world.
With each of the novels I’ve written, I’ve tried to explore essential values. In my third novel, one of the major characters has an affair with her best friend’s husband. It’s a terrible betrayal, and one that I tried to use to get at the heart of what it means to have integrity—not just in the sense of being honest, but also in the original sense of the word, what it means to be whole. Exploring THAT helped me get at the universal experience of why we all make mistakes, or do things that violate our own moral codes.
How do you figure out your novel’s value system?
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Flickr Creative Commons: Theo Crazzolara
So here’s my dirty little secret about writing fiction: Most of my characters begin with a real person. And before friends and acquaintances start thumbing through my novels, wondering if they should be outraged, let me emphasize that the key word here is “begin.” And let me also suggest that you may want to give it a try if you haven’t already.
Plenty of authors “steal” from real life—Harper Lee based To Kill a Mockingbird’s Dill Harris on Truman Capote; Harry Potter’s Severus Snape was a fictional portrait of John Nettleship, one of J.K. Rowling’s teachers; and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s Glinda the Good Witch was based on L. Frank Baum’s mother-in-law. (Truly! She was a suffragist and abolitionist who also fought for Native American rights.)
Real people—meaning people I know personally and people I’ve never met but know of, such as actors or authors or politicians—are a wonderful entry point into character. It’s like having an outline of a person you can color in and embellish, something much more manageable than trying to draw a person from scratch. It does not mean I think of someone I know, change the name and hair color, then work to provide a scrupulous portrait of that person in words. As every author knows, characters take on a life of their own, and say and do things we never expected or meant for them to say and do, and in the process becoming utterly and only themselves.
In my second novel I knew that one of the main characters would be a woman aged 75-plus, someone earthy and strong, with common sense and a good sense of humor. I found inspiration in the author Betty MacDonald, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the 1920s and 30s. My character, also named Betty, had a quick wit, no tendency for self-pity, and was physically strong, traits I stole from Betty MacDonald. She was also passionate, married to a serial philanderer, suffered multiple miscarriages, fell in love with a neighbor with whom she carried on an adulterous affair for decades, and a devoted mother—all things I made up. I made up her appearance and her childhood and her siblings and her relationships with her siblings. She’s still one of the richest characters I’ve ever written.
Four ways to use real people to find your characters:
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Flickr Creative Commons: Mel Trent
Recently I was talking to a friend about her mother’s death. Losing a parent—especially the only parent you had left—sends the world spinning off its axis. It can feel like a free-fall into grief. “But it’s also liberating,” my friend said. “Is that an awful thing to say?” The answer is no, because it’s true. While parent/child relationships are often complicated (my God, what would we all write about if human relationships were straightforward and easy?), the death of a parent brings enormous loss. We lose the buffer between ourselves and our own mortality; we lose a generation and the values and events and memory that shaped them; we lose the individual who shaped us, for better or for worse.
But it’s also liberating. Suddenly we are free to be and do things completely apart from our parents’ expectations or rules or hopes or disappointments. We are different people without our parents, no matter how young or old we are when we lose them. We can serve tapas on Christmas eve instead of roast beef, move to a different house or different town or different job or different relationship, take up the hobby Dad thought was a waste of time and money, go on the trip Mom worried was too risky. Those are just the obvious, external examples. How a parent’s death frees us to BE someone different is yet another piece of the story.
And this proverbial two-edged sword—we lose, we gain—is at the heart of writing fiction. It’s the key to character, because every character is both good and bad. It’s the key to plot, because every obstacle offers an opportunity to conquer that obstacle, to face down a challenge or a fear. And it’s the key to story, because every compelling story involves a win and a loss.
As you write, think about the flip side of your character and your story. Maybe your character is a young woman who’s calm and emotionally balanced and poised under pressure, the rock of her family. But there’s a flip side to all that stability, too. Maybe she can’t empathize with her husband or brother or the child who feel things more intensely than she does, so her relationships are distant, a step removed from real intimacy. You can find this duality in Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel Less, featuring a mild-mannered, polite, not very successful middle-aged protagonist who seems to let life sweep him up in its currents and carry him along. He’s soft-spoken, innocuous, not memorable. Yet he has an innocence, a kindness, and a sweetness that make him unforgettable, and that lead those around him to act in remarkable ways.
