Waiting For An Echo

The Inertiatic Introvert

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:27:00 +0000

A few weeks ago my friend, the writer Will Johnson, posted an entry in his blog about being anti-social. Or, more specifically I suppose, about the tendency toward anti-socialism (if that's even a phrase) that comes when one gets a little older and perhaps not quite as well suited to hard parties every night. The sudden and inexplicable urges to curl up and stay inside the house, even if it's alone. The odd feeling of having to Do Something Worthwhile, and work. The Supreme Satisfaction that comes from a good night's sleep. (When I was thirteen or so, I remember my father once saying, "The best part of my day is when I can crawl back into bed and go to sleep." I'll admit it: I thought he was a very, very sad man.)

But now? Seventeen (shudder) years later? I completely understand.

I mention all of this because the past few weeks have been, well, kind of weird. There's no other way for me to say it. I've worked a fair amount, which has perhaps contributed to the weirdness (although "working a fair amount", these days, does not compare at all to what "working a fair amount" meant three years ago, when I was living in Edinburgh and working an average of 60 hours a week), but I've also done a fair amount of socializing, and writing--aka my work--has completely goten lost in the maelstrom. I haven't written a word of my new novel in weeks. And I find it so exhausting, this not-writing. Exhausting even as I'm out there earning money and being with friends and to all intents and purposes living an excellent, well-balanced life.

Living in Scotland was hard, yes. But more often than not, these days, I find myself thinking back to my "golden period" of time in the country, which would have been the latter half of 2009. What did I do during that golden period? I worked. A hell of a lot. I never went out, because in spite of all that working, I never had any money. And every Saturday, I woke up at six, made myself tea, and wrote for at least twelve hours.

That was all I did -- work and write. Occasionally I went for walks on the beach. What kind of strange person looks back on a period in life such as that and thinks, I wish I could go back there?

Don't get me wrong. I love my new life here in Hamilton. I love it a thousand times more than I expected I would. Every day is a surprise in some way, whether it be through the discovery of a new antiques shop (bye-bye paycheque), or the meeting of new friends, or a delightful new theatre show (side note: if you ever have the chance to see Corin Raymond's "Bookworm", or Morgan Jones Phillips' "Emergency Monologues", do it. Do it, please).

But lately I find myself longing for the anti-social days of yore. Just like Jennifer Egan said, in the article that I've quoted from before and will no doubt continue to quote from ad nauseum, there was a wonderful kind of clarity in being reduced to myself as a writer, and nothing else, while I was in Scotland. There was no room, financial or otherwise, for being any different. There was no room or means to be social. There was no space to be anything other than a girl who worked hard and had the delicious expanse of an entire Saturday to scribble words into her notebook.

Which is so funny, when you think about it. Right now I'm working less than half of the hours that I did in Scotland, and making more money. Most weeks, I have three or four whole days in which to write. I also have the means to go out, and do delicious things like buy antiques and go out for food (though not a terrible amount, I'll admit--I'm not destitute now, but neither am I rich) and go on bus trips to Toronto and away for weekends to Peterborough and contemplate--whilst actually having the means to make a reality--potential road trips to Montreal.

And it's wonderful. All of it. But it's also so very easy to let the writing, the work, slip to the bottom of the pile.

When I was in my third year at UVic, one of my instructors, the wonderful Sèan Virgo, said, "The world will conspire to keep you from writing." I feel like I relive this truth every single day. Here, in this surprisingly lovely little city, where I have a beautiful little apartment and a decent job that gives me space and time to write, and friends who make me laugh and introduce me to new things and keep my cultural heart beating in a way that continues to surprise, the balance of real-life and writing-life seems that much harder to maintain. Counter-intuitive? Definitely. Why am I not writing more when I have more time to do it? Why not? WHY NOT?

And slowly but surely I find myself pining for those times when writing was my only choice. Longing for excuses to shut myself up in my apartment and get the words out. Looking forward to that moment when I, too, can crawl back into bed and stretch out and forget the various stresses of the day. (I feel guilty about saying this, because my father worked very hard his entire life--still works hard, in fact--and even though I also know that the work of a writer is hell-bendingly difficult in its own way, sometimes I still find it hard to admit that I am also tired at the end of the day, when I spend most of my hours sitting in a chair and swearing at my computer screen while my dad most likely spends his day lugging two-by-fours and huge pipes and straining himself in all kinds of physical ways. But there you have it. I'll say it anyway.)

Anyway. Why do I say all of this? Because I haven't even been blogging! It's been more than two weeks since I posted anything of substance. First you get busy, and then you get distracted, and then you get apathetic. Oh, it's been so many days since I did my morning pages. Meh. Oh, it's been x amount of time since I worked on the novel. Who cares? Do I really want to sit down and get immersed in it right now? Or do I want to stay in bed/watch another season of Sherlock/check my email for the millionth time/read someone else's novel/stare at the wall?

I'll take whatever's behind Doors 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, please. Anything but Door #1. ANYTHING BUT.

It's like running. If I go for more than five days without a morning run, it takes me that much longer to get back into the groove. I'll scramble up all manner of excuses to avoid restarting the routine. It's raining. It looks like it might rain. It's less than zero outside. It's more than 15 degrees outside. I feel sick. I might fall and twist my ankle. I COULD GET HIT BY A BUS. I should stay inside and fortify my insides with chocolate. Etc.

And now, here I am. Not running. Not writing. But sooner or later the guilt (you gotta love that guilt, you really do) kicks in, and eventually the routine starts again, somehow. I just need to find that balance. Somewhere between being an incoherent recluse and a super-productive powered word machine. It's there, somewhere. It has to be.

In the meantime, it really is almost -15 outside. And I have a doctor's appointment today. So, uh, maybe the routine will start in earnest tomorrow ...

Well, would you look at this ...

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:25:00 +0000

Waiting For An Echo has been nominated in two categories (Best Written and Writing & Literature) for the 2012 Ninjamatics Canadian Weblog Awards! Isn't that swell?

This little blog will be jostling shoulders with a whole bunch of fine, upstanding weblogs from across Canada. The nomination period is open until November 30th, so I'm sure there will be plenty of other nominees cropping up in the ensuing months. I'm so glad Ms. Schmutzie saw fit to get some folk together and celebrate the vast array of talent in Canadian blogging. I am humbled and so very grateful to be included in the bunch.

And -- I get another funky button for the blog. How cool is that?

Two new publications!

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:46:00 +0000

So. A funny thing happened yesterday. Was just about to close up shop and make my way to work when a friend posted a rather nice little message on Twitter. Said message read like this:

Got a nice three-part Valentine's Day gift from @fillingStation, with work by @AmandaLeduc, @PainEyre, and @derekbeaulieu.

It was a lightning bolt of surprise. Cliché, but true. Curious as to why? Read on ...

I submitted two pieces to filling Station back in July of last year, and never heard anything back from them. Since they state on their website that their response time is 3-4 months, when October rolled around and I hadn't received anything from them, I figured they'd turned me down. Imagine my surprise, then, to hear, via someone else, that my work actually had made it into the journal. Exciting! Fun!

I thought it was a joke at first, naturally. Or that this friend had somehow misread my name. Maybe the essays in his issue had been written by an Amanda DeLuc. (You have no idea how often people mix up my name like that.) So I sent him a Twitter message to confirm. And eureka--'twas all true! Both essays that I'd submitted to the journal had been chosen for publication. Woot woot!

Of course, adding to the drama (because there's always drama, always) was the fact that one of the pieces, "Mr. Dolittle", had in the meantime been accepted and published somewhere else. So as soon as I got over my elation at the fact that two of my pieces (two! Two at the same time! TWO!) were appearing in an issue, I shot them a wee little email explaining the situation. Also wrote to clarify as to how, exactly, they'd managed to publish two of my pieces without ever getting in touch with me.

It's a bit of a tricky thing, this simultaneous publication business. It was simplified a great deal by the fact that the initial publication had only acquired first-time rights, and also further simplified by the fact that neither publication would be paying for the work. (Sometimes, it would seem, there are advantages to not getting paid.) Anyway, the upshot of it all is the the non-fiction editor sent me a lovely, lovely email right back, explaining that they'd had several staff and structural changes over the past year, and that the magazine had experienced a bit of upheaval in the process and unfortunately allowed some correspondence to fall through the cracks. He apologized profusely for the situation and noted, happily, that there was no issue in reprinting the one piece. Hallelujah.

So! Now I get to add two (two! TWO!) more publications to The List. I'm also chuffed about the non-fiction acceptance. I love writing novels and short stories, but it's very nice to know that I can turn my hand to another medium in a way that doesn't send readers screaming for the door.

In the meantime, work on the new novel continues. Predictably, I have been overcome with a sudden need to delve into a new television series, and am thus spending perfectly usable writing hours scouring the Internetz, on the lookout for my newest Favourite Show. The eminently respectable Will Johnson tells me that Breaking Bad really is the way to go. I foresee many more hours spent in the testing of this noble hypothesis.

On Deadlines (Or, The Delicate Art of Lighting A Fire Under One's Own Ass)

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:16:00 +0000

I'd been meaning to write and submit an entry to the Canada Writes nonfiction contest since November of last year. That's when I first remembered the contest. Perfect, I thought. That gives me a good three months to write and work on a piece to submit. Three months? Fifteen hundred words? No problem at all.

Except, of course, that I didn't write the damn essay. At all. I didn't even scribble words into my journal, and I try and write in my journal every day. Nothing. Nothing.

And then February 1st rolled around, and suddenly it was 9pm. Two hours and fifty-nine minutes before the submission period for the contest ended. And I thought, well, heck. Should probably get to that essay now.

Ridiculous, I know. Why even bother? If I hadn't bothered to get myself in gear for this essay in the three months preceding the contest, why in heaven's name would I bother to cram all of that energy in the last three hours before the essay was due? Why not just give up?

Because I'm stubborn, that's why. And apparently because, like so many infinitely more worthy writers before me, there's something galvanizing about having that imminent deadline so close you can see it.

