2011 January | Cleavage by Kelly Diels.

confessing my secret fear (it’s probably yours too)

Last week I posted a slide from my Pecha Kucha speech. I posted it because I can’t not quote it. That’s the state of my world and my ego: I quote myself and I do so on a daily basis, because this thing I’ve said needs to be said. Over and over again.

And so I say it over and over again. Over and over again I tell people – my clients, folks in the bank line-up, my children, hapless event-attendees (1,500 of them!), and now you - that the conditions for creativity will never be ideal. And that’s why that point made it into a speech slide and a blog post. (And many a lecture, solicited or not.)

And please trust and believe I’ve learned this by walking – and resting – on the hot coals of inaction and artistic non-production for oh, eight-to-ten years.

Excuse me while I kiss the sky. And the ground. And anything else that will show my gratitude that I’m not there any more.

(Need a kiss? C’mere lover boy.)

Because all those not-ideal conditions are life. And if you let life be an excuse for not living life, then you’re going to watch a lot of television but you’re not going to do much else. And I’ve got stuff to do. And you do too.

And so does Kate Harding, who leveraged a successful blog into a popular book (Lessons from the Fatosphere, with Marianne Kirby) and is now a political commentator at Salon. And in my piece last week I linked to her essay, The Fantasy of Being Thin. Reading that essay was a long sigh of yesssssssssssss for me. You don’t have to be fat or even not-thin to appreciate it. In it, she writes:

Because, you see, the Fantasy of Being Thin is not just about becoming small enough to be perceived as more acceptable. It is about becoming an entirely different person – one with far more courage, confidence, and luck than the fat you has. It’s not just, “When I’m thin, I’ll look good in a bathing suit”; it’s “When I’m thin, I will be the kind of person who struts down the beach in a bikini, making men weep.” See also:

When I’m thin, I’ll have no trouble finding a partner/reinvigorating my marriage.

When I’m thin, I’ll have the job I’ve always wanted.

When I’m thin, I won’t be depressed anymore.

When I’m thin, I’ll be an adventurous world traveler instead of being freaked out by any country where I don’t speak the language and/or the plumbing is questionable.

When I’m thin, I’ll become really outdoorsy.

When I’m thin, I’ll be more extroverted and charismatic, and thus have more friends than I know what to do with.

….To someone fully wrapped up in The Fantasy of Being Thin, that doesn’t just mean, “All the best evidence suggests you will be fat for the rest of your life, but that’s really not a terrible thing.” It means, “You will NEVER be the person you want to be! All the evidence suggests you will never find a satisfying relationship or get a promotion or make more friends or feel confident trying new things!”

….Because I didn’t just have to accept the size of my thighs; I had to accept who I am, rather than continuing to wait until I magically became the person I’d always imagined being. Ouch.

That is, of course, a pretty normal part of getting older. You start to realize that yeah, this actually is it, and although you can still try enough new things to keep anyone busy for two lifetimes, you’re pretty much stuck with a basic context. There are skills, experiences, and material things you will almost certainly never have, period. It’s a challenge for all of us to understand that accepting this fact of life does not necessarily mean cutting off options or giving up dreams, but simply — as in the proverbial story about the creation of the David — chipping away all that is not you.

…Accepting my fat really wasn’t the hard part. Accepting my personality — and my many limitations that have jack shit to do with my thighs — was. But oddly enough, once I started to do that, my life became about a zillion times more satisfying. I found the right guy, I took up yoga, I started taking my writing more seriously, I stopped apologizing for taking vacations in the U.S. and Canada instead of somewhere more exotic, etc. And lo and behold, things got a lot more fun around here.

The Fantasy of Being Thin is about waiting for ideal conditions. And the conditions for creativity will never be ideal, dammit.

And, of course, it is a fantasy about being thin.

Let me tell you about Pecha Kucha. Pecha Kucha is the weird viral event that no one really owns but that takes place in many cities across the world. Organizers in each city invite a handful of people – creatives, cultural influencers, artists – to speak about their work and what inspires them. Each speech consists of 20 images that display for 20 seconds.

In Vancouver, where I live, Pecha Kucha is wildly successful. There’s an event every month and it almost always sells out. This is quite a feat, because the Vogue theatre, where Pecha Kucha is held, holds 1,500 people.

And at the end of last year, thanks to the generous and flattering recommendation of Danielle LaPorte, I was invited to speak at Pecha Kucha. I was honoured. I was flattered. I was terrified. I wasn’t thin enough to stand on stage in front of 1,500 people.

So I didn’t respond. For days. Until the understandably frustrated but still gracious organizer sent me a crisp ‘are you in or out’ message.

I said yes but I almost said no.

What stopped me from saying yes right away, as I should have? That persistent, perditious fantasy of being thin makes me believe I should wait to make public appearances until I am skinny.

What stopped me from saying no?

Oprah.

