About Our Mothers

I use a list in my column today in the Chapel Hill News to capture some of my mother's endearing and absurd ideas about how to maintain health and live well.

I love lists.

They're a great way to:
cover a lot of material fast and briefly, almost like shorthand.

Sometimes we feel we must write long, with
flowing narrative
smooth transitions
deeply developed ideas
clean seques

Lists let you break out. I often suggest writing a list to
record memories
jot descriptions
note feelings
explore images
record dialogue

You can create a week's worth of ideas in two mintues list writing.

Post a comment with some of your mother's sayings.
Try using a list.

On the Road...to Qatar

Just got back from my four-day teaching residency in Doha, Qatar, in the Persian Gulf.

Sometimes I invite students to get inside a place or an experience by doing a stream of consciousness exercise. Begin by writing one or two words that capture anything about the experience. Keep the pen moving or keys clicking.

To give you some of the flavor of the trip – I’m going to do that exercise now...

Sand storm, wind, blinking lights, abiyas (black dress of women), thobes (white dress of men), roundabouts, fast drivers, Arabic and English signage, construction, cranes, barricades, beautiful hotel, palm trees and water out window, doves cooing, vast atrium, colorful pillows, abstract art on walls, men in suits, military men, walled buildings, stucco walls,, compounds, geometric grille work, oriental rug mosaics on highways, fountains, azure and blue green water, geometric university buildings, no sidewalks, verandahs for cars, vast mall,flat open space, buildings shooting out of the desert, sand, growth, industry, wealth, calm people, tea, spices, men smoking in groups, feral cats...

Instead of a thousand more words, click here for a gallery of photos, some taken by me (sorry, my bad). Enjoy.

One Thousand Words a Day

Just do it! Just write 1,000 words a day.

This advice is standard fare--I don't know how many books I've read that recommend, well, demand it. What to be a real writer? Write 1,000 words a day, for starters.

I've tried . . . I can't remember how many times, and failed--every time. I get my writing done,
somehow, the deadline work at least. The book I'm writing? Uh, not.

But browsing through the 800s in the library the other day, I came across Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See. This might help some of my students, I thought, and tossed it onto my checkout pile.

Skimming it at home, I got hooked. See's humor, character portraits, irreverence--even for the creative process--made me laugh out loud. And her matter-of-fact "It's only four pages a day, five days a week. It won't kill you. You can't 'fall behind' and you can't 'get ahead.' Every day is a new one thousand words.

"Saturday is for errands, Sunday for rest, picnics, spiritual renewal. That's the way it's supposed to be. For the rest of your life. Or until you get tired of it. But wouldn't it be wonderful if you didn't get tired of it?"

Something feels different this time. I have a book to write and I'm getting to it--every day, 1,000 words. We'll see.

I think it's See's ebullient levity that stands out. Hey, it's just life. It's just words. It's just 1,000 of them a day, five days a week.

Got to go. Time to write.

Illustrated Dream Journal

Over the past year or so I've started illustrating my dream journal. I record the dream on the right hand side of the page and draw the illustration on the facing page. (I use an unlined journal with fairly heavy paper.)

I am not an artist. Sometimes my drawings look OK. I'm proud of a blue bead necklace I drew--with shading--from a dream in which I was trying to pawn the necklace to make money, lots of money. I needed several thousand dollars and so left my necklace for an appraisal. When I came back to the jewelry store, the sales person told me the necklace was worth $7--not the $3475.00 I needed. A lot happened in the dream but I focused on the necklace. I could see it so well in my mind's eye, when I woke up.

So I drew the necklace with a little tag attached by a string on which I wrote $7.

I also give names to my dreams, like "Seven Dollar Necklace."

As I flip through my dream book, I'm amazed at how many drawings I've made that include water and titles like "Three Lakes," "Drowned Sisters," and "School Pool."

I wouldn't be as aware of the recurring themes if I didn't draw the dream images. I use an extra-fine black pen and then my little watercolor set.

It's fun to try to capture an aspect of a dream--and no one can say, "It doesn't look like that!" Only I know what my dreams look like.

