Did you ever lose your writing or other work because you didn’t save it, your computer crashed, or for no reason that you can see? That’s not a real problem. We know this. Cancer is a real problem. Your house sliding down a hill is a real problem.
And yet, losing those pages feels TRAGIC.
Lately, I’ve been hit with a bunch of–I’m not going to call these problems. Let’s call them “aggravations.” Aggravations that feel a lot like lost pages.
I got robbed in Florence. Very akin to losing pages in that, you know, I simply wasn’t careful enough. I KNEW better. But someone took my cell phone and my wallet, with our passports, my credit and bank cards, and even Prose’s passport! A LOT of hassle, the expense of replacing the phone and documents, and the creepy feeling that someone of that caliber knows where I live.
Then, through some sort of the-computer-program-knows-more-than-you-do weirdness, we lost something very precious to me. Your name. Hundreds of people on the mailing lists for my newsletter and the Village Writing School newsletter were mysteriously unsubscribed. I know I’m not always brilliant, but I can’t believe half my list unsubscribed at the same moment.
We worked with the mail program to discover that it was the result of an of automatic thing ran by Yahoo/AOL and it only affected newsletters coming from a .mac or .me address. It wasn’t just us. There’s lots of discussion on the web about it. But I feel like a peasant whose village is burned because the nobleman on one hill decides to attack the nobleman on the other hill.
Then my own government decided they had misfigured my social security, and I owe them money out of the blue. Aggravations. I’m telling you, they are piling up. It’s enough to get a girl down.
I feel like a deer in headlights or that squirrel crossing the road. Which way do I go, what problem do I work on next, and how do I do it? Here are three suggestions from my own snarly mess for when you find yourself in one and when aggravations feel like tragedies.
1. Roll up your sleeves and slog into the swamp. When you find yourself discouraged and unmotivated, sometimes you just have to go on true grit alone. We are so insecure about our writing that obstacles can feel like a sign from God. Oh, maybe losing those pages is a sign I shouldn’t even be writing. Or that that story was not any good. This is not clear thinking. Never make a decision when you’re beset by aggravations. It’s too easy to quit during times of stress.
2. Sometimes, you have to go back to your first moments of vision to remind yourself of WHY you wanted to do the thing that’s been derailed. I’ve had to do this lately. To focus on the key mission of the Village Writing School, which is that everything we are about is to help you tell your story. To help us find our stories and in that journey to find ourselves, to better know ourselves and our creative purpose. That’s my personal goal and my goal for everyone who has a story to tell.
3. Look for another creative approach. Sometimes when I lose a chapter, rather than trying to recreate what I lost, I just pretend I’ve never written it and I’m starting with a clean page. Maybe I write it anew by setting up a different scene or starting in a different place.
Instead of just digging out from under, you can use the derailment to reconsider your original vision and your approach.
That’s what we’re going to do with the newsletter. I think we all get too much mail. I think we need to get less and better mail. So we’ve decided to send out the same newsletter to my followers and the Village Writing School followers. It will contain my message, the school’s upcoming events, and a useful writing tip from one of our teachers. That’s it. Ok, maybe a picture of Prose.
I can’t express my gratitude to those of you who have followed my journey and written to comment or encourage me. You are so precious, which is why this email thing has me so bummed. But we will build again, better. We will write that chapter we lost, better. We will set up better automatic saves or whatever we need to do to not lose pages. And I will be even more vigilant in crowds of pickpockets.
We will not give these things power over us. We will call them what they are. Aggravations.
–Alison
Walking home yesterday after buying a toilet plunger for my glamorous Tuscan life, I engaged in one of my favorite pastimes—asking myself irrelevant questions. Suppose I could fall in love with a man who was, say, perfect?
Let’s see. He’s taller than me, which really narrows the field, but, hey, it’s a fantasy. He’s just my age, a little rugged, with a great head of hair. Probably Scots, so he can sound like Sean Connery. He will adore me—literally.
Oh no, I said to my fantasy. Better than fifty percent odds he’ll die before me. No thanks.
No, no, said my fantasy. He’ll outlive you. And you’ll have thirty great years of good health to enjoy the world together. And did I mention he’ll adore you?
But then, the question: What if I could choose between Mr. Scots Great-Head-of-Hair and writing a beautiful book that lived up to my vision for it and—it’s a fantasy—was important enough to win a respectable award?
Girls, I took the book. Not only that, I didn’t even have to ponder. I instantly took the book.
Now, I’m not really sure how sane this is, but I tell this story to make a point.
You should want it. And you should want it because you love it.
Sure, there are days when your story is just a snarly mess. But overall, the time I spend writing is the best time of my life. And the rush, when it comes together, just clicks the whole universe into place in one exquisite moment.
For the second time this month, I told someone, “I’m not here to convince you to be a writer. The Village Writing School exists to help people who want to tell their stories. It’s not about proselytizing for the Church of Writers. There are enough of us already.”
