Secret Rooms

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image found at http://madbite.com/2011/06/09/secret-doorways-and-hidden-lairs/

Perhaps because of last night’s windstorm, and our power outage, I had that dream again, the one in which I remember that my house has secret rooms.

A realtor was trying to list our house, and I felt that she had undervalued it. Oh, I thought, I know just what to show her!

I started with the hidden apartment, the one entered by a kind of hatch in the garage wall. It was a studio apartment, never occupied, filled with boxes. Anyone owning this house would, of course, want to rent it out. I wondered, even as I spoke, why I never had.

And there was more! I showed her the children’s rooms with the lofts and secret cubbies. We walked through the kitchen downstairs (an elaborate, fully equipped kitchen for parties). Then, my sister was there, and said, “What’s that room?”

The guest suite! I had forgotten about it entirely. It had a hot tub! From the bed, you could see the ocean! Really!

Whenever I have this dream (or a variation of it), I know that there is some potential I’m overlooking.

On another note (though not entirely), I loved this post from Writer Unboxed (written by the amazing Lisa Cron, author of Wired for Story). I read it twice, I followed all the links, I watched the entire (irreverent) Dartmouth commencement speech given by Shonda Rimes (of Grey’s Anatomy fame). I think you should, too.

What Are Your Blocks?

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Photos courtesy of Ron Quinn

“Most of the time when we are blocked in an area of our life, it is because we feel safer that way.” (Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way, 30)

While composing this post, which was going to be, mostly, a quotation accompanied by a photograph of a logjam, I went on-line to find a good picture, and then I remembered the Lewis County flood of 2007 (7 years ago this week).

It was an epic time for my family. High water combined with timber and debris took out six or seven local bridges, and closed the bridge on Elk Creek road, the road where my parents and other family lived. Although my immediate family did not lose any property, houses of some of my cousins were flooded. The clean-up took months.

My youngest sister was, at that time, the Postmaster in Doty, Washington, and the bridge on Elk Creek road stood between her and home, completely buried in log debris. The back way, through Dryad, had its bridge swept away entirely. She was offered food and shelter, but it had been a harrowing day, and she wanted to be with her family.

Floods are a force of nature, but so is my red-headed sister.

A vehicle couldn’t cross over that bridge, but one could, if determined, climb across. A neighbor in the same predicament said that she’d go, too. Of course by the time the Post Office closed, it was dark, but my sister found a pair of old pants in the Goodwill box at the Doty Pentecostal Church, and, wearing her Clarks, she set out. (I don’t know what kind of shoes the neighbor was wearing.)

The logjam became their road home.

There’s a literary device, aporia, that teaches us this as well. It’s from the Greek (difficulty, perplexity, from aporos, impassable), but one way to think of it is as a signpost pointing the way.

As my friend Thom Lee says of bandaids: they show where the healing needs to occur.

Identifying your blocks is only the first step. Instead of thinking “impassable,” see your block as the very place where you must focus your attention. 

“How do I revise?”

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This is for Louise.

1. Type and print out your work. Reread it with a pen in your hand. You don’t have to give anything up, at least not at first. Just jot down your notes. Underline words that you’re not sure about.

2. Read your work aloud, just to yourself. Listen to yourself. (You can add movement, pacing can help with tempo. Standing up can change your perspective.)

3. Try doing something on the page to make the words more visible. You can use highlighters to pick out patterns. You can circle all of the adjectives, or all of the verbs. (Do one at a go, then the next.)

4. Cut some of the adjectives (and adverbs, too, those -ly words). Decide which ones your reader really needs, and which ones you used out of habit.

5. If you have a lot of was and is or have verbs, see if you can spice them up. Sometimes this is easy: change was sitting to sat. Instant fix!

6. Make a decision to ADD something. Maybe just concrete nouns one time; the next, maybe color; maybe sounds.

7. When I feel myself getting far away from something, I reverse the advice of #1 and write it out in longhand. (I think this is a right brain / left brain trick.)

8. Remember, above all, that it’s YOURS. And it’s not written in stone.

 

It Doesn’t Have to Be Good (2)

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CAM00264Yes, yes, I’ve used this post title before. It’s still the best advice I can offer anyone at the onset of a big project. Of an abstractly, potentially big project.

Here’s a line that I think I found in You’ve Got a Book in You, by Elizabeth Sims: “A year from now you’ll wish you had started today.”

The first thing you have to do: learn how to start.

I am always baffled by famous writers who claim they do not write every day. I don’t always “write,” I guess. (Okay, I always write in my journal, but not always on my current project.) But when I’m swept up in a project, I can’t seem to help thinking around it, reading around it, even scribbling around it. It’s as if someone has dumped a truckload of bricks on my driveway. I can’t get anywhere else without going past the pile of bricks.

A friend told me the other day that she has to work herself up into a kind of passionate fit before she can write. I do that, too, sometimes. I find, however, that a passionate fit is just a passionate fit (soothed by TV or Spider Solitaire or a heavy-carb lunch) unless I pick up my pen and start writing.

image borrowed from http://www.codercaste.com/2009/12/08/how-to-add-a-directory-to-your-path-environment-variable-in-linux/

If you want to write something, the first thing you might do is begin making a space for it. Write a little bit–even if it’s not “productive,” not “on task.” Just write. Write for 15 minutes. If 15 minutes sounds impossible (that would be anxiety, also known as fear), try 5 minutes. Even if you’re highly anxious, you can write for 5 minutes.

 

Let’s imagine that your project really is a truckload of bricks dumped on your driveway. Sure, you can work steadily for several days until the bricks are off your driveway and in the garden where you’re making a path. But you can also move them one or two bricks at a time, every time you see them.

Write for a few minutes. Then, try it again later today or tomorrow. Make an appointment with your passion. Show up (on time, with a good attitude!). Repeat. Don’t be surprised when you look at the clock and see that a half hour (or an hour or four hours) has slipped by.

Get proficient at starting your work, and the next time that passionate fit overtakes you, you’ll have a pen, paper, and a little block of time waiting for it.