So I sat down and wrote that essay. It ended up being just over 1200 words, and I finished it fifteen minutes before the deadline, which means that from first word to last, the essay took about two hours and forty-five minutes to write. Roughly four hundred words an hour. When I break it down into those numbers, now, it seems slightly less intimidating. I've written four hundred words in an hour before. I've written far more than that, sometimes. (Not often, but sometimes.) Four hundred words an hour, two hundred words every thirty minutes, one hundred words every fifteen. That is not undoable.

What made it different, of course, and exciting, was the fact that I was editing and revising and writing all at the same time. There was something very pared down and spare about that two hour and forty-five minute stretch. I didn't hit that keyboard unless the word I wanted was absolutely essential, and sometimes I took words away even then. There was no I'll try this out, and take it out later if it doesn't work. There was no time.

This, I am sure, is what so many other writers like about deadlines. There's something so liberating, strangely, about being locked into a timeframe with a piece. About forcing yourself to really truly let go of those distractions and just get it done. Hard, yes, but liberating all the same. Of course our relationship with deadlines isn't always so clear-cut -- I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by, said Douglas Adams, and I'm pretty sure every writer everywhere has felt the same at one point or another -- but there's definitely something about having to get it done. Something about lighting that fire under your own rear and saying that's it, no one's playing anymore.

Of course, pared-down nature of the above notwithstanding, there's a very real chance that the essay I wrote won't turn out to be any good. I'm not about to argue that an almost three-hour writing sprint, free of distraction and full of zealous writing mojo, necessarily translates into fantastic writing, at least not all of the time. I do think that that need for editing-as-I-went lent the piece, and the process, a certain kind of clarity and directness that can get lost when you're writing around the distractions of Twitter and The Internetz. But as to whether it is good, as to whether it will win -- well, that's anyone's guess.

Still, I found the whole process inspiring. Nothing like the feeling of flames on your posterior to get those creative juices flowing. And so, dear readers, here's a challenge.

Pick a writing contest. Any writing contest. (Though obviously, if you need to conserve your cash, might be best to stick to those contests with lower or no entry fees.) Want contest ideas? Look here, and here, and here. Note down the deadline of said contest. Slot yourself a three hour window just before the deadline closes. Refuse--absolutely refuse--to write anything in relation to that contest until your three hour window arrives. And then, when it does, sit yourself down in front of your computer and write that gosh darned essay/short/flash fiction piece. Be concise. Be brief. Think hard about your word usage. Remember that there's no time to go back and revise.

Obviously I'm not advocating that you do this all the time. But take your safety net away, just this once, and see what happens. Submit that three-hour piece to the contest in question. And let me know what happens, will you? I'll keep you all posted as to the fate of my little Three Hour Essay. Chances are it won't go anywhere, but now I know, once more, that the words can come right when I ask them. I know that I can edit and write and revise all at once, and get a submission-ready piece under my belt in less than half a day. That's valuable knowledge. It's almost as good as winning a contest!

"Instructions" on WIll Johnson's Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 02:54:00 +0000

Hey kids. Check it out -- Will Johnson has featured Instructions for an Inexperienced Lover on his website. Cool beans. Will is a Vancouver-based writer currently completing his MFA at UBC. He has exciting plans to relocate to Nova Scotia for the summer (in a renovated church, no less), which makes me more than a little envious.

His blog is hilarious (tips on being anti-social, anyone?) and definitely worth checking out. Also, you should definitely, definitely follow him on Twitter. As he says in his entry about my book, that's more or less how we discovered each other in the world. And it's been hella fun.

I love Twitter. Have I gushed about that lately?

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 06:09:00 +0000

Home from a night of volunteering at the swanky Book Lover's Ball. Three things.

1) Guy Gavriel Kay, whose books made me weep as a child and whose novels are still among my favourite reading companions, period, came to me twice and thanked me for volunteering.

2) Margaret Atwood is the tiniest of women, with soft haloed hair and bones like robin's eggs. She wore a lovely blue-green shawl and snuck out quietly at the halfway point of the night.

3) Kathleen Winter is taller and even more beautiful than I could have imagined. How I wish I could have stolen a moment away from my auction table and pulled her aside and said, "Your book changed the world for me." But I couldn't leave my post, and so instead I watched her smile and laugh and look so unbearably graceful as she went about the room, and I coveted her fascinator from afar.

Alas for lost opportunities. Sigh.

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 02:05:00 +0000

[Or, as the CBC likes to call it, Canada Reads!]

So. Canada Reads is up and running. Can’t you smell the blood in the air, the anger, the hurt feelings? Once more into the drama and the egos and the literary smackdown. Hoo-ha. Some of us are rubbing our hands together in glee … and some of us are throwing those same hands up in disgust. Fun times.

A few thoughts on the drama:

I’d never heard of Anne-France Goldwater prior to this show. But given that the CBC explicitly calls her “Quebec’s Judge Judy”, I don’t think anyone should be surprised that she’s saying inflammatory things on air. Also, let’s remember: Canada Reads might have started out as a show about books, but it has increasingly become a spectacle about the panelists, and how they lead the show. What the CBC wants is viewership, and controversy, and debate, and the formula that they have now for Canada Reads delivers it in spades. Sure – did Goldwater go overboard calling Carmen Aguirre a terrorist? Maybe. But it’s also probably true – to someone, at least. Like Shad said: one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

Did she go overboard when she called Marina Nemat a liar? I don’t think so. I’m not saying that Nemat deliberately lied in her book, but she did mention, right at the beginning of her memoir, that she altered certain events and people in the narrative. This almost always happens in the case of memoir. Why is anyone acting surprised that she’s getting called out about it? Why do people persist in thinking that memoir, based as it is on human memory (which can be corroborated with research and what not, yes, but still remains fundamentally flawed), is absolutely airtight in terms of how it deals with facts? Anyone who writes memoir (and I include myself in this category) knows that they’re dealing with a version of the truth. So it’s perfectly possible for Nemat’s version of the truth to be different, in subtle ways, from what might have transpired. Sure, Goldwater’s method of delivery in noting this was blunt and forthright and decidedly lacking in tact. Absolutely. But Canada Reads is out for blood, and anyone who thinks otherwise needs a little shaking up. Like I said above, the woman is delivering in spades.

I’m also not sure about Nemat’s rebuttal to Goldwater – both her Facebookpost and her response last night to the Globe and Mail. Nemat argued, first of all, that her book was voted off because it was “popular”, and that the judges were therefore not necessarily concerned with what book had more merit. And then she told the Globe and Mail that the judges needed to be careful with how they handled the voting of this contest, dealing as they were with nonfiction, with personal accounts and stories. “People are putting their souls on the line here,” Nemat said. “You cannot go in non-fiction at someone who’s been tortured or who’s been a revolutionary in South America, who’s invested everything into something that’s of value to them.”

I disagree. I wholeheartedly understand that Ms. Nemat found Judge Goldwater’s comments hurtful and disrespectful, because they were. But, as above, this isn’t some genteel show. It’s not about merit, in many ways. It’s about other things—debate and controversy and viewership. Sure, Goldwater could have been nicer. But then she wouldn’t be Goldwater, and they wouldn’t have invited her on the show.

But the larger issue here, as I see it, is this idea of the books—and, by extension, their authors—being both exempt from heavy critique because of the true nature of their material, and then inherently having merit because of this aspect of reality. What does that mean? That one book might “deserve” to win the contest because its story is … what? More “real”? More harrowing? More interesting to those of us that might not watch hockey or listen to The Rheostatics? Are the judges supposed to pussyfoot around their opinions of the books simply because the characters are actually real people? Are they supposed to coach their decisions in pretty language and let everyone down gently simply because these things have actually happened? Are they supposed to shift their attention away from the merits of the book as a literary narrative and more to the emotional responses that the books may elicit simply because they detail personal struggles?

I don’t think so. The fact that there are personal memoirs contending for the “top prize” just means that, well, there are personal memoirs in contention. It just means, really, that there’s more chance for authors to get offended. That’s all.

I enjoyed Prisoner of Tehran, but in terms of a book that “deserved” to win the competition? Purely on the basis of literary merit alone, I thought it lacked the chops. I found it forthright in its honesty and deeply interesting, but I didn’t find it compelling in the way that I found The Tiger compelling, or all-encompassing in the way that The Game reads, in the sense of appealing to a wide demographic of people, touching on issues that a variety of people can relate to. (Yes, it's a human rights book. Yes, we can all relate to the struggles therein. But the job of the memoirist--and it's a hell of a difficult job--is to reach beyond the narratives of their own tale and connect with the wider world inside that same narrative. I didn't feel that Nemat accomplished that.) I didn’t find it particularly well written, either. When I made up my top five list, I put Prisoner of Tehran at the bottom.

But look--that's just me, saying that. It's a subjective enterprise. And this is why the whole notion of a book “deserving” to win in the first place is ridiculous. This will probably ruffle a whole bunch of feathers, but I’ll say it anyway. As an artist, as a writer, you do not “deserve” to win any kind of accolade at all, ever. (Except perhaps in the case of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and that only because it references a wide body of work and is therefore so much more comprehensive than one single award.) As an artist, the only thing that you “deserve”, in the sense that you’ve worked for something and should receive some kind of recognition, is the ability to continue practising your art. That’s all.

The only thing that books deserve is a wider audience. They do not deserve prizes. I mean, obviously it’s nice and wonderful and lovely when they do get accolades, but how can they deserve them, in the sense that they’re intrinsically more worthy than other books? Who decides what’s more worthy? The judges on Canada Reads will decide one thing; I as a reader will decide another. Anyone who has ever practiced as an artist will know that the whole business is entirely subjective. Entirely. You might be able to get the finer points of craft down; you might be able to produce a work that is technically proficient and even emotionally powerful all at once. But all that that “deserves” is exposure. More readers. That’s it.

