Writing Life: Writers’ Day Jobs — Balancing the Time, Money & Credit Trifecta (Part 1 of 3)

Summer hours spent revising Wake. c. Elissa Field

In the years I’ve been participating in social media with other writers — beginning on early boards at Poets & Writers Speakeasy – one of the most common discussions to arise among writers was over “day jobs.” Like superheroes not yet fully embraced by Gotham, so many writers work on their fiction but pay bills with another job.

Today’s post is part 1 of a 3-part series sharing my experience with day jobs.

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Day Job Balance: Money vs. Time

The repeated refrain in evaluating the perfect day job is the need to earn a living against a writer’s hunger to preserve time and creative energy for writing.

Camp counselors, bartenders, odd jobs, temps. Writers are mercenary in their willingness to fill a resume with a string of odd jobs that load the refrigerator while buying time. Writers’ parents may roll eyes over what seems a stubborn inability to assemble a genuine career — while the writer squirrels away hidden hours that mean not thousands in income but, if well-played, thousands of words toward a polished manuscript.

Of course some day jobs include professional titles or even high paying roles, but often writers are willing to take less income in order to avoid overtime hours or retain more braincells undrained at the end of the day.

The Trifecta: Time, Money & Street Cred

In a perfect world, a writer’s day job produces the trifecta: money to pay the bills, time and energy to write, and street cred.

Street cred, in this case, would be jobs that earn a writer credit for experience in the writing or publishing world. It could be a legitimizing title, it could be professional interaction within the publishing world. Booksellers, business writers, journalists, freelance PR or social media consultants, agents, teachers.

In our less perfect world, writers often trade time or money to gain recognition: write for free or trade lower pay to chock up a byline or tear sheet. I say this while spending hours blogging income-free, and having published my short stories without payment.

What is less obvious are those who went into becoming editors or agents out of their own writing aspirations, only to achieve the money and professional accomplishment but surrender all free time and creative energy so their own writing never occurs.

The Goal: Balance

It might seem that all writers would seek the trifecta. Yet, really, the key is for each writer to balance money, time and credit as fit the writer’s current goals. For example, there are times when a writer couldn’t care less about street credit, because all that matters is time to get that novel draft written. At the same time, having all the time to write can be meaningless to a writer who is unemployed and preoccupied with how to feed their kids. And street credit can be shiny but meaningless if the industry continues pushing writers to be unpaid for their work, or if the attention becomes a distraction that keeps an accomplished writer from writing new work.

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Evaluating Your Day Job

Today’s post is motivated, in part, by what all writers need to do from time to time: I’m evaluating my current day job.  There are times — no matter where we are in our career — when things are out of balance, and I’ve been feeling a significant imbalance over here for the past couple months. At the moment, my job is earning me street cred, but not sufficient income to minimize distractions, and with what feels like suffocating demands on my time.

In evaluating what change is needed, I’ll ask myself these questions:

• Is it temporary? As a part-time teacher, overwhelming demands on my time from grading should be temporary — limited to the school seasons. The key is for me to evaluate if it is balanced by coming free time, and if that time can be used adequately to accomplish my writing goals. So far, each time I reach a vacation break I find myself writing like crazy, addressing those goals that have been on hold.  If not, I need to adjust — and adjustment, in most cases, comes through discipline.
• Am I using my free time well? This is where discipline comes in. My litmus test on how well I am using my free time is reminder that Toni Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye while working full time as a single mother to two young boys. She wrote before they woke in the morning and after they went to bed at night. Um-hmph. My arms cross in accusation over some unused hours I’ve let slip. The key is to know your goals, seek out your writing hours and get your butt in the seat, writing.
• Are there alternatives? Last Sunday, I spent 8-9 hours cleaning house. It would take me 4 hours to earn the money to pay someone to do that. Is that an alternative that would remove a distraction? I could leave my current job and get a different job, possibly doubling my income, but would work longer hours and not have summers free. Which option would be more liberating? Are there alternatives to bring in income with less demand on time? In some cases, there are no alternatives. If that is true, go back to the two points above to find your writing time.
• Are my priorities aligned with my current writing goals? Right now, I have two novels drafted that need substantial hours for editing — but either one would then be ready to query an agent. For this reason, it works that I kept a part-time writing position this year, as it buys me holidays off and the potential for writing mornings. In another year, if I were working on short stories or just blogging, it might make more sense for me to give up time to increase income. It’s also been a year where I wanted more writing connections, so it has made sense for me to take more time with social media and workshops than in other years where I just wanted time on my own to write. It’s important to respect your own current projects and goals when applying any writing advice. What is great for one writer may not be for you — at least, not at this moment.

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Coming Next:  I’ll share my experience on how different kinds of day jobs satisfy the trifecta in Writing Life: 5 Day Jobs Reviewed. Read How the January Challenge Arose from Freelance Writing for observations on successful freelance writing.

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If you like this blog, be sure to subscribe using WordPress’s +follow option, or via email or RSS feed. I love to connect with like minded bloggers!

Coming next:

• Writing Character: Challenge of Writing the Character Most Like Yourself – Part 2
• Christmas Shopping for the Writer in Your Life: 40 Top Gifts Writers Really Love
• Tackle 2013 writing goals with the January Challenge: Finish, Start, Improve, Plan
• How the January Challenge Arose from Freelance Writing

October Fiction Challenge 4: Where and How Do You Write? – Part 1

A perfectly good workspace: the desk in my office (notably, with a box open for shipping off my fried laptop). To my Hawaiian friends or fans of The Descendents, the print on the wall, bought by my parents in DC 20 years ago, hung on the wall in the family’s HI house in the movie.

Today’s post continues a series of responses to October Writing Challenges posed by fellow bloggers.

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To catch up on October’s Writing Challenges:

• October Challenges Week 1: Submit-O-Rama & Herding the Dragon
• October Fiction Challenge 2: Reflections on Writing Character & Place
• October Fiction Challenge 3: Raising the Stakes on Character Motivation

If you join in, post your links in the comments!

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Today’s post returns to the great 30-question list featured in Herding the Dragon’s 30-day challenge, to address Part 1 of the theme, “Where and How Do You Write?”

Day 5.) Where are you most comfortable writing? At what time of day? Computer or good ol’ pen and paper?

We have an expression in our family — “Don’t poke a sleeping bear” — and this question is provoking me to rant over how frustrated I’ve been without a laptop since its meltdown in July. I am an adamant laptop writer.

Pen and paper is fine. Early on, my first mode of writing was a fountain pen and a cheap composition book (I’ve had tons of “fine” leather journals, but find something freeing about not having to live up to the cover). I liked fountain pens because they flow quickly, removing one more level of resistance — but over time (and surely in response to all the complications parenthood adds), I’ve simplified to “any pen on hand.”

