The night after the election, instead of doing my regular piano practicing, I sat down with Rise Up Singing and played John Lennon’s Imagine. It’s become my anthem. Then I went through the entire book, and played a whole bunch of songs that give voice to hope–even if hope is so wispy right now, it’s hard to find enough to lift myself out of bed every morning.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
I played Let it Be, Love Call Me Home, The Rose, If We Only Had Love, and How Can I Keep from Singing.
And I sang along.
I’ve been struggling with vocal issues during the past couple of years, which has made singing difficult. But I’m now taking voice lessons and it has been thrilling to start recovering my singing voice. When I can sing without losing my breath or croaking into raspy-ness, I feel giddy with power.
And these things feel like what I need right now–giddiness, and, at least, a flicker of power.
In the writing world we talk a lot about finding or accessing one’s own writing voice. It can often take months or years before we find our “groove,” a way of expression that feels uniquely our own.
And in writing, our voice can change over the years as we experiment with new and different approaches. As in singing, we might at times lose our voice (writers’ block) for a while before we find it again.
Let’s trust that even in this very difficult and scary time we will find our voices and use them to speak our truths.
And let’s keep holding onto the vision of Imagine.
Once again, I’ve signed up to write 30 Poems in November to benefit the Center for New Americans, which provides English classes and many other types of advocacy for immigrants here in western Mass. And once again, as October draws to a close, I’m feeling that trepidation of adding one more item to my to-do list, wondering how I’m ever going to churn out 30 poems in a month–even poems that are unfinished and far less than stellar.
It hasn’t helped that my writing life has slowed to a crawl. Paperwork related to my father-in-law’s death, last minute election volunteering, putting the garden to bed, health issues with relatives, the Jewish holidays, my grandchild’s birthday, editing deadlines, and a flurry of visits with friends and family have made it hard to get to my desk as often and regularly as I’d like. Even this blog post–which I usually aim for mid-week–is late. (I just got a warning post from SubStack, letting me know that I had only two more days to fulfill my pledge of blogging weekly, LOL!)
But one of the things I love about writing 30 Poems in November is that permission to slow down. To make writing practice front and center again.
I find I’m most successful at birthing poems when I can be out of my to-do list and into what I think of as the fuzzier part of my brain. Then, I just let the pen flow and the words come–sometimes easily, and sometimes with a bit of effort, but the trick, for me, is not to try too hard to construct *a poem* as much as let myself sense what I’m sensing and free associate from there. And from that pile of words, I can often sift through and find the gems, threading my path forward.
The hardest part is to let the chaff fall away–the distractions, the judgment– and let myself fall into the “wow” of whatever is underneath all that detritus.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
And lately, when I need lessons in falling into the sensual wonder of discovery, I get them from my two-year-old grandchild Manu. Recently, he’s been entranced with the abundant display of Halloween decorations in his neighborhood: the furry spiders perched on the hedges, the life-sized dragon with the blinking red eyes, the pumpkin faces, the creepy hands sticking out of the ground, the lanterns hanging from the trees.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
Every day, he asks to see the dragon and the spiders. He takes his time, exclaiming, Oh, there’s another spider! before rushing over to investigate and dig his little hands into the fur.
After the “spider house,” we go next door to the Japanese rock garden, where he watches the brightly colored fish, and rains handfuls of small, cool rocks, listening to the pleasing sound they make when they hit the ground.
Poems are everywhere. Hopefully, some will come to me this November.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
And yes, please consider contributing to my fundraising page for this worthy cause. No donation is too small! Many thanks. Happy Halloween and Happy November!
For the past five years, I’ve done a self-reflective practice during the month of Elul, the 29 days preceding the Jewish New Year (which we celebrated on October 2-4 this year) where I focus intensely on my aspirations for the coming year, as well as my current short-comings, places where I’ve “missed the mark” in who I want to be as a person. During that month, I try to journal more than I usually do, often in response to inspirational readings and self-reflective questions I find on on-line, or books written by spiritual leaders in various traditions.
