March 20, 2017

The Shame of Writing

I woke up to an email from a woman I have not met. I’d submitted a guest post for her blog. She responded with a pile of mean wrapped in hair.

She said she’d read the article I’d submitted, didn’t know who I'd stolen it from (surely I couldn’t have written it because she’d tracked down the one salvageable sentence to my blog so knew I could write and wanted more of that), said the rest had clearly been written by a “failed academic,” and declared that the last paragraph of the piece (which was my bio) read like an “infomercial,” so I needed to delete that but also, could I send her a bio?

She left me with two options, either to 1) write the article myself, or 2) have someone else write an article about me, because, “Mixing those two modes won't work. After all, I want your work and book to shine, Jess!”

I'm chuckling as I type this. The levels of absurdity (for the record, she had a point about the stuffy tone; the rest was crazy cakes—of course I'd written the article). But if you think I was anything but locked in Rage Tower, shooting death rays at my dog and children (price of admission, folks) after I read her email, well, thank you for thinking so highly of me.

The Firestarter fury burned itself out within the hour, but it left behind a worm of doubt. Maybe this isn't the right time to write that book I've been dancing around for months…Now here is where it gets interesting for me. I’m 15 books into my career. I know the games I play, how I’ll scuttle into the nearest excuse and hide there, a hermit crab of a human being, comforting myself with the fact that of course I’d work on that book if not for this lovely, formfitting excuse.

But Unspeakable Things? The book I’m “working on” now? I’ve never gotten so personal in my fiction, and not coincidentally, desperate in my reasons not to write it. The book is Lovely Bones meets Stranger Things, a time travel to Paynesville, Minnesota, 1983, when boys were being abducted and returned but the adults never told us why. It’s an examination of the monsters we all grow up with. It’s mystery and magical realism, nostalgia and freedom. I’ve outlined it every which way but Wednesday, and now, I circle it. Looking for reasons not to write it.

• Maybe I should self-publish a Murder-by-the-Month novella and make some quick cash so I can pay for the trip I want to take with my family, and then I’ll write this next book. And I’m going out of country in a couple days. I should wait until I return to dig in. And I have articles to write for my book that’s coming out May 1. That’s time sensitive. I should do that first. And I work too much. I need more time for fun, less time writing. I already have a full-time teaching job, I shouldn’t make writing another job. And maybe I’m not good enough of a writer to…*

SNAP

It’s that last weasel worry that finally woke me up to what I'd been doing, and I have this morning’s email to thank for it (you might want to take a gift-wrapping class, blog lady, but gratitude for the present just the same): Maybe I’m not a good enough writer to…

I recognize that old friend. His name is Shame. He masquerades as a fear of failure, or a fear of success, a need to get this one page just right before I can even think about going on to the next one, a million reasons not to begin or not to continue, worry that I’ll waste hundreds of precious hours writing, that people won’t like the book, that they’ll see my imperfection laid bare in my words, or the order of my words, or that they just won't want to see my words.

I imagine that I'll wrestle with Shame at the beginning of every new book I write (he loses his seat at the table around page 100, dunno why), and I'll have to fight myself back to this place each time. Steven Pressfield does a great job naming this crisis of confidence in The War of Art. Anne Lamott offers an antidote in “Shitty First Drafts”—that whole book is a must-read. But here’s what I know, and what I forget with each book: there is only one cure for the shame, and it is this: word count.

The writing is the reward. The writing is the reward. The writing is the reward.

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March 2, 2017

Turn an Enemy into an Antagonist and Set Yourself Free

Dr. Moriarty. Mrs. Coulter. Alec d'Urberville. Voldemort. Literature is full of deliciously evil antagonists, characters whose primary mission is to keep the story’s protagonist from achieving their goal. Without a villain to serve as a catalyst for the main character’s evolution, most literature would fall flat. Turns out people who make us uncomfortable can serve the same purpose in our own lives: if handled correctly, they super-charge our personal evolution. It doesn’t mean they’re fun to deal with, though, and that’s where transforming someone who has made your life difficult into a fictional antagonist can help you to process the experience and lighten your emotional load.

This 3-part activity is short, fun, and healing:

STEP 1: Freewrite to choose your antagonist.

