On Writing

There’s no limit to the advice proffered to aspiring writers:

Write what you know.

Join a writer’s group.

Don’t join a writer’s group.

Write every day.

Lock the door.

And above all, keep your day job for now.

In the end I simply did what worked for me.

Believe in your story.

I spent much of my adult life as a wordsmith, but I didn’t sit down to become a writer until I knew I had a story to tell. I didn’t know how to tell it, but I was convinced it was worth the telling. I’ve heard sculptors claim they simply “freed” their figures from the marble, and I find this a truly incredible notion. But in truth I chipped away at my tale, sometimes blindly, and it did eventually reveal itself to me. Once I created the characters and got to know them, they helped me with the plot. At times they told me what they wanted to say. They reminded me of threads of the story that needed to be picked up and revisited. They cautioned me against a trite or simple ending. I fell in love with them, and I grieved them when I was finished.

Write what you know, and research what you don’t. You might find a treasure.

My work is fiction. I made much of it up. But I started with an event I learned about when I was very young, that happened to a relative, and that deeply impacted my family. At the start I could only imagine the various scenarios that led to my grandmother’s adoption. But years as a reporter taught me to ask questions, and so I began my research.

I used Ancestry.com for census records, which proved invaluable in tracking the movements of some of the actual people who inspired my characters. I used the internet to research crops and weather patterns, early railroad travel and the Spanish flu pandemic. I contacted the Grand Forks County Historical Society. Their staff was hugely helpful in creating an accurate picture of the town in the early twentieth century, as well as in finding historical tidbits in the local paper. I visited Grand Forks and Fargo, felt the prairie wind, watched the Red River flow, saw the abandoned supports for what used to be the swing bridges that reached across to Minnesota.

When I googled the orphanage, there was historical information, but a new organization’s name kept popping up, a family services organization. Finally, I picked up the phone and called, and from that call came the letters I used as much of the basis of Dear Clara. That’s when I knew enough to begin.

Consider a writing group, but stay only as long as it works for you.

I joined a writer’s group, and it got me started. Initially the feedback was encouraging, and having an external deadline helped get me going. I was invited into another small writer’s group on Facebook, but it blew up when the creator of the group changed her mind and took the page down. By then I had a sense of where I wanted my book to go, and I found that the downside of being in a writer’s group is twofold. First, while some of the feedback was constructive and helpful, some was just distracting. Second, I was continually focusing away from my own work to help others. That can be a noble pursuit, and I did it for years as a teacher of writing. But if I was going to become a writer, I had to put my head down and look inward, where my story lived all along.

Write at a consistent time every day… sometimes.

Writing is a creative pursuit. Unlike yoga and eating vegetables, it doesn’t always lend itself to daily discipline. I understand accomplished writers may argue this, and I only have my experience to share. If writing every day works, I applaud you. But my focus was on the story, which revealed itself at its own pace.

In the beginning I dedicated several hours of the morning to it, and I kept to this schedule as consistently as I could. Sometimes that meant I wrote after lunch too. Sometimes (not often) I got up at midnight and wrote while the house was quiet.

I was committed. But I was not always consistent.

Sometimes I took days off to weed the garden and think. Sometimes I walked and talked to my characters, asking them what was next. Sometimes I cleaned out cabinets and tried not to think about them at all. And sometimes I read. I read novels. I read poems. I read weather maps and farm almanacs. And I read about writing. My two favorite how-to-write books are Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. All of these things helped me chip away at my creation.

But there were days when I didn’t think about my project at all, and those days were important too. They cleared my head. They gave me and my characters a rest. I visited with friends, went on a date with my husband, watched a show. And before long, it was the characters who tapped me on the shoulder and gently told me it was time to get back to it. They were ready, and so was I.

Find your place, door opened or closed.

Where you write matters in that you need a place where you can be left alone, at least most of the time. You can be as creative as you need to be to find it.

My office was for a time a corner of our garage, the last spot left in our rambling house after we invited our daughter and son-in-law into our home and then COVID -19 hit, so that everyone had to work from home. A desk I procured off Craig’s List and a chair from Staples got me started. I added the bamboo screen for zoom calls. And the batiks, from Kenya, are the art we picked up there forty years ago and that no longer had a spot in our house. Except now it did.

Where you write matters in that you need a place where you can be left alone, at least most of the time. You can be as creative as you need to be to find it.

Everyone laughed when I said I was moving into the garage. When I arranged my desk to look directly at the expansive door, and then opened it, they stopped laughing. My garage has all the chaos expected in such a place, from a lint-filled dryer vent to old paint cans to my children’s twenty-five-year-old school projects I can’t bear to part with. But with its view down the driveway, over the treetops and through the notch in the hills that stand between us and the Pacific Ocean, it became to me the grandest office in the world. Momentary interruptions from Amazon drivers aside, it was a perfect spot in which to write.

We’re empty nesters now, the house is quiet, and my desk is back inside. But I did what I needed to so that I could write.

Keep your day job if that’s what you need to do. (Sometimes a day job can make you a better writer.)

            Anyone who’s tried to write and work another job on the side knows how challenging it can be. I compromised by working in newsrooms for a time. That helped me hone my writing skills, to be sure. But it left little time for writing outside of work.

            Then I became a teacher, and I kept my day job until I could retire, which isn’t inspirational for anyone young who is longing to get started. I just think it’s important to be realistic and to prioritize. I wanted a family, and I needed to work to help support that family. I loved teaching, and I didn’t have extra energy to focus on serious writing. I was fortunate in being able to teach writing, and when my students wrote, I wrote too. I did every exercise I asked them to do, and I kept my relationship with writing alive. All that time might be considered a big delay by some, but in truth I didn’t know I had this tale to tell when I was twenty-five or thirty years old. It took some additional decades of living for me to see it, though it had been there all along. It took those years for me to believe in my story.

So, I repeat: Believe in your story.

If you do, everything else is negotiable.