Two interesting observations about writing by hand:

• I learned in education classes that the physiology of writing something by hand records it more deeply in your memory. In this sense, if I’m in the car or on the run, the simple process of dashing something down (even if I never read it later) makes me more likely to remember the idea when I am back to a computer. Brain research shows this is particular to the wiring of eye-hand coordination and handwriting; typing and dictating do not have the same effect.
• I was mortified as a teenager to have one of my writing notebooks passed around between tittering family members. Perfect cure to this is that my handwriting has evolved to something nearly illegible, as if only I have the spy decoder for transcribing it.

I have two main complaints about writing by hand. One is that I have come to hate paper in general, as it piles in drifts that are hard to relocate, get damaged or lost, and no one seems to read. Spoken as someone who once knocked a cup of coffee into my notes drawer while vacuuming.

Worse than this is the inefficiency of it. I was able to continue full days of revising my WIP over the summer, while traveling after my laptop died. I marked editing notes on a print copy, wrote new sections in a notebook, used flags and highlighters and… yes, I got a lot done. The wastefulness is that I now have to double that effort, as all those notations have to be typed in.  The greatest limit most of us have is time, and I’d rather type something once than have the same effort take my attention twice.  It’s hard to be stuck typing last month’s changes when you want to move on to the new thoughts in your head.

Overall, the computer is more organized and faster. When drafting, I work rapidly in what I call an “add on” document, writing sections out of order, not worrying about spelling, capitalization or punctuation. Quick keystrokes fix the conventions.  I then work with two documents open at once: I copy draft sections from the “add on” document, pasting only those I want to use into the actual draft document, fixing order, chapter/section breaks, etc. as I go.  To keep orderly, I switch the text I’ve used to blue in my add on document, so I know what I’ve used.  I’ve started using Scrivener, which is fabulous for tracking themes, getting perspective, reorganizing, and making revisions.

Where I am adamant about using a laptop is that a desktop computer is frustrating in allowing you to work in only one place. I have an actual office in the house — with a computer on a real desk, with files, bookcases and everything — but it kills productivity to only work there.

I write at all hours of the day and especially like being able to sit next to my boys, wherever they are, and not have my writing keep me isolated from our daily life. I don’t mind the desktop during my disciplined work time (in the morning after the boys are at school, before leaving to teach my afternoon classes), but prefer the lucid flow of ideas I get late at night, when I don’t want to be here at the desk. My favorite place to write, at any hour, is sitting in bed, as the light and energy in my room are like an airy treehouse.

When traveling, I write anywhere — but I am not generally a cafe writer.  I’m too curious for that. When I’m out, I’m watching and listening, not writing. That’s actually one of my greatest weaknesses when attending conferences or workshops: I’m easily distracted. Look! Squirrel! Yeah.

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Where and how do you write? Have you tried Scrivener, or have you wondered if it is an effective tool for novel writing?  Share your experience — or links to your own responses to October challenges — in the comments.

If you like this blog, be sure to subscribe using WordPress’s follow option, or via email or RSS feed. I love to connect with like minded bloggers!

Coming next:

• Living With Books 06: Books Are Spooky, Too
• Christmas Shopping for the Writer in Your Life: 40 Top Gift Ideas Writers Really Love
• Writing Character: Challenge of Revising the Character Most Like Yourself – Part 2

October Writing Challenges: Week 1

Need a challenge to keep your writing moving in October? Here are two:

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Get Your Work Out the Door!

Khara House is a fabulously elegant writer whom I have gotten to know as a fellow Founding Member of the writing group, Wordsmith Studio. She’s generously offering us all opportunity to participate in a kick-in-the-pants challenge with her October Submit-O-Rama.  That link takes you to her blog (Our Lost Jungle) for explanation; or find it on Facebook: October Submit-O-Rama on Facebook.

Whether you are a fiction writer, poet or journalist, it’s a great opportunity to push yourself to get your work out the door, among the camaraderie of other writers who won’t give you the blank stare your spouse, cat or friend-on-the-treadmill give when you brag, “I just sent out three submissions!”

My participation this week? I’m busy reading manuscripts by others and working on novel revisions, so will not be submitting this week, but I did take time to update my submission target lists.

How do I manage information about magazines I submit to?  I use contact cards in Outlook to maintain my own data on hundreds of literary magazines (and agents).  I use this and Duotrope to actively research the magazines I submit to, updating guidelines, reviewing their latest publications, tracking their interests, keeping track of my communication with editors, and otherwise doing my best to connect with like-minded publications.

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Herding Your Inspirational Dragon

On her blog, Herding the Dragon (can we pause and appreciate what a fabulous title that is for a blog about writing?), Samantha Holloway shares a 30 Day Writing Meme that is perfect palate cleanser for writers hard at work on a novel draft or nose to the grindstone in revisions. Yeah, that includes me.  You, too?  Read my note below on joining in, so we can write together.

My participation this week? Here is my answer for day 1:

How many characters do you have? Do you prefer males or females?

In my current WIP, there is a female protagonist (Carinne), a male protagonist (Michael Roonan) and their son. In early chapters, there is vibrant interaction with people around them while traveling (the family Carinne travels with, the lively couple who manage a hotel). As Carinne and Roonan flee through several chapters, they are isolated, accompanied only by Roonan’s childhood best friend, Aidan, and pursued by an unseen antagonist. They are pointedly isolated until the resolution, where Roonan again meets Aidan as well as members of his mother’s family.  That makes three main characters, three important side characters, and less than a dozen other named characters.  This work is about isolation, so feels spare as compared to another draft, Breathing Water, which has half a dozen main characters.  Prefer male or female characters? I write each just as readily and enjoy getting to experience the story from multiple perspectives, so no preference.

Read my Reflections on Writing Character & Place (Days 2-4) on 10/10.

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Want to Participate in Either Challenge?

Here are links to both :

• Submit-O-Rama on Our Lost Jungle: on the blog or on Facebook
• 30 Day Writing Meme on Herding the Dragon: begin here with Day 1

Are you going to participate in either challenge, or are you at work on another challenge (how many of you have NaNoWriMo on your horizon)?  Let us know in the comments below and keep us posted on your progress.  If you’re doing the Dragon challenge, copy the questions and post your answers on your site, but feel free to share a link to your blog in the comments here.

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If you like this blog, be sure to subscribe using WordPress’s follow option, or via email or RSS feed. I love to connect with like minded bloggers!

Coming next:

• Reading Lists: Nobel in Literature, Man Booker Prize and National Book Award Finalists
• October Fiction Challenge 2: Reflections on Writing Character & Place
• October Fiction Challenge 3: Raising the Stakes on Character Motivation
• Living With Books 04: Books and Fashion

From my Parenting Blog: Parenting Gets Existential

I’ve never loved candy-stripe carnations as much as these that my sons gave to me to celebrate the end of our school year. (That great vase is a bar glass that makes me crave a trip back to Mama Kwan’s bar in Kill Devil Hills, NC.) c Elissa Field

Because it is summer, and because summer has me of the mind of young children, free for long days of unscheduled abandon, today seemed a good day to share an essay I posted originally on my old parenting blog. As I enjoy long days with my boys, I was reminded of this one day with them that so captures how non-writing days serve as inspiration.

