In Search of the bon mot

I suppose it’s writer’s block.

The swirling of ideas without focus. The blank brain mirroring white screen. The missing vocabulary. The onslaught of clichés…the inability to come up with a single fresh thought.

And vining around writer’s block, self-loathing. The inner critic who says, There’s no market for what you want to write. You’ll never land an agent, because you write trite tripe. The culture has moved on. Nobody’s interested in love stories anymore unless they’re loaded with toilet humor and sex.

When I began the novel submission process, I knew this day would come. And knowledge gave me a certain power over the voice of self-defeat…at least, for the first week or two. But momentum only lasts so long. And as I feel myself slowing, slowing, it gets harder to keep the pedals turning, until at last, the very thought of writing a blog entry on a Monday morning makes me think I’m unworthy of the gift.

The great thing about writing both music and prose is that when I stall out on one, I can shift to the other. Trouble is, even the music is about words right now. Texts are the bane of my existence. Oh, for someone to collaborate with, who writes gorgeous texts that make us rethink all our inner clichés!  Right now I feel like I’m methodically pulverizing my head against a titanium wall. (How’s that? Did I freshen up a cliché?)

Oh dear, here I am, writing about writing again. But this is what’s on my mind.

So I’m going to turn the tables on you. I want you to jar me out of my paralysis.  Since you are my target audience, I’m going to draw on your collective wisdom. Can you answer either of these questions for me?

  1. Think romantic comedy. Not Ghosts of Girlfriends Past romantic comedy (really some raunchy moments), but While You Were Sleeping and Return to Me romantic comedy. What books/authors have you read that echo those kinds of stories—with or (preferably) without humor?
  2. Here’s my song refrain…I’ll take a risk and set it out there, in the hopes that someone can inspire me with a good Scripture passage and/or focal point for the verses, which cover six or seven pages of scribbling and still haven’t come into focus:

Rise up, rise up singing
Leave behind all that bound you.
Christ is risen,
There is nothing now that can harm you.

Published in: on April 26, 2010 at 5:39 am  Comments (2)  
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Sung, Spoken, Secret

“People don’t really talk like that, you know.”
 “No, but they think that way.”
            —-Diane Kruger (Abigail Chase) and Nicholas Cage (Ben Gates) in National Treasure.

What I love about writing is that it lets me communicate in poetry without sounding self-important and condescending. Never in reality could I talk about a filigree-and-marmalade sunrise. People would look at me as if I’d picked up a spear and donned a breastplate and helmet with horns—and rightly so.

And yet I notice that some things that work in speech don’t work on the page. For one thing, if we wrote out all the dropped “ng’s’s, we’d look like a bunch of hicks, even though that’s how we speak every day. I’m sittin’ down, havin’ a drink.

On a deeper level, I’ve found that I cannot write characters who talk about God and faith and belief explicitly without them looking like religious freaks. And despite the depth and passion of my religious convictions, I do think that is a bad thing. There is an inevitable tension between the things of earth and the things of Heaven, yet the Church exists within the world. It can’t operate in a separate reality. Which of course, was true even when Jesus was treading the dusty paths of the Middle East.

The point is that, in reality, in the context of a discussion with friend or family—or in a blog post, for that matter—I can speak simply about the ways in which the hand of God has touched my life. But frame the same words in quotes and attribute them to a character in a novel, and suddenly they look holier-than-thou. This is why I can’t read Christian fiction. It’s too preachy. I tune out.

And yet change the context one more time—place the images and the insights into a song or hymn text—and suddenly they reach depths in the soul that we didn’t even know were there.

This is what I love about writing. The written word allows us to express both what is thought, but unspeakable, as well as the spoken, but unwritable. Liturgical texts, in particular, can make my breath catch. I live in awe of the great text writers—Dunstan and Cooney and Farrell, to name a very limited few—who are able to catch the essence of faith and use it to pierce the soul. I aspire to write that poetry…I receive the occasional gift from a wandering Spirit…but I’m not that good at it.

