A Cure for Writer’s Block
Posted by: Kim Justesen on: November 3, 2009
I’m not blocked when I blog. It’s a strange phenomenon. I tend not to think of blogging as “writer” per se. It’s a brain download. It’s more like processing my thoughts. But in recent weeks – nay, months even – my creative writing has suffered from a mental clog of sorts.
Until last week.
I’ve discovered a new cure for overcoming writer’s block – at least for me:
Hang out with college-aged film school students and write a horror movie script while in the background they take pictures of people getting makeup done to make them look like murder victims.
Seriously.
As bizarre as it sounds, it worked.
Let me ’splain . . .
Several of my former students from the Arts Institute of Salt Lake (I no longer teach there, but they still go to school there), invited me to be part of a movie-making team for the National Film Festival’s 72-Hour competition. The rules work like this:
At a designated time, all pre-registered participants are given access to the specific rules of the contest.
Each team must use a particular character name, a specific prop, and a predetermined line of dialog. They draw genre for their film (ours was horror), and they then have 72 hours to write, direct, produce, and edit a four to seven-minute film.
For us, the character was named Don Robinson, the prop was a flask, and the line of dialog was “What did you expect me to do?”
At 8:00 p.m. on Friday, October 23, the information was released to the teams. I had to teach class that night, so they began the story line work without me. I have to confess, I was worried. My writer’s block was hanging around my neck like an anvil, and I thought I might show up and prove to be an enormous disappointment to everyone there.
I stopped on my way to the apartment where we were meeting and grabbed a frozen pizza, veggies, and candy. I figured if nothing else, I could contribute food. As soon as I walked in the door, the energy was like static electricity, free-floating in the air and clinging to anyone who entered. The head of our team, Scott, began filling me in on the basic plot they had developed already. We talked through some of the specifics, and they sat me down at the computer and put me to work. It was 9:45 at night.
There was banter and noise in the background. Friends and fellow students wandered in and out of the apartment as some of them got slathered in Spam, chocolate syrup, and rice (all of which, in black and white, makes for amazing head wound photography).
When I paused to look at the clock, it was nearly midnight. I asked a few of the crew to read over the script and give me some suggestions. I was braced for the worst. “It sucks,” or “We need to start over,” or “Why did we invite you?” Instead, I got thoughtful feedback and deliciously evil ideas to make our horror movie even more disturbing. I went back to work. More victims arrived to be gooped up and photographed.
At 2:30 I paused again. Scott read the script and smiled. Brannon, our sound engineer and a terrific writer in his own right, took a look. He made some comments for minor tweaking. Sterling, another crew member and soon-to-be graduate looked it over. He grinned.
My heart had been pounding for quite some time, but it began to slow as I realized I’d managed to write something decent. We polished a few more items, then at 3:00, called it a night. I giggled all the way home. Seriously.
Around 9:00 in the morning, Brannon called. One of the actresses had to cancel. He wanted to know if I’d be willing to come and be in the movie.
Would I?
I took a shower, grabbed some clothes, and headed out to film. It was 9:30 at night before I got home again. I was tired, but energized. For the next 24 hours, I kept texting Scott for updates on the status of the film. At 6:00 on Monday night, he let everyone know that the film had been picked up by Fed Ex ahead of the deadline. I was so excited I wanted to yell. Instead, I headed to bed early.
The 15 finalists will be posted here:
I’m hoping Scott will post our movie on Facebook, too, so I can include a link to it. I saw the rough cut the day before we mailed it. It looked pretty good.
In the week since then, that frenzied energy has stuck with me. I’m putting it to good use. I’m hopeful that perhaps the team – fondly known as Weirdos from Another Planet – invites me to join them again!
So It Comes Down to This . . .
Posted by: Kim Justesen on: October 27, 2009
Time is a precious commodity. We each have a limited amount of it and it is incumbent upon us to make appropriate choices as to how we spend it. I’m having to rethink how I spend mine. I’m having to make difficult choices in order to ensure that my time is used in ways that are in line with my priorities. I’ve not done a very good job of that recently and changes are required.
