Tag Archives: community

Community: Find Your Guru

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, , , , ,

When I was fourteen, I knew everything. And I was insufferable.

I can admit that now.

When I was fourteen, I attended a summer school for the performing arts*, creative writing unit, and accidentally lucked into the best room in the whole dorm. For six weeks, high schoolers from twelve to eighteen (I’m assuming) were trapped together with assigned strangers, to absorb as much art as our long-suffering teachers could shout at us. But like, in a quiet and artsy manner.

The roommate became a lifelong friend and we visited each other in high school, though she lived just north of LA and I lived in a tiny, tucked away desert town. One visit, I saw a how-to writing book on her bookshelf. I asked her about it. But I asked as a sixteen year old, two years into knowing everything, asks about things. I asked, What are you doing with that?

She said, it’s interesting and I like it.

Don’t we already know how to write? I asked, forgetting that we had spent six weeks learning how to write from Actual People. And how did she know she had a good book?

She said, Just pick someone you don’t disagree with.

It was still years before I picked up a how-to writing book. To find a guru, I had to put aside my pre-conceived notions of what I expected to receive. I needed to accept what I accept from any book: a new thought. I also needed to pick something that fit my mind space at the time. So the first how-to writing book I bought was Peter David’s Writing for Comics.

I was already a comic book fan, I loved Q and Star Trek, and I had no idea how to write a comic book and thought that might be fun to try. It’s a great form to study voice and dialogue, while learning to trust someone who is not you to realize the idea you believe you have put on the page. I held on to that guru for as long as I needed him. Then I got the next book.

My favorite writing book is The Portable Poetry Workshop. You’ll notice I don’t write poetry, but the exercises can be applied to prose and never fail. I’ve gained an appreciation for books on theory, personal essays, lists of rules that can be flexed and twisted and happily ignored as needed. In all these, I have developed judgment to determine what will work for me and what won’t. And to know that someday, that judgment will change, and what did not work then, will work now.

Through it all, I kept writing.

*California State Summer School for the Arts (CSSSA). Home to artists, quirks, and ants. Oh, the ants.

Community: Critique Partner

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, ,

I used to be terrified of showing my work to people. Sometimes, I still am. I know it’s not perfect, I know what I need to change, I know it’s crap. I wrote it just for me, for that piece of me that needed to see it existing in the world, and now I’ll put it in a drawer and never see it again.


My time is worth more than that.


And the me I wrote that story for is worth more than an imperfect, not-quite-what-I-meant-to-say work.


When I was in middle school, I had hair below my shoulders. You should know, as an adult, I have curly-wavy hair and a tight regiment of moisturizing haircare products. As a kid, I lived in the desert. And as a kid in the desert, we used Suave. We used whatever was cheapest and on sale, and that was Suave. So I spent many years with very dry hair that didn’t like a hairbrush and eventually, I just gave up when I ran into a mouse-sized tangle.


Around Christmas that year, as we were waiting at the ice cream shop after the middle school winter concert, my mother got a good look at the now-guinea pig sized tangle on my shoulder. “WHAT’S THIS?” she asked.


“That was a tangle I couldn’t work out,” I told her. “In September.”


Sometimes we know we have a problem. Sometimes we even kind of know what that problem is, and we even know how to fix it before it becomes a huge issue. Sometimes we still need another person to say that they can see the problem, too.


Anyway, that’s how you get a free chin-length bob in middle school.

Community: Nanowrimo

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , ,

One of the craziest ways to get a novel on the page and existing in the real world is to participate in Nanowrimo. I would not have survived all the way through grad school without it.


Just before the bottom dropped out of the economy, I was quietly flitting through grad school in a foreign country, talking to no one I didn’t live with and quietly fading into my own shadow. I had attempted National Novel Writing Month before – and failed horribly. This time, I had no social obligations, I had a lot of studying to do, but I also had nothing left to keep me going outside of textbooks and tests. Deep in my soul, I was bored.


Part of Nanowrimo is attending write-ins, getting together with your local writing community, and meeting people who are just as strange as you. After all, you’ve all promised to write 50,000 words in only 30 days.


We met in Leeds, in York, on the train and in the rain and in cafes and in tiny little alleyways that had existed since before running water came to that part of England. It was magical. It was wild. I created utter crap. It was great.


I have done Nanowrimo nearly every year since and while I created several book-shaped objects, it was also what prompted me to dust off my very first failed project and to try again. That was draft 2, and a few other drafts. More importantly, the writing community in Nanowrimo has consistently been the same type of wild, creative, welcoming energy that promises yes, you can do this. Whatever this is.


They will help you gag your inner editor, they will help you work out that one detail, they will pick you up and kick you in the butt when you’ve spent the last ten minutes starting at a blinking cursor. We’ve all read those essays and articles about how writing is solitary. It exists just passed the door of your mind, a door through which only you can enter. They can’t turn the knob or help you push it open; but they can help kick you through it. If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend looking up the Nanowrimo website.

www.nanowrimo.org