This is why the drama associated with Canada Reads both fascinates and frustrates me. As an artist, I think contests are great for garnering more exposure. So many more people will read Prisoner of Tehran and The Tiger now as a result of this debate. And at the end of the day, this will translate into more sales for Nemat and Vaillant and all of the other authors whose books are in discussion. It will mean more money for them, which will mean more time and hopefully more opportunity for them to keep writing. And that, at the end of the day, is what’s most important.

But prizes? Accolades? These are gifts. They are unlooked-for delights. Obviously it’s great if you get them. Obviously, as a writer you want to get them. But you don’t deserve them, at all.

Anyway. Day Two of the contest is now over, and most predictably, The Tiger was voted off. Along with probably 95% of yesterday’s listeners, I pegged that outcome as soon as Goldwater said the word “terrorist”. So it really is about the interplay between the judges now, and the politics therein. I therefore predict that On a Cold Road will be voted off tomorrow, and that the final two will come down to Something Fierce and The Game. And even though they’re not supposed to let this influence them, I wouldn’t be surprised if the judges decide to go for Something Fierce, in the end, at least in part because of what has transpired thus far on the set.

We shall see.I did find the debate today quite interesting, and I liked the fact that the panelists (particularly Shad, who just seems so calm and levelheaded and nice) tried to discuss a wide range of issues pertaining to the books. But. In the end? It's definitely a show about the spectacle. So why, in heaven's name, is everyone all up in arms about it being so ... spectacle-y?

WritBits 4

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:53:00 +0000

Holy smokes -- it's been forever since I've done one of these! Cue feelings of Enormous Guilt. (Not that I harbour any illusions of you fine folks languishing in despair about the absence of a writerly info post. That would necessitate the arrival of the Enormous Ego.) But -- it's a new year, filled with more dazzling contests and shindigs and writerly love/fistfights. Just the thought of it all makes me excited.

So, in the spirit of all things resolutions (February isn't too late for optimism, is it? Even in spite of the dreadful dreary weather?), here's some get-up-and-at-em writing tidbits to get you at that page.

1) SLS Unified Contest: The deadline for the 2012 SLS Unified Literary contest is fast approaching. Get your fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction (three cheers for the CNF portion of the contest!) in to SLS by February 28. You can email your entries to sls.contest@gmail.com, or send them in the old-fashioned way -- check the website for their mailing address. Entry fee is ONLY FIFTEEN DOLLARS! Heck, even I can afford that. And most days I can't afford toilet paper.

Moving on ...

(I do actually purchase toilet paper on a regular basis, in case anyone is wondering.)

2) EVENT Magazine CNF Contest: EVENT's annual CNF contest is now underway. And Zsuzsi Gartner is the final judge! Deadline for submissions (maximum length of 5,000 words) is April 15. See the magazine's website for contest details in their entirety.

3) Q's Modern Love Six-Word Story Contest: I've never much been one for Valentine's Day, I'll admit (maybe it's my past life as a server speaking, and the utter horridness of making sure every dining experience is "special" and "unique" for those starry-eyed lovers at your table), but this little contest from CBC Radio's Q put a smile on my face. Taking its cue (ha! pun totally unintentional, BUT AWESOME!) from Ernest Hemingway's famous six-word story, Canada's most popular arts & culture radio show is inviting listeners to submit their own six-word short stories on the theme "Modern Love". See the Q webpage for details -- you can enter in the comments section. Post your entries before February 13. Winner gets their story read on air and a Q prize pack!

4) I've mentioned this website before in a previous WritBits post, but it really is fantastic enough to bear repeating. If you're on the lookout for markets to submit your work, have a peek at Places For Writers. Sublime.

5) And while you're at it, drop by Duotrope's Digest. Again. Sublime.

6) The Sketchbook Project: I found out about The Sketchbook Project via Kathleen Winter's wonderful blog. She's got some lovely sketches on her site, and you should definitely check them out. But I find The Sketchbook Project itself hugely fascinating anyway, just in general. It reminds me of the creative energy that Julia Cameron talks about when she advocates morning pages. I haven't signed up for the project myself, but I might. Will you? What if that creative energy that fuels your words and grammar were to break forth in a picture? What do you think you would see?

7) WritBits from the pros: Nothing like a commandment to make writing easy. Yes? Do this. Don't do that. Avoid this. Try more of that. Etc etc. Here's a delightful article on Open Culture that pulls together some of the best writing advice from The Greats. I'm partial to Peggy's segment, of course. If Margaret Atwood ventures to tell you something about writing, you can be pretty sure it's the holy kind of truth.

8) More WritBits, but with swearing! Struggling with the what, why, and oomph of your short story/novel/literary gift to mankind? Look no further, for Chuck Wendig can help! True, he might tie you to a chair in order to do it, but sometimes we writers must sacrifice comfort for Artistic Success. Behold Chuck's 25 Things You Should Know About Story Structure. Read it. Laugh. Repeat.

9) More Valentine's Day treats: Sugar's Coming Out Party! If you follow this blog you'll know that from time to time I reference a wonderfully wonderfully fantastic advice columnist who goes by the name of Sugar. Her column in The Rumpus is one of my all-time favourite literary pleasures, ever. This despite (or perhaps because of?) the fact that the column makes me cry nearly every single time I read it. Anyway, Sugar has been anonymous for the past year and a half or so, and there's been all kinds of speculation around who Sugar actually is "in real life". (I say that in quotations because, as Sugar herself has said, the anonymity of her column has allowed her to be the truest version of herself.) We know that she's published fiction and memoir under her real name, but we don't know what her real name is. Yet. But all will be revealed on February 14th! Bit envious, for sure. Wish I had the means to get myself down to the States so that I, too, could attend the party.

In the absence of the funds for travel, though, I'll be watching my Twitter stream like a fiend on The Day Of. If you haven't seen the column--or, heck, the magazine itself--I highly suggest you check it out. Delightful stuff. And the essays that they publish are amazing. I'm trying desperately to think of something that I could submit to them, but I fear that my life is just not that interesting. Woe.

10) Iconic Author Accessories: This is a great list--I came across it today, via the wonderfulness that is Twitter. Three cheers for author accessories! My favourite of this list is David Foster Wallace's bandana. I love how very ordinary the origins are. (Likewise for Joyce's eye patch.) Oh, and I also adore Nabokov's butterfly net. Look at that man. He wrote better novels in his second language than I'll ever manage in my first, he taught, and he was a BUTTERFLY EXPERT. So much so that butterfly science is now bowing to the man. I mean, what's the point in trying to go about one's own writing life in the face of that? Why. Even. Bother?

Anyway. What about you? Do you have any authorly accessories of your own that verge on the iconic? This list has inspired me so much I'm tempted to find an accessory of my own ... which would of course undercut the originality and ordinariness of the above. Like I said, my life isn't that interesting. (See No. 9.) I can't even lay claim to an authentic prop. More woe.

11) And on the Famous Author theme ... I tweeted about this article some time ago, but I don't think I blogged about it. *Amanda scrolls through blog entries and finds ... nothing. Phew.* And now look -- there's an updated version! The American writer Lizzie Stark recently blogged about what might have happened had other writers done their thing with Twilight. See the original here. And see the updated version here, complete with a TOTALLY OUTSTANDING version of Twilight as written by Dr. Seuss.

See this vamp? This is Ed.
Ed is pale. Ed is dead.

Clear. Concise. Straight to the point as only Dr. Seuss can be. Bravo!

12) Author Addictions: [This post is taking an increasingly list-ish slant. Ah, well. You go where the muse leads, no? Such interesting things one can find on The Internet!] Once you've finished learning about Author Accessories, hop on over here to learn about those invigorating, heathy, inspiring habits that fuelled the masters of yore in their pursuits of genius. Alternatively, let's all have a class in opium, absinthe, and the delicate art of determining the unique flatulence of one's spouse in a roomful of other farty folk. Inspiring. Totally.

So, to sum this post up in one sentence: we writers all start out with good intentions, and then end up caked in drugs. Come on now. Who wouldn't want this life?

In Praise of The Letter

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:21:00 +0000

(Okay, so this is kind of like a post I wrote last year, but what can I say? Letters never get old ...)

Have any of you heard about this? I read the article in The Guardian this morning and got all excited, and nostalgic. And then I went to the actual explanation page on The Rumpus (let's just say it -- my new favourite online publication, period) and did a little happy dance.

I love letters. I love everything about them. And anything that can bring them back into the world in a big way is a Most Wonderful Thing indeed.

Ten years ago I moved overseas and lived in England for a year. The Internet had just started to become more or less commonplace -- we had Internet lab classrooms at my campus, and the absolute thrill of email had faded somewhat in light of how useful emails could be. When you're away from home for the first time, that constant ability to keep in touch with family can be lifesaving. (It can also be crippling, which is a whole other post, but I'm happy to report that my family dynamics never fell into that category.) No more waiting days or weeks to get that letter in the mail. I could jot off an email, and bam -- someone, somewhere else in the world, would get it almost right away.

But email was still new enough that letters hadn't faded entirely. I have a whole binder filled with the letters that I got over the course of that year. This month, while I was moving my things around in my new apartment and trying to figure out where everything needed to go, I found the binder. Lost an hour or two or three going through those letters, and remembering how much they'd made me laugh and smile, how delightful it had been to have a real, tangible experience with a friend or a family member who was still so far away.

The strongest postal memory from that year was receiving a package from my friend Heather, who sent me, among other things, three snack-size bags of Mrs. Vickie's jalapeno chips. (You couldn't get them in the UK--in fact, I'm pretty sure you still can't--and I had a major case of withdrawal.) But when she went to mail her parcel to me, the postal clerk told her she couldn't send food through the mail unless it was accompanied by something else. (The rules of Canada Post never cease to amaze me. Like this rule, about mailing baby chicks. Whuh?) So Heather sent me a pair of McMaster gym socks. The socks have been lost to the ages, but the memory remains.