But making changes – even good ones – hurts. I wish that I could say that it is easy to let go of projects and commitments, but when you’ve invested time into something or someone, letting that go is painful. I’m grieving the losses already and the choices were only made yesterday.
So it comes down to this . . .
I only have a limited number of hours available to me. A certain number of those hours are committed to my family. That, obviously, goes without saying. I’ve come to understand recently that I have been short-changing this time. My kids have buys lives. They have friends and activities, and hopefully soon they’ll have jobs. I see less and less of them, and I miss them.
There are hours committed to my work with Eastern Star and supporting my girls in Job’s Daughters because I believe the value of both organizations. I also enjoy the friendships I have through them. They represent a connection to my father and my grandfather; a tradition I hold dear and honorable.
A significant number of hours is committed to my job, but I am now realizing that I give far more time to this than I need to. I love what I do, and I am grateful in this difficult time to have a job that pays me well and affords me benefits. But it is still just a job. It isn’t who I am. It isn’t my heart.
My heart is writing, and for nearly two years, the bulk of my writing time has been taken by my job and by my work for the Institute of Children’s Literature. I have loved working for ICL. I have loved giving my students the tools to follow their dreams. But it is getting harder and harder to give the time necessary to the coaching that this endeavor requires, and my students are not getting 100% of my attention. I’ve fallen behind on their assignments, and I’ve used my own writing time to try to make up the difference.
The choice has been difficult, but it is obvious. I’m not longer going to work for ICL. I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity, and so thankful for all that my students taught me. Their honesty their desire to follow a dream served as a constant source of inspiration to me. But that inspiration is only of value if I am following my own dream. Too often, lately, my own writing has been put on hold. The stress that this situation creates for me is harmful to the point that I become blocked.
Now, I’m not trying to blame either ICL or my students for being blocked. That comes from a situation of my own making, and I own the responsibility for both its creation and its solution.
That’s why I’ve had to make this choice. That’s why I’ve had to turn my students over to the capable hands of other instructors to finish their journey. I have to get back on my own journey.
I’m sad, I’m disappointed, and I’m wishing sincerely that there was another alternative. There isn’t. So the change has been made, and I am re-dedicating myself to myself, my own writing, my own purpose.
But to Joe, Kelly, Maureen, Evan, Dianna, Amy, Jackie, and my many other wonderful students -
I look forward to reading your work. You are each amazing, talented writers with hearts of gold. I’m excited for your success. Do keep me posted.
Blocked – Yet Again
Posted by: Kim Justesen on: October 19, 2009
Stress is a nasty element.
It’s like catching a cold in the middle of July. You feel miserable, you want it to go away, and you keep pushing yourself harder because you’re certain that you can overpower it by sheer force of will. Then, eventually, you give in to the reality.
I hate stress.
For the past two weeks, I’ve worked close to 80 hours a week. My full-time job required additional time, and my ICL work and my writing both suffered the consequences. I finally had the time this weekend to work on my novel. I was excited, enthused, ready to go.
I couldn’t write.
I sat down in a comfy spot, my cute little laptop right there in my lap. I opened the file and read the last few pages I’d written. My fingers were poised over the keyboard.
I froze.
I couldn’t think. I knew what I wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t flow from my brain to the tips of my fingers. I typed – it came out crap. I deleted. I typed again. I deleted. I started to shake. I started to cry. I fought like all-mighty mayhem for more than an hour and gave up in tears and frustration.
I’ve been here before – the familiarity of this pain is saved in a righteous spot within my cerebral cortex. If I thought it would help, I’d scream at the top of my lungs “I HATE THIS!”
It doesn’t help – I’ve tried it before.
So I have to take two giant-steps backward. Natalie Goldberg refers to it as returning to “beginners mind” – deleting all the voices, all the wisdom, all the workshops and conferences and returning to that primal place that just wants a good story.
Awkward segue – hang with me on this . . .
