Want to Hang Out?

 

I’m coming. Really, I am.

What are you guys up to?

I am eternally grateful for you hanging with me. I see page views. I'm almost up to two million views, so you guys are out there. Thank you, thank you.  

When you come, I will write.

I have confessed this before, but it comes up for me every once in a while. You know how a comment, even an off-hand one, especially from someone of authority, can get stuck in your craw? You push it aside. You try to ignore it, even counter it with logic and reasonableness, but it keeps raising its ugly head.

(Well crap, why do we give people power over us?)

This comment came from a psychiatrist; remember when we thought they were so smart and had insight into our behaviors, as if they could see into our soul? Well, that’s plain dumb. They are people.

That psychiatrist commented after I quoted someone I had read and liked, “Writing is self-aggrandizement.”

I couldn’t believe it. Obviously, he disagreed with the author, but I was too young, too immature, too intimidated to take him on, so I let it fester.  He had besmirched all of literature, novels, research papers, etc. How in the world did he get through school anyway? Even if our history is wrong, an opinion of it is there in books. We can question it. We can revise it. We can wonder about it. Theology is there. Archaeology is there, Geology, how our Earth was formed.  And medicine, oh, I could go on and on. Books are our stepping stones.

(Oh, that book was written by a peer. That explains it.)

However, I let that comment get to me. And this was before I decided to be a writer—my second child hadn’t even been born yet. And I decided to write when she was six years old, in the first grade. I had time then, for I drove my two girls 45 minutes to school and picked them up in the afternoon. (They are still mad at me for the many times I was late picking them up.)  

After dropping my kids off, I would stop at McDonald’s, have a coffee and an orange juice, and write. Hey, there was a bathroom in McDonald's. Many days I stayed in town instead of making the drive home and back.

That jab of self-aggrandizement came up for me again this week, spurred to the front of my brain by one of those books I mentioned in the last blog, Julia Cameron’s book, "The Right to Write."

Two things are going on, more probably, but let’s go with two:

One is, I think many of us writers feel we are indulging ourselves- maybe not Hemingway, who felt writing was opening a vein, but then he shot himself, so maybe he wasn’t too healthy.

You must have some ego to put yourself out there.

Second, I’m mad at myself for being intimidated by that psychiatrist. I felt he knew more than I did. Yeah, like in his little corner of the world. I’ve learned a lot since then.

See, here I am l writing out my feelings on the page. Natalie Goldberg is right; writing is therapeutic. That’s the reason some of us write. And it is our self-expression, and our creativity. (Maybe that’s one reason I am mad at the psychiatrist; he was shutting us down with shame.)  

I am living with my novel, which took a right turn this week. I decided one of the characters was boring; SLASH, off with the old, on with a new. I’m the God of the page. I’m having fun. I hope a reader will too.

 That’s the idea. There is too much doom and gloom these days. God almighty, it’s enough to drive a person to drink.

Okay, back to writing: Are you a writer? I have read many books on writing: Ray Bradbury, Steven King, Ernest Hemingway, oh, and Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon; that man is a genius, a breath of fresh air. (Sorry, folks, nothing is original. Kleon emphasized it. However, your expression, your take on it is.) My all-time favorite writers on writing are these three: Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.

I began painting the Tiny House this week. It’s sunny today. I will go out and do a bit more after this. I nudged my painter person, but got no response, so I began painting it myself. I want to sell this house and get it out of our driveway. My doctor ordered me not to work over my head, like painting. I thought, that’s the one thing I’m likely to do.

I will have to jack myself up or leave only the bottom painted.

See ya later,

Love and write to me.

Jo

P.S. You know about the slogan, "Write drunk, edit sober." Don't take that literally. It means write with wild abandon, edit it with sanity.

The Gatekeepers

 

Notice, I left the gate open.

I was rewriting old novels, editing. I don’t know if they’re real novels or practice ones, so far, they haven’t caught an agent's attention. Some say it’s harder to get an agent than it is to write the book in the first place, or even to get a publisher. But folks, if you are a writer, remember most of the books that make it have been rejected numerous times, even Harry Potter. Can you imagine those agents who rejected Harry Potter crying in their soup nightly because they missed it? Fifteen percent of a zillion bucks is what? Probably a billion.

About 20 years ago, when we lived in California, I took a workshop from a Screenplay agent in LA. At the time, my daughter and I were toying with a script. That agent, with her young daughter standing beside her the entire talk, said that agents invite a bunch of creative writing students to go through the slush pile. (Their stack of unsolicited manuscripts). First, they set them all in a room, throw in a pizza and packet of rejection slips, and lock the door.

That’s it.

I suspect it’s about the same with books. Maybe it has changed since publishers have more competition now that many authors are self-publishing their books and Indie publishers have best-sellers. I have the problem of thinking that few people want to spend the money on books with price tags publishers demand, but readers of Harry Potter must have forked out that money when the Harry Potter books were first released. And hey, who doesn’t want to believe in magic?

The success of JK Rowling and Harry Potter are not to be tampered with.

I don’t know why I began this blog as I did. I guess I am following my own advice to my grandson. Just begin writing, I told him, and see where it takes you.

He came up with a brilliant idea but doesn’t know how to implement it. He had compared what he calls “Culture,” meaning the youth of today, which includes artists, furies, Trans, and computer game creators, with religion. He says both wanted to give the people hope, and while religion says you can have it, you can find God, peace, salvation, all of those, he says Culture wants the same, but they believe it’s impossible.