There’s a danger in striving for eloquence, though. Eventually, it becomes too self-aware. The process of blogging, though it is an expression of myself, also insulates me from exposing my innermost emotions. Everything I write is honest, but it comes out through a filter—the filter of what is appropriate for public consumption. The more direct forms of written communication, the ones that should be most heartfelt (like a message on an anniversary card, for instance), suddenly feel far too intimate. Or perhaps it’s just that there doesn’t seem to be anything to say that I haven’t said a dozen times before. The writer in me recoils from insipid, sentimental words, no matter how true they are. It feels contrived.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this…this post has been hiding on my NEO for weeks, and with that last paragraph, it veered off in a wholly unexpected direction. Perhaps the point is simply to acknowledge reality, and let it all stew for a while longer, in the hopes that I’ll eventually come to a satisfying, literary kind of conclusion. If so, I’ll be sure to share a spoonful.

Published in: on September 6, 2009 at 2:31 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Inspiration, Insomnia

I had forgotten.

The creative process is a consuming one in any form. I tend to get my brain wound up, and then, even if my entire being is crying out for rest, I can’t get to sleep. It can happen after critique group, it can happen when I have a new article assignment or an idea for a blog post—even after scrapbooking. But nothing fuels my insomnia quite like writing music.

Writing music winds my soul into a tightly-coiled spring. I get music stuck in my head anyway—for days and days on end. When I’m working on something new, it’s weeks and weeks. Words and melodies rocket in circles in my head, preventing me from dropping off to sleep. They percolate so persistently in the background that even after I do fall asleep, they crouch in readiness, waiting for a change in sleep state—and then the music starts up again, like an alarm clock. I wake up, and the problem I haven’t yet solved sets my blood instantly to boiling again.

Even the obsession of prose writing, which is a pretty consuming fire in its own right, seems mild by comparison. I’ve been blessed to find writing gigs on topics I really care about, so those projects can keep me up at night, too. But for the most part, I’ve learned to overcome that obstacle to rest. Not so with music.

Caught as I have been in a long musical dry spell, I had forgotten all this. I’ve been puzzling about it this week, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it happens to me because the function is different. Magazines are read and discarded; a blog post is read but not usually revisited. Even a novel doesn’t usually warrant a second reading, unless it’s Austen or Tolkein or Rowling. But music—at least, music for worship—is meant to be experienced again and again, working its way down to the very core of those who sing it—until it takes on a life of its own—until it no longer belongs to me, but to the people of God.

It’s a humbling, overwhelming thing, to feel called to write this music. And hard. At least, words are hard for me. The music itself is pure joy. Even in music school I was a freak. I never minded theory, and after I started writing I became a theory nut. Fresh, unexpected chord progressions, voice leading, part writing—I glory in that stuff. I’ll stick my fingers in and dig in to it like Julianna does to her applesauce.

In the week since returning from NPM convention energized and inspired, with all the creative floodgates open, I’ve had a lot of trouble sleeping. Combined with Julianna waking up whining for water and Nicholas wanting to eat in the middle of the night, I am one tired mama. But even so, I’m grateful. Dry spells are good for puncturing my pride when it gets over-inflated. They remind me that inSpiration is a gift, not a right, and that the music isn’t mine. It comes from outside me, flows through me, and is given in turn to others, in the hope of making the world a better place.

Published in: on July 19, 2009 at 12:37 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Reflections on Text and Style

July 7, 2009: I began the day with “O God Beyond All Praising” and ended it with “Rockin’ the Runway,” which is essentially Contemporary Christian/Praise & Worship. In the middle I worked on my own hymn text, so while I stood at the concert tonight singing, I was also analyzing the texts.

Many of these songwriters—unlike me—are quite prolific. I envy them that; I love writing songs, but I wrestle constantly with text. For communal worship, I don’t want to speak in the first person, nor do I want to use the wagging finger “you.” And these days I insist on the syllables matching from verse to verse. I try to console my frustration by focusing on Stravinsky’s philosophy: the greater the limitation, the greater the art.

But the songwriters I heard tonight follow a totally different set of rules, and their music works for worship, too. The rules for CCM are a lot more relaxed, more tied to the spoken language. There’s something visceral about this music, the beat and the riffs and the way the words live so close to the heart, like the prayers you breathe and feel, but can’t find the words to say. These writers say them for us. Hymn texts are very elevated; they raise our sights—P&W grabs us right where we are. Detractors of either style of music could use this paragraph as ammunition, but the simple fact is that both styles are powerful, and prayerful, and I love them both—and everything in between.

