Gifts from the sea

Some days words come unbidden

sailing onto the page like tiny boats

blown by the wind.

Some days the page remains blank,

empty, like a cloudless sky, like a vast

ocean with a distant horizon past

which you cannot see.

Some days you can only hear waves

washing against the shore, the fog

too thick to see anything.

Some days you look for shells,

hoping to find a word or story or poem

hidden inside, and you put it to your ear

to listen.

Some days you wait and wait

like a fisherman waiting for a tug

on his line wondering what's hidden

beneath the surface, wondering if

anything is there.

Some days rain falls so hard

you can't tell the difference between

sea and sky.

Some days the sun is so strong

the light blinds your eyes.

Some days you open your arms

to heaven and words appear--you don't

know why--and you gather them up, 

as many as you can hold, gifts from the sea 

to share with the world.

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.

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

Minding the Muse

Seattle poet, writer, and master teacher Priscilla Long, whose book, The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life, offers a collection of insights into the process of making art, has found the inspiration to collect more wisdom on the artistic process in her newest release, Minding the Muse: A Handbook for Painters, Composers, Writers, and Other Dreamers.

It contains a lifetime of her observations on how artists and writers go about their lives and work.

“Over the years,” writes Long in the introduction, “I’ve studied the lives of artists and writers from Picasso to Patti Smith, from Raymond Chandler to the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. I’ve wanted to see what I could learn about how they went about their lives and work. I’ve used my own discoveries and those of creativity researchers to inform and improve upon my own strategies as a writer and poet. I find that no matter how experienced I get, there’s something more to learn. Here you have what I’ve gleaned so far.”

And what she has gleaned so far is simply remarkable.

In fourteen brief chapters, organized roughly according to the stages of the process, she provides insights into the various steps that an artist must take to bring an idea from the abstract realm of thought to the page and into a reader’s hands.

Beginning with a chapter on productivity and learning to work, she includes helpful tips on gathering, hoarding, conceptualizing, finding and inventing forms, acquiring skills, mastering domains, taking time, making space, marketing, becoming a public figure, and developing a high self-regard, and along the way offers helpful guidance on how to deal with feelings that might stand in the artist’s way.

Some of the helpful tips that Long shares:

“Learning to work is about learning to sink into the work. Learning to be patient with the work. Learning to work every day, even if only for a short time. Learning to eschew distractions.” (from Chapter 1. Productivity: Learning to Work)

“It’s not about working fast. It’s about returning to the work day after day, inquiring of it what it needs and giving it what it asks for. It’s a conversation, a dialogue, at times an argument. It’s a relationship. As long as we keep steady, keep the faith, keep on returning to the work, the work will keep on giving us back what we need to complete it.” (from Chapter 1. Productivity: Learning to Work)

“Any particular planned work benefits from a gathering stage. Objects, lists of words and phrases, photos, pictures and words cut from magazines, maps, fast drawings, discovery-writing sessions, studies of the sort done by visual artists—all are forms of gathering.” (from Chapter 2. Gathering, Hoarding, Conceptualizing)

“In the beginning you open the creative problem, in terms of both its form and content. Do not rush. Do not think of the rewards it will bring or of how good or bad it will turn out. Keep the problem open for a good long time.” (from Chapter 3. Opening the Problem, Closing the Door)

“I’ve learned that when I’m in the middle of working on a piece, my feelings are best ignored... It’s okay to feel the feelings. It’s okay to vent them in your journal. But to let them guide your actions—not okay. As Robert Fritz puts it in Creating, ‘Your feelings are irrelevant to the creative process.’” (from Chapter 5. Feelings Are Unimportant)

“Is there an artist in existence who does not, at one time or another, fall into the deep well of discouragement? Do not permit this. Just keep working. Miriam Schapiro, feminist art pioneer and leader of the Pattern and Decoration movement, wrote, ‘When I look back on the years of excessive self-doubt, I wonder how I was able to make my paintings. In part, I managed to paint because I had a desire, as strong as the desire for food and sex, to push through, to make an image that signified.’ In the end, what mattered was not how she felt but what she did. And so it is with us.” (from Chapter 5. Feelings Are Unimportant)

This is a relatively small book, fewer than 75 pages, but contains many memorable passages like the ones quoted above that can’t help but inspire artists as they tackle their work. (And since when is size an accurate measure of a book’s success? Just look at E.B. White’s slim book of writing advice, The Elements of Style),

In addition to such invaluable tips, Long includes helpful questions at the end of each chapter intended to serve as guides for artists to use as they explore their own artistic methods and goals to help you forge new work.

On days when the isolation of working in solitude can feel overwhelming, it helps to have the wise and supportive voice of Priscilla Long whispering in your ear that making art is a possibility, and that you, like the many artists quoted in this book, have something to say.

Her book will help you say it.

For more information about Long and her work, visit her website: http://www.priscillalong.com/