Don't panic!

Not writing?

Take a breath.

Then take another.

This moment will pass and words will return the same way your breath returns.

The page in front of you may appear blank at the moment, but it won't stay empty forever.

You have choices, decisions to make, even when it feels as if you have none and can do nothing more than wallow in self-pity and despair, fearing you've lost your gift, and you'll never write again.

But what if the situation isn't as bleak or as dire as you fear?

What if you take these moments of not writing and, instead of panicking, lift your finger off the panic button and open your eyes to whatever is happening around you in this moment.

What do you see? A messy desk covered with papers?  A shelf filled with books? Clouds floating by?

What do you hear? A bird singing outside your window? The sound of a neighbor playing the violin?

What about your breath? Can you take a long slow inhale and feel your lungs filling up? Can you let the air out slowly through your nose?

What if you start with this moment?

What if you take a pen and open your journal to a blank page and try again.

What if you start by making a simple line.

Or a row of dots.

Or a silly doodle.

Just make a mark. Let your pen touch the paper simply to prove to yourself that you can still make a mark.

Then take another deep breath, close your eyes, and ask yourself what you feel now.

Open your eyes and ask yourself what you see.

Record what you're feeling (or seeing) in the moment.

Let your hand relax.

Tell yourself you can write for a minute. 

Or two. 

Or maybe five.

Watch how you slip out of yourself onto the page.

And how words appear out of nowhere. 

Filling the empty page again.

Getting Unstuck

This is the morning you hit a wall. 

You don't know the answer. You don't even know the question to ask. And you stop. You come to a halt. With no way to go forward. 

So what do you do?

Give up? Figure out another way to keep going? Where do you find the answer? How do you keep going when you don't know where you're going, or what comes next, or how to go forward?

What do you do if you're unable to move? Feeling stuck?

How do you get unstuck?

You can't stare at the page forever. 

So, maybe, if words and ideas don't come, you put the pen away. 

Close the journal. Tell yourself it's not yet time. The words will come, just not today.

Read instead. Open a book. Lose yourself in someone else's story or poem. Fill yourself with words.

Or watch a movie. Dive into story. Let the images wash over you like a cool, refreshing stream.

Or go outside for a walk. 

Think away from your desk. Or stop thinking. 

Let life unfold minute by minute, and savor the process of unfolding. 

See what's around you, make discoveries as you walk. Or sit by a lake and dream.

Watch clouds floating by. Notice sunlight falling on leaves. Listen to the wind. 

Wait for words to come, to reveal the answer to the question you couldn't solve a moment ago.

And suddenly a door will open, and there it is waiting for you.

And you are unstuck, Your hand is moving across the page again.

Writing.

A Writer’s Inner Library

Over the course of a lifetime—from the time as children when a parent or adult begins reading books aloud to us to the time when we can read to ourselves—a writer is likely to read hundreds, if not thousands, of books (as well as the back of a lot of cereal boxes).

Picture books, comic books, ghost stories, mysteries, adventure tales, pirate plots, science fiction, westerns, romances, classics, plays, poetry, literature—it all becomes part of us as we rise early or go to bed late, covering our flashlights with our bed sheets so no one will catch us secretly reading. As long as there are words and pages to turn, we will read and read and read.

Now imagine this. Imagine each book that we ever read or heard read aloud to us has found a place on a metaphorical library shelf that exists within us, a resource hidden inside every writer to sustain us for a lifetime.

Imagine—all the books we ever read! From The Cat in the Hat and Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are to Charlotte’s Web, Robin Hood, Amber Brown, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice, The Iliad and Odyssey, A Room of One’s Own, The Scarlet Letter, My Antonia. Any book that we ever picked up and spent time reading, it’s there, sitting on a library shelf and catalogued inside us.

Imagine, too, when it comes time for us to revise our work—whatever pages that we are writing to tell our stories, our poems, our plays—we subconsciously hear the sounds of these books, the cadences and music and rhythm of the words, the pacing of the plots, the feelings that we had for the characters and the settings.

These elements of a story stay with us long after we finish the last page. And they become our guides in revision, a kind of background music, so that as we read our own words, we compare them—their cadence and rhythm and music—against the music of words stored in our inner library, the words that guided us from one book to another, that made us into readers and then into writers.

                                                                                        

I used to think that reading was just about reading—about the joy of holding an imaginary world in one’s hands and immersing oneself in that world—but now I wonder if, as a writer, reading involved more than reading. Certainly it involved reading for pleasure, but I suspect there was also a question gnawing at the back of our minds as we turned the pages: how did the author do that, pull off that trick, make that magic? We read for pleasure, but also for understanding how to construct a story. 