Imagine if Oprah turned down her talk show until she was thin. She would have spent twenty years waiting for her career to begin instead of working on that career and becoming truly excellent at what she does.

I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to wait to create. I’m not going to let my fear of some uninvited body commentary stop me from growing and glowing. I’m going to – and I did – accept my fears as legitimate and then do what I need to do. Instead of fighting my fear, saying it is unreasonable, and then fighting with myself because I’m such a flawed, fearful creature, I love and accept my fear. And here’s the thing: in the society we live in, weight commentary is the norm rather than the exception, even for people within the range of “acceptable” body shapes (which I am not). So my fear was reasonable. What’s not reasonable is waiting to be acceptable to other people to be acceptable to myself. So I accepted my fear and I wrote an incredible speech and I practiced it in the bathtub, in the car, in bed. Because, as Danielle LaPorte writes, preparation is love. Because I knew that even if someone says something awful, there are other people in that audience who need to hear me and who will be lit up by what I have to say.

And there were and they rewarded me with whoops and cheers. It was incredible. I was incredible. I could feel the floor through my five inch heels. I was one with that stage.

And, at the after-party, there was some uninvited body commentary. It went like this:

Well-meaning and strangely charming dude with beer in-hand: You know, I get what you said about cleavage being the space between, and that’s literally what it means, but when you were up there explaining your definition of cleavage, did you ever wonder if maybe people were just staring at your breasts?

Me: I certainly hoped so.

——————–

I’m all about making room for your fear. Accepting it and acting in concert with it. Fear-loving, not fear-busting.

And I’ve written a (free) chapter about fear-loving. It has 39 pages + 5 exercises. You can download it here and I’ll be delighted if you do.

January 31, 2011 | filed under: Bodies

25 people have

Sunday School for Sentences #9: Thread the Grommets, Lace the Corset, Feed the Rabbits

This week’s Sunday School for Sentences adheres to the principle ‘show, don’t tell’. Sorta. I’m starting with the showing (a story I wrote called Love, Fury, Lola) and then I’ll move on to the telling (the technique I used in that story and how you can use it too).

love, fury, lola

Lola, my daughter, is a fire-cracker. Part of it is age three; part of it is who she is meant to be.

Between us: friction.

Every feeling she has is grand. Every thought she has is big. She likes to run around and entertain and she loves to lasso and marshal and make you bend to her will, which is endless, intense and disconcertingly effective.

My baby: she’s fierce.

In her circles, she’s the boss, the star, the sun, the Empress. The rest of us are satellites, lesser planets or possibly minions.

But Lola’s a lover, too.

It is her mission in life to torment me all day with unreasonable and non-negotiable demands, and then at night, after all of that, she rounds her small body into my corners. She starts off in her own bed but almost inevitably finishes sleeping on my head. She sleeps curled in the small of my back. She slumbers with her cheek on my shoulder while her small fists clutch handfuls of my hair. Wherever I move or shift or try to draw a border between us in the bed she remorselessly colonizes, her body tracks me and finds me – even through the depths of sleep. We are magnetic.

It is what saves us.

Her extravagant moods, dogged determination to challenge everything, and commitment to charming and owning the souls of every creature she encounters is modulated only by the generosity of her affection.

I submit to you the events of last Tuesday.

I was fried. My last nerve had been cooked and eaten by two cannibals two days earlier.

In short, I wasn’t negotiating bed time.

Bed time, however, was under formal protest, and I met that one-person riot with beatific resistance.

Thank you Gandhi. Thank you MLK.

I told her I simply couldn’t, and wouldn’t, read stories to people who yell at me.

And left her in her bed. She was story-less, and mad as fuck.

She screamed. She raged. She wanted a story, she wanted a new mommy, she wanted to live with daddy, she hated me.

Yes she did. She screamed, “I hate my mommy!”

My baby hates me.

Distraught. Both of us.

I lovehated her right back, right then.

Tantrums and time have a curious relationship. Time slows with each raised decibel. I waited forever. She screamed for a millennium.

Then Lola wanted her mama – the beloved mother she hates – who enrages her and torments her with bedtimes, vegetables and non-violent revolution. Only a mama can calmly surf a tidal wave of going-on four-ness. Sometimes only the one who hurts you can heal you.

My baby was drowning in grief. She’d swam too far out to get back on her own.

I went to her. I knelt beside her bed and put my arms around her. She put her hand on my cheek, and her teary, tired eyes met mine. Her face was wet. Her heart was unravelling with each raggedy breath.

“I love you, but I hate you,” she sighed. It escaped her like the last of the air in a furiously deflating balloon.

She spoke without malice. She spoke the truth.

Lola’s sighing surrender to love and rage felt like emotional organization, to me. I rocked her while she sorted her passions and catalogued her surprise at the fierceness of her feelings.

Then she let go and melted into me. And she slept.