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I was the first one pregnant in our generation, on either side of our family.  From those first weeks of confessing it, I ran the steep hill of all the things I would learn about what it took to parent.  Diapers, pack and plays, how to know if it’s sick.  And then they grow up a little.

You work on which vacuum has large enough bore to suck up Cheerios without clogging, teaching yourself to say sugar! instead of shit, and truisms like “hands are not for hitting.”

Mysteriously, I discovered I absolutely love parenting.

Not the least of which is the way its existential challenges never cease to amaze.

This month’s challenge: answering the question, “Mom, what is a hippie?”

My five-year-old said, “It means ‘an old man’.”

His eight-year-old brother corrected him:  “No, it’s a teenager with long hair…  and funny clothes… and…”  He accurately described Shaggy, from Scooby Do, then faltered, breaking down to ask, “Mom, what is a hippie?”

And here parenting becomes existential – because even in their little boy way, they were grasping at something they could not articulate but could sense.  They got that there was some socio-political, socio-historical implication behind the meaning.  That it signified something they did not understand for there to be a hippie in their cartoon.

I begin to answer, but it’s the ubiquitous sound of one hand clapping.  Any explanation of what a hippie is means nothing without understanding the context of the culture they were rebelling against.  In our current environment where the two long-haired boys on my sons’ baseball teams are the sons of fashionista mamas, not grunge, how can they get what a statement it was for a guy to let his hair and beard grow shaggy in an era where hair didn’t touch one’s collar?  Where men and women still wore hats in public, and my grandmother and even my mother still carried spotless white gloves?   Our kids know hippie images as neon flowers on paper cups and napkins at the party store, or the peace signs in rhinestones on the neighbor’s jeans, without seeing them as re-imagined icons of what was once a radical attempt to move toward a gentler, more natural way of being, at a time of corporatization and war.  How do you explain the experience that I remember intangibly as paper butterflies on my young aunt’s wall, fanning out above her black and white poster of “A Bridge Over Troubled Water”?

In attempting to find simple words to explain it, my understanding grows expansive in memory of history lessons and personal experience growing up in the 70s, touched with hindsight and the newer context of the world we have become since then.  I was not a hippie or flower child or child of hippies; my parents were primly republican.  As a child, I associated hippies with broken bottles on the pavement at our playground.  Yet here I am, forty, riding along in my SUV with little boys rattling about in the back (who are fascinated we did not have to wear seatbelts as kids), and feeling a wan tenderness in memory of avocado kitchen appliances and trying to remember what the whole affection for rainbows was about.

My world becomes larger with children.  Not just because more square-footage is required to be able to move around highchairs and train tables and strewn Legos, but because the whole expanse of the universe is new again in their eyes.

Soil that clearly belongs nowhere but between the roots of the hedges and flowers outside is now meant to be dug up, spread apart, carried about and stored in little containers that just would not have occurred to you as meant for analyzing dirt.  That is, not until you have a playdate with brightly dressed, neat little girls who open the little play kitchen and find it caked with dried spattered mud and your son smiles and explains it to her – proudly pointing out how when he shook the soil in a jar with water, the mulch, peat and sand separated into layers, creating a distinct grey, tan and brown rainbow that he’d just been dying to show someone.  He discovered density, you think with pride, at the same time you apologetically wash away the filth and reassure the little girls that there are clean toys here somewhere.

Life is a mystery.  Full of dark turns and surprises and joys and tragedies and things so beautiful and amazing.  You go on vacation and see a sunset or painting or giant gorge in the earth so startlingly beautiful that you honestly could not have borne seeing it without someone meaningful beside you to touch and say, “Look at that!”

Children find this not only on vacation, but in the mundane, the sagging days of life that might otherwise be only about when to fit in grocery shopping and whether a successful day at work was enough to qualify for bonus and if you will be able to sleep soundly tonight.

“Look!” they say, all the time.  “What is that?  Look!”  They pick out the plainest flower at the market and fall in love.  You find rocks in the bottom of your purse, a wilted  feather left for you beside your bed, stray bits of hardware clanking in your dryer.

And they take what we have known always in our lives – something as irrelevant and silly as a hippie – and hand us a whole cosmos of depth and meaning to wrestle with.

“What is a hippie?” I repeated, ready to say something about how people sometimes choose their clothes to express their feelings about the world, or maybe share something about what it was like to be a child in the 70s, or how the times then were or weren’t like our times now.

But they were laughing at something.

Just at the point they had me thoroughly wrapped up in the riddle of it, the boys moved on.

In the same effortless way they expand our lives with depth and complexity, they model for us simplicity.  My boys decided, simply, that “hippie” will be their favorite new word for anything weird… whether or not they really get what it means.

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Related Posts:

More on finding inspiration when least expected: Writing Life: Today’s Job – Non-writing Days

Reading this summer, including with my boys: Summer Reading List 2012

Another post on challenging conversations with kids: Reminders of What We Wished Lost

Are you a writing parent? Where do you find inspiration or challenge in balancing family with work?

 

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Enjoy your summer day, all!

Writing Character: Sometimes the Work is Messy

Notes of scene and personality of my character, scribbled in the margins while reading Ann Hood’s Creating Character Emotions.

My writing hours are all about budgeted time — hours or whole days declared for fiction, versus blocks of time commanded by the kids, teaching writing, client work, and the daily grind.  While teaching usually yields hours every day for me to write, the last two weeks were forfeited almost entirely to the end of the school year.  As Friday was finally the last day of school, it was interesting to see what writing work I would land on, in my first days of freedom.

My main goal for summer’s longer hours focuses on the two novels I am revising. 

That work craves larger blocks of hours for rereading drafts. I last left off rereading the more finished draft, Breathing Water, needing to decide between two voice options, then delete some random chunks in the middle, and fix any broken transitions. The second novel, Wake, is still working its way to becoming a first, full draft, so there is a veritable carnival of piecing together the written portions, replacing original ideas with newer scenes, now curious to chart plot points and track how effectively the story unfolds.  Revision to three short stories is also on target for the summer, as it has now been nearly 10 months since the last time I submitted work.

With those clear goals, you’d think the first free days would have been spent rereading those drafts.   There will be days that I do exactly that.

But today was messy. Messy to wake from the deluge of the past weeks: blearily checking email, voicemail and social media to see what was going on while I was otherwise occupied.   Messy to face the end of year mess my house becomes, with two wild monkeys disguised as sons co-habitating with me.

