Karinwritesdangerously

« Just keep going. You’re on the right track. You’re going to find it. »
Directions from a helpful stranger

One balmy evening some time ago ago, I hopped on the subway and found my way Brooklyn. My destination: a book signing.

I was equipped with Google Map notes, but since I’m directionally challenged, I still felt the need to ask someone if I was heading toward 7th Avenue, a major thoroughfare. The fellow I asked paused briefly and grinned. Instead of simply saying, “Yes,” he made the comment quoted above. It occurred to me that this is not just a road map for finding a bookstore in Brooklyn, but also one for writing:

Just keep going: Whatever obstacles you encounter and however tough a writing session proves to be, forward momentum matters. If you just keep going, no matter how long it takes, you will eventually reach your desired destination. But if you let distractions or disappointing days derail you, you won’t get where you want to go. 

You’re on the right track: Knowing that you’re on the right track makes all the difference when it comes to motivating yourself. To me, this doesn’t mean that I won’t make mistakes or find myself in a muddle or take time-consuming detours the don’t prove fruitful. For me, being on “the right track” means that I’m pursuing the right road overall and keeping my eye on the prize.

You’re going to find it: If I just keep going and stay on the right track, then I’m guaranteed to ultimately achieve a major goal, which is to produce an exciting, engaging children’s novel. The same goes for you and whatever major project you are working on. 

Let’s keep it simple. Let’s follow these three steps and screen out everything else. If we keep going, stay on the right track, and have faith that we’re going to find what we’re aiming for, then we’ll all reach our writing destinations — and have fun along the way. Write on!

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« The chemistry of the body is inseparable from the chemistry of the brain. Movement can stimulate anyone. I can’t say enough about the connection between body and mind; when you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can’t simulate in a sedentary position. You’re making it work differently, and new directions can result. »
Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit

The Creative Habit brims with helpful ideas to jump start everyone’s imaginative juices. It’s no surprise that dancer Tywla Tharpe believes in the body-brain connection and that physical activity ignites creativity. 

As writers, how can we ramp up our physical activity? On days when we can’t make it to the gym or go for a run, how can we boost our creativity? A few strategies:

Do chair exercises: Simple body movements performed « butt in the chair » mode reduces fatigue and gives creativity a jolt. You can find easy chair exercises online.

Stretch and walk around: Every hour or so, stretch, shake out your mental cobwebs, give your eyes a rest, and get your blood flowing. Walk up and down a hallway or stairs. Moving every hour for a few minutes will refresh you and may even trigger a new idea or two. 

Dance to a beat: If you work at home and can dance, go for it! Moving to a beat helps get your creative juices flowing. It also boosts your endorphins, upping your happiness IQ. A song lasts a few minutes, but the surge in creativity it gives you can be long-lasting. 

Walk on the wild side: Nature is restorative! Research shows that people who spent four days hiking while unplugged scored almost 50% higher on creativity tests than a control group. Give yourself and your writing a gift! Leave your cell at home and take a walk in a park. Many a writer walks daily. I’ve had many inspiring ideas among trees and flowers!

In-chair exercises, dancing, walking — we can do this! Write on!

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« I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil. »
Truman Capote

Our boy Truman has a point: pruning our prose is often one of the best ways to improve it. There are so many missteps that can weaken the arrangement of words we put on a page: dull adverbs, lackluster adjectives, redundancies. Whatever we’re writing, we want it to sparkle and sizzle, not sputter and fizzle. As Jack Hart puts it in his terrific guide, A Writer’s Coach,” “Anything that doesn’t contribute to a piece of writing detracts from it. So create the strongest possible prose by eliminating everything that isn’t essential.” Strong words, but valuable advice. Here are some more tips from Jack for streamlining your sentences and adding more punch to your prose:

Question everything: Once you have a full draft, read through it slowly, mentally cutting words, phrases, and clauses. If the cuts don’t change the meaning, then keep them. If a word adds little to an essential point you’re making, consider cutting it. Look closely at the words or phrases on both sides of a conjunction like “and” or “but” and make sure they each say something different and that you need both of them.

Make modifiers work: Be sure that these descriptive words add impact by making them specific. Instead of using the word “worn,” come up with something juicier and more evocative, like “rump-sprung.” If a modifier repeats a meaning already conveyed by its noun, then drop it. For example, “slowly ambled” can be shortened to “ambled,” because ambling implies a slow pace.

Don’t overload: Don’t intimidate your reader with convoluted sentences that are confusing and muddy your meaning. Focus on one or two main ideas in each sentence and keep working until their meaning unfolds elegantly and clearly.

Avoid creeping nouns: Avoid using two nouns when one will work. Forget “sales event” and use “sale;” dump “crisis situation” and say “crisis.” And write on!

