Emotional Garbage Truck

Okay, so here's what last week's crazy parenting moment reminded me of: 

I was writing a novel while I worked (at my fancypants corporate job I was required to look busy but there was often no work to be done) and one day found myself in an all-out war with a secretary over the office supply products that kept vanishing from my desk. It wasn't exactly a "stapler" moment (have you seen Office Space?) but very very close. I resolved to leave as soon as I got into an MFA program. And luckily it was the right time of year and I was able to schedule and take a GRE within a week and the applications sent by the end of the month and I was in by the end of the year. Never looked back. 

That's how I tend to deal with situations in which the emotional weight is preposterous compared to the actual reality of the situation. I assess, I change things, I fix it or I go away from it.

But last week, I got caught up in a stupid emotional undertow that was all about parenting. A riptide of useless anger at things that I have no business being irritated by. Normally, I would tell myself to asses, change, fix, or go away. How can you do that as a parent? I find myself in emotionally overwrought situations daily, if not hourly. I discover I am yelling over the fact that a kid wants to wear a summer dress when it is obviously a fall day outside. I find the last, uneaten bite of scrambled egg can give me hives. Pajamas on the floor? Look out.

It's not like I can give up parenting and go to grad school. I haven't even paid off the last one.

This is what a time-out is supposed to be about: this stepping away from it to asses and destress. But we don't usually. We have too much to do. If we manage to extract one kid (by giving them a time out for yelling back at us) we usually still have another kid or spouse or bills to pay or someone texting us or a dog to feed or garbage to take out or god knows what to deal with - we can't just duck into our laptops and try to write about it. 

And yet, writing your situation into words helps a lot - write it down, get it out of your head. Use the back of a receipt or email it to a close friend. This is why Facebook posts are good, or Tweeting. Because it forces you to take your emotions and turn them rationally into words. In order to do that, you have to assess. 

On the other hand, be sane about it - FB, Twitter, even emails - you're sending out this stuff into the universe. People are going to respond. Think before you publish! 

And that's hard as a writer. We love to publish.

Here's a tip: write and then assess. Was I writing this down in order to clear my head? If yes, then it's emotional garbage. Don't try to publish every piece of emotional garbage that was cluttering your head. You're writing to get it out of your head, not to put it into the world. Put it away. Post in on FB if you have set up appropriate privacy standards. Or better still save it in a file. Don't look at it again. Head cleared, get back to your real work.

Obviously if your real work is a memoir, well, it's interesting isn't it? Memoirs and creative nonfiction are such a delicate balance of the author needing to process his own feelings (listen to our podcast of Darin Strauss discussing why he wrote his memoir) and wanting to advise others on how to deal with the issues you faced (Abby Shur, our very first Pen Parentis Fellow, wrote a memoir about obsessive praying. The podcast of the panel discussion that night is available to logged-in members of Pen Parentis.) And the noise of the garbage in our head can be so damned loud sometimes that it's hard to find the creative space to actually write fiction. So maybe that memoir is important. But take some real time assessing whether it's important because it cleared out the creative space in your head, or if it's important because it will actually help other people get through what you went through.

We as writers forget that writing does not necessarily equal readers reading. So many writers publish too quickly and are appalled at the horrific feedback they get in comments (too easy for response, no one writes you a letter flaming your book, they just post it to the whole world after they give you one star on GoodReads.) So think twice before you publish your personal junk. Be sure. And then treat it like any writing - get an editor, make every word count, and like I said last week, make sure your main character (that would be you) is clear on what they want. In a positive way.

Remarkably? this helps with parenting too. If you are clear on what you want "I want you to wear shoes that will not get damaged in the rain today." Then your kid can assert what they want "I want to wear my diamond studded felt-and-cork flip flops" and you can discuss without fighting. "Will your diamond-studded shoes be damaged by the rain?" "Yes, and I don't care." "I'm sorry you don't care. However, you must find shoes that won't get damaged by the rain." "I hate you, you are a horrible mother."