Freewriting and Rewriting

I love to freewrite and am always recommending the activity to the
writers I work with. Freewrite with a place, I'll say, or a character, a mood, a story.
See what you turn up.
We often seem to feel that we should "know" what's
going to happen next or that we should understand a complex character
in one swipe. Freewriting turns up all sorts of nuggets--that the mind
wouldn't have come up with on its own, thinking. You don't think your
way to some of these things--they emerge, kind of like dream images,
from a deep trove.

The Perils of Perfectionism

Author of The Artist's Way and many other books on writing, Julia Cameron, has just published a new memoir, Floor Sample: A Creative Memoir.

She talks about her struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction as well as the pull of madness--electricity becomes dangerously charged, trees vibrate, melodies overwhelm her consciousness. She stops sleeping and eating and ends up hospitalized. It's a compelling portrait. I found one anecdote particularly poignant.

Through a friend, Cameron was able--many years ago--to send a few short stories to a New Yorker editor. The editor thought the work was promising, good in fact, but a bit heavy on sunsets and roses. Clearly the editor was interested and willing to take another look at the stories, if revised.

Cameron was so ashamed that her work had seemed overly romantic and sentimental that she put the stories away--she didn't revise and send them again. Hyper-sensitivity to criticism and hpyer-perfectionism squelched her. This is so sad and so common.

Have you ever had this problem? Write about a time when you gave up due to criticism rather than respond with positive action. How could you have responded differently? How will you respond differently in the future?

The Rapture of Being Alive

People say that what we’re seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
Joseph Campbell

When the desire to write shrivels and threatens to die, try sitting quietly and waiting for am image to emerge from the
unconscious. Close your eyes and let something bubble up. A room, a memory, a dream. Write about it. If nothing happens, take a walk and pay close attention or find a photo or an object that moves you and begin writing. Start with the concrete--
with are you seeing, feeling, touching, smelling, hearing. Move on from there. Consider the rapture of being alive, alive to the senses.

This post is in answer to Judi's question about what to do when the creative juices aren't flowing.

Writing Sweet

Pat Schneider, author of Writing Alone and With Others, and many other books as well as the founder of the Amherst Writers and Artists method, suggests that the discipline of writing does not arise best out of obligation but will always arise best out of love. p. 51. “Rather,” she says, “than thinking of going to your writing desk as the ‘ought’ and ‘should’ work of your life, think of it as a longed-for pleasure, as a hot fudge sundae, as that which pleases you, delights you, that which you love”

Prompts:

Write about what you did for Halloween. Did you dress up? Eat sweets?
Write about a Halloween costume from childhood, yours or somebody else's.

On the page dreaming

A student gave me a journal that has gold stars on a dark blue cover. It is
unlined--a necessity for me--and small, good for packing and keeping
by the bed. I use it as my dream journal. And now I leave the left side of
the page blank for drawings. I draw and then watercolor a dream image or two
before writing the dream on the right-hand page.
Who can say the pictures are inaccurate?
Not in perspective? It's a dream image.

Insomnia

Write about how it feels to be awake at 3 AM and unable to get back to sleep. Write from your senses, in present tense.

I've just started an "Insomnia Journal." It won't be about dreams because I keep a separate dream journal. For my insomnia journal, I bought watercolors, stamps, ink pads, tape, pens, and vellum. I cut, paste, stamp, paint, and doodle in this journal.

Because sometimes, in the middle of the night, I don't want to reflect and write and I don't want to read. I want to make tiny lines across the page, cut up newspapers, find images, and anchor it all on the page.

Stealing

Write about a time when you stole something--and when someone stole from you.

From As Good As It Gets

Jack Nicholson says he's been "suckered in, set up, and pushed around" by his neighbor Simon's art agent who forces Jack to take care of Simon's little dog--verdell. Simon is in the hospital, having been beaten up by a male model. Nicholson, a rich OCD author named Melvin Udall--who compulsively locks and unlocks his door, can't step on sidewalk cracks, and endlessly washes his hands with fresh bars of soap--can't help but fall for the cute smart dog.
Write about a relatioship with a pet and how it changed you.

Falling

Write about falling: on the school playground, out of favor with the cool crowd, in class rank, from grace.

Summer will grow old

Pick a line from this poem,
published in The New Yorker
September 18, 2006, to use
as a prompt. I like:
Summer will grow old . . .
It is growing old. What
does that mean to you?


