Wandering Wisdumb

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Arizela

If you are going to have children, study Lamaze – even if you don’t use it while giving birth, trust me, you’ll need it when they hit puberty.

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Self-education vs. MFA

Posted on December 9, 2011 by Arizela

I’ve been doing a bit of reading lately, and came across an e-book that was briefly available for free through the Kindle store.

Portable MFA in Creative Writing was one of those titles I downloaded because the price was right ($0 is hard to say no to), but figured I’d never actually open.

Now that I have, I’m glad I did.

There are a couple of reasons, really. The chapter on fiction writing has, thus far, been helpful. The information is broad rather than specific, but that’s because the answer in writing is general “it depends” and the book freely admits to that fact. Still, the information presented has allowed me to take a closer look at the structural elements of my work and has given me a new lens to see dialog and point of view.

But it’s the introduction that really got me thinking. The early portion of this book is dedicated to telling you why, if you’ve ever considered getting an MFA in writing, you’re probably better off saving the cost of tuition.  Don’t get me wrong, the book doesn’t dismiss the benefits of an MFA. It simply acknowledges that those letters are pretty meaningless for most people writing fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, or screenplays for money. Unless you’re intending to teach, chances are good your actual degree won’t get you much, and in a lot of programs, it might cost you a great deal more than time and money.

That said, as a self-taught writer, the notion of attending formal, structured classes and workshops is appealing. It’s difficult, sometimes, to find that perfect early reader. It can be very difficult to connect with another writer who is interested in what you write, who has the time to actually participate in your process, and who understands the difference between workshopping and editing. Particularly if you happen to write in a genre and with topics that are only approachable to particular audiences.  I’ve been lucky to find a number of readers who have benefited my work over the years, but never anything as intensive as a workshop environment.

I fully believe that my writing has grown over the years in ways it never would have if I’d gone the university route, but I miss having those connections, those other voices to inform and temper my own creative endeavors.

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Did you choose a self-taught or more formal path through the writing process? What factors led to your decision?

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The Cost of Literary Abandon

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Arizela

I’ve been a participant in NaNoWriMo since 2004. I win some. I lose some. This year, though, I decided to step away from the madness and just keep on doing my own thing for November while cheering on my friends who NaNoed.

Obviously, I think the event has its moments. It can be wildly fun. The local events are awesome ways to meet up with other people who share your interests in your geographical area. The forums can be a hoot.

What’s not a hoot is their budget. I got an (unsolicited – I told them not to email me anything) email asking for donations to cover their budgetary gap this year, with a link to this graphic:

A million dollars. $1,000,000. That’s a lot of zeroes.

NaNo is a lot of fun, but there’s a little voice in the back of my head that keeps whispering that this 501(3)(c) charity and the tax deductible donations they take in every year… well, a million dollars could be a lot of people fed. A lot of coats and gloves and hats for the homeless. A lot of shelter and pure water for disaster relief. A lot of books for under-served populations.

I seem to remember when NaNoWriMo donations went toward building libraries, actually. Then again, the operating costs back then were a couple zeroes smaller. NaNo is fun, no doubt. I’m just wondering if it’s fun enough to justify this price tag, and if my donation wouldn’t be better spent somewhere else this year.

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Long Lost and Unwelcome Holiday Guests

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Arizela

So I had a little Thanksgiving shindig at my house. I spent the week before shopping for the fixings, hunting for the turkey (a locally produced farm bird), repainting the guest bathroom, cleaning the house, shampooing carpets, and of course preparing the feast for 12.

The day before the big dinner, four of my guests cancelled. No big deal. More left overs for me!

But the day of, when I was finished with the cooking, I barely had the energy to eat. I ended up spending 2 hours of the post-meal entertaining time curled up in bed with a pillow. My hubby (gently) prodded me until I got out of bed to spend a little time with our family/guests, and after they left, I fell asleep in the bathtub.

The next day wasn’t so bad, even if I did sleep a lot. I mean, a lot. 16 hours or so, actually. The whole weekend after the big day, I didn’t do a whole lot to be honest. Just sat around and worked on writing and consumed the left overs.

Saturday I wasn’t feeling great, though. Still tired. Still having a hard time forcing myself to focus.

