Category: Writing

I Have Confidence in Me

It’s been one of those weeks.

I spent last weekend in Ohio with a bunch of awesome Alphans, and I came home full of determination.  This week, I would finally finish Great Expectations.  I would work on my Fulbright application.  I would sure up my outline for my World War II Italy project.  I would get back on track editing my middle grade small child wizard novel.

And for most of this week, I’ve felt like none of that was happening.  I was still flailing around hopelessly inside Great Expectations with no ending in sight.  My idea for my World War II Italy project still seemed too big.  On Wednesday someone made a pretty confidence-damaging comment about my writing to me and then apologized by saying that writing is subjective.  The middle grade small child wizard novel is still twice as big as it has any right to be.  The Fulbright application page keeps crashing my computer.  And on top of all of that, Mopsy has an ear infection and I think she’s plotting to take over my blog, and I’m having stress dreams where I’m in the middle of World War II with only my new hot pink stapler as protection.

Despite all of this, by last night, I somehow managed to complete everything on my Fulbright application except the essays, and I’ve talked through my World War II Italy problems.  Just achieving that much gave me the confidence in myself to look at the big picture again.  I am doing a zillion things this summer: working my way through two massive book lists, applying for a Fulbright to teach in Italy after I graduate, studying for the GRE and looking at graduate schools, writing one novel, editing another novel, and starting a third novel.  If I’m going to get through all this stuff this summer, I have to do a little of everything every day.  So yeah, most of the time it feels like I’m going nowhere, but it’s not true.

I can do this, and I will do this.

So I’m having trouble with Charles Dickens.  So what? It will get done.

So I’m not making any progress editing the small child wizard novel.  All right.  I’m going to do Camp NaNoWriMo and devote one hour every day to editing in the month of July.  That will get done too.

I’ll take Mopsy to the vet and get her ears fixed up, and…  I honestly don’t know what to do about the stapler dreams.

I will keep going.  And if a little voice in the back of my head is telling me that this time last year, I was already finishing my study abroad program and I’d already read fifteen books, then I’m going to tell that little voice to shut up, because those books were not Beowulf or Great Expectations.

As for the confidence damaging comment about my writing…

No, I have not published a short story.  No, I have not finished a novel that I want to get published yet.  Maybe I have 116 rejection letters and nothing to show for it.  And maybe right now the chances of me making it onto the New York Times bestseller list are next to zero.  Yes, there are writers out there who write faster than me and better than me and who are published because they deserve to be.  Heck, there are writers out there who are worse than me, and they’re published too.  And yes, that can get pretty discouraging sometimes.

But honestly, that’s not why I’m writing.  I’m writing because I can’t not write.  I’m writing because there are stories inside me that are burning to come out, and there’s nothing else I can do.

A friend wrote in this post that this is how things work:

1.  Write things.

2.  Finish things.

3.  Make each new thing better than the thing that came before it.

4.  Try to publish your work,  in one of a zillion ways that have been thoroughly covered elsewhere.

5.  As long as steps 1-3 are making you happy, or at least speaking to a part of you that can’t be fulfilled in any other way, do not under any circumstances give up.

So I will not give up.  Because I can’t live without steps one through three, and I believe that one day, it will happen, and I will be published.  And right now, that’s all I need to keep going.

(Title Quote: “I Have Confidence”)

My Shiny Teeth and Me

When I pictured myself blogging about writing, I never imagined I would write about where ideas come from.  Why should I? Everyone does, and everyone says the same thing: Ideas come from anything and everything.  They come from books and movies and things you witness on the street and scraps of information in the newspaper or a textbook and anywhere else you can think of.  Be observant, everyone says, pay attention to the world around you, even eavesdrop on other people’s conversations, and voila! You have an idea.  The point is, as 2011 Alpha guest David Levine told us, “Ideas are like neutrinos—they shoot down from space and you just have to be dense enough to stop one.”

So I never pictured myself writing about it, because I honestly don’t have anything new to add to the conversation.  I have not, much to my chagrin, found a secret well of ideas or a failsafe method to find inspiration for that novel that you just know you have inside you.  What I mostly have is a testimonial to the bizarre way our minds work and the truth to the fact that ideas are all around us and we just have to know where to look.

