Some years ago, I decided to treat myself to piano lessons. I’d never studied music before, although I’d sat through hundreds of hours of my daughters’ lessons. Since I’m a skilled typist, I figured that the piano fingering would be simple. (I pause here for anyone who’s played a keyboard instrument to snort incredulously in my general direction.) Needless to say, I was soon juggling trying to make my hands, wrists, and shoulders do something new and exciting, and also to wrap my mind around and through the internal structure of classical music, and also to listen to what I was playing. As frustrating as this process can be, it was also exhilarating. I was asking my brain—motor, sensory, cognitive and kinesthetic functions—to work in a new way, a new and creative way.
(I’m going to sidestep the issue of whether a musical performer is “creative” in the sense of adding anything to the composition. I will say instead that playing music is inherently creative because you’ve gone from silence to the active presence of an art form whose medium is sound. A dancer who is performing choreography is creative in the same way.)
An essential part of the care of a writer is “filling the well” or “recharging the batteries.” It’s rare to be able to pour forth volume after volume of peerless storytelling while sitting in a room by yourself, isolated and absorbed only in the work. Most of us need to actively engage with other people and in other activities, to rest one part of our minds while flexing and strengthening others, to stockpile a treasure trove of sights, sounds, dreams, thoughts, emotions, relationships. Acquiring a new skill—whether it’s karaoke singing or mountain climbing, a Chopin Prelude or a perfect pirouette (human or equine), is a good way to begin.
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On Writing and Healing
Some years back, my sister gave me a copy of Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing (Beacon Press, 1999). It sat on my shelf as I debated whether its contents would be grim or admonishing. I was wrong on both counts. Although my fiction writing is just that—fiction, as in “I made it all up, I truly did”—the book presented me with two invaluable gifts.
The first is that when we tell the truth, we improve not only our emotional but our physical health, and there’s research to prove it. DeSalvo writes specifically about autobiographical narrative of trauma or other difficult situations. I think the same holds true in a broader sense for all writing. It does not matter that my character is not me or these things never happened in my own life. I can still tell the truth, the truth of my heart, the truth of my spirit. When I do that, something unfolds within me and is given space to breathe, to stretch, to grow into a different shape.
My Darkover novel, Hastur Lord, alternates points of view between a bisexual man in a love triangle and that of his gay male lover. I am not a man of any sexual orientation. Yet as I dug into myself to write about jealousy and inclusivity, the courage to face one’s fears and the generosity to transcend them, the needs we can set aside and the needs that, if denied, can kill us, I found resonances within my own life. I remembered times when I acted badly and hurt the ones I love, and times I could not ask for what I needed because I didn’t even know what that was. Did I make my characters speak for me? I hope not. Did they think and feel and act in ways that invited me to be more gentle with my own past? Absolutely.
The second gift of this book was DeSalvo’s approach to writing as work. Commercial genre writing tends to encourage a regimental approach: you sit down, you pound out so many words or so many pages, you vent about this problem or that, you feel satisfied or not, depending on whether you achieved your daily quota. DeSalvo, on the other hand, encourages the writer to prepare for the day’s work, just as an athlete or actor would prepare, and to reflect on the experience afterwards. This means getting friendly with our goals, our intuition, and our inner processes. When we hold in mind what we intend in whatever terms are meaningful for that particular day, we are ready to begin. Afterwards, we conclude—giving each session a beginning, middle and end, just like a good story. We deepen our understanding of what works best for us.
I love what she says about book-length works:
Writing longer works helps us mature. We learn persistence. We recognize that profound understanding takes time. In elaborating our first impressions, we discover there’s more to our stories than we’d thought. We identify patterns in how we work, in our work, and in our lives.
All this takes time, which is important. As Isabel Allende observed in an interview . . . “You need a lot of time to exorcise the demons and take enough distance to be able to write with ambiguity and irony—two elements that are very important in literature.”
She also points out, “Every published writer was once a beginner. Even seasoned writers, facing a new project, must start anew, begin anew.”
Faced with a blank screen and an even more blank mind, I find this immensely reassuring.
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Writing Fears
Tonight I had a brief conversation with a friend, touching on the social pressure to participate in an activity she found overwhelmingly frightening. This has got me thinking not only about what are my own “hot button” fears in general, but in my writing. We all have our individual crazy places, things about which we are not rational, things that create instant, flip-out, certifiably-nuts adrenalin overload. I’ve made my peace with how difficult some issues are for me. Over the years, with a lot of help from my friends, most of these have loosened their hold on me, even if they haven’t entirely let go. I’ve come to believe that “courage is fear that has said its prayers,” and know myself capable of a great deal despite those fears.
But what about writing? This is the new part. Are there things about writing in general, publishing, career, my own work, that intimidate me? Are there things I do or don’t do because of fear? A few obvious fears I can cross off my list. I’m not afraid:
Of having a book or a story rejected.
Of receiving a harsh review.
Of making a fool of myself on a convention panel.