I had two pen pals as a child. The first pen pal was from Russia, and we wrote to each other for four years or so, from when I was eight until I was about twelve. The second pen pal was my aunt, also a novelist, and I have all of these letters in a lovely little binder as well. There's something so ... beautiful about them. We can talk all we want about the efficiency and practicality of emails--and believe me, as someone who checks her email roughly a million times per day, the efficiency of emails is a big point in their favour--but there's something intrinsically beautiful about the art of letter writing. Something incredibly special.

When I sit down with a letter that someone's written--especially if the letter is handwritten, although this applies to typewritten letters as well, to an extent--I'm always bowled over by this thought: someone sat down with pen and paper for an hour, just for me. In our hyper-charged world, where it's the norm to be busy and doing five million things at once, setting an hour or two aside for someone is almost akin to a sacrifice. Why spend an hour (or two) writing a letter to someone when you can dash an email off to them in a fraction of the time? Why bother?

Here's why: because as anyone who's ever received a letter knows, there's nothing quite like that thrill of a letter in the mailbox. What joy, to discover a handwritten note in amongst your bills and flyers! For me it's a complete excuse to drop whatever I'm doing and curl up with those sheets of paper, just as I might curl up with a book. It's a reminder to stop, and slow down, and appreciate what beauty comes from being patient and putting thought and craft into something.

In one of her many interviews last year, Jennifer Egan talked about her experiences traveling in Europe in the early 1980's. This was, of course, during The Time Before Cell Phones. It was also, as Egan noted, the time before answering machines. She describes the experience so beautifully--queuing up for the payphone and waiting alongside other travelers, only to reach the phone, dial your number, and hear it ring and ring and ring. That feeling of waiting in line, she says, paying for the phone and then not only having no one answer, but not being able to leave a message so that they would never know you called. It's hard to fathom what that disconnection felt like. But I'm actually very grateful for it. Because it was extreme. And that kind of extreme isolation showed me that I wanted to be a writer.

I think this is so interesting, and so applicable, in its way, to the dwindling letter phenomenon. Just as the absence of answering machines brought Egan face-to-face with her own kind of isolation, so too, I think, do letters bring us isolation of a kind. They remind us of how physically removed we can be from other people, and yet how inextricably connected to them at the same time. They are at once an homage to the physical world and the mental/spiritual plane--the physical nature of the things that we make and gift and carry with us, and the mental nature of thinking and missing and loving those friends and family members who might be far away. And in this present age of instantaneous everything--instant music, instant communication, instant publication, you name it--the time-traveling nature of physical letters (which are created in the past, in a sense, and come to you in the future carrying news that might already have settled and gone) is entirely unique.

A friend of mine once said that the thing she missed the most about film photography was the anticipation of getting her rolls of film developed. So too, I think, can emails do away with a certain sense of anticipation. Bereft of steady written correspondence, we look at our mailboxes now with little more than dread. (Or maybe that's just me, and my perma-impoverished status of cringing in the face of steady bills.) We don't see our mailboxes with excitement anymore, because emails can bring us everything in less than half the time.

I think it's time, like I've talked about before, to bring the mailbox back in vogue. And so, three cheers to The Rumpus! I'll be signing up to that little letter service of theirs for sure. Imagine getting a letter, addressed just to you, from DAVE. EGGERS. Holy smoke. That's exciting.

Know what else is exciting? Two nights ago, when sleep wouldn't come, I crawled out of bed at midnight and sat down to write a letter to a friend. I mailed it today. Nothing fancy--no special stationery (remember those days? Remember the stationery collections? Sigh...), and a plain white business envelope to address it all. But the simple act of writing the letter felt like the best kind of meditation I know. Maybe if everyone took time to write one wee letter a week, or even one a day, like in this fun challenge hosted by writer Mary Robinette Kowal, we'd find more time in our days for breathing.

PS. If you're on Twitter, and you like letters, make sure you follow Letters of Note! You'll find your faith in pen and paper (not that it was ever shaky, right?) completely renewed ...

This is where it all gets done

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:00:00 +0000

I’ve talked about this before, so I’ll try hard here not to belabour the point. But this recent article from Anis Shuvani on the age-old question of whether or not creative writing can be taught got me a-thinkin’, and as is my wont (perhaps unfortunately), I thought I’d share some more of these thoughts on this here blog.

Can creative writing be taught? Can it really?

Mr. Shuvani makes an excellent point in his article, for sure. (The Victoria-based writer Matthew Hooton, via Twitter, called him a “perfectly articulate devil on my shoulder”, and I’d say that’s pretty apt.) Do creative writing programs—particularly those in North America—run the risk of promoting one particular writing style (ie. Hemingway, Carver, Munro, etc)? Perhaps. Do they champion minimalism above all else? In my experience—at least in my North American workshop experience—they did. Is workshop an oddly sadistic, thinly-veiled form of therapy? Maybe. Okay, sure it is. The word cathartic isn’t used to describe the workshop experience for nothing.

But. But.

I take issue with Mr. Shuvani’s neat separation of “craft” and “literature”. Craft is a very revealing term, he says, as though writing were a matter of figuring out the essential components of a story or poem (the novel is typically not taught in workshop, because it's too hard a nut for craft to crack), and duplicating those elements in the comfort of your home. In that sense, creative writing can absolutely be taught. It's just that it's not literature.

He goes on to explain that literature, at its heart, is essentially the study of this messy enterprise called life. Literature is about having, first of all, a broad humanist understanding of the tradition, how vastly oppositional styles of writing have sought to grapple with the same human problems over time, how history and politics have shaped national literatures, how you can not necessarily learn--for that is too reductionist a term--but be challenged by great writers like Chekhov or Tolstoy or Kafka, to create something utterly unique to yourself.

So—okay. Fine. Craft is about the nuts and bolts of writing—the how-to, the steps—whereas literature, according to Mr. Shuvani, seems to be about how we can create something that both speaks to and transcends our specific human experience. Using your particular filter as a writer to imagine something that goes beyond what’s come before you, and manages to speak to the world anyway. Encapsulating how you view the world in a way that other people can respond to, and be affected by.

I suppose his point is that too high a focus on craft puts on in danger of distilling their own particular voice—of submerging their own unique ways of seeing in favour of always checking the right boxes where craft is concerned. Do away with your adverbs, Young Skywalker. Cross out those clichés. Don’t go heavy on description, even if what you really want to do as a writer is detail the hell out of that tree, because no one reads long descriptions anymore. That simply isn’t in. (I’ll never forget the time when one of my instructors told me that the second person, as a voice, was “done”.)

All of this is fine and well and good. I do think that an over-adherence to craft can be dangerous. And I do think, from time to time, that the North American view of writing-as-a-skill, one that can be taught to anyone in much the same way as one might be taught baking, or knitting, or whatever, has a tendency to produce writing that is exceedingly competent and yet lacking in original thought. (I’m quite happy to shuffle a large degree of my own writing in here. One always hopes for improvement, of course, and prays that the gradual discovery of one’s voice yields more originality as time goes on, but I’ve definitely, in my time, produced a story or ten that sounded like every other workshopped piece out there.)

When I was studying in Scotland, my one instructor put it this way. In the UK, she said, we tend to think that artistic capability is something that you either have or don’t. It’s a question of helping people uncover what’s already inside them. She talked a lot about how the good old American dream—the idea that anyone, anywhere, can pick themselves up and obtain whatever they want in life through dint of hard work and time—had a huge part to play in the creative writing workshop boom in North America. I always found her perspective fascinating. I did find the European writing workshop experience quite different from my time as a student in North America. Workshops were much looser, if indeed they happened at all. You were mostly there to read loads of books and write whatever you wanted and take advantage of your supervisors whenever you could. That was it. In comparison to my life at UVic, where I’d had fifteen hours of workshop a week, life in the UK felt like a scary, it’s-all-up-to-you-now vacation. Of sorts.

But all this focus on workshop, and the question of whether or not adherence to craft destorys a writer's sensibility, tends to ignore one small and yet very important fact: your real growth as a writer comes after you’ve graduated. I did five years of academic training in writing—in addition to the twenty-odd years when I’d been writing little bits of nothing whilst growing up—and I think I can safely say, now, that my real growth as a writer happened once I was finally out of school. What taught me the most? Living on my own. Living overseas. Working sixty-hour weeks in Edinburgh and scribbling late at night. Never (ever, ever) having any money. Walking dogs for food. Crying in the middle of a nice café in Paris. Being lonely in Amsterdam. Being lonely everywhere. Locking myself in my apartment on Saturdays and working on my novel. Taking minutes at board meetings and thinking about dialogue. Zoning out of conferences and having imaginary conversations in my head. Spending non-existent money on writing contest fees. Moving back home with my parents. Never figuring anything out.

Etc. Etc. You get the idea.

Of course, this is only my experience. But those writers who stick with the game after workshop is over—I think there’s a pretty good chance that they’ll grow in monumental ways too. Think about it—you’re only in workshop for a small fraction of your writing career. As nice as it is to have that group around you, ready with feedback (as sadistic, yes, as the experience can be), sooner or later you have to do things on your own. You have to edit your work, by and large, on your own. Sure you’ll have a first reader, or two, or three. And eventually you’ll have an editor, too. But you also have to know, for yourself, whether it works. Writing is a solitary experience. True, finished, “graduated” writing—outside of the academic sphere, in the comfort of your own little home—is entirely self-driven. And so in that sense, yes, the workshop is artificial. In that sense, yes, one can question whether or not a workshop really helps a writer in the long run, especially if a student spends their workshop career trying hard to emulate instead of trying to discover.

But as to whether or not we’re “fucked” because of it? I’m not so sure. For every malleable student that Mr. Shuvani mourns, there will be another student who’ll take those lessons on craft and transform them into something extraordinary. (Never mind the fact that hundreds of writers get published and forge careers for themselves without ever having taken a writing class. It still happens! Gasp! Extraordinary!) Maybe it won’t happen right away. Maybe it will take this student years of “unlearning” in order to get to that point. Maybe the difficulty lies in thinking that four years of workshop can make or break a writer, when in fact what four years of workshop does tend to do, more often than not, is provide a student with tools and memories to hold onto when they go out into the writing world alone.