Of course, there aren’t any physical books inside us. But it’s as if the memory of every book that we’ve ever read exists in some way inside us. It's there, available from memory, as we write and revise our manuscripts. And we can hear the background music of these other books as we revise, listening and looking closely at every word, every sentence. It’s as if there’s a monitor of sorts, a revision meter, lets call it, and it sends up a flag whenever a word, sentence, character, or plot needs more work. A flag goes up, I suspect, based on our understanding of the relationship of what we’ve written to all the words that we’ve ever read.

Perhaps it’s a certain sensibility that we cultivate by reading. We gain a sense of taste. Each of us acquires our own sense of taste, and we fine-tune that sense of taste by reading, culling what we love from what we find distasteful, uninteresting. And it’s our sense of taste, which becomes more sophisticated over the years, thanks to all our reading, that helps us write the things we need and want to write.

It can take years to trust one’s sense of taste, one’s love of a certain sound, a particular pace, the way a story is told. And I suspect that long after we’ve written our stories, we will be able to see in these stories some of the books that we read that influenced us along our journeys, and that we still hold safe, well-worn and beloved, inside us.

The Essence of the Process

If you read only one book about the writing process this year, I hope you'll consider John McPhee's Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process.

It contains eight essays on the writing process that were previously published in The New Yorker, the magazine where McPhee's work has appeared since 1965, and where you may have read some, or all, of these pieces.

If you have read any of these essays before, I recommend reading them again, since I find McPhee's work so rich that it can easily sustain multiple readings, each time offering up some new jewel that the reader may have missed or overlooked. And if you haven't yet read any of them, you are in for a treat.

You'll discover a man's love of the craft of writing, and a devotion to the process of putting words on paper reminiscent of a religious scribe, a man passionate about language and its usage and the delight that it provides for reveling in life's joys and mysteries.

McPhee believes wholeheartedly in revision as the core of the process. "The difference between a common writer and an improviser on a stage (or any performing artist) is that writing can be revised. Actually, the essence of the process is revision. The adulating portrait of the perfect writer who never blots a line comes Express Mail from fairyland."

If you take away just one nugget of truth from this book, let it be this one: The essence of the process is revision.

One of the things that I love about McPhee's approach to writing, and his willingness to teach writing to others (he's taught students at Princeton University, his alma mater, for years), is his understanding that each writer is cut from different cloth and approaches the problem of getting words on paper differently.

He gives us as examples the different ways his two daughters deal with the process.

"Jenny grew up to write novels, and at this point has published three. She keeps everything close-hauled, says nothing and reveals nothing as she goes along."

But keeping things close-hauled isn't the way his younger daughter Martha goes about the process.

"Her sister Martha, two years younger, has written four novels. Martha calls me up nine times a day to tell me that writing is impossible, that she's not cut out to do it, that she'll never finish what she is working on, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth and so on."

Two writers, two different ways of approaching the process.

Actually, three writers. There's McPhee himself who shares his own approach.

"It is toward the end of the second draft, if I'm lucky," writes McPhee, "when the feeling comes over me that I have something I want to show other people, something that seems to be working and is not going to go away. The feeling is more than welcome, but it is hardly euphoria. It's just a new lease on life, a sense that I'm going to survive until the middle of next month."

There's a wealth of information in Draft No. 4 that will provide sustenance for you as a writer for weeks, if not months and years, whether you write fiction or, like McPhee, nonfiction.

And if you love reading The New Yorker, you'll love learning a bit of what goes on behind its cover and pages since McPhee generously shares stories about his working relationships with editors at the magazine who have nurtured and guided him along the way.

If you're curious about the kind of advice McPhee offers, here's a link to his essay, "Draft No. 4," as it appeared in 2013 in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4 

And here's a link to the book, if you want to take a look: 
https://www.amazon.com/Draft-No-4-Writing-Process/dp/0374142742

And if you're interested in The New York Times' review of the book, click this link:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/books/review-draft-no-4-john-mcphee.html

The Wonder of Worlds Within Words

When I was much younger and beginning my studies as a graduate student in the newly designed MFA Writing for Children program at Vermont College, I was assigned to participate in a workshop led by two writers whose names weren’t widely known outside the field of children’s literature at the time.

One of the writers was a skinny, gruff guy with a Boston accent, broad shoulders, pitch black hair, and an intimidating stare, a young man by the name of Chris Lynch, whose more than thirty books since then, including Iceman, Slot Machine, Whitechurch, Gold Dust, Freewill, Inexcusable, and The Big Game of Everything, have been named ALA Best Books For Young Adults and have received many awards.