A Pasture Poem

This upstart thistle
Is young and touchy; it is
All barb and bristle,

Threatening to wield
Its green, jagged armament
Against the whole field.

Butterflies will dare
Nonetheless to lay their eggs
In that angle where

The leaf meets the stem,
So that ants or browsing cows
Cannot trouble them.

Summer will grow old
As will the thistle, letting
A clenched bloom unfold

To which the small hum
Of bee wings and the flash of
Goldfinch wings will come,

Till its purple crown
Blanches, and the breezes strew
The whole field with down.

--Richard Wilbur

A Prompt A Day

I'm going to try to do it: Post a prompt a day.

Don't know if I'll succeed. I'm not good at maintaining routines,
or sysems. I do finally have a place for the keys. Most days I find
them there. My eyeglasses? No way.

Prompt:
Write about a routine or a ritual.

Hot Cicadas

"At eight of a hot morning, the cicada speaks his first piece. He says of the world: heat. At eleven of the same day, still singing, he has not changed his note but has enlarged his theme. He says of the morning: love. In the sultry middle of the afternoon, when the sadness of love and of heat has shaken him, his symphonic soul goes into the great movement and he says: death. But the thing isn't over. After supper he weaves heat, love, death into a final stanza, subtler and less brassy than the others. He has one last heroic monosyllable at his command. Life, he says, reminiscing. Life."
E.B. White

Prompt: Write about the heat on a summer day.

Rereading Great Books

In "Rereadings: Seventeen writers revisit books they love," Anne Fadiman collects essays she commissioned while editor at The American Scholar. It's a wonderful collection of essays about reading and life and changing perspective.

As a teenager I read all of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and most of Thomas Mann. I'm now rereading "The Magic Mountain" and enjoying it immensely--in part because I'm recognizing passages I loved as a teen and I'm thinking about why this book appealed so much to me when I was younger. Who was I? What did I think about? It's a fascinating adventure.
Try it. Reread a favorite book.

from "The Magic Mountain," page 156
"What a strange game these two tablemates were playing. Both of them knew that their lies had double and triple twists--that Hans Castory teased the teacher just so he could talk about Frau Chauchat, but that at the same time he took unwholesome delight in flirting with the old maid; and that for her part, she welcomed all this: first, becuase it allowed her to play the matchmaker, and second, because she probably had become smitten with Frua Chauchat, if only to please the young man, and finally, becuase she took some kind of wretched pleasure in being teased and made to blush. They both knew this about themselves and one another--and that it was all tangled and squalid. But although Hans Castorp was usually repelled by tangled and squalid affairs and even felt repelled in this instance as well, he continued to splash about in these murky waters, taking oconsolation in the certainty that he was here only on a visit and would soon be leaving."

Naming--and writing about-- the Forbidden

"When we are told that something is not to be spoken about, we understand this to mean that this something should not exist - should not, cannot, must no, does not exist. In that moment our reality and, consequently, our lives, are distorted; they become shameful and diminished. In some ways, we understand this to mean we should not exist. To protect ourselves, we too begin to speak only of the flat world where everything is safe, commonplace and agreeable, the very small world about which we can all have consensus. Soon we don't see the other worlds we once saw. For it is difficult to see what we are forbidden to name". - Deena Metzger


Prompt: Make a list of what is/was not spoken about in your life. What's taboo? Look over your list. Write about what jumps out at you. Give voice to those "other worlds."

Nerves

OK. You may not be a tennis fan but anybody can be inspired by the French player, Amelie Mauresmo, who won Wimbledon today--beating Justine Henin-Hardenne in a three set battle. Mauresmo, 27, has for years been a "head case," undone by nerves, erratic at key moments, defeatist. Today she prevailed and said in her acceptance speech that she doesn't want to hear any more about her nerves!

Write about a time you overcame your nerves.

Spend it all

"One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water." --Annie Dillard

Sometimes I'm tempted to save a glorious anecdote or an intriguing workshop prompt for another column or another class--for a day when my deadline looms large or I'm short on ideas.

No more! Use it all. There is more where this came from--always.

Share what you have with other writers, teachers, students, friends.
Remember: All boats rise with the tide.