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Author: Jessica Ruprecht

Lessons from a dead bird

The dead bird is flat as a pancake on the sidewalk. It looks small — just a baby, then — perhaps an adventurer tumbled inadvertently from the nest, or the shy quiet one forcibly defenestrated by an aggressive older brother.

What surprises me is the remarkable flatness of dead bird’s body. The bird has been compressed entirely into two dimensions and I imagine that if I peeled it up from the sidewalk it would feel in my hand not unlike a sheet of paper.

I don’t pick up the bird.

I cannot invent a good explanation for how the bird became so flat. I imagine the height a baby bird would need to fall from to become so perfectly flattened by the resulting splat — I cannot believe the trees overhead are tall enough — not even factoring in the possibility of softness in the growing bones of a baby bird.

Perhaps the bird has been run over. But how it would have found it’s way from the street to where it lies fused with the sidewalk, I cannot imagine.

The bird’s shape regards me mournfully, its feet curled up into its chest in a mockery of the way I myself have curled up on lonely nights — flattened by exhaustion and the weight of a world I struggle to endure.

Perhaps this baby bird is a metaphor. Squashed flat not by any specific force, but merely by the weight of life itself — a metaphor for my own worn and weary heart.

—

I pass the dead bird on many subsequent evenings, watch as it seems to melt slowly into the crannies of the cobbled sidewalk. I am the only person who seems to notice the bird, a tiny tragedy of blue feathers and grasping feet pressed helplessly into the paving stones below.

The bird does not decompose in the gross way that bodies usually do — becoming a nest of maggots and liquefying entrails. Due perhaps to its flatness, the bird has desiccated on the sidewalk and so it decomposes not unlike a sheet of paper, becoming dirtied and besmirched by the passing feet of passers by. It’s feathers melt away until it is little more than a skeleton pressed flat into the sidewalk.

And then one day it is gone.

—

One day it’s gone and when I walk by on my way home from work, I find I miss its steady presence — I miss the daily reminder to let life ache a little in the hollow cavern of my chest, to let the world feel sharp and painful for a bittersweet moment.

I miss the daily reminder to feel again, after so many years of choking numbness. In this small, helpless bird I have, at last, found a reason to ache in a way I could never justify aching for myself — for the ruin that seems to have crept into my own life as I plodded on, so utterly unaware.

I miss the daily reminder to mourn for the baby bird that wasn’t, for the living birds that invested so much to incubate a fragile egg and — more than that — I miss the reminder to mourn for the small tragedies that litter everyday life like the litter that lingers along sidewalks, tucked away in shrubs and nestled among tree roots on my walk to work each morning, or the litter strewn along the freeway that I pass by each day on the bus. I miss the reminder to mourn for the flowers that have melted away too soon, under the weight of a persistent downpour.

These days I am eager to mourn, because it is only from sorrow that we begin to imagine a better way, it is only by travelling through sorrow that we remember joy. And so, even as I mourn, I am beginning to dream. I dream dreams of sidewalks free of garbage and empty of dead baby birds.

And my only regret is the bird’s body vanished to dust before I could scrape it up from the sidewalk and give it burial befitting the gratitude I feel for having experienced its gentle reminder. A reminder served by fragile feet curled up helplessly against flattened bird belly and the triangulation of a beak pointed straight toward the heart.

 

Now it’s your turn! What has touched your heart lately? Let me know in the comments.

 

How to know when you’re ready to leap

I’ve been thinking about “taking the leap” a lot lately as I’m considering what comes next for me. I’m writing a book right now, and writing this book feels like a fitting end to this chapter of my life — a chapter defined by academics and MIT and growing up, a chapter defined by becoming the person I am today: a person who blogs and reads and writes, one who is writing a book.

When you start writing a book it’s impossible not to think about publication.

It’s impossible to put words down on the page and not wonder about the people who might one day pick up those pages and read those words. It’s impossible not to wonder what will they think? will they like these words I have written? how will they judge me?

The question I keep coming back to is: how will I know when I’m ready?