My dad showed up in a dream last night. I tend not to write about my dreams very often. Typically they’re weird and make no sense to anyone including me. Dad shows up periodically. He’s usually just visible in the background – no real expression on his face, just a presence.
My dad was a larger-than-life kind of guy. Love him or hate him – if you knew him, you had an opinion. He was amazingly generous. He was a small-town Southern boy who made it big with a limited education and a lot of smarts. He died almost three years ago at the very young age of 70. I miss him dreadfully.
But there he was . . .
I was sitting at Rino’s Italian Restaurant – a family favorite. I was on the patio, drinking a glass of Riesling, waiting for my lunch to be delivered. The patio is covered by an arbor that hangs heavy with grape vines. I sipped my wine, nibbled on bread, and looked up to discover that Dad had joined me at the table.
“You’re too full,” he said, pouring his own glass of wine.
“My lunch hasn’t even come yet, and this is only the first piece of bread I’ve had.” I was insulted at the perceived meaning of his comment.
“Did you order dessert yet?” He put the wine bottle on the table with a thud.
“Dad, I haven’t even had lunch yet. I probably won’t eat dessert. I’m trying to get back in shape.”
“You’ll be too full before you get to it, so you won’t have dessert. You know that.”
Frustrated, I looked him in the eye. He had a twinkle in his eyes in life that always indicated some sort of mischief was lurking in his head, looking for an opportunity. I saw that twinkle as he looked back at me across the table.
“Dad,” I said, “I’m trying to do all the right things. If I don’t save room for dessert, it’s not the end of the world. It’s probably better for me anyway.”
“But you’ll feel empty,” he said.
“Not if I eat my lunch.”
“Especially if you eat your lunch and do all the right things.”
The waiter appeared at the table and set a plate of shredded paper in front of me. “Would you care for fresh-ground pepper?” he asked.
I looked at him, then back at Dad. Dad just smiled – something unusual in my dreams. I looked back to the waiter. “No, thank you.”
I looked back across the table, but Dad was gone. The shredded paper on my plate had multiplied and was spilling across the table. I looked to the waiter. “May I see the dessert menu, please?”
I didn’t fully get the concept until a few hours after I’d gotten out of bed. It started becoming clear to me in the shower. I’m too focused on doing things that are “good for me” – which may sound odd. Yes – I have to work. I don’t have the luxury of spending my days creating stories. But I can’t let the required things get in the way of the necessary things. Writing is what gives me joy. Writing is my dessert.
So it’s back to beginner’s mind.
I am collecting words today. I’ve done this before, and I have found it to be very beneficial. Today, I am looking for words I find inspiring and adding them to my journal.
Intrepid
Vivacious
Gladiatorial
Triumphant
Grandeur
Tomorrow, I’ll add to my list of humorous words -
Flabby
Picayune
Snivel
Glop
As with most blockages – this, too, shall pass
What’s it Worth to You?
Posted by: Kim Justesen on: October 13, 2009
When I first started writing seriously, I had three very young kids. Only one of them went to school, and the other two were home with me all day. I had quit working full time because my hubby and I realized that all the money I made was going to cover the cost of daycare. In essence, I worked so that other people could raise my kids.
I was lucky – I didn’t have to work. So I stayed home and raised kids and tried to learn to be a writer.
Yes – I had that same “I’ve always loved to write and I used to be pretty good when I was in school” kind of ambition. I made all the beginner mistakes that there are to make. It was a slow, often difficult learning process. I would stay up until the wee hours of the morning so that I could spend more than 15 minutes at a time working on a story. I would read articles, books, message boards (yeah – it predates the blog thing), and I would write my guts out until I was nodding off with my fingers poised on the keyboard.
I would sneak writing time in when my little ones were napping, while I parked in front of the elementary school waiting to pick up my oldest, and – I confess – while I sat in the back pew in church. Anytime was writing time as far as I was concerned.
