Chapter Three

Writing as Practice

“Anything we fully do is an alone journey.”
—Natalie Goldberg

Now that you know how to engage your muse, it’s time to marry craft and inspiration and put it on the page. This is the part where you actually have to write something. Where you sit down and write word after word for hours a day every day until you reach The End. This is otherwise known as practice.

The word practice gets a bad rep. It reminds us of all those painful hours we spent practicing the piano as a kid. Or at least that’s what it reminds me of: suffering under the tutelage of Sister Elizabeth at St. Peter and Paul’s Elementary School in Cincinnati, Ohio. Sister Elizabeth was not one of those lovely singing nuns from The Sound of Music. She was old and mean and scary looking and wielded her brown wooden ruler like a kendo master. I was seven years old when my parents got a piano and signed me up for lessons. Neither of them played the piano, and I don’t remember wanting to play—at the time I was all about my new bicycle—but nonetheless all good 1960s parents got their kids piano lessons, and my parents were nothing if not perfect 1960s parents.

I was supposed to practice playing the piano an hour a day, with my little hands curved in the shape of what Sister Elizabeth called pigpens. I had no idea what she was talking about; I’d never seen a pigpen before. All I knew about pigs was from the story The Three Little Pigs, and they lived in houses made of straw and wood and brick, none of which featured curves. Sister Elizabeth’s image of a pigpen did not resonate with me; even at the tender age of seven I already trusted stories more than I trusted grown-ups.

Those who attended Catholic schools can guess what happened next. Whenever my fingers failed to curl into this proscribed pigpen-style arch, out came the ruler. Sister Elizabeth would smack my hands, hard, time and time again, over the course of every lesson. To add insult to injury—the default mode of wicked teachers everywhere—a very displeased Sister Elizabeth called my parents in for a special teacher/parent conference, in which she informed them that Paula Sue’s progress at the piano was unsatisfactory. Not because I couldn’t transform my fingers into pigpens but—horror of horrors—because my parents had failed to exert the proper discipline on their only child. They had failed to make me practice.

My parents were mortified. Especially my father, who was a captain at the time, teaching ROTC at Xavier University.

It was bad enough for a good Catholic to be called on the carpet by a nun for being a subpar parent, but for a captain in the U.S. Army to be reprimanded by a civilian over disciplining his child—well, that was simply unacceptable.

My punishment was twofold: (1) two lessons a week instead of one with the triumphant Sister Elizabeth, and (2) practice, practice, and more practice, supervised on good days by my compassionate mother and on bad days by my far more rigorous father.

I hated Sister Elizabeth, I hated the piano, and, most of all, I hated practice. My reprieve came as it always did: We moved. (This is the glorious part of moving, the part no one ever talks about. If you hate a place, or its people, or just who you are while you’re there, moving is a get-out-of-jail-free card that grants you a new start.) My dad went to Korea, and Mom and I went to Oklahoma to live until he returned a year later. The piano went into the garage. Sometimes, when no one was looking, I would sneak in and play it, just for fun.

That was practice, too, but it wasn’t fun enough to keep me coming back often enough to make a difference. I still can’t play the piano, and the truth is, I don’t much care. What I did practice as a child was reading: I read all the time, I grew to be a very good reader, and now I make a living reading. Of course, I also practiced ballet and tap dancing and the guitar and cooking, and while I’m no dancer or musician or chef, I still use those skills in my adult life from time to time.

If you hate the word practice, you probably have a Sister Elizabeth in your past as well. But you must have liked something well enough as a child to practice it, whether you called it that or not. What you liked to practice when you were a kid—the flute or free throws, computers or crochet—can inform your writing practice today.

Showing Up

“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.”
—Jane Yolen

Woody Allen once said that 90 percent of success is showing up. Allen practices what he preaches: He’s been showing up at his typewriter—the very same 1950s-era manual Olympia portable SM-3—for the past fifty years, producing a breathtaking oeuvre of jokes, cartoons, plays, monologues, essays, short stories, and, of course, scripts. When he finishes one piece, he slips another piece of paper into the typewriter.