Sunday was a little worse. I realized my heart rate was up a little and that I hadn’t really eaten much in the way of salty foods. One of the ways I manage my broken-heart-thing is by consuming more salt than a typical diet, despite the fact that I don’t really like salty foods. I had always followed a relatively low sodium diet prior to the heart-thing, because of my family history of heart disease and high blood pressure. Figures I’d get stuck with the one condition that requires a high-salt diet, eh?

Monday rolled around, and I didn’t sleep well at night. Really broken up sleep. When I got up and tried to start my day, my resting heart rate was 140, just sitting in a chair. After an hour of reclined rest, it was down to a whopping 130. (For the record, the normal rate is 60-80 when resting upright) I had enough extra beats for a second heart.

The gig was up. No more denying it. My long lost and most unwelcome heart-thing had returned to plague me again.

It’s so easy to forget, when you are dealing with a chronic condition and feeling relatively well, that you can’t go back to the usual patterns. That over-doing it for a couple of days to get the job done can sap you for days or weeks or (hopefully not this time) months.

A friend of mine linked me to a story over at butyoudontlooksick.com today. The author explained what it’s like, living with lupus to a friend using a handful of spoons. I think her analogy works for me except for one factor – I never know how many spoons I have. I never know if pushing myself just a little harder will result in more stamina tomorrow or no spoons at all in reserve, and misjudging where those lines are can be crippling.

As I am planning to head back out into the job market soon, this was a reminder I didn’t want, but perhaps needed – that while my heart-thing may be lying dormant these days, it is certainly not gone.

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What Progress Looks Like

Posted on November 20, 2011 by Arizela

So after having a really bad year, when my heart was at its worst and my writing suffered just as bad as the rest of my life, I got back up on the pony in January of this year. By the beginning of February, I got bucked off again when my sister died unexpectedly. Dealing with the grief and the family stuff and the continued antics of a heart that isn’t running on a full deck cost me another 6 months.

So when I started back up in July, I decided two things – that I desperately needed a low stress on-ramp for the writing-as-career thing, and that I just as importantly needed some metrics to guide my efforts. I knew that I wanted a graphical representation of what I was tracking – something to look at my progress at a glance. Excel was the perfect solution – it does a lot more than simply track columns of numbers if you know how to use it. All the graphs on this post were created in Excel with just a few clicks, utilizing data I’d added daily.

 

Why ‘net’ words?

Rather than counting every word I drafted (Nanowrimo style), I decided to count only words that made the cut to go into the working draft of the project. My “cut file” has twice as many words as my working draft of any given project. The scenes in there are good, they speak to me and occasionally I reuse bits of dialog or description. Sometimes the whole scene ends up back in the draft. They’re usually good words, but they’re the wrong words.

So just tracking the count of how much I’ve drafted doesn’t really measure anything helpful for me. I decided to measure by simply doing a word count on my working draft at the beginning and end of each day and calculating the difference.

Sometimes, this approach ends me up in the somewhat irritating position of stopping with a negative count. Other times, I work the whole day, drafting thousands of new words, and end up recording 10. And I’m ok with that. To me, what matters is that the book is growing, changing, and getting better.

So how does this metric effect the writing?

Data doesn’t help anything you only collect it and let it gather dust. To make the data meaningful, you have to look at it from different angles. Manipulate it and let it manipulate your behavior to push toward your goal. The words per day graph keeps me on track, keeps me pushing for better numbers, but my high quality standards keep me honest with it. Those bars that fall below the line remind me, every time I look, that the goal isn’t words. Words are easy. The dictionary is full of them. My goal is a story, one that I love and am proud to share with the world, and that’s a lot harder.

That said, you don’t get story from stagnation either. So I’ve been pushing myself to get that average daily count a little higher each month. Sometimes life intervenes – July was only a partial month. August saw me playing doula and caring for a newborn while her mom was in the hospital. September started to pick up a little, October kind of rocked, and November is still a work in progress. It’s the trend over time that matters to me. Maybe 286 words per day average for the year isn’t a great count (certainly it wouldn’t be if I were counting all the toss-away words), but it gets me a 100k book in under a year, and these are the revised, polished, finished words.

And notice the trend – the sky is the limit. Now it’s just a matter of keeping myself on track, using my time wisely, and streamlining my process. All of which I’d be floundering to do without the data to light the way.

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What metrics do you use to track your writing progress?

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