Tag Archives: editing

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.

Practice: Word War

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, ,

Word wars can be played by yourself or with another person, or against up to forty or so people. Probably more. Here’s how it works:

  1. Set a timer.
  2. Write.

Here’s how it actually works:

  1. Procrastinate.
  2. If in a group: chat a bit. Chat a bit more.
  3. Realize your writing time is going away like that last few minutes between the alarm going off in the morning and the time you actually HAVE TO BE UP AND MOVING NOW NOW NOW.
  4. Decide on a time. Fifteen minutes is good. Five minutes is good. Sixty minutes is a marathon but if you’ve never scooped your brain out with a teaspoon, you can give it a try.
  5. Procrastinate.
  6. Realize the timer is going.
  7. Write.

Realistic tips:

  1. Set a timer for 5-25 minutes.
  2. If you are working by yourself, allow for 5 minute breaks between wars.
  3. Before the timer starts, write down your beginning word count.
  4. Double check your inner editor. This is no time to talk to yourself, so put a gag on it. You are here to get ink on the page or pixels on the screen.
  5. Press start.
  6. Write.
  7. Do not look back.
  8. If you get stuck or are trying to think of that one minor character’s name or if a gun really weighs this much, write an easily locatable symbol and move on. I use [xx].
    A. Later, I will find every [xx] and replace or remove it as necessary.
    B. If you ever read a work I have written and you stumble upon [xx], I meant to put it there. Don’t worry about it.
  9. Stop when the timer goes ding!
  10. Write down your ending word count. Subtract your beginning word count from your ending word count.
  11. Set the timer. Your goal is to beat whatever was calculated in step 9.


Talking to Yourself: MFK Fisher

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , ,

I have an abridged version of MFK Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf. The original version was written as a cookbook to stave the wolf of starvation from the door during World War II. It included such ideas as cooking a quiche with sawdust to stretch the recipe.


When she revisited the book sometime later, she included editorial comments in brackets suchly []. So that when I read How to Cook a Wolf, it included that recipe for stretching a recipe with sawdust to feed four and in brackets she included the line “if three are not your friends”.


The line struck me in the haven of my own mind. It was wryly funny, and darkly realistic, and yet. Her re-visitation of the work was something few artists are able to do, we believe, and yet the avenue is open to us all. Think of the painter who reuses a canvas to paint a portrait of a sunrise where once he had painted yet another portrait of his grieving wife. Letters were once written vertically and then horizontally to conserve paper.


A commentary to our past selves is a conversation with a now stranger. Be kind. Don’t light that draft on fire. It says something important, even if you are not the person now that it was speaking to when you wrote it.