Well, it's dramatic, anyway. Write it down on the back of that receipt for those shoes (what possessed you to buy those in the first place??) In the novel you're writing, that girl would have put on her rhinestone-studded rubber flip flops and gotten to school on time. When you drop off Princess at third grade, come home and change the scene to reflect the much-more-entertaining reality of conflict. Or have your character wear the shoes to school and they'll dissolve into a puddle of actual money that slips down into the sewer...

One day you'll be stuck in your writing and you can go to your file of angry moments and you can harvest it to get your characters in a scene again: all scenes have drama and as a writer said at our salon, Kids are drama all the time. For them the stakes are life-and-death over everything: which shoes to wear to school, who took their chair at the table, the fact that they erased something they meant to keep. Use these moments. Be inspired by them. It doesn't have to be a memoir or a blog - it can be inspiration to get your paper characters acting like flesh and blood. 

Take a chill pill

I sat down to my laptop intending to write about my stressful morning - perhaps you can relate - but when I tried to come up with a title that was properly blog-positive for what was basically going to be a rant about other parents, I found myself stuck. I discarded words like hate, frustration, grr, colossal idiots, and started rethinking from the positive: finding peace, enforced relaxation, mom time out... and wow. My actual mood changed. Then I recalled the phrase "take a chill pill" that I haven't used since I was probably ten. I suddenly understood what those words really meant - take a sedative, you are overwrought, and I thought, I used to say this when I was in second grade? Horrific thought, how slang filters down into the mouths of the young. Like "sucks" as in "life sucks" or "this meal sucks mom" - I remember my mother being aghast that I would say such a thing. But then, I wasn't saying what she thought I was saying. I was just using a word. I bet you say it too, and your kids likely as well. We don't think about the words we use in conversation. They're placeholders. But when we write, they have evocative power.

The power of words. 

See? and now all the parenting stress that was tightening my neck and shoulders is gone. Vanished. I'm in the land of words. It's amazing what power words have.

but I just re-read the beginning of this blog and want to talk about this concept of thinking from the positive.

I had an acting teacher back before having kids (I'm from the pleistocene era, originally) and she used to tell us to find positive motivation for our characters. When she used the word positive she didn't mean smiley-face, she meant active. Characters with negative motivation "I don't want to be stuck at home all day" or "I don't want to eat that for dinner" are characters we hate. They're basically whiners. Turn it around "I want to travel more" or "I want spicy food" and we have characters that are tolerable. Make the desire specific, "I want to go to Thailand and climb the face of a god," or "I want to try a ghost pepper omelette," and we are dying to see what will happen. 

Crazy isn't it? I didn't even know that until I just typed it.

Writing is awesome. I really was in this preposterously stuck mood when I sat down here. I had rushed to get my first-grader to school on time and we were going to make it -- barely -- but we ran into some twins she knows and the girls walked together and I felt the clock turn to mush. I couldn't get her away - the girls were sweetly hugging and giggling and all I could think was "oh god, they're going to make her late and they'll get into Harvard because their parents who are both here and both dressed in Gucci will simply buy their way in, meanwhile my daughter will have her attendance record checked and it will be obvious from her first grade records that she has a tendency to arrive to school tardy - and she will have to go to a tiny community college in Appalachia. If they let her in." The designer parents told my daughter to wait for their daughter (one twin shares a class with her) and so my daughter did. While the parents removed their D&G sunglasses and hugged first one twin, then the other, then "hey! what about my kiss!" then same for the other. And my inner clock was covered in oozing taffy, the second hand was moving like a superhero and the bomb was going to go off anyway. My daughter went upstairs three minutes late, with two giggly happy girls on either side of her, and I went home gnashing my teeth at...what? at family love? At joy?  

It reminded me of the reason I finally applied to grad school. I'll tell you about it next week. 

For now, keep your characters active. 

Make their motivations positive: Susan wants X. 

And specific. Susan wants capital X in courier font, 12 point type.

Get to work!