I picked up a part-time job working for a ceramic studio and managed to save enough money to go to a writing retreat one summer. I met one of my best writing friends there – Jan Czech. We would talk about all the ways we tried to make writing a part of our day. I would tell her how hard it was to write with little kids, and she would tell me how hard it was to write with a full-time job, and we would laugh and drink wine, and then we’d head to bed. Of course, we’d both stay up late into the night – writing.
I had several years where I did get to write full-time, and I have reaped many rewards from that. My writing grew stronger, my books and articles got published, and I got a taste of the type of success I had wanted for so long.
But things have changed. I’m back to sneaking my writing in late at night, on the weekends, when I can get away with it at my full-time job. I have to be careful or I will find myself getting only a few hours of sleep at night. The circumstances are what they are – I can be angry, I can be frustrated, or I can accept that this is my reality and move on. The question with any dream is: What’s it worth to you?
It’s worth not getting enough sleep.
It’s worth not getting the laundry done, the house cleaned, or being productive at work.
It’s worth spending the money on a laptop that I can smuggle in my purse.
It’s worth understanding that – for the short-term at least – I have to take a step back from other things I’d like to do because my spare time is limited and I want to spend all of it writing.
I was lucky enough to take four giant steps forward at one point, and now I’ve had to take a small step back. Patience is indeed a virtue.
Words Flooding My Head
Posted by: Kim Justesen on: October 6, 2009
I woke my husband up last night. I was talking in my sleep. I haven’t done that for a very long time, and it typically happens when I’m under a lot of stress.
I switched jobs recently. I’m still teaching for ICL, and still teaching at the college, but I became a full-time instructor (officially – I’ve been working full-time for years), and the lead instructor for the General Education section. Oh, and we are undergoing an accreditation review. I’ve been reviewing faculty files and hunting down documents that are missing from them.
I fell a little behind on my ICL work as result of working a lot of extra hours at the college, so I spent the past weekend catching up. But I also wrote. I worked on a novel that I outlined when I was down with food poisoning a few weeks ago. I found that magical flow that writers love; that wave of words that carries us along for hours of time of which we are unaware.
It felt so good to devote so much time to that. Then Monday arrived, and I had to go back to the “real world” of my job. I must have been harboring some deep-seeded frustration, because this morning my husband said I was thrashing all night long.
“You kept telling me to get out of the way, there wasn’t enough room,” he said as I brushed my teeth.
“Room for what?” I had no recollection of the dream at all.
“All the words that were flooding your head,” he said, and he laughed.
It makes sense, really. I don’t get as much writing time as I used to, so subconsciously, I must be feeling like all those words are backing up in my brain, flooding my head, looking for a way out and onto a page or a file on my computer. I must have been aware of this at some level. Last week I bought myself a new laptop – one of those tiny ones that weighs less than a Danielle Steele novel in hardback and is smaller, too. I downloaded some software, and now I take my writing with me everywhere.
I think today, I’ll take it to work.
The Role of the Reader – Part 2
Posted by: Kim Justesen on: September 29, 2009
Yes, I’m into sequels these days. Actually, I have to thank the local writer who hates my guts for this one. I peeked in on her blog the other day – for which I’m sure I’ll now be referred to as a stalker again. Of course, in order for her to refer to me like that, she’ll have to acknowledge that this means she reads my blog as well.
Hmmm -
Anyway – let me fill in a bit of detail first. One of my ICL students wrote to me a while ago and said she liked reading my blogs. She said she felt she got to know more about me, but she also learned somethings from me. My initial reaction was enthusiasm, but then I got a little bit concerned. I immediately checked the blogs I’ve written because this student is a teen-ager.
That was the first time I’d had that happen, but in recent weeks it has happened a few more times and not just with my ICL students. A young woman who was a friend of my youngest daughter said she had read my book, looked me up on the internet, found my web site, then found my blog. I wasn’t as nervous with these most recent discoveries. I haven’t ever put anything in my blog that I’d be embarrassed to have my kids or their friends read. I do that on purpose because I write for kids. I can imagine having written something that involved sex, alcohol, battery-operated adult toys, or use of illegal substances on there when some of my readers discovered it, and then having his or her parent walk into the room just in time to see what I’d said.
