Superstition Review: The Writing Assignment

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cropped-blogbannerwithwithoutsecondaryheaderToday I’m the guest blogger at Superstition Review. I’m very excited about this — their guest blogger series is well worth the time, and because of it I’ve become acquainted (virtually!) with some exciting voices.

Although I wrote this post over a month ago, it still holds true. Grading papers, taking care of children (and my wonderful mother–I’m just home from an overnight trip to Lewis County)…those things never end. I don’t want them to end! Even so, my fifteen minutes on the manuscript this morning (despite being at my mom’s place) turned into 37 minutes, and this afternoon on the way home I stopped, got a latte, and wrote in my car.

Which reminds me, several of my students gave up coffee (see my blog post), or at least the expensive mochas. I am thinking very seriously of doing the same.

Thinking!

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Louise Erdrich

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I may have shared this video before. But today I’m talking about Louise Erdrich’s “The Red Convertible” with my American literature students, and yesterday afternoon I had a conversation with a friend about how women get writing done. Erdrich, who has five children, offers some poetic advice. It’s a good one to mark as a favorite and watch whenever you need encouragement.

It’s from Bill Moyer’s Journal, the post is dated April 9, 2010.

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What’s Your Passion?

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388691_445645662187687_850795261_nEmma’s choir took first place today in a competition in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Emma sings high soprano, and she has a gorgeous voice.  She also has a passion for music, and it’s rare that the tinny sound of her tunes aren’t trailing along in her wake. You have to get her to take out her ear buds before you can talk to her. If it takes 10,000 hours to master a discipline, Emma is well on her way to mastery. Maybe you should take piano lessons, I suggest. She shakes her head. She puts her earbuds back in. She sings along, closes her eyes.

I worry about this plugged-in generation, and especially about my three plugged-in teenagers. Their passions are still emerging, uniquely their own, certain to be different from my passions. But shouldn’t they be? 942896_462788093806777_1680409533_n

Writing anyway…

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stoweWhile preparing for my library talk about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I made a number of discoveries, many of them about my own process. So, in no particular order:

1. No matter how busy and overwhelmed I was on various other projects, doing a small amount of work every day toward the library book-talk helped.

2. Fussing and fuming about having not started earlier was not helpful. If only for five or ten minutes, doing a bit of work was a better way to spend my time than fussing and fuming.

3. When I was really, really stuck, opening a document on my computer and typing a list of possible topics was a great  strategy.

4. Putting together a slide show of pictures around the five or six biggest topics also helped. Audiences like pictures. (So do I.)

5. Rereading the novel (even though I didn’t have time to finish rereading it) helped enormously. In fact, opening the book and reading a few pages was a great way to put aside the fussing and fuming (again) about not having enough time.

6. I already know a huge amount about 19th century literary studies, which is, after all, the context I wanted to set this novel within. Once I had a list of topics, and had decided which ones were the most important, I had no trouble talking for an hour.  The worry wasn’t merely unhelpful, it wasn’t necessary.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) had seven children in 1852 when Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published. Yes, I presume she had household help. Yes, she said that she didn’t write it (God wrote it; she just took dictation). Even so, she had plenty of excuses not to write, and she picked up her pen and wrote anyway. stowe%20house%20front