Words to Live By, Part I

Last evening, I got two pleasures I rarely enjoy.
First, I dug the first of my garden; if everything comes up that I planted last night, by August, I may be inviting you all over for strawberry shortcake.
Second, I sat down to watch a movie.

Yep. A whole movie, with no popping up for commercials, no pauses to go and do a quick cleanup of the supper dishes…just me and homemade meatloaf and the couch, for two solid hours.

Even without homemade meatloaf, that would have been good stuff. But I was also watching a movie I’ve seen once before and wanted to see again—to find out if my first impression had rung as true as I thought.


The movie was Stranger Than Fiction, a story with one of the great creative premises in the world, one I still wish I’d thought of and written down first.


I saw this movie originally in the theater (another rare pleasure) with my son and daughter, and I was most flattered when Matt told me that the author character reminded him of me. (!) Except for the chain smoking, I would love to be that character. Especially the skinny part…

But I digress.

I found the movie more affecting the second time around. More human. More touching. And I could, obviously, see the foreshadowing of crucial scenes now that I knew they were coming. (I still don’t buy the romantic relationship of our hero and a heroine I pretty much wanted to b***h slap the first time…but that’s a whole ‘nuther story, too.)

The pleasant surprise about this movie this time, for me, was a couple of good words of wisdom, especially nice to hear at a time when it can be hard to hold onto wisdom and perspective.

When Christian values are under attack on all sides; when the Constitution is pretty much being walked all over by our present leader of the free world, without challenge from the media and without the vocal criticism that came to his predecessor for “offenses” that are kindergarten-level by comparison; and when the world around us seems to have gone absolutely berserk in its lemming-like rush to oblivion, to nihilism and to the godless void that focuses on “feelings” as arbiters of good and evil…it’s hard to keep perspective.

It’s hard to have any faith that what you did today is going to have any impact tomorrow; it’s hard even to know, sometimes, what you should be doing versus what truly needs to be someone else’s fight. The fights are myriad and endless; every time you turn a corner, someone else is pleading for action on your part and screaming scary consequences of your failing to act strongly, right now, and this instant, whether you’ve ever felt called to act in those particular ways before or not.

At times like this, it’s good to remember things like what the heroine said in this movie. How she came to realize that, even though she was at Harvard Law School because she wanted to “make the world better”…that what she really loved to do was bake.
She finally relates that, after being on the verge of flunking out, she realized something: that she could “make the world better…with cookies.”

And I thought, ain’t that the truth.
As a writer, I can’t tell you how many times I day I wonder if what I do ever makes a dent. Even though I edit some pretty effective literature, it’s hard to see how our little books are going to make a dent in the prevailing mythology by which so many people live. And when I consider my little fiction stories…it’s harder yet to feel like they matter.

But then I sit back on the couch, and I drain my wineglass, and I realize—a movie has just made my life better. It’s just given me both insight and comfort, in a line that was probably put in more for whimsy, maybe even for laughs, than for any statement about the profound nature of little things in life

That statement is, in fact, made at the end of the movie, in a way that makes it impossible to miss. Just in case the moviegoer was too dense to catch it the first time. But if you weren’t…if you were paying attention…you got the message of the movie way earlier than the narrator “told” you it.

Which made it all the sweeter.
Especially since I, too, love to bake. :-)

So here’s to making a difference with cookies. Or novels. Or movies.
Or “merely” by raising kids with aforementioned Christian values, with enough smarts to know when they’re being had and enough energy to fight for future generations if they have to.

And never, ever forgetting that with one cup of cold water, we can and do change the world.

This movie also has another great line in it…which I’ll blog about in Part II, for the sheer fun and the sheer uplift it’ll give us all (I hope).
Stay tuned!

Thoughts?
Janny

The Deep Wall of Sadness

Some of you will read this title and think, “Huh?”
Some of you will read it and think, “Oh, no. The CWC has had another disaster!”
Some of you—bless your hearts!—probably think this is a typo.
That the title should be “well” of sadness. After all, everyone knows wells are deep, and walls…are not.

You’re partly right.

First of all, though, not to worry—the CWC hasn’t had another disaster hit. Well, okay, let’s amend that. The CWC has become embroiled in not one, but two legal encounters of the close kind, but neither of these is likely to end in disaster. They’ll be a pain in the butt, they’ll stress her out, but they’re not likely to end in disaster, just immense piles of paper that signify nothing. (Would that I were a lawyer, and got paid by the syllable. Obviously, they do.)

