My Medicine
When my friends Jen Louden and Lisa Jones invited me to Boulder, Co. this summer to go on a little hiking/writing retreat with them I leapt at the chance. Not only did I look forward to seeing my pals, I was looking forward to some real writing time. Earlier in the summer I’d spent a week with my writing mentor, Deena Metzger, at her place in Topanga, with 20 other writers, but I hadn’t done much writing since then. I’d liked what I’d started at Deena’s – it was juicy – and I figured these two friends would give me the ass kicking that I needed. They’d challenge me, they’d get past all my clever shit and push me to the wall for more. In my mind, Jen and Lisa were the real writers, while I’ve considered myself more of a writing teacher over the last 15 years. Yes I’ve written books, and yes I write with my students 10 times a week, and yes I write blog posts that I care about, but Lisa and Jen sat down daily to work on their own writing projects – their books. They had discipline, and both had agents who encouraged them. They’d made actual deadlines for themselves, and Lisa was positively unstoppable after 12 publishers had passed on her latest book. She was sure she knew how to make the right changes and she couldn’t wait to get back to work. I was in awe of her. Writing is hard work. I don’t need to tell you that. Teaching is not as hard for me, and Wild Writing – the...
The Duchess of Coolsville
So there we were at the Rickie Lee Jones concert in San Francisco a few months ago – my pal Ann and I. We thought we were going to be late, but it turned out Rickie Lee was even later. Apparently her band’s bus had broken down 8 hours away and had finally chug-a-lugged it into San Francisco…
How To Get Your Writing Mojo On
Dear Writers and Creative Friends, If I’m about anything, it’s helping writers to take the lead out and get some ink on the page. I’m a process person – I believe Mo is Bettah when it comes to writing – which is to say, let’s get a lot of words on the page so that eventually, good golly, a story will emerge. It’s kind of like that joke about walking into a room full of horse shit. There’s got to be a pony around here somewhere. That’s what I mean when I encourage people to write as poorly as possible. What I’m saying is, don’t sit there huffing and puffing over the right word or the right line. You’ll find both, but start writing. Perfection is very rarely going to come out of you like lightening the minute the pen hits the page. The beginning of your piece, that awesome lead, might spill out of you on the second page of your messy scrawl – but that’s what it took – if you’re lucky – two pages of messy crap to find the one thing you meant to say. I support that kind of murky goodness. That’s my practice and I would never ask you to do something I wasn’t willing to do myself. I know that if I’m just willing to keep the pen moving a story of some sort will emerge eventually. I might not even love it, by the way, but it doesn’t matter. Every piece I write makes me a better writer. I’m in it for the long haul. It takes patience and...