Cathryn Lavery cathrynlavery, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
What comes through loud and clear, no matter how much (or how little) I journal, or what I choose to read, is that forgiveness—especially self-forgiveness–lies at the heart of personal growth. Even when I may be regretting something I’ve done that may have hurt someone else, and feel compelled to ask their forgiveness, I find that I can’t let the incident go until I’ve forgiven myself.
Forgiveness is a hallmark of many faith traditions, but even those of us who don’t follow a strict religious path (and I include myself in that category as a mostly secular Jew), can incorporate it into our personal growth plan. In fact, forgiveness can be kryptonite to the nudgy inner judge. What would our lives be like if every time that nasty voice reared its ugly head with some critical, self-deprecating comment, you simply answered by smiling and saying, yes, but I’ve forgiven myself for this.
The flip side of forgiveness is aspirations. When I went through old papers a few weeks ago, in attempt to create a more sacred space (while practicing forgiving myself for my messiness!) I was touched to find a journal entry from the past secular New Year in January. I wrote:
I was (am) a writer who is setting even deeper roots in a community of writers. The past year brought out that it is ok to be successful. That I have a voice that matters. That others have a voice that matters. That it’s important to me to nurture other people’s voices as well as my own. I value community. I stand for expression and an artistic standard that I would like to encourage others to reach for, and what I would like to keep improving in myself. I want to communicate what deeply matters—to humans, and to the world. My writing is now central to my life. It is what I am.
I followed this with a list of wishes. Some were pie-in-the-sky, like getting a story from Immigrants optioned into a movie. Others were possible, but not likely to happen, such as getting an agent who believed in me and my work and saw it as more than a commodity. But what stood out was this:
My biggest hope was to be taken seriously by everyone as a real writer whose craft is at standard and whose art and messages matter. I would like to be seen by others as a person of integrity and depth whose words and perspectives matter.
This is my New Year’s wish for all of you–in whatever you do. May your words, images, music, movement, actions, thoughts and perspectives matter.
A few weeks ago, after the presidential debate, I was inspired to write about the topic of lying. And last night, I couldn’t help but thinking about the slickness with which Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance shamelessly delivered lie after lie after lie, complaining when corrected by moderators, that “they weren’t supposed to fact-check.”
And if you didn’t have the facts, it would be totally easy to be lured into Vance’s narrative, due to his polished, smooth delivery. He delivered his untruths so confidently, it left me wondering whether Vance believed his own narrative.
And this, I think, is a good lesson for fiction writers–even if the “lies” (which I’d prefer to call “stories” in this context are not intended to do harm or be taken as factual. Writer John Gardener in The Art of Fiction writes about the importance of creating “a continuous unbroken dream” where the reader is totally ensconced in whatever reality the writer has created–kind of like a virtual reality experience that’s dependent on words, rather than 3-D classes.
And to do that, you as a writer need–to some extent–to believe in your own narrative, to present it with complete and unshakable confidence.
How do we do that? Here are a couple of things to think about.
DETAILS: In an episode of Young Sheldon, Georgie tells his out-of-sync genius younger brother that lying well involves details. You’ve got to add enough heft to make the story stand on its own. Take a random subject-verb-object sentence (i.e. The spider crawled on the corn) and let us see, hear, taste, touch and smell the action as you relay it. Note: This involves more than adding adjectives, too many of which can easily weigh a sentence down. It can often involve just adding a couple of well-chosen words, or adding another sentence or two before or after to increase the stakes and add more context.
APPEAL TO EMOTION: Many of Vance’s falsehoods last night were clearly designed to arouse anger. And while in this context, this was a manipulative attempt to sway people’s votes, for our fiction to be successful, we often need people to engage emotionally by empathizing with our characters and the situations they are facing. This means we need to work hard to create believable and fully developed characters who are sympathetic and realistic, despite whatever flaws they might have.
KNOW WHERE YOUR PLOT IS GOING: I laughed as I typed these words because I’m often not sure where my plot is going until my second or third draft. But once I do know, I cut out the tangents that weigh my stories down. Last night I was both amazed and horrified about how Vance made Kamala Harris, or immigrants, or both, the villains in nearly every lie he told–a move that was clearly plotted in advance.