I know that a lot of us have a story we feel we should tell. Or we were once told we were good writers, and that feels like a sign that we should write. Or we are creative people looking for a creative outlet. So we slog forth, and we get some satisfaction from it from time to time, but it’s the satisfaction that comes from doing something we think we should.
Give yourself a break. Set yourself free. There are many people walking around in the world who are not writers, and they are perfectly happy. You could be one of them.
But, if you would trade Mr. Scots Great-Head-of-Hair for your own beautiful book, then you’ve already been bitten by the writing vampire. Give in. The undead have their own pleasures.
And if you know a Mr. Scots Great-Head-of-Hair, you can give him my number. But just make sure he understands, I’m a writer first.
******
Saturday, May 26, I’ll be teaching my online workshop, Thirteen Ways to Make Your Characters Come Alive. The time is Noon, Central, but the class is recorded so you can watch it later. More info and to register HERE.
Character is the most important element of your story. Make sure yours are unforgettable.
–Alison
I’m trying to grow as a writer. And I fear I’m just going to make a fool of myself.
Don’t believe me? Watch this one-minute video of my trying to psyche myself up before an interview that I’m about to do with a novelist:
It’s terrible, right? But I keep reminding myself: we takes risks because that’s how we grow. As writers. As people. So I’m pushing myself way out of my comfort zone but for good reasons:
- To continue to become a better writer.
- To connect with other writers, editors, and agents to learn from them.
- To find new ways to teach writers at the Village Writing School.
At the Village Writing School, my mission is to help other people learn to tell their stories because, hey, your story may be way more important than mine. It may inspire more compassion, more true empathy, more healing. So I want to help you tell it.
Which brings me back to that embarrassing video from above.
I have learned so many skills because of my attempts to grow as a writer and ensure that the Village Writing School succeeds. This includes: graphics, social media, newsletters, organizing events, speaking in public, baring my soul in a newspaper column, and now, online interviews.
Am I good at any of those things? No, I’m only passable. But each of these things has helped me grow.
The interviews I’m conducting are a part of a new online conference I have been putting together called the Historical Fiction Online Summit. I couldn’t be more excited about presenting this event at such an affordable price, but it continues to push me far outside my comfort zone.
I try to think of risk-taking as a package. Yes, I’ve fallen flat and yes, I’ve embarrassed myself. But overall, being able to overcome my fear has been worth it.
If there is something that you think you should do to build your platform or to write the story that burns in you, you should do it. Even if it scares you. It gets easier.
Would you rather be a real person, however flawed, doing real things, or a perfectionist, sitting on your sofa, dreaming of doing things perfectly but never actually doing them?
Challenge=risk=growth=satisfaction.
– Alison
He couldn’t have been more of a jerk, this handsome young man who worked at the ticket counter of the funiculare. (A train on a cable that runs up and down the very steep hill to the medieval town in Italy where I moved last fall.)
Of course, it was our fault. Local residents can buy a pass that is good for multiple tickets. I have one and my mom has a handicapped one that let’s her go through the special handicapped gate, since she can’t get the walker through the turnstile on the regular gate. You swipe your pass and the gate opens.
With her walker, my mom is like a greyhound. I can’t keep up with her. So I was shocked to discover, after I had swiped her pass for the handicapped gate, she had paused to dither and was not right behind me. The gate opened and closed without her. When I tried to reopen it with the pass, it wouldn’t.
Thereafter ensued a comedy of errors in which we wound up with both of us inside the gate and the walker still outside. Finally, I was able to get the handicapped gate to open, I dashed through backwards, grabbed the walker and shot back in. We got on the funiculare, having only spent four tickets for two people.
But then, here comes the ticket guy, who tells me I have to swipe my ticket yet again. I tried to explain what happened and that I had already spent four tickets because my mother didn’t get through the first time. He informed me that I must obey the rules. And, by the way, I must muzzle my dog. (At this, Prose looked at him to reveal her black muzzle the size of a thimble.) “Ok,” he said, “but you must swipe your ticket again.”
Even without a nasty ticket agent, it’s a little terrifying.
So I did, and we made it home. But my mother was livid. “These people are rude. And they don’t like Americans.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said.
“No they don’t. It goes back the War.” She can’t get it through her head that by the time Mussolini fell, no one was happier that most of the Italians.
She flounced into her recliner. “I hate this place. I want to go home.”
One man. One incident out of literally hundreds of interactions with Italians who have been beyond helpful, kind and generous, including the city worker who got dog bit rescuing Prose from a pit bull. When I finally found him a week later to thank him, he was unable to tell me the feeling he had when he saw Prose being carried off and me in hysterics. So he laid his hand over his heart.
