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Blocking Writer’s Block – Part V – No Permission Needed

August 4, 2009

Rule No. 7  – You don’t need permission to do your work

Sometimes if you are a parent, a partner, or even just someone living with others in this world, your writing, painting, music-playing, yoga – whatever it is that you aspire to keep doing in your private life, whatever it is you do to feel fully you—gets overlooked because you’re convinced you don’t have the time.

Rather, you’re convinced that you don’t have the “right” time.

You wait for the opportune moment; those precious minutes in which there’s nothing else you think you need to do, nothing that you think others need you to do.

Then, even when there really isn’t anything, or not very much—dinner is done, kids and partner are, sort of, settled in–you wait a bit longer.  Partly because you’re tired, and partly because the moment still doesn’t feel right.  You don’t feel free enough to begin.  Something is still missing.

Often what you are truly waiting for is to be given permission, permission to turn to your private work, permission to take time to be solely yourself. Sometimes, especially if you are on the insecure side, you are even waiting to be urged, encouraged, exhorted.   You want someone to give you a cue, to tell you that the moment you have been waiting for has arrived, to get you going.

Don’t do this.   It will not get you to your work nor will it endear you to your loved ones.  (Or at least, it won’t endear them to you!)

Because even the most enlightened children are not going to turn to you and say, “hey mom, don’t bother to make those cupcakes, why don’t you just go write for a while?”

Your loving partner is unlikely to volunteer: “I’ll just turn off the t.v. dear, so you’ll have peace to work by.”

Unless you work in a zoo, your employer will not come out with “we’ve noticed you like drawing elephants.  Why don’t you just stay home and practice Fridays?”

Not even the dishes soaking in the sink will quietly give you the freedom to go and write that sonnet.

Don’t get mad at them.  (Especially not the dishes or the children.  The partner maybe.)

Because this is a battle you have to take on yourself.  If you want to do your work, you have to allow yourself to do it.  (More than allow, you have to make.)

This means accepting that no permission is necessary; that there is no “right” moment, just this moment.

If you succeed in seizing the moment, accept in advance that you are unlikely to win any kudos.  The children, husband, dishes, may listen to your sonnet; but they probably won’t congratulate you on it.  Not enough to make you feel completely justified anyway, to give you retroactive permission.

At least not at the beginning.

Hopefully, as everyone ages, they may be happy that you were able to be fully yourself.  They may recognize that you were giving them permission to be fully themselves too.  Even though no permission is necessary.

And even at the cost of those cupcakes.

Check out my counting book with beautiful paintings of elephants (no permission was necessary) on Amazon.  See link to 1 Mississippi.

Categories: parenting, Uncategorized, writer's block, writing
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For Single Parents About to Explode – Put On Some Shoes

August 3, 2009

There’s a Buddhist teaching about the most skillful way to protect one’s feet from all the sharp stones that litter one’s path.

The question is whether you should wait to walk until the path, the whole earth, is covered with soft leather so that your feet will be protected from the sharp stones.   Should you yourself try to cover the earth with this soft leather?

The answer is no, silly.  (Although Buddhists don’t usually add that last part.)

Still, the answer is no.  You can’t coat the earth with soft leather, you should put the soft leather on your feet.  You should put on shoes if you want to mitigate all that sharpness.

I’m probably misphrasing this teaching.  (Sorry!)  But even my garbled version offers good advice, especially for single parents.

What are some of the main characteristics of single parents?

  1. The single parent is generally exhausted.
  2. On the good side, the single parent is usually less likely than the paired parent to be having daily arguments with another adult (except on the phone or through attorneys.)  On the bad side, the single parent is less likely  to have the daily succor (sorry) of another adult.
  3. Because of the lack of adult company, the single parent tends to want their kids to be their friends.  (As much as they try to resist this.)
  4. The single parent has to be the heavy.  Because of the child’s dependence, the single parent also has to be the softie.   Agh.

What does all this mean?

That, for single parents, it can be very hard to say no.  Even when we really really want to.

“No, we can’t go to the toy store right now, I’m exhausted.”  “No, you can’t stay out till 1: 30.  That’s too late and besides, I’ll be exhausted waiting up.”  “No, your boyfriend can’t stay over again.  The whole situation is still a bit strange to me and I’m already exhausted by it.”

Now keep in mind, I’m not advocating any particular limitations here (though I do believe in limitations.)  The important point are the words:  “even when we really really want to.”