Actually helpful writing sites

I keep wanting to write a post about actually helpful writing sites because it's rare to find a parent who has the time between marketing him/herself, social networking, earning a living, and actually (ahem) getting some creative writing done, to browse random writing websites in search of helpful places to bookmark.

So back in June, I started trying to collect websites that I found actually helpful (as opposed to those that are good for marketing - like Goodreads and LinkedIN - both are very useful, but not particularly helpful. They tend to suck your time as often as not.)

Well, I did find this great website called WritersWin.com - it seems to have a plethora of good advice and doesn't demand a membership fee (always nice).  But other than that, I found a lot of fantastic articles spread out across lots of various writing websites. So I approached it differently, I tried asking this question as a poll on Facebook and then on LinkedIN, but I guess people don't do polls.

In my own browsing I found a lot of sites that claimed to be great, but they were often rehash of the same lame articles "how to get an agent" and "how to write a character" - these are questions better asked in the Google Search bar because you'll get a list of articles that actually refer to your issue.

And that's what I left off at - we who hardly have time to get through an issue of the New Yorker, much less checking a website every day or two will likely do best by just Googling our questions at the universe. Someone has certainly written an article about every one of our writing issues.

Yet, in this age of something-for-everyone, I keep wishing there was some website that was just perfect for me, as a writer.

So, dear reader-of-this-blog, I leave it in your capable hands. What is your favorite website that is actually helpful to your writing? Maybe the question is too broad because a beginning writer and one that is published several times over might need different advice.  So I'll alter it a bit: what is your favorite website that is actually helpful to your writing--and why?

Just in time for Grandparents' Day

A lot—maybe too much—has been written and philosophized about the effect of our parents on our lives. But what about their parents, Dr. Freud? Once upon a time, Oma and Poppy, Gramps and Gramma were the loving/hateful monsters that our own parents would have discussed to pieces with a therapist—so why don’t we ever stop to wonder how Nana or Grandpere have influenced our own lives?

They’re just stories. That’s why.

Just stories.

The last AARP Grandparent Study was in 2002 and at that time the average age of becoming a grandparent was 47 with eventually, an average of six grandkids... Now? Merely ten years have gone by and the average age of becoming a first-time mother is climbing every year. In 2010, the American Fertility Association (AFA) reported that 20% of American women wait to have their first child until after age 35; meanwhile the average death age in 2010 was 78.7 (numbers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics).

Do the math.

But does their death make their influence irrelevant?

I’m an author; stories are my living. Stories are the most memorable means of transference of an idea from one person to another. Stories can expand horizons, quell fears, expose the reader to new situations, and teach them appropriate behavior. So let’s take a close look at grandparents-as-stories:

·      The ambitious guy who left everything to come to America

·      The desperate guy who lost everything gambling in Vegas

·      The brave woman who was the first in the family to earn a high school degree

·      The feminist who abandoned her husband and kids to start a career in law

·      The tailor who slaved his whole life at a job he hated, just to make ends meet

·      The couple who celebrated their 50th anniversary and divorced the next year

Just stories: easily summarized in one sentence. I submit that we routinely undervalue the influence of grandparents on our life-stories because we are looking at the wrong part of their lives. We are looking at the biological entity we met when we were kids. We look at them as Grandparents, every one of them old, and therefore “irrelevant,” as MIT software guru Phillip Greenspun argued in a 2009 blog post. Few of us ever got a chance to really know them; they had little direct influence on us.

But think of them as stories: who were your grandparents? I’ll start.

My grandfather was a smart and determined guy who ran away from home at 19 so as not to have to fight on the wrong side’s army.

My other grandfather grew so angry at being called a stupid immigrant railroad worker that he earned a living winning word contests by converting a language he barely spoke into math. Then he  got a job as an engineer and returned to spit at his ex-boss' feet.

One grandmother was a famous opera singer who left her career behind to raise a family and always regretted her decision.

The other invented her own medium in visual arts at 40 and continued to gain respect as a visual artist until she had her first public art show in Manhattan at the age of 90, which is also when she started winning prizes.

See? Just stories.

But oh, their resonance.