When I’m in my writing groove, I believe in my own narratives, even as I know they have no factual foundation, and even as, like many politicians, I might flip-flop on the details of their creation. But whatever changes my characters go through can be attributed to my getting to know them better, or their choosing to reveal more of themselves to me. Ultimately, the details, the characters, the plot are all there as props for me to reveal my truth–or my lie, if I choose. But in this context, I always choose my truth.
Paul_012, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
My aim in writing has always been to get to a deeper, grittier place, beyond the personal into some universal but often unspoken experience. Yet, getting to the central core of rawness isn’t easy. I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve looked at an unfinished poem or piece of fiction and said to myself, “Push!” a process that feels as difficult as giving birth.
And at least when one gives birth, there’s a baby at the end of the effort. With creatives, the labor continues—the question of what lies behind the next edge continuing to linger as we try to reach deeper layers of mattering.
It’s important to realize that despite these efforts, sometimes our creative expression won’t be easily discernible—or even appropriate—for an outside audience. Occasionally I write “private poems” solely for my own cathartic release in lancing some emotional clot.
Yet, having gentle, loving witnesses can enhance and deepen our creative confidence—as long as they stay in the role of witnesses, not judges. When a witness tells me what they liked or noticed, they tap into that shared place I’m reaching for and let me know that my words touched them—and mattered.
If you’ve never shared your art, music, dancing, writing, etc. with other people, or only had bad experiences because the people you shared it with gave you unsolicited and unhelpful criticism, I recommend finding someone who understands the difference between witnessing and judging. (Note: I’m not against and fully aware of the benefits of constructive criticism, but judging is a different process from witnessing, which should be done at a time when the creator is asking for and expecting it.)
There are many community writing and other creative-based class settings that use a witnessing framework. For dancers–or for anyone who simply likes to move–Authentic Movement is built on the model of mover/neutral observer.
If classes don’t appeal, find a friend you trust—perhaps someone who’s also engaged in something creative where you can both share the roles of creator and witness. Remind each other to keep comments to what you liked and/or noticed, and then bask in their affirmation that yes, indeed, you matter.
Seven summers ago I took a canoe trip in the boundary waters in northern Minnesota, a state that seems to have found its way into the spotlight with the selection of its Governor Tim Walz for Vice President on the Democratic ticket.
For days we paddled in a quiet dreamscape, rarely seeing another canoe. No Google Maps here. To get from lake to lake, you needed to consult a large laminated map, where the portage spots were little dots that you needed to approximate by looking at the shape of the lake, the shape of the map, the shape of the lake, back and forth until you spotted it…a small break in the tree-line that just possibly could be a path to the next lake.
We discovered the hard way that once we docked the boat, it was a good idea to take a few steps down the path to make sure it really was a path before carrying the canoe and all our heavy gear. We had a few false starts and a few longer-than-expected portages where I began to wonder if I was on a canoeing trip or a hiking trip that involved carrying canoes.
But, on the whole, things went smoothly–until the last night, where all the campsites on the lake we planned to stop at were full. So even though it was late and we were tired, we portaged to the next lake–where there were still no empty campsites.
“Why don’t we ask someone if they’re willing to share,” I suggested. The areas marked for camping were huge… big enough for many tents. As a New Yorker used to crowds and small spaces, that seemed like the obvious solution. But my companions–all Minnesota born and bred–were not as wild about the idea of intruding on other people.
So we went on to the next lake. The campsites were still full. And it was getting dark.
Finally, we asked a nice family if we could share, and chatted with them a bit before braving the swarms of dusk-ruling mosquitoes as we quickly put up our tents and cached our food.
The mosquitoes were so bad that my sister-in-law hung a mosquito net over the “outhouse” (i.e. stand-alone toilet). It felt like a little boudoir. Still the goal was no liquids after sundown–get into your tent, and try not to have to come out and pee until morning.
I started thinking about this trip again several days ago–before all the Tim Walz hoopla, especially the challenge of finding those hidden portage paths. Because lately a lot of my writing life feels like I’m circling around the lake, unsure of where the exits are that will take me to the next step on my journey.