Messy to greet the twine-ball of pent up ideas my writing mind is today.  Apparently, a mind antsy with ideas, made to wait days to write, does not reach its turn ready to proceed in an orderly fashion.

Writing Character

Today’s writing job, instead, is to re-open the copy of Ann Hood’s Creating Character Emotions that I’ve been reading for the last week. I attended a workshop with Hood in Miami, last month, and bought the book from the Books & Books table at her reading.  While the workshop focused on novel beginnings, Hood’s lectures and responses to workshop questions shared a wealth of advice, both from her own experience and drawing on advice from dozens of other fabulous writers she has worked with or learned from in her roughly 30-year career.

In that vein, a single line of advice she offered (how to avoid writing flat characters, when writing those most like yourself), piqued my curiosity to read her book, which explores the full gamut of how to write characters with complex and authentic emotional resonance.

As I pick it up today, however, it is not to continue reading, but to face the rampant notes I scribbled wildly in the margins when reading last week. The picture accompanying this article is modest compared to the extended scene scrawled in the margins stretching 6 pages, between headings for “Anger” and “Confusion.”

Creating Emotional Characters:  Hood on Anger

Ann Hood begins the section on writing Anger with a quote from Margery Allingham’s Death of a Ghost: “‘Outrage, combining as it does shock, anger, reproach, and helplessness, is perhaps the most unmanageable, the most demoralizing of all the emotions.’”

Applying this to writing, Hood says, “Anger has so many gradations, so many levels, it is indeed — for the writer at least — one of the most unmanageable emotions.”

The paragraph following this lists words for the myriad levels of anger people experience (from pique, ire and exasperation, to madness, wrath and ire), with the warning that writers “tend to write anger as a flat or simple emotion, something closer to rage.”

By contrast, she says, “What makes the emotion so interesting — and challenging — is that it has many different levels.”

This idea that emotions are not one-dimensional, not predictable, but composed of complex gradations, unpredictability and even contradiction, is key to her advice throughout the book.

Messy Writing: Scribbled in the Margins

Roonan, the enigmatic male character in my draft, Wake, is confused, guilt-ridden, self-condemning, but rarely angry.  Still, a single line at the end of those three paragraphs in Hood’s chapter on Anger triggered a newly-revealing scene.  Roonan cascades through layers of emotion, through the tiers of family history he has previously misunderstood.

In one fit of messy scribbling, I tied together a series of tropes that have been disconnected references scattered through the story.  Roonan now connecting the inner (and reflexively external) conflicts signalled by his father’s racing motorcycle, his mother’s reaction over evidence of a death, memory of cleaning up to protect her, facing the day his brother died, discovering the bag of locks his father had left stashed beneath the bed… the guilt he lives with keying back to a single, fierce moment of fury, in which he sees himself fulfilling everything he had set out to avoid.

In my head, I understand each of these elements, but in this baby-draft, they were as-yet unwritten.  Magically, this dam of understanding burst in reaction to a single line at the end of those 3 paragraphs of Hood’s advice: “Sometimes anger leaves you sated.”

So it is that today’s job is to return to those notes, transcribing them into the “add-on” document I keep in Word as new material to be added into the draft. The work may remain messy after that, or may fall into a neat pattern of revision as planned.  The key, I’ve found, is to respect where my head is — most of all, to get all fresh material recorded, so not lost, before pushing myself back to revision.

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More on Character, and Hood’s Advice on Beginnings

I’ll share more of Hood’s advice on character, as well as advice on writing beginnings in coming posts.  If you have specific questions (such as Hood’s advice regarding the challenge of writing characters similar to yourself), let me know in the comments.

Want more now?

Previous post on budgeting time: Writing Life: What I’m Looking for Isn’t Here

Previous post on Hood workshop: Writing Life: Today’s Job – Non-Writing Days

Update 6/10: Next post, now up: Novel Writing: How Internal & External Conflict Build Story

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If you like this blog, be sure to subscribe using WordPress’s follow option, or via email or RSS feed. I love to connect with like minded bloggers!

Coming next:

• Living With Books 03: Books as Portal into Another World (or Just the Next Room)
• Twitter for Writers: Top People to Follow on Twitter (& Useful Hashtags)
• Next on my Reading List: Fall 2012

Ann Hood’s Creating Character Emotions: Amazon Powells    Indiebound.org

 

Writing Life: Today’s Job – Nonwriting Days

Considering my last two posts had to do with managing time and keeping the writing work moving forward, I shift gears today.

For me, today’s writing job, no exaggeration, is to sleep.

A week ago, I had been driving back and forth to Miami for three days to complete a writing workshop with Ann Hood. If you live outside a major city (think: New York, LA, Chicago, even DC), you know what that means. I live 60 miles north of Miami: the drive there is bearable; the drive out at rush hour is stop and go for two hours. Add to that, my son was home sick the whole time and we had family in town, so it was an exhausting few days.

My writing job in the week(s) leading up to the workshop had included preparing and sending a manuscript for the workshop, then reading and commenting on the 15 manuscripts for the other writers in the workshop. I mixed that in between commenting on student essays for classes I teach, and responding to submissions to the literary magazine I read for. This was in addition to regular daily writing, which included new material for Wake, a brief interview, and a couple blogs you’ve seen here.

The workshop then provoked new writing tasks. While the workshop was to focus on beginnings (making the first 250 words work), Ann Hood mentioned at one point how, in draft, characters most like the writer are often the flattest (Note: I blog about this advice later, here and here). Her advice inspired new insights into a main character I hadn’t spent much time with yet, so last weekend was spent writing two important new scenes. Also, the main response Ann had to my manuscript was a comment that it had reminded her of writer Alice McDermott. I knew the name, but had not read McDermott’s work, so a new writing task was to find and begin reading Charming Billy (which later made my annual best-reads list).

Round about then, the inevitable happened: mom caught the 8 year old’s cold.

This is how the week played:  I teach, and am in the last month of the year. My house looks like sheep have moved through.  Not hyperbole.  As a single mother, I have been done in by my house. The disposal died, causing the dishwasher not to work, and I won’t have time to get a repairman in until next week, which means I’m washing dishes.  I have student essays to read, which are completely disorganized after leaving all the drafts for them to work on with a sub while I was in Miami.  I spent Sunday teaching my son how to restore the research project he’d gone off-road with at school, helping him select a new topic, and directing him through online research.  Monday: student work and teaching, and helping the son who’d missed school all last week catch up. Tuesday: called in to sub for a colleague, so missed my planning time, which got shifted to the evening.  Wednesday, slept as late as possible.  Wednesday night: out with my college boyfriend, who I hadn’t seen in more than a decade and happened to be passing through town on business.  Thursday: shot.  Teach, then out late for son’s spring musical.  Friday, teach early, all day, then out all night to deliver and pick up son from his first middle school dance.

