Tag Archives: writing

Where are they now?

1 Oct
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Oh, hi!

Early last week, one of my good friends from nursing school sent me a text that read, “I miss having a life.”

I stared at the text with a mixture of anger and confusion. I knew what she was referring to. She had started her second week of training as an RN. She was lucky enough to not work through nursing school and had the summer off to travel and spend time with her friends and family. Working 40 hours a week was feeling overwhelming to her.

I, however, was in my ninth week of working as a nurse, after only one week between quitting my job as a vet tech and staring as a nurse. I was confused by her message, because for the first time in years, I feel like I have time, like I’m able to have a life.

It’s only dawning on me now just how much I put myself through to become a nurse. For three years (1.5 of prerequisites and 1.5 of nursing school), I managed to hold down a job, manage many pet sitting clients, and work hard enough in school to become my class’s valedictorian. None of this was easy. There were moments of breaking down in exhaustion, feeling frustrated, and questioning whether it was all worth it and would ever come to an end.

I wanted to post about my different clinicals (Psych, Maternity, Pediatrics, Community) and the impact they each had on me. I wanted to write about graduation, studying for the boards, the job hunt. But everything happened so fast, and I’m still having a hard time believing that I get to be where I am today.

From the outset, I wanted to be in the emergency room. Fast paced emergency situations were always my favorite at the veterinary hospital, and I loved the idea of seeing a wide variety of complaints. The ER is what I wanted, and just about everybody told me it was impossible. I had professors tell me that I wasn’t meant for the ER. I had classmates tell me that the ER was for the heartless. Advisors and recruiters told me it was a pipe dream, and I should settle for less. In New York State, there are very limited programs that allow new graduates into the emergency room. In New York City, only six positions were made available in 2019. Five at the hospital I work at, and one at the only other hospital that hires new grads into the ER.

I feel lucky. I feel grateful. When I spend time in the ER now, running around feeling dumb and useless, I also feel excited and incredulous that I’m one of the lucky few. By a simple twist of fate, one of the families that I used to cat sit for had connections at my hospital and were able to instruct HR to consider my resume for the ER fellowship. This leaves me with mixed feelings of being undeserving and embarrassed that cat sitting is what landed me my dream job. But I’ve decided that it comes down to what I do from here and how valuable a nurse I become with this opportunity that I’ve been given.

So now, I’ve bequeathed my cat sitting clients to co-workers from the vet clinic, and I’m working a healthy 37.5 hours a week. On my days off and in my evenings, I come home without anything to study (sometimes I briefly review things I encountered during the day), without any modules or homework assignments. I don’t have to run to an apartment in the Upper East Side to feed or medicate any animal. It’s like I’m learning how to be a person again.

I go for long runs in Astoria Park. I sip Guatemalan coffee while reading New York Times op-eds on my iPad. I binge watch all of “Fleabag” in two days. I make Shrimp Scampi over orzo with a side of steamed broccoli and a glass of white wine. I spend an ungodly amount of time looking at throw pillows and art for my new apartment (my first ever sans roommates). WHO AM I?

So when I think about getting back to my life and having all this free time, of course writing is at the top of my list. I’m so rusty at this point, though, that I’m having issues getting back into the groove. I always loved having this blog, because it always felt like a good warm up to keeping those writing muscles strong. I’ve just been conflicted about how or what to write.

While my vet tech days were full of stories about the clinic, my experiences as a nurse are largely things I can’t write about. I have to maintain privacy for my patients, and I don’t want to get into any hot water with my employer. A lot of the nurses I follow on social media have anonymous accounts that are private. My employer hasn’t made any rules about that sort of thing, but I really don’t want to rock the boat or have any uncomfortable conversations with HR. So I’m trying to decide: do I want to write innocuous posts about nursing that have nothing to do with my employer (is that possible?!?)? Do I want to start an anonymous blog about nursing? Should I write about other things altogether and let this be a blog about all things non-nursing?