The flip side is critical for antagonists, too. I play a game called “Monster Confessions” in the creative writing workshops I teach to kids, in which I ask kids to write a monologue from a bad guy’s point of view. I’ve had students write “confessions” by the big bad wolf, by Harry Potter’s Professor Quirrell, by Jugo, the bad guy in a Japanese Manga series. What I love about all of their essays is the way the students manage to find the common thread of humanity in every villain, the […]
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Flickr Creative Commons:: seanbjack
When my daughters were little I used to read all kinds of books and magazines filled with parenting advice, looking for the nugget of wisdom that would help me be the best possible parent. One day, I found it: “Don’t forget to smile at your kids.”
Well, that’s obvious, you think. But it isn’t. In those days I was working full time, raising two toddlers, and helping support my husband through a PhD. I played stuffed animal games while plotting grocery lists in my head, and bustled them into clothes and socks and shoes and coats with determined concentration every morning. But once I took that mandate to heart and began smiling at them more readily, the dynamic in our house shifted. Their faces would light up in response to my smiles, and their happiness made me happy, and it became a virtuous cycle. It remains the single best bit of parenting advice I ever got.
Can writing advice be distilled down to one game-changing essential nugget? I’d say yes: What does this character want? Well, that’s obvious, you think, as obvious as smiling at your kids. But just like that nugget of parenting wisdom, there’s more to it than that. Because what your character wants may conflict with the wants of a host of other characters, for starters. What your character wants may put them at odds with themselves. What your character wants may be not one thing but two things, and those two things may be at odds. And if you can stay focused on all those wants, you will end up with one hell of a story.
So what’s the best way to do that? Here are a few tricks:
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Flickr Creative Commons: Josh McGinn
On Thanksgiving Day, I was standing in my kitchen, chopping celery and contemplating the timing for dinner, when Joni Mitchell’s song “The River” came on and all of a sudden my eyes filled and I felt such a sense of loss I could hardly stand it. I missed my father, who LOVED the holidays and has been dead for seven years; I missed my mother, whose distinctive laugh has been the soundtrack to all my holidays but who is now too infirm to leave her home; I missed my daughter, who lives 3,000 miles away. Then our guests arrived and the house filled with food and talk and laughter and I felt elated.
If ever there were a best of times and worst of times, it would be now, that period from Thanksgiving through Hanukkah and Christmas, with all its expectations and disappointments and loves and heartaches and estrangements. It’s the time when all the things we value most and despise most about families come roaring to the forefront, demanding attention, and when all our own successes and losses seem to tumble from their neat little shelves in our lives and knock us on the head.
Families are at the heart of most fiction, be it Game of Thrones’s Starks, John Steinbeck’s Trasks and Hamiltons in East of Eden, or Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, the ultimate father-son dyad. Every single fictional family is messy and imperfect, sometimes fierce in their love for each other, sometimes brutal to each other, always multi-layered and complex. So if the holidays evoke a similarly broad range of emotions in you, USE that. Use it to explore the complexity of family relationships in your fiction. If your main character is an orphan or a thief or a soldier, she still has a “family,” even if it’s the one she’s cobbled together out of vagrants or wizards and elves (depending on your genre). Consider:
Estrangement. Once, one of my family members stopped speaking to me for more than a year over something that seemed minor to me but was major to them. And of course it wasn’t just about the inciting incident; it was about our years of history together, the wounds inflicted without knowing how much they hurt, the misunderstandings, the failed communication. If one or more of your characters is estranged from someone important to them, make sure you understand the history behind that. You don’t have to put it all down on the page, but you need to understand the complexities there, so the estrangement makes sense to the reader even if the characters themselves lack the self-knowledge or self-awareness to get it.