Like the memoirs, blogs, and reality TV that have captivated and nearly taken over the general entertainment industry (With the notable exception of epic movies with crazy special effects. Hang in there Hobbits!) these stories are true. These heroes are real. These stories actually happened.

Truth has resonance.

In practice, the direct influence my grandparents had was to introduce me to their hobbies: fishing, word games, chess, sewing, music, art, fashion, and heavy drinking.

You probably have a useless passion that some grandparent inspired: crossword puzzles, knitting, a card game, cruise ship travel, genealogy. Grandparents have been studied, of course: one study in 1994 by a psychologist named Laura DeHaan described their direct influence as “significant others who have a great deal to do with one’s view of life.”

But I submit, based purely on anecdotal evidence, that our parents give us our limitations while our grandparents-as-stories offer us our ambitions. The web is full of blogs of grandkids eulogizing the deaths of grandparents by following in their footsteps in some way. In the introduction to their book Grandparents/Grandchildren: the Vital Connection (Transaction Publishers, 1985), Arthur Kornhaber and Kenneth Woodward complain that “the literature of social science treats the three-generational family as a myth” – but isn’t that its very strength?

•      Madeleine L’Engle's granddaughter, Léna Roy (one of our devoted members! yay!) has a young adult book of her own, Edges.
•     Gifford Pinchot III, the grandson and namesake of the former Pennsylvania governor and first head of the National Forest Service, is carrying on his famous relative's legacy of conservation.
•       Fabien Cousteau is following in the footsteps of his famed grandfather, ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau 

A myth is a powerful story usually concerning a hero experiencing a series of events. Want to know what characteristics your kids will admire as adults? Stop looking at your aging parents. Instead, listen to the stories you tell about them. These are going to be the main characters in your kid’s life story. Not the complex psychological inner-demons you deal with: no. Your parents will become the simple heroes of a bedtime story. But one that is true.

--

Don't forget to help us out by blogging, Tweeting, Facebook liking, and word-of-mouthing the fact that the Pen Parentis Literary Salons season opener is THIS COMING MONDAY, yes, September 11th. We have spectacular writers in a stunning location. You'll need every adjective you know. Come! We offer wine! Books for signings! It's fabulous! You'll be so happy you live in NYC! 

here's the link: https://www.facebook.com/events/491504440878779/

cheers! I for one am desperately sad to see Summer slip away. But Fall is notorious for getting people working, so who's complaining?

New page in Salon history

A lot of you who follow this blog, I count as my friends - and as such, I want to take a little break from trying to inspire all writers who are parents and just sit back with a cup of coffee and thank you for everything you've ever done for me. You know who you are: I emailed or called you or you replied to a desperate Tweet or FB post and when you found me struggling to get my ass over whichever fence was currently in my way, you gave me either the shove or the swift kick in the rear to get me the rest of the way over. I'm being all facetious but that's my nature - so let me drop the eternal sarcasm and tell you seriously and with all warmth: thank you for not giving up on me.

Thanks to your belief, the Pen Parentis Literary Salons were picked up by Andaz. Starting on the Second Tuesday of September (which happens to land smack-dab on my least favorite day of the year, thanks to the fact that since 2001 I've lived one block from the madness) and going until May from 7pm -9pm, please join me at the Andaz. They have a spectacular bar and food menu - my favorite drink is the 'corpse-revivier' - and have been so welcoming and excited to host the Salons that I am shaking my head wondering why I never left the last million times they invited me.

For you, because you are so lovely, here's the messy story. Ready?

In late 2008, I was looking for a place to house a salon that Arlaina Tibensky and I were vaguely considering. We thought it would be inspiring to hear from a bunch of authors who had somehow managed to find time to write despite having little kids. I had date night with my husband at a "new Todd English" restaurant that had just opened nearby. It was overbooked, but the hostess was happy to let us eat "in the library"...one look at the floor-to-ceiling books and I knew Pen Parentis had found its home. It took a little negotiating to convince the GM of the place that we weren't a book club, but once he got the idea he was grudgingly interested in giving us a trial. We? Completely in love with our new space.