I don’t know. I’m not even sure who would read this or see this after it has been dormant and abandoned for so long. The people that come to this blog seem to want answers about Penn Foster or about life as a Vet Tech, two things I don’t want to talk about and don’t even feel qualified to talk about. But for me this is an exercise, a means to write. Maybe there won’t be another post for 10 months. I guess it just feels good to write again. I didn’t know how to break the ice on this long silence, so here is this imperfect, rambling post. I’m alive. I’m an ER nurse. Above all, I’m happy.

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What kind of writing do you want to do?

20 Jan

Turning 29 did something strange to me. I’m not lamenting getting older, and if anything, I’m looking forward to what the rest of my life will bring. So many adventures, loves, opportunities. But there is something about approaching 30 that shakes my core whether I want to admit it or not. If only because it is the end of an era, simply a numerical one, but an era nonetheless. This is the last year of my twenties, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what that means to me and how I want to move forward

I have more or less finished with vet tech school, and I have been looking into what my next step is. While I love my job, it’s not enough for me. I want bigger things. I want more education. I want to move up in a field. I want to always feel good about the things I put out into the world, and I had to figure out what that means.

I circled back, as I always do, to this notion of being a writer. I decided I was going to fully invest myself in it moving forward. So I revamped my linkedin, started applying to every writing job I came across, read an endless sea of articles on how to be a published writer. I networked until I found some real life writers in New York.

Through a friend of a friend, I met Katie. She was so kind and helpful and agreed to meet me for drinks so I could pick her brain about the writing industry in New York. We met at a bar in Midtown, and I asked her about her writing path. She told me about journalism school, about endless internships while waitressing, about small gigs, and about eventually landing an assistant editor position for Yahoo News. She was smart, interesting, impressive. I was excited to be talking to her, thinking, “I could do that!” Then, she asked me, “What kind of writing do you want to do?”

Just about the most obvious question to ask anyone pursuing writing. But my mind was blank. I muttered about my blog, about books, about short stories, poetry, essays. All the things I’ve written over the years and written well. I’ve had numerous writing projects. But what kind of writer did I want to be? I simply didn’t have an answer.

Over the next couple of weeks, I thought about this question that I don’t think writers ask themselves enough. What kind of writer am I? I managed to get a couple of freelance, part-time offers. The first writing blog posts for business websites, the second writing click-bait articles about love and relationships. Real writing jobs! Things that would give me a byline. That foot in the door. On the subway train to the Love and Relationship job, I brainstormed article ideas. I could write about break-ups (I’m a reluctant expert), I could write about the types of guys I’ve dated. I could write about epic fights and moments of love and following one’s heart.

And then I had the answer to that question. “What kind of writing do you want to do?” Not this, I thought. My personal relationships and life are worth more to me than $12 an hour. I didn’t want to give away articles about my sexual history, about the men I’ve loved, about the men I failed to love to some start-up website. Yes, it was a foot in the door. It was a way to get published. And, yes, a part of me does want to write about all of that, but on my own terms. That website is not the kind of writing I want to do.

In December, I wanted 2016 to be the year I became a real writer. That I got published and paid to write. That I could earn some sort of badge I could show everyone that I am a writer. But in January, I realized I don’t need that. Writing, reading, words are fundamental to who I am, and they always will be. I’m 29 and unpublished, but I haven’t formulated anything I want to put into the world. I haven’t yet figured out what piece of my soul I want to share and how. Maybe it will be poetry. Maybe I’ll finally pull together a novel about my crazy Upper East Side vet tech life. But I’m learning to be more gentle with myself. There’s no deadline to be a writer. I am a writer, as much as I’m a girl with freckles. It’s a part of me. I can’t sit at a desk all day writing like some writers do. I write best after a long day or a stretch of days on my feet, absorbing the people around me, the world. As much as I’ve read and researched other people’s writing processes, that’s mine. Slumping in near-exhaustion at my desk and writing for a couple of hours before I pass out. And maybe I just haven’t found that one subject, that one book that will tell the story I was born to tell. And that’s okay. I’m only 29 after all.

