Writerly resolutions for 2018: say hello to the rest of our lives

(This post is a reprint. The writer will return to regular schedule January 2, 2018.)

For this final entry about writers’ resolutions for 2018, I want to write about something besides writing. Notice, this isn’t about quitting. It’s about expanding, about having a life outside of writing that nourishes the craft emotionally as well as physically.

It’s often said that most writers can’t support themselves solely as writers. And that’s not a bad thing. History (and literature) are full of examples of authors whose “outside” job actually led to their writing. Or informed it. Or just made them better writers by broadening their experience and sympathy.

image: pixabay

Take doctors, for instance. Medicine may hardly seem like a profession for those with a literary bent (although for several years I’ve attended a local Literature + Medicine conference aimed at using literature to aid medical workers.) But medicine is among the professions which have historically produced major literary figures. And not just by writing about medicine.

Consider the careers of Anton Chekov. Or Abraham Verghese. Even Arthur Conan Doyle. (Where would his Sherlock Holmes have been without Dr. Watson?)

Or consider the late Oliver Sacks, who was still in active medical practice nearly forty years after his first bestseller, Awakenings, was turned into a popular film. After a further string of popular and critically-acclaimed books, Sacks could probably have afforded financially to drop his medical career. But he knew the value of having a day job.

I’ve thought of making a list of all the doctors who maintained practices while writing. Or all the dentists, lawyers, teachers, civil servants, business people and others who continued to write, and write well, while practicing their “day jobs.” But it would fill all the room in all my posts for the rest of this year. 

For now, I’ll just urge all of us to seize the advantages a day job offers for enhancing writing in the coming year.

I trained and worked for several years as a journalist, then spent nearly twenty-five years of my working life in customer service work because my family needed the regular hours a nonwriting job provided. But even as a journalist I’d never have learned the breadth of information I did as a customer service rep. In the course of talking about their financial issues, callers gave me a wealth of information about their personal lives, ways of speaking and making a living I couldn’t have learned in a lifetime of reading research articles.

How else would I have known what it’s like to be a welfare mom, a truck driver, an accountant, a prisoner, an immigrant student? Heard how many dialects there are among Southerners, Midwesterners, New Englanders? Or what it’s like to be very old or disabled or just plain furious at life?

Since retiring from the bureaucracy of a large government agency with the (fulfilled) intention of writing more, I’ve volunteered at a nonprofit organization that provides therapy through horsemanship. It reconnects me with a love of horses developed from early life on a working cattle ranch. And it’s opened even more possibilities for characters and settings.

For 2018, let’s embrace our “day jobs,” whatever working hours those entail, both for themselves and their application to our writing. And consider volunteering or pursuing a hobby outside of writing. Who knows where it may lead? 

Tragedy + Time = Comedy: the essential Stephanie Klein

Stephanie Klein

How had I lived so long and gone to so many writing conferences without running into blogger/memoirist/TV script writer Stephanie Klein, the petite New Yorker with a head of wild copper-colored curls who was the keynote speaker at the 2017 DFW WritersConference in Dallas. 

The popularity of her original blog, Greek Tragedy, focused on life after her divorce. Its popularity gained her the title “Internet Queen of Manhattan,” and led to the publication of her first book, Straight Up and Dirty: A Memoir, about moving on after divorce. It was followed by a second book, Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp. A third memoir, about her too improbable to be fake stint as a Girl Scout leader in Texas, is in the works.

In this post, and especially for the benefit of those who already heard her conference speech, I’ll also include quotes from the conference’s “Book to Film” class whose speaker, Dallas film executive Will Evans, invited her to join him, as well as from her role as a panelist on “What Makes a Publishable Memoir.” (No, I have not been stalking Klein. How could you even think that? These were purely serendipitous occurrences!)

So, how does a magna cum laude graduate of Barnard College, who married the “mensch-nest door” move on after her perfect marriage came to a bitter end? Wildly. And detailed in detail on her blog.

(The popular post about the guy who was into Pam cooking spray – “and not because he wanted to cook me an egg” – had to be taken off before her first book came out. Who, her publisher asked, would pay money to read about it if they could see it for free on the internet? When asked, she first told the questioner in the audience “there’s a book in the lobby, it’s in chapter one.” In response to later questioning, she would only admit that it involved one person going north while the other was intent on going south. With cooking spray. Hopefully, no gorgeous auburn locks were injured in the process.)

That’s the kind of bone-deep honesty that she recommends for memoirists. Well, that and what she called “the observational stuff. . . what the artist notices that makes the good story. Not the expected, not the cliché.

“Don’t ask permission to tell the stories you need to tell. People will connect with you because you’re authentic and real. And not because of how promiscuous you are. The minute you fear what other people will say is the minute you become inauthentic.”

(She then confessed that even she thinks it’s a little weird that she dedicated the first book to her father. In answer to his hope that she “took a little poetic license” in her telling, she can only say, “OK, Dad, whatever let’s you sleep at night.”)

Her second book, Moose (“and not just Moose, but Moooose” as she heard in her school hallways), is the source of her equation: tragedy + time = comedy. (She confessed to recently taking a course in writing comedy, “which left me constipated,” but insisted she doesn’t try to sound funny, and it’s not her fault that people find her writing hilarious.)

Still, she’s happy to take the cash, including payment for writing the pilot for a TV series based on Straight Up and Dirty. She did, however, turn down a request to do a reality show of her life, which includes a new husband and twin children. A camera in the house? “Sounds like a recipe for a second divorce!”