A week ago, if someone were to ask me where I got the idea for my current project—what I’ll call the memory wiping academy novel for simplicity’s sake—I would have listed a collection of books and TV shows that mushed together to influence the book.  The Hunger Games, Never Let Me Go, Hogwarts, and River from Firefly are just a few.  My dentist’s office would not have been on that list.

To give you some necessary information, in the novel, the students in the academy have their memories routinely wiped by an ear-piercing screeching sound produced by brightly colored rooms.  A week ago, I assumed that the idea had come from somewhere, but I didn’t know exactly where.  My fear of surgery and the Spongebob episode with the padded yellow room might be factors, as well as my desire to find something that was thematically connected to my protagonist’s affinity for music.  But then I went to the dentist.  As I was sitting in the waiting room, reading my Italian history book and waiting for my name to be called, a hygienist came out and called a little girl, and as she got up, the hygienist said, “You’ll be in the yellow room today, honey.” My immediate instinct was to jump up, grab the little girl, and protect her from the horrible fate that awaited her in the yellow room.  It’s funny now, but I was seriously freaked out then, and a few minutes later, as I was being led to the white room, I honestly felt like I was going to scream.  Right then, I was positive that this was where the idea for my colorful memory wiping rooms came from.  At some point, my subconscious stored the idea of the new colored rooms at the pediatric dentist’s office, and when I was looking for a way to wipe my characters’ memories, it presented this to me.

I’ve been thinking about it all week, and at this point, I honestly don’t know if I originally got the idea from the dentist’s office or if I’ve just recontextualized the yellow room or the white room so thoroughly that I caused myself to have that reaction.  There’s no way to prove it now, but it is a distinct possibility that the dentist’s office did give me the idea, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.  Ideas are like neutrinos.  But how do we become dense enough to stop them? If the dentist really was my inspiration, how come I didn’t realize it then? How can I become more open to the world so that I can not just absorb potential ideas to use at a later date but recognize that I am doing so? And if ideas are so prevalent, I guess the question becomes not so much how do you get one, but how do you know what’s worth using? And then how do you use it?

I’m certainly not the only one to consider this, and I don’t have any answers.  There are books upon books about the craft of writing, how to get inspiration, how to turn your idea into a story, and then how to write that story.  I’ve been writing for years, so I have plenty of experience, but I’m obviously no expert.  I didn’t even want to start blogging about writing with ideas, but then I had one, and I just had to write about it, which seems to be how it works.  But after my experience at the dentist’s, I’m interested in further exploring this path from subconscious absorption of ideas to a full story.  Right now though, all I can say for sure is that I’m switching dentists.

(Title quote: “My Shiny Teeth and Me”)

Too Dark to Read

Groucho Marx once said that “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” And that’s what I want this blog to be about: how the creation and absorption of literature impacts my life.  In other words, I’m blogging about reading, writing, and occasionally the warm fuzzies of having a dog.

 

I am blind, but that’s not what I’m writing about.  It’s just a fact.  I’m me.  I’m blind.  Moving on.

 

I’m not blogging about it in general, but the fact that I’m blind does lend itself well to the title of this post, because the fact is, for me, it’s never too dark to read.  When I was little, when my brothers and I had early bedtimes and our parents turned out the lights, my older brother always complained that I could still read in the dark.  In fact, sometimes I would read so late that I would fall asleep with the book still lying open across my chest, and I would wake up some time after my parents had put it on my night table to find my fingers still moving across the sheets, reading a story even in my dreams.

 

Now, I’m going into my senior year at Kenyon College, where I’m studying English, creative writing, and Italian.  I read every book I can get my hands on, and I write young adult fantasy and literary fiction.  I love language.  It never fails to fascinate me how one word plus another word plus another word and on and on for hundreds of thousands of words can create a story that can make me laugh until my ribs ache or cry until my ears pop.  I hope to write a story like that one day too, and since my career after college is going to have something to do with literature, I feel like I should get some practice talking about it in a public way.

 

But this isn’t about literature in the scholarly sense of the word, not really.  This is about stories, and what stories can do for all of us.  For me, my favorite books are like old friends who are always there, whatever is going on in my life, and there’s nothing like the joy of discovery that comes with a new book.  And writing a story is just the same, a journey of discovery and emotion.  Stories of all kinds have gotten me through the hardest times in my life, so I guess what I’m really blogging about is how, even if you’re inside a dog, it is never too dark to read.