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30 Before 30: Read “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion

23 Dec

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In my 30th year of life, I’m attempting to do 29 new things. Full List Here. All Bucket List Adventures Here.

I read this book in the span of a day. It’s not a long book, and the prose is quick and simple. It’s also a story that pulls the reader in. It documents the year of her life after her husband John died. He had a heart attack in front of her, and, as she puts it, in an ordinary moment her life changed.

I’m still processing how I feel about the book. It’s different from most anything I’ve ever read. Death and loss are not new topics. I think the difference with Didion is that she doesn’t try to pull at your heartstrings. She doesn’t conjure up lost memories of her husband and her at their happiest. Their first kiss. Sweet things he did for her. None of that is there. It is simply the story of her mind coping with the grief.

Reading her analyze her mind and notice her thought patterns in the year after she lost her husband pulls the reader closer to understanding how it feels to lose a life partner. At one point, I took a break from reading it and looked at the simple layout of the cover. Only four letters in a different color than the rest. My eyes scanned from the J to the O to the H to the N. John. Her ex-husband. I give that cover designer enormous credit for putting together such an understated cover that describes the essence of the book. The shadow Didion’s husband cast over her life, especially in the year after he died, was unavoidable and seeped into her mind in curious ways.

Her writing is so straight-forward and without embellishment that I was surprised by how much her love for him resonated. In interviews, she has said that she thought the book turned into a love story instead of a story about grief. And I agree. This is not a book for the faint of heart. Your heart will break alongside hers. But it is beautiful, and it is important, and I learned so much from it.

“We are not idealized wild things.

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. And as we will one day not be at all.”

 

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The Problem with Ernest Hemingway

21 Dec
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Great Hemingway writing quotes here.

Young girls around the world adore Marilyn Monroe. They wear her image on their shirts, on purses. They quote what she said about beauty and self-confidence, only to find out later that she never actually said those things. The problem is that huge swathes of these girls have never even seen a Marilyn Monroe film, some of her fans can’t even name one. I’m friends with a couple of people like this. I try not to judge them, though, because in my world (the world of writers and readers), we do the same thing to Ernest Hemingway.

I love Ernest Hemingway, but he is the Marilyn Monroe of writers. Most anyone who reads or writes will profess a deep, holy love toward him, often citing him as their hero. My journals are full of his quotes. I’ve watched “Midnight in Paris” more times than I can count. I’ve read every fictional and non-fictional thing written about him. I even once had a beta fish that I named Ernest. But my big confession is that I don’t actually like the majority of his books.

I’ve read the major ones and could give a brief summary of the plot lines. I know why he is one of the most important writers of the 20th century: his razor-sharp, journalistic prose. But it’s not my thing. I like descriptions. I like being pulled into a scene with imagery and metaphors. And I’m not a fan of war, which is a huge part of most of his books. The one book by him that I adore is “A Moveable Feast” which was published posthumously. I see it as a departure from his iconic prose. He indulges metaphor and description. He gushes about Paris without much restraint. Or maybe his prose was easier to stomach when he wasn’t talking about battlefields and soldiers. Maybe I need to reread “A Farewell to Arms”?

You see, I carry so much guilt at not loving Hemingway’s books as much as I think I should. I carry a lot of his advice on writing and life around with me as comfort. And I wish I had the grace of his prose, which he admittedly attributed to being able to revise and discard. He reminds me of that perfect guy that you just don’t fall in love with. He’s handsome, smart, loves animals, loves you, but something in the chemistry is amiss and you can’t, despite your most valiant attempts, feel love for this person. I want to love Hemingway. I sorta love Hemingway. Just not in the way he deserves to be read and loved.

I think he’s an easy person to idealize as a writer. He traveled the world, transformed literature, had wild love affairs, wrote important pieces about things that he cared about. But another parallel can be drawn between his fan base and Marilyn Monroe’s. When people idolize Marilyn Monroe, they conveniently forget that she had crushing insecurities, that she suffered through an abusive relationship, that she was addicted to sleeping pills and might have even taken her own life with them. Hemingway, likewise, struggled with depression and took his own life. One of his oft-quoted lines is one that I downright hate.

