Writing vs. editing

Why would I rather work on something brand new than edit? I think it's because the new piece is fresh, it has potential, no one has rejected it or critiqued it yet. I have two pieces right now that need editing, but a new essay is calling. I only have a couple of hours. What to do?

Contest season

I'm compiling my annual list of writing contests. I can tell I have time constraints--my list is much smaller than previous years. I have one essay in mind to start sending out, but I have to spend some time polishing it.

I was on the Bellingham Review Web site checking out the guidelines for the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, and I see my piece from 2007 is still up there as an example of creative nonfiction work. I thought that was nice.

My non-Valentine's Valentine to everyone!

As I get older, I get more cynical about Valentine's Day. It seems to be a holiday for the newly in-love. For us older people, well, hey, if you're still bumming around the house with me, I'm assuming you love me. I don't need a $100 bunch or roses or a $2 card for that matter to prove it.

So here's a treat, an ode to non-Valentine's Day, from Morrissey, of course. "Tell me, tell me that you love me. Oh, I know you don't mean it."

Twilight

OK, I am far removed from my teenage years, but I'm reading TWILIGHT. I wanted something easy to read as I travel to and from Miami this week. Stephanie Meyer has been criticized by literary circles for her writing. And I say the writing is clunky at times. But yet I keep reading. And I went to NEW MOON, and was surprised by how much I liked it.

Here's why, and here's why I think these books are a success even if they aren't exactly "literary." Meyer taps into the exact emotions I remember experiencing as a teenage girl. Oh my gosh, I remember being completely obsessed and gaga over beautiful boys. Trying to catch his eye at lunch, or analyzing for hours one sentence he may have said to me, or feeling the butterflies at the realization that he might actually like me. Swoon! Meyer transports me back to that time, and her target audience is right in that time. No wonder it's so appealing.

Validation!

I think this is how I write! It's so good to see that a published author also works in this way. I feel like day-to-day I don't get anything done, but when I look at how far I've come in a month, or a year, somehow it all adds up, but I'm mystified as to how it happened:

This comes courtesy from a page off the Park Literary Group Web site. Janice Y.K. Lee is one of their clients:

Janice Y.K. Lee
Sometimes, I don't know how I finished my novel. I'm the most distracted writer, jumping up and down to attend to this child, that bill. When I do find myself writing, I scare myself sometimes. It's as if I write from one very specific corner of my brain, and I can't think about it too much. I never write for long stretches--it comes in five minute bursts, here and there, interspersed with much daily matter.
Here is my usual schedule:

Get the kids off to school
Make another cup of coffee
Bring it upstairs where I sip at it while answering emails (I live in Hong Kong, 12 hours difference from NY so I usually wake up to at least two dozen emails)
Browse newspapers online
Open up a Word document that I'm working on ("youth essay" for a magazine article or "new" for what I'm too frightened to call a novel)
Go right back to browsing newspapers and blogs
Shop for books on Amazon
Don't complete the purchase
Go back to the Word document

And so on. It goes like this for much of the morning. Somehow work gets done. Somehow, at the end of the month, I have five more pages, or an essay finished, or a short story edited.
Accepting this scattershot way of writing was important. For a long time, I thought it meant that the work I turned out was not good enough, or that the distraction showed through in the writing. This is not true. This is just the way I write.

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For me, my list would be:

Check email
Respond to some if I feel like it (I will respond if I want to put off writing)
Look into writing contests/journals accepting submissions
Open up Word document
Open up journal document
Write in journal about what a distracted writer I am
Check Facebook
Get back to writing
After about half-hour, check my writing group blog
Get back to writing
After 10 minutes, research on Internet something I'm writing about
And on it goes...

A book I'm so excited about

I'm reading ANNE FRANK: THE BOOK, THE LIFE, THE AFTERLIFE by Francine Prose. Good reviews convinced me to buy it. I've always been captivated by the diary. I'm not very far into the book, but so far it's intriguing. Prose looks at the diary as a piece of literature and posits that Anne approached the writing of the diary very much like a professional writer would approach the creation of a piece intended for an audience. If Anne was indeed that astute, it makes her diary even that much more remarkable. I didn't realize the diary had gone through so much actual revision by Anne herself.



I finished UNDER THE DOME in three weeks. I was proud of myself for doing so, considering I was at my busiest, working about 60 hours a week. I thought it was great. How Stephen King can keep people wanting to turn the page over the course of 1,100 pages is remarkable. I found some of the characters a bit cliched, but oh well, it was a slick read.

Grading and writing

Grades submitted as of about a half-hour ago. Major alleluia. I survived 10 weeks of teaching two classes and working full-time. Not quite sure how. Oh yes, I remember--I barely did any of my own writing!

I should take that back. I managed to get in an hour or two once a week. I'm progressing along with the manuscript. I dare say I would like to be finished before the next semester starts. I need to sit down in the next couple of days and make a plan for finishing the last few chapters (four chapters?). Wow, if I had just four left, that would be amazing, but I think it's these four that need to be tinkered with the most.