——————-

How To Thread the Grommets, Lace the Corset and Feed the Rabbits

There’s something I do, or try to do, in most things I write, and when Dave Doolin of Website in a Weekend and I talked about it, he called it ”threading the grommets”.

Were I a less poised and polished lady-type, I would have growled. That name is purrrrfect.

I have a small but rabbit-like collection of corsets (it fervently and frequently reproduces), and Dave’s image makes me think of lacing and unlacing them. And, if you like that sort of thing – who doesn’t??? – you’ll understand why lacing the corset creates shape and builds emotional tension.

And you can do that in a story, an article, a blog post.

Here’s what you do:

Repeat and expand upon one or more metaphors or modes of explanation. These are your threads.
Lace them through the piece.
At the end, tie up the piece with a twist on one or more of those repeated metaphors, images, or explanations.

I did it in the piece above – Love, Fury, Lola – with allusions to seas, revolution and sleep:

Sea

Only a mama can calmly surf a tidal wave of going-on four-ness.

My baby was drowning in grief. She’d swam too far out to get back on her own.

Revolution

Wherever I move or shift or try to draw a border between us in the bed she remorselessly colonizes, her body tracks me and finds me – even through the depths of sleep.

Bed time, however, was under formal protest, and I met that one-person riot with beatific resistance.

Thank you Ghandi. Thank you MLK.

Then Lola wanted her mama – the beloved mother she hates – who enrages her and torments her with bedtimes, vegetables and non-violent revolution.

Sleep

It is her mission in life to torment me all day with unreasonable and non-negotiable demands, and then at night, after all of that, she rounds her small body into my corners. She starts off in her own bed but almost inevitably finishes sleeping on my head. She sleeps curled in the small of my back. She slumbers with her cheek on my shoulder while her small fists clutch handfuls of my hair. Wherever I move or shift or try to draw a border between us in the bed she remorselessly colonizes, her body tracks me and finds me – even through the depths of sleep. We are magnetic.

Then she let go and melted into me. And she slept.

And that last example – sleep – is how I started and ended the piece. I laced the corset and tied it in a knot.

That was gratuitous, yes, but now my tightly-lashed corset is a business tax deduction.

Gotta feed the rabbits.

——————————-

Sunday School for Sentences will be a sixteen-part series. Missed one? Here they are:

Prologue: God, Sex and Dazzling Sentences

January 23, 2011 | filed under: sunday school for sentences

27 people have

the conditions for creativity will never be ideal

The conditions for creativity will never be ideal.

Case in point: all of these famous books were written while their authors were in prison, where, one assumes, conditions were not ideal.

The exception of course is the lovely lady in the centre, Miss Jane Austen, who wrote all of her novels in the middle of the sitting room of the crowded cottage she shared with her mother and sister as visitors came and went, came and went, came and went…

(legend has it the parlor door had a squeaky hinge that she deliberately left un-oiled because the creak gave her time to hide her manuscripts from the prying eyes of relatives and visitors)

….which makes me think, if Jane Austen can write while enmeshed in domesticity, so can I.

And so can you.

Stop waiting to get started.

(Please)

January 19, 2011 | filed under: Meaning, People

13 people have

come on baby light my fire

Yesterday was Blue Monday. The holidays are over, holiday credit card bills have just arrived, resolutions have unravelled. Researchers say it is the saddest day of the year.

And it’s still winter: grey, grim, dark and cold.

Perfect time to light your fire.

————————–

June 9, 2009. Sunshine. I’m driving the winding road to Whistler and appreciating everything in my path. I’m grateful for the good road, the great weather, having a paid day off from my salaried job, and having a salary so I can pay for days like this. I’m on the road to where I want to be. The music is hot, the sun is warm on my skin and two hours into it, I admit, Fuck it. I’m an artist.

Then, during a group firestarter session with Danielle LaPorte, I mainline her white hot truths for surviving and thriving as a solo entrepreneur and an artist: Build an online platform. Your art requires an audience and your business needs customers (and they need you). Guest post. Know your squeak-by number (the minimum amount of money you need to live) and then go get the money, honey. When designing your site ensure that whatever makes you the most money gets the most virtual real estate. Craft your conversation-sparking elevator speech and deliver it. Organically grow your twitter following like this: give. Ruthlessly and relentlessly hone your vision and your mission. Exercise your askus requestus muscle (ask. ask for what you want. ask for what you need. ask. keep asking. ask). Protect your time and assume the divine responsibility of self-care. Have integrity. Be faithful to your vision and your people. Do what you say you’re going to do. Always.

But I swear everything Danielle said sounds like this:

you’reanartistyou’reanartistyou’reanartist

youcandoityoucandoityoucandoit

doitdoitdoit

Everything she says sounds like she’s saying it just for me. I get tear-y.

I cry the happy cry all the way home and then I get terrified. I have two kids to feed. They don’t eat words.

At home I check my e-mail and there’s a note from Danielle. It says: you’re hot shit and the real deal and you should be getting your ass published as widely as possible.

