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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!

 

 

Is resistance ruling your life?

How are you living your “one wild and precious life” (to quote Mary Oliver)? Do you struggle to do the things you want to do? Do you feel like you’re four steps behind where you want to be? Do you feel like you work and work and work but that your work never gets you anywhere you want to be?

This is exactly how I have felt for the past two or three years. Ever since I graduated from college I’ve been stuck in a rut that I know isn’t where I want to be, but from which I seem unable to free myself. It was a state of affairs that left me feeling frustrated and baffled and kept me from living my best life. Until recently, that is, when I read this article by Martha Beck, in which she writes:

“As every life coach knows, the way we do anything is the way we do everything. The same thoughts… torture me when I’m writing, emailing, even sleeping. I should be going faster, getting somewhere. I should have more to show for this. I shouldn’t have to double back, to revisit old emotional issues, to wipe the same damn kitchen counter every day. These thoughts burble along just under the surface of my consciousness every day. They make me slightly anxious—okay, some days irrationally terrified—and lend a driven quality to moments when I could be relaxed and present.” [[Emphasis mine.]]

And, you guys, it was like a thunderclap in my head as, with a whooshing sound, I realized something incredibly profound:

I do everything in my life with resistance.

Every single thing I do I treat as though it’s a struggle. Getting out of bed in the morning is a drag. Making my lunch is a drag. My day job — a double drag.

By the time I get home at night I’m so tired from dragging myself around all day that the things I actually wanted to do with my evening turn out to be… you guessed it, a drag!

Because my chosen after work activities (like my writing!) felt like a drag, I would often avoid them. And then I would feel terrible guilt for having avoided doing the things I was “supposed to” do. (Even if they only person who had decided I was “supposed to” do them was myself.)

But what if it didn’t have to be like that?

What if your life could be effortless and joyful instead of a drag?

What if you could make your life effortless simply by choosing to stop resisting what is? These questions have been plaguing me for the better part of a week  — and I have to tell you, the results so far have been nothing short of amazing. Already my life feels lighter and more joyful. Already I am beginning to find space to breathe for what seems like the first time in years (decades even).

I’m finding myself sitting down to happily do tasks that I have resisted for years. Suddenly my writing practice, which I have struggled to grow into anything robust, feels almost effortless.

I used to fall into a trap where I knew I wanted to write, at least in theory. But whenever I had the time to write I would find myself doing something else — anything else.

If you find yourself struggling to achieve your goals, I invite you to ask yourself this question:

What are you really resisting?

Because what I now realize is that I was resisting becoming the person I really want to be.

Somewhere deep down in my lizard-brain I was still struggling to hold onto my vision of myself as I am/was: the good student, the scientist, the professional. I wasn’t allowing myself to set aside those old dreams in order to step fully into the person I am interested in becoming: the adventurer, the poet, the writer.

So if your dreams seem continually out of reach, or you’re always struggling but never really satisfied with your success, I invite you to question what it is you’re actually struggling against.

Because if you are like me, you might just find that you’ve been struggling against yourself.

And the only thing I know for sure is that that is a battle we’ll never manage to win.

 

I’d love to hear from you! What are you struggling with in your life? What seems to be holding you back? What is it that keeps getting in your way?

Let me know in the comments below!

 

No one wants to read your victim story

Do you want to tell a hero story or a victim story?
You get to choose.

I’ve been writing a lot of memoir lately. Partly, this is because writing memoir seems to be an important piece of my journey to tackle my decades long habit of hiding and my soul-crushing fear of being seen. Partly, it’s because memoir fascinates me.

When I set out to tackle the genre of memoir, the first thing I found myself confronted with is the flimsiness of the truth. After all, truth is what separates memoir from fiction.

Or is it? Memory is tricky and truth may be unknowable. Do I really remember the time I explained how lightning works to my mom at age four? Or have I just heard the story so many times I’ve reconstructed the memory based on the details of the story?

As memoirists our job is twofold. On the one hand, we vow to tell the truth as best we know it. On the other hand, memoir is not so much about the simple facts, the truths of our lives — memoir is about how we come to make sense of those facts, those truths. And because of this, every memoirist is faced with a choice:

What kind of story do you want your memoir to tell?

I’ve been participating in Anna Kunnecke’s Queen Sweep program for the past few weeks, and she has participants start by “sweeping” their stories. She encourages participants to move “from victim to hero” in the story of their own lives. She invites us to reconsider the way we talk to ourselves about our lives, to make the shift from “poor-put-upon me” to “kicking-ass-and-taking-names me”.

For me, the shift looks something like this:

A girl grew up. She did all the things she was supposed to do and just about killed herself bending over backwards to achieve success. In the end, it won her nothing except crippling exhaustion, a deadened heart, and a desk job she came to loathe more and more every day.

Sad, whiny victim-me is full of pouting and sad-faces. But what about hero-me? How does she see my life?