Today’s job: sleep.  Do not yet open eyes to the housekeeping and laundry put off through this week, waiting for you to wake up.

None of those things seem to have anything to do with writing.  They sound like the writer’s nemesis: a list of all the things that kept me from writing today.

I don’t see it that way.

To me, when I’ve just posted two articles on how to make the most of your writing time, it seems only fitting for the third to be about all the things that happen in the rest of our time, and the fact that some days your job is really just to sleep.  Some days, it is to mend house, or to jockey for strategic seating at your 8-year-old’s spring musical, or to go to work early to cover a friend’s class or to assist with the school Eucharist where the mayor shows up to honor your retiring head of school.  Other days it is to sit shoulder-to-shoulder as your son struggles through his first research project or be on hand as he dresses for his first dance.  Some nights it is to sit at a table along the sidewalk at Rocco’s Tacos with an old friend who has come to town, laughing and talking until the busboy says he needs to carry in the table and chairs because the bar is closed.

Strategize your writing time, yes.  But there are days when a writer’s life is about the living of life, the connections with others.  When insight and understanding comes from having lived through the weakness of sickness or broken appliances or bad schedules and struggling children.

So today’s post is in honor of those days – recognizing that today’s writing chore really is to sleep, recovering from the week’s experience so I’ll have it in me to write tomorrow.

An observation I would offer is that much of this week I was pushed out of my comfort zone.  Things did not go the way I wanted. I had to put my intentional schedules aside to do things I hadn’t planned on doing. I even managed to back into my ex’s car in my driveway – while leaving him to watch our kids so I could go out to meet the boyfriend I’d dated before marriage. Crunch.

As writers, we don’t write “screw up” as a to-do item on our calendar, but isn’t the imperfection of life where much of inspiration comes from? Awkwardness, inconvenience, failures, crossed wires, confusion.  The realistic brokenness of life happens out there — not in all our planning while sitting at the computer or our writing desk or wherever we work — but sometimes in those hookie moments when we needed to be working but life intervened.  It’s just worth saying, to all of us struggling to work writing hours into our days, there are times to embrace the chaos of life, wecome it in and even count it as part of your writing goal.

I wish you all a productive week — in the hours things go as you planned, and when they don’t!

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If you like this blog, be sure to subscribe using WordPress’s +follow option, or via email or RSS feed. I love to connect with like minded bloggers!

For more on managing writing time:

• Click Time Management for Writers or Writing Life in the Category cloud in the sidebar.
• For time management strategies to reach your goals, check out the 2013 series January Challenge: Finish, Begin, Improve, Plan

Coming next:

• What I’m Reading: Summer Reading 2012
• Writing Character: Sometimes the Work is Messy

Writing Life: A Zen Prompt for Writing Past Blocks

My car’s view while I’m in a fiction workshop today (Freedom Tower, overlooking Biscayne Bay, Miami)

I wasn’t planning to post today, as I have about an hour to get ready to head to Miami for the last day of a writing workshop I’m doing with Ann Hood, on beginnings.  It has been a fabulous workshop, astounding in the depth of advice Ann has offered, and I’ll be putting together posts about this in the coming week.

Although I’m in a rush this morning, in responding to reader comments about managing writing time on my last post (What I’m Looking for Isn’t Here & 5 Tips for Managing Writing Time), I was struck by Eden’s comment:

“As my husband always says, ‘Do something, even if it’s wrong.’”

For many writers who are getting started, or those beginning to have successes but still balancing day-jobs, family and other priorities with their writing goals, simply doing something is at the heart of making any progress.

Do something, write something – even if it’s wrong. Claim the time, get something done.

Two other commenters on the same post spoke of the times they finally have the time, but not the inspiration or (heaven forbid) forgot what they had been planning to sit and write.  This made me think of advice I read in one of Natalie Goldberg’s books (either Writing Down the Bones or Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life).

Common writing advice is to write every day and, when writing, to keep the pen or keyboard moving.  As Eden’s husband encouraged, do something.  Write something.  It is also common advice to not be afraid to write something bad, or at least not good.  Frequently I hear writers say, there’s no such thing as waiting for inspiration.  You write anyway.  Write something, even if it is wrong.

What is different in Natalie Goldberg’s advice is her use of Zen principles, and the concept of positive and negative space.  Writers waiting to write the right thing, the inspired thing, insist on that positive space: the thing they want pictured, described, acted out.  Writing negative space is to acknowledge the non-thing.  To write what is not there, not happening, not inspired, not the focus of the story.

Goldberg offered this daily prompt, as a way to get writers past fear of the blank page.  When you don’t know what you want to write, then start by finishing the sentence, “I’m not going to write about…”

Try it.  I know it is strange, but it is oddly freeing.  The first time I did it, I remember the first line that came out was, “I’m not going to write about the blinds.”  How mundane.  But the riff that followed (I’m not going to write about the cat quacking at my feet, I’m not going to write about the growl of the trash truck and silence of the trees, with no wind.  I’m not going to write about the main character who is stuck sitting in that cafe…) revealed entire reams of detail and even a scene I hadn’t thought of before.

It’s an odd little practice, but sometimes flips energy just enough to loosen your voice.

There are two ways to use this activity.

1)  In the example above, I wasn’t even trying to go head-on at writing something I would use in existing work.  It might only shake loose distractions, quiet a preoccupied mind, and mess up that pristine white page enough to get past writers block for the moment.  It might free you enough to move on with more effective writing for the day, or might just be an activity in creative practice, maybe percolating some interesting details that might at some point be useful, or maybe just dormant or even discarded journal entry.

2)  Where Goldberg’s Zen approaches have been more meaningful to me, is her entire approach of thinking of negative space can be liberating and eye-opening in imagining story.  So often we are focused on inventing what is happening in the story, but what about what is not happening?  We focus on our main character’s experience, but what did those same scenes look like from a fringe character’s point of view?  Generally speaking, when we take our focus off the main attraction and take in the negative space, we understand (and can write) the story more fully.  We begin to notice the blank space around the story we wrote, and realize what might have been happening in the world around our character.  New “what if’s” begin to come to mind.  In using this practice, I’ve written scenes from another character’s perspective, which might lead to more insightful dialogue.  I’ve realized entire scenes or tensions, or outcomes of the conflict that hadn’t otherwise occurred to me.

That said, this girl needs to get in motion or I’ll miss Ann Hood’s reading during lunch today.  Since I won’t take time to edit this post as carefully as usual, do let me know in the comments I’ve left it unclear — or let me know if resonates with you.  Have a great day!

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Update 10/8/12: I have to share with you all a link to this beautiful post by fellow Florida writer, Kelly Turnbull, from her blog Parsley and Pumpkins on “writing what you don’t see”: Change with Color.