Loss. I’ve written before about how loss drives fiction (https://staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud/2016/06/15/forging-character/). And it’s true. There’s not a person alive who hasn’t experienced some kind of loss by the time they’re a teenager, whether it’s the loss of a first love, the death of a pet, a move, a loss of innocence, or the death of a grandparent.
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Flickr Creative Commons: Jeff Kubina
Last week in the creative writing workshop I teach, one of the students shared her latest short story with the group. None of these kids—ages 13-17—know each other outside our class. They all attend different schools. One is an outgoing 6’5” 17-year-old rower who loves fantasy fiction; another is a shy and brilliant 14-year-old who writes realistic fiction about the terrors of high school. Anyway, we all read Riya’s story and one of the students immediately said, “I love this. This story is just CLASSIC Riya.” And I thought, Bingo!
My thought wasn’t a response to the student’s comment; it was a response to the meaning behind the comment—I know you, I know your writing, you have a voice that is only yours, I get you. It was the validation we all hope for—to be seen and heard and understood. It was also affirmation that our little workshop of 6 (including me) has become a real community, a group of people who are working hard, making themselves vulnerable, challenging each other, and rooting for each other’s success as much as their own. It took me many years to understand the important role of community in my writing, and I couldn’t have written—let alone published—any of my novels without the various writers, readers, students, teachers, friends, and family who make up my communities.
Here’s what I love about my writing communities:
A community keeps you honest. I wrote half of my first novel sitting alone in my house without showing it to a soul. I had no idea what I was doing or whether or not it was any good and I was stuck. So I took an online novel-writing class. Every week, the instructor and seven or eight other students read whatever chapter I posted. I was warmed by the positive feedback—they liked it! They really liked it!—but they also pointed out that the reason I was stuck was because I had taken the plot in a direction that was way too complicated, difficult to follow, and didn’t make a lot of sense. It was hard to hear, but it was also true. It gave me the courage I needed to delete the chapters that didn’t work and forge ahead in a new direction. Now I’m in a critique group with four other published authors. We genuinely like each other and admire each other’s work, but we also tell the truth. When one writer showed us the climactic chapter of her crime thriller we congratulated her on getting the book done, then pointed out the flaws that made the chapter totally implausible. We hashed out all the reasons it didn’t work. She was embarrassed (she’s a pro who had published four novels by then) but also agreed. The next week she rewrote the chapter with a brilliant, unexpected twist that couldn’t have worked better.
A community keeps you going. Have I told you about the hell that was my second novel? I’m sure I have, because I’ve told just about everybody. I struggled to write it and rewrote it and rewrote it and despaired and it took me YEARS. But my community—in this case, my Fiction Writers’ Co-op, a private Facebook group of […]
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What book changed your life? As tempting as it is to give a lofty, literary answer, the truth (for me, at least) is probably A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I read over and over and over, or C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which upset me so much (the shaving of the lion’s mane) that I cried all afternoon and threw the book out the window because it distressed me too much to even have it in the house (a lesson in the power of story). Last week I interviewed writer Anne Lamott for a magazine piece. She’s a voracious reader and prolific writer (seven novels and even more works of non-fiction, including her classic book on writing, Bird by Bird). What book changed her life? Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which she read for the first time at age eight.
What is it about the books we read when we’re young that makes them stick with us forever? PBS has a new initiative underway called “The Great American Read” which brought out a list of America’s 100 Most Loved books this spring. PBS worked with a public opinion polling service to “conduct a demographically and statistically representative survey asking Americans to name their most-loved novel.” Approximately 7,200 people participated. And what’s interesting about the list is that Americans don’t seem to love the books that are supposed to constitute great literature (Phillip Roth, William Faulkner, Jonathan Franzen). But we sure do love the books we read as children or teenagers—fully a quarter of the list are books aimed at kids and teens, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Charlotte’s Web to Harry Potter to The Hunger Games.