More tears.

Months later Danielle DM’s me:

leap

Months later, I do.

————————–

January 18, 2011 | filed under: Meaning, Money, People

5 people have

the moral arc of the universe

Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice – Martin Luther King Jr

A’men.

January 17, 2011 | filed under: Uncategorized

1 person has

Sunday School for Sentences #8: How To Execute a Climax or Series of Climaxes. I’m talking About Writing. Mostly.

I love confident girls. Truism by Sophie Diels

A young woman I know has a passion for fashion. Everyone knows it. Her teacher tells her to keep working on her French because there’s a very fine fashion design college in Montreal…and then Madame works her network to introduce her to a fashion designer. (Young’un is savvy: she notes that she needs to work on her math so she can manage “all the money”.) For Christmas, Grandma gives her a sketch book and templates of mannequins and clothing. The sketchbook is finished – full - in just a few days. Mama cuts up old sheets and draws dashes on them with sharpies to teach her how to follow lines with the needle. And, for her birthday in four months, our budding fashion designer has three requests: a business suit; a sewing machine; and a blender. You know the Sesame Street segment, “one of these things just doesn’t belong here”? That’s the blender. She wants to make smoothies for breakfast. The business suit and the sewing machine, on the other hand, are for the business she’s itching to get started. The suit is so she can take meetings and the machine is to sew clothes. She’s already spirited a chair out of the kitchen to create a home office and cleared a table in her bedroom to make space for the future sewing machine. Her will be done.

Oh and this business, she tells me, is really more of an empire. She wants to design clothes and own the factory that produces them.

This young woman has passion and a vision.

She’s six.

Who were you when you were six? Who did you want to be?

When I was seven, I started writing stories. My second grade teacher would hand out a sheet of paper with a line drawing of something – every time it was different – at the top of the page. The doodle was a writing prompt. It was a tough assignment. Most of the kids struggled to fill a page but I always needed more paper. It was the best part of my day. Even then, I knew I was a writer, not because I had “talent” but because I enjoyed it enough to do it a lot.

And that’s what I told my daughter when she and I and Madame were having a parent-teacher-student meeting: sometimes the things you love as a child do turn out to be your calling. I always wrote stories. Now people pay me to write stories. Now my passport says “writer”.

As much as she loves designing, Sophie loves God, and she believes both loves are related. She told me, so full-up with spirit and herself that she was bouncing in place, “Mama, my talent is designing. God gave me this gift.”

That is an awesome – in the fullest sense of the word – thing to say and believe.

I have trouble believing in talent and in God.

That’s not quite right. I have trouble having faith in talent and God. I work towards both.

Sophie’s close to God. She believes, she talks to him, she prays in the back seat of the car that traffic will abate and we’ll make the movie on time. We make the movie on time. She takes everything to Him: bad dreams, bullying, homelessness, poverty, sewing machines.

And so who am I to say she doesn’t have a calling? Who am I to say God hasn’t blessed her with an innate talent? She and He are tight. I’m not privvy to all their conversations or their plans. I’m just the chick tasked with hiring her a seamstress.

So Sophie and I have different understandings of talent. She thinks it is God-given and a calling to be served – and in her life, that’s certainly true, because everyone in it is rallying to her call – but I think talent is pleasure and preference. You like doing something so you do it a lot, and when you do it a lot, you get good at it.

I, for example, am really good at sex.

And, so far, here are the ways I’ve said you can get good at writing:

Love words. Wonder at them and savour them as though they are holy. Because language is divine: even this earth was breathed into place on the wind of words. In the beginning was The Word.
Use understatement and strive to say the expected in unexpected ways.
Use parallelism and then, when you’re feeling really tricky, swap the order of the adjectives in your parallel lists.
Use material objects to develop your characters and hint at their backstories.
Give good quote. Write sentences so tight they beg your people to repeat them. Pack your wisdom and opinions in fiercely edited prose.
Write or at least read poetry. Give yourself to permission to write bad poetry so that you’re free to experiment with romantic phrasing, alliteration, assonance, consonance and other poetic devices that will inevitably make your prose more lyrical.
Write with the worldview of a colt and edit through the lens of a skeptic. Delete the words just, actually, very and really. (Confession: I need to take my own advice.)
Ditch the pressure to craft perfect, magical, alchemical pages and just write. Anything. Every day.

That’s the quick-list of lessons learned and preached in Sunday School for Sentences.

Ah, the list. Usually the only thing that induces my gag reflex are lists. (Let’s further test it with another quickie.) Here are three terrific resources for nurturing your craft:

And the moral of today’s lesson?

To introduce emotional tension and rhythm to your work, vary the length of your sentences and paragraphs. To develop a climax, or a series of climaxes, think about riding – and writing – a roller coaster: follow a long, emotionally intense paragraph with a short, terse, pointed sentence. The long paragraph is climbing the hill. The short sentence is screaming down it.

This also works with sex.

