WRITING RITUALS: DEVELOPING THE HABIT

People often ask me what a typical writing day is like for me. As a juggler of many roles: author, book marketer, business writer, teacher, parent, community activist, etc., no day is typical, but habit plays a major role for me in keeping my nose to the grindstone. I’m not blessed with the ability to wake up at dawn, (and the rare times I do, I have absolutely nothing worth saying) but on the days I’m not teaching full-time, I do try to get to the computer within an hour after I wake up—by nine or nine-thirty at the latest. I find that building in little rituals helps, allowing myself a quick glance at the newspaper over breakfast before carting a large mug of tea upstairs. I find this habit so ingrained, it feels a little bit like Pavlov’s dogs. I find myself facing the computer without even thinking about whether I should write, clean the house, run errands, grade papers, or work on a paid project. Then, I actually build in a limit of 30 minutes of procrastination time which serves as both a warm-up and a way of not succumbing to distractions later, I check my e-mail and social networking sites, and play no more than one—all right, maybe two—games of solitaire. While people may scoff, I find that spending 10 minutes thinking about nothing but the patterns of cards frees up my brain to create without thinking about the pressing administrative minutiae and other demands of the day, all of which—out of habit—I’ve trained myself to save for later.

Owning All Your Writing–The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

In going through the backlog of poetry, most of which I wrote 20-30 years ago, I found, along with poems I liked and was proud of, a number of poems that now felt too embarrassing to even have my name on them (some of these were even published). And in putting together a binder of my work, I actually left some of these “bad poems” out, adding instead a number of what I’d previously categorized as unfinished poems that I was finally able to revise by putting into practice a lot of the craft I didn’t have twenty years ago.

It was interesting that just as I was winding down this process and settling back into my next YA fiction project, I reconnected with my old poetry friends, who ran a reading series in New York. This reading on the upper east side of Manhattan was my favorite among the many series I attended, and I remember fondly all the quirky and interesting people. Some of the poetry was amazing, some less so, but all of it, I realized, like both the poems of mine I loved and the poems of mine I am now embarrassed about having ever written, gave us the freedom to speak out about what was important to us, and to share that with a community–this was no small gift, and I treasure its difference from the modern day “poetry slams” where there are winners and losers.

So what I’m trying to learn from this is not to feel embarrassed about old material. It simply is part of the process of growing in writing and in life.

The Gift of Art

The Gift of Art

Last weekend at the New England Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference I heard Laurie Halse Anderson, whose work I greatly admire speak on giving ourselves permission to write. Having been to countless writers conferences over the years, I’m kind of past the point of needing to hear that I have to write everyday, find a good space, ignore the seduction of distraction, etc. I already have figured out how to build consistent writing into my busy life, and I’ve gotten to the point in my own writing process where if the space in my head is clear, it doesn’t matter if I’m sitting in the middle of piles of junk in the living room, “listening” to my husband complaining that I left the laundry room light on, and my son yakking about his school day.

But then she got to point number three. “Give yourself the gift of art,” she said. Play music, paint, dance, sing, write poetry.

Duh!

No wonder, last month, after finally finishing a manuscript that took five years of birth pain, did I feel drained, empty. It was my spring break from my teaching job, and work slave that I am, I wanted to make the most of the extra time, so I immediately started cogitating all the other things I ‘should’ be working on, the snippets of manuscripts I started or made notes for, the dead novels needing to be resuscitated. I couldn’t face any of them.

Instead, I started looking through things I wrote twenty years ago–a bunch of half-finished poetry and journal entries that could be poems. Though I’d published many poems in my 20s and 30s, I don’t think of poetry as my strongest art form—in fact I consider myself an imposter poet. But what did I do for that week? I wrote and revised poems. Lots of poems. They weren’t terribly good, and I didn’t really care about publishing them, but I had fun, I paid attention to language on a different level, and I felt nurtured rather than emptied. I did this for a few weeks before I slowly started going back to work on the next manuscript project, and now I’m continuing to dabble in poems as a sweet coffee break on the long road to polishing the next manuscript.