But I do understand something of what my mother feels. There’s a vulnerability in being in a new country, and the tiniest things can have a huge impact on our moods. If the woman checking my groceries is hateful, I feel belittled. I, too, might think, maybe we should go home. If then, on the way back to our apartment, ten people I don’t know smile and say buongiorno, I think, what a warm, friendly place. I want to stay forever. But most of this is my own overreaction, my own inner weather.
I think we do the exact same thing with our writing. We are so sensitive to the opinions of others. If we let a friend or family member read something we’ve written (which I don’t recommend), unless they write an oath in blood that it should win the National Book Award, we are plunged into self-doubt. Maybe we should just quit.
If we have trouble finding the information we need, if our timeline won’t work out, if we read what we wrote yesterday and conclude it’s worse than awful, we are so despondent, we have to eat a large bag of Funyons (ok, maybe that’s just me.) And when we reach that stage of sending it out to agents, we have to buy our Funyons by the case.
None of this is connected to reality. Our friends are not likely to be literary authorities, and all writers suffer from timeline snafus or swing wildly from thinking their own work is great to using it for toilet paper. That is the nature of the beast called a writer.
To lay aside our writing because of some negative moment is as silly as my mom and I leaving Italy because one man was a jerk.
And the rest of that story? I went back to him. I told him I wanted his name so that when I told my friends how rude he had been, I could use his name. I told him that my mother thought he hated Americans.
“No Madame, I love Americans! It is my dream to visit New York. And Chicago!” And, of course, that led to a real conversation toward the end of which he said, “It’s this guy over here.” He pointed to the empty desk where his supervisor usually sat. “Twenty years I’ve had this job and I love to come to work. But then this guy comes and now I hate my job. He’s always onto me. Obey the rules! He calls me back from home if I fail to do one little thing on the reports.”
Was he playing me? Maybe. But I felt better. I think we’ll stay.
–Alison
Last week, I was reminded of some truths about research.
- What you need is not always in the most obvious place.
- Going back to a place/person can turn up more.
- Your intuition may be right.
- Nothing is as inspirational as feet on the ground.
I have fallen in love with the plot in which my main character is inspired to tell his story when he finds an Etruscan coffin (actually they were called funerary urns and held ashes) on which were carved images from the deceased Etruscan man’s life. I want my character to say:
This unknown man who preserved the events of his life through carvings of himself and a woman, children, a horse, a ship, continues to call to me, and even in the night I sometimes come out and study it. It raises more questions than it gives answers: who was the man, why did the child die, what is the meaning of the horse, the ship?
I know that I will never know the answers to these questions. And yet, at some place deep within me, I know the man. He is no longer just one of that mysterious race we call Etruscan. He is saved from oblivion by his story, vague and incomplete as it is.
But, unfortunately, when I visited all the great Etruscan sites near Rome, I learned that these funerary pieces depicted religious symbols—gods and sacrifices, etc.
Well, bummer. I decided maybe I would just invent a funerary urn with a personal story—there might have been one, right?
But then, in San Gimignano, the town that I can see in the distance when I look out my bedroom window, I found funerary urns that were much smaller and cruder than the ones in Rome. With family events carved around the base. Apparently the Tuscan Etruscans valued their personal stories.
Sometimes, what you need is not in the Library of Congress but in your own little corner—in your local library or in the mind of your elderly neighbor. Sometimes it’s better not to settle for the “best,” but to keep looking.
This family’s story included a horse.
My other ah-ha moment of last week occurred when I revisited the underground rooms beneath the hotel in my little village of Certaldo, where this novel is set. I only went back to take an American friend. The owner had shown it all to me before, relating how the ceiling collapsed sometime in the past, but no one knows when, effectively sealing off a whole area of rooms. He basically gave us the same tour, but this time, he happened to mention the bats.
“I don’t know where they get in,” he said. “They don’t come through the hotel, so obviously, somehow there is an opening from the sealed rooms to the outside.” Then he shone his light into the small opening above the mound of debris that blocked a flight of stairs going down to somewhere and, sure enough, there was a bat.
One of the hotel’s underground rooms with a mysterious double wall.
These stairs once led down to a lower level, but a cave-in has sealed those rooms. What’s in them? No one knows, and the architect says it’s too dangerous to find out. But the bats know.
Why this matters is that my characters, who are trapped down there, can now see a bat and realize that the legends about a tunnel leading out could be true. And that will be a big moment in my plot.
If you went back to a site in your story—perhaps at a different time of year, perhaps accompanied by someone with fresh eyes, perhaps understanding better now what you are looking for, would you find something that you hadn’t seen before? Maybe. If you revisited someone you interviewed previously, might they say something new? Probably.
Research is like peeling back the layers of an onion. You can go deeper by looking at smaller, less well-known sources. You can go deeper by revisiting sources that you think you’ve already mined.
And if you have a feeling, such as my instinct that some people would have wanted their own stories on their funerary urns, don’t ignore it. That research intuition comes from the same place inspiration comes from–that mysterious source of our story in the first place.
– Alison