But stress, evil as it is in this case, is not what’s making up the wall of which I speak.
What is making that up is a little more delicate.

Over the past several months—okay, years—I’ve been in a creative funk. I’ve worked through some of it. I’ve even done some rather nice revisions on older work. But when it’s come to creating new work…I’ve gone dead cold.
Colder than I’ve ever been in my life.
And that’s a scary feeling.
So scary that literally, it has me unable get any momentum writing fiction again.

I can do it for short periods of time.
I can write a few new scenes.
I can come up with pieces of story ideas.
I can even write synopses for new work.
But when it comes time to dig in and really write…I fail.
I start well, and then everything stops.
Either I don’t care about the people I’m writing about…
Or I don’t care about their story…
Or I do care about both the people and their story, I just don’t believe I can write it.

And I’ve been spending no little time in this blog trying to ascertain why that is.

If this were not so sad, it would be funny. I don’t even believe in writer’s block...I’ve said that a hundred times.
But there's something there that checks me when I try to get up and running. I can feel it. I try to sit down and get up some writing speed and energy, and I stop myself cold. I can’t get around this. It’s a wall.
A deep, cold, sad wall.

Something’s frozen off in me, something that used to be alive and kicking and always thinking of ideas. I used to swear I could come up with half a dozen books just from the storylines of the Celtic songs I listened to.
Now, I think of that sentiment and cringe.

I actually tried being a romance editor for awhile, and I had to stop it…because I couldn’t stand romance anymore. I couldn’t stand reading love stories. Any kind.
Because, deep inside me, there’s this plaintive voice saying, What’s the point?
Not only is the falling-in-love part not holding my attention anymore...but the romance of writing itself has flown the coop as well.

Sounds like someone’s coming off a bad love affair, right? Or worse? Only I can’t say that. I’m living in the midst of a long-term marriage. My relationship hasn’t broken up. My kids haven’t gone to prison. Nobody’s terminally ill in the family. I’m living in a great 100-year-old house, I’m doing a job I’m good at, I’m getting some freelance nonfiction work, I’m singing with a good choir at IPFW…

But somewhere in here, I’ve lost a romantic spark. Somewhere in here, I’ve lost a great deal of magic. Maybe I’ve just had to fight too damn many battles, beat back too damn many wolves from the door, and be too damn tough for too damn long. (Sorry for the rough language, but sometimes the bluntest Anglo-Saxonisms really are the best.)

Maybe going through the trauma of being sure my marriage was dead in the water, only to confront some demons, see them wrestled to the ground, and make the long, arduous trip back through learning how to love my husband again…took all the romantic sparks clear out of my eyes. (And yeah, it’s okay for me to say this out loud. My husband knows exactly where we stood then versus where we stand now, and we're in this together.) But oddly enough, I did some of my best, most romantic writing during the precise period of time when I was going through some of the worst personal emotional minefields you can imagine. I had to write…it was my way to stay sane.

So what has happened to my liking for, and ability to write, love stories—or for that matter, any kind of stories—now?
Did it die while I took care of my mother, scrambled to pay off her debts, borrowed just to get her buried?
Did it die when I kept struggling to hold ends together, only to have them keep slipping on me?
Did it die when I pulled up stakes and came to one of the last places on earth I ever thought I’d be?
Did it die when the biggest dream I’ve ever had—seeing my son play major league baseball—faded to black?
Or did it die because so much of what I’ve associated with writing fiction was tied up with RWA…and RWA and I have parted company on far from the best of terms?

I can’t honestly tell you why. I only know that every time I try to write, something chilling drops over my fingers and over my brain and I freeze. I wrote from hope before (the real thing, before it became a cheap political buzzword), sometimes nothing but hope. But now? The enthusiasm and fire that propelled my Muse seems to have packed up and left.

Something weary, something cynical, creeps into my writing now, and the people I want to write as warm and “nice” come out as wary, jaded smart-alecks. Part of me doesn’t even want to write “nice”…because something in me despises that in those characters. So I don’t write them that way, and I don’t tell their stories.

And that’s heartbreaking. Because I could do it once. I did it very well, several times in the past, in past manuscripts and in a pubbed book. I wrote sweet, funny, and genuinely nice people, and I cared about them, and I still do care about the ones who are like that in my old stories.
But I can’t seem to write them again. Or if I start to…I stop.
I hit a wall, almost immediately.
And I get very, very discouraged at the thought that I don’t know where to go from here.

