The Writing Life: Using the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

If you’ve stopped by my blog lately, you’ve probably noticed that things have been a bit quiet. Between a sick kiddo and an exceptionally large amount of freelance work, my blogging time has been sadly limited.

I’ve also had little time to write—but I’ve been so busy "living life” that without realizing it, I’ve filled up with ideas and inspiration that are now itching to emerge on the page. I’ve been collecting bits and pieces over the past weeks: characters, settings, conversations, emotions and how I experienced them physically. I feel like my creative pond has been restocked, even though I wouldn’t have expected a time of stress and busy-ness to recharge or refresh my muse.

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The Writer’s Survival Mode

Kelly James-Enger has a rule for never missing a freelance writing deadline: she never, ever, ever accepts more work than she can handle.

 

So far, that's seldom been an issue for me. I mean, I stay plenty busy, but most of the mix consists of my own, more flexible projects—books, queries, article ideas, reading (mustn’t forget the reading pile). Not so at the moment. Right now, I'm swamped. I’ve had a steady stream of freelance work this year plus a host of unexpected family-related things, and (like a true freelancer who is dependent on work for bread), darned if I'm going to ask for anyone to cover my freelance projects unless I can't complete them.

Except that burnout ain't such a great thing, either.

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Finals! (and Other Teenage Troubles)

FINALS. They have descended on our kids—and, therefore, on the entire household, a week of exams preceded by what seems like two months of building stress, final projects, deadlines, and kids with too little sleep. It brings back memories of my own high school career—the intense emotions of being a teenager coupled with the stress that comes with knowing that what I did mattered, like, for the rest of my life. Teens are in that awkward middle place where they want to be in charge of their own lives—and yet, at the same time, they don’t. Being in charge is scary. Being grown-up is scary. The stakes are starting to get higher.

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How Plot Development Is Like Navigating a Maze

It struck me, as I was working my way through my latest first draft, that plot development is very much like navigating a maze…

*Photo courtesy of Mecookie on Flickr Creative Commons

…and the similarities give some insight into how to tackle a tricky plot problem.

• A methodical approach can work—but sometimes you just have to go for it. As an avid “plotter,” I usually know in advance the course I want my book to take. There are moments, though, when the muse tugs me off the beaten track. I always follow!
• Sometimes you have to go down dead ends. No matter how well you’ve planned your route, sometimes the only way to know a particular path leads to a dead end is to go there…and sometimes the only way to know a scene doesn’t fit is to write it. Those efforts aren’t wasted: now you know where *not* to go!

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Writing from Your Character’s Point of View: 5 Guidelines

In my current work-in-progress, I’m writing from the POV of a 12-year-old boy. As I wrote earlier, finding his voice has been a challenge! And since I’m writing in first person, I have to stay in that voice ALL THE TIME—when he speaks, when he thinks, even in the details I include when describing setting and other characters.

*Photo courtesy of exfordy on Flickr Creative Commons

Despite my love of writing flowery description, 12-year-old Elliot probably won’t think about the way light reflects golden from the many-paned window, and even he does happen to notice flowers growing alongside the path, he certainly won’t know that they’re tiger lilies unless I’ve already shown him to have a love of horticulture. (He doesn’t. He loves squirrels.)

I never get voice perfect on a first draft, but keeping the following guidelines in mind can help me get closer. On a rewrite, these guidelines help me analyze whether the voice is consistent and believable—or whether it strays into author-speak.

Five Guidelines for Writing Character’s POV

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Care and Feeding of the Discouraged Writer

Jami Gold's recent post Have You Ever Been Tempted to Give Up? is thought-provoking and true. In a weird way, it’s encouraging to realize that even published, successful authors struggle with this question.

Jamie’s post ends with a question: “What pushes you to the edge of giving up (lack of time, rejections, something else)?  What things help motivate and encourage you (a support system, wanting to prove something, finding successes wherever you can)? ” Visit her blog to see what other writers have to say.

Have I ever been tempted to give up? Absolutely! As has every writer in my critique group. As has every writer I know personally. And yet, most of us don’t. What keeps us going? I think the answer depends on why we’re tempted to quit, the way different illnesses respond to different treatments.

