Minding your Mind

So I heard this novelist say (and I wish I could cite the novelist, but I can't) that if you have an hour a week to write, it is better to write for 10 minutes 6 days a week than to write for an hour on Saturday. His reasoning (and I do remember that it was a male) was that if you think about your characters every day, you carry them around with you when you are jogging, when you are running errands, and you think about them and develop them even when you aren't writing.

This reminded me of some advice given by the poet & novelist Julianna Baggott (which I've mentioned before) that it is useful to read your work right before you go to bed, so that you might dream some of the answers to your problems, so that you can put your unconscious mind to work on your writing.

So the other night I was working on a poem in which I had an image that I had just worked to death. Rather than simply using the image, I had made an extended metaphor out of it and just worked the magic entirely out of it, and I was wondering what to do. I wanted to cut everything but the image, and leave the leap for the reader to make, but then I had a few empty lines (in a poem with regular stanza lengths otherwise) and I went to sleep thinking about this. At four AM I awoke with two new images to put in the poem, exactly what I needed, and an interesting new perspective in addition.

Yay for the unconscious mind! Yay for the conscious mind! May their collaboration continue!

Submitting to the Subconscious

Jennifer Haupt explores writing rituals at the Psychology Today blog, asking, "Writing Rituals: Spiritual or Simply Habits?", a question she doesn't actually bother to answer....

She does mention a few rituals of various writers, including the following:

"At the end of each writing day I think, What do I want to write about tomorrow? I ask questions about the bare bones of the scene or chapter: Who needs to be here? What's the mood? Are they inside or outside, alone or in a crowd? What should be resolved or undone by the end of this scene? Then I put the questions on my pin board and close up for the day. In the morning, not only do I know where to start, but I've given my subconscious mind a chance to scribble in the details."
- Susan Henderson, Up From the Blue


Earlier this year, I saw similar advice from Julianna Baggott on her blog, Baggott, Asher, Bode, about letting your subconscious do some of the work for you. Here's what she had to say:

2. If you can't (or choose not to) write in the mornings, still run your eyes over your pages so you can keep your characters at the fore of your mind as you walk through your day ...

9. And, of course, tell yourself you're going to write. Let your subconscious begin to prepare the material, and then show up.

I tried these tips earlier this, and they were very helpful to me, especially thinking about the poem I was working on just before going to sleep. But I've since forgotten to keep this habit up. What a great reminder as the New Year comes!

 

More MFA Alternatives

My goodness, yet another author weighs in on alternatives to MFA programs for those of us whose real lives simply don't allow registering for formal study.

This time it's Julianna Baggott, poet, novelist, and YA author (also writing under the names Bridget Asher and N. E. Bode) who offers advice in her blog post How to Build Your Own MFA Experience. What I love about Baggott is that when she makes a suggestion, she gives you specifics. For example, she names conferences she trusts and gives criteria for ruling out other conferences from consideration. She lists editors who take on clients for manuscript reads and tutorials, and she gives you their links so you can contact them immediately. She also tells you about how she designed groups she put together in her own dining room that served almost as well (or as well as) a degreed program.

I have before discussed Baggott's blog, in my own post Stop Reading this Blog, in which I encourage to writers to take Baggott's suggestions and blog more seriously than my own, as I tend to ask questions, whereas she answers them. And she has the publishing history success to back her ideas up. We are lucky she is generous enough to share.

The Art of Eavesdropping

If you took a look at Julianna Baggott’s Boot Camp, which I blogged about earlier this week, you will have seen that one of her ideas for gathering raw writing material is eavesdropping. I’ve heard this advice before: listen to the language around you and write it down when it’s provocative. Seems like a good idea, yes?

Well, yes, particularly if you are living in a country in which the majority of people speak your native language. Otherwise, not so much. Or perhaps it’s just me who has this problem. I am conversant but not fluent in Japanese; I can understand most of what is going on around me. Specifically, I can eavesdrop. But for some reason, for me there is much less emotional content in words in Japanese than in the same words when spoken in English. I don’t know if that’s because I learned Japanese as an adult instead of during my childhood, or if the emotional content will come once I am completely fluent, or whether this is just a personality problem unique to me.

Here’s an example. My husband and I are raising two sons, so the word penis comes up in conversation. A lot more than I, one of seven daughters with only one brother, would have guessed. (For those of you without firsthand experience, consider potty training, hygiene, scratching one’s self in public, those sorts of topics that little boys have to be introduced to.)

Now, you will notice that I wrote the word penis in tiny letters, the way I say it. Which is in a tiny embarrassed voice, in a voice that desperately hopes no one can hear me except for the intended listener. It’s the way I was raised. But I have fixed that discomfort by learning to use the word penis in Japanese. It’s chinchin, by the way—that’s the colloquial form, not the medical word. I can say chinchin all day long and not blink an eye. It just has no embarrassing emotional content for me. Perhaps because no one ever shushed me for saying it, no one ever whispered it to me, teaching me by example that it was a word not to be spoken aloud.