Also, before going further, maybe I should broaden my audience.  This advice may not just be geared to single parents but to boomer and post boomer parents.  People who are constantly explaining things to their children; people who want to be understood by their children;  people who believe that if they only explain the reasoning behind their decisions (ad nauseum), the children (rational beings) will simply have to see agree.

But the children don’t always agree.  Often, no matter how much the parent explains, the children continue to want, to wheedle, to wish for.

So what?

But the guilty single or boomer or post-boomer parent can’t stand discontent in their children.  They want everyone to be in agreement.   So they frequently say yes, reluctantly, even though they really want to say no.  Even though they may believe no is the correct answer.

Sometimes, this is no big deal.  Sometimes it works out just fine.  Sometimes, yes may have been the right answer.

But when the parent really really wants to say no, saying yes is a bad idea.   Because, in that case, the parent’s patience grows thin.   That parent already feels compromised, put upon, and she/he is not in the mood for more.  So one wrong move on the part of the child, sometimes even a move that is not truly horrible–such as a polite request for a really cheap toy, an arrival at 1:43 due to the unavailability of taxis, or the child (not such a child) and boyfriend leaving shoes straddling the living room floor, can set that parent up for a major snap.

And once the single parent, the boomer or post-boomer parent, snaps, she or he feels bad.    (What happened to rationality?  How could I have said that?)

The problem is that you simply let yourself get pushed beyond your limit.  You were trying so hard to be your biggest, most p.c. self, that you snapped into your angry, most intolerant self.

In other words, you thought that your feet were tough enough to take sharp stones without any leather.

The overworked single parent can even begin to blame their explosion on the child.  Why did they ask you for something they must have known you were against?  They know how you hate to disappoint them?  Why didn’t they protect you?

In other words, why didn’t they coat the path with soft leather for you? 

But they’re the children.  They want.  You’re the parent.  You decide.

So put on some shoes.

And just say no.

(And if you have snapped, remember that life is long; and both children, and parents, forgiving.)

P.S. If you are a parent (or know a parent), check out 1 Mississippi, counting book on amazon for little children:  http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Karin+Gustafson&x=12&y=14

Also, my series on Blocking Writing Block will definitely be continued soon.   Thanks for comments.

Categories: parenting, single parenting, Uncategorized
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Blocking Writer’s Block – Part IV

August 2, 2009

Rule No. 6.  Go into yourself.

Yes, I know.  Yesterday’s rule (Blocking Writer’s Block – Part III) was get out of yourself.   And yes, if you are following this blog at all, you probably see a certain pattern emerging. (Other than the pattern in which I write a few serious blogs and then sneak in some commentary on Robert Pattinson.)

But my advising you to go into yourself right after I’ve told you to get out of yourself is really not a contradiction.  Because what I’m advocating is that the two steps be taken at different times.  (Also, remember that I am writing about writer’s block here.  If things are flowing, do whatever you want.)

Getting out of yourself means getting out of your normal grooves. Getting a fresh starting point.

But once you have that starting point, you need to have something to say, right?  Something not generic, something unique.  You have one great big source of the non-generic right at your fingertips.  This is yourself.  Your own set of experiences, which if observed with precision and care, are inherently unique.

Now, I really do not push the idea that all writing should be memoir, or confessional, or navel-gazing.  Besides the huge danger of self-indulgence, self-justification, martyrdom, in that kind of writing, your friends and family will never speak to you again.

But it really is helpful in getting out of writer’s block, in writing exercises, in loosening up your writing sinews, to feel free to write from your own experience, to write of what you know well.

This does not have to be directly about yourself.  It can be the mood of your childhood kitchen summer mornings, or Sunday mornings, or Sunday nights—each one way way different.   It can be the geometry of light on the bottom of your community swimming pool;  it can be the lines on the bark of a locust tree you used to lean against, counting, when “it” in hide and sick.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love plot, narrative.  And I love things that are created and fantastical.   (I’ve written a fantasy novel which I hope to publish soon.)   And frankly, getting too caught up in your own experience can inhibit invention, and can be very very limiting.

But in an exercise in which your primary goal is to simply learn how to think with your hands, to let words flow through your fingertips, it is usually easiest at first to focus on what you know.

It actually takes a lot of courage.  The subject is there, but grasping the details, and then putting them on the page, can take real fearlessness.  Especially when writing with a buddy.  Especially if ever actually re-reading on your own.