How will I know when I’m ready to leap, to dare to be seen, to just freaking do it already? Because I’ve been waffling a long time, one foot in science, one foot in poetry, one foot in some nebulous future I can’t even imagine — and I can’t help but worry over the thoughts, the fears that keep holding me back.

It’s easy to start writing a book full of the feeling that writing your book is somehow “safe” because probably no one will ever read it anyways. But as I’ve continued working on mine I’ve realized the most important thing: I’ve realized that I don’t want my book to be just words that linger on my digital desk. I want, some day, to share them with the world. And sharing my book with the world will require an unimaginable leap of faith.

So I wanted to boil it down today, because it occurs to me that the question of when will I be ready to leap? can be put like this: Will I regret not doing it more than I would regret trying and failing? I think that’s the only question I need to know the answer to. And, as I commit ever more words to the page on this book, the answer to that question is rapidly becoming yes!

The more I write, the more I invest in this book, the more I begin to feel that I can’t back out now — I’m already in.

I’ve got some 80 (double-spaced) pages tucked away on my hard drive these days and with each page I feel a little like I’m deepening my own grave — because very, very soon I know I’ll have reached the point from which there is no turning back. The point at which the cost of quitting is higher than the cost of failing — because there comes a point beyond which the most important thing is that you really tried.

And I’m almost to that point with my book. I’m almost past the point of no return.

If there’s something you’re dreaming of but can’t quite dare to do in your life, here are five tips for getting to the point of no return on your project:

  1. Start small. You think I’m joking, but I’m not. Start small. Start so small it feels stupid. Write one paragraph or one scene. Write for 20 mins. If 20 minutes feels like too much, then write for 10 or maybe even 5. Start so small it feels easy. (Start so small you’d feel worse about not doing it because it’s so ridiculously easy.)
  2. Grow slowly. Celebrate your first paragraph or page or chapter but don’t overdo it. Don’t finish your first 20 minutes and then binge on a four hour tear. This is how you achieve burn out. Instead, when your 20 mins are up, STOP. Stop while you’re still excited, because that way you’ll be looking forward to 20 more minutes tomorrow.
  3. A timer is your friend. I resisted the timer so much when I first started writing, but now I don’t really know what I’d do without one. I set timers for everything. Pick one that doesn’t make you jump when it goes off. Pick one that goes off gently. And then set gentle, sacred boundaries around your time.
  4. Don’t over think it. The middle is the most dangerous part. The moment where you’re almost to the point of no return. The moment when it is your absolute last chance, the last moment in which it might still be ok if you fail, if you quit, if you cop out on your dreams. I just didn’t have it in me, I couldn’t do it, I guess it wasn’t for me. The excuses are already piling up in your head and this is the moment when you need to stop thinking. You need to just keep setting your timer and do it.
  5. You win. Really. Because here’s the thing — even if my book never gets published, even if no one ever reads it, even if people do read it and they hate it, or me — whatever might happen I win if I tried. I win if I put my life on the line, if I took a risk, a plunge, if I dared to do different, to be different. I win if I dared to expand until I was as big or bigger than my dreams — even if I never achieve exactly the dreams I set out to achieve.

If you’re struggling with taking the leap in your own life, here’s some related reading:

Now, it’s your turn! Do you have a project you’ve been dreaming about getting started on? If so, what’s been stopping you from taking the leap? Let me know in the comments!

 

Heimat and homesickness

In German there is a word, Heimat, which rather famously doesn’t have any direct translation into English. Most commonly the word is translated as “home” or “homeland”, words which are respectively, too small and too large to encompass the feeling of Heimat.

Heimat is more than a home and less than a homeland. It is the spaces that made you, the places that live tenderly inside your heart, it is not one place but many places — places that somehow add up to something whole.

When I first learned the word Heimat in a German class during college it seemed to me a revelation. A word that I had been looking for ever since I had left my home and flown across the country to go to school at MIT. It was a word I hadn’t known I’d need until I had moved away from home and found myself unable to explain the way I missed my home: not so much with sadness, but almost viscerally — as though the rocks and trees themselves were a part of me that I’d left, planted in soft soil some 3,000 miles away.

