The Work of Writing

I don't think I'm lazy. Not really. But when it comes to writing, I have this feeling that talent is supposed to ooze out of my pores and flow across the screen or page. I expect that if it's good—if I'm good—polished writing will simply flow. When it doesn't work that way, I despair.

That's just plain silly.

Now that I've read almost every single word of Stephanie Klein's blog, Greek Tragedy, I can tell you for sure that's now how it works for her. Publishers may have sought her out, and she may have gotten a two-book deal out of Judith Regan without writing a single query letter, but that woman works at her writing.

During the editing phase of her new book, Moose, Klein gave readers a glimpse of what goes on behind the curtain. Looking for an improvement on a single sentence, she considered dozens of ways to complete the phrase, "lazy as a. . . ," eventually settling on "Susan." At another point, she spent nearly a day trying to ascertain whether chickens have hair. Turns out the tiny, hair-like things she saw on a plucked chicken were pin feathers. This information allowed her to change two words, which made her manuscript the tiniest bit more accurate.

Klein also tells of polling her friends to find out what they carried in their purses and googling 80s slang until she'd read nearly everything available on the web and still asked her readers for additional suggestions.

Writing is fun. It's compelling. It's also work. The only way to get it right is to invest the time and effort necessary to link words into sentences into paragraphs into stories. The only way to sell a book is to tell stories someone will pay to read.

It only seems like that should be simple.

Lost and Found

A lighthouse disappeared from Cape Cod in 1925 and reappeared in California in 2008.

I like lighthouses, the windswept places they squat, the forlorn shores they announce, the economy of their scales. I like that the biggest thing the lighthouse keepers kept was faith. That's what all the glass polishing and lamp tending added up to: a two-way kind of faith. Sailors trusted the lighthouse keepers would be there and the keepers trusted that their vigilance mattered.

It's not easy to keep the faith when nothing happens. Nobody washed up on shore today. Break out the champagne!

Probably not.

Last night I dreamed I was pregnant and didn't know, not exactly. My stomach was huge, impossible to miss. I was stunned when the contractions started. Nothing had happened for so long, there had been no movement, that I thought it was over. Then I looked down and saw ripples beneath my skin, evidence that someone was about to be born. Ecstatic. That's the only word.

Maybe that someone was really something.

My book proposal has been out more than an month now. We've had two rejections so far. No word from the other 8 editors who have the proposal. My agent started out so optimistic that I was, too. But nothing has happened for so long that it feels like it never will.

Who knows. Impossible things happen every day. Hell, they just found a lighthouse that had been missing for 82 years.

Fear and Writing in KC

When I first lived alone, I was afraid. Of the dark, mostly. Or of what lived in it. As each night approached, fear made a pallet on the floor of my chest and slipped ice from its drink into my bloodstream. Every squeak or scratch, whether from tree branch or night owl, demanded that I fight or flee, but there was nothing to fight and nowhere to run.

Now I walk outside at 2:33 am to let the dog pee, disarmed and disturbed only by being awakened at such an hour. That may be progress.

I stumbled across the writing of Stephanie Klein the other day. I've been reading her blog archives for days, every spare minute. Believing she was put on this earth to write, she carries a notebook at all times, scribbles in journals, posts every day, or nearly so. Her writing is fearless, shocking even. She spares herself (and the reader) nothing. She worries. She frets and obsesses. But she writes every day.

She must have been right about being born for this because the publishing world flew paper airplanes through her transom, asking for her time and consideration, rather than the opposite, more usual order of things. Without a single query, without an agent, without a manuscript, she made a two book deal.

Stephanie started the blog after a painful divorce. In the beginning, she was afraid of lots of things: getting fat (again), spending the rest of her life alone, being too difficult (crazy, even). She did not hide under the covers. She used her keyboard to light a fire under her life, one big enough to keep the scary stuff away or at least circling at a pretty safe distance.

Four years later, she's married again, with twins more than a year old. Her fears are different now, but she's still facing them on the page and living the life she imagined as well as one she couldn't.

Like most people, Stephanie Klein is a lot of things. One of them is a writer. And a writer writes. Fearlessly.



check out Stephanie's books, Straight Up and Dirty and Moose.

Signs, Signs, Everywhere the Signs

While sitting down to meditate yesterday, I noticed a feather floating at the edge of the pond. It looked mighty similar to the two feathers on my meditation altar, the ones Jennifer gave me at the workshops. I thought about going out to pick it up, but let that thought go and got on with my meditation.

This was the first feather I've seen on the pond or on the banks in the two years I've lived here. It's always seemed strange that, with dozens of geese around all the time, there are no feathers lying about.

This morning, as I was lighting my meditation candle, I wondered what had happened to the feather, wondered whether it was—by some really strange chance—still out there on the pond. It didn't seem likely, but I checked.

I found not one but two feathers floating in almost the exact same place the feather had been yesterday. One is floating along, held up by the other. Reminds me of the circle and the way we hold and suport one another.



Bidden or unbidden, God is present.

Thinking of England

Remember a few weeks ago when I was all verklempt over the intros an editor rejected? The ones I couldn't find ways to write?

The comments I got were—as always—kind and loving and helpful. Realized this morning I'd never let you all know what happened.

One day I sat down in my beautiful red leather recliner and refused to let myself get up until I'd written them. I visited web sites and bulletin boards for cigar smokers and people who love to pamper themselves to get a flavor of what they talk about among themselves.

Then I mediated a moment, consciously turning loose of my reservations and my own opinions about the topics. Finally, I wrote.

Can't say it exactly flowed, but I did manage to hit the word count with every one, "pumping up the envy factor" all over the place. They were pretty over the top if you ask me, but I got it done.

The editor sent a one line response: Thank you. These are exactly what I was looking for.

I read one to Mystic Wing yesterday and he informed me I'm now officially a literary whore. Works for me. In the end, all I had to do was close my eyes and think of England the pond.