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

I can’t abide that. I think it is a harmful and mean thing to say. I don’t think happiness is a reflection of intelligence as much as it is a reflection of a mindset. I think people are really and truly happy when they turn their mind to it. Some of the most beautiful pieces of art, music, literature have come out of dark times and sad people, but I think some of it has come from happy individuals. I think about this quote a lot when I am happy and worry that my writing will suffer for it. He’s bullying me into choosing either happiness or intelligence, when I think that it is possible to choose both. And maybe that’s what pushes me away from his novels. This overarching gloom of war and death and failure doesn’t inspire me as much as his love and excitement and happiness in Paris. That’s the part of his writing that means something to me.

So instead of ending this on a criticism of the patriarch of modern writing, I’ll end it on one of my favorite quotes from “A Moveable Feast.” A quote that makes me want to quit my job and move to Montmartre. To find my own mustachioed Hemingway and while away the hours debating back and forth about politics, love, happiness, writing. No matter how I feel about some of his books, the man could craft an elegant sentence.

“You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”

Am I alone in this? How do other people really, honestly feel about Hemingway? Love him, but don’t like him? Are there other authors out there that have that type of relationship with their readers?

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NaNoWriMo 2015

1 Dec

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About a month ago (probably around the last time I wrote a post), I went to a pumpkin carving party. It was a girl’s night with apple cider sangria, Hocus Pocus, and a variety of garlic spinach dips. The night was hosted by a girl I met through softball. I don’t know her very well, and I didn’t know her friends at all. As I always do in new social circles, I clammed up. I sat gulping my sangria out of nervousness and listening to the conversations around me. One of the girls there, a 26-year-old bubbly blonde mentioned she was a journalist at a small press magazine. It was inconsequential, but it stuck.

That night, I walked back to the apartment where I cat sit and thought, “Why that girl? Why not me? Why aren’t I a journalist, a writer, a novelist?” The Greek chorus of negativity filled my brain. I’m not good enough. I’m too lazy. I should just give up and stick to animals. But the fact of the matter is that I haven’t tried. I can count on one hand the amount of pieces I have submitted for publication. One smattering of poems to a contest, two or three articles to online publications. That’s it? I put together this blog and revel in the humble amount of readers, likes, comments it receives. But I’ve wanted more.

When I was 7-years-old, I changed schools for the third time. I toured the new classroom in the new town amongst new people feeling overwhelmed and scared. The teacher, Ms. Sperling, tried to cheer me up by showing me the art projects, the crawfish pool full of critters, and the music room stuffed with instruments. But what I remember most is when she showed me the area of the room where students could make “books.” To my childish memory they looked like the books I spent so much of my time with: professional, real, put-together books. In reality, they were stapled together sheets of printer paper with lines on them. But I held those stacks in my tiny, little hands and that was it for me. My future, my dreams were as blank and as limitless as those lines on paper waiting to be filled with something, anything.

So at 29-years-old, I wanted to start then and there. I wanted to get back on that road. So I signed up (for the fourth time) for National Novel Writing Month.

NaNoWriMo is an event that has been going on for a long time. It challenges writers to put together a 50,000 word novel within the month of November. I first did it in college with my friend Eric, who is now a writer/editor for Vice Sports. It was something fun to do together. We’d meet up after class in the student union and type away. We kept tabs on each other. It was a silly side project, since we were both deep into the Creative Writing program at our university. Once it was over, it was done, eclipsed by the concerns. The two times I’ve attempted since then, I’ve given up after a day or two. I’d get behind and abandon the concept, citing a lack of time and commitment.

Why not try again? I’ve spent years talking about putting together a novel based on my experiences in veterinary medicine. The crazy clients, the patients that have stolen my heart, the dramatic co-workers. Life, death, love, hate, anger, loss. All there and ripe to be written about. And that’s where I have spent my month. I got behind on my word-count often and would spend my days off trying to catch up. I stopped going out, usually grabbing a quick drink before making an excuse to head home and invest an hour or two in my writing. My mind felt like it was coming alive. I started carrying a notebook with me to jot down ideas. Instead of watching “Gilmore Girls” before bed, I found myself reading volumes of poetry, soaking in the eloquent language and trying to incorporate it into my own. I thought about publishing, writing programs, writing jobs, freelancing. So many options beckoned before me, but I didn’t have time for any of them.