Here’s what many children’s/YA books have that make them resonate with readers:
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Flickr Creative Commons: Mark Lorch
So here’s the thing: I’m not writing fiction right now. I haven’t written fiction for a solid 18 months, maybe longer. My last novel was published in 2013, the culmination of a writing streak that produced three novels in five years, all of which were agonized over and rewritten and edited and re-edited and shopped around and published and reviewed and read. I started and shelved two different novels over the course of three years after my last one came out and then, dear reader, I stopped writing.
I still write—I have a busy and productive career as a journalist, I teach creative writing to kids and play every writing game and do every writing exercise right along with them—but I don’t have a “work in progress” right now. I don’t have an idea that consumes me; I don’t need to write to maintain my sanity; I don’t write every day.
What have I been doing since I stopped writing? All the work involved in the full catastrophe of any life. Mine happens to include an elderly parent and kids and spouse and work and bills and leaky roofs and grocery shopping and head colds and what’s for dinner tonight? Yours is some variation on that, I’m sure. But if I don’t make writing fiction a part of my full catastrophe, am I really a writer?
When I was young, from age 8 or 9 on, I wrote. I wrote a neighborhood newspaper and I kept a journal and I wrote short stories and I wrote poetry. I kept writing through high school and I wrote when I got to college. I remember vividly during my senior year when a friend mentioned that she’d been doing some non-school-related writing lately, that she was pleased with her writing, that she liked being a writer. When I asked what she was writing she said she’d been writing one or two journal entries a week. To me, that was living, not writing. I marveled at her boldness in declaring herself a writer but I still didn’t think it applied to me.
For a decade or more I would say, “I’m a journalist,” or “I’m an editor,” when people asked what I did for a living, because even though I was writing magazine and newspaper articles regularly and still writing poetry and fiction (for my own amusement) it seemed hubris to declare myself a real writer. Then, after my first book came out, I’d say, “I’m a journalist but I recently published my first novel.” It wasn’t until my second book came out (and I already had a contract on my third, as-yet-unwritten novel), that I began to answer, “I’m a writer” or even “I’m an author.” I felt I’d earned it.
But I think I earned it long before I could say it. I think all of us who have tried to capture the currents of words and images as they run through our brains are writers. It’s ****-ing HARD, what we do, isn’t it?
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Flickr Creative Commons: Adrian Wallett
Last week, a 10-year-old in one of the creative writing workshops I teach outlined the plot for his next story to me:
A war breaks out between Glue and Tape to determine which is the best adhesive. Gorilla Glue is the leader of the Glue Army, with Super Glue as second-in-command. Glue-sticks are the foot soldiers. The Tape Army is led by Duct Tape, with Packing Tape as colonel and rolls of Scotch Tape as minions. The battle is complicated by the forces of the Resistance, led by Teflon, who is opposed to having anything stick to anything. But Staples have a role to play, too, and may come in and put a definitive end to the war.
How creative and clever is that? The thing I love most about teaching kids is that they constantly surprise me, and open my mind to new ways of thinking about story.
In my creative writing workshops (I teach with writopialab.org), I teach kids the basics, week after week: Figure out your main character’s want or goal, the thing that’s driving the story. What obstacles stand in the way? Is one of the obstacles internal, a personal flaw or weakness of some kind? Will the character obtain the goal or not? What will he/she learn? What will he/she gain and lose by the end of the story?
We play writing games designed to reinforce all these basics, or to unleash new ideas. And week after week, the kids astonish me. There’s the girl writing a novel about Merlin the magician, who has traveled through time and is working as a docent at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. There’s the girl who wrote a story about Dreamcatchers, creatures whose job is to fly into children’s bedrooms each night and capture their dreams to fuel the world (and steal their nightmares to prevent destruction). There’s the boy who wrote a story from the point of view of the humble thimble token in Monopoly, about wanting to be better than the other, flashier tokens.