Life comes with millions of built-in distractions. Some of these distractions—making a living and working out and raising kids and running a household—may be nonnegotiable. Others—television and hobbies and social media—may be up for examination. But whatever the distractions that clutter your day, you can declutter your time and carve out a clean, spare space in which to write.

This time is critical. Most successful writers have a regular writing schedule, and they keep to it. Most write every day. Annie Dillard writes in the mornings and then goes out to lunch. John Updike wrote every weekday and took weekends off. Maya Angelou rented a hotel room in her hometown and checked herself in from 6:30 A.M. to 2 P.M. to write every day.

Showing up every day to write is one of the rules you break at your peril. And yet it’s one that many writers take a long time to learn, myself included. When my kids were little, I wrote during their naps and after they went to bed, but once I got my first nine-to-five job as a reporter, I found it much harder to make the time to work on my fiction. And it wasn’t just because I was too busy.

This was partly because the creative impulse—the itch we creative people need to scratch on a daily basis to stay sane—was often satisfied by the demands of writing and editing stories for the paper. I had always counted on that compulsion to get me to the blank page, but by the time I got home from work, I’d already filled tons of blank pages. My creative self was spent.

Another factor affected my ability to find time for my novel as well. As a journalist, you’re a working writer. You don’t need inspiration to show up; it’s your job to show up. You write what you’re told to write; your editor and the news itself dictate what you write and when you write it. You write a specified number of inches for the paper about a given topic, and you do it fast. There’s no time for writer’s block; there’s no time to panic or procrastinate. Your deadline is a hard stop; if you miss your deadline, your story doesn’t appear in the paper—and you are out of a job.

As a gainfully employed reporter, my parameters were very clear—and I worked well within them. But when left on my own as a freelance fiction writer, I faltered. No deadline? No output. Without the pressure of a hard stop, I rarely even started. I consoled—and excused—myself by telling anyone who would listen that being a single working mom who wrote all day and cared for the kids all night made it impossible for me to do anything else. I felt very virtuous and very sorry for myself.

Until I met Rob. Rob was hired on at the same business publication where I worked, and we commuted together to the office forty miles each way from Santa Cruz to Monterey. It was two hours a day stuck in a car with a writer who bettered me in every way. Rob was already a published author; his first novel had been published by a small literary press in San Francisco. I read it and admittedly only understood enough of it to know that I was sharing my commute with a guy way smarter and more productive than I.

Rob came from the “no excuses” school of writing. Forget deadlines and creative impulses and kids and jobs and everything else. Writers write.

When I told him my writer’s sob story, he told me that he got up every morning at 4 A.M. to write. By the time he picked me up, he’d already put in two hours of writing fiction. Morning person, I thought, cursing my own late-night biorhythms.

But as it turned out, I couldn’t chalk up the fact that he wrote fiction every day and I did not to his being blessed with the circadian rhythms of a rooster. Rob wrote when he could. He couldn’t write during the day because he was at the office. He couldn’t write at night because he was watching his two-year-old daughter and six-month-old twins (!) while his wife worked the late shift. So he wrote before the sun came up. Every morning. Rain or shine or teething.

Rob taught me that writers write, come what may. I learned that if I wasn’t writing fiction, that was okay—at this point I was the only one who needed me to write my novel—but that I had no one to blame but myself.

The same is true for you. If you want to be a writer, don’t leave your writing to chance. Schedule time to write into your daily life—and then show up.

Taking Your Seat

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
—Stephen King

Okay, so you’ve carved out the time to write. You’re setting your alarm an hour earlier every morning, or you’ve given up The Big Bang Theory reruns, or you’re staying up after your family has gone to bed to write because, as Elizabeth Jolley says, “I am not needed in their dreams.”

You’ve got the time. Now what? Now you sit down and write.