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« You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. »
Maya Angelou

« You can be cautious or you can be creative. But you can’t be a
cautious creative…Good ain’t near great. »
George Lois, art director

Wonderful, isn’t it, the way the inspiration for our work can come from so many places? I once read a piece by Anne Sibley O’Brien, a children’s book illustrator, with some great advice for us all. In it, she talked about her growing inner desire to “be bold and fierce. To do the work that only I can do.” To spur herself on, she created a list of practices that in her experience help her be bolder and fiercer. Here are some of her approaches that we can apply to our own projects:

Sit in stillness: “Getting quiet is the core practice for shifting from the good ideas imposed by my busy, chattering brain to the much better ideas and images that bubble up from somewhere deeper in
my unconscious.”

Ask questions: Anne finds that her work often improves when she spends time “musing on the questions I’m asking and what I want to achieve.”

Visualize: Daydreaming about an unfinished piece: what it will be like when it’s completed and how it will make you feel can be a great motivator.

Use free writes: As Anne puts it: Setting her pen to paper and “writing without stopping for a timed segment is a good way to go digging for and be surprised by nuggets hidden in my unconscious.”

Create a buffer zone: when you are creating, give yourself an “envelope of quiet, time, ease and freedom around the work.” Focus totally, with no distractions.

Give it space: Creative work “benefits from time to mature like wine. I’m able to see more and take the work farther when I live with it for a while.”

Be serious, yet light: Take your work seriously, but “hold it lightly. Don’t apologize or make excuses. Instead, put that energy towards creating work” that you can be proud of.

Get help: Anne values the insights of Eric Maisel, a creativity coach and especially likes three of his many books: Coaching the Artist Within, The Creativity Book: A Year’s Worth of Inspiration and Guidance, and Fearless Creating: A step by Step Approach to Starting and Completing Your Work of Art.

Let’s be fierce and bolder — and see if we can use some of Anne’s advice this week as we write on!

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As we move into warmer, greener days, something to delight us all:

“They always called it Magic and indeed, it seemed like it in the months that followed — the wonderful months — the radiant months — the amazing ones. Oh! the things which happened in that garden! If you had never had a garden, you cannot understand, and if you have had a garden, you will know that it would take a whole book to describe all that came to pass there. At first it seemed that green things would never cease pushing their way through the earth, in the grass, in the beds, even in the crevices of the walls….

“The seeds Dickon and Mary planted grew as if fairies had tended them. Satiny poppies of all tints danced in the breeze by the score, gaily defying flowers that had lived in the garden for years and which it might be confessed seemed rather to wonder how such new people had got there. And the roses — the roses! Rising out of the grass, tangled around the sun-dial, wreathing the tree trunks and hanging from their branches, climbing up the walls and spreading over them with long garlands falling in cascades — they came alive day by day, hour by hour. Fair fresh leaves, and buds — and buds — tiny at first but swelling and working Magic until they burst and uncurled into cups of scent delicately spilling themselves over their brims and filling the garden air.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett, from The Secret Garden

« Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? » John Keats 

Adversity—it’s not exactly something we embrace with enthusiasm! And yet, here, Keats advises us to use it as a catalyst for growth. How, practically speaking, can we use adversity? How can we use it to spur us to change and improve, instead of grinding us in the dust and making us feel powerless? After pondering this, I’ve come to see that when adversity comes our way, when it smacks us over the head, we still have the ability to make a choice about how we’ll respond to it.

In a nutshell, we can use it or let it use us. 

On the writing front, adversity — defined as ill fortune, misfortune, or a trial — comes to us in many forms:

We can find ourselves stymied by a writer’s block or hit a rough patch when our prose limps along on feet of clay. We can face revision decisions and feel like throwing our pages up in the air because we’re confused and frustrated. We can read something wonderful by someone else and fear our story will never be as good or as popular or as….whatever. Or we can polish our prose and buy it dancing shoes and send it out into the world only to have it meet rejection and be forced to regroup and revise yet again.

I could go on, but it’s painful and I know you get the picture. At some point, if you’ve been writing for a while, it’s likely that you’ve faced all these trials in one guise or another. Here’s the rub: Adversity comes with the territory. If we’re striving to write dangerously, to get out of our comfort zones, to do something that matters to us, well, the world is going to smack us down. Not once, but more than once. 

So let’s rethink our mindset about adversity. When it comes our way—and it will!—let’s use it to activate us to up our game. If we get rejected, let’s use the pain we feel to make our characters experience their pain more deeply. If we feel envious, let’s use that to push ourselves harder. If our revision stalls, let’s take a pause that refreshes or ask for help so we can get back on track.

When adversity hurts us, let’s make sure that’s not the end of the story. Let’s compel it to help us, to make us better, as we all write on! 

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« Have fun, and write what you love. When J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book, and my boss, Arthur A. Levine, bought the American rights, fantasy wasn’t “hot.” Children’s books weren’t “hot.” British books weren’t “hot.” And publishing people sort of thought Arthur was nuts. But he just knew he loved this book, that it was one of the most fresh and wonderful things he’d ever read.