But be brave.  Take up the thread you’ve been given, that surprising thread that you got from someone else—that topic, or those random words—and follow the thread into yourself.  Follow it through curve and cranny.  Take a Rube Goldbergesque approach to your exercise.  Put in the leaky bucket and the grandmother in the rocking chair, don’t worry about sleekness–whatever works is terrific, whatever gets the job done.

Remember always, if not now, when?

And if you do follow the thread to something that actually happened to you, then sit inside that happening and look at it freshly.  Can you see the pores in your Uncle’s nose?  Tell us about them.  Were there fireflies blinking right next to the laces of your husband’s hiking boot?  Make them blink on the page.

Pretend that a brain surgeon has accidentally stimulated that place in your brain where all that particular data are stored.  Was there mica in the dust in the curb?  Did your friend hold out her hands as she balanced on the brick wall?  Did her fingers lengthen in the grey air?   Use memory, but feel free to mix in invention.  And if you’re stuck, look around the room you are writing in.  Or rustle further around inside.  You’ve had tons of experiences.  Mix it up.   You don’t need to stick with just one.

And remember always always, that this is an exercise, a draft.  Is your time really so precious you can’t spend a bit on something that you might end up throwing away?  Oh please!

To be continued. …

Check out my children’s picture book 1 Mississippi  on Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/1-Mississippi-Karin-Gustafson/dp/0981992307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1249231671&sr=8-1

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Blocking Writer’s Block – Part III – Get Out Of Yourself

August 1, 2009

Rule Number 5 – Get Out of Yourself.

Sometimes all you can think when you sit down to write is that you can’t write, you hate writing, you have nothing at all to say.

Jotting down this litany can be a legitimate way to get started.   At least, it gets your pen or fingers moving.  Pretty soon, though, it’s boring—or in the case of the variation used in The Shining – ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ – seriously creepy.  In other words, you are putting something down on the page, but you are still stuck in a rut, a rut of your own stuckness.

One way to avoid this stuckness is to try to get out of yourself, your typical grooves.  If I were more Buddhist, I would probably suggest looking around yourself, feeling your connection to the greater world.  But since I am a dyed-in-the-wool pragmatist (who likes the idea of Buddhism but is not so good at its practice), my advice is to get someone else to give you a topic (or, even better, a simple set of words.)

By “topic”, I don’t mean a paper topic, something to mull over and explicate.  I mean a writing exercise topic, something to use as a jumping off point; a stepping stone into your stream of consciousness.  But a new stepping stone, not one of the habitual ones that’s become a boulder sealing off flow.

Writing exercises are a wonderful tool for breaking down writer’s block.  They deserve their own posts, which I hope to write.   As a brief introduction here, I’ll just say that the exercises I prefer are short, sweet, and relatively low risk.  They have three basic parameters (derived again from Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down The Bones):

1.  Pick a set short time period for each exercise in advance.  Use a clock, and make yourself and your writing buddy stick to it.    (Ten minutes is a good amount to start with.  If you want to be anarchical—try seven, twelve or thirteen minutes.  Five is a bit short.)

2.  Keep your pen moving or your fingers typing throughout your set time.  (Meaning don’t stop and think about what you are going to write next, just write.)

3.   No crossing out; no back-spacing, no deletes.   (Not during your time limit.)

So back to your topic (someone else’s topic).  Choices are infinite.  It can be a single starting point:  “I remember” can be a good one, or “I don’t remember.”   Something about grandmothers often works (almost everyone has something to write about their grandmother.)

But although that kind of single topic can be interesting, you can also get stuck all over again trying to pick the “right” one.

To skip that quandary, it’s sometimes best to just use a list of 5-7 random words as “topic”.   The advantage of several words is that none has to be ideal.  The requirement is that you simply have to use the words, not actually write about them—they are not your theme (unless you want one of them to be.)

It’s best if the words are not chosen by you, or at least not by you alone.  (Choosing with a buddy is fine.)  This is because it can be very very hard to make a fresh channel through your own head.  The mind is just so tricky—it tends to cling to the old grooves, comfortable with the familiar, even the painful, tiresome familiar.  The mind is also a master of self-justification; it loves to set up situations in which it can say, ‘I told you so.’

A quick example:  let’s say that you’re stuck trying to write about your cousin’s wedding last year (or last decade) when you suddenly realized that everyone in your family thought you were too bossy, too demanding, to insecure, to ever feel loved.  You’ve tried to write the story, you may even need to write the story, but you just haven’t been able to.