Once we had a location, we aimed higher: thought it would be great to hear from people who were able to actually manage to publish something great despite having kids. "Great" was loosely defined as: we liked it, or had heard of it and really wanted to read it. Luckily Arlaina and I have wonderfully divergent taste in books, so that she'd invite people I hadn't heard of and I suggested people she was wary of (our earliest meetings were fairly hilarious). What stunned us was the overwhelmingly positive response we got from everyone: even people like Jonathan Lethem, who we had tracked up to Maine where he has a secluded writing cabin, were intrigued by our idea. And others were positively gracious; Jennifer Egan and Deborah Copaken Kogan not only read for us but also gave us names of friends who had kids, who were also great writers. Arlaina and I were astonished by how many of the writers who were successful had a small tight community of other writer-parents to hang out with. Our salons mattered to people. Each time we'd present a pair of authors, at least one of them would tell us they ached for this sort of a group when their kids were really little.

Pen Parentis grew up around that idea. Building a community of writers that are parents has been a spectacular job - and social media has grown up with us, so that now we have not only this blog, but a Twitter feed (@PenParentis) and a Facebook page (www.facebook.com/penparentis) as well as our website. We just started a private LinkedIN group to allow for the kinds of intimate discussions that happen all the time at our salons -- if you or anyone you know is a writer with kids - please feel free to request membership! It's free and we'd love a huge active group!

Sorry - got off story!!  I was telling you about our move.  So over the years we learned that the location was a property that was used to train new managers. Over the three years, I met something in the line of seven restaurant managers, three events managers, four sales managers, and at least four GMs. Each time I called it seemed someone had moved on or was about to be replaced. It was a little exhausting to explain, over and over, that no, we were not a book club. Not even a "high-end" book club. But the library kept us. Brass railings, candles, and most importantly, books that someone lovingly chose - all of them were books a real human being might read. All the way to the ceiling.

Then this summer rolled around. We had our first community-wide children's lit festival. 175 people turned out. It was magic. I called up our space to make sure we were on track for September only to discover the whole restaurant had closed. The new GM was in the middle of ripping out the bookshelves. He told me I would be delighted with the results - it would be a lovely country Italian place. 

Like Harry's Italian across the street? I asked, or more like the expensive Italian around the corner?

He was ripping out the books. I felt justified in being a little bit mean.

But no hard feelings. I knew right where to go. The GM of Andaz Wall Street was constantly wondering if I was ready for a new location. I had always passionately loved his property: they brought in a farmers' market, opened an outdoor bier garden, their staff had always been so lovely to me. I loved going to Wall and Water to eat, it's by far one of the best restaurants downtown. The bar downstairs is sleek and spectacular. Really, all Andaz hotels are a vision, they just feel special the second you walk in. And how great was it to finally find a GM who loved the idea of hosting a series of literary salons. They showed me a lovely space with floor to ceiling windows - showed me where they would set up a bar. They were gracious and welcoming and excited to work with us to promote the event. It was a whole new partnership.

So now I share this excitement with you. We've worked hard to book gorgeous writers for this upcoming season. Our Fellowship winner, Sarah Gerkensmeyer is flying in from Fredonia to accept her award and read her winning story. September 11, 7pm -9pm - come to the second floor of 75 Wall Street (in the Andaz Hotel) and let us entertain you. You deserve it. You know you do.

multi-multitasking

Here's what happens to me: I'm writing a novel and it's great, the idea is as enticing as cupcakes, and I'm enjoying getting the words on the page. It swims along for about 150 pages. Then: crash. I take walks. I find myself wondering if the plot of this Adam Sandler movie I just hated might be a better twist than the one I'd thought of, I read Murakami and have lots of green tea, I eat chocolates (I do that anyway)... point is, writing becomes work. And it never stops being work after that. Sure, I'll have breakthroughs, and I'll write for a while in spurts, but it's never again the easy, fun, excitement of the initial ride.

And then the editing starts and the work is actually tough and painful. Bye-bye, two-pages of fantastic writing about cupcakes.