The other writer, a soft-spoken young woman with a gentle smile and a voice that sounded like velvet, was Jacqueline Woodson, who was named earlier this year as the United States' National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and who this week received word that she had won the Astrid Lindgren Prize, the world’s largest award for children’s literature, for her work of more than thirty books, including I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This, The House You Pass on the Way, If You Come Softly, and Brown Girl Dreaming.

Even then, long before these two writers had established their reputations, it was an intimidating workshop.

There was another writer, though, who helped lead that workshop long ago. She was a graduate assistant who offered insights into our manuscripts with a Southern drawl that I later learned was more of an Oklahoma-Texas twang, and who spoke about the writing process with the self-assuredness of a poet and with the sensitivity and kindness of a writer who understood our disappointment and pain when we were told our stories needed more work as if it were her own. 

Her name was Sharon Darrow, and she went on to become an esteemed member of the Vermont College faculty, teaching at her alma mater for more than twenty years, as well as publishing her own award-winning work for children--Old Thunder and Miss Rainey, The Painters of Lexieville, Trash, Yafi’s Family, and Through the Tempests Dark and Wild.

Memories of that workshop flooded back recently as I opened Sharon’s newest book, Worlds Within Words, a hefty collection of her thoughts on writing and on the writing life that she's shared with her students and other writers over the course of her career. 

What she’s learned over a lifetime about writing and teaching the craft of writing might be summed up in three words: Trust the process.

Again and again, in various chapters devoted to the writing life and to the craft of writing, as well as to the art of teaching writing, she suggests that trusting this process, which is filled with mystery and setbacks, obstacles, frustration, and despair, is the only way a writer can go forward into the dark, leap off a cliff, set foot into an unknown forest, or swim into unchartered waters.

Trust in your ability, she seems to whisper with assurance, and you will find a way where no way existed before you picked up your pen to write.

But don’t listen to me summarize her work. Here are a few samples from the book:

On first drafts:

“Allowing the reader to share in the character’s thoughts and responses as the scenes unfold, allowing more of the character’s emotional core to show through is difficult, and can’t usually be expected to come to the fore with power on the first draft. In first drafts you find the characters, setting, events, and begin to watch the scenes unfold. In subsequent drafts, do not settle for what you noticed first, but continue to discover the hidden moments in the folds and layers of your story.” 

 “In the first bursts of inspiration, a writer is struggling to tell herself the story. In revision, she is striving to show the story to the reader.” (p. 105)

 On beginnings:

“The first step in the presentation of a story is the setup, and in that setup, the spotlight shines upon the first sentence. It signals what kind of story we can expect, it gives us the first sound of the voice of the story, and, for some readers, may determine whether they keep reading or put the book down and go make a cheese sandwich.” (p. 137)

 On revision:

“The first draft is a way to tell yourself the story. The succeeding revisions will be your increasingly successful efforts to show the story to the reader. That’s why revision is such an important and necessary part of the process of discovering your real story. You don’t always find it in first draft, but in revisiting the moments one after the other and finding more than you could possibly have seen at first glance, just like entering a room day after day and viewing it from many angles each succeeding day. You will gradually discover the most minute and elusive details. Then (and only then) will you absolutely know which details are the most important ones for the story. In the same way, you won’t really know the whole story until the details have unfolded through revision and re-vision.” (p. 80)

 On finding our way:

“The contradictions and uncertainties we learners see coming toward us all the time seem to be detriments; they seem to be roadblocks, but really they are the road…We persist with courage and discover our way as we go. 

 “We walk into the dark and find the light, tread upon the rough ways and find a road. We learn by doing. We are here to give it our all, to teach, to learn, to read, to write, to grow, to become what is possible.” (p. 169)

As I turned the pages in Sharon’s book, I could hear her gentle voice, filled with the same compassion and encouragement that I remember hearing more than twenty years ago, whispering in my ear “You can do this!”

She’s the kind of teacher every writer needs to hear when facing a challenging part of a story or when coming up against a blank page. She trusts in the creative process—its beauty and mystery and, ultimately, its ability to enable us to grow and expand as writers and as human beings.

Her book is packed with lots of helpful advice, some of it, I’m sure, gleaned and stored in her heart from that remarkable workshop of ours with Jackie and Chris so many years ago.

But mostly it’s the sound of her gentle voice on each page that inspires us to keep going, to keep putting words on paper, to keep having faith in the process, and, most importantly, to trust our ability to write our story.