————————-

Sunday School for Sentences will be a sixteen-part series. Missed one? Here they are:

Prologue: God, Sex and Dazzling Sentences

January 16, 2011 | filed under: sunday school for sentences

18 people have

Sunday School for Sentences #7: There Are No Magic Words

For five years, he tried to find the right words, the magic words, the key words. The words that would unlock her.

And then she said, as she often had before, “I can’t keep having this conversation.”

He said, “Me neither,” and packed up her things – she’d never lived there but her stuff was everywhere – and put them in her car.

And those words unlocked him – or they would have, if there had been chains.

There are almost never chains. Or locks. Or keys.

—————

Why do you stay in prison

when the door is so wide open?

Rumi

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

Alexander Graham Bell

Maybe you’re reason why all the doors are closed

So you can open one that leads you to the perfect road.

Katie Perry, Firework

When you’re walking someone else’s path, everything is hard, because nothing on that path is meant for you.

F

——————-

In romance and in writing there are no magic words. If there were, I would have nailed my point in one pithy quote instead of four.

Take, for example, pick up lines. Sexually unsuccessful men put a lot of stock in pick up lines, as though there is a secret phrase that open legs.

But the secret of any seduction isn’t what you say, it is how you say it. Just ask my friend Joanie, the sexiest woman in the world. When we go out together she vacuums up male attention until I am living in a vacuum populated only by me and my first-hopeful then-disappointed CFM heels.

And all she does is make eye contact a little longer than she has to and smile naughtily. That mischievous grin makes everything she says hot. It makes men hot. Hell, it makes me hot.

And what is true for starting relationships is also true for sustaining them. When we start having relationship woes – not regular ol’ problems, but woes, the kind that can only be fixed if the other person changes, and I think we all know how that goes – we stew and brew and stay up late and grind and sift and shake through our wishes. We’re like a nervous little dog with a latte habit: hopeful, fearful, on edge, trembling on the ledge.

(My friend, for example – my friend of the five year example – has a nickname: “Shakey”.)

When we’ve got a relationship woe, we worry it. We wrestle it. For hours and hours and days and days, until we’ve got it sorted. Until we know The Thing that will fix it.

And then we worry it some more. We gnaw and we chew until we’re down to the bone. We try to find the magic words, phrase, paragraph, argument that will encapsulate that journey (with all that eating and worrying) for our partners, and make them see.

Then they don’t see.

And how can they? How can they see the sights and sites we’ve visited in our 4am sojourns of the soul? How can a few finely-honed, freighted and weighted words approximate or encapsulate the terrain we’ve traversed or the mysteries we’ve solved?

You’ve spent time and energy and angst on this. You’ve wrangled your dragons, and probably a few of hers, too.

But she hasn’t. And she can’t see what you’ve seen because she wasn’t on that safari – into the wild plains of your mind – with you.

Often we think that our partners choose not to understand, that they’re just not listening, because if they were, they’d get it.

And then we think – back to my theme of the day – that if we presented it properly, found the magic words then presto! abracadabra! holy insight and white rabbits, batman! there should and would be a supernatural, superlovin’ breakthrough.

But.

- and I’m getting repetitive and didactic here -

When you take that trip into the wilds of your mind (and by proxy, your relationship), you do it alone. There are no magic words that will replicate that journey for your partner.

He has to go there for himself.

————————–

And so all those minutes and hours and years in which you mentally writhed and wrestled words, attempting to shape them into keys to unlock the door to understanding, harmony and the future so that the two of you would walk through it, triumphant and together…

They’re not wasted. They’re part of your trip.

But they’re not going to yield you what you seek.

(If what you seek is The Magical Relationship Solution that will finally get you partner to see what you see.)

Because there are no magic words.

————————–

And what does this have to do with writing and being a better writer?

Writers, one would hope, should be able to find the magic words. That’s kinda our bag, yes?

No.

I’ve written before that great writers write great sentences and so you, my future great-writer, should spend a whole wack of time line-editing.

Jonathan Franzen, on the other hand, “doesn’t think so much about sentences anymore…These days I’m just trying to make them adequate, and to press them into the service of the story. I use to revise heavily, now not so much.”

And both things are true. When you are in the midst of inspiration, and flowing with the flow, the words come, and they surprise you. I once singled out a sentence from Siddhartha Herdegen as exceptional. Siddhartha later told me that sentence wrote itself and as soon as it did, he knew it was pretty special.

So you can abandon yourself to the words and the story, or you can have an idea or a concept and let it drive you. I struggle with the latter approach. When I’ve got a point, agenda, or idea, I step into the more academic, teach-y and preachy side of myself which opens a chasm between me and my words. Writing a piece for this Sunday School for Sentences series, for example, is a tooth extraction of existential proportions.

As the publishers of The Rumpus write, “Good writing and good ideas are not always the same thing. A topic for an essay might sound horrendous but if a writer is in love with the idea enough she’ll often render something beautiful.”

