March 28, 2016

Advice I Never Write Without (A Writing Whip-It)

It takes a village to raise a writer.

I don’t just mean the nerdy English teachers who infected us with their love of language, or the librarians who provided us our early book fixes, or even the editors who so artfully disguise the moles, mustaches, and pockmarks in our manuscripts. There’s also the other writers who’ve generously shared their own tricks. I’m passing on the two best pieces of writing advice I’ve ever heard, one from Carolyn Hart and the other from Elizabeth Gilbert.

Carolyn Hart was speaking on a Malice Domestic panel in 2007. She was at the conference to accept the Lifetime Achievement Award, and over 200 fans packed the room. During the Q & A portion of the panel, one aspiring writer timidly raised her hand and asked Ms. Hart whether she should hold off on using all of her good ideas in her first novel because then what would she have left for her second one?
After some polite laughter in the room (which I didn’t understand until later—the question seemed excellent), Ms. Hart said, “Use your good ideas now. Your brain will make more. I promise.” Maya Angelou concurs in her famous quote: “You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

Don’t hold back when you write.

The second piece of advice came from Elizabeth Gilbert, who was speaking at a retreat I attended in the spring of 2015. A young author asked Ms. Gilbert how she knew which ideas to use when writing Eat, Pray, Love and which to leave out. The question wasn’t so much about using up all your good stuff as it was about being overwhelmed with potential directions and not knowing how to select what helped the story and what hurt it.

“That’s easy,” Ms. Gilbert said. “Every book I write, I write to one person. It doesn’t have to be someone close to me, and they don’t ever have to know.”

The idea struck me as both simple and revolutionary: which one person am I writing this book for? Who most needs to read it? What parts of the story must they know? What won’t matter to them? What tone must I strike? By selecting a one-person audience and writing to that person from the brainstorming stage to final edits, you will instinctively know what to include in your novel and what to leave out.

Use your good ideas now, and write your book to one person.

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March 25, 2016

Transitions, Rebirth, and a TEDx Talk

This past Sunday marked the vernal equinox, that time when day and night are equal, green buds tremble with potential, and the robins return to sing in Minnesota. This week is symbolic to many spiritual and religious traditions--Pagan, ancient Mayan, modern Christian--a period of potential resurrection after a winter of dormancy. In a very real way, I find myself right now living this process of transition and rebirth: struggling to find balance, choosing hope (light) over worry (dark), and shrugging off the itchy skin of a previous life. Specifically:

• I'm uprooting my kids and moving us all to Minneapolis. My house sold in three days--too soon! we have nowhere to live--and then yesterday the buyer changed his mind--whut??? how can we move if our house doesn't sell?
• My fiance and I will be moving in together in Minneapolis. I've been a single parent for 17 years. I am CRAP at compromising. He is great at bringing playfulness into my overbooked life...
• We're moving from a small, conservative city to a big one. All good, but still...transition.
• My 17 yo is moving to Chicago to start college this coming fall. She is brilliant, feisty, funny and will thrive. But she's my baby...
• I've completed the closest thing to a memoir that I've ever written, an intimate, instructional, how-to-transform-life-experience-into-a-powerful-novel guide that rips the lid off of treasures, pain, and fear that I've been sneaking water to for decades. My agent began to shop it around yesterday.
• In the most unbelievable news of all, my proposal to deliver a TEDx Talk on my experience transforming fact into fiction in the wake of my husband's 9/11 suicide has been accepted. I walk onto that big stage on June 22. Me, who was raised to be intensely private, will stand emotionally naked before the world. I am profoundly honored, and even more profoundly positive that when the time comes, I will step in front of the cameras and bleat like a sheep before my bowels relax. But I'm going to do it because turning fact into fiction is a magical process, both for personal healing and for crafting incredible novels, and I don't get to keep that gift to myself because I'm scared.

I know the secret to navigating life changes: celebrate what you had (even if what you had was a too-small life, it still deserves acknowledgment), release it (this is super uncomfortable and feels exactly like the wrong thing to do, which is why your ego will come up with all sorts of fancy-sounding reasons why it would be stupid to release the familiar), and surrender gratefully to the future. Can I give you an example of how bad I am at letting go and surrendering to the future? Two hours into heavy labor with my son, I convinced myself that if I kept my knees together and didn't make eye contact with anyone that I could maybe avoid the whole messy process. (I was wrong.)