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If you like this blog, be sure to subscribe using WordPress’s +follow option, or via email or RSS feed. I love to connect with like minded bloggers!

Coming next:

• Writing Life: Today’s Job – Nonwriting Days
• What I’m Reading: Summer Reading 2012
• Writing Character: Sometimes the Work is Messy

Writing Life: What I’m Looking for Isn’t Here (& 5 Tips for Managing Writing Time)

Northwest 200 1993 – R. Dunlop

Have you ever had days you moved through furtively restless, with the certain impatience there was something you needed to do?  A pressure that meant you could not go outside to trim the bougainvillea that nearly clotheslined the UPS man (in all its bloody thorniness), could not (as you had promised) take the boys to the movies, could not spare the hour to catch up with your dear friend in LA (even though, for once, the time diff was in your favor), could not do laundry or dishes or even think of writing…but couldn’t name source of the urge?

I spent today in the tufted leather chair my boys expect me to sit in when I work (I work better sitting on my bed, but look so much lazier there, so that the leather chair claims me).  I had the laptop in my lap.  I had lists of things to do, and those that had been accomplished to check off.  I’d written three blogs this week, which needed proofing before posting.  I’d gathered more pictures for another Living with Books.  I’d traded notes with staff at a TT race in Ireland, that gave me just the detail to write an inner monologue for Wake‘s mose elusive character (where he dreamed himself the race marshall responsible for warning approaching racers of a hazard in the road, but somehow failed, as the character does ultimately, in preventing a family member’s death).  I had 14 brief manuscripts to read and comment on for a workshop with Ann Hood starting Wednesday, and three more litmag submissions to read and respond to.

More urgently, 69 student essays and 17 preliminary research packets await comments for classes this week, with mid-period grades due tomorrow.

I assumed that was source of the restlessness: resentment at spending my Sunday grading, guilt not to be with the boys.  I love teaching writing but have to confess myself worse than the students this year in having early-onset of summer fever.  As much as I’ll miss this fabulous year when it ends, right this moment I want nothing more than hours alone to myself to read and write and play with my boys and maybe, if I have to, get the house clean.  Or go on a date.  Student papers drag their toes in self-conscious awareness there’s no competing with all that. Together, the weighty bag of papers and I went through the day watching guilty marathon episodes of Miami Towing on tru.tv (yeah, that bad) knowing I was clearly in a state of avoidance.

The boys went out to let me work but the urgent impatience continued.  With the irritable absentmindedness of a nervous tick, I flicked back and forth through software on my computer and online.  Metaphorically pacing.  Searching.  Waiting for something.  Every twenty minutes or so, a tweet would come through, an email would come through, friendly comments and connections from my friends in the ether.  A good article to read, an interesting piece of news.  I’d be sated, momentarily, like easing a junkie’s craving, so that yes, it seemed, maybe that was it: just boredom.  Avoiding the essays.  Loving the connection of fellow writers.  Avoiding the essays.

Just as quickly, the craving would be back, the pacing, the constant flickering hunt through the buttons on screen.

But, whatever I was looking for, it wasn’t here.

The boys came home, breaking my trance.  I broke free of the leather chair (who may find itself summarily dismissed for its continued failure to aid in productivity), went upstairs to where the beginning of twilight lit the bay window of my room like a treehouse.

Sitting here reminded me of the hour stolen before teaching last Thursday: writing the scene where this elusive character revealed himself, pulling the long unused key to his parents’ house from his wallet, his men turning away in denial of how his hand shook, scraping the brass face of the lock before he could turn the key.  The house of the death he’d caused, the main character still thinking him a victim while the shear act of turning away had revealed to him that his closest friends had thought him at fault all along.

Where all day there had been restlessness, I am now there in that novel — in the scene just written, in the race getting ready to be underway in Northern Ireland (in the real world) which the elusive character’s father was famed for winning before his death (in the novel).  In the scene still in my head, wanting my attention.  Awareness fills me, as it does, with the engulfing physical and emotional presence a work in progress can have.

I realize with a mix of frustration and relief this is the answer I looked for all day.  The novel.  I want everything else — the grading, the cleaning, the movie, the duties — to fall away and leave me dozens of hours to disappear into finishing this story.  It’s frustrating because the timing is off.  I budget time for fiction, but today’s hours were allotted to getting grades entered and I’m being bratty to complain about it.  I’m lucky enough to be working only part-time this year, to have 3 days off for a workshop this week, to have 2 months home this summer between teaching.  Wait, impatient novel.  Your turn is coming.

But, even with the limited time, I pause to enter this post to say one thing: what a relief it is, and a joy, to know the writing I am doing has this powerful a pull on me.  To know that, even when it has to wait its turn, it is strong enough to leave me pacing and craving the work.  Relentless: that’s the nickname of the motorcycle race coming up in Northern Ireland this month.  I like that, as it fits the relentlessness of this urge I have to get this story down.

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5 Things I Could Have Done to Make Today More Successful:

Yeah, I know better.

1.  Write first.  What relief I would have felt, had I given myself an hour, even, to get that one scene down before trying to work on other things.

2. Not let interruptions begin, in the first place.  Bad, leather chair, bad.   Sounds like I’m kidding, but fact is, this chair is aimed at the tv, in a room crowded with the boys’ toys, causing stifling chi even when the tv is off.  I know this to be true.  The trick is to know yourself and not invite the disaster in to begin with.  I should have begun the day in the room where I knew I worked more productively.

3. Don’t worry what other people think.  I started my day in the family room because I was waiting for the boys’ dad to pick them up. He would have taunted me for “sitting in bed all day” if I’d been working in my room when he got there.  So what?  I should have done what I knew to be best, regardless.

4. When you get in a rut, break it right away. Okay, so yeah, it was hysterical seeing the crazed big man stuck in the passenger window of his car, fighting to keep the tow truck driver from pulling away.  But, yo.  As I procrastinated into the third episode of Miami Towing?  Take a hint.  Break the trance.  Go for a run.  Go to that movie with the boys.  Do anything — but don’t let the procrastination take over.

5.  In avoidance mode? Use a timer and break work into 15 or 30 minute increments. Grade 30 minutes, then give 10 to something rewarding, whether that be a break with friends online or reading for the workshop later in the week, or a turn with fiction, getting that new scene down.  Several 30 minute increments would have left me much more productive than the day turned out.

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Worth Reading:  For friends who have been participating in Robert Lee Brewer’s Social Media Platform challenge this month (#mninb on twitter), I’ll end with a link to a great article by Jane Friedman: read this for the great checklist, providing an interesting approach for deciding how to balance time between writing and building platform. Comments following the article are just as insightful.

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Best to all of you, who struggle with the ongoing need to balance writing with the other demands of life.  If you have similar challenges, or insights for what works well for you, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

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If you like this blog, be sure to subscribe using WordPress’s +follow option, or via email or RSS feed. I love to connect with like minded bloggers!