My husband has a touch of a disorder they call dysthymia. For those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s a persistent sadness that permeates a person’s entire being. It’s closely related to depression (which he also has), but it’s slightly different in that a person can live with dysthymia for years and be functional; he just doesn’t get any joy out of anything. He would no sooner wake up thinking, “What can I do for fun today?” than the devil would wake up thinking, “Which virtue can I practice first?” Consequently, people with dysthymia live in a kind of perpetual fog. They’ll go along with plans other people make, but it’s beyond their scope to do much on their own that isn’t work, sleep, or other forms of routine.

Unfortunately, I see this disorder now taking over my writing. Sapping it of energy. Robbing it of a reason to be. Making me lose patience with boy-meets-girl, or even boy-saves-girl-in-jeopardy (or the other way around!). I don’t want this deep wall of sadness to be the way my fiction writing career ends…but right now, I’m in that gray cloud without a clue how to get out of it. Nothing seems to work, at least not on a long-enough term basis to make me think the worst is actually over and that the light at the end of the tunnel is not the proverbial freight train.

So is this where it stops? Or is there a way out?
I know what the way isn’t. It isn’t to write “one word at a time.” Because I’ve done that. One word, one page, a bunch of pages…and then it stalls out. And it’s happened too many times for me to think I can try the same thing again and expect a different result.

So…
Thoughts?

Janny

Stewardship...Beginning at Home

Had some interesting input from the “weekends” post last week about writing on the Lord’s Day—along the lines of “God gave me this talent, so if I’m using it on the Sabbath, that’s a good thing.” Can’t really argue with that, on one level. Just as my singing in church is “work” in one sense, in a greater sense, it’s using a talent God gave me in the best possible way to use it, and that’s counted as blessed. But it’s when we spend our Sunday/Sabbath doing nothing different from an ordinary day except going to church that, I think, we need to take care. Catholic interpretation of keeping the Sabbath includes doing no unnecessary work, as well as refraining from treating the day the same as you would a regular weekday. So, ironically enough, if your normal weekday is spent writing, technically on the Sabbath you should break from that routine and REST from same. But it’s a dilemma if the other six days of the week crowd out writing, and your “Sabbath” becomes the only time when you can do the writing you feel God calls you to do. That might mean that something on one of those other six days has to go…in order that Sunday truly is not “the only time” you have to do these things in. That’s the tricky part, because we can convince ourselves that almost any use of time is “the way it has to be,” if we’re not careful. I know people who have actually talked themselves into believing that they can only grocery-shop on Sunday, for example; these people had abundant time for sporting events, bar hopping, or the like on Saturday night, though. So was it really true that they “didn’t have time” any other time in the week? Nope. Did they see that? Nope. Would they have been offended if a priest or even another “ordinary” Christian had pointed that out? Maybe. But it would need pointing out, regardless. That’s the kind of careful examination/inventory I maintain we all need to do, and not just once in awhile, but on an ongoing basis. Because these little chinks in our armor don’t ambush us all at once. These little omissions don’t happen in one fell swoop, Invasion of the Body Snatchers style. Satan knows if he comes in with guns blazing, we have no trouble resisting him. So he comes instead under the guise of “busy-ness” and “obligations” and “have tos” instead, our culture applauds us for being endlessly productive, and… Sigh. It’s all part of stewardship. Managing our time, managing our gifts…and managing our environment, as best we can. Caring for what’s been given to us. And I had an interesting session of stewardship this past week, when I deliberately structured a couple of vacation days so that I could in effect have a 5-day weekend. So what did I plan to do with this time? Write nonstop? Sleep half the days? Sun myself? Picnic? Well, part of it, I spent doing a wonderful dose of heavy duty cleaning. Now some of you are screaming.“What are you thinking? You’ve got this time off, don’t waste it housecleaning! Get outside! Do holiday stuff! Write first, then clean!” But what if I expressed it as stewardship for my home? And my sanity? And my emotional state? How, then, does it look to spend the better part of July 4 and 5 in dusting, polishing, decluttering, scrubbing, vacuuming, and organizing? Not only is it a worthwhile thing to do—and enjoyable, if you’re a homebody, as I am—but it’s also good stewardship. And good stewardship is not optional…it’s required of us. Did you ever think of housework that way before? I know I didn’t necessarily. I thought of it as “taking care,” as doing what needed doing…but I don’t think it really hit home to me that a home is part of the “abundance” that God has blessed us with, and we are to be stewards of it as well. So, while we may not get excited about housework, or while we may feel it “is never done,” or the like…the fact is, if we allow our surroundings to be anything less than the best we can make them, to that degree, we’re not practicing good stewardship of what God has given us. And it strikes me as it’s then tricky business to ask God for “more,” for prosperity, or success, or whatever material thing would really make our lives easier, while at the same time treating cleaning our houses as something unimportant—something we only do if there’s “nothing better” to use our time on. God says we have to take care of the “little” things to be trusted with big ones; in that sense, nothing we do in the home is unimportant. On the contrary…it’s more important than we may have ever suspected before. Scripture says if we don’t provide for our own families, we “have denied the faith, and are worse than an infidel.” That’s not just referring to financial provision, although the temptation is great to limit it to that in our own minds. It also applies to keeping our homes clean, uncluttered, and as beautiful as we can make them. It all counts. It’s all stewardship. And that’s why this past holiday weekend has been a great one for me…because I gave myself, and God, the gift of treating my home like the treasure that it is. And in the process, I also “had time” for outdoor stuff, for grilling, for resting, for fireworks…and for writing up a storm part of Friday night and all day Saturday. And I’m going to continue to do some of that same writing today, with God in charge of it, as best I can. It all counts, but the good news is, it all blesses, too. Thoughts? Janny

