A Writer’s Alchemy

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“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”

-e. e. cummings

Do you dream of being a “real” writer?

  • Do you have a compelling story that you’re dying to tell?
  • Would you like to write your stories down for your children and grandchildren?
  • When you brainstorm what you’d most like to write–what you’d most love to write–do certain ideas turn up, time after time?
  • When friends ask you what you’re working on now, are you embarrassed to have to admit you’re still working on the same piece of writing as when they last asked you, a few years ago?
  • Do you dream of being a more productive writer, a writer with a habit of writing that helps you to finish what you begin?

I too have lived with these questions. Although I knew, even as a kid, that I was a writer, somehow life kept getting in the way. As a young adult I waited tables, I went to school, I got married. My beautiful daughters came along. I found a full-time teaching job. Through it all, I never stopped believing that I was put on this planet to write. And through it all, I found ways to write. That journey and the lessons learned are part of what I want to share with you.

At the same time, I always knew that there was so much more that I wanted to accomplish in my writing life.

After retiring from full-time teaching a few years ago, I discovered that having a day-job is not the only way to keep your dreams on hold. Your kids don’t go away, even though they get older. Your parents become frail. You work in your yard. You volunteer. You say yes to lunches out.

No matter where you are in your life, if you want the writing to survive, you have to be intentional. You have to develop a habit of writing. That’s what this blog is all about.

My former blog, A Writer’s Alchemy, has been transported to this site (all posts are available–back to 2012!). As you’ll see, I’ve posted a few times here in May, and I’ll continue at a pace of two or three posts per month while writing my little heart out on all of my other projects as well.

I’ve also cooked up a little collection of previous posts for new followers to sample (and for my “old” followers to enjoy again). Leave your email and I’ll send you the download!

These last few months (okay, years), I’ve been digging deep, trying to find out what’s stopping me from becoming myself, the real, full-meal-deal Bethany. I’m excited to tell you all about it.

And thank you for being part of my journey!

All Your Perfect Imperfections

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A friend has a new grandson, and she reports that he is “perfection.”

Of course he is perfection–what grandmother worth her salt would think otherwise?

Even so, when she said it, we both laughed. I think we laughed because even though our children are now young adults, we remember all too well when they were babies. The first time I held each of my daughters is a moment burned into my brain. They were perfection, too, just like the new grandbaby.

We all are.

We are lumpy and wrinkled. We are overweight or skin-and-bones. We are blotchy. Our hair gets dry or it gets greasy. If we could buy that dress or own those shoes…if we could get the perfect job or the car or the spouse or the house…then our lives would be perfect.

If you could get a publisher to pay you a big advance for your manuscript, or if you could win a prize, or just see it once on a bestseller list–then your life would be perfect.

But your life would not be perfect. No matter what you do, it will always be perfectly imperfect.

Along the exact same lines, there is no right time to write your book. An investment banker told me, “The best time to invest is yesterday. The second best time is today.” The perfect time to write your book is not after your daughter’s graduation, or wedding, or after you get settled, or when the new baby arrives, or when the new baby isn’t so new.

I keep thinking my manuscript will be perfect if I just work on it a little bit more. But it won’t. Manuscripts are never perfect. They are what they are.

The perfect manuscript is the one I send out. The perfect time to send it is now. Okay, the perfectly imperfect time is now. But it’s now.

As the song says. (And I wish I had tickets to see John Legend in Woodinville on June 4.)

 

Got Revision?

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Just want to give you a quick head’s up about my guest post, yesterday, over at The Poetry Department. 

What I learned from writing this post, which is about the different lenses I apply to revising a poem, is that I have WAY TOO MUCH to say in a single post. I was asked for 300 words, I squeezed it down into 600…and I still had so much clattering around in my brain.

Writing the post made me miss teaching, a little. It made me want to get out my poems and start tinkering some more. (I think I’ll stick with the latter.)

I hope it makes you think about your poems, too.

That First Small Step

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I recently took my husband and two of my daughters to see Hidden Figures. The story of these women mathematicians inspired my husband to go out and buy the nonfiction book on which the movie is based. His report is that the movie goes way beyond the more grounded details of the real-life story. But I find myself thinking about how, fictionalized, dramatized, whatever it is that movies do in order to jump from “based on a true story” to the big screen, I was perfectly satisfied. I loved the movie and I found the main character–based on the real life person–of Katherine Johnson to be…well, epic. (And, reading about her on-line to make this post, I’m still blown away by her accomplishments.)

One of the things I have been thinking about is how, whether or not NASA had separate coffee pots for African Americans, let alone separate bathrooms, these inequalities did exist in the 50s and 60s. They were pervasive. What exactly did Johnson do? If she didn’t save the mission in the nick of time,  it strikes me as a miracle that she wound up at NASA at all, that she was able to attend college, that she had mentors along the way who looked at her and saw her, saw her potential rather than the limitations of her gender or her race, given the times she was born into.

Everything the movie wanted to dramatize, to make larger than life, to emphasize as a story, could be traced back–that’s what I found myself thinking–to some small choices chosen by, the small steps taken by, Johnson and the adults in her life when she was a child.

A space mission is not one big thing, and it can’t be reduced to a flashy image of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, nor can it be reduced to a single person’s mathematical calculations. It is made up of many, many small steps, by many people working together.

Raising a child has been a lot like that for me, and writing books is like that, too.

When you pick up a book, you’re looking at a kind of dramatization of extended effort. It’s as much a symbol as it is an object. One day an author sat down to a blank screen or with a new notebook and a favorite pen and began to write. The next day, she wrote a little more. Eventually it had to be rewritten and polished. Beta-readers had to be found and editors and maybe an agent. Someone had to make a decision to publish the book. All of these are fortuitous choices that you, reading Lincoln in the Bardo or Gone Girl or The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, benefit from.

Yes, you can write a book. Just not today, not all at once.

As my mother used to say, “Sooner begun, sooner done.”