Freewriting is a powerful tool for accessing your subconscious and boosting creativity. If you’re not familiar with process, it simply means writing for a set amount of time without pause and without judgment. For this first step, set your timer for ten minutes. During that time, write down everything that bubbles up in response to this question: What one person has recently caused me the most stress? Think about any interactions with this person, what happened, and how they made you feel. There is no wrong way to do this as long as you’re writing fast and furious, without criticism.

STEP 2: After your timer goes off, do a quick body scan as you think about the person you chose. Where in your body are you feeling the stress? Briefly record the location and sensation.
STEP 3: Create a character bible page for the person you chose.

A character bible is a notebook or a Word doc that a writer uses to organize a novel’s characters. Standard character bible entries include such things as the character’s name, physical details (height, weight, hair color, etc.), personality traits, and a brief background. For your character bible entry, you’re going to answer some very specific questions about the real-life villain you chose, making up answers where necessary. This fictionalizing of a real person is where the healing really takes off because it requires you to empathize, connect, and create.

Questions for your antagonist:

• What's your name? Nickname?
• What famous person do you most resemble?
• Of all your qualities, which one are you most proud of? Where do you think you acquired this quality?
• What do people seem to like the least about you? How does this make you feel?
• What habit of yours would you most like to change?
• If someone looked in your bathroom garbage right now, what would they find? How about your refrigerator?
• What scent do you enjoy the most, and what does it remind you of?
• If you could go back in time change one day of your life, what day would it be, and why?
• Who do you love most in the world and why?
• What scares you?
• What do you want more than anything? What challenges do you have to overcome to acquire it?

After you’ve completed this three-part exercise, do a body check again as you think about the person you chose in Step 1. I am certain you’ll find your stress has less power over you. How do I know? Besides the extensive science establishing that writing about a traumatic experience alleviates stress and boosts physical and mental health, I’ve got front-row experience. The first time I tried this exercise, I chose as my antagonist an ex-partner. I’ll call him Doug.

He was the first man I seriously dated after I unexpectedly lost my husband. I’d been a widow and single mom for five years when we met online. Doug was 40 years old, intense, smart, artistic, and wanted to return to college. I supported him financially and emotionally, absorbing his weekly outbursts and accommodating his growing jealousy. A month before he was scheduled to move into my house, I discovered that he was actively courting a 20-year-old woman he’d met at the tutoring job I’d helped him land.

I’ve got some personal responsibility in that scenario, for sure, but I was so angry and ashamed that I couldn’t get at the insight and payoff that I know lives inside of every awful experience. I developed this 3-step exercise as a way to not only forgive Doug but to celebrate his role in my personal evolution. As a bonus, I had great grist for a bad guy in a future novel.

Such is the power of rewriting your life.

p.s. A fun side note: two summers after Doug and I split, I received a phone call from an Unknown number. I was in the passenger seat of a rental car, traveling to Indiana to teach at a writing conference. I answered the phone. A private detective was on the other end of the line. Seems my ex was applying for a high security government job and the PI needed to call anyone he had had a relationship with in the past ten years as a character reference. I said that despite nearly four years together I was unable to give such a reference, hung up, and high-fived Karma.

More info on my weekend immersive Rewrite Your Life workshop in San Francisco May 12-14: Rewrite Your Life. And a Groupon!

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November 15, 2016

Don't Heal the World

Don’t heal the world
Heal yourself, and then you heal the world.

I woke up thinking those words. I pushed back at them as I made French toast for my son and walked my whiskery dog. They’re dorky words, the kind you embroider into a pillow or carve onto a piece of wood to sell at a spiritual-center fundraiser.

But the words kept coming back to me.

Tap tap.

Don’t heal the world. Heal yourself, and then you heal the world.

It’s been a painful week. It’s not about politics. I agree with some of Trump’s policies and disagree with most others, he’s not my guy but he won, that’s politics. Why so many of the kindhearted are reeling is not because their candidate lost, though that does set a person back; it’s because Trump won on a platform of hate, ignorance, disrespect, ownership of women’s bodies, and separating people from their stories so they become inconvenient chess pieces to be moved somewhere else, out of sight, out of America.

It's jarring to go to sleep bullied and wake up to find out that the child who was proudly, joyfully cruel to you and those you love is now the principal. You were confident there was a system in place that wouldn't allow that—surely not anyone can run the school, there must be requirements designed to prevent such a thing, rules of basic human decency.