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. None of these things is any fun at all, but being embarrassed isn’t fatal, and a sense of humor will go a long way. One reason I love networking with other writers is that we aren’t all off-balance on the same day. We’ve all been through some version of the above, and someone is sure to say exactly the right thing to carry me through the worst. Then I get to do the same for another friend.
I have moments of self-doubt, in which my thoughts go in unfortunate directions, prompting me to believe, if only for a moment, that nothing I’ve written is any good, I can’t write my way out of a wet paper bag, and no one will ever want to read my work again. Fortunately, these moments are so brief and so easily made ridiculous, I don’t categorize them as fears.
However, I am afraid:
Of letting myself get talked into wasting precious years on a project that’s not meaningful to me.
Of not having the courage to tackle painful or controversial material.
Of dying before I tell the stories in my heart.
This kind of pressure—I Must Write Stories of Earth-Shaking Significance—is not helpful. Who is to say what work will be cherished a century hence? Perhaps it won’t be that Momentous Tome, but a bit of fluff—air and feathers and sheer delight. This is what fear does to us, thought, it makes us all tight. Desperate. Grim.
Talk about dying? Better, talk about living, about falling in love with every story, even the most fanciful. About letting that love, that joy, shine through. These things are, after all, ephemeral, but the memory of having experienced them is not.
After all, today is all any of us have. This present moment. This present story. This scene. This word. This unfolding of the heart.
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Goals vs. Wishes
Quite some time ago, in the late 1970s I think, I stopped making New Year’s resolutions (which always seemed to me to be engraved invitations to guilt) and
started making goals. One-year, five-year, ten-year, and lifetime goals. They’d be something like:
1 year—write three short stories
5 years—sell a story
10 years—sell a novel
Lifetime—win a major award
As years rolled by, I wrote those stories, and I sold one and then another, and the goals shifted. Sometimes they got more specific, like “one year—finish X project” and sometimes more vague, “Write a work of enduring literary quality.” Items came and went, like getting an advance of Y dollars or getting published in hard cover or getting reviewed in Z publication. I found that the more I achieved, the less satisfied I was with how I was progressing with my goals.
Why? I was working well and selling my short stories and novels regularly. I loved my work. But I was confusing goals with wishes. A goal is something I can achieve by my own effort. My goal is to finish Chapter 27; my goal is to hike 5 miles; my goal is to play the Brahms Waltz in A Flat.
A wish can seem like a goal—it’s something I want and have to work for. But its achievement relies on some aspect that is beyond my control. I can want to win a Pulitzer Prize, I can work my brains out to that end, but I can’t control the factors that lead to such recognition. As I gained more professional experience, I became more realistic in what I could and couldn’t control. One novel sale does not guarantee the next. I have absolutely no way of making a movie studio take enough interest in my book to option its film rights. I can’t force my publisher not to lay off my editor if that’s what they must do (this has actually never happened to me, but it has to my friends).
So some things become wishes. I wish that my book be selected by the Science Fiction Book Club. I wish that it sell overseas. I wish I get invited to be Guest of Honor at my favorite convention.
With time comes wisdom.
I wish that my words bring hope and comfort to those in hard times.
I wish that my stories help to further understanding and acceptance of all peoples.
I wish that my heart may speak through my work.
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Settling in Meditation and in Writing
Quakers call it “centering down,” but I like the word, “settling.” It reminds me of settlers, pioneers and voyageurs who have, for some utterly unaccountable reason, taken a mind to put down roots. My mind is like that, wandering all over the place, alighting here and there with no particular purpose. It thinks it knows what it’s doing, but a butterfly has more focused direction. So I sit. What I do with my mind isn’t important and probably wouldn’t work for anyone else. I sit. I breathe. And at some point, that surely must be magic because my own poor will has nothing to do with it, a little bubble—not of mental chatter but of deep stillness—forms inside me. Now I can begin to listen. I don’t have roots yet, just little thread-like rootlets, but they’re enough to keep me in one place long enough for that bubble to do its work.
Some days—heck, who am I kidding? most days—my writing begins with a similar process. I can find almost any excuse not to sit down in front of the computer or with pad and pen in hand. It’s not that I don’t want to write or I’m not excited about the story I’m working on. I know intellectually that once I’m into the flow, I’ll lose myself in it. I love my characters and miss them, even overnight. But some part of my brain, my monkey-chattering, time-frivoling, recalcitrant part of my brain, runs amok.
I can get into a death match with that monkey-mind, grimly insisting that we will sit down. No. Matter. What. Sometimes I need that 5th turbo-charged gear. I have deadlines, I get caught with too many projects and one of life’s inevitable sand-in-the-gears crises. Then I need to be able to put Ms. Idiot-Monkey on ice and plunge into work-on-steroids mode.