This is where the trouble often starts. You sit down at your dining room table, whose surface now holds only your computer, ready to write. Then you get up because your butt hurts and you’d forgotten how uncomfortable your dining room chairs are and you couldn’t possibly sit here and create for any length of time. Or you sit down on your couch, cross-legged, your laptop balanced on your knees, ready to write. Then you get up because your stomach growls and you realize that you’re hungry and you know the synapses in your brain won’t fire properly without sufficient protein. Or you sit at your desk during your office’s official lunch hour, door closed, ready to write. Then you get up because your colleague knocks on the door to remind you that it’s the boss’s birthday and everyone’s taking her out to lunch, and while you could miss it, you are up for that promotion and as you’re not successful enough as a writer quite yet to quit your day job, you’d better make nice and go.

Another day’s writing avoided.

Taking your seat—even when you’ve made the time—can prove more difficult than you anticipated. But it’s usually simply getting started that is tough. We aren’t talking about a true writer’s block here; we’ll go into that later in chapter thirteen. We’re talking the low-grade unease that hits us whenever we sit down to write, the performance anxiety that afflicts all performers, from surgeons to actors.

More than 80 percent of professional actors admit to suffering stage fright at least once during their careers, according to a study by Fielding Graduate University. Surgeons rarely admit to anything resembling fear, but Dr. Charlie Brown, an expert in performance psychology, says that it’s “not uncommon for surgeons and physicians to use beta-blockers to treat symptoms of anxiety associated with performance.”

Actors face public humiliation when they set foot on the stage; surgeons face life and death itself when they step into the operating theater. Yet the show—and the operation—must go on. We do our writing alone, and the only lives at stake are those of imaginary people. But there’s something we can learn from actors and surgeons—and that something has to do with ritual.

Ritual can help you get through those first lines, those first cuts, those first words. The physical, mental, and emotional aspects of ritual prepare you to launch into your performance.

Place is the physical aspect of ritual. The actor has the theater; merely treading the boards invites the spotlight. The surgeon has the operating theater; he presides over the operating table in a performance that can mean the life or death of his patient. For writers, where we write is important, in that it needs to be a place that we associate with writing, a space consecrated to our art. Writing is a sacred act—and so you must create a sacred space in which to do it. Dedicate a studio, a spare room, even a corner of your den to your work—and equip it with the tools and talismans that will inspire you to write every day. If you can’t—or won’t—work at home, then try the west wing of your local library or the corner table by the window in your favorite coffee shop.

Regalia comprise the mental aspect of ritual. These are the trappings that allow you to get into character and prepare for your performance. The actor applies makeup and dons a costume and warms up her voice and body. The surgeon reviews the X-rays and MRIs and CAT scans, puts on his scrubs, and washes his hands and arms for a full five minutes, during which time he visualizes the procedure he is about to perform. For writers, regalia may take the form of pajamas or sweatpants or a suit and tie, a review of the previous day’s work, a pot of tea or a can of soda or a bottle of water, twenty minutes of meditation or a three-mile run—whatever helps you assert the writer in you.

Tools represent the emotional aspect of ritual. These are the weapons you bring to the fight, the talismans that give you the courage to act once the battle cry goes up. For the actor, the overture plays, the curtain rises, the audience quiets, and she steps into the spotlight and breaks the hush with her first line. The surgeon enters the operating theater, consults with his colleagues, inspects his sterile instruments, checks the patient on the table, chooses a scalpel, and, accompanied by the music of his choice (or silence) and under the glare of the surgical lights, he makes the first cut. For writers, the tools of the trade that ease the transition from blank page to work in progress are a matter of personal taste and productivity. Write on paper or tablets, with pen or pencil or stylus, with music on or television off—whatever allows you to make that first mark.

“When you sit down to practice, however casually, you cast yourself as a hero and victim of your own myth; you will encounter obstacles, you will struggle, succeed, and struggle some more.”
—Glenn Kurtz

The Yoga of Writing

“I used to be a pre-industrial writer: thousands of words in a spurt and then a few days off. But as I get older, I’ve switched to a mode best described as ‘slow and steady wins the race.’ Basically, I write during the same four hours every day, after breakfast and the all-important coffee, generally in the same room and wearing the same pajamas.”
—Scott Westerfeld

Like Scott Westerfeld, I, too, wrote in spurts for many years. The reasons for this were many. First and foremost, most of the books I’ve published have been written under contract, which means they were written under deadlines. Because I began my career as a reporter, I’ve always been very deadline driven—give me a contracted deadline, and I write to that deadline. I produced these books on my own time, outside of my day job, so I wrote mostly on the weekends when I could set aside several hours in which to write one or more chapters at a time. I didn’t have a daily writing practice because I wasn’t writing for practice; I was writing to publish, and I had a deadline set by a publishing schedule.