Plenty of people will leave workshop and leave writing altogether. They’ll probably do it gradually, but leave it all they will. But some writers will go away and live their lives and keep writing—in the early morning hours, around their regular jobs, in their crumbling little apartments. And as time goes on and distances them from the intensity of workshop craft, they’ll find their own ways of saying things. This goes for “workshopped” writers and non-workshopped writers alike. Whether they learn the ins and outs of language through school, or apprentice in another way—working as a journalist, maybe, or sitting in their living room and reading millions of books—all writers learn craft at some point. And eventually they’ll take the elements of craft that resonate most with them and grow and mature and make their stories their own. This is where the real writing happens. This is where and when and how it all gets done. There's nothing wrong with focusing on craft, as long as you understand and acknowledge that craft is only part of it. It's an important part, though.

It's absolutely crucial. Look - if you're going to build a fucking temple, first you have to know how your bricks and mortar go together!

A raise o' the glass to Robbie Burns

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:45:00 +0000

I've been thinking about Scotland all day today, and missing Edinburgh like mad. The office windows of the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust are papered with a variety of poems and quotations about that fairest of bookish cities. My favourite of them all, from the Scottish poet Iain Crichton Smith:

Dear Edinburgh, how I remember you,
your winter cakes and tea, your bright red fire,
your swirling cloaks and clouds

Yesterday my best friend--who's finishing her PhD in Scotland, as it happens--said, "You know what I love best about the bagpipes? That first moment when you hear them, and you can't tell, at first, if you're hearing music, or if it's just the air."

Sigh. Oh, sigh.

I'll get back there one day. I promise.

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:48:00 +0000

Tonight, one of the women that I work with came into my office and asked me what my story was. How did I end up at the hospital? Where had I come from? Is this what I had studied? When I told her, no, that it was basically a fluke that landed me in a hospital job at all, and that I'd gone to school to be a writer, she said, "Really? That's so wonderful. You know, I've been working on a collection of short stories for years. They're mostly based on my life, and my experiences, and I have no idea if they're any good, but I'd love to see if I could find a publisher for them one day. I've always thought that when I retire, I'd like to devote all of my time and energy to finishing my stories, and then see if I could get them out into the world."

Isn't that just lovely? Look -- stories find us anywhere, and grab each of us, no matter where we are or what we're doing in the world. Years ago, when I was little, I remember my grandfather purchasing a typewriter for himself because he wanted to write the Great Canadian Novel. Or I remember those stories--you know the ones--of that woman or man who nears the end of their life and sits down to write their memoirs.

I think it's comforting, this knowledge that the written word lies buried deep in each of us. Some of us will hear it more than others, but still--so lovely, I think, to know that it's there.

The agony ... and the ecstasy

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:32:00 +0000

Came across an interesting article—Salon magazine is always, it seems, a bastion of interesting—this morning. “The agony of the male novelist.” Great title, don’t you think? There’s a certain amount of wryness in there that I like (or, at least, I very much hope that there’s a certain amount of wryness in the phrase, because if there isn’t I’m a sucker), and I also like how you can almost smell the feminist rage sure to come as a result of a title like that. You can say lots of things about the literature/gender controversy (like how it’s so, uh, controversial), but one thing’s for sure: inciting rage is a great recipe for inciting discussion.

Anyway. I like this article—let’s start right there. I think it has a nice, quasi-self-deprecating tone that’s kind of refreshing. (Though again, maybe I’m just a sucker. On subsequent reads it does sound a little more sexist than not, which is a shame.) I’m not so sure about the overall “male literary novelists actually have it tougher than most” line that the author seems to tread towards the end of the piece, but it’s nice to read someone who isn’t, it would seem, in danger of taking his career as a literary novelist too seriously.

Let’s face it: in today’s publishing market, where the big money comes from genre novels and celebrity memoirs (Snooki, anyone?), literary novels, by and large, languish at the bottom of the pile. And I say that as someone who writes primarily in the literary genre. I don’t think that literary novels are intrinsically better than genre novels, and I honestly think that genre novels can be crafted every bit as well as a so-called upmarket book. But in terms of money? In terms of works of art that can actually make their creators a viable source of livable income? Yeah. Literary novels—and literary novelists, by extension—generally lurk near the bottom.

But I’m not. Quite. Sure. About the whole “agony” thing. Sorry, Mr. Wayne, but the agony of literary fiction isn’t limited exclusively to men. Anyone who has dabbled in literary fiction can attest to the long, long, looooong upward climb. Anyone, regardless of gender. I don’t think that short story collections written by females have a better chance of making it in the market than collections written by men, and I don’t think that the female-centric nature of a lot of North American book clubs crushes the market for male writing. (In fact, studies have shown that female readers are just as likely to read books by male authors as they are to read books written by women, whereas male readers tend to read books written primarily by men.)

I also find it interesting how easily, toward the end of the article, he dismisses the standard achievements of a life spent writing literary fiction—that is, a life spent writing fiction or nonfiction or poetry or whatever it is that doesn’t usually garner six-figure advances and a spot on the NYT list. It’s true, he says, basically, that male writers usually get more academic appointments, and they tend to get more attention, and more fellowships, and more freelance assignments … but this doesn’t necessarily translate into better sales.

Well hang on there, just a minute. Most literary novelists—those who, as we’ve noted, lurk near the bottom of the pile in terms of making money and living off their writing and whatnot—most of these novelists have to scrape a living together off of fellowships and adjunct appointments and freelance writing. And, uh, I’m sorry, but if you’re admitting right here and now that your status as a male novelist (and a white male novelist, to boot) tends to give you easier access to these things, even if it doesn’t necessarily mean you get sales, well … maybe I don’t like this article that much anymore.

I think we can all agree that people like Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Weiner are, as Teddy Wayne says, the 1% of the publishing world. I think we can also agree that life as a literary novelist is fiendishly hard, regardless of one’s gender. Arguably harder than ever in this age of paranormal romances and James Patterson knock-offs galore. But honestly—when has it ever been easy? When has it ever been about getting rich? Most writers do what they do because of love. Getting rich is always wonderful (who doesn’t have a problem or two that could be solved with a nice fat royalty cheque?), but most of the writers I know want simply to be able to continue doing what they do. And for most of us, that means cobbling a life together in between teaching positions and fellowships and freelance assignments and all that jazz. And if, as Wayne seems to imply, it's still easier for male writers to acquire these things, then we've still got a long way to go before the playing field evens out. Even in spite of female-centric book clubs, and voracious female readers clamouring for chick-lit plotlines and the like.

I can understand how someone might get disillusioned with Jennifer Weiner sniping about her royalty cheques in the face of snubs from the NYT and other ilk. Sure. But arguing that female writers have it easier than men because female readers buy their books seems just a tad bit too simplistic to me, especially when, as above, there are so many other factors that go into building and maintaining a literary life. It’s not always just about the market. It’s not always just about the sales. It’s everything else, too.

But then, I’m not a man. Perhaps there’s a whole side to this that I’m not even seeing.

Kill your darlings, all alone

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:01:00 +0000

Spent a chunk of time revising this morning. I love revising. I love going over a story and slicing words away--looking at your paragraphs with new eyes and thinking, actually, this doesn't flow at all. This doesn't need to be here.

It's one of the things I miss most about workshop--that ready availability of other eyes. Sometimes it's so hard to bring that fresh perspective to your own work. I ran a story of mine by a friend yesterday and his overarching advice was this: cut at least 1000 words. It's repetitive, and slow in spots. And of course he was right. I went to the story and gleefully hacked away. Unsure of something? Slice it. No longer quite as much in love with that little turn of phrase? Bugger needs to go. There are four lines of dialogue here, and everything you need can be said in two. Delete. Delete.

So much of writing, as it turns out, is about undoing.
Undoing. Unwriting. Making each word, as a friend recently said, earn its weight on the line. Paring and sanding and carving away. Sculpting, much like Michelangelo and others have done through the centuries. I saw the angel in the marble, and I carved to set it free.

Except, of course, that I am not Michelangelo, and I am no longer in workshop, and sometimes--as much as I love the process--going back over those stories and slogging away on one's own in a little attic nook (delightful though it might be) can be a lonely, dreary business. How do you know when enough is enough? How do you know when you've pared and revised your story/essay/poem/chapter down to the best that it can be?

You don't. Or, should I say, I don't know. I never know when enough's enough. I just fumble along in the dark. I let things sit. (This is hard for me, as I am not the most patient person in the world.) And then I come back to them, these slippery story things, and if I find myself unsure of something, I'll axe it more often than not.

Kill your darlings is one of those handy phrases that get tossed around writing circles a lot. William Faulkner said it, supposedly, but apparently the quotation itself was borrowed/modified (we writers, we're big on borrowing and modifying) from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who said this: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – whole-heartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings.

Which sounds a little different from me slicing out a piece of writing about which I'm unsure. This is why workshop was so handy. It's one thing to come back to your work and realize when things aren't working as swimmingly as you thought -- it is, in some ways, entirely a different thing to go over your work and stand apart from it enough to realize that those parts you love might not be working for the good of the story overall. This is why editors and outside readers are so absolutely essential. The story that I worked on this morning -- it might just be better now, thanks to my friend's suggestions. Cut at least a thousand words.

I'm grateful for his advice. I'm grateful for that chance to slice and cut and excise and try, always try, to be better.

In other news, I get paid this week. This is not particularly writerly news, nor is it very exciting (unless you happen to be me), but hallelujah, money in that bank account will sure as heck feel nice. I might even be able to think seriously about a couch. Why doesn't anybody ever talk anymore about writers who survive on ramen noodles and furniture made from milk crates? Wherefore all the stories about starving in garrets in Paris (or Hamilton, as the case may be) and being poor and trudging away at your work in the eerie bluish light of your laptop screen while everyone else is out having a fun Friday night because that's what normal people do? What about all of those success stories? What about the hours of revision and those moments when you crumple in a spasm on your floor and think, if I'd gone into accounting all those years ago none of this would have happened??