I still feel that way. Even after living in Boston for almost seven years, the city has never felt like home. My Heimat is still a piece of Northern California roughly described by the boundaries of Humboldt County, a place that is indelibly etched on the ventricles of my heart.

I mention this because the weather in Boston has been remarkably reminiscent of home this past week and I’ve been feeling more than a little homesick (heimwehkrank) as I listened to the rain pouring down outside my bedroom window and remembered so many nights spent similarly as a child in my bed at home.

This week I thought I’d share a little something I wrote about it:

It’s raining in Boston — a grey, cold rain that reminds of Christmas in California even though today is the first day of June. The sound of the rain dances in my soul and I feel blessed and washed clean of the weariness and heartbreaks that have gathered in me since the moment I first boarded a plane, almost seven years ago now, and flew away from the rocky beaches and tall trees I call home.

I boarded that plane with my heart in my throat but with a miracle stretching out before me — an unfolding of possible futures that had felt limitless.

As I flew across the country and away from childhood, as I descended into adulthood, I felt at once impossibly small and still larger than life, tucked away in the confines of my seat.

Now, seven years later, I no longer feel the same swell of possibility that floated in me as my heart caught in my throat. Seven years later and I feel bone-weary and over-wrought in a way that leaves me wondering, more days than not, whether it is still possible to keep on going when I feel so very tired.

And the miracle is that I do.

Day after day. Year after year.

Each morning I march off into the dawn like the “good” girl I’ve always aspired to be.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I can feel in me an exhausted yearning for tall trees and rocky beaches. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I miss my home some days the way one might miss a lost tooth — as though there is a palpable emptiness inside me that I remain unable to fill.

I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I long to go home. Someday.

On some not-so-distant future morning.

But not this morning. Because on this morning the rains have come to wash my weariness clean and I can almost imagine that the swish of cars driving by on soggy streets is the sound of spruce trees — swaying in the wind.

 

Now it’s your turn! What does Heimat mean to you?

 

Does writing have to be hard?

Here’s the question that’s been plaguing me ever since I started working on a book a few months back: does writing have to be hard?

I desperately wanted the answer to this question to be no, of course not. But everywhere I looked I seemed to find authors bemoaning the agony of their fates as they birthed books into the world — a process often likened to a woman’s labor in childbirth. (More than a little melodramatic, no?)

And yet, as I committed to writing my book and got to work it seemed that every sentence was a struggle. I labored over every word. I worried that I had somehow managed to bungle the book before I had even really managed to start. I wrote the beginning over and over again — never really satisfied with my efforts, always feeling like somehow I’d already missed the mark.

I’m two months in now and I’m no longer struggling as much to write.

Which isn’t to say that my writing is always easy, but it’s no longer always hard.

There’s a lot of narrative among writers that suggests the writing process must be hard if the work is to be good. If you don’t struggle over each story and labor intensely over every word, then somehow your writing will never be truly great.

It’s a narrative that has been perpetuated by many unhappy writers — the myth of the tortured artist is alive and well in many artistic fields today. But personally, I think it’s just that: a myth.

For the past couple of months, as I’ve dived into the writing this book, I’ve been reaching for a new goal: I want my writing to feel effortless. I want my writing to feel joyful and fun and easy. I want the words to flow from my fingertips with grace.

Because this is the real truth: writing a book is a lot of work.

But I think that the work doesn’t have to be hard.

What if, instead, your writing could be joyful?

As I’ve embarked on this book-writing journey I keep remembering how I used to write when I was a little girl. Like many writers, I started writing young. I wrote my first stories in elementary school and by age 12 or so I had written the first hundred pages of my very first (and still unfinished) book.

When I was 12 writing was easy. And more than that — writing was fun. I delighted in dreaming up worlds and characters for my stories and once I had them dreamed up the words seemed to flow from me.

