Re-Visioning from the Core

My two major creative projects are running in tandem for the moment.

My husband and I are making changes to our new house that we want done before we bring furniture over at the end of next week. These are the big projects, the ones that are painful to do while living in the space, the floors.

My novel is undergoing major surgery. The big stuff. The stuff where you throw out most of the words and hang on to a few core pieces of story.

The carpet in the basement bar had to go - along with the half-disintegrated rubberized pad underneath.

In both projects, I see huge potential. But both require digging deep and getting dirty.

In the house, we are tearing up flooring and putting in new carpet and new hardwood floors. To save money, we have ripped out the old flooring ourselves and have hired a small business to put the new floors down. We split the job. I did most of two rooms and my husband finished the second room and tore up a third. Both of us have committed to this new house with blood and toil.

The revisions to my novel will not be finished so quickly, and I have to do both the destruction and the rebuilding. But I have the same sense of tearing away the surface of the work to find the centre that will hold. There will be new covering for the ideas that work and for the core story that is being told.

But, the colours, the textures, the mood, and even the point of view are all up for grabs.

What's underneath doesn't always work easily together and needs to be carefully recombined.

As I dig deeper past my fears, I find the story needs to be told through different scenes in different locations, with a different cast of characters. There is a creamy centre to the work that I will care for, but the outer coating is being melted down into raw materials.

This is scary. I have a lot of words that will not make the cut. But, for now, I am not even looking at the words. I have a spreadsheet with a description of each scene that currently exists in my manuscript and I am transforming that scene list into a beat sheet. Only when I have completed that transformation will I start to write again.

And by then, I should have furniture and wall hangings in my new home.

But the cosmetic stuff will come later. Right now, it is all about the guts.

The goal is readers.

I must thank Patrick Ross for sharing some of the wisdom he gained from Patricia Hampl during his MFA residency, which gave me a wonderful perspective on deep editing. From them comes the idea of Re-Visioning rather than fixing the mess that currently is my work in progress.

Bleeding onto the Page

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it. ~Anais Nin

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. ~Gene Fowler

Deep writing is a courageous act.

The visual art I have been making recently is rough and dark.

When we read a book that articulates something we hardly dare to admit to ourselves, let alone to another person, we make a connection; we are given a reprieve from our shame and our solitude. This is a precious gift.

In order to write work that moves readers, we must be courageous on the paper, writing the things we fear to say. We can use fiction and metaphor to protect ourselves partially, but unless we find a way to write those feared depths of our lived experiences, our work will remain shallow and will not touch the depths of our readers.

We must write fearward, into the heart of what troubles us.

Sharon Overend, a writer I met through the Writer’s Community of Durham Region, wrote about struggling with this as she works on her novel:

Anne, I thought, I’m afraid of Anne. After all, she’s living every parent’s worst nightmare—her kid is sick and the family aren’t handling it well.

We aren’t meshing because as her world falls apart, so must I, but I’m not, I’m not letting myself fall apart (figuratively of course).

…Anne scares the bejesus out of me, but I owe it to my readers (and to myself) to push my fears aside and write Anne’s true story.

At the end of her post, Sharon shares an exercise that helped her get closer to her character’s feeling.

Copy a strong line from your existing prose onto a clean piece of paper. With that sentence as your guiding light, start writing everything you see, hear, smell, FEEL around that sentence. Keep your hand moving for fifteen minutes.

This is a recent doodle using images that would have appealed to me as a teenager.

It is a good exercise, and I used it this week to help me get closer to some truths I need to write as part of my contribution to An Intense Life. Christine Fonseca has asked each of the contributors to the blog to write a letter to our teenage self about growing up gifted. I have been struggling with this letter because writing it honestly is forcing me to face the worst experiences of my life and the short-comings of well-intentioned people who love me deeply.

These issues from my teen years are the reason that I started writing my current novel. My fear of facing them is the cause of the biggest weaknesses in the novel. It is time for me to write into the hard places of my life and bleed all over the page. And I am scared.

Do you have tips, tricks, exercises, etc. that you use to help you work through your fears. Please leave them in the comments. I need all the help I can get.

I interrupt this blog to…

Bionicle in the Bathtub. Luckily, he wasn't there until after the purchase offer had been made and accepted.

Two short announcements this week.

1) The reason for this is that we sold our house this week and the final stages of that process have thrown everything out of whack. This is a good chaos, but chaos nonetheless.