Yeah. In and amidst revising and chasing these words and the advice from friends, I think: what about all of that?

Don't be like the rest of them, darling

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:02:00 +0000

It's a beautiful, snowy day in Hamilton. I'm watching the snow dip and swirl over the rooftop next to my little attic apartment, and thinking somewhat hazily -- the way that you do about slightly unsavoury things that lie in the not-too-distant future -- about how I have to bundle up and go out into the cold in a few hours, and get my rear to work. I'm also thinking about a new story, and this new novel that has taken a sneaky little hiatus.

And I'm thinking about something that a dear friend posted on Twitter a few days ago. A sentence that contained so much of me and what I think a great deal of the time that it might as well have come from my own keyboard.

One of the hardest things about writing stories is reading someone else's.

It's so true. Can I just take a minute to step away from my dreams of being a better person and say it? That is so true. Sometimes (in fact, a great deal more often than I'd like), I find myself curled over a book that I love and start thinking: I'll never be that good. What's the effin' point? It is hard, this reading of other writers that I admire. Sometimes it's wonderful, and I'm inspired and eager to get to my blank page as a result, but more often than not it just serves to remind me of how much growing there still is to do. Reading the work of others reminds me of how flawed I am as a writer. Cue sad music, and the bottle of Bailey's in the corner ...

But here's the thing: it's your voice, and yours alone. Flawed or impeccable or whinging or incandescent -- everything that you say has a distinct tinge of you, and how you see the world ... and that's key. Maybe you'll never express yourself or capture images in precisely the way that Author X or Y or Z can do. Chances are, though, that you'll capture another slice of the world in a way that's every bit as important. Maybe even more important. What if there's a reader out there who couldn't care less about Authors X, Y, and Z, but finds themselves totally blown away by the work that you offer to the world? Isn't that saying something?

Like I said, I struggle with this all of the time. (As usual, I've also talked about it before. In here. Amanda's Blog: the same three topics ad infinitum ...) But just under a year ago, I wrote a little review about Stanley Park, in which I talked rather wistfully about how the novel made me want to be a better writer, and how I feared I'd never measure up. This is writing that makes me want to be the best possible writer I can be -- it's also writing that leaves me convinced that I'm so far off the mark as to be, well, delusional. It's the kind of writing that leaves me with a sinking, you'll-never-be-this-good-in-a-million-years kind of feeling.

I wrote that, and I mean every word of it. I still do. I wasn't trying to be cute. I wanted to express how much the novel made me wish to be better -- how much it challenged me, how much it galvanized and terrified me at exactly the same time. It made me feel raw, as a writer. Raw and unfinished, like some sort of sculpture abandoned halfway through creation. I'll never get there. Never.

So I posted this review, and then a few days later I got a Twitter message from none other than Timothy Taylor himself. He thanked me for my review ("such kind words"), and then -- get this -- he said that he felt the same way. He talked about how writers like Don DeLillo were his own source of frustration and inspiration both.

I was a little gobsmacked, I admit. Looking back, I'm not sure why -- why wouldn't Timothy Taylor have his own sources of inspiration, like the rest of us? -- but at the time, I was just floored to think that a writer I admired so much could have his own mountains to climb.

Silly of me, I know. Aren't we all raw and vulnerable and hurting inside, on some level? Aren't we all worried about measuring up, about being the best that we can be? It's a universal condition, this. We're all afraid. We want so desperately to get there, to wherever it is that we perceive Authors X and Y and Z to be, that we forget the fact that these wonderful, incandescent writers are on journeys of their own. Remember LM Montgomery and her Alpine Path? Remember Emily Starr, when she unwraps her first novel and lifts her gaze to the heavens? The crest of the Alpine Path at last? Emily lifted her shining eyes to the deep blue November sky and saw peak after peak of sunlit azure still towering beyond. Always new heights of aspiration. One could never reach the top really.

We don't reach the top, we writers. We are always in the act of reaching higher, and that's okay. More than okay, even -- it's perfect. More than ever now, I think, in this increasingly digital, public world of ours, the creative spirit is as much about the journeys that we take as it is about what we produce at the end. We are more comfortable with raw now. This blog, for example -- as flawed and bumbling and insecure as it is -- this blog is as much about my creative aspirations as my novels are. It will never be perfect, and odds are it will often fall shy of being as imperfectly good as it could be, too. Same goes for my stories. But it's my writing, and my voice, and that's what makes it special.

And so, to my dear friend who worries about those stories: don't be like the rest of them, darling. (For further inspiration, lovelies, have a look at this, the blog that inspired this title.) Be inspired by them, sure. Let them hurt you in good ways and rub you raw and make you wish, so very badly, to be better. And then write, and develop your craft, and make yourself better because of it. But don't be like them. I read you -- and so many other people will read you, too -- precisely because you don't sound like anybody else.

Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You!

So get to it, lovelies. Show me your words and your deepest, shining self. Be the Youest version of You. There is a space in this world of ours for everything you have to say. I guarantee it.

New home, new job, new life (kinda)

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 02:23:00 +0000

Greetings, my lovelies. Greetings, and a very belated Happy New Year to you all.

Remember that post a few months ago, when I rhapsodized about my little Scottish writing space and wondered if I'd ever get my own space in order again? Well. What do you know, but the time has arrived. That time is now.

Thank heavens.

Of course, with all the moving and the lugging up stairs and the finding out that my couch wouldn't fit through the doorway and the panic/reorganizing that ensued and then the long days of cleaning/painting/shelving/figuring out where to store all of my stuff, there hasn't been much time for writing.

But I hope to change that, and soon. (Amanda always hopes, as we know. But maybe this year will be the year of action, too.) In the meantime, I wanted to share this with you. If a week and a half spent putting one's home in order has taught me anything (aside from the sheer brilliance of foldable, easy-to-fit-into-tiny-spaces furniture), it is that there should always be time for stillness and rest. Rest from lugging stuff up the stairs. Rest from alphabetizing those bookshelves. Rest from cleaning. Rest, and the permission to sit for a moment on one's shiny wooden floor. Thinking nothing.

Rest, too, from the writing. Even that. From the worry and the doubt (it's come on awful hard of late) and the fear and the guilt (you're not doing enough! You're never doing enough!) and just ... everything. Sometimes it's nice to take a break.

So. The space is organized now, more or less. The break is over. Here's to a productive and happy and rest-filled 2012, a year where the words mean just as much to me as those spaces of stillness in between.

2011: The Year That Twitter Saved My Life

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:36:00 +0000

2011 was a hard year, if I may say so. I was not hungry, and I wasn't working crazy 60 hour weeks like I did back in 2010, but still, it was difficult. I spent large swathes of the year unemployed, and as anyone who has gone for stretches of time without work can tell you, the boredom that comes from a lack of routine is awful. I tried very hard to make good use of my time -- I finished revisions in January, and I used the stretches of time later in the year to draft and begin my new novel, but still: it was tough. There was many a day in 2011 when I just didn't see the point of getting out of bed.

This was particularly true at the beginning of the year. I entered 2011 not knowing if my novel would find a publisher (woe is me, I know -- just like practically every other writer out there on the planet!), not knowing if I'd ever get a job, not knowing if I'd ever find the means and the way to move out of my parents' house. I entered 2011 longing for Scotland and the life that I'd left behind. I entered 2011 lonely beyond belief. An expired driver's license and a home deep in the heart of rural Ontario meant that I was, quite literally, stuck. I could not go anywhere physically, and for the longest stretch of time it felt as though I wasn't going to go anywhere emotionally, or mentally, or spiritually, either.

And then I found Twitter, and ever so slowly, things started to get better.

You don't have that many options when you move home after ten years away. Or, should I say, you don't have that many options when you have no money, no car, no license, no job, and no social circle. I tried to find peace in those long winter mornings, when I had all day in front of me to write. I held those quiet moments of solitude whilst walking the dog on a crisp country road close to my heart. But here's the thing about peace: it's not peaceful, at least not all of the time. It's elusive as heck. You can grasp it in the morning and watch it float away by noon, and most days that's what happened with me. I was grateful for the space and the time, and for parents who loved me and opened their home without question, but I longed for the city. I missed all of my friends who were scattered far away in various corners of the world. I wanted people, I wanted to engage, I wanted the peace that comes from lots and lots of doing. I wanted to feel like I was saying something to the world, and also to feel as though the world was saying something back. Hard to do, sometimes, when the only people that you interact with on a regular basis are Mom and Dad. (Not that there's anything wrong with Mom and Dad, you understand. But variety, as they say, is the spice of life, non?)

And then, in part due to the urgings of @AProckford, I started spewing random thoughts on Twitter. I'd joined back in 2009, during the apex of my Facebook withdrawal, but hadn't really ever thought I had anything interesting to say. (I would find out, later, that this is a chronic Twitter condition. Most people encounter this problem. But we forge ahead anyway.) You know how they say that courage is acting in spite of fear? I kind of think being on Twitter is like that. Twitter success is writing in spite of the humdrum details of our little lives ... somehow, in the midst of tweeting (just as somehow, in the midst of fear, your actions are transformed), your pithy little words become interesting. There's a strange kind of alchemy going on there, and I think we should all stop right now and say thanks for the magic.

Anyway -- so I started talking humdrum nonsense on Twitter. I put up a link to my blog. And then I started following other people, most of whom were not, in fact, talking humdrum nonsense at all. Interesting people. Fascinating people. People like @MargaretAtwood and @jianghomeshi and @snolen. People like @johannaharness, who got me hooked on the #amwriting hashtag. People like Steph, the mastermind behind @bellasbookshelf, who suddenly and intensely got me all excited again about books. People like @janetsomerville, who made me long for the glamorous literary life of an English lit teacher in Toronto. And -- most important for those of us who've left Facebook behind -- people like @thepamelaking and @sabrinalheureux and @theplumpplate, @bunnybeloved and @groinapron and @annanotkarenina, dear friends from yesteryear who either were already on the site or hopped onto the tweeting machine and gamely followed along with stubborn, un-Facebooking me.