Each day I consider three projects that all will require some heavy-lifting: a revision of my piano memoir to potentially make it more “prescriptive,” a YA novel that I seemed to have sputtered to a halt on, and a new collection of poems that needs polishing and shaping, as well as some more overall conceptualization. Instead of diving into any of them, I’ve done some minor picking away, and then mostly pivoted to revising individual poems (not necessarily in the collection), sending out submissions, engaging in small social media marketing, and writing blog posts–haha! Then I’ve spent the rest of the day in the garden picking string beans and cherry tomatoes, pulling weeds, and trying to make space among the overgrown beds of irises and lambs ears. My shoulders are aching!
But my mind’s eye is on the memory of those small breaks in the bushes of the boundary waters, because I know that eventually I WILL find the right path to the next lake with all of these projects.
In the meantime, LFG Walz & Harris!
***
For anyone interested, I had a poem about this trip, Lessons in Portaging, published in What Rough Beast, which was a daily on-line publication of resistance-oriented poems from the years of He-Who-Will-Not-Be-Named. We’re NOT going back! (Another writers block activity I’ve been doing is writing letters and postcards.)
I’m writing this post in collaboration with Tzivia Gover. Tzivia and I have been orbiting in similar circles for decades, and we’re both regulars at the same drop-in writing group in our community. We recently got excited about a question raised by another writer in our group. “People keep telling me to put together a book. But that would be so much work. I’m retired. I want to enjoy writing, not commit myself to a long slog.”This got us thinking about how to balance the joys of writing with the inevitable oys —the difficulties and discontents. So we decided to carry the conversation into our Substack newsletters. As you will find, having a writing community is one of the joys in each of our writing lives! We invite you to read each of our reflections—and join the conversation in the comments.
Dina …
Even though I’m often jazzed by the editing and revision process that’s needed for long, extensive projects, I’m also a survivor of several slogs–which had many, many moments of NOT FUN. So I immediately understood this far too familiar dilemma raised by our fellow writer.
“To keep going you’ve got to find the joy in the process,” I told him.
Sometimes, that joy can be envisioning the overall outcome and holding onto that vision. Sometimes it can be the pleasure of revising a single poem, or paragraph, or scene. For me that often involves focusing on paring down words I don’t need or substituting words and phrases with more heft and resonance and sound quality. I find it fun to look at the before and after and see how far I’ve come at chipping away at a block of marble to make it beautiful.
The hardest part for me–the “oy”–is when I have to conjure up details about a character/scene, etc., that I haven’t been able to conceptualize, or to clarify something that makes perfect sense to me but others don’t get. In my mind, I often compare this process to giving birth. “Push, push, push,” I literally say out loud to myself. No, it isn’t fun–but that’s when it’s time to go back to the vision and trust that somehow, I’ll get there.
It just won’t be quick. And that’s ok. Patience is a virtue—not one I have a lot of, but one that’s good to cultivate. Besides, while I’m going through these slogs, I can still get some instant gratification by writing short generative pieces that give me the creative rush I’m constantly seeking.
Tzivia …
Some years back, while writing my book, Joy in Every Moment, an inspirational self-help book about accessing more everyday happiness, I was scrambling to make my deadline and tapping out sentences through gritted teeth. The time pressure, the critical voices chiding me, and the overwhelm of everything else that was on my plate at the moment were crowding in on me
Photo by Tzivia Gover
Recognizing the irony of the situation, I stood up, stepped away from my desk, and laughed off my grim mood.
I promised myself I wouldn’t make writing a book about joy into a dreary job. To remind myself of my intention I placed a string of children’s wooden alphabet letters on my desk spelling out: J-O-Y. Each day when I sat down to write, that word smiled back at me, reminding me why I was there.
But writing with joy doesn’t mean that I’m going to love every minute of it. Daily writing is tiring. The transition from illuminating idea to words on the page can feel like mud-footed disappointment. Tedium and slog are part of the territory each writer must traverse. But with experience we learn that the effort is rewarded in the form of the well-earned satisfaction of having a reader sigh at the end of your poem, or seeing your work in print and knowing that you’ve said what you wanted to say, and you’ve said it as well as you can.