And so what works for me is either having a story – fully fleshed out, ready to be written and revealed – or abandoning myself to the flow and letting the words prance around naked and splendid until they all pair up and…

(Ah yes, how very Cleavage: creation is an orgy, or at least orgasmic.)

And then editing the shit out of it.

Literally.

For me, as both a writer and a reader, something alchemical happens when the story intersects with the sentences and the sentences are just as compelling as the story, and I believe (I believe! I believe! I believe!) that this kind literary magic emerges from practice and editing.

Practice doesn’t have to look like (or result) in writing an essay, a novel page or a blog post per day. It can be writing snippets or phrases in your notebook. It can be a conversation via thirty-seven highly-charged e-mails that you then cut-and-paste into a dialogue. It is a naughty and reflective IM conversation that hones an idea that will later be an essay. It is eavesdropping on and then outright stealing a coffee-shop dialogue. (Writers are unreformable thieves.) It is watching the world without sound so you can tell a story through scars and tapping toes.

Betsy Warland calls this “keeping the door ajar”.

And that’s probably why, after twentyish years of writing awholelotta essays and several books, Jonathan Franzen doesn’t need to work and overwork his sentences. He’s practiced his way to intuition. As a wannabe excellent writer, I suspect achieving that level of craft and confidence is like the difference between toddling and walking.

————————–

My point is this: when, as a writer, you start thinking that you must create the perfect piece of writing, you must write xykazillion words per day, you must sit down right now and bang out an essay or a poem and it must be good,

you put yourself in chains.

This is how you block your flow.

This is how you become task averse and start avoiding writing instead of running to it and with it.

This is how you habituate yourself to procrastination (the bad kind of procrastination, the one that prevents – rather than incubates – creation).

And so accepting that there are no magic words and only a magical process (practice + editing) will free you from your imaginary prison.

Because when you write, it might not flow. The words might not surprise you with their excellence. Most of what you write won’t be good.

But that’s how you get it right. You get it write. You write and write and write – everything, from e-mails to IM conversations to press releases to paid bios to fragments of poems to graffiti to grocery lists to letters to your boyfriend’s son’s soccer coaches to advice to other writers to plot summaries and novel outlines – and then you go back and make it right.

Amanda Farough doesn’t call me “The Editrix” for naught.

————————-

The gift you have as a writer is the one failed lovers crave: you can go back again and get it right. As Stephen Elliott writes, “When you walk away from someone and think of something you wish you had said, in movies they always say that.”

Writing is a godly, time-travelling, manna-for-the-romantic-control-freak activity.

You can rewrite all those closed doors. You can invent windows. You can forge golden keys. You can create for your audience the emotional experience and trip that your lover wouldn’t take with you.

But it isn’t magic. It’s just inclination and practice. Daily practice.

Work will unleash your words.

————————

And, finally, to all my tormented lovers (and artists, and writers):

The door isn’t locked.

And if it is locked, it isn’t your door.

————————

Sunday School for Sentences will be a sixteen-part series. Missed one? Here they are:

Prologue: God, Sex and Dazzling Sentences

———————

PS I don’t care what the high-brows say about Katie Perry. I LOVE HER. Every single thing she does – especially Teenage Dream - reminds me of Julie Roads.

PPS Everything except the cupcakes.

January 9, 2011 | filed under: sunday school for sentences

22 people have

The Previously Undisclosed Secret to Parallel Parking (and, quite possibly, lasting love)

Parallel parking is my super-sexy-secret power.

Using only my wits, a manual transmission and a steering wheel, I can maneuver a thousand pounds of metal in and out of spaces so small they should require a can opener.

And I can do it consistently. With crowds of people watching and cheering. With the guy I want (always) to impress (always) in the car.

True story.

We were going to breakfast at my favourite joint in Fort Langley - ohhhh, the evil omelettes, ohhhhh the wicked weekend line-ups – and parking in that ‘hood is almost always a challenge. But lo! there was a spot. A very tiny spot, and a very long line of traffic behind me.

I lined up my passenger door with the driver door of the car ahead of my spot, backed in until the curb was in the middle of my rear view mirror, continued reversing while rolling the steering wheel the other way…and I was in, and tight to the curb too.

It was spectacular. I was spectacular.

And my newish man smiled at me and said Wow.

That was seven months ago and I don’t remember if we had sex that morning (of course we did), and it’s probably inappropriate to say if we had sex this morning (of course we did!), but let’s assume this driving lesson does indeed instruct.

The ability to parallel park can get you laid.

And maybe even loved.

January 6, 2011 | filed under: Love, Sex, Uncategorized

10 people have

burn the list, trash the script

It is time for New Year’s resolutions. Most of us make lists. I have a list. You probably have a list. I’d like to urge you to ditch it.

Sometimes – like right now, in the midst of a month of manic self-improvement – it seems we all want to weigh less and make more money. We want to collect and display our shiny things to prove that we do indeed shine.