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5 Tips for Getting Back in the Groove

Spring Break! Those two words take me back to memories of school—and a few days’ freedom from it. What do you think when you hear those words? Sunshine? Beaches? Sleeping in?

This year, our Spring Break involved four days of camping, hiking, and biking in the desert of Moab, Utah, where it rained and snowed and didn’t fit the typical Spring Break imaginings. No high-speed internet, no cell phone coverage, no electricity…just lots of time to explore, read, play card games, and hang out. And it was wonderful.

But now here I am, back at my desk, trying to figure out what the heck I was working on when I left. I’ve written before of the importance of keeping your writing momentum—but everyone has those times when, for whatever reason, you’ve had to take a break from the page. How do you get back in the groove?

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Ten Reasons to Practice Freewriting

Many writers I know think of freewriting as writer-style therapy—a way to get worries out of your head and onto the page. However, freewriting has so many more applications. The Faculty Leadership for Writing Initiative at the University of Nebreska-Lincoln defines it as “an invention strategy where students write for a certain amount of time for the purpose of generating ideas…”

Great. But what does “generating ideas” really mean? The truth is that I don’t *want* new story ideas when I’m supposed to be editing my current work-in-progress. New story ideas = distractions, so if that’s your view of freewriting, you’ll probably shove it on the shelf until you’re ready for a new project (or a new therapy session…) And that would be a shame, because freewriting has a lot to offer writers at all stages and skill levels.

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Seven Strategies to Keep Momentum When You Don’t Have Time to Write

Over the past week, I’ve had a flood of freelance and contract writing—which is wonderful and fun, but makes it much more difficult to maintain momentum on my work-in-progress (WIP). Back in January, blogger Jill Kemerer wrote about how momentum is vital to success. 

I wholeheartedly agree. When I lose momentum on a project, I often dread returning to it. I know it will take me days to get rolling again, and I’ll be plagued by the ghosts of ideas that I meant to write but can’t quite grasp anymore. So how do you keep writing momentum when your time is limited?

Here are a few tricks that have worked for me:

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When the Words Won’t Flow: Four Tools to Try

Stalled scene? Lagging action? Flat description? Sometimes when you’re writing it feels like there’s no way forward—and all you want in the world is to trade in your pen and paper for a nice, mind-numbing sitcom.

Most of the time, though, a scene stalls for one simple reason: you don’t have enough information. And that’s an easily-remedied problem. Try these jump-starts the next time your words won’t cooperate.

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When the Book Is Finished…Tips for Surviving the Post-Novel Mourning Period

After months of living, breathing, and dreaming about my YA paranormal, VOICE, I'm finally finished with the rewrite. I’m sending  it off to my agent, and if he doesn't have any suggestions, it will soon be on its way to editors again. I feel...odd. At loose ends.

I think I go into a period of mourning after completion of a novel. It's strange, because I'm happy—ecstatic—to be finished; but after spending so much time with a book, it can be difficult to move on. Anyone else experience this? It reminds me of how I felt as an actor, the day after a play closed. I was apt to wander back to the theater, expecting another hectic afternoon and evening of rehearsal, only to discover an empty stage where there used to be sets, costumes, and a frenzy of activity.

Luckily, I’ve been through this a few times. I know it’s normal to feel a little down; I know it will pass. Meanwhile, here are some strategies that help:

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New Year’s Plan, Revisited

The end of January looms nearer and across the nation, New Year’s Resolutions (or goals or plans or whatever you like to call them) are dropping like flies. How are yours going? Are you still in the race, or did you trip coming out of the starting gate and never quite find your feet again?

I shared my New Year’s Plan at the beginning of the month: to cultivate the habit of rising early to write by getting up 15 minutes earlier each week. By this week, I’m supposed to be getting up at 6:15. This is a very achievable goal, especially since ideally, I’d be getting up at 6:00 am already. And yet…it’s not happening.