So maybe you need to put it aside for a bit; warm up those fingers with something completely different.  But if you’re picking you own random words, you may still end up with “rice, veil, resentment, glare, daggers, heart, tin cans.”  Pretty soon you’re stuck all over again; you may be writing, but your subject may also be the same old thing–how lousy you feel about yourself and your family.

But if your buddy, or if you have no buddy, your friend, your child, or even your dictionary, picks the words, you might end up with things like” drill, jackhammer, whammo, smudge, chocolate cake” words that have a better chance of taking you into unexplored territory.

You may not initially feel like exploring that territory.  Let’s say you’re completely disinterested in drills, only mildly interested in chocolate cake.   Your exercise doesn’t need to be about drills; it just needs to use the word.  It can come out as metaphor: “the chords of Wagner’s wedding march were like a jackhammer, drilling into her brain.”  Or, “the icing formed a snowy veneer, but she knew that her cousin, who truly was the bossy, demanding one in the family, had insisted on a chocolate cake beneath it.”

So maybe you can’t leave your groove.  Still you can at least approach it from a different direction.  The direction may just feel like a detour but, like the classic detour, it may also help you bypass the closed lanes of your normal route and to miss all those pesky orange cones.

Please check out my picture book, 1 Mississippi, at Amazon.com.  http://www.amazon.com/1-Mississippi-Karin-Gustafson/dp/0981992307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1249155338&sr=8-1

Categories: Uncategorized, writer's block, writing
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A Poetic Interlude

July 31, 2009

For those of you that can’t relate to Twilight (or understand my obsession –I can’t either), I’m posting aVillanelle.  This was written as part of a writing exercise over the phone with my dear writing buddy.  (See Blocking Writer’s Block  – Part II), and when I was lucky enough to be in a quiet woodsy place where I could walk while jotting.

Swimming in Summer

Our palms grew pale as paws in northern climes
as water soaked right through our outer skin.
In summers past, how brightly water shines,

its surface sparked by countless solar mimes,
an aurora only fragmented by limb.
Our palms grew pale as paws in northern climes

as we played hide and seek with sunken dimes,
diving beneath the waves of echoed din;
in summers past, how brightly water shines.

My mother sat at poolside with the Times’
Sunday magazine; I swam by her shin,
my palms as pale as paws in northern climes,

sculpting her ivory leg, the only signs
of life the hair strands barely there, so prim
in summers past.  How brightly water shines

in that lost pool; and all that filled our minds
frozen now, the glimmer petrified within
palms grown pale as paws in northern climes.
In summers past, how brightly water shines.

Copyright 2008, Karin Gustafson, All rights reserved.

Check out 1 Mississippi on Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/1-Mississippi-Karin-Gustafson/dp/0981992307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1249040514&sr=8-1

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A Twilight Interlude, Rachel LeFevre-Round Peg in Star-shaped Hole

July 31, 2009

For those of you interested in my posts re writer’s block–sorry.  I’m temporarily distracted by the news that Rachel LeFevre is being replaced as the vampire Victoria in the upcoming Eclipse movie, third of the Twilight Series, and just can’t resist.

I’m sorry, Rachel, but it’s a smart casting move.

You are too womanly for Victoria; too rounded, too soft.  Your breasts are full, your hips are present, your nose is rounded, even your forehead is noticeably convex, you are one curvy dame.  I don’t mean this as a criticism; you have a figure to be envied.  But these are teen books in which narrowness prevails.  Besides, the whole idea is that vampires are stone, hard, streamlined; their bodies weapons; their faces aquiline.

Victoria’s supposed to menacing, to almost kill Edward (Whoa!) but you, Rachel, have the smile of a character actor, someone  who would only kill with poison, or maybe, if the victim were drunk,  a blunt instrument to the back of the head.

You smile is too self-deprecating to be as singleminded as the Victoria in the book, an old Hollywood-style villain, almost cartoonish in her all out commitment to vengeance.  (To get to Edward’s beloved, she forges an army of new-born vamps who come rampaging from Seattle, refusing to be satisfied by anything Starbuck.) 

Hollywood.  That was the magic word in that last paragraph.   Which is the final problem here.  Hollywood personifications are generally to be way hotter than the characters in books.  (See, e.g., Emma Watson as Hermione Grainger, Anne Hathaway in the Princess Diaries, Meryl Streep as Julia Child.)