And slowly but surely, the world started opening all over again. Who knew that Twitter was such a hotbed for writers? I certainly hadn't. But it was. All of a sudden living in the middle of rural nowhere -- sans job, sans friends, sans cash -- became bearable. More than bearable. Exciting. Because who knew what was going to happen next in the Twittersphere? There was Egypt. There was the election fervour. There was the outpouring of grief and love when Jack Layton passed away. There was the buzz, later in the year, when the literary awards season fell upon us and brought with it another host of delicious controversies and debates. Every day! Every day there was something knew going on, right that very minute, right in front of my eyes. People discussing and debating and laughing and cheering one another on. People getting angry. People crying foul. People making silly mistakes in plain view of anyone watching their Twitter feed. Fascinating. Every single bit of it was fascinating.

And what do you know, but sooner or later my own list of followers started growing. I count the day that I snagged a follower from Singapore (the lovely and hilarious @darkonfire -- fangirling right back at ya, darling) as one of the year's greatest achievements. But there were so many people who started becoming familiar. People like @jonusko, who keeps a wonderful blog on CanLit and was kind enough to review my first novel later in the year. People like @ayoungvoice and @nmtblog, fellow lit geeks who read and cheered and blogged alongside me.

A quarter of the way or so through the year, I got to meet my first Twitter acquaintance in real life. That acquaintance happened to be @trevor_cole, who had just recently won the Leacock Medal for his latest novel, Practical Jean. Imagine that: lunch with an Actual Factual Writer! Lunch with an Actual Factual Published And Successful Writer! It was lovely. He told me not to give up, even in spite of the fact that at that point The Raptured had gone through another host of rejections and I was seriously doubting my viability as a person of the written word. (Perhaps, I thought, at the end of the day, perhaps writing had only ever been a dream.)

But who was I to argue with an Actual Factual Published Writer? So I didn't give up. I kept writing. I kept hoping. I blogged. I tweeted. I took my computer with me on that mid-year jaunt to Scotland and tweeted away. And while in Scotland, things took a sudden and delicious swing for the better. Of course I blogged about it, right away. But I also tweeted about it, and felt anew the bonds of my Twitter community when those cheery @replies came jumping in. What a wonderful, wonderful thing -- to be so isolated, and yet surrounded by so many people all over the world. Connected to so many wonderful writers, and thinkers, and readers who took the time to stop and say hello.

I am so grateful to the wonderful Thing That Is Twitter, this year. So grateful because I think, in all honesty, that I'd have been lost without it. I'm so grateful to the website for connecting me with so many wonderful souls, both on virtual and in-real-life levels. Would I have trucked out to the Giller Light Bash early in November if I hadn't had the excitement of my "huge blind date" with my Toronto Twitter tweeps? Certainly not. Would I have had the pleasure of meeting @kingvonelk at that selfsame bash had he not "listened in" on our Twitter conversation and urged us to stop and say hi? Certainly not. (Thank you again, sir, for that offer of bringing me McDonald's from TO's Union Station. I'm, uh, still waiting ... or maybe you can bring me fancy McDonald's from Hong Kong? Much obliged. ;)

While at Giller Light, someone noted that Twitter has to a certain extent done away with initial levels of shyness, insofar as you can "meet" someone virtually and get to know them in a certain capacity before you actually meet them in real life. I know this is true for a variety of online social networks -- that, after all, is the reason they exist in the first place -- but I've found it to be particularly true of Twitter. I never felt that my world changed or expanded in any way as a result of Facebook. (Cue the bias, and the subsequent apology.) But Twitter has brought me riches beyond imagining, and now, at the end of the year, I can't help but be grateful for all that's transpired.

So thank you, Twitter, for saving my life in a very real way. Thank you for lifting me out of my solitary funk, and keeping me in touch with the world. Thank you for the lovely people that I've met -- there are so many more that I haven't yet mentioned, people who have been so generous with their encouragement like @kerryschafer and @lornedaniel and @GoodWillJohnson and @davebending2 and @jazprimo; still other writers that I admire so very much, like @sarahselecky and @supremetronic and @charlotte_gill and @sideshowami and @angieabdou and @Timothy_Taylor_; funny women, writers, and fellow travellers @amylaurajones and @jessicakluthe and @christingeall and @kileyturner and @maryeleach ... and so many others. There are so many others, and my heart is warm and full on this last day of 2011 because of you.

I'm standing on the cusp of 2012 with the knowledge that a great many things are about to begin. In two days I'll move into my new apartment. Really mine, with all of my stuff together in one spot for the first time in ten years. Yesterday -- and so, almost exactly a year after I was despairing and unsure if my novel would ever find a home -- I deposited my first ever publishing advance. And while I'm still searching, and still finding it hard some days to get that enthusiasm going, I'll have a job in the new year, and as we all know, being busy can inspire a person to great heights. So here's to a smashing 2012, lovelies. Here's to another year of not-so-humdrum tweets, another year of writing, another year of friendships discovered and nurtured and giggles galore.

And here's to the love and inspiration that a single tweet can hold. Who would have thought that 140 characters could say so very much?

On Beginning ... Again (and again, and again)

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 01:46:00 +0000

Two days or so ago, I went for coffee with a good friend and confessed my usual Horrible Truth About The End Of The Year, said Horrible Truth being that I do not, generally speaking, do ANYTHING at all worthwhile during the last week of any given year. It's like I view the pending entrance of January 1st as complete permission to drop whatever resolutions or good intentions I might hold about myself--let's do some writing today, let's go for a run, let's whatever--in favour of lolling about in a turkey-and-sugar-induced haze.

New novel? Pfft. That story that's been nagging for revision? Meh. Essays? Blog posts? Who the heck cares? You can start over on January 1st. Go ahead. Eat that cupcake. Read that trashy book. In two days, it will all disappear in a wave of resolutions!

I mention this only because I have, of course, been feeling terribly guilty even in the midst of my slothfulness. But earlier today I came across this post from the lovely Dani Shapiro, and now I feel much better.

"Every paragraph, every chapter, every book is a country we've never been before."

And:

"No, it never gets easier. It shouldn't get easier. Word after word, book after book, we build our writing lives."

Word after word. I love that. It reminds me of that children's song, the one about planting: inch by inch/ row by row/ i'm gonna watch my garden grow. Well, I'm going to watch my writing life grow, word by word, in 2012. I am. Truly. But sometimes it's nice to sit back and sloth around. Because when you sit back down in front of that blank white page, and the words start coming -- even when it's hard and it feels like you're breaking a trail in undiscovered country, just as Shapiro so succinctly pointed out -- even then, you know, it's still so very sweet indeed.

The trouble with smiling

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:28:00 +0000

Earlier this morning, I came across this hilarious blog post by Elizabeth Stark, contemplating what would have happened if other writers had taken a stab at the Twilight franchise. Much hilarity ensued. Intrigued, I then followed that article up with this one, wherein Ms. Stark gleefully substitutes some oft-used phrases in Twilight with other, slightly more expressive verbs. Again, much hilarity. (The great thing about living alone is that you can cackle to your heart's content at all hours of the day, and no one will think you're insane.)

Of course, once the laughter had subsided, I got to thinking. I am always heartened, on some level, to hear stories of writers whose editors save them from many a mishap. As one of the comments on Ms. Stark's article pointed out, the later books in the Twilight series are strengthened by a greater grip of editorial control; somewhere along the line, it would seem, her editorial team got wise to all of the repetition, and tried to do 'way with it as best they could. Whether or not they succeeded, ultimately, is anyone's guess. But I've talked about my not-so-secret hate/love of the Twilight franchise before, so perhaps it will come as no surprise when I concede the point that, iffy diction aside, Stephenie Meyer certainly knows how to do something with regard to books. You can't write a four-book series in which precious little happens and garner the kind of readership that Meyer has without doing something right.

Anyway, what I wanted to touch on today was that idea/presence of sloppy diction in Meyer's novels. As a former writing student, I think I can safely say that sloppy diction, at least in the eyes of my professors, was right up there with murder and other heinous offenses.

Trouble is, though--I worry that I use sloppy diction all of the time.

Ten years or so ago, a fellow student at UVic explained it to me this way: Think of it like a game. You get one point for every adverb, two points for unusual adjectives, and three points for excellent verbs. No smiling or nodding allowed! My instructor at the time put it a little less diplomatically -- on the front page of my first story for workshop that year, she said this: The first page contains the weakest writing in the story. Diction is sloppy and dull, and your verb usage has little to no imagination.

The horror! Oh, the horror! Ever since then, it would seem, I've been labouring in a small cocoon of fear, always wondering if my diction is good enough. But what does diction mean, truly? Sometimes I worry that I still don't know. The word is defined, via the online dictionary, as a style of speaking or writing as dependent upon choice of words: good diction ... I don't know about you, but that still doesn't clear it up for me. (One could say that the definition itself suffers from bad diction, but hey now. That would just be petty, wouldn't it.) What does this mean? Does it mean that you should eschew verbs like smile and nod and shrug, perhaps, like my colleague once advised, in favour of verbs like grin (though even that becomes problematic, I'd wager) and jerk and ... and what? What's a good alternative for shrug? I don't know. So the question then becomes: if I struggle to find alternatives, what kind of wordsmith am I? Really truly?

I have a sneaking suspicion, for example, that I use the word dark an awful lot in The Raptured. I've also made reference--cue cringing!--to my antagonist's dark, endless eyes, I am quite sure, definitely more than once. I also have trouble finding expressive speaking verbs. I don't tend to use fancy speaking verbs like interjected or exclaimed or postulated, because a) I worry that it makes me sound like a puffed-up douchebag; and b) I am always reminded, when it comes to dialogue tags, of the venerable Elmore Leonard's words on the subject: Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. Still--as ready as I am to cede this point to Mr. Leonard, sometimes I wonder.