Keeping the Fire, Making the Magic

It’s been an interesting several weeks (months?) in the writing life, and your comments and observations about the “non-competitive life” post have been encouraging. The consensus seems to be that one keeps on because one never knows what effect one’s work is having on the greater world. This seems at first to be a little grandiose, to say the least. I mean, whom do we really think we are, anyway? Are we really going to change the world with our words? Are we really touching anybody? The obvious answer may not be the most accurate one. Because on the surface, it seems like we’re not getting very far, whether we’re writing away and collecting rejection letters, or singing away and not getting solos. The kicker is, the more lasting effect we may be having, we can’t see. At least not obviously. But we may be able to “see” it, or at least grasp some of it, if we reflect for long enough. Now, I’m not talking about the eternal effect of what we’re doing. It’s a given that if we’re Christians, and we’re trying to do our lives to the glory of God, we’re going to have at least some lasting treasure accumulated in a heavenly bank account, and I for one plan to write checks on that with glee when the time comes to cash in. It's the temporal effect I'm talking about. Sometimes we can’t see that effect, because all we can see are the ways in which we haven’t “made it.” But the bottom line is, everything we do affects someone in some way. For proof, all we have to do is think about ourselves, and how we got into writing in the first place. Wasn’t it because someone wrote something that meant something to us? Wasn’t it, sometimes, because we had stories to tell—but it took someone special to “give us permission” to tell them on paper? Wasn’t it because someone in our academic world, our friendships, or our families—or all of the above—said to us one day, “You know, you really ought to be a writer"? That’s the temporal effect we’re having, whether we realize it or not. If we put any writing out there in public…if we lay ourselves and our aspirations out there for the world to see…if we counsel, mentor, guide, or edit one other writer along the way…we’re having a temporal effect, and it’s a good one. That, too, shall count toward the heavenly checkbook. (Yippeee!) But it’s nice to consider that it also counts here on earth. And while we may not have thousands of people applauding us for those efforts…someone, somewhere, is benefiting from them.And they’re passing it on. And so on. And so on. Mind-boggling, isn’t it? Whenever I coach a school musical (of which I’ve done a few), or a performance of any kind, I always try to put into my pep talk the following sentiment: Remember when you go out there that not everybody can do what you’re about to do. Very few people can put themselves on the line the way you’re going to. They either don’t have the talent, or they don’t have the courage. You have both, and that’s why you’re going out there. But remember, most of all, that somewhere in that audience is a kid who’s never been to a live performance of this kind before. A kid who’s going to sit there and watch and listen to you…and be enthralled. A kid who’s going to come out of this performance this day saying, "I wanna do THAT!" Someone did that for you, and that’s why you’re here today. So when you go out there today…remember that kid. Perform for that kid. Make magic for that kid. In the end, that’s all that matters. So make the magic, as only you can. Someday, someone else will be where you are now, eternally glad you did. I think if we could all give ourselves that pep talk, preferably on a daily basis (!)…it’d make the rest of this feel a lot better. I’m going to try to remember it myself, and I hope you can, too. Now, let’s go make magic happen! Janny