Most of the time, however, my schedule is a bit less frantic. On some days, I’m ready to go as soon as I’ve finished breakfast, or even before. Yet on other days, I don’t “settle” until an hour or two before dinner. I go through much the same process as I do at Quaker meeting. I wait. I listen. I try to pay attention to what I need in order to be ready to write. The very concept of being ready to write took me years to formulate. Partly because I have insanely high expectations of myself and partly because I began writing professionally when my children were small and there was no such thing as transition or warm-up time, I think I should be prepared to write at any moment. The truth is that when I do that, I have to rip out a lot of what I produce. If, on the other hand, I am able to pay attention to what my creative mind needs, I am much more likely to work well and productively.
After some years of trying to listen to myself, I realized that most of the time, the things standing in my way were not frivolous or unrelated to my writing. As often as not, I discovered a niggling plot problem, a lapse in tone, or a character aching to point me in a better direction in yesterday’s work. Or a new story idea that will quite happily go back to sleep once I’ve jotted it down. Or something in my life that is moving beneath the story, awkwardly and silently, waiting for my attention to bring it to life.
Listen. Pay attention. Settle. Put down roots deep into your story, deep into your life.
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Copyright & Credits
Ink Dance
Essays on the Writing Life
Deborah J. Ross
Book View Café Publishing Cooperative Edition January 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61138-350-8
Copyright © 2014 Deborah J. Ross
Some of these essays have appeared in earlier versions on my blog, LiveJournal, and the Book View Café blog.
Production team: Proofreader: Elisabeth Waters; Ebook Formatter: Vonda N. McIntyre; Cover design: Dave Smeds
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Book View Café Publishing Cooperative
PO Box 1624
Cedar Crest, NM 87008-1624
www.bookviewcafe.com
About the Author
The work of Deborah J. Ross has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Star Wars: Tales from Jabba’s Palace, Realms of Fantasy, and Sword & Sorceress. She continued the Darkover series of Marion Zimmer Bradley and wrote Collaborators, (science fiction, as Deborah Wheeler) and The Seven-Petaled Shield, a fantasy trilogy.
About Book View Café
Book View Café Publishing Cooperative is a professional authors’ publishing cooperative offering DRM-free ebooks in multiple formats to readers around the world. With authors in a variety of genres including mystery, romance, fantasy, and science fiction, Book View Café has something for everyone.
Book View Café is good for readers because you can enjoy high-quality DRM-free ebooks from your favorite authors at a reasonable price.
Book View Café is good for writers because 95% of the profit goes directly to the book’s author.
Book View Café authors include New York Times and USA Today bestsellers, Nebula, Hugo, Campbell, and Philip K. Dick Award winners, World Fantasy and Rita Award nominees, and winners and nominees of many other publishing awards.
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Chapter 1: Kardith of the Rangers
Scaling the final hill was like climbing into a sea of ice. Up and up we went, one shivering, dogged step after another, woman and mare. My fingers had gone numb, laced in her mane, and I could no longer tell if she pulled me along or the other way round. I envied her, with no thought but to keep going.
As we neared the crest, I squinted up at the sky, as white and airless as if some vengeful god had sucked it dry. I reminded myself there were no gods here in Laurea, vengeful or otherwise.
The mare plodded on, head lowered, one ear cocked toward me and the other flopping, snapping at a sucker-fly without breaking stride. Her neck and shoulders were so wet they looked black, the dapples hidden under flecks of foam. Suddenly her head shot up, ears pricked. She snorted and lunged forward, nearly yanking my arm off.
The next moment, I stood on
the crest of the hill, sweating and shivering at the same time. As far as I could see stretched green and yellow patches of wheat, barley and hybrid oats, all outlined by orange bug-weed. A farmhouse flanked a silo, pond, and vegetable plot. The mare nickered, scenting the ripe grain.
On the horizon, a line of trees marked the river. Serenity, it was called, typical dumbshit Laurean name. The trees looked blue from up here and I could almost see the smaller tributary snaking in from the northwest. Where it dumped into the Serenity, colder than winter snot, the trees bunched as if they’d scrambled up on each other. Buildings hid among them, glass and rock as pale as weathered bone.
Laureal City. Back on Kratera Ridge, I thought I’d never see it again. Now I remembered the streets, so smooth and flat, the rows of trees in flower and fruit at the same time. The courtyards with their fountains and gardens, set between angular geodesics or inside tall, square houses where a dozen families might live together.
I remembered standing in the Starhall with the other Ranger candidates. Pateros hearing my oath, just as Guardians have heard Ranger oaths for hundreds of years. The light in his green-gold eyes and the grainy softness of his voice as he talked about beginnings and moving beyond the past. But it didn’t sound like the usual Laureal wishcrap. It seemed to me the demon god of chance had finally turned my way and smiled.
I remembered too much.
The gray mare shook her head and stamped one hind hoof. The metal shoe clicked against a stone buried under the trail dust. By now I’d stopped sweating, but I was still shaking and my hands hurt. I opened my fingers and pulled free of her mane. My right hip twinged as I mounted up and swung my leg over the rolled sleep-sack and saddle bags. I let my body sway with the mare’s east gait and my lower back popped and felt looser.
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