Labouring the point

Word count: 420            Reading time: 1-2 minutes 

In December 1872 the Toronto Trades Assembly took to the streets to support the Typographical Union's strike. The printers had been pounding the pavement since March that year, seeking a mere nine-hour work day, six and a half days a week. Yeah, you read that right: a 58 hour working week. Canada’s Labour Day holiday, this coming Monday, commemorates workers’ rights to campaign for improved working conditions.

For the past few days I’ve been cursed with the blahs, the nagging sensation that I have neither an original idea nor a creative insight to bring to writing. In spite of temptation, I didn’t stop trying. It was more important than ever to keep on plugging. As Janet Frame put it: “The only certainty about writing and trying to be a writer is that it has to be done, not dreamed of or planned and never written, or talked about (the ego eventually falls apart like a soaked sponge), but simply written; it's a dreadful, awful fact that writing is like any other work.”

So every day I’ve sat at my desk and teased the current work-in-progress (WIP) a line or two closer to its next revision. I’ve copy-typed. I’ve done writing exercises. I’ve researched. I’ve gone to the Word Whips group and forced myself to compose and read on the spot. I’ve walked away from human company and avoided the lulling drone of the TV in favour of tinkering with the WIP. I’ve (mostly) resisted the siren’s call of warm August days and stayed on course. The minutes ground into hours, maybe not 58 hours, but a long work week that started the moment my eyes opened in the morning and haunted me after my head hit the pillow at night. My chagrin built as progress stalled. Finally a tiny slice of light cut through the darkness and a new idea or two started to germinate in its warmth. But it didn’t happen because I gave up for a few days, it happened because I pushed through the doldrums.

Was it hard to write without a wisp of inspiration? Very. Was it as hard to write as it must have been to bend over stinking, deafening machines in 19^th century working conditions? Not by half. This Labour Day I’m reminding myself how easy writing is. I’m celebrating this fun, often frustrating, pursuit

Are you inspired as August draws to a close? If not, how do you respond to that niggling sense that your work is going nowhere fast?

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Photo from Wikimedia Common

A Basket Full of Miracles

 Word count: 486                      Reading time: 2-3 minutes

When I learned to scuba dive in the Pacific Northwest, it wasn’t a laidback, warm water experience. The environment posed the biggest threat so I’d don my 40 lb drysuit, heft my 25 lb weight belt, and pick up my 35 lb tank. Then I’d start the long descent to the beach. Adrenaline lightened my load as I anticipated sinking into the dark, frigid ocean. After an exhilarating, sometime dangerous, dive I’d surface and have to haul all that gear back to where I parked.

As I picked my way across kelp-slippery rocks and up rough steep tracks, I’d tell myself not to look at the long stretch that separated me from my car. I’d get there, one step at a time. When did I forget that simple philosophy?

Over the years I’ve amassed a small collection of writing reference books. Trouble is I sometimes buy them, read a random chapter or two, and then file them. Recently, I’ve added a few more to the collection. Then I set them around the house like land mines: on a side table in the living room, on the mantelpiece, beside the bed and on my dresser – anywhere that I am likely to trip over them. They aren’t going back onto the shelves until I’ve finished them, cover to cover. The ones I’m reading (simultaneously) right now are:

• Writing Down the Bones – Natalie Goldberg – I love her theories of free writing for a more physical connection with the work and to unearth long-buried feelings.
• Reading Like A Writer – Francine Prose – I had forgotten her invaluable advice on how to get the most out of the hours spent lost in fiction. A must for anyone who wants to write.
• Self-Editing for Fiction Writers – Renni Browne & Dave King – I wish I’d read this years ago. It gives such a different approach to revising one’s own work.
• Steal Like An Artist – Austin Kleon – this is my latest and I’m reading it for a second time this summer because he offers grounded, often humorous, advice on everything from an artist’s social life to his or her financial management.

I found many treasures had been buried in my bookshelves for far too long. Now they are helping me as I revise my YA novel, due for release in Spring 2014.

So, just like I climbed up the beach with my scuba gear, one step at a time, I’m working through them, page by page. In fact it’s almost Bird By Bird. Thank you Anne Lamott. It’s amazing how much we can do when we concentrate on what is in front of us and stop thinking about the faraway goal.

What books are you reading to help your craft? Do you buy reference books, skim them, and then set them aside for another day? Are there any more books I should be reading?

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Scuba photo: Cathy Komar

A rose by any other name

Word count: 397                         Reading time: 1-2 minutes

The ancient walking tracks that crisscross Australia are sacred pathways that the indigenous people call songlines, dream lines, or dreaming tracks. The Aboriginal people believe that they must continually sing to the land to keep it alive. As they sing they walk, navigating thousands of kilometres with clues provided by traditional songs.

When the European settlers tried to force their culture, and more specifically their work ethic, on the local tribes, they didn’t anticipate the phenomena of the walkabout. To the Europeans, walkabout meant a time when their workers simply put down tools and disappeared. To the Aboriginal people it meant a focussed journey, to reconnect with the spirit-creators by following the tracks laid down at the start of time, during The Dreamtime or The Dreaming.

To clarify, for all the journalists and marketing people out there, going walkabout does not mean taking a pleasant stroll around a garden or park as suggested on the Vancouver Tourism website. Or should I say it didn’t used to mean that? It used to be a specific and respectful word that denoted a spiritual practice by people whose culture has been under attack for over two hundred years.