2) I have joined a team of writers who will be blogging about all things gifted from various perspectives. Christine Fonseca, author of Emotional Intensity in Gifted Students and 101 Success Secrets for Gifted Kids, has put together a great group of writers, including Jen Merrill from Laughing at Chaos, whom I mentioned recently. My first post will be up next week. In the meantime, head on over to An Intense Life to see what is going on. There is also news on the site about Christine’s gothic YA novella Dies Irae that has just been released. I am in the middle of it and am enjoying it tremendously.

Out of the bathtub, ready for action.

Theatre: Training for Life

Several people have expressed interest in hearing more about my life in theatre, so here is a beginning. Being involved with theatre for more than 30 years has affected my life in too many ways to be the subject of one blog post. In many ways, theatre training and production has actually been my training for life.

Over the years, rehearsal and performance of plays has given me:

At the Gaudi Cathedral in Barcelona, revealing my inner contemplative.

• Self-Awareness. Many roles taught me something about myself or gave me an opportunity to stretch out of my comfort zones and experiment with other ways I could choose to live. Finding similarities and differences between myself and the characters I played enabled me to explore who I am and what makes me unique.
• Awareness of Other Perspectives. Playing characters who differed from me pushed me to develop a bodily understanding of the reality that the world looks different from other people’s perspectives.
  
• Community. Everywhere I go, there is a theatre company that benefits from my involvement. When I move, the local theatre community is usually where I make my first, and often my closest, friends.
  

  As a Kit Kat Girl in "Cabaret" - finding my burlesque.

• A Reason to Work Hard. School never challenged me. I got through my entire education by handing in something for each assignment and showing up for classes and exams. Theatre challenged me. I started with nothing more than a good speaking voice. After 30 years of classes and productions, I have become a respectable actress and a good director. My theatrical accomplishments are some of my most cherished because I had to work for that growth.
• A Place Where Unique Contributions Are Valued. Whatever your skill set, if you want to work on a show, there is a theatre that can use you. Even the most elementary amateur production needs performers, sets, costumes, props, lights and sound, publicity, front of house, and overall coordination. Even if you don’t want to perform, you can be a valuable member of the team. I like to know what is going on in every aspect of the production which makes me especially valuable as a stage manager, director, producer, or Board Member.
• A Reason to be Part of a Team. I am naturally introverted. I like to figure everything out myself, and manage all the details on my own. But, you can’t do that in theatre. My senior thesis in college included a solo performance that I wrote, choreographed, and directed. I also designed and created the costumes, set, and sound. But, even so, I needed people to run the show while I performed in it and somebody else to design the lights. It would have been impossible for me to succeed without at least a small team.

Writers Aren’t Competing With Each Other

Competition between writers seems unnecessary because our role is not to become the one voice drowning out the others; our role is to be our own unique voice.

Alegra Clarke, Love the Competition: The world needs writers

This has been on my mind since Jen at Laughing at Chaos posted about her upcoming book from GHF Press. Jen and I interact in enough spaces on the Internet that I feel a connection to her. My first response upon hearing the news was entirely based on my expectations/projections of her feelings: elation followed by a gut feeling of panic on her behalf.

And then, I started thinking dangerous thoughts, “why not me?” thoughts. Thoughts I needed put away and consider reflections of my own feelings of inadequacy and no more. Because the truth is I really want to read her book.

I couldn’t write it. I would have to be her to write it.

She actively looks for (and more importantly, finds) the humour in challenges that I share with her, humour that usually eludes me. When I write about the challenges of parenting 2e kids, my thoughts are peppered with scientific research and education policy. She writes the funny. We could both write amazing books about our experiences raising 2e kids and they would be entirely different – even if we were raising the same kids, which we aren’t.

I had similar thoughts when I first saw a Barry Eisler novel for sale with the other mass market paperbacks at my local drug store. You may have heard of Barry: best-selling thriller writer, turned down a half-million dollar publishing contract to self-publish last year. I practiced law with him.

And when my best friend from middle school won a Pulitzer? Mostly just awe. She’s incredible at what she does.

No matter how hard I might have worked, I could not have written what they have written. They see the world through different eyes than mine. They have worked exceedingly hard and been lucky. And I celebrate them.

My voice is my voice. My work is what it is, and reaches who it reaches. They have their own voices and their own audiences.

And that is how it should be.

Leaving the Realm of the Average

I am in-between houses.

The kitchen at the new place is missing a few important things.

We have started moving things into the new place, but we are still living in the old place.

I am in-between in a deeper sense as well.

In the language of social anthropology, I am in a liminal phase, a transitional period between outward personas, an inner transformation reflected in the move from a modern suburban development with matching neighbors to an older, quirky, custom-built house.