Nice way to make your name in publishing. Therefore, I leave it out. Besides, those subjects are no one else’s business. For as public as it may appear that I am, there is a tremendous amount of information that doesn’t get put on here because of privacy.
Interestingly, the LWWHMG doesn’t feel that same obligation, even though she professes to writing for kids. A recent blog included a topic that was – quite frankly – TMI on all levels. And simply for having said this, no doubt I’ll be lambasted. It’s okay. I’m used to it now – and fairly immune.
The thing is, kids are exposed to so much junk in the world that I guess I figure they don’t need it in my books or my blog. This is not me being prudish or Puritanical by any means. I’m certainly not naive enough to believe I’m somehow protecting them or saving them, and I absolutely don’t see those as part of my objectives. I guess I just figure they deserve a break.
The best analogy I could use is music. I love music. I love all kinds of music; though, oddly enough, I really like heavy metal. I can listen to Metallica, Alice in Chains, Hollywood Undead, Flyleaf, and bands in this genre for hours on end. Sometimes I’m not even aware I’ve been listening for hours as I’m working. But sometimes, it’s nice to listen to B.B. King, or Joe Bonamassa, or Vivaldi, or Kitaro. And sometimes it’s nice just to have quiet.
I don’t write this blog with kid readers in mind. I haven’t changed how I write just because I’m now aware that kids are reading it. I simply don’t need to be in anyone’s face over things that are unimportant and uninteresting to anyone but me and those I chose to share them with. If I’m all that interested in someone else’s sex life, I’ll watch HBO; that’s certainly not why I follow the blogs I follow. And obviously, that’s not why anyone reads mine.
I guess I consider the reader a bit before I write a blog, out of respect for his or her intelligence. I’ve been rewarded with thoughtful readers who post insightful comments and with whom I have a dialog that I enjoy and appreciate.
Thanks to you all.
A Little Bit of Weirdness – Part 2
Posted by: Kim Justesen on: September 28, 2009
I’ve had an unusual weekend on several levels. Some of it has been unusually good, some unusually bad, and some – well – just unusual.
This weekend, my golf league had their year-end tournament and party. I played a dismal round. Ever since I began working with a personal trainer, my golf game has gone slithering down the pipes. My muscles don’t work like I expect them to, and thus when I hit a golf ball, I have as good a chance of hitting it 200 yards as I do of hitting the person next to me. It’s annoying.
At any rate, the tournament was this weekend, and hubby and I got to play with a couple with whom we are building a new and delightful friendship. The more time we spend with these two, the more we discover we have in common. None of this qualifies under the weird part. However, they were witnesses to the weird part.
I’ve previously mentioned my former best friend; the woman with whom I’ve not spoken much in the past four years (almost five now). Just over a year ago, she approached me at one of the league tournaments to share a blast from the past. That was all spelled out in “A Little Bit of Weirdness” – a blog from last summer.
I was having a little putting competition with hubby before we teed off when this woman came walking – almost marching – across the putting green. She wrapped her arms around me, and in a very quick explosion of words, said,”I’m sorry that we got sideways with each other, I miss you, I hope you’re well, I hope your life is good. I just want you to know that I think about you all the time.” And then she started to walk away.
Now, I could immediately tell that it had taken a great amount of courage and energy for her to do this, but I was nearly knocked over both by her words and the fact she had hugged me. I stood in shock for a second or two, then I said, “I think about you, too.” Which is true, I do. I think about what I could have done differently. I think about what we’ve missed in each other’s lives. I think about what great friends we used to be. She was my maid-of-honor at my wedding. She was my children’s unofficial godmother. Our lives used to be very intertwined, and extricating ourselves from each other was like going through a divorce – at least, for me it was.
But I let all of that go. When I think of her, I remember very good times. I don’t have the time or energy to hang on to the anger or the sadness I used to feel.
We stood there talking for a few minutes. I showed her pictures of the kids. She asked if I would be at the year-end party. I said I would, but I’d be late. The girls had something I needed to attend.