Something in this novel took over me. I had to finish it. I didn’t think it would be great, and I don’t know if I will ever do anything with it. But I had to finish it. It was something that I had a hard time explaining to loved ones. It was a reminder to myself that not only is this a dream, it’s a possibility. I had to reach my hand back in time to that 7-year-old girl within me and let her know that I’m still working on it. It was a way to shut up the chorus in my mind that said maybe being a writer wasn’t feasible, maybe it’s all been talk over these years, maybe it’s time to settle down into some other career.

The novel is done. I finished it yesterday with such an air of satisfaction. Some things came out of my mind that I was proud of. Most of it is fluff that will later be deleted. I don’t know if I’ll pursue editing it into something publishable or break it into short story vignettes that I might start submitting. But I am comforted by Hemingway’s letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald where he said, “I write one page of masterpiece to 91 pages of shit.” So, as long, as my 150 page novel contains at least two good pages, I’m on par with Hemingway, and that’s all any hopeful writer can ask for.

 

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To Write, To Work, To Somehow Do Both

28 Jul

My mother told me that quote when I was a teenager getting ready to head off to Seattle, to an unknown future. The only thing I knew as I entered the University of Washington was that I was going to write. And I lived by those words and still do.

But four years later, I was left with a quandary that I still haven’t been able to solve. My fellow creative writing graduates fell into one of two categories. One, they got a job and started paying off their student loan debt. (That’s my category.) Two, they applied to MFA programs to continue on in creative writing academia. Seven years later, I’m not sure which is the better option, and I bounce back and forth every couple of days as to whether I want to apply to an MFA program or whether I want to continue working as a vet tech while writing on the side.

The pro of doing an MFA program for me is the time allotted to write. MFA programs are typically completely funded and give writers a one or two year window to just write, to talk about writing, to edit and craft and read on some isolated college campus, hobnobbing with established writers and other prospective writers. It sounds like paradise.

The pro of working a normal job comes from the inspiration it provides. A lot of the writing I’ve read that comes out of MFA programs doesn’t resonate with me. The skill of composition is there, the ability to create a well-crafted story is there, but it’s stilted, contrived. So, often, the main characters are writers, struggling through academia. Or the fictional characters don’t feel real; I’m assuming because they came from the writer’s imagination. This is where experience helps so much. I have so many stories I have collected in the last 7 years that I want to tell. My solo drive from Seattle to Reno, fraught with confusion at what my future held. Working at a hospital in Northern Nevada, seeing some of the craziest hillbillies in existence. Moving to New York and starting a new life with no money, no friends, no direction. Working at an Upper East Side vet clinic where I get to meet strange characters and see dramas unfold between co-workers, clients, pets and their owners every day. If I had spent the last seven years focused on writing, I don’t think it is possible to have come up with characters and situations as rich as these.

But the con of working is the catch-22 of the whole problem. I’m tired. All day at the clinic, my mind is running on eight cylinders thinking of the stories I want to write, the novel I want to put together of this strange microcosm of New York City. I come home and collapse. I opt to kickbox or cook a new dish or just watch the newly released Season 4 of “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.” I look over at my beautiful new laptop, sitting shiny and lonely on my desk, and I can’t do it. Can’t is wrong. Won’t. I won’t do it. Here I sit on a Tuesday night at the end of my weekly string of three days off, and this is the only writing I’ll have to show for it. I kick myself. I kick myself every week.

Where did that time go? I drank. I played softball. I drank. I grocery shopped. I kickboxed (subsequently regretted the drinking). I bought Microsoft Word for Macs, thinking that getting a better word processor on my laptop will flip the magic switch in my brain and make me write. I watched Anthony Bourdain and read “Outlander.” I played a stupid game on my cell phone. I did laundry. I finally got that ink stain off my desk. I called and emailed vet clinics about setting up an externship. I made this delicious mixture of heaven.

