Yes, it's always like this

A while back, I somehow fell into the job of costuming for a dance company. It isn't anything I'd ever intended to do. 

Every show presented more technical challenges. How to get the pleats to lay flat? How to secure the boots that were too loose? How to ensure that a girl's top stays in place? All these little details that I had never thought of before. I mean, who thinks of these things? Well, now I think about these things. But that wasn't the biggest challenge. 

You see, I didn't grow up as a performer. I did a couple of plays in high school. Small shows and I had very small parts, which was fine by me. Now, suddenly I was involved in these huge productions with elaborate and expensive costumes. Hundreds of pieces to keep track of and repair and replace. It all seemed pretty straightforward and each show started out that way.  Alas, it never went as easily as I planned. Things were torn, or misplaced. There were last minute casting changes that led to last minute alterations.

Early on, one show went especially wrong. I hadn't thought about that evening in a long time and then I read Maisey's post and it all came back to me in sharp detail. It was one crisis after another all night long. I literally didn't sit down before my name was called again by panicked dancers - Torn pointe shoe ribbons, tights with holes, makeup stains, ripped tulle, lost headpieces, tears and stains, glue and thread and needle.  Finally at the end of the night, the star was back on stage - neatly sewn into his costume with the broken zipper - and I turned to some of the veteran performers. They were celebrating our success in getting everyone back out on stage on time. The audience had no clue how frenzied we were back stage. My hands shaking with an excess of adrenaline, I couldn't see anything to celebrate. "Tell me it isn't always like this," I said, half-joking. I wanted some reassurance that some day I wouldn't have to do this, some day in the not too distant future I would get it right.

They assured me that it was indeed always like that, and if you were very prepared and very lucky, the audience never knew. It was one of those moments when the world shifts around, like a kaleidoscope, and suddenly you see a different pattern. 

I wasn't supposed to get it right every time. It wasn't supposed to be done. I wasn't supposed to be done. Being accomplished didn't mean being finished. I carried that thought with me out of the theater that night and it quite changed the way I thought about my life.

I'm not perfectly organized or getting everything right. Every single day is an adventure. I'm making it up as I go along.

Writing Challenges

The last few weeks I've been hanging out on Twitter a lot. It's not what you think. I'm not procrastinating. OK, I'm not alway procrastinating on Twitter. I have been following the 1k1hr hashtag. Writers jump in and try to write a thousand words in a single hour and then come back and report the outcome. It's been wonderfully productive for me. I finished my first draft, writing at a pace that I hadn't duplicated since NaNo. More importantly, it didn't feel like work at all. I'm far enough along in the book that I won't be doing much in the way of 1k1hr for a while. Which sounds like a wonderful thing, but I'm a bit conflicted.  I'm a bit disappointed not to have the camaraderie and motivation of  my writing buddies.

I saw the link to this  blog via @Lili_Tufel  and it got me thinking about why the 1k1hr challenges worked so well for me. The author raises some really good problems with these writing sprints or even the longer challenge of something like NaNo. Some of the ways I deal with these problems were just luck, but some were a choice and some where the result of the cool writers that are doing 1k1hr.

The race is the point I think part of the appeal of contests for unpublished writers is that external deadline. It is hard for me to make the writing a real priority when there is no deadline. It's pretty easy to ignore the writing and  distant goals in favor of the army of dust bunnies invading my house and the piles of laundry right in front of me. For me the fact that I have to check back in at the end of the hour means that I can ignore the phone and emails for a bit and just focus. Pushing hard, knowing everyone else is writing, gives me that extra competitiveness to get writing. I don't always win. There are a couple of writers who I know will double my word count most days. The wining isn't the point, it's the race that pushes me to try harder.

The quality varies Some days I read over what I wrote and I'm very pleased. Other days I know I'm going to delete half of it. But the other half is something unexpected and wonderful. All of it could use some tightening, but I tend to be pretty wordy in the best of circumstances. The easiest scenes to write that quickly are the ones where I know just what happens and I just type the words. But some of the best things I've written have been when I have a crap word count and little idea of what comes next.

Huge pressure for only 60 minutes For an hour you are writing full out.  Sometimes the time flies by too quickly. Sometimes I am interrupted. Sometimes I can't believe the time is up because I've been so caught up in the story. Sometimes I am counting the minutes at the end trying to put enough words on the page to get even close to a thousand. But if I don't make 1K, I don't worry about it. The other participants cheer when you've hit the goal, but are quick to point out that even if it's only 500 words, it's 500 new words. Or even 250. If it goes well, I'm extra happy and there are people to celebrate with. If it doesn't go well, I just let it go. I do another sprint. Or just figure that tomorrow is another day.

I think at the end of it, that is what makes the 1k1hr work so well for me. Even if it is a complete failure, it was only an hour. If I delete the entire scene because I want to go in a different direction, it was just an hour of my life. That doesn't seem such a terrible commitment.