And that was it for the next several hours. Well, mostly that was it. I had a mild anxiety attack and had to ask my husband to stand next to me so no one would notice I was breathing fast and shaking like Jell-O.
The second bit of weirdness happened at the event my daughters and I attended. My girls are both involved in Job’s Daughters, an organization for young women associated with the Masonic fraternity. My youngest daughter was competing to be a Spirit Ambassador – sort of a street PR representative for the organization. They march in parades, hold fund raisers, but most importantly, they get together for parties and sleep-overs. But the competition is difficult. They have to take a written test, answer several personal questions (like the Miss America contestants answer), and they have to recite a bit of their ritual work from memory.
We were very nervous for her, my oldest daughter and I. My youngest daughter has a learning disability. She is 14, but she spells like a six-year-old. Her brain has difficulty processing written language, so reading is also a challenge for her. I was so hoping she wouldn’t be disappointed after trying out.
She was so excited about the event. The competition started in the morning and went until the early afternoon. I was at the golf tournament the whole time, but I kept thinking about how it was going for her. That night there was a dinner followed by the award ceremony. All throughout the dinner I could hear her chatting excitedly with her friends. She had on a turquoise blue formal dress that fell just below her knees. it was covered in glitter, and she had managed to get some of the glitter in her hair and on her face. She looked beautiful.
My oldest daughter and I sat with friends right behind where my youngest daughter was awaiting the results. There were several awards to be given, and I was just hoping beyond hope that she would be chosen for the team. Then they announced the award for the highest score on the ritual work – the memorized part – and they called her name. Cheers went up and tears came to my eye as she walked proudly to receive the award. Then, true to her silly self, she did her T-Rex impersonation as she came back to her seat. And yes, she made the team. Her written test score wasn’t as good as she’d hoped, but it was high enough to help her win, and the judges for the personal question all gave her very favorable comments. I chided myself for underestimating her abilities.
The last bit of weirdness came as I wandered in late to the year-end party. A lot of the people had already left. I had the girls with me, so I told them to come in and meet some of my golf friends. Their dad was there, too, so I wanted my youngest to tell him the good news. And there was my former best friend. She was stunned to see my girls after not having seen them in several years. The girls left – my oldest is 19 so I let her drive my car home – and I said hello to the folks who were still left at the party.
Most everyone had had a drink or two (or eight, or nine) so there was a bit of silliness going on. We hid the keys of a few people and got sober people to drive those who shouldn’t be driving. Just as she was leaving, my former friend said “I’m so glad we’re us again.”
“Me, too,” I said. Which is mostly true. I’m not entirely certain what “us” is after such a long time. Things are not as they were four years ago. I’m not the same person I was then, and I’m certain that she has changed, too. My kids are nearly grown, I have a completely different job, my life revolves around different things now than it did then, and we were not “us” during those transitions.
But I’m hopeful - truly and sincerely – that we can be a new us. Then maybe a lot of this won’t seem quite so weird.
Lost Time
Posted by: Kim Justesen on: September 22, 2009
I managed to pick up a raging case of food poisoning yesterday. The offending product was rancid Bleu Cheese dressing on a salad I ordered while watching football. I was a few bites into the salad, which had been drowned in the dressing, before I realized that – yes, indeed – the dressing tasted funky.
At around 1:00 in the morning I came to realize that I’d consumed enough of the rotten stuff to catch a significant case of salmonella poisoning. I was reminded of that fact about every 20 minutes for the rest of the night. Around 6:00 in the morning, I tried to find a substitute for my class but to no avail. I grabbed a shower, my knees shaking as I tried to hurry and get ready. I managed to survive an hour and a half at work – long enough for my students to turn in their projects and be graded. Then I bolted for home.
The rest of my day was spent sleeping in various positions on my sofa and in my bed. I couldn’t get comfortable. I couldn’t get my stomach to settle. I couldn’t stop thinking about all of the things I needed to be doing other than waiting for my body to heal.