Am I doing enough? Am I pushing the writing enough? I will be the first to say, here and now, that I'm not one of those lucky writers who deal so blithely in literary pyrotechnics. I'm not. My writing has always tended to be somewhat more straightforward--a little too earnest at times, for sure, but still straightforward nonetheless. My writing is also--and this seems to be increasingly the case as I get older--kind of spare. On my more fanciful/delusional days, I sometimes think that if Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor had a love child who was also a writer, that would be me.

Except that, uh, I have approximately .025 the talent of each. Meh. What are you going to do.

All of which is to say, I suppose, that this question of diction continues to dog me. I continue to wonder and worry and fret over whether my word choice is appropriate, whether I'm pushing my work in all of the ways that I can--at a macro as well as at a larger level. But I am comforted, as I noted above, that there are things like editors and copy-editors and entire editorial teams whose task (among many others--let us all take a moment and give thanks for the patience of the editorial juggernaut!) it is to help you sort through the sameness and find better ways of saying what needs to be said.

I'm still really bad for smiling. And nodding. My characters do that an awful lot. I still find myself slicing those verbs out of manuscripts at every available opportunity. You'd think that I learned enough, all those years ago, to never use them in the first place, but dear reader: you would be wrong. What I haven't learned about writing could fill an entire university library. This is why I'm still waiting for the folks at ECW to show up at my door, clad in trenchcoats and big dark (har har) sunglasses and holding oversized jumbo red pens with which they then proceed to bludgeon me to death. "Sorry," they might say, by way of explanation, "but we thought that you actually knew what the hell you were doing. We've re-read the manuscript now, and it's excruciatingly clear that you'll never even bite the dust of Twilight. Bye-bye, charlatan!"

Anyway. All is not lost. To the contrary: ECW seems rather sure of my writerly abilities, my penchant for words like "dark" and "shrug" notwithstanding. And one can always continue learning, non? At least I know enough now to gut those verbs when I can. At least I know enough now to search, and to push the writing beyond what's safest, beyond that easy first option. At least I am aware (entirely, painfully aware) of the fact that the writing can always get better.

There are, one could argue, far worse places to be!

Reverb 11: Day 18 (And: My two hundredth post!)

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:23:00 +0000

Lets do lunch! - If you could have lunch with anybody, who would it be and what would you like to discuss?

Oooh, that's a toughie. It's the kind of question with an answer that changes all of the time -- based on my mood, my current place in life, and a million other factors. Right now, though? I'd love to hunker down over lunch with Flannery O'Connor.

We'd talk about writing. We'd talk about birds. I'd ask her all about life on Andalusia, and whether or not she was terrified at any point during that famed Iowa Workshop. If you write to find out what you know, I'd say, what do you do when what you discover ends up being so different from what the rest of the world tells you?

If we could have lunch today, today's world being what it is, I'd ask her whether she ever struggles. Do you believe it all of the time? Do you really? Because I don't. I don't see how anyone can.

I wonder what she'd say.

"Instructions" reviewed on JamesOnusko.com

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 01:25:00 +0000

Today I received the lovely news that James Onusko, a writer, reader, and force-to-be-reckoned-with CanLit blogger, had posted a review of Instructions on his website. You can read the review here -- it's lovely and thoughtful and I'm so thankful to James for sharing his thoughts on the novel.

James was also kind enough to conduct an interview with me about self-publishing, social media, and other bookish-related things, and he's posted the interview on his site as well. I tried hard not to ramble overmuch, though it would seem, glancing at the interview now, that I have failed yet again!

Regardless, though -- enjoy, and happy Saturday, everybody!

Reverb 11: Day 17

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 16:02:00 +0000

Life is filled with lessons. We learn from our mistakes as much as we learn from our successes. What lesson did you learn this year? How did you learn it?

Hmmmm ... most probably, something about patience. Be patient about that book, Amanda. Be patient with your job hunt. Be patient with your writing. Be patient with yourself. Be patient with your life.

It's a lesson I'm still learning.

Reverb 11: Day 16

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:47:00 +0000

Finding time for stillness is a balm to our souls, our family and our creative lives. How do you find moments of stillness in your daily life?

[Another prompt courtesy of Relish 11, Rebecca, and her guest blogger, Celina Wyss.]

I guess you could say that this year's 365 project -- though I will admit, here and now, that I've lost track of it, become tired, let the struggles of unemployment pull me down -- was an exercise in stillness. Looking at that list of Twitter prompts, I am reminded now of each and every happiness moment, and those moments now have a still, eternal kind of quality. I guarded them carefully, and at the beginning of the project I was bowled over by how much this single act of seeking happiness in the smallest of things had the potential to open up my day. If you look for joy in those tiniest of moments, you will find it, guaranteed.

I remember the stillness of standing on my parents' porch, life noisy and happy inside -- I'd gone outside just for that moment of quiet. There was a thunderstorm gathering in the air. And I remember that day a few weeks later, when the prolonged surge of heat that was our summer broke, like a fever, and left the world outside dizzy and shimmering. I remember sitting at my desk and sipping a gifted vanilla latte. I remember that sudden spike of sweetness in the heart of a purple clover bud.

Now? Sometimes I fear that my life is too still. A constant source of irony: you work, and complain about working because you never have time to get everything done; and then you stop working, and all of a sudden the weight of all that extra time immobilizes you in exactly the same way.

But sometimes I forget how much of a gift this can be, too -- all of these hours in front of me to stop, and rest, and find that energy. The unemployment won't last forever, and all too soon I'll find myself surrounded by movement and longing for stillness. So today's prompt, if nothing else, has made me stop, and think, and be still if only for a moment. It's definitely something worth keeping in mind.

Reverb 11: Day 15

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 17:11:00 +0000

What single image stands out to you from this year? Perhaps it sums the year up for you in the way it communicates on a wordless level. Or perhaps it just captures a truly happy moment, one that will be only memory in time but, thanks to this photo, you’ll be able to hold on to the moment that much longer.

[Today's prompt, once again, comes courtesy of the lovely Rebecca.]


Iona harbour

2011 was a hard year. Maybe not as hard as 2010, in many ways, but still difficult. I felt so ... lost. I felt like I was drifting so much of the time. But when I had that time in Scotland in July, things just clicked in a way that's seldom occurred for me over the past few years. It probably has a lot to do with the unrealistic expectations that I set for myself -- the pressure that I place on being happy, on being extraordinary all of the time. It probably also has a lot to do, in general, with getting re-adjusted to the world after leaving the idealistic bubble that is higher education. It's so easy to imagine that great things are waiting for you when you're in school. Your whole life is one long red carpet waiting to dazzle the world. And then you graduate, and suddenly you can't get a job, suddenly you don't have any money, suddenly the smallest things like paying your rent and feeding yourself become these huge obstacles. Suddenly all of those dreams that you held in school sound silly. Suddenly you think: did I make a mistake? Am I going to pay for this mistake by being hungry--physically hungry, spiritually hungry, everything hungry--for the rest of my life? Suddenly, you can't see an end.

This is what happened to me in 2011. It happened in Scotland, too, back in 2010 -- but at least in Scotland I was working (too much, one can argue), at least in Scotland there was routine. For a large part of 2011, there was no routine. There was no drive. There was restlessnesss galore. And then, through a series of lovely little moments, I found myself on the Isle of Iona, and the restlessness disappeared.

Something about that tiny little island did it, for me. Standing there on that unbelievably white beach, looking back at the rest of the world, swept by the rain and the wind and suddenly, unshakably sure that everything in life would be okay. Unshakably sure that there was Someone, somewhere, waiting and watching and making sure that I was doing everything right. Yearning for magic in all of the right places. Growing in all of the right ways. I knew it, there on that island. I was absolutely convinced.

Of course, that conviction bled away as soon as I got on the ferry. By the time I was back in Edinburgh I could feel myself looking back on my Iona day-and-a-half and thinking: it was just a nice island. That's all. You're struggling: you want answers. You'll look for them anywhere. Nothing wrong with finding them in a quiet little corner of the world, sure, but was it magical? Hardly.

And yet this is the picture that I choose for 2011: that moment, there, on that little windswept beach. That moment, standing there on the shores of the island and suddenly being sure that everything you dream about when you're younger can sometimes still be true. Sometimes, there is still possibility in everything that you see. Sometimes, the peace that you long for -- that moment of calm beneath the restlessness that characterizes the rest of your days -- is just buried beneath the rest of life's detritus. Maybe it takes a journey to the outer edges of nowhere to find it.

Or maybe it can come to you in one of those small moments of calm in a regular day. I've tried to recreate my Iona experience, on some level, with my little 365 days of rejoicing project. Some days it doesn't work. But maybe I can use the photograph above to remind me that there are places in this world where peace and quiet and calm reign supreme. Where it is possible to unburden your mind for just a little while and let yourself sink into simple things. And maybe, just maybe, I can take that peace with me into 2012.

Reverb 11: Day 14

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:06:00 +0000

Gratitude - What five things are you most grateful for from 2011?

1) My parents. Who have been entirely patient and gracious with me as I struggled through the murks of joblessness and trying to find a publisher. My parents, who make me laugh. My parents, who quite happily opened up their home again to the wayward, unemployed daughter, and made sure I got fed.

2) Twitter. More on this in a future blog post. But let's just say, right here, right now: I am very grateful for the wonderfulness that is Twitter, and the cheeky writing/publishing geeks whose accounts I follow (yes, I admit, like a stalker) and whose lives are ever so much more interesting than mine. It's like TV, only immeasurably more awesome!

3) The series of lucky-ish events -- catching that train on time, finding that cheap-enough hotel room, missing that last ferry -- that allowed me to spend some time on Iona.

4) Small pleasures. I've been somewhat lax in posting about my 365 project (seems to be par for the course with me and projects of all kinds!), but this year more than any other, I think, I've come to appreciate those smallest of things that bring us joy.

5) The fact that other people have faith in me even when I lose faith in myself. Don't ever underestimate the power of other people believing in you, kids. Sometimes it can make the gloomiest of days seem special.

:)