What do you do when your ambitious plans for change don’t seem to be working? Experts claim that fewer than half of‘people who make New Year Resolutions stick with them longer than six months, and it’s oh-so-easy for one stumble to lead to another and another, until you’re ready to call it quits.

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A New Year’s Plan: The Power of Small Changes

After the success of the past two months, when I worked to establish a new exercise habit, I’m ready to embark on a new goal: I want to develop the habit of getting up earlier so that I can write at the start of the day, when I’m fresh and undistracted.

Why do I want to do this? Because although I can write any time of day, I tend to get distracted as soon as the rest of my household starts moving. Sad though it is, an argument over whether a child has to wear a coat to school (10 degrees and snowing? What’s that have to do with wearing a coat?) or (still sadder) even a messy kitchen can sabotage my muse for hours. As the day progresses, my head tends to get cluttered with to-do’s and should’s and don’t-forgets.

First thing in the morning, I’m at my best writing-wise. I want to harness that time and become more productive.

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Success Breeds Success

Just over two months ago, I set myself a challenge: establish an exercise habit before the year finished. I’d suffered some serious exercise set-backs when I managed to injure both Achilles tendons (what can I say? I’m talented) and subsequently traded running and walking for extra glasses of wine. Not good for the waistline or energy level. Not good for my writing productivity, either, as it turns out.

Yes, that motivates me more than my waistline. Call me crazy.

So I adopted Leo Babauta’s Six Habits method of establishing a new habit via incremental tiny changes, finding motivation along the way with other writers trying to make pre-New Years’ changes.

The result?

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Dropbox: New Favorite Writing Tool for the Writer on the Move

My writing discovery of the month is a little tool called Dropbox. Dropbox is a tool that automatically syncs files stored in the Dropbox folder (on your computer) with the Dropbox server. It’s not just an online backup tool, though: the magic of Dropbox is that you can access—and edit—these files from numerous computers.

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The Ethics of Medical Writing: Wyeth Pharmaceuticals Used Ghostwritten Articles to Promote Product

As someone who writes on science and medical subjects, this recent report* in PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine disturbs me greatly.

Dr. Adriane J. Fugh-Berman of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Georgetown University Medical Center, analyzed ghostwritten reviews and commentaries published in medical journals and journal supplements that “were used to promote unproven benefits and downplay harms of Prempro—a brand of menopausal hormone therapy (HT)—and to cast competing therapies in a negative light.”

As a writer, it makes sense to me for a pharmaceutical company to hire professional writers to assist in editing, or even creating, articles for publication (the key word being “assist”). However, Fugh-Berman reports that academic physicians were invited to “author” prewritten articles that Wyeth had paid the medical writing and marketing company DesignWrite to produce. In addition, Wyeth paid for numerous reviews, commentaries, and opinion pieces for publication in medical journals—where they are not under the strict FDA regulations seen elsewhere. These types of articles are not usually peer-reviewed, but they can still have an immense influence on physicians’ understanding of disease and its treatment.

According to Fugh-Berman’s analysis Wyeth’s ghostwritten articles were designed to “Mitigate perceived risks of hormone-associated breast cancer”; “Promote unproven, off-label uses, including prevention of dementia, Parkinson's disease, and visual impairment”; “Raise questions about the safety and efficacy of competing therapies (competitive messaging)”; “Defend cardiovascular benefits, despite lack of benefit in RCTs”; and “Position low-dose hormone therapy”. She also states that many physicians have been impacted by these reports, believing that the benefits of hormone replacement therapy outweigh the risks in asymptomatic women, despite clear evidence to the contrary.

I find medical writing to be fulfilling as well as lucrative—it feels good to be writing material that will help someone better understand breast cancer, for example—but the truth is that most medical writing is funded by the pharmaceutical industry, which definitely has selling drugs as its agenda. So where did DesignWrite cross the line in their medical writing business? How can other medical writers avoid doing the same thing?

I think the answer lies in that DesignWrite intentionally designed a marketing strategy that incorporated these ghostwritten articles as means to promote the product—and to promote off-label use of the product. Pre-writing articles for academic physicians to “author” rather than beginning with material from the expert also seems to cross that line from medical writing into medical marketing. One thing is clear: any time a company pays someone to write an “informational” article for them, there’s the possibility that the article will be slanted in that company’s favor. Writers beware.

