If You Could Be Any Genre...

Okay, I quit sulking and got to work, which was a major victory for me. It doesn't usually happen that way when I'm feeling anxious and tired. I did as much writing as I could make myself do and then took a short reading nap until my son woke up from his nap.

Made myself a small pot of coffee, put on a movie for him because it's one of those days and really cold outside to boot, and started musing. Something that Deanna Raybourn said in an interview by Material Witness struck me. She said she worked for fourteen years writing manuscripts and not getting published. Then her agent told her to take a year and just read. So she did. She read only what she loved, which often turned out to be historical and British. The result: she decided to write what she loved to read and was published. I finished recently her Silent in the Grave, a fun and surprising Victorian-era murder mystery, and I applaud her decision.

What I mused on this afternoon was this: I read children's novels all the time. The slight majority of the books I own are children's or young adult books. In the last month, I've borrowed these books from the library: The Story of Doctor Dolittle, Little House in the Big Woods, Swallows and Amazons, The Amber Spyglass, and Little House on the Prairie. Two months ago I re-read for the tenth time The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. At the moment, I'm reading All of A Kind Family. Hmmm. What do I love to read?

Yes, I just finished a draft of a children's novel. But I wrote that because I had an idea about gnomes and I didn't picture it going over well for the adult audience. I thought it was going to be an exception for me. Maybe it shouldn't be.

Today's Mood

Today I feel like I could falll asleep at the desk. I am here under protest. That's all.

Progress Report Card

Time for a progress report. How am I doing with the advice from Madeleine L'Engle that I said I was going to follow this month?

1. I'm still reading at least an hour a day. Most of the time I get that good-for-me reading done as well as the pleasure reading. I'm reading a good-for-me Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson right now and a pleasurable All of A Kind Family by Sydney Taylor.

2. I have not been writing consistently every day for the reason that I've been sick and so has my son. This is a legitimate and useful reason (skipping writing allows me to get a much-needed nap when my son does), but now that we're both mostly better, it's hard to get back in the swing of things.

I'll start revising my children's novel on February 11th, and I know that's going to be a huge job. I don't want to start another big project before then. The story I'm working on is fun but not going anywhere yet. I don't feel like I've gotten serious about it. This makes it even harder to make sure to write every day.

3. "Hold true to your vision." This is still the trickiest piece of advice to follow. I think if I did this, I would already be working on my new novel idea, even though I'll be getting into revising my last novel shortly. I'd be writing as fast as the inspiration came, for as long as it took. This is unrealistic with a toddler in the house, but I could be doing it to the best of my ability, writing in all my spare minutes rather than in just one toddler-nap chunk.

In my original post about Madeleine L'Engle's advice, I wrote: "How will I do this as I sit down to write? I think I will actually turn to a piece of Anne Lamott's advice. She sits down, rereads what she wrote the day before, and muses about it. Actions, thoughts, and descriptions flit through her head. When they begin to form themselves into sentences and paragraphs, she types them down like she's taking dictation."

I tend to not want to sit down to my keyboard until I already know what I'm going to start writing. What I want to do instead is, as they say, "Suit up and show up." Then we'll see what happens.

On this report card, I give myself a B. Plenty of room for improvement.

Building Up

"Being a writer does not necessarily mean being published...When you have a vision, you want to share it. But being a writer means writing. It means building up a body of work. It means writing every day. You can hardly say that van Gogh was not a painter because he sold one painting during his lifetime, and that to his brother. Van Gogh was a painter because he painted, because he held true to his vision as he saw it."
-excerpt from Madeleine L'Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life (Chase, Carole F.) in The Writer, June 2002 v115 i6 p26(4)

Building up that body of work, if I follow my vision for it, can be as satisying as anything in life. The joy I thought I would feel upon being published is already accessible.

truth and Truth

Today I told the truth about how I felt to a family member. Shouldn't be too hard, should it? It was. I'm an honest person, but when I talk to people, I empathize with their feelings and opinions and usually leave out or smooth over the parts where I disagree with them. I tell the truth, but not the whole truth. Today I told the whole truth. I was shaking, I was so nervous about it. When I was done, I felt light as air.

Later this afternoon, I was struck with inspiration for a new book idea. It was an exciting idea and it felt Truthful (the way that fiction tells the Truth). Is it coincidence that inspiration came to me after I had let my whole truth come out?

Writing and a Spiritual Life

Madeleine L'Engle (author of 62 books and this month's No Shame Novelist featured author) did not separate her spiritual life from her creative life. I think she would say they are inseparable.

I think about this in terms of inspiration when I'm writing. I don't want it to be a purely rational process where I think about options, choose some and reject others, and write from an unchanging plan. I've been reading L'Engle and C. S. Lewis and Louisa May Alcott all my life. Out of many influences, they were the heaviest on my love of reading and writing. Each of them had strong spiritual or moral beliefs that affected their writing to the point that their works would never have been written without those beliefs.

Writers don't need to go to church or profess faith, but I think we do need to tap into something outside our normal experience in order to do the best work we're capable of.

Einstein and L'Engle

Whew. I did the latest writing exercise, and it led to some work getting done.

But on to L'Engle. One of her greatest inspirations was Albert Einstein.

In an interview with frugalfun.com, she said, "I was asking myself all the big questions about life and the universe and not finding the answers. Then I picked up a book of Einstein's and he said anyone who is not lost in rapture at the power of the mind behind the universe 'is as good as a burned out candle.'"

Later in the same interview, L'Engle said, "And particle physics says nothing is without a purpose, everything has an impact."

You can see her philosophy in the books she's written, perhaps most memorably in the five Time books: A Wrinkle In Time, A Wind In the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. In these books, a child often plays a crucial role in events affecting entire worlds, from the cellular level to the outer environment.

Her philosophy is in her writing advice, too. In Madeleine L'Engle Herself: Reflections On A Writing Life, she said, "Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically."

She also liked Jean Rhys's description of the whole of writing as an enormous lake. Big rivers feed into the lake, but so do little streams. Each drop of water becomes part of the lake's composition.