Here's what I am learning: you can grip the familiar so tightly that your fingers bleed, as I do more often than I'd like, or you can let go, slap a smile on your face, and enjoy the log ride, coming out at someplace wonderful beyond your wildest imaginings. The butterfly is the symbol for this transformative process, and there are a ton of aphorisms about how wonderful this personal metamorphosis is, but you know what? If you stuck a tiny microphone up to that little green caterpillar's leaf-chewing mouth and asked him if he wanted to be a butterfly, he'd say, "Pass. Hard pass."

Because you know what? Moving into the unknown--house, next level of a relationship, new style of writing, a TEDx Talk, whatever you're dealing with right now--is terrifying.

The only thing that keeps me going is that NOT evolving is even more frightening. Really. In case I doubted that, I received a call this morning letting me know that a coworker, the best teacher I've ever met and a woman my own age, is having emergency surgery and will not be back this semester. I’m sending her and her family a heart full of love, and I am reminded of how we must live large, each day, stretching, pushing, falling down in spectacularly embarrassing ways, rising, laughing as we dust each other off, and stretching some more. Because the only safe bet in life is what you decide to do with this moment.

So please, if you can find it in your soul to join me in this feels-like-bullshit-but-probably-looks-good-from-the-outside spring metamorphosis, even one small way you can step out of your comfort zone with me, post it below. It's easier to leave this cocoon if I'm not alone.

Happy spring and big love to you, baby butterfly.

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March 24, 2016

Reading Like a Writer (A Writing Whip-it)

Hey, guys! Spring is here and I've got things to say, news to share, life pinatas to crack open. As such, I'm excited to start blogging regularly(ish). As a good faith effort, below is the first Writing Whip-it, something I envision being a regular deal (in the same way I envision fitting back into my 1994 Girbaud jeans because nothing good happens if you don't vis-U-alize it, people) where I offer a brief writing tip (500 or fewer words).

Reading Like a Writer

Imagine being a chef who only eats chicken nuggets, a carpenter who refuses to look at buildings straight on, or an orchestra conductor who doesn't listen to anything but commercial jingles. Such is the problem for a writer who doesn't read regularly and widely.

Books are the maps to your craft.

Reading like a writer requires you to figure out what in a piece of fiction moves you and what turns you off. I'm calling that self-awareness your narrative detective—its job is to solve the mystery of the narrative, looking at the ways it is and isn't succeeding—and I'm going to encourage you to feed it PIE every time you read anything: a menu, a short story, the interpretive plaque next to the world's biggest redwood tree.

A book.

Here's the ingredients to the PIE:

• P: prepare with pen and paper. In other words, always have a notebook and something to write with nearby when you read. Be prepared for insight. A writer cannot simply read for pleasure. S/he uses every word as research.
• I: immerse. Get inside the words, the sentences, the story arc. Don't simply stay on the surface of what you're reading, no matter how shallow it seems. Go deep.
• E: examine. If that cereal box makes you excited to eat the Sugar Doodles, ask yourself what it is about the words and their formatting is doing that for you. If you read that redwood plaque and walk away feeling smart, ask yourself how it pierced your busy mind. If—especially if—you're reading a book, and you connect with a character, or you find yourself yanked out of the story, or you read a sentence twice to savor the citrus taste of it, study that shit like a lover's face. Write down what you think is happening ("main character makes stupid choices," "too many adverbs," "lots of smell detail drops me straight into the story," "each chapter ends with a hook," etc.) because transcribing information flips a switch in our brain, waking up the records guy who then goes over to pick up what you wrote and file it somewhere so you can access it later.

When you feed your narrative detective PIE, she begins to internalize the language and rhythm of story. The results, like magic, will begin to show up in your own writing.

Jessica (Jess) Lourey is best known for her critically-acclaimed Murder-by-Month mysteries, which have earned multiple starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist, the latter calling her writing "a splendid mix of humor and suspense." She is a tenured professor of creative writing and sociology, a recipient of The Loft's 2014 Excellence in Teaching fellowship, and leads better-than-average writing workshops all over the world. Salem’s Cipher, the first novel in her thrilling Witch Hunt Series, hits stores September 2016. If you'd like to see a specific topic addressed in a future Writing Whip-it, please email her at jesslourey@yahoo.com, with "Writing Whip-it Request" as your subject line.

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