In other news, I’m on spring break. I have decided that I want to try to write a hundred pages while I’m out of class. I still have to work, but that does not signify. I want to see if I can push myself to do something like this. I’ve got a summary draft and an idea of where I’m going, and for now that’s enough.

School started again last week and, oddly enough, I was really ready. As I walked up Michigan Avenue to the building where the Fiction Department is located, I felt less apprehensive than I usually feel when I start new classes. Instead, I was, dare I say, actually excited, face-melting cold notwithstanding. I feel like I’m finally getting on my feet in this program.

The irony is not lost on me that it’s my second-to-last semester.

(Seriously, it’s cold. Who thought that building a city on the banks of what I’m told is a REALLY BIG lake was a good idea? I’m not from here! I don’t know how winter works!)

I’m really looking forward to doing the steeplechase again. The steeplechase is a twelve-step exercise, performed in the Advanced Fiction workshop, that aims to stretch a story in many different directions: point-of-view, form, etc. Since I write novels that generally have a first-person or close third-person point-of-view, this exercise doesn’t give me a lot of material that I can use, flat-out, in my stories, but last semester I figured out that it’s completely excellent for building novel backstory. It’s a love it or hate it kind of exercise, but I know I’m taking the steeplechase with me after I leave the Fiction Writing program.

My elective course this time around is called Small Press Publishing and, I swear, I could not be more thrilled that I decided to take it. It’s essentially an independent project course — at the end I’ll have a book, magazine, zine, or website that I created on my own. The teacher is a guy who runs a small press himself, and I’m hoping to learn a lot about the business end of small presses.

Combine this with a sekrit project that I’m working on, and I’m feeling pretty good overall about this semester. Someone remind me of this when I’m mired in despair in about ten weeks, okay? Tell me that, for once, I felt content. Maybe this time it will stick.

Last semester, in my Censorship class, we were talking about process. We do that a lot, actually, in the Story Workshop program, but this time my teacher asked us what we could do to actively change our process.

It sounds silly, I know, but I was kind of dumbfounded. You mean, I can just… change it? I don’t have to stumble upon the one true way for me to write, which incidentally only works for me so no one can give me any advice? Beyond butt in chair, I mean, which from what I understand is the only thing we all have in common. I don’t have to flap about and angst about it anymore? I have agency?

My process and I have been getting along a lot better lately. I’ve decided on a daily page goal and I’m drafting again, which feels really good. Like Keenan, I’m (hopefully) going to be done with the Fiction Writing program soon and all of my lovely weekly deadlines will be out the window. I have to figure out now a way to be productive so that I don’t lose all this momentum.

So have you ever actively changed your process? Have you added or thrown something out? What makes you productive?

Dear Amazon Customer Service,

First, just want to say, love you guys. I bought myself an Amazon Prime membership for my birthday this year and it’s probably the worst thing I’ve ever done for my wallet. I added the Amazon iPhone app and boom! It’s UPS delivery city over here. Not that I’m complaining, but I will say my husband has begun to look very concerned every time I bring another little something inside that eats up our precious bookshelf space.

Anyway, so I’m a student in the Fiction Writing department at Columbia College Chicago, and this semester I’m taking a class about censorship. (Remember this — it will be important later.) My list of required texts included Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by DH Lawrence. Makes sense, right? Lady Chatterley is a book that’s almost iconic for being censored. So I hopped online and ordered the book. Why should I bother walking all the way next door to the school bookstore when I had AMAZON PRIME? I made a pretty big order of books and waited the two long days it took for the books to arrive.

Then I waited for the day to read Lady Chatterley in class. (As part of the Fiction Writing program, we do a lot of in-class reading aloud.) Today was finally that day. Before class, my classmate and I bonded over having the same copy of the book — you can see the cover on the link here. Even our teacher pointed out that the girl on the cover looks a little young. Ha ha, we all said, that is a little creepy. Then we proceeded to read a chapter of the book.

I’m not going to lie — it was a pretty racy chapter. And at the end, there’s a little bit of an extended discourse using, well, the C word. (I’d type it out, but I don’t want to offend anyone. Turns out in a censorship class you use words like that a lot, and it doesn’t bother me to use it anymore, but I trust you know the word I’m talking about.) I didn’t quite remember that bit from when I read the book at home, but I figured that maybe I’d just forgotten, or skimmed over it. My classmate is smarter than I am, though — she looked back in her copy, identical to mine, and saw something horrible.

The discourse on the C word? Totally missing from our copies.

The book I ordered for censorship class has been, in fact, censored.

It’s really funny, in a way. It’s also unfortunate, because I have no idea what else might have been missing from my copy. I was going to be able to check Lady Chatterley off the list of Great Books I’ve read, but I can’t count it now! There might be entire subplots missing!

I checked the product page, wondering if I missed a note about it being an abridged version or something, but no. It’s just the first version of the book that comes up when searching.

So, I’d like to arrange a trade. I want a non-bowderlerized version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (for my CENSORSHIP class!) and in return you can have this one back. It’s not in perfect condition — I’ve read it, but I do take good care of my books. No writing or anything.

