About a month ago, the good people from the Indiana Author Awards contacted me to let me know that I was a finalist for the Emerging Author Award. I’ll be embarrassingly uncool here and admit that this was—and is—a really big deal to me. I’ve been going to the awards ceremony for years, and Indiana is a big part of who I am, so, yeah. A big deal.
But I couldn’t tell anybody. The good people swore me to secrecy. (Okay, I told my wife, because I’m human, but no one else, I swear.) Today was the announcement, and I posted it on Facebook and Twitter and there was this gush of goodwill.
What I want to say here (to myself, mostly) is this: This is the best part of the whole thing. No matter what happens, it won’t get any better than this: Being happy with my friends.
Someone remind me of this in a few days when I turn all neurotic, all right?
I just filled up a notebook, and it occurred to me that I might
share its front page as an example of one way to set up a
notebook. Steal/adapt/scoff as you see fit. Here’s the first page; the
explanation is below.
So,
as you can see, it’s divided into two basic columns. The left column is
a kind of Table of Contents. Every day, I list the date, a title for
what I’m writing (most of these correspond with chapter titles for my work-in-progress), and the
starting page. This makes the notebook searchable.
The right column is a calendar. Every day that I write gets an X.
This is an easy visual way for me to track my frequency over the course
of several months. If I’m going to miss more than a couple of days
because of a trip or something, I put a little line through the dates
and add a note.
This indexing technique is adapted from the world of bullet journaling.
The notebook itself (which I would be wondering about if I was reading
this post) is a spiral bound sketching journal from Walmart. $5.77 for
150 pages. I like it because the spiral binding allows it to lay flat,
and the paper is thick enough that the ink doesn’t bleed through to the
other side.
That you should find a notebook you love half as much is the urgent hope of your faithful correspondent,
Furunicorn
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Goats!
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Bleak House
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Great day for a bike ride. Better day for hammock time. The boy wins again.
Last night I talked with a group about how to get started with writing/how to get out of your own way. Here’s a little snippet from that talk—
(Thomas Mann, from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, via Afflictor)
Four Things I Want to Say About Writing that Might Help You
Writing is a struggle.
To paraphrase Thomas Mann: Writers are people for whom writing is hard. So if it’s hard for you, you’re in good company. Struggle doesn’t mean that you suck, and struggle doesn’t have to mean misery. Scaling a mountain is a struggle. Raising children is a struggle. Getting through grad school is a struggle. Every meaningful thing you’ve ever done in your life has been a struggle. As with those other struggles, writing can be pleasing and a pain at the same time.
Expect to do many drafts.
If you know that you’re going to do a bunch of drafts, it takes the pressure off of any single one. It allows you to be comfortable with sucking at first (which you will do, regardless of whether you’re comfortable with it or not) and comfortable with allowing a project to improve gradually over time. Pressure down, patience up.
You don’t have to know in order to go.
Sometimes people want to figure everything out before they start drafting: meaning, structure, audience, etc. This is an awesome way to paralyze yourself. But the truth is that you don’t have to know what you’re going to say or how you’re going to say it before you start writing. You can explore and discover as you go (because, hey, you’re going to do a bunch of drafts anyway, so the early ones can be exploratory). There are no prerequisites to the page.
Stop doing shit that does not work for you.
All the time I hear writers describe a process that jams them up and makes them miserable. They moan and moan and then … they don’t change a damn thing. Why? (Insert 38 possible reasons here). Don’t be this person. There is no right way or wrong way to write. There are only ways that work for you and ways that work against you (see this synopsis of Mike Rose’s study). Find and adopt ways that work for you.