For more information about Sharon Darrow, visit her website: http://www.sharondarrow.com/

And to check out her book, Worlds Within Words, visit: https://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Within-Words-Writing-Life/dp/0998687804

This Is How Writing Works

This is how writing works for me, which is going to be different than how it might work for you since each of us holds a pen in our own unique way, or types by applying our own subtle or not-so-subtle pressure with our finger pads to the keyboard, or looks through our own lens at a blank sheet of paper or computer screen.

You might think that writing starts with a blank sheet of paper, but it doesn't, not for me anyway, although that sheet of paper is foremost in my mind (not the paper itself so much as its blankness). I know, of course, that sheet of blank paper is waiting for my words to fill it, even though I’m not yet at my desk. But, even so, writing doesn't start with that blank sheet of paper.

It starts with fear. 

I can be in the bathroom washing my face and thinking about that piece of paper or I can be lifting my head off the pillow after a good night’s sleep and suddenly, before I blink my eyes awake, that blank sheet of paper can flit into my thoughts, and along with it comes the fear that always accompanies writing, or, on some days, not writing.

See the way it works? Writing starts not, as you might think, with a blank sheet of paper, but with a choice: to face this fear of emptiness, of blankness, or run away. Sensing this fear is the way writing begins for me long before I sit down at my desk. It doesn't matter what I plan on writing. It only becomes a day of writing if I’m able to overcome this fear and choose to write.

This fear is such a large part of my being. It seems to accompany me everywhere—into the shower or to the bathroom when I brush my teeth or on my morning walk or while I’m eating breakfast or as I’m checking e-mail or making lunch or during my late afternoon run or even after dinner when I’m reading or stealing a few minutes watching Netflix. And feeling these moments of fear means that I'm constantly feeling the need to make a choice--to go to my desk to write or to get into the car and go to the beach to avoid writing; to sit down in front of my computer or to go back to bed; to take my journal and pen to a quiet nook in the library or to retreat to a local nature sanctuary to go birdwatching.

Writing starts with fear, and if you don’t feel this fear before you begin to write, you’re one of the lucky ones. I've felt this fear in many different forms ever since I started putting words on paper in high school. The fear that I won’t have anything to say. Or the fear that what I do have to say is utterly worthless. Or the fear that what I say will sound stupid and inane and ridiculous. People will think I’m silly. You’re a writer? They’ll ask this question innocently but with such an undertone of disdain and disbelief in their voices that I’ll begin to doubt myself. Me? A writer? Who am I kidding? Just because I happen to be holding a pen and notebook in my hand? Oh, how funny!

So, this is how it works (for me): writing begins with fear and with learning anew each day (each moment) how to deal with this fear—to face it, to put it in its place, or to step over it without disturbing it while it quietly sleeps—so that I can get to the page and begin writing.

But here’s the thing: getting to the page doesn't mean I've accomplished my mission. Sneaking past fear isn’t enough. Once I reach the page, I’ve got to deal with my own doubts and lack of self-confidence to get words on the page. You may think it’s easy once I get to the page, but it's not. Waiting for me on the page are the demeaning voices that I hear in my head and that can distract me and pull me off course if I let them. I need to shut them out if I’m going to write. Doubt, lack of confidence, insecurity, fear—these are all obstacles that can keep me from writing unless I learn how to hurdle over them or crash through them or subdue them if I want to write anything.

What I've learned over time, though, is that words have great power to dispel fear and doubts. When I finally get to the blank sheet of paper and start writing, in spite of the fear and despite the voices warning me to stay away from the page, suddenly I discover—because it’s the way my brain works—what I’m thinking. It's like magic. A light bulb goes on as soon as my pen starts moving across the page. It’s as if the keyboard lets me slip past my fears and doubts once I start typing. This is how I discover what I’m thinking, and I don’t really know what I’m thinking until I start writing. (Believe it or not, I had no idea I was going to write about fear when I started writing this morning).

I would love to be able to compose sentences and paragraphs and whole stories in my head. But I’m not that kind of writer. I’m the kind of writer who needs paper and pen. I need a keyboard and a screen. There’s something about moving my fingers and seeing my hand move, or just turning a page, or hitting the “return” key, something about these small actions, that, for some reason, bring out my thoughts.

Without paper and pen, I’m mute. 

Words come slowly, often with a struggle. Rarely do they flow out of me. Each sentence, each paragraph, is shaped on paper, by paper and by pen.

What about you? Do you struggle with fear? Do you prefer a pen, pencil, or keyboard? Do you compose in your head, or are you the kind of writer who needs to write in order to discover what you think? 