That was my excuse. And it worked—at least for contracted projects. But my most important work, the novels I had to write in their entirety without benefit of contract before I could find a publisher, remained unfinished. Writing on spec forced me to establish artificial deadlines—deadlines I never took seriously. Without a writing practice, I started and abandoned several novels—and actually finished only the books I was contracted to write.

And then I took up yoga. I didn’t mean to; after nearly two decades in California I thought of yogis as touchy-feely, woo-woo Type Bs who spent too much time in hot tubs. I lumped writers who did yoga into that same category. But after another year of not finishing a novel, I treated myself to a Julia Cameron writers workshop with the hope of discovering what I was doing wrong.

Julia Cameron, author of the classic The Artist’s Way and one of the most influential writing teachers of our time, was coming to Kripalu, the yoga and wellness center in the Berkshires, only a 150-mile drive from my home. I’d taken one of her creativity workshops twenty years before, and I had loved it. I thought if anyone could help me get my writer’s juice back, it was Julia Cameron.

I talked my writer friend Susan into going with me to Kripalu, worried that I’d feel uncomfortable in a room full of yogis twisting into pretzels and eating sprouts and saying “Namaste” all the time. But to my surprise I felt immediately at home at Kripalu, partly because the setting’s look and feel reflected its origins as a Jesuit seminary and partly because the people seemed so welcoming and, well, so enlightened. Julia Cameron was as wonderfully inspiring as I remembered her, and Susan and I both loved her workshop.

Like all of the workshops at Kripalu, it was designed to provide time for contemplation and yoga as well as writing and learning. Always one to get the most for my money, I took a yoga class—and fell in love. When I came home, I was determined not only to finish a novel but to find a yoga class like the one I had just attended. One of my Mystery Writers of America pals pointed me to a local studio run by a Kripalu-trained yoga teacher, and I signed up. Within a year I was hooked and so dedicated to my yoga practice that I enrolled in yoga teacher training. Now I’m a certified instructor, but more important, I’m a yoga practitioner. I’ve learned the art of daily practice—and I’ve applied it to my writing life as well.

Yoga taught me that what’s important is coming to the mat, whether you feel like it or not. I know that if I just come to my mat every day, I may accomplish things I’d never have dreamed possible. Like learning to stand on my head for the first time in my life at age fifty-four. Like sitting still in a full lotus position to quiet my monkey mind long enough to meditate. Like finally establishing a regular writing practice that doesn’t depend on deadlines or contracts but on the deep desires of my true writer’s soul.

This is what writing as practice can do for you, too. Taking your seat—like coming to your mat—will, over time, help you delve deeper and deeper into your writing practice, deeper and deeper into your writing.

In some ways, writing is like learning to drive. When you first get behind the wheel, you’re thrilled and scared and overly conscious of every detail: the pressure of your foot on the gas pedal and then the brake as you navigate stop-and-go traffic, the anticipation you feel when you realize that the light ahead of you is changing to yellow just as you approach a busy intersection, the vehicles you can see in the rearview mirror that you’re supposed to check every five to eight seconds. Every minute on the road seems like an hour; you (and your instructor) breathe more easily when the lesson is over. (I’ll never forget how my driving instructor in Ft. Leavenworth screamed when I nearly sideswiped a military police car during one of my first lessons.)

Driving is such a stressful and demanding activity that more than half of all people fail their first driving test—and new drivers have higher crash rates than experienced drivers, no matter what their age. And yet, once we master the basics of driving, our odds of having an accident drop, along with our anxiety level. Soon, as a result of our practice, driving becomes second nature; we grow so comfortable that we don’t think twice about getting in the car and driving away, regardless of traffic or weather or destination. We just drive.