When I was 12 I didn’t struggle so much with self-censorship — that dreaded inner critic that we writers like to spend so much of our time talking about. I didn’t worry about writer’s block — writing ideas were plentiful. I never worried about finding a “great” one, I just sat down, stared at the blank page, and then charged forward with the first idea that popped into my head.

When I was 12 my writing wasn’t great. I’ve been back and re-read the beginning of that book I started writing in middle school and it’s cringe-worthy in places. And, yes, when I was 12 I wrote a lot of crummy stories that had faulty plots and fragile characters — stories that didn’t hold together very well on the page.

But among those failures are nuggets of gold. Poems I wrote not long after that, at age 14 or 15, that really do hold up. Stories that start to catch my attention, to draw me in as I look back at them again, more than a decade later.

Among the wealth of garbage, I also managed to write some things that were unexpectedly good.

I’ve made it my goal to reclaim joy in my writing, and I’m doing it with play.

As adults in America (and this is especially true for women) we don’t play. I’ve been reading Brigid Schulte’s fantastic book Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time and it’s a fascinating portrait of leisure time for parents (mostly focused on mothers) in American families. But the chapter I’m reading right now is all about the absence (and huge importance) of play.

I think that play is the secret to falling back in love with your writing.

When we talk about writer’s block or the inner critic what we mean is that we’re letting our fear get in the way of the words. Writer’s block is not a state of having nothing to write about — it’s a state of fear that none of those ideas are “good enough” to be worthy of writing down. Writer’s block is an existential crises, not a literal one — because story ideas are everywhere.

There are lots of articles about “20 ways you can beat writer’s block”. But I think the real truth is that you only need one. You need to play.

What if writing was a game? What if your writing was where you went to play?

When I was 12 and I wrote, my writing was a game. It was a game of dreaming up ideas and putting them down on paper and seeing what happened. It was a game of experimentation and getting messy.

Most importantly, when I was 12, my writing was a game at which it was ok to fail. It was a game I always got to keep on playing — even if the story in question turned out badly.

As an adult, I’m finding that the same thing is true. If it treat my writing like a game the words pour out and I don’t worry about them. The story ideas come and I don’t worry about whether or not they’re good enough — I just start writing them and see if they turn into something interesting. (And if they don’t, no big deal, I just move onto the next one).

This new approach has been invaluable. I’ve stopped worrying about finding the “right” beginning for my book. I’ve stopped worrying about whether the scenes I’m writing are the “right” scenes — if they are the ones that will ultimately tell the story.

I’ve stopped worrying. And in exchange the scenes pour out of me easily, effortlessly, and not always in order. The words come out rapidly, joyfully, and with a surprisingly lyric grace that is more artful than anything I could have dared to achieve with a more painstaking approach.

Most of all, for the very first time since I was 12, I feel like my writing has become prolific. Free of worry about doing the writing “right”, I’m finding that the words come at the speed of thought and the pages have been stacking up at a rate I can hardly dare to trust.

If it keeps going like this I might even have to rethink my position on participating in NaNoWriMo — because maybe, for the first time, I’ve finally unlocked the secret.

After all, I just wrote more than 1,000 words of this blog post in 30 minutes. At that rate NaNoWriMo can be achieved in less than an hour of writing each day.

Of course, many of these words will fall to the floor as I go back and revise and tighten up my thoughts and turn this post into something someone else (you!) might want to read.

But I think it’s an excellent example of the point I’m making.

Your writing need only be as hard as you want it to be. And if you want to write with ease, I strongly encourage you to try thinking of your writing as a care-free act of play! 🙂

 

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This does not affect your price.

The Paradox of Publishing in Literary Magazines

The accumulation of rejection letters from publishing houses and literary magazines is an infamous rite of passage for authors. The writing world is full of stories of heartbreak, stories of quitting, and stories of wearing rejections proudly like a badge of courage. As I myself have recently started collecting rejections, I’ve been giving some thought to their implications on our writing.