What can I do to make this happen?

Best,
Eliza Evans
Totally loyal customer

I read this entry on Editorial Anonymous the other day, about whether unpublished writers should do things like create Twitter accounts for their characters as a pre-emptive publicity strike. The blog post and comments have varying opinions on that tactic, but what I found most curious were comments from people that said that unpublished writers shouldn’t blog at all! Because they should be writing instead! And also Twitter won’t be around in a year so why bother.

I have a few problems with that line of thought. First, I guess, is that I look at social networking as an honest attempt at building community. If you only blog or tweet or post on Facebook to try to sell books, you’re doing it wrong. I’ve been connecting with people online for fifteen years — I was very young when I first went online, okay? — but I am still in contact with some of the people I chatted with then. I kind of think of meeting people online like a snowball going downhill — the group of people you know just keeps getting bigger. Yes, I’ve lost touch with some people along the line, but my online social circle has only gotten bigger since 1995. I’ve met a LOT of those people in real life, too. I even met my husband online. I am a fan of online commnity.

Twitter has been an amazing tool for meeting other writers, none of whom, on my follow list at least, are there just to sell their books. Every day, I get a near-constant stream of articles and conversation about craft and about business. Twitter can be totally, totally overwhelming, though. I’ll get to that.

Why not blog, especially if you enjoy it? I subscribe to something I call the Apprenticeship Theory. I think of being a writer as, well, being an apprentice. Every word you write counts, even if it’s not for the all-important novel. Blogging is great writing practice — you learn how to organize ideas, what works and what doesn’t. And if you’re not communicating clearly, you get instant feedback, usually from a comment that says “What the hell are you talking about?”

I know, honestly, that social networking can be a great procrastination tool. It’s easy to log on, fall down the rabbit hole, and look up three hours later with that precious writing time gone and only a string of “Me too! That makes so much sense!” blog comments to show for it. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up completely so you can slave away in your unheated garret, only emerging to eat a mealy apple and stare through a plate-glass window at all your productive friends drinking champagne and laughing at you.

Some tips:

Write first. That makes sense, right? But maybe you’re like me and would never be able to do that. (I just had to be honest.) I write to a timer. 45 minutes writing, 10 minutes internerding. I started out with 7 minutes writing and 5 internet and moved up from there. My eventual goal is to write for an hour straight. Also, if you’re really moving, it’s okay to ignore the timer that says stop writing. Stopping internet time, though, is compulsory.

Too many Facebook emails? Turn them off. (Settings –> Account Settings –> Notifications.) You don’t need to know every single time someone comments on that picture of your college roommate dressed up as a sexy nurse four Halloweens ago that you accidentally clicked the like button on when she uploaded it last April. Besides, all that shows up when you log in to Facebook in the bottom right corner. It’s more exciting to have like ten of those when you load the page than one or two, anyway. The only Facebook emails I get are when someone contacts me directly by posting on my wall or commenting on something I’ve posted.

Loop emails clogging your inbox? Switch to digest mode. If something happens and you must monitor emails as they come in, just go to the group’s main page. Busy loops might have several digest emails a day, but it’s still fewer than you’re getting now.

While you’re at it, don’t check your email obsessively. My iPhone beeps at me every time I get an email, which, let’s be honest here, is a lot less often than I would actually check it if it didn’t let me know, oh frabjuous day, someone thought of me. Unless you’re waiting for something specific, it can wait the 45 minutes you’re writing on the timer.

Do you have too many blogs to check? Google Reader. Use it, love it. Just search for the name of the blogs you check regularly, add them to your subscription list, and boom. The blogs come to you when they’re updated, saving the time you’d normally use loading all of them, futilely, hoping that someone posted in the six minutes since you checked last. I used to use Livejournal’s syndication this way but frankly Google Reader is much easier. (You could always search for ‘elizawrites’ on there if you wanted to add this blog (hint hint.))

Twitter threatening to crush you? It’s super easy to get overwhelmed, especially if you have even a modest number of followers. Leah Jones, social media consultant, came to speak to my RWA chapter about social networking a few months ago, and said something that stuck with me: you don’t have to read every single tweet. You can jump in and jump out when you have a few spare minutes. It’s okay to miss part of the conversation. (This is very difficult for me, by the way.) If there’s something you really must see, the person posting will @msg you. Using something other than just the plain web interface can help, too. Lots of people rave about Tweet Deck but frankly I found it frightening and hid when I opened it up. I use Brizzly on my computer and Tweetie 2 on my phone.

I have not yet discovered a cure for watching three dozen music videos on Youtube or reading six month old flame wars.

I’ve been fighting the internet’s procrastination siren song for a long time, but I’m sure there are many other tips out there to keep focused. Do you have any?

In the fiction writing program I attend, there’s an assignment in Advanced Fiction classes called the Steeplechase. The Steeplechase is dangled over students as something terrifying, a rite of passage that only the strong will survive.* In fact, the Steeplechase is a twelve step writing exercise, that, as it turns out, is excellent for building novel backstory.