For hundreds of years, the music of the Church was art music—medieval motets, the incredibly dense textures of the Renaissance, the long, drawn-out, (unusable) high Masses of the masters, and so on. Composers used popular tunes—drinking songs, even—as the basis for their sacred music, but not in their original form; they were always altered to suit the liturgy.

In the post-Vatican II world, popular styles have again been lifted from the culture and adapted for sacred use. In my lifetime we have traveled from the much-derided folk style through the music of the Jesuits, to the Haas/Haugen era, and beyond. The “new” music is P&W and Contemporary Christian. That all this has happened and continues to happen in less than 35 years illustrates just how rapidly the changes are occurring. Unstoppable, by the way, and thank God for that. There’s room for all musical styles in worship.

But I’m writing this at 12:27 a.m. and I am totally shot…must get Nicholas to go to sleep…must sleep… sleep…sleep…

Published in: on July 13, 2009 at 7:09 am  Leave a Comment  
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The Muscle That Is Exercised

Several years ago, a liturgical songwriter I admire made the comment that he hardly ever wrote any music anymore. This is a man whose gift with words, and his music in general, are really powerful, and it made me sad, wondering what caused his dry spell.

That was before Alex was born. At that time, I practiced flute a little, and I spent an hour a day writing music before I allowed myself to work on my novel. Inspiration struck at all times and in all forms, those days. I had to keep scratch paper, a pencil and a pen with me to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

Every child and every developmental stage increases the amount of attention and time that I spend mothering—which is as it should be. But the final result is that pieces of me that I once considered immovable have now been laid almost completely aside. Flute practicing, for instance. I play at church, and a little during lessons, but that’s about it these days. And writing music. I’ve spent so much time and energy on prose the last three years—because I’ve had obligations to meet, to editors and critique groups—that I’ve had to let the rest of it slide in order to meet my obligations as a wife and mother.

I miss playing flute. While I was warming up for a wedding a few weeks ago, I was horrified to discover that I could not play B to C# without hitting C natural in the middle. My pinchers simply refused to coordinate with each other. I must have sat there for fifteen minutes going back and forth, B-C#-B-C#, driving my husband and everyone in the wedding party, who were taking pictures, berserk.

Even more acutely, I miss writing music. As much as I love prose, writing music is still the most fulfilling part of my creative bug—the one that makes my heart swell and my throat constrict. But inspiration strikes rarely these days.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, and I realized: the creative muscle you exercise is the one that produces.

The solution, however, is not as simple as the problem would suggest.

The inspiration for prose comes from day to day life—from parenting three little ones, one with Down syndrome, and all the challenges and triumphs thereof. Musical inspiration, on the other hand, comes in the quiet, comes through a well-nourished reflective life, and there’s precious little that that when parenting little ones. And it’s not like I can just find quiet and poof, there’s music. Sometimes there are long, frustrating “quiet” periods in which I spend time but accomplish nothing. That doesn’t happen to me with prose, probably because I have so many projects underway at a time—but that assurance of productivity is why, with my limited time, I’ve focused my efforts there.

Once again, I’m navel-gazing. It might be a waste of time, except that I’m self-analyzing surrounded by a jungle gym covered with netting, foam wrappers and bungee cords…and approximately six gazillion kids, all screaming at the top of their lungs. So this is as good a use of time as any. Well…it might be better use of time to go climb around in the jungle gym with Alex. Hmm…

Hmmmmmmmmm….

Besides, while I was writing I came up with a strategy for spending some time at the piano this afternoon. So there!

Published in: on June 30, 2009 at 9:01 am  Leave a Comment  
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There’s nothing quite like a deadline…

As of ten minutes ago, I’m more or less done with my short story. I have one more question niggling the back of my brain, and I’m waiting for the all-seeing, all-knowing perspective of my critique group to help me find clarity. But with or without their response, I will be finished with my story tomorrow.

 

What brought on this quick end to a months-long ordeal? Simple: Tomorrow is the deadline for a competition that is just perfect for “The Third Day.” So, for better or for worse, by midnight tomorrow it will be all over.

 

Come to think of it, I’ve always done better knowing there was a time limit. Otherwise, I could tinker forever. Even today, I look at Beggars’ Queen and itch to fix things, tweak word choices—and it’s been published for two years!

 

There you go, people. The answer to writer’s block, to procrastination, to lack of self-confidence? DEADLINE.