And that magic happened because Ms. Rowling wasn’t writing to please the market. She was writing to please herself. And she did that across all seven books, in spite of the pressures of fans and reporters and the Internet and critics, keeping true to her vision every step of the way. »
from Second Sight by Cheryl B. Klein

There are so many things to love about these passages from Second Sight, ow a classic writing guide by a gifted editor, Cheryl B. Klein, who served as continuity editor for the two last Harry Potter books in that ever-popular series. While this guide focuses on books for children and young adults, it offers well-honed advice on character development, voice, and plot that applies to all types of fiction.

“Have fun,” and “write what you love” — what better touchstones can we have for the work that we do? So often, it’s easy to derail ourselves by thinking about what’s popular and what’s passé, what’s selling and what’s slumping. The best path we can take? The one that leads us to stories we love—love stories we want to share. The best path we can take is the one that leads us straight on until morning by staying true to our vision and writing the best book that we can write in the way that only we can write it. All the rest is just distraction. Write on!

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« Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. » E.B. White 

Make “every word tell” — this advice is from the classic handbook, The Elements of Style, a writing guide always worth revisiting. E.B. White, widely admired as an essayist, achieved his spare but sprightly prose only by vigorously paring his words. One admirer observes:

Each word must pull its weight: « Refining a draft is a process of elimination that, like any contest advancing the survival of the fittest, tends to dramatize what’s left standing when the competition is complete. Like passengers in a lifeboat, all the words in a concise text must pull their own weight. That’s why good poetry, which places a premium on brevity, stakes such a claim on a reader’s attention. »

Cut with care: « I frequently hear champions of brevity advising writers to cut their word counts by scratching all the adjectives or adverbs. » But the goal of brevity isn’t to slice a certain type of word out of your text, but to be sure that each word you use really matters. 

Strike a balance: « …brevity, whatever its virtues, must be balanced against a multitude of other needs in composition. If extreme brevity were the only goal of writing…we wouldn’t have Moby-Dick or Anna Karenina. Not every piece of writing requires a Spartan word limit. »

Wise words for us all as we craft our prose and write on!

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« It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.” William Morris

“The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”

“If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

William Morris was a poet, artists, textile designer, novelist, printer, translator and socialist activist. As a writer, he contributed to establishing the modern fantasy genre. Friends always remarked that William was bursting with zest for life and with an infectious enthusiasm that touched everyone he met.

How did he accomplish all of this? To my mind, he brought enlivening qualities to whatever he set his hand to that we can all use as well:

He had a mission: Whether he was designing wallpaper or a book, William had a single goal in mind. He strove to create something that was both useful and beautiful. This was his touchstone and it led him down amazing paths to create work that is still admired.

He was curious: William gained mastery over unfamiliar subjects with self-taught gusto. He seemed endlessly curious—always wondering—about how things could be done and eager to capture the beauty of nature. He was open to new ideas and ways of working.

He followed the “find it out or figure it out” path: William went boldly in whatever direction his creativity took him. He was never afraid to experiment and brought can-do energy to his endeavors. His self-confidence arose from taking action—it was the fruit of doing. There’s an old Estonian proverb I love: “The work itself will teach you.”

He relished resilience: William had his share of failures and setbacks, but he never let them dampen his enthusiasm and love for his work. He just kept moving forward and left his mistakes behind. A great attitude!

May we catch a spark of William’s creative flame as we all write on!

The practice of any art has certain general requirements,
quite regardless of whether we deal with the art of carpentry,
medicine, or the art of love.” Erich Fromm

Or the art of writing.

At first blush, The Art of Loving may seem like an odd guide to draw on for writing advice, yet it’s surprisingly apt. Since today, March 23 is Erich’s birthday—he was born in 1900,—I thought I’d turn to him, a holocaust survivor, therapist, and gifted writer, for inspiration.

In his classic, The Art of Loving, Erich lays out the ingredients for achieving excellence in any artistic endeavor. What a gift to us as we hone our craft! Reading the chapter is like attending a master class in mastery. Erich’s five keys to mastery:

Discipline: “I shall never be good at anything if I do not do it in a disciplined way; anything I do only ‘if I am in the mood’ may be a nice or amusing hobby, but I shall never become a master in that art.”

Concentration: “The activity at this very moment must be the only thing that matters, to which one is fully given. If one is concentrated, it matters little what one is doing; the important, as well as the unimportant things, assume a new dimension of reality, because they have one’s full attention.”

Patience: “If one is after quick results, one never learns an art. Yet, for modern man, patience is as difficult to practice as discipline and concentration. Our whole industrial system fosters exactly the opposite: quickness.”

Supreme concern: “If the art is not something of supreme importance, the apprentice will never learn it. He will remain, at best, a good dilettante, but will never become a master.”

Devotion: “If one wants to become a master in any art, one’s whole life must be devoted to it, or at least related to it. One’s own person becomes an instrument in the practice of the art, and must be kept fit…”

What wonderful advice to ponder and apply, as we all write on!

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