See Klein’s site for more, including book excerpts, and musings on relationships, food, beauty, and parenting, where “Mother,” she says, is a verb.

(Tomorrow: author J.C. Davis’s tips on crafting fabulous first sentences for our own books, and a contest for those who dare to craft the truly awful.)

Wordcraft -- Resolution IV: do something else

This is the final entry in writing resolutions for 2013. Before you throw in the towel -- or your notebook -- I’m not talking about quitting as a writer, but about doing something in addition to writing.

It’s a topic more than usually on my mind because the adventure classics discussion Wednesday will be about a physician-writer who’s never given up his nonwriting job. Dr. Oliver Sacks is still in active medical practice nearly forty years after his first literary bestseller, Awakenings, turned into a popular film.

In another post (“The importance of being employed,” January 18, 2012) I noted that most writers can’t support themselves solely as writers. After a string of popular and critically-acclaimed books, Dr. Sacks probably could afford to drop his medical career. But he knows the value of having a day job as well.

I considered making a list of all the doctors who maintained practices while writing. Or all the dentists, lawyers, teachers, civil servants, business people and others who continued to write, and write well, while practicing their “day jobs.” But it would fill all the room in all my posts for the coming year.

For now, I’ll just hope you’ll seize all the advantages your day job offers for your writing in the coming year.

I trained and worked for several years as a journalist, then spent nearly twenty-five years of my working life in customer service work because my family needed the regular hours a nonwriting job provided. But even as a journalist I’d never have learned the breadth of information I did as a customer service rep. In the course of talking about their financial issues, callers gave me a wealth of information about their personal lives, ways of speaking and making a living I couldn’t have learned in a lifetime of researching articles.

How else would I have known what it’s like to be a welfare mom, a truck driver, an accountant, a prisoner, an immigrant student? Heard how many dialects there are among Southerners, Midwesterners, New Englanders? Or what it’s like to be very old or disabled?

Since retiring from the bureaucracy of a large government agency with the (fulfilled) intention of writing more, I’ve volunteered at a nonprofit organization that provides therapy through horsemanship. It reconnects me with a love of horses developed from early life on a working cattle ranch. And it’s opened even more possibilities for characters and settings.

For 2013, embrace your “day job,” whatever working hours it entails, for itself and its applications to your writing. And consider volunteering or pursuing a hobby outside of writing. You never know where it may lead.

(Need more -- or different -- writing resolutions? See my previous year’s list, “Resolution 1: subscribe,” “Resolution number 2: Join other writers,” “Resolution 3: Get out there!” and “Resolution 4: Pay it forward,” from 2011.)

#

I can’t end another year of blogging without acknowledging readers from dozens of countries on six continents who have viewed these posts more than 10,000 times, including the ten brave souls who read my first post in August 2010. Thanks!

Wordcraft -- When nobody knows you

I got an email from ArmadilloCon in Austin, Texas, http://armadillocon.com/, asking which potential writing workshop leaders I was interested in. I recognized several names on the list but when I looked up the rest, for some of them, there was no information available.

Actually, in the case of one poor guy, Google listed his name as belonging to a Confederate soldier in the U.S. Civil War. Which would make him, at a minimum, well over 150 years old. Maybe it was a reference to his couple of times great-grandfather. But intriguing though the possibility was, a nineteenth century Civil War veteran seemed unlikely to be writing science fiction in the twenty-first century.

The point of this, besides to caution you against naming your kids for distant ancestors, is that if you’re writing -- writing seriously enough to be thought able to tell others how to write -- you need to get your name on the Internet.

I know, I know, everybody in your writing group knows what you write. Your instructors and mentors know. Maybe even everybody who’s anybody in literature in Austin, Texas, knows. But can they tell the world what genre you write in? What stories you’ve had published, and when and where to find writing samples? And is the information accessible to somebody who doesn’t know you from, say, a 150-year-old man?

So how do you get information about your writing to the public, especially if you have few or no publication credits? Well, you’re looking at one way -- blogging. It’s cheap, free even, although it takes a lot of links posted on the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn to persuade search engines to pick up your URL. (Here’s where you call in favors from all those writing group friends.)

Or you can set up a website, which costs, but not as much as you probably fear, especially if you’re willing to use off the rack templates. I used www.godaddy.com/ and its Website Tonight option. I’m a born and bred technophobe, so the result wasn’t pretty. But it’s out there. Or maybe you have a friend who’s good at stuff like that.

Even if you haven’t published yet, writing on your website or blog -- even on social media, which doesn’t cost anything either -- can tell people what you write and how you write, so they’ll have some clue whether they’d want to be in a writing workshop with you. And of course, if you’re published, share your blog or website address in your biography.

You may say you don’t want to appear on the Internet because you value your privacy. Are you kidding? You hope to share your writing someday with thousands, maybe millions of readers, right, but you’re worried about privacy?

It’s okay to allow your family their privacy. It’s okay to create decent passwords to keep your accounts from getting hacked. But remember that with every word you write, like it or not, you reveal yourself. And that’s great, because we read to learn what other human beings -- what we ourselves -- are like.

#

Conference update -- Last day to get a 20 percent discount on registration for the Houston Writers’ Guild’s October conference is this Saturday, June 30. See
www.houstonwritersguild.com for details. YA author Nikki Loftin is a featured speaker, and I can attest from hearing her this past spring that she is dynamic.