Published in: on April 29, 2009 at 2:29 pm  Comments (1)  
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Procrastination

It’s psychological, I’m sure of it.

 

I’m so insecure about this short story that I keep clicking from place to place on my desktop, trying to put off writing the blog post about how I’m procrastinating finishing it.

 

Am I blocked? No—the darned story was “finished” eighteen months ago. But we all know what “finished” means. It means, “I have written a beginning, a middle, and an end, and fleshed it out. And now I will commence tearing it to shreds and re-seaming until it disintegrates from wear.”

 

“The Third Day” is too long for the inspirational market, and neither I nor anyone I asked to look at it came up with a way to shorten it. So I decided to rework it for the literary/mainstream market. I went back in to smooth and flesh out the transitions, and in the process I added a thousand words. Then I took three days off and started at the beginning for one last revision—the one in which I polish word and phrasing choices.

 

And that was when the procrastination began.

 

I have no confidence in my ability to tell a story to the literary market. I second guess every word choice. (And triple- and quadruple- and quintuple- guess.) Is my tone too colloquial? Or do I sound like I’m trying too hard to break into the literary market? What about references to God? Will they doom my story to rejection in a mainstream/literary market? Is the point of the story too obvious for the literati?

 

I could not come up with satisfactory answers to these questions, so I decided that the story must need more time to stew. So I set it aside and worked on a retreat presentation. And I blogged. And Googled. And did blog visits. And Facebook. And email. And picture organizing. And (gasp!) flute practicing.

 

But eventually, I had to own up to the truth. I was procrastinating. So for the last ten days, I have been crawling through the 18-page manuscript, one painful paragraph at a time. I have never (and yes, I do think the italics are warranted) had so much difficulty finishing a manuscript. Have you ever spent half an hour working on one sentence?

 

This morning I “finished” the last seven pages in an hour…which should tell you that I have yet another painful revision headed my way. But I needed to send it to my critique partners in time for meeting on Sunday, so there you are.

 

And in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that since I began writing this post, I have nursed, made three phone calls (but hey, they’re very important—I was calling legislators!) and played around on my blog. Clearly, I still have plenty of procrastination left in my bag of tricks.

Published in: on April 21, 2009 at 12:38 pm  Comments (2)  
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Too much–Too Long!

It is an occasion for thanks, and a little bit of frenetic freaking.

Writer’s block? What writer’s block!I have too much to do!!!!!

There is the long-standing commitment to finish the novel so I can be sending it out while I’m nursing around the clock for the next six months…There’s the  new Advent book idea, which is my first attempt at book-length nonfiction, and for which, so far, I have spent about twelve hours online looking to see What Is Out There And Who Has Put It There, and I still have that much more to figure out a list of publishers, before I ever manage to start writing the proposal…There is a new song that woke me up two different nights with a complete melody and text fragments, which I haven’t even begun to brainstorm the complete text…There is the need to look at my rejected music and see who I can send it out to next…

And of course, there’s Julianna sitting like a big girl at the kitchen table with tinsel in her hair, eating fresh bread with butter and honey and banging the plate every few seconds to make sure I come check on her. (Very cute.) And Alex, upstairs whining because he wants me to dress him. At least, I think that’s what’s going on. (He insists on sleeping naked for naps. Weirdest thing.)

Well, that’s my life. Nearly 3 hours on the computer trying to process books and publishers has left me completely shot, and it’s time to start dinner and start teaching lessons.

Whew!

Published in: on January 6, 2009 at 9:39 pm  Leave a Comment  

Momentum Revisited

Time is limited. Demands on it are not. Distractions abound, weariness interferes, sleepiness settles down over my brain in a heavy blanket that slows thought to a crawl. I sit at the computer and beat my way through it as best I can. Sometimes I do well. Sometimes I don’t.

 

In 1998 I began writing music. Well, writing seriously. Up till that point it was all scribbles and fragments. 1998 was when the Spirit first got in my head and shaped all the chaos into something real. For the next eight years or so, that was what I did—I wrote liturgical music. (Almost all of it very bad.) It was my work; fiction was playtime. But in 2006 I started working with prose, and for the last 2 ½ years, that has been my focus.