There are no rules in literary fiction, maybe that's why it's so satisfying to write it. But because there are no rules you can't possibly know when "the flowchart" is ready to hit your boss' desk. Why can't I leave the cupcakes in? Proust would. But here's what happens to me: I miss the fun. A week of this hard work goes by and I get a great idea for a new project...or...I write a blog post. Oh those blogs. And emails. And articles we get paid to write. And random other piecemeal work (anyone passed out free samples for money before? I have...)

I want to introduce you to @YuviZalkow a writer-with-kids who I think has a great blog. He's doing the hard thing and giving up making his hilarious videos for a specific period of time in order to work on his writing. We can all take a lesson from him.

(now please forgive me if the link takes you to a later blog-posting. the video i want to share with you is embedded in a blog entry called Project Mismanagement. it's four minutes long, and it raises a great question. What has to go?) 

Let's think of our lives as a novel we have to edit. He does it by making a pie chart, but I suggest creating a plot outline where you start as a writer who has kids and you end as a writer with kids who has a book deal.

Prioritize. Figure out where you want your life-plot to go. Edit down the chapters that don't help.

If you have artistic tendencies and want to email any of your charts to me, I'd be happy to post them.

fifteen minutes of euphoric play

Is there ever a time when we writers are working on only one thing at a time? Yes, of course, there's the big piece-- amassing a collection of stories, hammering outlines to a novel-- but somehow, creatively speaking, that big piece becomes "work" and you seem to lose (or I do, anyway) the fun of creativity.

When you come across a writing prompt "Win $2000 for a sentence that describes eating bacon!" Doesn't your mind just explode with ideas? If you're like me, there is no writing surface that is safe at that moment. Not that I plan to actually sign up for the bacons-r-us mailing list and enter the sweepstakes (it's never merit-based, it's always a random drawing, sorry) -- but the idea that words are valuable, that I can think of them quickly and it can be FUN. Well, that's why I got into writing in the first place.

because I love words.

but let's get back to the subject: buried. Of course we all have personal responsibility (sometimes, you just gotta shower) and we have interpersonal responsibilities (you also have to ensure that your kids sometimes shower) and we likely have financial responsibilities (running away from the mail man takes precious second of every day, and even then, those bills keep coming--darn federal agencies and their persistence) ... and all those take time.

But let's not complain about our awesome lives.

Instead: let's look at how buried we are in our creative work. Have any of you got only one creative project? Do you devote yourself wholeheartedly to it--treating it like a job, getting it done in manageable chunks, checking off boxes on a to-do list? Do you have an end goal like you would in an office (you can go home, Mr. Smith, when the flowchart is on my desk)?

It's certainly possible to write that way. Am I for it? I don't know. It seems that it would be "taking writing seriously" -- which is important.  But goal-oriented writing often has a lot of the magic crushed out of it. There has to be a session, somewhere, when you get inspired and it's FUN. There has to be at least a moment here or there where you aren't a slave to your flow-chart and instead your work comes easily. Doesn't there?

And we have to have playtime with our kids as well as make them take showers. And what's hard hard hard not to do as parents is cutting playtime. After all, the shower-fight is more important, right? And the writing is obviously important.

Here's my radical idea: cut the boring, slave-driven part of writing instead. Are you totally jacked on a scene that isn't working, and you have got to think about it? Instead of staying holed-up in the coffee shop while your sitter plays with your three-year old, make an unscheduled visit to the little tyke. Pop in and play a game. Find your kid's euphoria and try to recall your own. We've all been there. Then, before the tears begin, vanish back to your office-of-choice. Helga can deal with the tears (it's her job) and you might be able to ride the wave of happy-place back to working on that scene.

Worst case, you've spent fifteen minutes of actual quality time with your kid and you're still as stuck as you were before. Best case, you've spent fifteen minutes of actual quality time with your kid and while playing, you came up with the idea that broke the wall. Either way: it's fifteen minutes.

And even the New York Times agrees with me. Well, one crazy writer does, anyway. Do you?