I hate being sick. I’m used to running at full-tilt in my life, and when I’m forced to slow down against my will, I get very resentful. My husband likes to remind me that sometimes the need to slow down and pay attention to myself has to be forced on me, like the time I picked up e-coli and the doctors discovered I had colon polyps. Yeah – that one got my attention.
My body having been forced into slow motion, my brain managed to keep working. I wrote several outlines for books while I flopped around on my bed. Initially they were in my head, but as I started feeling better, I made my way to my office and typed the outlines into a form I developed. That made me feel a little better; however, looking around my office I realized that there were so many things I needed to be working on for which I completely lacked the energy.
It’s finals week at school. I have papers to grade and grades to be entered. I’m behind on ICL work and I need to dedicate a significant amount of time to catching up. I have revisions to work on for several books. I have presentations to prepare. All these reminders sit heavy on my mind. But today is lost. Today forced me to stop and be mostly still. I guess I’ll have to start over tomorrow.
The Role of the Reader
Posted by: Kim Justesen on: September 13, 2009
There are those writers who claim that they never think about the reader as they are writing. They want to tell a good story, and thus, they don’t want to cloud their thinking with extraneous details or distractions.
These writers fear that, if they think about the audience, the story will somehow be altered. These writers believe that including the reader in the writing process is like including an editor; that thinking about the reader will cause the writer to limit him or herself in telling the story the way it should be told.
There are those writers who claim that the reader is first and foremost in their thoughts. Each story they write comes from the potential perspective of someone who may pick up a finished story these writers have created, and these writers want to be certain that that reader feels welcomed and included.
They believe that the reader is paramount to the writing process; that the reader is the purpose for creating the story and therefore must be given consideration as the story is created.
Then there are those writers who fall somewhere in between on this spectrum.
Some stories need to be spilled out without thinking about anything other than the integrity of the story, while others need to thoroughly consider who the reader is and how the story will be read and interpreted.
What is the role of the reader in writing? It all depends.
Yeah, I know – What kind of answer is that?
The role of the reader depends on a variety of factors. For example, what type of writing is this? I tell my college students that, before they ever begin an essay, they need to think about the audience for whom they are writing. I encourage them to consider what type of information this reader can reasonably be expected to know. It’s frustrating to read articles or papers (or stories, too) that seem as if the writer was trying to impress the reader with a vocabulary that exceeds PhD thesis standards, or that feel as though the writer was condescending to the reader.
When I talk to my ICL students about this, I tell them that they need to think in terms of not only the age of the reader – which will have a significant bearing on their choice of vocabulary – but also the sophistication of that reader – which means thinking about concepts and experiences that kids of this age group may or may not have had exposure to.
Writers of all kinds have to stop and think about the reader at some point in the writing process. Eventually, if you’ve written a book, a story, a poem, you put it into a format for others to see, so you must have intended it for an audience? If you print it off of your computer, if you turned it in as an assignment, if you mailed it off to an editor, or if you posted it on a blog, your ultimate purpose was to say something to someone else. You intentionally brought it into the world for other eyes to come upon it. You wrote with the idea of having a reader. It’s a wee bit contradictory to say “I write this for myself” when you post something to a blog. While that may sound very noble and literary, it’s a lie. When I write something for myself, it goes in a journal that is kept in a location that not even my own family members are aware of. To put my writing in another location means I want someone to see it.
So how much involvement do we allow the reader during the writing process? Like I said before: it all depends.
It depends on who your reader is.
If you’re writing for very young children who are just grasping the reins of independent reading, you have to think very carefully about them.
Each word you choose, the structure of each sentence, the concepts you create in your story must all be considered carefully. If you are writing for a middle grade audience, these issues aren’t as important; however, the subject matter may be.
Are you introducing concepts that eight-year-olds are ready for? Will your subject matter bore a 12-year-old? Do you risk being called pedantic or do you risk being chastised for overstepping boundaries of taste and appropriateness?
If you are writing for teens, are you giving them something original, or is this something they’ve seen before in a better format? Are you preaching? Are you condescending? Do they really need another vampire/romance/Romeo & Juliet knock-off?