I accept that language is organic. In the 1964 movie A Hard Day’s Night, Simon Marshall (Kenneth Haigh) pushed some shirts at Beatle George Harrison and said, “Now you'll like these. You'll really "dig" them. They're "fab," and all the other pimply hyperboles.”

Those hyperboles, which had replaced superlatives like wacco, wizard, and smashing, were soon discarded in favour of hippie expressions like cool, groovy, outasight. Today awesome, amazing, epic, brilliant and sick are conferred on much-admired and coveted things. As I write this, I’m sure other superlatives are incubating. And that’s good; language should evolve and change. Each generation needs to leave its own stamp.

Still, I have trouble accepting walkabout in the meaningless way it’s tossed around lately. On the other hand, I probably use dozens of expressions that once meant something very different than they do now so I’m trying to be patient with this one. In time I may even forget that walkabout meant anything other than a stroll in the park.

As you craft your work do you stumble on words that have taken on new meaning in a way that irritates you? Or are there new words that delight you with their flexibility and mental images?

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Photo: Alan Bolitho, LM

Thank you kindly.

Word count: 451                   Reading time: 1-2 minutes 

Last week I stood in line at the supermarket. The slender young woman in front of me with the flashy diamond ring and the Louis Vuitton handbag flicked her blonde hair over her shoulder as she slapped down her sole purchase, a 4-litre jug of milk. When she paid with a debit card she kept everyone waiting as her long, manicured fingernails mis-hit the keypad. The cashier gave her the receipt and said, ‘Thank you.’

The customer stared at him blankly.

‘Oh. Did you want a bag for that?’ he asked as he fumbled for one.

‘Yeah,’ answered the blonde without a trace of a smile.

The only thing that made this transaction unusual was the LV handbag. Don’t see too many of those at Lynn Valley Centre. 

Bad manners seem ubiquitous these days and they are just the start of disrespect for others. Thanks to the anonymity of the internet, some people now readily escalate beyond everyday incivility; they hide behind false identities to sling hatred and vitriol from a safe distance. Read any current events or news article online. Then read the comments that follow. Some incendiary remarks will be posted by trolls who enjoy a fight. Others will be vicious personal attacks directed at anyone and everyone.

Maybe we can’t stop attention-starved people from flaming others but can we set a better example with our own conduct? I know about please and thank you and not cutting people off in traffic but I wasn’t so sure of the rules of the road in cyberspace. Luckily there is a myriad of opinions out there. Here are a few that helped me lift my game:

• 101 Email Etiquette Tips
• 20 Essential Tips For Better Twitter Etiquette
• Blog Etiquette or Blogtiquette

For writers reviewing other writers’ work, there’s even an article about that:

• John Updike on the Ethics and Poetics of Criticism

Why is any of this important to the writer’s life? Because we are all hyper-connected, our bad behaviour is no longer as private as it once was and it leaves a lasting impression. People see the tweeters who run a monologue, never acknowledge retweets, and only tweet in self-interest. They know whose blog they can comment on* and never receive a reply. The internet has rendered the small world even smaller and we need to be careful whom we offend out of simple ignorance.

How are you conducting yourself out there? Are you treating the supermarket cashier with the same courtesy that you extend your editor, your boss, or the clients of your business? Do you value your social capital and does it show in the way you respond to others, in R/L and online?

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Photo by: mu_mu_ 

 * Recently I removed the CAPTCHA filter off this blog. It should be easier than ever to comment and I always reply.

On your mark....

Word Count: 398                                  Reading time: 1-2 mins.

Australian swimmer Leisel Jones has collected a sack of Olympic medals since she first competed in Sydney in 2000: 3 gold, 4 silver, and 1 bronze. Not satisfied with that outstanding record the Herald Sun newspaper attacked her this year because of her body size. How much does a person have to give before it’s enough?

When I think of Olympic athletes, I think of how young they have to start, how early someone has to recognize their talent and start grooming them for a prize way down the road. I envision all the dark mornings when parents get up and chauffeur them (if they are lucky enough to have a car) to far away venues. I imagine all the holidays that focus on sporting competitions. The costs must be off the scale and family sacrifices immeasurable, like those of Chinese diver Wu Minxia who rarely speaks to her parents so her training won’t be disrupted by potentially disturbing news.

All that perseverance for a few weeks in the sun, once every four years if an athlete is lucky enough to qualify for more than one Olympic meet. And if they are off their form at any point in the qualifying rounds, they may never even hear the starting pistol; they’re finished before they’re out of the gate. Injuries may end their careers permanently.

So if you train and train and never make it beyond the city championships, has all that effort gone to waste? Not really; the habits of hard work, endurance, and courage last a lifetime.

Writing also demands hard work, endurance and courage. Katherine Anne Porter called courage the “first essential for a writer”; it’s essential if we’re ever going to be true to our stories and our characters. Getting a novel to reader-ready status demands both hard work and perseverance. In the end, if we are lucky, we might achieve moderate success, maybe the equivalent of a win at a city championship: a publication and good sales. And, unlike Leisel Jones, even the greatest among us will never have their pictures splashed the front page of the paper, questioning whether they are fit enough to compete in the frantic world of publishing.

What type of writing athlete are you? When you’ve had a bad day writing do you put your losses behind you and jump back into the pool, ready for the next heat?

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Photo by: Epicstock