That was so sad, a defeatist attitude, to want to express yourself only to believe you will never be successful at it.

That is the legacy we have given our young people.

He says he wants to give people HOPE.

That’s what I want too.

When I was editing those novels, and at home discussing theme, plot, the deciding moment, and the old saying that without conflict you have no story, I thought, I need to write a new book maybe it will hit the refresh button on my brain.

What if I, instead of following the convention that you must put your protagonist through hell, write a book where things work out? Yeah, yeah, I know, one must struggle first before events work out. But isn’t hope what we want? Don’t we want to believe that good is waiting for us—that life will get better?  And what about attitude and the belief that much is accomplished with a glad heart? Did we lose sight of those?

Is that boring? Think of the book Chicken Soup for the Soul. It stayed on the Best Seller List for 4 years.  What about Robert Fulghum's book, Everything I Know I Learned in Kindergarten which stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list for two years. And I loved the recent book Theo of Golden, basically uplifting—not that people didn’t have troubles, or were sad, but it was enchanting. You think people don’t want good news?

Every time I open my computer, it spits something depressing at me.  I’m tired of the Government's rabble. I’m tired bitching, snipping, and arguing. I want something that shows the goodness in people.

 

 

Five Rules for Writers*

 

and read:

I would say that I keep a novel going all the time, but there is a moment between books where I'm searching for another.

I read, not because Steven King said, "If you don't have time to read, you don't have time to write,' but because I love reading. And selfishly, I want to have beautiful phrases running through my head as encouragement, and with the hope that they will teach my brain how to write decent phrases and descriptions.

I don't tend to be flowery with words, and poetry boggles my mind, like someone writing music—how in the heck do they do it?  That Dolly Parton keeps perking them out. "I write the songs that make the young girl's cry," Oh, that wasn't her song. Bruce Johnson (1975) wrote it. And in 1977, it won a Grammy for Barry Manilow.

At first, Manilow didn't want to sing the song, for unless you really listen to the words, it sounds like an ego trip for the lyricist.

"I Write the Songs," wrote Joanna Landrum, "isn't just a self-aggrandizing anthem for the gifted songwriter; it's a poetic ode to the universal power of music. At its core, the song celebrates the emotional and transformative impact of music on humanity, suggesting that the essence of music itself is the actual creator of songs."

 

"I wrote the very first song." The MUSE. GOD, MUSIC?

 

Finally, in my search for novels, I decided to check out the best and found Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, a Pulitzer Prize nominee.  Over the years, I had heard of that book but didn't know what it was about — a scholarly book about Christianity or the Bible? No, it was a bestseller about the Congo, with religion, philosophy, and politics intertwined in a way that only a deft hand can achieve.

It deeply impacted me.

 Poisonwood has two meanings; one is a plant in the Congo that, when touched, will give a terrible rash. The other means Blessed.  There are many words, especially in primitive cultures, that have multiple meanings.

The Poisonwood Bible was set in the Eisenhower era when the US was trying to bring Democracy to the Belgian Congo. (Or force, and it looks as though they are trying again.) The Poisonwood Bible is about a Missionary family who move to the Congo to give them Christianity. The father, the Preacher, is so obsessed with bringing Christ and baptizing all the little heathens that he would let his family starve to do it. And starving is what the natives of their village are constantly on the verge of while trying their damnest to avoid.

The viewpoint is from the wife, the mother, and her four daughters. Each of the five has their own voice, which Kingsolver said she wrote their monologues over and over to get their tones and perspectives.

One point I took away was that democracy doesn't work when people rush to a vote without having a viable discussion and coming to some consensus. As an old chief said, "When a vote is 49 to 51, half the population is angry all the time.

Kingsolver lived in the Congo for a time, and she said she researches the devil out of her books. She wants to be honest and have her readers trust her. One point that surprised me is that Kingsolver isn't afraid to use cliches, idioms, and everyday speech in her writing, something writing teachers try to drum out of writers. "Your writing is too good to use convenient slang." Well well.

I also read Kingsolver's The Bean Trees, which I loved. It warmed my heart; it didn't tear it out. I got a kick out of her description of Oklahoma, where my husband and I attended school for two years. In The Bean Trees, I gained some insight into the Cheyenne Nation of Oklahoma.

And people read more non-fiction because it teaches them something. Hum.

Kingsolver won the Pulitzer prize for Damon Copperhead, which I've chosen not to read for I don't want to endure a little boy getting slapped around by a man his mother marries.

I can take just so much angst.

I read a sweet little book this past week titled The Family Journal by Carolyn Brown about a divorced mother who finds her 14 girl smoking marijuana and her little 12-year-old boy sneaking out at night to drink beer. She decided that tough love was in order and moved them to a small town where she had inherited her family's old house and rented it to an agriculture teacher. (Enter a hunk.) It's handy to have an inheritance, but then, that is the stuff of novels. It reminded me of how much fun it is to grow up on a farm, as well as how much work it entails. Children seldom get bored on the farm and often begin to love and care for the animals.

The kids hate her at first, of course.

When I closed the book, I said, "Now that was refreshing."

 

*Here are Barbara Kingsolver's five rules for writers:

1.     Give yourself permission to write a bad book.

2.     Revise until it isn't a bad book.

3.     Get cozy with your own company.

4.     Study something besides writing.

5.     If you're young and smoke, you should quit.

She goes on to say that you want to live to an old age, for it is then that you do your best writing.

There's hope for me yet.