So if you are thoughtful, or in a group that our president-elect vowed on the campaign trail to separate from your story, you are in deep pain. I’ve seen many of you transform this intelligent fear into a beautiful fire, protesting, organizing, speaking out, declaring solidarity with the oppressed, burning through this dark slop of hatred and ignorance that has risen to the surface. I celebrate you.

I also feel overwhelmed by all the work there is to do.

Heal yourself, and you heal the world.

Sigh.

Fine. I know what those words mean. I’ve been bucking it—there’s freedom and focus in anger, it makes everything out there rather than under our skin—but not all of this country's current problems originated with someone else. I carry some of them inside me. The work I need to do starts with me.

There’s a book that I need to write. An uncomfortable one, one that shocks all my tender places. I need to dig into that rather than choose the easy road and write another mystery. Also, I have a tendency toward the judgmental. I must stop that, even though I have to remind myself a thousand times a day. Maybe tomorrow it’ll be 999 times. Wait, there’s more. Sometimes, I repeat political or social or newsy things without either having heard them firsthand or verifying via at least two objective sources that they are true. No more.

Here’s a big one for me: I have to address my racism. In graduate school, I was lucky to take a class with Dr. Tamrat Tademe, an African-born professor. Tamrat was passionate, brilliant, darted around the classroom. He mentioned one day he’s also racist. He said there’s no other way to be in this country, that even he—who got pulled over regularly for driving while black—would lock his doors when he’d drive through black neighborhoods. He said it is a daily fight, and a necessary, important fight, to push back against the racist images, words, and actions that our culture continually tries to normalize.

His words set me on my ass. They also pushed me to examine what cultural racism I’ve absorbed. Turns out I have a hefty dose of what I’m going to call Minnesota racism, where I aim to be nice to everyone but also to stay comfortable, i.e. do the things I know with the people I know, people who look and think a lot like me. I have a duty as a citizen of a diverse community to seek out different stories.

(Incidentally, I’ve seen “expose yourself to people who think differently than you” twisted lately to mean, “let people barf mean/untrue words on you.” Willful ignorance is not a perspective worthy of attention. The willfully ignorant around you are the horns and burps designed to distract you from your purpose. Love them, but don’t engage their ignorance.)

But yeah. It’s time for me to get uncomfortable so I can begin to clean out the institutionalized racism I’ve absorbed. I plan to start by researching and—if I believe in her platform (what I’ve seen so far looks excellent)—getting involved in the Minneapolis mayoral campaign of Nekima Levy-Pounds, a local attorney and civil rights activist.

That’s my self-work, the stuff I’m being called to undertake: use my creativity as a flashlight and salve, be less judgmental, be more responsible in my words, tackle my racism. I think that’s what those dorky words meant, that if I want to fix this stinking pile, I have to start with my own stinking piles.

I believe that.

But damn, there is also outside work to do (apologies to the Inspirational Word factory; I will abide by the message your guy shipped down here this morning, but—and maybe it was the font he chose?—I remain inspired by equal parts Leslie Knope and Furiosa).

If I can swing it, I’m heading to DC for the Million Woman March. According to their official statement, “This event is inclusive of all and specifically centers around those who need this support the most: people of color, immigrants, the LGBT community, disabled citizens, trans people, and of course women. We are child friendly.” Hell yeah. There is power in numbers. Passion feeds passion. There will be Million Woman Marches all over the country on January 21, and busses to get you there. I’d love to see some of you.

I’m also getting active in the midterm elections. I will have representation in Congress. I’ve thought about running myself. It’s a fleeting thought because I did all the drugs in the late 80s, but it’s still a thought. As of last Tuesday, I’m also tithing for progress, donating 10% of my income to Planned Parenthood, Center for Reproductive Rights, Public Radio, Human Rights Campaign, ACLU, and the National Immigrant Justice Center. Also, I’m subscribing to my local newspaper in support of credible journalism and signing petitions whose causes I believe in.

I sometimes get paralyzed by the thought that I can’t do everything and so shouldn’t do anything, or even worse (to my mind), that I am not allowed to enjoy the good when there is so much bad. So and finally, I’m giving myself permission to play, laugh, and make mistakes.

Heal yourself, and you heal the world.

Please, if you’re comfortable, share below what you’re doing to heal. Let’s bring the light.

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