For more on managing writing time:

• Click Time Management for Writers or Writing Life in the Category cloud in the sidebar.
• Coming next: Writing Life: Today’s Job – Nonwriting Days
• For time management strategies to reach your goals, check out the 2013 series January Challenge: Finish, Begin, Improve, Plan

Coming next:

• Writing Life: A Zen Prompt for Writing Past Blocks
• What I’m Reading: Summer Reading 2012
• Writing Character: Sometimes the Work is Messy

Why Writers Should Use Twitter and Top 5 Tips to Get Started

The legacy of Cypress Gardens (waterskimag.com)

Some of the best articles I read each week are through fellow blogs, newsfeeds and links I find on Twitter (find me at elissafield).  That said, since Twitter has played such an important role in where I am getting and sharing this reading, it’s time I sound off on why I think Twitter is so valuable.

I bet many of you are still Twitter skeptics.  A year ago, I had 3 Twitter accounts and honestly… could not see the point. I used Facebook daily to communicate with friends around the world (literally). I set up a separate Facebook for writing, and had been connecting with writers at Poets & Writers’ Speakeasy since back when not all of us had email accounts (really).

But, man.  That Twitter just made no sense.

Last fall, between following a series of advice on how to use the thing and beginning to use it more regularly, something clicked.

I can say this: it’s like when my dad taught us to waterski as kids.  Those first hundred yards, as the rope between you and the boat goes taut and begins to drag you artlessly through the water, the skis and chunky ski jacket adding resistance so it seems impossible to imagine you could ever lift up and glide across the water, it was so tempting to let go and give up. Newbies do that, calling back to whomever goads them on, “It’s not working!” But keep those skis and body in the right position, lean back against the pull as the boat gains speed, and there it is: water rushing beneath lifts the skis and up you go.

Getting up on skis isn’t impossible, but it’s a matter of getting up on plane – letting the boat accumulate speed and overcoming resistance so you lift and skim across the water.

In this metaphor, Twitter isn’t gliding when you first sign up because you do not yet have the momentum of a community to lift you, and you are not yet actively using muscles to work with that lift, to engage in the community so that posting and reading feels as fluid as conversation.  Once you seek out that lift and engage yourself, you pull free of the resistance and glide.

Why bother?

Extending the metaphor, the reason I’d push people to make the effort with Twitter is that active tweeps (Twitter peeps) find it becomes their hottest source of information, just like waterskiers who come to dash, leaping, across wakes.

For one, Twitter has become my fastest and most reliable source of news. New York Times and Guardian UK post news alerts the moment news hits, before it’s compiled and released through other media. I read about London riots on tweets last year, before anyone knew of the first fires. Reporters at the front lines and witnesses on site post firsthand accounts, and the media post frequent updates, so I get a more complete and corrected picture than other media has time to serve.

But beyond news, I’ve gained a watercooler intimacy on issues throughout the publishing industry. Not only can you get periodic news from the magazines and publishers you admire, but can connect individually with their editors, as well as agents, book reviewers, independent booksellers, librarians, and writers, readers and educators, at all levels.

And, hey, we’re not all that serious all the time. Can I say how thrilled I was to trade tweets with Tom Colicchio as he live-tweeted through Top Chef, or to trade tweets with the Dowager Countess Maggie Smith?

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That said, here are my top tips for getting up on plane with Twitter:

5 Top Tips for Succeeding with Twitter.

1)  Identify yourself clearly. Establish your account in the name you use for writing, not a nickname. This is how people can find you. Take the time to write a bio statement for your profile, that lets people know who you are. Do you write? Say you’re a writer. Is it poetry? Fiction? Nonfiction? Add that. Most of us have a day-job, too, or we’re parents or have other interests that impact who we are as people and as writers. Note these simply, and unapologetically. If part of your schtick is that you’re funny, be funny. If not, don’t think you have to be. Just try to convey who you are. And, hey – you can modify it as often as you want, as your identity changes.

2) Get people linking to you.  The key to Twitter is to draw further connection, so make sure to include a link to you, in your profile. If you have multiple media sites (Facebook, Pinterest, a blog, Tumblr), assume people will only click one, so list the primary link that you want to draw traffic to.  For example, list your website or blogsite, and have links to Facebook or other media on those sites.  (Note: there is an option to create an About.me page, which is a splashy bio app, but don’t do that unless you have no other sites, as it will actually be diverting traffic away from your site.)

3)  Find key people to follow. Search out friends and colleagues. Search out authors, magazines and editors you admire. Follow your favorite news media or other influencers. Okay, not bad. When I was at this point, I was still a Twitter skeptic. The change from skeptic to being on-plane came for me when I discovered lists of the most recommended people to follow on Twitter.  Here are three lists of people to follow.  The first list is my own, posted June 14, 2012, and the other two each offer a different emphasis in selecting people to follow.

• [Update: added 6/14/12]: My list: Twitter for Writers: My Top Recommended People to Follow (& Helpful Hashtags)
• Poet Robert Lee Brewer’s List 2011
• PC Magazine’s Top 100 – general, not just writing

4) Use hashtags. Seriously, I think it’s a stupid word. We’ll move past that. Definition: hashtags are words, letters or abbreviations, preceded by the pound symbol: #. Wow do they make posts look ugly. We’ll get past that. They work. I really began to jump wakes with Twitter when I began making connections with others by participating in conversations I discovered using hashtags.  How? Keep one image in mind: growing community in Twitter is like the growth of crabgrass — you want to branch sideways, to reach more than just the people in your sights.