So one day my husband and I were walking along downtown and I was telling him about a discussion concerning hygiene I had had with one of our sons, so that my husband would be on the same page as far as reinforcing good habits in our boys. I was chattering away about it, when my husband asked me to lower my voice. I was surprised. Why? I asked. I’m talking English, no one can understand me.

My husband sighed. You are talking English except for one word, chinchin. So here is what everybody around us hears, “Blah blah blah blah blah chinchin blah blah blah chinchin blah blah blah blah blah blah chinchin blah blah.”

(Or, to translate into English, “Blah blah blah blah blah penis blah blah blah penis blah blah blah blah blah blah penis blah blah.”) (Notice the type size is normal here because I was using my normal voice for the word in question, speaking that one word in Japanese of course.)

My husband is a doctor who doesn’t blush over any the names of any body parts or functions, but a quick look around confirmed what he was saying. People were staring at us, wondering what the heck we were talking about. Well, they knew what we were talking about, but they were clearly wondering why.

So, words that horrify me in English don’t affect me in Japanese at all. In fact, when I was reading Little Red Riding Hood to my sons (in English), we all three of us fell off the couch laughing when I got to the part about the Wolf saying, “Not by the hairs on my …..” That would have never happened with me and the word penis.

Okay, so eavesdropping in Japanese doesn’t have the same effect on me as eavesdropping in English, and I have precious little chance to eavesdrop in English. I guess overhearing for writing content is one piece of advice that won’t do me so much good these days. I considered jotting down things I heard in podcasts that I found fascinating, but that isn’t the same as recording people who don’t expect to have people listening to them. You don't get the same effect with people who are madly editing themselves to make the impression they intend. So for now, eavesdropping as an art form is out of the question for me. It’s not even fun to eavesdrop as a hobby, since nothing shocks me in Japanese, nothing has that learned punch of naughty English words.

I’d be curious to hear from other people who speak multiple languages. Do you get the emotional content in both/all of them? Is it just me? Do tell.....

Baggott's Boot Camp

I know, I know, three posts in one day is excessive. I will shut up after this one. But there's a deadline involved, so I need to say this now.

Celebrated author and poet Julianna Baggott is offering a most interesting-sounding writing boot camp over at her blog, and it starts tomorrow. So check it out, and sign up if interested. It sounds positively inspiring, and since Baggott herself is a prolific powerhouse, I know I listen when she gives advice.

Stop Reading This Blog

This weekend I was reading the blog of the poet Julianna Baggott, who also writes novels and young adult fiction under the pen names Bridget Asher and N. E. Bode, and I realized that nobody should waste time reading my blog. You all ought to just go over there and read hers. Really.

For example, this weekend Baggott published a post entitled When Do You Sleep. The Truth about being a best-selling author of 17 books and mother of 4 kids (see, right there you know you should be over at her blog, not here at the author-of-one-chapbook-and-one-not-best-selling-book-and-mother-of-only-two's blog), in which she gives specific advice about how to make time for writing which includes timing your caffeine consumption, writing through exhaustion, and noticing patterns of what gets you fired up to write so that you can replicate these conditions later. Plus plenty more specific tips (compared to the one tip I have of not wearing your glasses in the house so you don't see the dust) for finding extra minutes to write. Stop reading my blog right now and go over there and read hers.

So I keep POSING QUESTIONS about how to write better (like asking how to harness your unconscious to write for you and how to write when you are not writing) but Baggott ANSWERS those questions in her post entitled Efficient Creativity. How to Write While Not Writing and Other Tips. Quoting Norman Mailer:

"Over the years, I’ve found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write." (The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing, Random House, 2003)

Baggott goes on to give specific tips, including reading through a list of characters (she's talking about writing fiction here) on mornings when you aren't going to or can't write first thing, so that they are your mind's companions during the day, giving you a jump start when you finally do sit down to write. This can work for poetry just as well. First thing in the morning, or before bed last thing at night, read through the poem you are working on and let your unconscious do some of the work.

Follow Mailer's tip and make an appointment with yourself to write. Trust in your unconscious to prepare something for you in the meantime.

And most of all, stop reading this blog, and go read Baggott's, or read Mailer, or better yet, just go write!

(Oh, and Julianna Baggott offers a free pdf download of her first book of poetry, This Country of Mothers (Southern Illinois University Press) here, if you scroll about halfway down the page. This will inspire you to purchase her other collections of poetry, Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees (Pleiades Press, distributed by LSU Press), and Lizzie Borden in Love: Poems in Women's Voices (Southern Illinois University Press)).

Now, seriously, stop reading this blog!