But I didn’t write. But the question then becomes, if I didn’t have work to tire and stress and drain me emotionally, would anything really be different? Is it possible to balance it all? Do I even have it in me?

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Finding Poetry

2 Jun

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New Year’s Resolution #5 this year (right after “Drink Less”) was “Find My Poetry.” By that I didn’t mean write more poetry, read more poetry, or even go to more poetry events, although all those are lacking in my life. I meant to find the poetry that used to infuse my life, that used to be the core of who I was. Six years ago, it meant everything to me, and somewhere along the way I lost it.

As with most resolutions, I started out strong. I volunteered at the Poetry Project‘s annual New Year’s Day Reading Marathon. After serving chilli to the masses for a couple of hours, chatting with poets, volunteers, fellow verse enthusiasts, I was allowed free admission to the reading. The Poetry Project is housed in a church in the Lower East Side and this reading took place in the nave. Some of the poems were beautiful, some were hilarious, some were stirring. More than anything it felt good to be hearing it again.

As I was leaving to go feed a pug in Midtown, I ran into an old friend/writing partner. I recognized his shock of white hair, and we hugged, whispering together. We used to get together once a week in Seattle to read poetry and write it, to drink whiskey and talk about our futures. He’s currently getting his MFA in Alabama. He was in town to spend time with his boyfriend who lives in Brooklyn.

“Oh, I knew Chrissy Wilson would be here!” he said to me. “I’ll be moving here in June. Let’s have poetry dates again.”

We were shushed by people around us, so I agreed, hugged him, and left. Six months later, it’s June. He emailed me that he’ll be here in a couple of weeks. But I haven’t done a single thing to find my poetry since that blustery New Years day. Time has done nothing but slip through my fingers.

But the other night, I was reading an interview with Cheryl Strayed where she mentioned one of her favorite Emily Dickinson quotes, the one in the art above: “If your Nerve, deny you-/Go above your Nerve.” And I couldn’t get it out of my head. I couldn’t get Emily Dickinson out of my head. I found myself pulling my dusty Parini Poetry Anthology (which could also function as a bludgeoning weapon) off the shelf and started reading the poems of hers I found there. And not just her. I felt as though I was looking through an old yearbook as I sighed over the names of poets long forgotten. Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Louise Gluck, Theodore Roethke. I read Anthony Hecht’s “The Dover Bitch” over and over again, feeling just as enamored with its perfection as I did when I first read it for a class in 2007.

“…To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl…”

Then I moved on to my old notebooks. The ones I carried with me everywhere. Full of mini-poems, thoughts, quotes, drawings. Nothing spectacular, just the things I heard and saw that stirred something in me, that felt destined to become a poem or a story or anything.

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This page with lyrics from a Gwen Stefani song, from a Blur song, a quote from the beginning of an episode of Planet Earth, a drawing of my legs in capri jeans. The notebook was full of nonsense like this. Recipes, directions, notes to self, doodles, schedules. It reminded me what I was missing when I lost my poetry. It’s about the observation, the curiosity of life, the ability to try and turn things askew and look at them in a new way. This isn’t to say I’ve found my poetry but those old notebooks that are full of embarrassing things and a couple of poignant things reminded me to observe and to note. That is the purpose of writing after all. Not to just publish or write successful how-tos. It’s to be a correspondent to the unique experience we each have.

I said that I hadn’t found my poetry, but on second thought, maybe I have.

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July 11, 2012

10 Dec

I was recently going through older pieces of writing I have saved to my computer when I found this. I don’t know where I was going with it or what it was meant to become, but I like it. Also, I found a picture from around that time to go with it.

Brooklyn Botanical Garden, May 2012

Brooklyn Botanical Garden, May 2012

I recently read this new theory that scientists have about time. They theorize that the feeling that we all tend to have, that time is slowing, creeping along, is true. Time is slowing down, the universe itself is slowing down, and will eventually stop. This is how the world will end.