• Use them when you post: When you post without hashtags, only your “followers” see your post. What if you’re new and are only followed by your mom and the account you set up for your dog? You found this great article on McSweeneys that jumpstarted your writing Monday morning, and posted the link. You had a Zen moment and posted a wise mantra.  You shared news that you finally finished novel edits. Unfortunately, the dog can’t read (What’s up with that? Lives in a house full of books, all that time on his paws, and still can’t read.), and mom is a twitter skeptic, so no one read your brilliance. When you add the hashtag (#writing or #amwriting, for example), it includes your post in the feed for conversations on that topic. Someone halfway across the planet you have no other opportunity to connect with now sees and clicks your link. They now: a. get the brilliance no one else saw, b. follow you to experience more brilliance, and c. retweet you, so the 2 or 200 or 2000 people following them now also see your brilliance.
• Use hashtags when you read.  These hashtags are trickier — they tend to be tags you see included in an interesting post by a key player you are following. Don’t know what a hashtag means? Click it and see what people are talking about. Major conferences and events will establish a hashtag — for example, Associated Writing Programs used #AWP2012 during the annual conference that attracted some 10,000 writing and education professionals.  I’ve used hashtags to read the livestream of reporters attending a press conference for an international event who were live-tweeting before they even sent news back to their news desk (yeah, wow), and the livestream of publishing movers and shakers live-tweeting from panel discussions they were attending at an “un-conference” on change in the industry, held in NYC one Sunday morning. In both cases, not only did I gain remarkable insights by reading, but retweeting the genius I was witnessing convinced others I was genius as well, and led to many of my followers.
• Use hashtags to participate in live chats. For nearly any topic you could want, there are live chats held on twitter, which you find by using the chat’s hashtag. I write adult fiction, but teach middle grades and ended up making connections with several young adult fiction writers, publishers, agents and teachers by participating in #YAlit (young adult) and #MGlit (middle grade fiction) chats I stumbled on to. I’ve met writers discussing their writing process by participating in “book tour” chats at #litchat, and discussed trends in education with teachers on various edu-chats.
• You will notice that people also use joke hashtags, which is a funny way to make a point, although will not develop into a conversation unless everyone uses the tag. #works #pointmade #fewerwords That’s one reason for doing it. You can add an emotion to the post without having to say it in a full sentence, which the 140 characters don’t allow.  In twitter, I could have made the joke above with the silly hashtag #dogdoesntread #whatsupwiththat.
• To get started, try this list of 40 Twitter Hashtags for Writers.

5) Number one suggestion is going down as number 5: participate. Reply to tweets. Comment on articles you read. Retweet articles that are worthwhile. I can give more specific advice about each of these, but will keep it simple here, because it is absolutely important to get this message: be genuine. Twitter is not for blasting demands. You may want people to buy your book or read your blog or follow you, but expect these things to happen naturally because you establish yourself as a participating member in the community. If you tweet and retweet things that are of interest, people will be drawn to find out more about you. Yes, share alerts when you post a new blog or get a story published, but readers will “unfollow” tweeters who only post “buy my book” updates. Don’t: harass, stalk, turn into a megalomaniac or post that you ate cereal for breakfast. Do: send thank you messages when people follow you, reply with interest when you liked a post or link, retweet the things you found worthwhile. Be genuine. Be mannerly. Be funny if it’s in you. Be helpful. Share what you know.

Those are my top five.  Feel free to start by connecting with me and seeing who I follow.  Leave comments to let me know how it goes, or post questions I could address in the next post.

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If you like this blog, be sure to subscribe using WordPress’s +follow option, or via email or RSS feed. I love to connect with like minded bloggers!

Related Posts:

• Social Media for Writers: Twitter (vs. Facebook)
• Twitter for Writers: My Top Recommended Users (& Useful Hashtags)

Coming Next:

• Next on My Reading List: Fall 2012
• October Writing Challenges: Week 1

Living with Books

Monkeys reading. c. Elissa Field

When asked about designing bedrooms, my mother (Connecticut ASID designer, Julianne Stirling) once said that she makes sure to put a little bookcase in every room.

In my parents’ 230 year-old house off the village green in Fairfield, Connecticut, my boys’ favorite room has African-carved giraffes and a porcelain elephant hiding among the books on a carved case that also features a portrait of my grandparents when they still lived in North Africa at the end of World War II. Monkey prints parody my boys’ personalities as they read in bed. It is a room Kipling or Hemingway might have brought keepsakes home to.

At the back of the house, the girls’ room, where my nieces stay and where I stayed the night before my wedding, is more delicate, its curtains gathered high as if the empire waistlines of Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibilities. A copy of Austen is likely tucked among the books held on an antique latticework shelf above the bed.

Long before my mom was an accomplished interior designer, back in the first house I remember, with the 70s lemon yellow shag carpet and turquoise leather chair, there were books in every room. Coffee table books of famous artists, designers and photographers. Picasso, the impressionists. Biographies of dignitaries, inventors, trendsetters. Henry Ford, Marilyn Monroe. And fiction. A leatherbound set of Fitzgerald. Updike. Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, Moveable Feast, Finca Vigia collected stories. Henry Miller. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. And the fodder of avid readers: the bent-spined, inch-thick paperbacks whose pages aged brown by the time it was my turn to read them.

Coveted, to this day, are the found books. The hand-me-downs. There is a threadbare, heavy volume of fairy tales my Grandma Aho read to us from her childhood in Michigan’s upper peninsula, whose line drawings had been painted in watercolors by herself and her sisters as girls. I have pictures of the same girls straddling the shoulders of a draft horse, patting his neck to warn his heavy hooves from stomping cabbages as he navigated the garden. Equally loved: question arose over the holidays as to who last had the dozen original clothbound Nancy Drews, printed in the 30s and 40s, that had been passed from one cousin to another, then down to my cousins and myself.  Less lovely, but equally treasured, were the horse books left by my college-age aunt for me to discover at the cottage we all shared in the summer. Or the James Bonds my brother and I traded, or the military training guides he found in family footlockers. There was the elicit, always denied, hairy-armpit copy of The Joy of Sex that finally disappeared altogether. And there are the Bibles, passed down from the last-living members of various branches of the family, with patchy recording of births and deaths and marriages written inside the covers.

We were a family who lived with books.

I carried this with me as I set up my first houses. In college, novels advanced in a line along the baseboards around the wood floor in my Richmond rowhouse, arranged by country, by year of publication. In Florida, waiting for a hurricane, books were one of three things I protected with plastic bags and packed into a sheltered closet. Along with photographs, the few things I could not bear losing to a storm.

It hadn’t occurred to me this is idiosyncratic. I’d never lived in a house without books and never took time to think of it as unusual – a joy some of us share, in surrounding ourselves with the magical worlds we’ve discovered in those pages, loving the undulating ribbon of color and texture formed by a line of spines.

Coming across interior design photographs of great rooms with books has made me aware of this kindred reality some of us share: living with books. This new column will share some of my favorite Living With Books images, in monthly editions.

Here is the first:

I have always loved a dining room with books.

A dining room with books, featured at www.atticmag.com.

Fabulous photographer chotda (santos) has photographed a number of versions of a hue-spectrumed bookcase, most notably this one below.

I love this picture, by author, photographer and gender activist Rita Banerji, of a bookseller’s stall at Kolkata’s Annual Book Fair.

In this Chicago living room, featured by Architectural Digest, books hold their own against dramatic artwork. As much as I love books, the room’s balance is crucial, as a library should reflect the owner’s pleasure in books, and not feel a weighty burden.

And what about you? I’d love to hear your favorite experiences or memories, living with books.

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If you like this blog, be sure to subscribe using WordPress’s +follow option, or via email or RSS feed. I love to connect with like minded bloggers!

• For more Living With Books: click the Category Living With Books in the sidebar for a listing of all posts for this column. Here is a sample:
  • Living With Books 04: Books and Fashion
  • Living With Books 06: Books are Spooky, Too
• Coming next on writing character: How Could This Be My Story?