In the past few months, I’ve started submitting my writing to literary magazines with nothing but rejections to show for it so far (admittedly, my sample size is small). But one of the magazines from which I’ve recently been rejected indicated in their letter that they had accepted work from only 2% of authors who submitted work for that issue.

A 2% acceptance rate is a number that stops me in my tracks.

Just to put a 2% acceptance rate in context, the year I was accepted to MIT (2008) they had an acceptance rate of 11.9%. And with a 12% acceptance rate, I considered myself extremely fortunate to have been accepted to MIT.

Getting submitted to a literary magazine is an order of magnitude more difficult than getting accepted to MIT.

Well ok, these days the MIT acceptance rate is down to 8%, but still.

And unlike MIT, where qualifications are at least more-or-less based on measurable achievements and performance (grades, courses, standardized tests, extracurricular engagement, etc.), literary magazines are in the business of grading art and art is unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) a matter of not just quality but also of taste. Which means that as authors our work is judged not merely on merit, but on the vagaries and whims of editorial taste.

I think we can learn a couple of things from this staggering statistic:

1. No really, do your research.

Editors often like to tell writers to read the magazine before they submit. Because acceptance rates are so small it’s very important that the submitted pieces actually be a good match to the tastes of the editors in charge of the publication.

If you submit a piece to a journal that doesn’t fit the “ethos” of the journal, your chances of acceptance are less than zero. You’re really just wasting everyone’s time.

2. If you don’t feel like doing research, submit everywhere.

This is the shotgun approach and I’m naturally not inclined to this sort of approach because it’s so inefficient — but it might also be your best bet if you just want to get published and don’t particularly care where. After all, if a literary magazine has a 2% acceptance rate and you submit your piece to 100 qualified markets you’re likely to get two acceptances.

There are however a few problems with this approach: there may not be one hundred qualified markets for your piece (likely there aren’t) and you have to do all the overhead of finding the markets, writing cover letters, etc. for each submission.

3. Submitting to literary journals might not be worth your time.

I don’t really know the answer to this because I haven’t been published in a literary magazine, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suppose that 90% of literary magazines have a very small readership and that those that do have a significant readership are extremely hard to get in to (of order 1-2% acceptance).

Because of this, it may simply not be worth your time to polish and submit pieces for publication in literary magazines. If your goal is simply to get your words in front of an audience you may do better with a more grassroots approach utilizing platforms with a lower barrier to entry.

4. Don’t take your rejections personally.

With such low acceptance rates, a rejection really has no bearing on the quality of your submission. Significantly more submissions were qualified for acceptance than were actually accepted for any issue.

This means that your piece was most likely rejected on grounds other than merit and you shouldn’t feel disheartened by your rejections.

Which all adds up to what, exactly?

Here’s what I’ve concluded for myself, (but feel free to draw your own conclusions!).

Literary magazines and story contests are an inefficient way of building a platform for fiction writers.

I think there are lots of free ways to get your words in front of readers with a much lower barrier to entry than literary magazines (places like Wattpad or Medium.com, using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, etc.). Although, with that said, I have no actual experience with how effective these platforms are so please correct me if I’m wrong.

I think that submitting to literary magazines is kind of fun

I particularly like writing pieces for magazines running themed issues! Because I think it’s fun, I will likely keep submitting work at the rate of a piece every few weeks. I don’t expect to see any positive result from this for at least the first year, and I don’t think it’s a great use of my time except that once those pieces have been rejected I can take them elsewhere: I can publish them on my own site or on another platform.

I won’t be taking the shotgun approach to literary magazine submission.

I hate researching markets and forever rewriting form cover letters and I would derive no joy from the process. The shotgun approach might yield results faster but I wouldn’t enjoy the process, so I’m not going to do it.

I think the only real argument for submitting to literary magazines at all is that it grows your credibility as a writer.

And growing your credibility as a writer is awesome — just don’t count on literary magazines as your primary route to platform building.

 

What do you think? Do you submit your work to literary journals? What strategies have you found most effective for building a platform? Let me know in the comments below!