Doubts

Doubts are in the air. There have been many people talking about the ways that writers can combat them. Maisey Yates compares them to crows, big ones that are just waiting to peck at you. There are certainly more than enough reasons to doubt. When I'm all alone in front of the screen, the crows seem menacing. Writing is lonely indeed. Some days the crows seem more like vultures.

They circle around overhead as I wander the wilderness of my manuscript. Their very presence seems confirmation of some weakness that I hadn't noticed before. They drift ever closer as the day goes by. Even if the word count is getting larger, they taunt me. They aren't the right words. The words aren't good enough. The dialogue is stilted. The pacing is off. The characters are boring me, who will ever want to read this?

Thoses big black birds peck away at our confidence. It's so hard as writer to keep going with so little feedback. When you do get feedback, it isn't always what you'd hoped for. There are harsh critiques, revisions, maybe even a rejection from a publisher. Writing is pouring your mind, heart and soul into a story knowing there will be rejection. Not everyone will like the story. Perioid. For sure. For every wildly popular author, there are groups that hate that author's work. Someone is going to hate that thing in my novel everyone else loves.  That will hurt.

And then the scavengers come back, drawn by the smell of blood. Like wild animals, they can sense my weakness and there they'll be ready to pounce on me. In the past, I didn't have the courage to face them down. Rather than accept that I might not be good enough, I just stopped trying. I was busy doing other things and just didn't get back to the story that was attracting those scary birds. I came out of it whole, but what I gave up was the thing I most wanted: to write.

So, as they circle over head I'll keep an eye on them, but this time I won't turn and run.

Happy Birthday to me!

My birthday was Sunday. Monday morning a woke up to the best present. I won a spot in Lani Diane Rich's Revision class over on StoryWonk. I am so excited!! I've been listening to her weekday podcasts and aside from being super fun, she manages to get the big concepts about what works in a story into brief, laugh-filled 10 minutes bites. Seriously. At the very least, you should listen to her talk on owning your greatness. Go on. I'll wait.

It is such a struggle to believe in yourself as a writer. No matter how great your manuscript, there always seems to be room for improvement. To the unpublished author, getting an agent or a contract seems a well-nigh unattainable goal. Even published authors face lousy reviews and rough revisions. Everyone seems willing to line up to tell you no. It is hard to pick yourself up when you're feeling battered and bruised. It's hard to try again with no promise of success. The only thing I no for certain is that if I don't try, it's a regret I can't live with.

That's true of all of the things that really matter to me in life. When I had my children, there was no promise that they'd be okay. Or even that I'd be a good mother. There have skinned knees and tears. There have been awkward questions. There have been heartrending things I've had to tell my children. Maybe I haven't always been a good mother, but I've been a good enough mother. They are both in high school now and they are young women of whom I'm as often proud as I am provoked. I think those are pretty decent results.

When I got married, there was no promise, beyond our vows, that our marriage would last, that we would be one of the lucky couples. But I believe in my husband and I believe in love. We've been married nearly twenty years now. I just can't even imagine my world without him.

It's obvious that I believe in love: I write romance. It's easy to believe that loving someone can change your life for the better. It's so much more frightening to have that faith in myself.

Resilience

 

Someone forwarded to me Jessica Hart's blog post on increasing emotional intensity in writing. It's a great post but it's her post from Moday that really resonated with me. The post is all about the ways to trick yourself into the right frame of mind to write. It's got some good ideas but what I've been thinking about this week is how people have reacted to the New Voices competition. What surprised me most of all is my own reaction. I have never been much of an optimist, yet I have certainly come away from the competition with that attitude and I wondered how I've changed that much.

The answer is my kids ballet dancing. Or to be more frank, my absolute refusal to allow my daughters into the jealousy and bitterness that some of their peers indulged in. Seems an odd thing, but preprofessional dance training is much like any other athletic endeavor. Some dancers excel from an early age, only to be overtaken by a late bloomer. Some kids just don't have the body or aptitude to ever be able compete with other kids their age. And some kids just have everything they need; they are just better without trying as hard. And at every casting for a ballet or recital it is a question of not only what did I get, but what did the other girls get. Who's better than me? Who am I better than?

Let me tell you, you take a bunch of young teenaged girls and give them something to compete for and it can be a recipe for disaster. If they do well, they forget that it might not always be that way. They forget that if they do poorly as well. And then they all have to go and stand next to each other at barre. And dance for two and half hours. Things are said. Teachers, and other dancers, criticisms and compliments take on a disproportionate weight. That burden can weigh on a child. And so I have spent years now teaching my kids to be gracious and kind (even if you're sure the other girl doesn't deserve it) when things are going your way, to be patient and determined when they aren't. The girls who are able to put all of that aside, both the good and the bad, and refocus on their classes those are the kids who survive.

Neither of them are dancing this year. The mental toughness they gained from all those years of training remains. They both have had more academic challenges this year than ever before, but they never gave up. They both have thrown themselves into new pursuits with the same passion they had for ballet. So should I be tempted to sit in front of my computer screen and question my goals or be tempted by frustration to give in to despair, I just whip out one of my well worn little pep talks and try it out on myself.