This is the most beautiful theory for the end of the world that I can possibly imagine. Compared to the devil roaming the world, nuclear apocalypse, freak global-warming storms killing us all, the world will just come to a stop, like a quarter rolling on its side that eventually falls even with the table.

These scientists also explain that this shift in time is so subtle that we won’t even know it is happening.

So right now, as your life spirals around you, and nothing makes sense. It is coming to a conclusion, time is working in ways around you that you cannot possibly comprehend. It will stop. It will freeze, and you won’t even know it is happening. All of a sudden, everything will freeze-frame like in a musical from the 1950s.

Where will you be? What will you be doing? Think about this insane world of ours and imagine that moment is happening right now, and you (by some universe intervention) are allowed to walk around and observe it. The couples whose lips are mere millimeters away from the first kiss, the bullet that is heading toward some undeserving heart, the match that is so hot and just about to burst into flame, the girl that’s been crying for days and days, and her tears just stop, floating between her cheeks, her hands, the floor.

In a way, all of those photographs we take of one another are just precursors to this, I hate to use the term, but disaster. Look at those photos, look closely, this could be your eternity, that stupid smile, those people you sit with, words escaping somebody’s lips in the background. This is what forever looks like.

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Morning Pages

22 Jan

2013-03-05 15.18.12-1This is the year that I’m forcing myself to become a writer. I’ve started writing a downright shitty book, full of cliches and adverbs, and I have no idea where I’m going with it. But I’m getting it out there. It’s the book I’ve been holding inside of me for years, and I’m doing it. I want to shape it, help it grow. I’d love for it to be great one day. But, right now, I’m getting that shitty thing on paper one word at a time.

I’ve committed to writing for at least an hour, for at least five days out of the week. As much as I wish I could quit my job and dedicate myself to my dream full time, I have to go to work. A part of me likes work, finds inspiration there. I’ve looked to other writers to see how they’ve circumvented this problem. So many of them offer the same piece of advice, morning pages. They get up before their normal day would start and churn out some writing. Before the different stresses of life arise, before work and family and friends drain the energy, before the phone starts ringing, they dedicate themselves to solitude and writing.

I’m not a morning person. My college roommate, who has been one of my lifelong friends, described my morning persona as “Satan incarnate.” I’d like to think that with maturity, I’ve become a little less demonic in response to my alarm, but I still hate it. I love nothing more that staying in bed, continuing my dream, snuggling for an unreasonable amount of hours. I’m a pro at it.

So this whole morning pages thing has been something I have always eliminated as a possibility for me. But this is the year. This is when I dedicate myself to writing, when I decide that writing my shitty book is more important than an extra hour of sleep. I bargained with myself. At first, I planned on doing it every day before work. Then I eliminated Saturday, because it is already tragic enough that I work on Saturday. Then I eliminated Fridays, because I already get up at six and that’s too early. Soon enough, Wednesday went out the door, because it’s like my Monday, and Monday’s are horrible.

So Thursday.

If I can resist the snooze tomorrow morning, it will be my third Thursday in a row where I got up an hour early to write morning pages. I sulk for about five minutes, then I get down to it. It makes such a difference. That little sacrifice of sleep reminds me how important this work is to me. It gets my brain going in the directions I want it to go. And my shitty book keeps growing and growing.

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Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro

13 Jan

It’s such a tiny, little book. It fit so snuggly in my purse, and I took it out almost everywhere I went the week I was reading it. It’s not even a book as much as an amalgamation of all the different things she has learned in her years as a writer. It’s her wisdom, it’s the wisdom of the people who have inspired her, it’s little tips on how to approach writing.

I had fun reading this book. So much so that I bought my own copy while I was still reading the one I had checked out from the library. It now sits atop my printer on my writing desk with its own designated bookmark. Each nugget of advice is only a page or two long, and I’m trying out a ritual (at her suggestion). I read one little nugget as preparation for an hour of uninterrupted writing. It inspires me and reminds me why I write. It makes that hour of solitary writing a little less lonely.

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