One of my teachers, Joy Chute, told me years ago that ultimately whatever method you use to write is irrelevant as long as you get the words on paper.  If a particular method fails you, abandon it. If it works, embrace it... and write!

For more information on how writing works, visit:

https://www.nownovel.com/blog/the-writing-process/

https://writingcenter.gmu.edu/articles/9215

http://www.songwritersonprocess.com/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/11/20/daily-routines-writers/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/05/03/advice-on-writing/

One Writer’s Process: Fran Manushkin

Before becoming a writer, Fran Manushkin had the idea that books came to life inside an author’s head fully made and that an author simply wrote them down “lickety split.”

But then she started writing and discovered that notion simply wasn’t true.

"Books develop according to their own time,” she says. “You cannot dictate that a book be born; neither can you dictate to a book. Listen. Really listen, and your book will speak."

Manushkin’s picture books, early readers, and stories about Jewish holidays have been speaking to generations of children in ways that have enriched their lives and imaginations for the past forty-three years.

Beginning with her first book, Baby, Come Out!, which appeared in 1972, and most recently with her book about diverse families, Happy in Our Skin, and her latest Katie Woo books, she’s written dozens of books that have touched the hearts of the children (and adults) who read them.

Manushkin never set out to become a writer. Born in Chicago, she graduated from college, earned a teaching certificate, and became a substitute teacher. But after four months, she decided what she really wanted was to live in New York.

So she left Chicago for Manhattan and, thanks to a lucky meeting with Ezra Jack Keats, learned of an editorial assistant’s opening in Harper & Row’s Department of Books For Boys and Girls. That’s how she began a career in publishing, working with two of Harper & Row’s most illustrious children’s book editors, Ursula Nordstrom and Charlotte Zolotow.

It was Charlotte, says Manushkin, who encouraged her to write a book, and once she started, she couldn’t stop.

"Whether you know it or not, every book you write is about yourself," Manushkin says.

“Don't be nervous if you've started writing something but don't know where it is going—be willing to discover the book as it evolves."

She was kind enough to take time from her works-in-progress and her love of bird watching to share her thoughts about writing with Wordswimmer.

Wordswimmer: If writing is like swimming...how do you get into the water each day?

Manushkin: I remind myself that writing is what I do—that it’s important—just as important as enjoying the park and bird watching. Having a book contract is definitely motivating! 

Wordswimmer: What keeps you afloat . . . for short work? For longer work?  

 Manushkin: What keeps me afloat is making any progress whatsoever on a story. I only write short books, so if I get one new line or one new idea in a day’s work, I’m thrilled. I write one step at a time and measure progress in small steps. They are satisfying, and add up to a story I can love.

Wordswimmer: How do you keep swimming through dry spells? 

Manushkin: Sometimes I do stop swimming for a while. When I’m really stuck, I give myself brief vacations: I watch a lot of episodic TV, go to the park and bird watch, and go to a museum. I also eat a lot.

Wordswimmer: What's the hardest part of swimming?

Manushkin: The hardest part is whether to give up on a story that isn’t working or to keep going. I have wasted a lot of time pursuing stories that should’ve been written by others. This happens when I begin with a theme rather than with a wonderful image or a rhythmic line or an intriguing character. But it should be said that my very stubbornness has also allowed me to plow through difficult days and come out with a workable story. I think I’ve solved an intractable problem this week!

Wordswimmer: How do you overcome obstacles, problems, when swimming alone?

Manushkin: I don’t feel good about myself if I’m not pursuing a story. I lack a center and a purpose. My problem is that I swim alone too much. I should be showing my stories to others for critiques sooner than I do. I used to have a fine critique group, but it dissolved because of illness and other factors, and I really should find another that meets on a weekly basis.

Wordswimmer: What's the part of swimming that you love the most?

Manushkin: The part I love the most is making a story work! It’s thrilling to start with nothing and end up with something the world has never seen. As my god, Sondheim, says: “Look, I made a hat—where there never was a hat.” I don’t send out a story until I’ve fallen in love with it. I know it’s true love when the lines and rhythms remain with me, and I find myself chanting them as I walk down the street. 

For more info on Manushkin and her work, visit her website:

http://franmanushkin.com/bio.htm

And here’s a link to her most recent book, Happy in Our Skin:

http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/258447/happy-in-our-skin-by-fran-manushkin/

If you’d like to read more about her, check out these sites:

http://biography.jrank.org/pages/2013/Manushkin-Fran-1942.html

http://www.kidlit411.com/2014/04/kidlit411-author-spotlight-Fran-Manushkin.html

http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/wstudies/ogrady/daughter_of_fire.html