 

I love writing, and the Spirit moves there too. But I do get a niggling bothersome spot in the back of my mind sometimes, when I realize how long it’s been since I wrote a song. Where did the song inspirations go? Why did they quit? I console myself: well, God’s inspiring you differently now, that’s all. And I am writing music, just focusing on the instrumental music instead

 

But really, it’s the momentum. The creative muscle that is exercised is the one that churns out new ideas. When you have more than one creative muscle, and one is allowed to atrophy…well, you get the idea.

 

Yesterday morning I woke up at 4:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep. By 5:15 I was out the door for my run/walk. It was chilly and nearly dead silent outside, which is rare around here, a mile from I-70. As I jogged down the hill I asked God to help me quiet my brain so I could enjoy it. When my brain is shouting, the quiet might as well not even exist. And on the heels of that prayer came another: God, send me a song. Please? Just a liturgical song. I miss writing songs.

 

I finished my run, sat on the deck and watched the wind play in the darkened sycamore grove, came inside to start the daily routine. All morning the kids drove me crazy. Sick and tired after the long weekend in Illinois, crabby because Mommy was dragging them all over town, grocery shopping, picking up contact, talking to the swim school about scheduling…

 

I dropped them off at the home of some friends who had agreed to watch them while I went to the perinatal center for my 1st trimester screening ultrasound. The only thing I brought into the waiting room was my music notebook. I had an idea where to start, but found myself caught by an old 14th century prayer that I had printed, thinking that I would try to craft it into a song. The first attempt was cheesy and I knew it, but for once the inner critic didn’t shut me down. I simply tried again. I was so-so about the second attempt. The ultrasound tech called me in about four minutes later and that was the end of my writing time, but I promised that I would sit at the piano at naptime and see what could be made of it.

 

By the time I walked out of the ultrasound, three more pieces of the song puzzle had made their debut on the radio in my head. And when I did get down to the piano, I was astonished to find that my so-so refrain was actually pretty good.

 

For the past several months I have been gripey and negative. I wanted to blame it all on supplemental progesterone (shots in the butt, tablets at night), but I knew that some portion of my mood change would require attitude adjustment. I’m several days off progesterone now, and still struggling. The lightness I felt after that piano session…after writing an entire song in an hour and a half (that never happens)…the euphoria, the energy, the sincere, joyful thanks sent Heavenward—all of it reminded me that I haven’t been thankful in a long time. I’m so grateful to feel it again. Spiritual growth has been rather stagnant. Please God, I’m finally catching my momentum again.

Published in: on September 17, 2008 at 6:20 pm  Leave a Comment  

Time, Momentum, and Concentration: the anti-Writer’s Block

Momentum: the motion of a body or system, equal to the product of the mass of a body and its velocity.

            Antonym: paralysis.

Concentration: the act of bringing one’s efforts, faculties, etc., to bear on one thing.

            Antonym: distraction.

 

The idea of “home-based support services” is that the respite provider comes and takes the kid (or, in my case, kids) off your hands for a couple of hours, so that you can focus on something else.

 

The reality is that I’m working at a computer upstairs while Melinda tries to keep the kids occupied downstairs. The problem? They know I’m here. So Julianna is whining and crying, being a general PITA (this is called manipulation), and Alex keeps dragging imaginary dinosaurs to me so I can kick them out the window.

 

It’s instinctive behavior. Seriously.

 

I intended to write for an hour and then blog, but there is no concentration to be had, so we’re reworking the schedule.

 

As often as not, what we call writer’s block is really more a problem of momentum. Getting going on something takes a lot of mental effort, but once the gears are spinning, you can return from one day to the next and get going again with relative ease. I find that it’s less a problem for me when I’m working on short projects, i.e. articles or music, because I can focus on a small piece and finish in an hour or two.

 

The same is not true of novel writing. If I’m trying to develop a voice for a character, for instance, I need concentrated time to get into his or her head, and once there, I have to carry it throughout the book. If I’m trying to weave in a subplot, I have to spend a lot of time reading what’s already there, and figuring out where the narrative will allow me to insert whole scenes, or work the subplot into existing ones.

 

Once the gears are turning, I only need concentration. Unfortunately, these days the only concentration I get is if I remove myself or the children. I’m rarely able to work during respite visits, though, because I don’t have a laptop, and there isn’t any way to seal myself off from the household.

 

Two words: nap…time.

 

Which is now. 55 minutes to the arrival of my first lesson. Time to stop blogging and get to work.

Published in: on June 27, 2008 at 6:09 pm  Comments (3)  
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