Writing practice yields the same results. Take your seat every day, and pretty soon you won’t think twice about getting into your story and getting words on the page. You’ll just write.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Days

“If you have a limited amount of time to write, you just sit down and do it. You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a page. You can’t edit a blank page.”
—Jodi Picoult

Establishing a writing practice means taking your seat every day with the faith that if you sit long enough, the words will come. But sometimes you sit down, ready to write through the butt aches and the hunger and the lure of a good restaurant lunch … and nothing happens. Not a word comes to mind, much less to the blank page.

You are tempted to throw in the towel and go to the movies. It’s just one day, you think. And you’d be right. But don’t abandon your seat quite yet. There are several techniques you can use to get the words going again.

• The hourglass. One of my favorite gifts for new writers is an hourglass. Using an hourglass is an easy way to get into the flow of writing when you find yourself resisting your practice. Most “hourglasses” are sand timers that count out different segments of time, from two minutes to a full hour; I find that fifteen-minute sand timers are the best. Just tell yourself you only have to write for fifteen minutes, and turn over your hourglass. Write anything—even if it’s just “I hate writing, and I hate hourglasses, and I hate you”—and keep writing until the sands have all slipped away. Nine times out of ten you won’t even notice because you’ll be in the flow.
• If … then. If you’re thinking that this is a time-honored plotting technique—“If my protagonist does X, then Y will happen”—well, you’re half right. But If … then statements are also a great way to reward yourself for taking your seat every day. If … then statements resonate with your subconscious, so keep them simple: “If I write the scene in which my heroine meets her love interest for the first time, then I can read the next chapter of Gone Girl before I go to bed.”
• Set a word-count goal. Some writers prefer setting a word-count goal for writing practice rather than specifying a given time frame. If this works for you, great—just don’t set the goal so high that you struggle to meet it or so low that meeting it is too easy. Experiment with various counts to see which daily target works best for you. Note: Setting word-count goals can be particularly effective when you have a hard-stop deadline to meet.
• Play a movie in your mind. Your subconscious responds to images, which is why you can use visualization to jump-start your writing whenever you feel stalled. Close your eyes, and watch your story unfold. Picture the next scene you need to write—the one where the killer traps the hero in that burning building—and watch what happens, frame by frame. Now open your eyes, and write it down.
• Don’t judge; just write. Don’t think about whether the words you are thinking about writing down are any good; just write them down. When you are tempted to quit your practice today because you think your work is, well, crap, just keep writing. When you review your words tomorrow, odds are they will be just fine. We are never the best judges of our work, especially while we are writing it.
• You/I affirmations. When all else fails, simply create an affirmation that addresses your angst, and repeat it until you can settle down to write. Here’s one that some of my clients (who worry too much about whether they are going to sell their work) have found effective: I am a gifted writer, and I can write anything I want.

Practice long enough, and sooner or later the rituals you put into place will train you to write on command. Just like Pavlov’s dogs, you’ll come running to take your seat whenever you hear the bell.

All you have to do is ring it.

Sleep, Creep, Leap

“A book is a garden … .”
—Charles Baudelaire

There’s an old adage in gardening: Sleep, creep, leap. This typically refers to the growth pattern of newly planted perennials, provided they are nourished with sun and water and nutrients: The first year the plant will “sleep,” the second year the plant will “creep,” and the third year the plant will “leap.”

As your writing practice deepens over time, you will grow as a writer—in much the same way as a well-nourished perennial. You’ll take your seat, and you’ll write. You may think you are getting nowhere, but as you keep at it, and your pages pile up, you are literally growing yourself as a writer.

At first, this development may be unnoticeable—that’s the sleep part. But before you know it, you’ll find your prose creeping along toward good and then leaping right into great. Growth rates vary for writers just as they vary for plants, but whether your “sleep, creep, leap” development takes three months, three years, or three decades will depend on what you learn as you explore the many places your practice may take you and how quickly you apply that knowledge to your work in progress.

In the next chapter, we’ll take a look at one of the most important ways in which your practice can help you enrich your work: voice.