A girl grew up. She had a series of wonderful opportunities/adventures which led her to one of the best colleges in the country. There she got to study the mysteries of the universe alongside some of the smartest people in the world. After she graduated, she landed a job in her field that paid better than she’d dared to dream — and when it turned out she still wasn’t happy, she took matters into her own hands and set off on an adventure to redefine her purpose and reconnect with joy.

So, here’s the real question — whose story would you rather read? Because if I could only buy one of these stories, I’d pick the brave story of hero-me over the whiny, self-absorbed story of victim-me in a heartbeat.

It occurs to me to wonder whether this is all writing memoir is — the opportunity to meet your victim story on the page and discover the ways in which it’s actually the story of a hero.

Right now, I’m thinking the answer is yes — but feel free to chime in with your thoughts in the comments below!

And I want to make something else very clear — victim-story, hero-story — they’re not about whether or not you were a victim. They’re about how you choose to respond in the aftermath of your victimhood. No one escapes life without some bad things happening, and some people encounter more than their share of unpleasantness. These generally aren’t things we have control over. What we get to decide is how do we want to respond to the unpleasantness in our life? By choosing the hero-story over the victim-story we have the opportunity to re-empower ourselves and make courageous choices in the face of our circumstances.

I don’t know for sure, but I think that shifting your perspective about your life from victim to hero might just be the kind of powerful magic that has the potential to change everything.

So, which story do you choose?

Let me know in the comments below! And if you’re interested in reading something more on this topic I highly recommend this article by Anna Kunnecke.

And, if you’re feeling victim-y about something that’s happening in your life I invite you to ask yourself this: What action could I take in this situation that would make me feel like a badass?

And then go do that — because you deserve to be (and feel) awesome! (Example here.)

 

Facing the fear of being seen

The thing about fear is it rises up in your throat until you’re choking on it and you think you might be about to puke. Suddenly your hand isn’t your own anymore as you feel your way into the words, taste them on the tip of your tongue, and then can’t quite bring yourself to put them down on the page.

Fear is the nagging voice in the back of your head that says you can’t say that and warns that they might not like you if they really know who you are. And because you got used to hiding at an early age, you think it’s safest if no one ever knows the real you.

After all, even you aren’t sure about that person you fear you might be.

The thing about fear is that it’s staying home when you want to go out and not offering help when you see someone who is lost on a street you know like the lines on the palm of your own hand and you’re tempted to say hey, where are you trying to go and maybe I could help?

But you don’t because that’s not the sort of thing that people do and no one asked you and everything feels easier if you turn aside and look away and above all you don’t make eye contact.

Because if you meet their eyes they’ll speak up after all and say hey, I’m looking for this place

And even though that’s exactly what you wanted to offer a moment ago, now you’re choking on the thought of how you’re in a rush and it’s so inconvenient to stop and you don’t know the area as well as you thought and you wouldn’t be of any help anyways.

And this is why you mustn’t make eye contact.

Dodging gazes — it’s been the way you’ve lived your life since you were small and you learned that teachers wouldn’t call on you in class if you didn’t make eye contact. You learned that you wouldn’t have to raise your trembling voice and worry what the other kids would think. That maybe you were showing off because you always knew the answers. Even though you weren’t and you didn’t want them to think that. (School was always easy for you — but people not so much and this is where you stopped make eye contact.)

But the thing about the fear is that you’ve finally come head-to-heart with the fact that fear is the only thing that’s still holding you back.

That it’s the lump in your throat that’s growing like a cancer until it eats at your voice, until time after time at the very last moment you’re forever turning your head aside and averting your eyes because this is what you do:

You never, ever make eye contact.

And what you’ve only just begun to realize is that eye contact is the beginning of everything — a solitary moment that says I’m here and I see you and look, you see me!

And that for just an instant we see eye to eye, two as one, separate and together — and together has always been larger than I.

Which is how I know that, no matter how frightened I am, it’s time to start making eye contact again.

It’s finally time to be seen.

 

What fears are holding you back?

It’s a question I’ve been bumping up against all over the place lately as I struggle to find a way to grow as both a writer and as a promoter of my writing. Because as much as we like to pretend it’s a dirty word, writing without some self-promotion is an awful lot like shouting into the void.

And the truth I keep running up against is that I’ve built my life around a pattern of hiding. It’s a pattern that began in school when I was the smart kid, the one who always had the right answers but didn’t have the right friends, the one who always stuck out in the crowd. The older I got the more different I felt and the more isolating it became. 

As a defensive maneuver, I retreated into myself and in doing so I initiated a pattern of hiding. Of hiding me, not from myself, but from everyone else.

It’s a pattern that still haunts me today, even as I’m struggling to be a writer and it’s a pattern that I now recognize is holding me back.

Which is why I’d like to ask:

What patterns or fears might be holding you back from achieving your dreams?