Publisher’s Weekly compares Linda Schlossberg’s Life in Miniature to Mona Simpson’s Anywhere but Here, and my dear friend and looovely writer Terry Gamble calls it “poignant and riveting.” I’ve got it on my TBR pile, and only wish I were in the bay area this month. I’m missing two great opportunities to meet Linda in person: at Book Passage on the 18th, and on West Coast Live on the 22nd. I love her post below, though, about putting writing on the “to do” list and getting it done. Great writing advice! – Meg
At my first book reading for Life in Miniature a former student of mine asked a question I did not expect: “How did you manage to finish the novel, and how did you know when you were done?”
What a smart question, I thought to myself. Everyone else is asking what “sparked the idea” for the novel, or how I “found inspiration,” but no one seems interested in the long, tedious process of revising and editing, and the moment at which you stop and say, “That’s enough.”
But how to answer the question honestly? I wanted to say that one night the heavens parted and the moon suddenly broke through the clouds and illuminated my manuscript (here, cue fantasy of self in Merchant-Ivory style film, with long, flowing tresses, writing by candlelight in a gothic mansion), but the truth was far more mundane: I had a deadline from my publisher that I had to meet, and to do so I would need to write almost every day. No moonlight for me. No sparks. And therein lay the secret of finally finishing the novel, which was to de-romanticize the writing process, get my head out of the proverbial clouds (or at least, my proverbial ass), and treat writing as just another task on my daily “to do” list.
I know it doesn’t sound very exciting: Clean litter box. Pick up dry cleaning. Write something new. But it was only by cultivating an “unromantic” relationship to writing that I was finally able to finish the novel that had been nagging at me for years, and that was taking up a disproportionate amount of space in my emotional world.
For years I did not follow this sort of advice at all. I mooned about and walked by rivers and lakes and spent a lot of time in coffee shops, feeling “artistic” and misunderstood and at the mercy of divine forces: Will I be able to write anything today? Sometimes I would get a few pages written, and more often than not I’d like what I’d done, but it always felt like a matter of luck: Maybe today I’ll manage to write something. Maybe —if the stars are aligned correctly, and I wear my lucky ring, and my favorite barista is working— I’ll feel “inspired.” Every once in a while I would have an especially bad day and worry that I would never write anything again.
When Life in Miniature was accepted for publication and I had to make revisions to the manuscript, I realized that I could no longer afford to be so superstitious: I had to finish the darn thing. It was then that I learned an important lesson: the problem with “waiting for inspiration to strike” is that it puts you in a passive position in relation to your own talent. The more I stopped waiting for the writing spirit to move me, and the more ordinary and everyday I allowed my creative process to become, the easier it was to write. And the funny thing was, my writing got better. I wasn’t so scared of it anymore—I wasn’t just waiting by the phone for it to call, as it were. Soon I was able to seek it out and tell it in very calm and firm terms what I needed. I started to feel like a “real writer”—not someone who “just happened” to write every once in a while. And since I was producing something new almost every day, I was no longer scared that I would never write again.
How did this change come about, after so many years of solitary rambling and pretentious soul-searching? I joined a writing group. The meetings took place at the library, and the premise was simple: show up when you can, and write something new. Unlike other groups I’d been in, we didn’t exchange or critique each other’s work— we just sat around a table together and wrote. This was a revolutionary concept for me.
I’ll admit that we spent some of our time complaining. We also ate a lot of donuts. (And complained about eating donuts.) All of us felt as if we were struggling with our work, and many days one or another of us would walk in and sigh dramatically and say “I really don’t want to be here,” just to make the point clear. But the truth is, we all ended up writing something, and I finished the manuscript of Life in Miniature—in an air-conditioned, fluorescent-lit library, with nary a moonbeam in sight.
So my advice for every “aspiring writer” out there is stop waiting for inspiration—stop waiting for some magical spirit to infuse you—and approach your writing as something familiar and everyday. Soon you won’t be able to imagine it otherwise. Now excuse me while I put the laundry in the dryer. – Linda