Considering the reader can also depend on your own style of writing.
Do you need to belch out an entire story first and then go through it with a more discerning eye? Do you hold up your own progress by thinking too much about outside issues, or do you effectively revise as you progress through a piece? Your own approach to the process has much to do with where the reader falls in your consideration. For those writers who need to get a story out of their system first, trying to incorporate the reader into that initial part of the process would be disastrous. However, many writers couldn’t get the story written without first thinking about whom they were addressing.
The point is not to say that you must consider the reader at a given point in the process, but more importantly, that the writer must at some point acknowledge there will be a reader and that this reader deserves some bit of acknowledgement. Where your writing process falls on that contiuum isn’t as crucial. Attention must be paid to the reader. That’s ultimately what you’re writing for, isn’t it?
Enter the Know-It-All
Posted by: Kim Justesen on: September 8, 2009
I’m attending a conference next month, and I’m very much looking forward to it. I haven’t been to a writing conference for a few years, and the opportunity to mix and mingle with like-minded folk is very appealing at the moment. But I dread the Know-It-Alls. There is always one of them. They appear at conferences not to learn but to demonstrate their vast knowledge to anyone who will pay them half a second’s attention. At the last conference I attended, as an agent was giving a very engaging presentation on shifts in the children’s market, a K-I-A piped up from the back of the room that the agent hadn’t discussed the growth in self-publishing.
“Since I don’t represent that market segment, and it isn’t necessarily a genre, I’m not in a position to talk about it,” the agent said.
The K-I-A persisted. “Yes, but it is an important segment of the children’s market.”
“Not really,” the agent answered without a pause. “It represents less than two percent of the total industry, and that’s an incredibly small number.”
And since the agent had been speaking on genres and not on publishing options, the comments by the K-I-A were completely off target anyway.
K-I-As show up in all kinds of places, and certainly they are not relegated to writing, but for some reason, I find the writing ones more annoying than the others.
This, by the way, is not intended to mean I know more than they do. The minute anyone in the children’s writing industry states that he or she knows everything about the industry is the day that person should be locked in a well-padded room with the key tossed out. Publishing in general is such a dynamic business that each day brings new innovations, changes in policy or procedure, or interesting twists on the business. There is no possible way to know everything – but that just doesn’t stop some people.
Particular favorites in the K-I-A realm include those who offer critiquing services to new writers who can not, themselves, speak or write using correct grammar. For example:
A new writer is someone that has spent much time on their craft.
If you can’t spot the many errors in this sentence, you have no business offering writing advice to kindergarteners, let alone to anyone who is serious about writing.
Another example:
Sending my submissions alphabetically to each publisher listed in the Writer’s Market Book will guarantee I find the right publisher.
Any editor who has been in the business will tell you that he or she can spot one of these within the first sentence of the cover letter. But there are K-I-As who swear by this process.
A brief interlude before I segue into another section:
I love working for ICL. I love teaching students to write. I love when a student sends me something that opens my eyes and causes me to gasp either because it is so compelling, or beautifully crafted, or just unique. I love seeing students progress from awkward, rambling beginnings to smoothly painted prose. There is a lot of joy and reward in doing what I do.
But every once in a while I get a K-I-A. These are the students who, because they did well in high school English class, believe that they know all there is to know about writing. They write comments like, “I have so much to teach children,” or “My life has been such a challenge that I think kids could really learn from me,” or “There are no good books out there for kids.” These students require additional patience and guidance. Some of them get it eventually, some of them never do. I can’t force people to learn, I can only offer them the information I have.
To be honest, sometimes I want to say, “I’m paid to do this. And you?”
But I don’t.
Okay, now I have. I guess that should get it out of my system.
K-I-As are good for a few things, though. They are a good reminder that there is a diversity of opinions on writing. They are a good reminder that no one can possibly know everything about this weird business. They are a good test of patience. And, sometimes, they are just a good source for a laugh.
For that, I guess I have to be grateful.