I spent my young adult life struggling to fit into a model of the world I had absorbed through my years of schooling. That model involved a lot of applying myself to other people’s goals and working hard to appear normal, getting a good job and putting in the hours behind a desk to earn the paycheck that would allow me to become a useful consumer.

But, those goals were never mine.

Since leaving legal practice in 2000, I have been on a quest to rediscover my values and build a life that reflects me in my full glory. My return to writing and a life centered in creativity and play was part of this quest.

Parenting my challenging children has forced me to confront the pressures I yielded to as a child that I should have avoided. By choosing to homeschool at least some of my children, I have created an opportunity to pass different messages on to my children. The literature that is helping me understand my extremely bright children is helping me understand myself.

Last year, the demands of my novel and the self-awareness triggered by learning how to help my children came together and cracked my persona, and I haven’t put things back together yet. I don’t know what I am growing into; I only know some of the elements my next persona must acknowledge.

The new house is part of my growth. We rationalize the move by saying we need an additional bedroom and that the kids need more outdoor space, but a deeper truth is that my soul cries out for the quirks of a custom-built house.

After hiding in plain sight for years, I am standing up and saying to the world, “I am an outlier.”

Light breaking through

I don’t remember ever not being aware that I was out of the range of normal. In Kindergarten, I spent most of the year reading by the coat cubbies while my classmates learned the alphabet. That was also the year I gave up my English accent so I didn’t sound strange to my American classmates.

I learned about bell-curves when my class-mates accused me of “breaking the curve.” I learned about percentiles in 3rd grade when the doctor referred to my height as 105th percentile; my mother gave me a math lesson during the drive home. By 6th grade, I was taller than most of my teachers. And the stories of my struggles against gender-stereotypes deserve a blog post of their very own – or maybe a series of posts.

For too many years, I saw being different as being bad. But it isn’t. It  is just different.

I’m not sure where all this is going. I’m sure it will show up in my writing.

I hope you’ll come along with me for the ride.

Hang On and Pretend It’s a Plan

Last year, I didn’t make New Year’s Resolutions. I chose to take incremental steps to change my practices. I set out to play more, write more, and move more. In retrospect, I made progress in all three areas.

This year, I know better than to make resolutions, or even to make much in the way of plans.

By choosing to move, I have invited a world of change and I do not know how things will shape up. The new house will inevitably take more work than I have estimated. The new environment will surely require modification of my routines. I cannot predict how much the transition will upset the children or the cats, but I will have to deal with whatever arises. And then, once we have adjusted to the new house somewhat, most, if not all, of the kids will change schools after the summer.

I can go anywhere I want in time or space. Can you?

Watching this year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special, The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe, I was struck by a single line of dialogue. When asked by his companion what to do next as they whooshed through the time vortex in an alien escape pod, the Doctor advised, “Do what I do: hang on and pretend it’s a plan.”

And it struck me.

That is exactly what I need to do in 2012: hang on and pretend it’s a plan.

Last year taught me that I can make all the plans I want, but without the flexibility to drop or modify them, I will be courting trouble. This year, although I have directions I would like to go, setting specific goals feels like setting myself up to fail. But, and this is a big issue, I like to feel in control – and that’s where the “pretend it’s a plan” part is so brilliant. If I pretend it’s a plan, I might not freak out so much when I feel out of control.

Or maybe not. I won’t know until I get through the time vortex.

What star is this? From whence?

In the meantime, I found a guiding star.

Inspired by Christine Kane’s Resolution Revolution post (December, 2007), I have chosen a word to be a touchstone for the coming year, a word that will serve as grounding image, inspirational guide, and ongoing challenge, a word I hope will give me a stable focus and flexibility in the face of changing external environments.

My word for 2012 is ease.

I am aiming to ease my way through 2012, hanging on through the changes that are coming my way, and pretending it’s a plan if I start freaking out about my lack of control of outcomes.

Or at least, that’s the plan intention…

I’m heading into 2012 with a motto and a word.

Check back here in a year and we’ll see how it went.

Imagining Sisyphus Happy

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
Albert Camus

This morning, washing dishes, I spied a black squirrel creeping along a fence outside my kitchen window carrying a huge bread roll in its mouth, its light brown burden, almost as big as itself, extending sideways like a tightrope walker’s balancing bar.

The squirrel inched its way across the fences surrounding my backyard before jumping into a neighbor’s tree. Scrambling into the tree, it lost the roll. After a brief pause, looking down at the fallen roll, the squirrel scampered down, recovered the roll, and climbed back up the tree.