One of the steps is called Overall Storyteller, which is meant to focus on the narrator’s voice. I’ve been working on commercial fiction for the last five years, though, so I’m much more accustomed to writing a really close third person POV. Which means that I pretty much dreaded writing that bit. We’d done some similar in-class writing that I really struggled with, fighting against my conceptions of head-hopping the entire time, so I really wasn’t looking forward to writing that short section.

But I soldiered on, and wrote a couple of pages about the town where my novel’s set. At the beginning of the story, my heroine returns (after a twelve-year absence) to the small Midwestern town where she grew up. I thought it would be a good idea if I could get an idea of the town’s history. I started in 1897 and wrote up to the present day.

Frankly, I hated it.

That’s okay, though. I turned it in anyway because I’d fulfilled the assignment and also because I don’t have to love everything I write. I got a bit of good backstory out of it and that was enough.

The other night in class, though, it was my turn to have some of my work read. Including, of course, that section I hated. As I read aloud, I worked very hard to keep my pace slow — I have a tendency to read faster when I think the writing’s not working, trying to get to the parts I think are better, I guess.

Afterwards, the class participated in a bit of Recall. Recall is another thing we do multiple times every classroom meeting. It’s simply retelling what we remember from a story, whether we read it the week before (typically at the beginning of class) or just heard it. It’s a quick way to get feedback on what’s working. It’s a very positive environment; there’s not a lot of criticism. The Story Workshop method is 180 degrees from the typical environment in creative writing classes, where the student presents a story and it’s torn to shreds by classmates. Personally, I think there are times for both approaches — Story Workshop when a piece is in the draft phase, the other (which I call Iowa method, after the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I had a Vague Idea that’s where this system developed, but the internet doesn’t seem to agree with me.) when you’re getting ready to send the work out for publication. But at any rate, my classmates did a little Recall about my work.

Imagine my surprise when almost all of the Recall came from the two pages (out of about six) that I hated the most. There was a comment about how, by writing about people leaving and returning to this little town, I was echoing the theme of the rest of the story.

I was? Oh, I totally meant that. Well, at least my back brain did.

Jenny Crusie calls her back brain The Girls in the Basement. I’ve heard it called the mud, among other things. It’s the subconscious, doing its own little thing back there, writing the story while our ego up front flails around, writing and deleting the same scene or avoiding writing altogether by searching Etsy for tiny bird sculptures.***

We know the stories we’re trying to tell. The novels and short stories and poems are all there, just waiting to be dug out. I once wrote about how my process felt like floating around on the bottom of the ocean, in the dark, scrabbling with my hands and hoping that I’d find a treasure chest. That much, at least, hasn’t changed in the last ten years. But I am learning to trust the back brain to sit up there on deck and steer me.

*Possibly exaggerated for dramatic effect.**
**New blog title, y/y?
***That last bit might be just me.

I’m clearing out tabs. These are some links I’ve come across (mostly from twitter) with publishing tips, news, etc, over the last couple of weeks.

Maggie Stiefvater with a Giant Butt-Kicking How to Write a Novel Post.

Stephen Pressfield on research as resistance.

Things you should be able to expect of your editor. (Yikes)

Nathan Bransford’s Book Publishing Glossary.

William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Jessa Crispin on Jeff Vandermeer’s Booklife. “To the other writing students, I would tell them another Booklife is possible. One where people are allies and not contacts, one where you work with the people who bring your best writing out of you, who are not necessarily at the highest profile or best paying publications.”

Kristin Nelson on how to get publicity money out of your publisher.

Nancy J. Parra on the perfect pitch.

Rachelle Gardner on tightening up your manuscript.

Rachelle Gardner, again, this time on myths v facts of publishing.

I spend a lot of time thinking about The Fear, enough so that the phrase somehow graduated to Capital Letters recently.  The Fear does a lot of things, but mostly it keeps me from doing my creative work.  The Fear tells me that perfectionism is a perfectly reasonable way to get through life.  The Fear tells me that my stories are insipid, my prose flat.  The Fear tells me that to be a good writer, I shouldn’t have to practice.  The Fear tells me that, no matter how much I practice, I’ll never sell it anyway.

Honestly, The Fear is kind of a jerk.

I’ve been looking back through some of my writing from maybe ten years ago.  Back then, I was writing on the web regularly.  I had a web journal, since the word blog hadn’t even been invented yet.  (And yes, the children can get off my lawn while I’m thinking of it.)  Going over my old work, I was struck with the immediacy of what I wrote, how I poured all of my emotions on to the keyboard.  The Fear was there then, too, I know, but I was able to ignore it long enough to get something done.  I don’t know how to get back to that place, but I’m going to try.

I know The Fear won’t go away.  I have friends, authors who have published multiple books, who tell me that The Fear is still there, but that it gets more complex.

I want to learn to listen to something else, that still voice, the one that says I can do this, that I can craft a novel, that I can tell a story that people want to read.

Here’s to small voices, out there in the dark.