Meanwhile, I look for joy where I can find it.
Let me wax poetic about rooting into word origins, revising a sentence until each word slips, as if slotted, into just the right place, and of unraveling a knot of paragraphs to find the order that makes an essay sing.
And when the going gets hard, connections with other writers who understand the oy and the joy of the craft sustains me through storms of self-doubt and eases me around the rocky edges of despair when it seems nothing is coming together on the page.
Add to that the act of collaborating with other writers (as Dina and I are doing now) and the joys multiply.
Where are you finding the oys – and joys – in your writing life today? Drop a comment below.
Check out Tzivia’s Substack Newsletter—This Dream is A Poem here.
If I’m at a beach or a lakeshore, I’m one of those people who inches my way into the water, one excruciating shock of cold at a time. But with writing, even when I have no idea what I’m going to say, I just grab my pen or my keyboard and dive in!
Tim Marshall timmarshall, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
That’s what this week has been about, as I’ve now committed to exploring the murky idea I have for another YA novel. My goal has been to write two handwritten pages every day. I try not to edit as I go, even as shoddy writing dominates and the plot/character contradictions pile up. I even try not to read what I’ve written the day before when I begin, because I know that if I do I’m going to get bogged down in trying to revise it–and I may not even use the scenes I’m generating. I only read enough to jog my memory so I can continue to go forward.
Some people love first-draft writing because they can make up whatever they want without worrying about it. I find doing the first draft of a prose piece the hardest part of the writing process. Conjuring people and situations out of wisps of my consciousness always feels daunting, and outlines feel even harder. I need to actually write to discover what I’m going to say.
Eventually, I hope I’ll come to a point where the ideas will feel more clear and I’ll have a better sense of the characters and overall trajectory, even if I still might not know exactly how the book will end. This will be when I’ll start typing up what I have, revising as I go, but likely saving anything I’ve cut in a different file in case I want to refer to it later. Then, I’ll probably keep writing two-page segments until I get to a possible end, but likely I’ll do this on the keyboard and allow myself more leeway in polishing what I’ve written before continuing.
This won’t nearly be the end of the process.
After I’ve written my way through beginning, middle, and end, I’ll put the manuscript away for a few weeks. Then I’ll read the whole thing through with a fresher eye to get a sense of it, making notes to myself on what needs to be added, cut or changed. Then the more intensive revision will start. This is the part I like–when I finally emerge from the thick woods and can see a thin path leading me on, as long as I’m willing to chop away the overgrowth and do some bushwhacking.
Once I get that draft done, I’ll share it with my fiction-writing group (and perhaps a few other people) to get their perspective about what is working and what isn’t. Likely, their feedback will inspire me to rethink the entire novel, generating another revision, which could focus on structure, character development, plot points etc. Depending on how confident I feel about that revision, I may ask my writing group to read the book again.
And again. And so it goes.
Eventually I’ll get to a point where I’m ready for micro-editing: searching for overused words, clunky phrases, wordiness, etc. I do some of this throughout my revisions, but considering not all the prose I generate will ultimately make it into the final draft, it’s been time-efficient to save focusing on this until the end.
When the book is as good as I can get it to be, even if it isn’t perfect, I’ll test the waters by sending it out. If it’s accepted, I’ll likely have more editing to do. I’ve been lucky in that every editor I’ve worked with has helped me make a book substantially better.
And if it doesn’t get accepted for publication, I may revisit and revise from time to time, if the book still holds interest for me. Or, I might just need to be satisfied with my enjoyment of the process. And yes, I do ultimately, enjoy the process of writing long prose. Why else would I have written 11 novels and one non-fiction memoir?
Time once again to brave the cold water and dive in.
And this, I think, is a good lesson for fiction writers–even if the “lies” (which I’d prefer to call “stories” in this context are not intended to do harm or be taken as factual. Writer John Gardener in The Art of Fiction writes about the importance of creating “a continuous unbroken dream” where the reader is totally ensconced in whatever reality the writer has created–kind of like a virtual reality experience that’s dependent on words, rather than 3-D classes.