But in Stephenie Meyer’s books, the vampire characters out-Hollywood Hollywood.   They already look like movie stars; that, in fact, is one of their primary character traits.   So that now that the films are big budget, Hollywood has to go all out (and, I guess, throw out) just to live up to its name.   The brand name too. 

It doesn’t seem fair, but the fans will love it.

 

Check out 1 Mississippi at Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/1-Mississippi-Karin-Gustafson/dp/0981992307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1249040514&sr=8-1

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Blocking Writer’s Block – Part II

July 30, 2009

Sorry, but I have to start this Part II of “Blocking Writer’s Block” with a correction to Part I. In Part I, discussing Rule No. 1 – Don’t Care, I suggested that you might tell yourself from the start that what you are writing was stupid.

What I really meant here was to tell yourself that what you are writing is a DRAFT, that it can be stupid, that it doesn’t matter, that you can change it, that you WILL change it.

It’s a draft, right?  So you can throw it away if you want, you can burn it.

But keep in mind that maybe, just maybe, there will be some scraps of this draft that you will want to save.  And, if not–if the draft really is stupid– that it will at least have allowed you to work through some of  the junk clogging your voice, to break down some of the fences in your head. Even if all you unclog or breakdown ends up on the bonfire, this is terrific.

So just do it, get started, don’t care.

Rule No. 3 – Get a friend.

Get a friend. By friend, I mean writing buddy. Not someone you can show your work to.   That kind of friend is great. But the kind of buddy that you need when you are suffering from writer’s block is someone you can actually write with, at the side of or across the table from. Someone who is writing too.

I’m not talking about collaboration here. Collaboration may be nice but it’s an awfully lot of pressure for someone with writer’s block.

I’m talking about company.

Having a writing buddy is a bit like going to the gym or taking an exercise class. If you’re an Olympic swimmer, you can probably jump into an absolutely deserted pool, and swim three hours without stop. But if you’re tired, grumpy, out of shape (and as a writer, possibly fearful), it’s useful to be with someone going through the same travail. Energy is contagious; companionship can replace discipline; even the feeling that you are performing (which comes simply by doing something in front of someone else) can be a useful goad.

Choose someone you trust, or that you can learn to trust. Because the second part of writing with a buddy is reading aloud what you have written. (I will write more about reading aloud another time, but only will say now that this technique is again derived from Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones.)

Arrange to meet with your buddy regularly if you can. If you can’t meet, set a time when you and your buddy can write over the phone. This means that you call up your buddy, set a time limit and topic, then hang up the phone and you both start writing until one of you calls back. (Remote companionship is better than none.)

Be friends with your buddy, but limit the small talk;  socializing can eat up limited writing time, and the urge to procrastinate is great. If you have something to say, write it down. (Then, as we’ll discuss later, read it aloud.)

Rule No. 4 – Cultivate Solitude.

It’s useful to have a writing buddy. But writing is an inherently solitary process. When you are writing, it’s just you and the words, just you and the page or the computer screen, just you.

Learn to enjoy that solitude, even to crave it. Find company in your words, your page, your screen.

It helps to be quiet. (This is a rule I need to practice a lot more.) Try not to talk through every story or emotion in your telephone calls—save some of your voice for your work.

Don’t mindlessly turn on the radio or the t.v.; don’t mindlessly speed-dial or text. It’s so easy in the modern world to be addicted to constant stimulation; give it a rest.

Even pull yourself away from friends and relatives sometimes.  Loved ones, as much as they love you, will rarely say, ‘hey why don’t you take time for yourself to  write?’   You have to be the one to pull away.  (And you won’t always want to.)

Still, if you want to write, if you want to break through a block, it is something you may need to work on.

The advantage of quiet for the writer  is that it gives you something to fill up, a fresh blank page.

If the blank page is just too stark, write in a public place—a café, a library, a subway car, a park. Your surroundings can be your subject matter.

But, even in this public space, work hard to keep some quiet in your head, to maintain some loneness, the “you ” that is separate from the place, looking out.  Meaning be friendly to others, but if you’re there to write, write.  Meaning don’t think about the dirty laundry, that call you need to make, that other homework you haven’t yet done.  Those are uninvited guests, pests; kick them out.

The words that are trying to come out of your hands need quiet to be written.   At first, these are often very shy words.

To be continued….

P.S.  Check out 1 Mississippi by Karin Gustafson on Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/1-Mississippi-Karin-Gustafson/dp/0981992307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1249001844&sr=8-1

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