So thank you, Laurie, for putting to words what I knew in my deepest self was true. It We need to take time to replenish the well through other art forms. This week, I’m looking forward to singing.

Essie’s Story, Partisan and Teacher

All through the time I was writing Escaping Into the Night, I wondered if there was anyone out there who was part of the Bielski Partisans whom I could speak to. I made a few inquiries at the National Museum of the Holocaust, and heard about people who lived in trees, people who wandered the forests, but no one who was actually there, so I had to piece together details from various memoirs I read about other survivors’ experiences, and historical accounts about the Bielskis.

Imagine my surprise, then, when a friend of mine in response to a review she had posted of Escaping on my Amazon site forwarded me a short letter she had received from Esia Shor, a cousin of Tuvia Bielski and one of the original members of the partisan group.

Esia has written a detailed and compelling account of her life during the war. The story tells how the Germans took over her home town of Norwogrodek, and in one day, killed 4000 Jews in the town, miraculously sparing Esia and her father, but not her mother and sisters. Esia and her father were driven open army trucks to the ghetto, where each “old and dreary” house had four rooms, with twelve people to a room. Food was scarce, just one ration of soup per day, and people stood by the fence that separated the ghetto from the outside world, waiting for a moment that a guard wasn’t looking, then quickly making whispered exchanges through the wooden slats. A Polish couple for whom Esia did domestic work for helped in her first escape, giving her clothes in which to disguise herself and taking her to a cornfield, where she spent the night hiding, but when she stopped at a house the next morning to request a drink of water, she found the Polish police. Esia ran, then jumped into a deep ditch, where she hid for two days. As she tells it,

“I lay in the cold dirt, holding my legs close to my body for warmth and to still the trembling of my body. I kept hearing gunshots and menacing Polish voices repeating, ‘Come out, come out, we’ll find you anyway!’ It was like some nightmarish game of hide-and-seek only with death as the consequence.”

While she was able to avert the police, this escape attempt ended in failure, and Esia returned to the ghetto. However, several months later, she escaped with her cousin and two others who cut a hole in the fence, and made her tortuous way over fifteen miles into the woods to join the Bielski partisans. She was one of the first twenty-five people in the group, which later grew to over 1200 people. There, like my character, Halina, she carried a gun, went on guard duty helped with cooking, and went on missions to procure food from neighboring villages. The group was constantly on the move to avoid being discovered by German soldiers. She lived in the forest for two years. Eventually, after the war was over, she came to the United States, where she became a teacher.

Esia writes, “While it is true that I believed in myself and managed to survive through a combination of courage and chance, the fact is that others, also courageous, died simply because of bad luck.” When I read those words I thought of my characters Halina and Reuven coming to terms with the same issue, how they were brave because they had to be, and how they recognized that they were also lucky. As they set off to try to rescue Batya, Reuven carrying a gun and Halina carrying nothing but her lucky stone, they think about bravery, and how others were just as brave but less lucky. Halina says, “I wasn’t sure if I could believe in God and I didn’t really believe in the stone, either, but I could believe in luck.”

As I read parts of Esia’s story over and over, I am inspired and awed by her bravery, and her luckiness, but even more by her generosity in taking the time to share and, in essence, relive some of the horrors of her experience. Her story, like the stories of so many other survivors, in Esia’s words, “shows us that there is something remarkable about human beings, how they can start over and keep on going. Memories dim, but we should never forget what happened so long ago. This kind of horror should never happen again.”

Upcoming Events–Spring 2008

April 12-13, Dina will be attending the New England Conference of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators in Nashua, New Hampshire

May 28th, 7-9 pm, reading with Michele Barker, Judy Jaeger and Michelle Kwansey, E. Longmeadow Public Library, E. Longmeadow, MA