Back Up The Tree with Treasure

Observing this, I thought of Sisyphus. In the Greek myth, the Gods punish Sisyphus for his crime, the specifics of which are debated and rarely mentioned, by forcing him to push a boulder up a hill. The task is arduous and takes all day. As soon as he reaches the top, the boulder rolls back down the mountain and he must descend and repeat the task the following day.

According to Albert Camus, Sisyphus is representative of the human condition, endlessly toiling at repetitive tasks without hope of success. From Camus’ perspective, the torture of being conscious of the futility of the task is nullified by accepting it and continuing, by being stronger than his task, by scorning that it is punishment. At the end of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus exhorts, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Life is full of tasks that are never-ending, futile to believe will ever be completed, but necessary: washing dishes, doing laundry, emptying the in-box, paying bills. Perhaps not as physically exhausting as rolling a boulder up a hill, but potentially torturous nonetheless. If we resist doing the tasks, they become impediments, obstacles, irritants. But, if we accept them fully and do them willingly, they lose their power to torment us.

Watching the squirrel struggle with the bread, I smiled at the absurdity of it, and at the persistence of the squirrel. The lack of doubt, the perseverance, the acceptance of the situation. And somehow, connecting the squirrel and Sisyphus, I found myself deeply accepting the household tasks that waited for me, even enjoying them.

And in that state, I could imagine Sisyphus happy.

A Creative Space of Your Own

Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn’t scare you, doesn’t shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it.

Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit

Do you know what kind of work environment is most conducive to your creative productivity?

One of my favorite reading rooms: the A. D. White room in Cornell University's Uris Library

Do you dream of a seriously cool office? Have you ever had a workspace that looked like it should work, but didn’t?

Where we work has an impact on how we work. Sometimes, we need to work wherever we happen to be, but for our daily routines, we can establish an inspirational space.

Be prepared to experiment until you find a place and then stick to it.

Things to think about as you plan:

• What do you want to see? Do you want to see nature, or will nature distract you? Do you want toys or art to look at? Are there colours that invigorate you?
• What do you want to hear? Does music help you focus? If so, what music? And what quality of player do you need? Do you need silence, or the hubbub of a crowd, or something else?
• What do you need to feel? If you are thinking about your comfort at your chair or your desk, you probably aren’t thinking about your work. Do you work better if you are slightly warm or cool?
• What do you want to smell? Fresh flowers? Coffee? Essential oils
• What do you want to taste? Coffee, mint, lemon, toothpaste, licorice?

All five senses are conscious of your environment. It is possible to use them all to inspire you.

Even a simple routine involving a comfortable place to work with something to drink and the ambient sounds touches all five.

If you are struggling to find a routine to support your creativity, spend some time experimenting with your environment. Change one element for a week and see how you respond differently to the space.

For inspiration, here are some photos of where writer’s write. Here are some written descriptions. And here, Ken Scholes mentions that his constant is the music on his iPod. The Guardian ran a long series on writers’ rooms. And finally, a longer piece on where writers write and why from Poets & Writers.

Me, I like to work on my bed or a couch with a cup of tea or coffee beside me, listening to silence or mellow music without lyrics. The only trouble is my lap gets hot from my laptop, so I’ve been eyeing one of these lap desks. And I think my back would appreciate a reader’s pillow.

Have you given thought to your work space? What environment helps you move forward creatively?

Do You Notice the Good Stuff?

Human beings are wired to notice the bad stuff in life. In fact, we are so good at noticing the bad stuff that we sometimes miss the good stuff.

And, most of the time, there are good things and bad things going on at the same time. By choosing to notice and affirm the good things, we can train our brains to bring those things to awareness rather than letting them slip past unnoticed.

Stop and Smell the Flowers

The Big Bad Wolf won't get you for looking at the flowers. It's straying off the path without noticing the big teeth that gets you.

This morning, the kids were late for school. It was the first day that was cold enough for hats and gloves, and the kids decided they needed scarves, too. Eventually, one was ready and I went outside to encourage him into the car. In a moment of inspiration, I realized I had time to snap a photo of him because we were still waiting for the child inside. But, my intended model was my camera-shy child and I was not sneaky enough.

So, I ended up with this:

And the child is...where?

The beauty of the morning sunbeams caught by my camera took my breath away for a moment. I looked up and noticed this:

Good Morning, Sunshine!!!

And, we were still late for school, but I was less stressed.

And that, my friends, is the power of noticing the good stuff.

Do you notice the good stuff? Or does the rough stuff get in the way?