And so we think we’ll shine brighter with smaller waistlines. And bigger cars. And ever-bigger houses. And why?

Why are you resolving to change yourself? Are you not loveable just as you are?

You are.

When I was younger, I back-packed through Europe and Australia and then I lived in Taiwan.

And, if I’m honest, at least 98.4% of my motivation for doing those things was not art, culture, expanding my horizons or “finding myself”.

(In fact, I’m ridiculously hard to lose, and - like Ethan Hawke’s Before Sunrise character who says

I know what you mean about wishing somebody wasn’t there, though. It’s just usually it’s myself that I wish I could get away from. Seriously, think about this. I have never been anywhere that I haven’t been. I’ve never had a kiss when I wasn’t one of the kissers. Y’know, I’ve never, um, gone to the movies, when I wasn’t there in the audience. I’ve never been out bowling, if I wasn’t there, y’know making some stupid joke. I think that’s why so many people hate themselves. Seriously, it’s just they are sick to death of being around themselves.

- I sometimes prefer to be lost rather than found.)

Instead, I travelled to have good stories to tell.

To be interesting to other people. To distinguish myself from other people. To be a little different than the average office worker. Sure, I’d punch in, but I punched in with this resentful and self-important subtext:

this isn’t my real life. I just work here to earn enough money to travel…to be free…not like the rest of you worker bees, whom I will – like the Queen Fucken Bee I one day hope to be – graciously entertain with my witty, well-traveled and even better-practiced international banter.

Because I wanted to shine.

(Note to younger self: obnoxious isn’t attractive.)

(Note to current self: IBID.)

Because if you shine, people come hither. And good things come from coming hither.

Because I wanted to be loved.

That’s why we seek prestige and status: to attract mates and followers and secure our place in the tribe.

And I think that’s what New Year’s Resolutions are about: they’re lists of all the ways this year that I will collect and claw and accrue more shiny things to attract more attention and followers and lovers and mates so that I will be loved and happy.

If being loved and celebrated and happy is what you want - it’s what I want – then burn the list and its indirect map littered with useless objects and empty fame and drive straight to the love.

You get love by giving it and growing into it. You find love by losing your seedy old self to it and inviting your emerging self to unfurl, root, and bloom. Relationships are a garden. In them, you grow.

And when you find that juicy green garden of love, throw out the tattered map sketched on the back of that hackneyed script cobbled together from countless Harlequin Romances, skimmed psychological tracts, every single Jennifer Aniston rom-com ever made, and bad advice from bitter ex’s. (We’re all bitter ex’s once in a while.) Throw out the advice from all your friends. Throw out the shoulds. Throw out the milestones and the timetable for the three kids and the three-bedroom house and all the things you ought to do. Throw out the shit-tests and the attempts to make him do what you want so you’ll have tangible proof (in the form of obeisance) that he adores and wants to please you

and just let him adore and please you.

Burn the list. Trash the script. Love.

January 5, 2011 | filed under: Meaning

10 people have

January. Relationships. Hold On (Maybe).

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. – John F. Kennedy

A successful marriage is basically an endless cycle of wrongs committed, apologies offered, and forgiveness granted…all leavened by the occasional orgasm. – Dan Savage

Marriage is not a game for the young… Maturity brings—among other things—the ability to sustain and survive enormous contradictions and disappointments. Marriage is—among other things—a study in contradiction and disappointment, and inside that reality there is space for us to truly learn how to love. -Elizabeth Gilbert

___________________________

Here are the things I hear through the shared wall of my townhouse:

My neighbours got a Wii Fit for Christmas and it sounds like this: thump thump thump thump thump + some sort of repetitive musical refrain. Rinse. Repeat. For hours. I sincerely hope someone is getting skinny.
My neighbours have spent a little too much time together this week, and they’re both over it. Loudly.

They’re not alone.

January and Divorce and Break-ups, Generally

Today – and every day this month – is momentous and shattering. Today is the day when people return to work, after a week or so of holidaying at home with their families, and file for divorce.

Really.

Google tells me it is common, and if Google says so, you know it is true.

Article after article names January 7, 8 and 12, or just January in general, as the busiest month of the year for divorce lawyers (and long-suffering couples).

In preparation, and in the spirit of Christmas generosity, a law firm in the UK offered discounted “divorce gift certificates” in December.

It makes awful sense to me. Who breaks up right before Christmas? You grit your teeth and you get through it. And then you make a New Year’s resolution, escape to the office a few days later, and make the call.

That’s bald and clinical and unsympathetic. But when I put my heart in it, I think, a lot of us are hurting right now.

So, if this is you, peace be with you. My heart aches for you. Hang in there, my friend.