Cheryl

 

*Fugh-Berman AJ (2010) The Haunting of Medical Journals: How Ghostwriting Sold ''HRT''. PLoS Med 7(9): e1000335. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000335.

Inner Mean Girl: Week 4

This is week 4 of the free online class Inner Mean Girl Cleanse, a class for which I signed up and then promptly decided I didn’t have time for (promptly meaning as soon as I realized the class involved weekly 1-hour calls). But…I’d already signed up and so I’ve continued to get their inspiring emails and links to expert interviews…so I feel like I’m auditing the course :). And this week’s topic feels so applicable to my current life that I figured I’d dive in and share.

Toxin: Unrealistic Expectations
Self Love Antidote: Give Yourself A Break

In case you hadn’t guessed from the sparse postings of late, I’ve been running a little ragged lately. This is just the message I need to hear right now. Or, to get more pointed:

• It’s okay if the laundry’s not all put away.
• It’s okay to take a nap and then serve salad for dinner.
• It’s okay to ask for help from kids and husband.
• It’s okay to stop and breathe.

I spent time yesterday (the class runs Wednesday through Wednesday) journaling and thinking about their message for the week, with the result that I *did* take a break and serve salad for dinner, and you know what? No one died. In fact, the meal was probably much more pleasant because I wasn’t exhausted and stressed.

This morning, I opened my blog reader to catch up on some reading, and this was the first post I opened: “The Minimalist’s Guide to Cultivating Passion”. In it, guest blogger Cal Newport challenges readers to do less in order to have time for our passions. From there, I ended up on mnmlist.com reading the post “letting go of fake needs”. Hmm. Anyone think there’s a message for me here? 

Even if you missed the beginning of the class, you can find call recordings, inspirational essays, and interviews online at Inner Mean Girl Cleanse. There are also a number of Self-Love Ambassadors who are blogging their journey through the program, like my friend Wendee Holtcamp. Feeling a little stressed, overwhelmed, or like you can’t get everything done? You’ll find it worthwhile to take a look.

:) Cheryl

Flora and fauna reports a la The Artist’s Way

Tuesday morning, for the first time in a while, I woke up feeling energized and ready to face the day. This comes during week three of working through Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way, which is a fantastic course on getting your head straight as well as fostering creativity.

In it, Cameron writes about the importance of taking time to notice things. “Flora and fauna reports,” is her example, an aunt’s lengthy letters detailing the flowers blooming in her garden, the cottonwood’s leaves, and other snippets of beauty and joy. My ability to notice and enjoy the world around me is one of the things I like about myself—but when I get crazy busy, it’s one of the first things I stop doing. I duck my head and plow forward, trying to survive one day to the next.

So Monday night, I took a break from the endless to-do’s to spend a little time in my garden. Not long: I spent about half an hour watering flowers, pulling weeds, and collecting windfall apples from my lawn to compost. For half that time, I press-ganged my older son into picking apples with me as the sun sank behind the mountains. I got my hands wet and muddy; the smells of crushed mint and sage filled the air from the flower beds; and we ended up with a full compost bin and a colander full of red and green apples.

I spent the next half hour luxuriating in those apples, cutting and chopping (there were quite a few bad spots to remove) and plopping them into a few inches of water in my pressure cooker. I have a great pressure cooker cookbook by Lorna J. Sass, so I turned to it for guidance on how long to cook apples to make applesauce. Instead, I found a recipe for cranberry applesauce…and since I had a wayward bag of cranberries in my freezer, I decided to give it a try. I added one bag of frozen cranberries and about two cups of water to my apples (6 cups or so), brought the pot to pressure, and cooked for 5 minutes (the advantage of a pressure cooker!). Then I put it all through an applesauce maker (a sort of pot with a strainer on the bottom and a hand-turned crank that presses the soft fruit through the strainer while leaving peels and seeds behind), added a few tablespoons of chopped candied orange peel (the recipe called for orange zest, but I didn’t have any), a bit of sugar and a dollop of agave nectar…

…and the result was this jewel-toned creation. It satisfies the senses in every way: bright, colorful, tart, sweet, yummy.