I play all the writing games with the kids in workshop, and I love the way that playing at writing energizes my own writing work. Here are some ways to flex your own play muscles:
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Flickr Creative Commons: Rangga Rr
I love survival stories. Ernest Shackleton in Antarctica, Uruguayan soccer players in the Andes, plane crash survivors in New Guinea—I’ve read and loved them all. (The books about those stories are Alfred Lansing’s Endurance, Alive, by Piers Paul Read, and Lost in Shangri-La, by Mitchell Zuckoff.) Aside from the fact that survival stories are the best possible thing to read when you’re sick (so you have a cold? It’s not scurvy! And you’re not trapped inside a tent in gale force winds where it’s 30 below and there’s nothing to eat but seal blubber!), they’re also a wonderful window into character and how people respond in extreme circumstances. And since the best novels are about ordinary characters running up against unexpected obstacles, be they icebergs or aliens or a husband’s surprise announcement that he wants a divorce, survival stories are a good road map for how to draw believable characters.
What I learned:
Human nature is full of surprises. Ernest Shackleton was a bull of a man with a quick temper and little patience for fools. Yet he had a gift for managing people—something that proved invaluable when he and his men were marooned in Antarctica after fierce ice crushed their ship in the Weddell Sea. During the 15-plus months they were stranded, Shackleton did everything he could to keep his men united. He did his share of every chore, no matter how menial, and insisted everyone get the same rations and do the same work, no matter their class or rank. He held poker games and played phonograph music to alleviate boredom, and even shared his tent with the three most troublesome personalities on the expedition so he could keep them in check. He finally sailed a lifeboat more than 1,000 miles to get help. Every single man survived.
When faced with what seems like an insurmountable obstacle, how will your characters react? What unexpected things will they do?
Putting people in strange settings gives them a chance to grow. When a bunch of 19-year-old soccer players found themselves alone in the Andes with little food, shelter, or means to melt snow for water, some curled up and waited to die and some immediately started searching for ways to get help. And the “natural leaders” weren’t necessarily the ones who took charge in this bizarre and unexpected setting. What will your characters do if they find themselves in a different world?
People form unusual alliances under duress.
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Flickr Creative Commons: asenat29
It’s easy to look ahead to a new year and make resolutions about new habits—I’ll write 1,000 words a day, I’ll write seven days a week, I’ll finish/start that novel/short story/novella—you get the idea. But instead of resolving to do better, try harder, work smarter (not that there’s anything wrong with that), why not look at what gifts you could give yourself in the year ahead instead? A few to consider:
A sacred space
This year I looked around the home office in which I do all my writing and realized it looked like a dorm room, with posters taped to the walls, papers overflowing the desk, piles of books on the floor, and a mish-mash of furniture. My desk, a lumbering dark wood beast, faced a wall that hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in 10 years. When I opened the closet door, things fell on my head (this is truth). This was not a space that said, “brilliant creative work is being done here.” It was a space that said, “I’m too busy to deal with this.” So I made time. I painted the office cream, with pale gray woodwork. I painted that big dark desk a beautiful shade of gray-blue. I moved the desk to face the window, and put a bird feeder outside in the yard. I organized the books and papers, threw away a lot, cleaned out the closet, and framed and hung paintings I’d done on the walls. I cleared my desk of everything except my computer, a notepad and pen, and one or two small items that bring me pleasure—a millefiori paperweight my aunt gave me when I finished my last novel, a photo of my girls as babies, the glass bowl that sat on my father’s dresser. When I walk in here to work, it’s peaceful and inspiring. It’s been well worth the cost of a few gallons of paint. For more on how I created my sacred space, complete with before and after photos, click here.
Time
It’s our most precious resource and the one we waste most often. I learned long ago that I need to exercise a minimum of three times a week or I get squirrely. So I schedule three hours of exercise a week into my calendar as soon as I turn the page to a new month. Those three hours per week are inviolable; everything else I do (with rare exceptions) gets scheduled around them. I’ve learned to do the same with writing. I wrote my first novel while working part-time and taking care of two young kids, and I got it done by carving time out of each morning after my kids left for school, and out of each evening after they went to bed.
Imperfection
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