Tag Archives: frustration

You Ever Feel Stuck?

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You ever feel stuck?

Sometimes you just do. It’s a good time to eat chocolate ice cream, or go for a walk, or take a bath.

Getting unstuck is usually a combination of mental and physical, which is interesting because feeling stuck is usually entirely a mental thing.

But we’re mammals, so getting unstuck sometimes requires a little physicality. Shaking it off might be literal. Don’t overthink it, just get moving. Enjoy something. Not so much “rest” in the sense of removal from activity, but thoughtful rest in an activity you enjoy.

That was my advice to myself this week when I grew frustrated with my inability to attract a fiction agent. My nonfiction career is going great guns with our seventh edited anthology, thanks, but nobody thinks I have an imagination? I took myself on a long, shady walk in the woods to give myself a pep talk.

Two years now, I’ve been working on a coming-of-age novel set in West Virginia. Two years, the characters have shaped and stammered and grabbed the keyboard from my hands and run amok across it. Now it’s time to edit the opening to make it more of a grabber than an explainer. Something that has never been my forte. But in the personal rejections coming from agents (in a ratio of 1 personal for 3 standard), they pretty much say the same thing: the opening isn’t making me care what happens to the characters.

This is a puzzle to be solved, a craft to be practiced, and I have to remind myself I write because I like writing, because there are things to be said, and because it keeps me from strangling people with my bare hands. So, there’s that. Do what you love because you love it, and remember that’s why you started this journey.

That said, the journey doesn’t have to end down a dead-end alley with the words “your characters are not compelling” written on it. I intend to see that mine does not.

But oh, the energy, oh the strategy, oh the strange masochistic joy of this journey.

If you’re out there writing,too, be encouraged. I’ve published seven books across four lovely publishers, and this is what I have to say about our industry right now: this too shall pass. One way or another, we will unstick. Because, writing.

Get up and try again, kids. That’s my plan.

Why Writing is Like Crocheting (or Knitting) II

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Today’s blog is dedicated to all the needleworkers out there, keeping the world warm and held together.

yarnStarting is the hardest part, isn’t it? The blank page {shudder} – nothing is scarier. And part of it is knowing that the foundation row has to be right. How often have we made an afghan that’s gorgeous, except down at the bottom it’s too tight and curls and won’t lie flat. Or worse, worked our way up and found on row 20 that the reason for this ever-increasing mistake is a tiny error back on row 2–and you have to go back and fix it, or nothing will turn out right.

Which is debilitating, as you stare at that massive tangle of ideas that might or might not be one single and whole thread, the piece of yarn that’s all gnarled up together so you can’t even see the beginning and ending of it. Your heart sinks as you take up the mass of loops and knots all stuck together, and yet, there’s this tiny piece of you that wants to get in there and tackle the thing, rise to the challenge, subdue it, turn order into chaos… and that’s pretty much the opening process, isn’t it? Every story has a beginning, the entry point A, and an ending, the exit point Z, so you try to find yours in all those crazy ideas tied together in your head, and they wind so tightly together that they seem like one thing.

But then you find either point–the beginning or the end–and start moving, forward or backward, patiently, one hand on the thread and one pushing through the tangle, moving, sifting, unwinding, over and under and back up again with gentle movements–although every once in awhile you just give the whole thing a good hard yank accompanied by a correctly-conjugated F word, and go get yourself a glass of something. Then you come back and sit down and think some more, slow, patient, finding the thread that runs through the middle of all those knotted bits.

And before you know it, you have a plan: a ball of thread to work with, a pattern to follow, and some time to get going. And time makes time, which people who do yarn work understand: it doesn’t take away your time, it gives it back. You write and write, and then you hit a mistake, a bit where the pattern doesn’t seem to read right, a character who dances sideways with a big raspberry, and you get frustrated and put it down and go away.

It’s amazing how a night off provides clarity, because when you make yourself take it up again yarn bombthe next day, well of course, here it is, a mistake in the pattern, or a doubled stitch, a word out of season, an idea in the wrong place, easily fixed, what were all the hysterics for? And on you go.

And on, and on, and then suddenly you look down and the thing that was a tangled mess that became a pattern and a plan has become under your steadily moving fingers a cohesive whole, a recognizable garment, a story to be reckoned with. You didn’t think you were getting anywhere and then BAM you’re putting on the edging, binding the whole ending back to the beginning. It’s colorful, and vibrant, and right.

rainbow-crochet-coatAnd satisfying. So very, very satisfying.