And the next morning I awoke refreshed. Coincidence? I prefer to think of it as a sign that I’m on the right track.

:) Cheryl

Planning for re-entry

A wise woman recently suggested that when I plan a vacation, I also plan for how I’m going to weather those first few stressful days after we arrive back in the real world—you know, those days when the house is trashed, the kids suddenly need a million doctor appointments and shopping runs to prepare for school, and everyone you’ve ever worked with wants to speak with you at the same time. How do you prepare for the stress and chaos?

I didn’t manage to make this re-entry plan before setting out on my trip, but it’s been on my mind ever since. Little by little, a plan is taking shape. I thought I’d share my ideas with you—and let you know how things turn out when I get back next week.

Strategy 1: Stepwise Re-entry

Instead of returning to everything at once, I’m going to reenter my “normal” world one area at a time. For instance:

Day 1: Deal with unpacking, laundry, and other details of moving back into a house…WITHOUT giving in to the urge to check and answer emails, sort mail, prioritize projects, and so on.

Day 2: First pass through email, mail, and other “In boxes”. Reveal my return to work colleagues :). Update my list of current projects and decide what’s top of the list.

Strategy 2: Pick Top Projects/Priorities

I have a tendency to try to tackle every important and urgent item simultaneously—a tendency that seriously backfires when I’ve been on a break, because suddenly EVERYTHING is important and urgent. My goal here is to trust that the world will not end if I mail out a query a week later than planned.

Strategy 3: Have a House Meeting

My husband and I try to have weekly house meetings, kinda like the staff meeting in a business. It gives us a chance to take care of administrivia, share schedules for the upcoming week, and catch conflicts before they become a problem. It’s also a time for discussing everything from what movies we want to see to how to tackle the latest parenting dilemma to what kind of car best suits the family’s needs.

A regular house meeting gets the two of us working in the same direction, toward the same goals.

These meetings are most important when life gets crazy-busy, which is also when we’re most likely to skip them—but this time, I’m making sure a meeting gets on our schedule!

Strategy 4: Plan Breaks and Rewards

My overall goal here is to avoid post-vacation burnout (or catatonia). Reducing the amount of work I tackle each day (above) will help; it will also help to plan a few no-work zones into the days. Here’s what I’m going to try: no work after 9:00 pm, at which point I may indulge in a book, piece of chocolate, or glass of wine. Or maybe all three.

Strategy 5: Anticipate Setbacks

This isn’t a strategy specific to vacation re-entry, but it’s one I need to remember. If I anticipate setbacks, it’s easier to deal with them and move on. Things won’t go perfectly. Transitions are always tricky, in writing and in life. But we’ll get through.

I’ll let you know how it goes!

:) Cheryl

Fear and Success and Keeping On…

I promised myself that there would be NO MORE BLOGGING—or Tweeting or random researching, or any of the other ways I distract myself and procrastinate—until I began the much-dreaded rewrite of my latest YA, VOICE.

  I usually love to rewrite, but this round has been unexpectedly difficult to begin. Why, you ask? For an unanticipated reason: an editor or two actually LIKE the manuscript.

Intellectually, I know this is a Very Good Thing. The problem is that now it’s up to me to sift through advice and suggestions, dive back into the story, and turn around a rewrite that WOWs…and that’s a little scary. I’m close, but I’ve been this close before. I’m afraid I’ll screw it up.

I think my inner 6-year-old is holding onto the logic that, if I don’t ever turn in the rewrite, I can’t possibly fail. It’s the same logic that keeps writers from submitting manuscripts, because that which is not submitted can never be rejected, right? Surely I’m not the only writer to struggle with gut-level illogic?

I know, I know: the solution to this problem is to trick my subconscious into moving on, which is what I’ve been working on this week. I’ve made enough progress that I’m allowed to blog again and maybe even write a Tweet or two.

If I’m a good girl and keep on writing that story!!

:) Cheryl