If this is maybe you - but you’re not really sure of much except that things aren’t what you expected and your wolf isn’t being fed and the scary hairy one has an empty stomach – here’s a little white hot truth from Joseph Campbell by way of Danielle LaPorte:

Marriage is not a love affair,
it’s an ordeal.
It is a religious exercise, a sacrament,
the grace of participating in another life.
If you go into marriage with a program,
you will find that it won’t work.
Successful marriage
is leading innovative lives together,
being open, non-programmed.
It’s a free fall: how you handle each new thing as it comes along.
As a drop of oil on the sea,
you must float,
using intellect and compassion
to ride the waves.

So: hold on.

Or don’t.

Do what you need to do.

Divorce and Break-ups, Specifically (and Personally)

This is my first year of being single since pretty much ever.

(Stealing a great line from Ms. Robinson, woman of experience, here: I’m single, though not all the time.)

So I know. I really know. I’m not in the midst of it, now, but I didn’t get to be a much-vaunted single mama without a catastrophic heart-home-love-and-life smash up.

I was with someone for seven years even though I knew the truth. I knew we weren’t It or Meant To Be, always.

But nothing was wrong. He was (is) a good person and good to me. And so, next step and next step and next step.

I told myself that the things I was looking for, and lacking, I could find other places.

I think, generally, this is a wise strategy, because no one person can be everything to you. You have friends and careers and kids and knitting and online pornography for a reason.

But we couldn’t talk to each other. Yes, we spoke different languages (his five to my one-and-a-half, franglais is sort of a language, right?) but we really spoke different languages.

If I asked him a question that required a yes or a no, he would tell me stories freighted with cultural allusions and fraught with entendres and shadows.

And then I would say/scream, what the *bad word* ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? CAN YOU PICK UP THE MILK OR NOT?

Talking. We talked past each other. Like a kitten with a newly dead mouse, I would bring him my ideas and in the interests of getting me to think harder, better, higher, he’d tell me I needed a rat. He’d advocate the devil to purify my psalms.

Frustrated by the missed connections and fraying vocal cords, I would yell at him which would take him to a terrifying place: in another country, in another world, he was tortured.

My screams – at him – haunt me, still.

In short: we wanted the same things in life (family, children) but not from each other, because we couldn’t know each other. Our words whizzed past each other and whacked into the wall.

So I knew for a long time – always – but I knew, intensely, unrelentingly, in the itchy, painful, transformative, horrific, something’s-gotta-give way, for two years before it gave way.

Eventually you get tired of running and let your monsters catch you. It is pretty much the nightmare you imagined, more so and less so, and you survive.

What I Maybe Know About Love and Loss and What You Probably Do, Too

So I’ve loved and lost and tried again and here’s what I think I know about loving hard, holding on and letting go.

We are all, fundamentally, mysteries to each other. Sometimes we are mysteries to ourselves.

But, I believe, we want to be known. To speak the same language as our loved ones. To be heard. Understood.

It doesn’t matter what The Problem or nest of interrelated, tangled up problems is or are or how trivial it will appear to outside eyes. It doesn’t matter if it is communication incompatibility or sexual incompatibility -

and this is NOT trivial. Dan Savage gets it right when he says this:

in a long-term relationship—or a marriage—one partner’s sexual selfishness and another’s sexual frustration rarely prove trivial over the long haul. They’re more often grounds for divorce.

- or just plain growing in different directions.

The truth is a beast. Ugly. Big teeth. Relentless. Patient (sometimes). Hungry. It will be fed. Sometime.

If you know, you know.

And all the reasons in the world that are stalling your exit – kids, family, property, social expectations – are just that: stalls.

The biggest stall is the dream. The myth. The internal myth making and myth busting that comes with a marriage bust-up is more dangerous and damaging than anything inflicted on you from the outside.

Myth breaking:

fairy tales and happily ever after and us, always
The One

Myth making:

I can’t commit to anything
I quit again
I failed again
this is all my fault
I should be stronger. I should just buck up and grit my teeth and get through it
I will never find another
I will die alone with cats because that’s what the unlovable/unfuckable do
my children will be juvenile delinquents
I will never have children

All those “again”s. They indicate personal narratives and toxic loops you’re knitting yourself into.

Sometimes we enslave ourselves to our stories.

So tell yourself a new story. Tell yourself the truth. Start with this:

If you know, you know.

If you don’t know, wait until you get to the knowing. More heavy lifting, hard works, stillness and listening.

So these are the things I know about relationships:

Hold on.
Or don’t.
Be the truth. You already know what it is or how to get to where it is.
There is no later.

Wait, that’s not entirely true. That’s not the entire list.

There’s one more thing: stay true, my friend. Think, cry, grieve, eat, pray, love (again) and know there will be light (again).

___________________

PS – this is a repost from last year. January 4th is January 4th is January 4th…

PPS – thanks to my new friend Catherine for the conversation that inspired me to add these two videos.

PPPS – just so you know, I like it when you follow me on Twitter. I’m @KellyDiels.

January 4, 2011 | filed under: Uncategorized

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