Monthly Archives: March 2009

7 Quick-Takes (Vol. 8)

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~ ~ 1 ~ ~

I’ve specialized.

It is a recent realization, and just now that feels a great deal like saying I’ve “settled.”

I’m beginning to understand that 50-, or 70- or 80- year old who says they still feel like they’re 20 (or 40).  I feel like I know things.  And on some level I always will.  But I’ve got to realize I’ve gotten beyond being equally wonderful at everything I do.

On one level that should be a good thing– because it illustrates that I have committed to and developed something, that I’m no longer a “jack (Jane) of all trades master of none.”

I see I have a distinct edge in writing over all these other areas, and the (should be) obvious result means I need to expect not to be as good everywhere as I am in my best subject.

But I still feel like that 50-something guy who, from his 45-degree angle of pain, was advising my 30-something husband: “Once you hit 50– don’t try to keep doing it all.”

And I keep thinking, I ought to be able to do all this.

Sorry, Mike, if you’re reading this.  That low-ceilinged room with its mediocre florescent lighting *really* sapped my confidence when it comes to being a good photographer.  I can’t help thinking if I did pictures like I do writing I would have figured out some solution.

~ ~ 2 ~ ~

Finished an absolutely perfect-for-now book this week: The Healer’s Keep.  The reasons I liked it are listed on my reading page.  (If you’re not following the progress of my novel those specific details probably won’t interest you.

I’ll take no offense ;) .

~ ~ 3 ~ ~

We are looking at a record-breaking snowfall in the last 24/36 hours.

I know 9-inches isn’t much compared to what has been happening elsewhere, but Fairbanks is essentially a semi-desert in terms of precipitation, so this is unique for here.

And maybe it counts as unique that there’s no such thing as a “snow day”  here; no days off of school or work because of the snow, even today.   (Though we have had ice days in the past.)

~ ~ 4 ~ ~

I got to hold a little baby last Sunday.

I wondered if I’d get “baby fever” or feel sated in some way, but neither happened.  I got to enjoy a little person, give Mama’s arms a break and was ready to return him when Daddy came to collect.

I was surprised to think it was the first baby I’ve held for long since Elisha was born, and this sort of makes sense; I would have been holding (or resting from holding) him up till now.

~ ~ 5~ ~

My novel wants to grow again, but I’m trying to be very selective about how much I allow.

I told Jay I was uncomfortable with 87,200 jumping so quickly to 96,000 and he blandly observed that “It’s gotten long enough to be a real novel now.”

~

My background in journalism makes me inherently mistrustful of increasing word-counts.  So this has been an. . . interesting process

I cut more than 1,000 words last night, and felt relieved to do so.  It was growing too fast with all the storylines getting added back in.

That said, I’ve just remembered another section that will (in some form) get added back in.  A useful “misunderstanding” scene (in the RomCom tradition), that is resolved before the end of the scene but creates more problems even as it’ s resolved.

Worth keeping according to my math.

It’s funny, too (at least to me), and I should snatch up anything I can in that department.

~ ~ 6 ~ ~

My home has been maintained in remarkably good order for more than a week now, but I felt very tired yesterday and almost couldn’t do the upkeep.  My own desk area is totally trashed– books and papers piled everywhere– and I’m finding that very draining.

I like having books to hand (there’s a whole shelf six inches from my left elbow), and looking at a cover while I type about the book is only natural, but I have always derived a sense of calm from open spaces and my perfect nook begins to feel too small in this state.

~ ~ 7 ~ ~

This week I’ve talked with the kids about definitions.

  • Like the term help, as in, “Can I help, Mommy?”

We have completely different understandings of that word.

To them it means, What you’re doing looks like more fun than what I’m doing.  I want to do it too.

To me it means I expect to get something useful out of your action (Even if it’s simply a teaching opportunity).

~

So when they say “I want to help,” and I say, “Great, you can do X,” they might fall apart with, “But I want to do Y!“

If it’s not time for Y, or Y is distinctly too complex for the askers, they’re not willing to hear it; and I won’t budge for whining.

  • All their lives I’ve used the phrase Low voice to convey what I want from them audibly.

That is, I don’t just want an “indoor voice,” I want to train them to speak also with a lower pitch.  Well, somewhere along the line our expectations have missed each other, and they’ve stopped hearing the bit about pitch.

And when I’d say quiet, they’d translate that as quiet*er*.  The whole thing was making me nuts, really.

I’m not on the phone much, so when I am, I expect the kids to let me talk and save their non-blood issues till I’m off.  I’ll say quiet, and while they’ll stop shouting at me, they’ll not quit talking.

So finally, today I lined them up, made them keep all eyes on me and I catechized them on the difference between Low voice and Quiet.

Haven’t had opportunity to test it yet (like I said, I’m not on the phone much) but I expect we’ll review today– along with pitch.

It is a bit embarrassing to be constantly reminded that, well, constant reminders are useful.

One theory I have on this is that every time something is repeated or reinforced, it’s digging that synaptic path a bit deeper into its groove, making more and more likely to stick.  I hear (read) this is what happens when a kid is learning to walk: they do the same thing over and over and over until the brain takes over and just does all the complex work so well  the walker no longer remembers how complex the process of upright movement really is.

~

I am really looking forward to the times when certain elements of behavior are blessedly thoughtless.

For me and the children.

For more 7 Quick Takes visit Jen’s Conversion Diary

Other 7 Quick Takes on Untangling Tales

Advice from the Unqualified

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Have you ever thought about how, technically, people at the same level as you are not qualified to give you advice?

Take parenting, for example.  I’ve offered quite a bit of random advice here, all written down because I expect it to be useful (to someone… sometime… somewhere…) but if you were looking for real results, you wouldn’t look at my advice.

For that you would look around for some mother whose kids are grown and turned out the way you want your kids to turn out.  That’s results.  That’s experience.

Unfortunately, those moms can also be most insensitive to the place where you are currently living.

“Oh yeah,” says one lady enthusiastically, the first time I bring my 2-year-old and 6-month-old to practice for the musical Beauty and the Beast, “I brought my four kids with me *everywhere.* It’s so good to have them watching real life.”

Six weeks later she was irritated with me for bringing my baby, even with the 2-year-old farmed out.

I thought it was tremendously silly: even wearing the baby I could do all the choreography, and felt rather pleased with myself at that.

So I am not an expert in mothering: I am only keeping notes about what’s worked for me as I go along.  And sometimes that has been helpful.

In the same way

I am not a best-selling novelist.  I am not even a published writer (beyond our local paper), but I read people who are, and I am writing. I also happen to be very good at compiling and extrapolating.

So.  I have advice about writing.  Yay for me.  ;)

I’ll just share the thing on my mind just now, that provoked this post, and perhaps I’ll write more in the future.  But if there was one thing I could say to anybody gung-ho about getting published it’s this:

Don’t Trust Yourself.

Aren’t I mean? That’s the opposite of every female-written piece of advice I’ve ever seen published.  But I think it’s very important.

If you’re already convinced you’re a great writer, that you can slap your best stuff together on the first go around, I (or anyone else who might disagree with your assessment) am not going to seem all that helpful.  And you’re not going to be very easy to work with.  The trick is to let other people (the kind of people who should know) praise your writing.

There’s a great story in G.K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy where Ches is speaking with a publisher who remarked, “That man will get on; he believes in himself.”

Chesterton’s reply began with the observation that those who believe most in themselves are the ones who end up in lunatic asylums.  When the publisher protested they don’t all go there Chesterton agreed.

“And you of all men ought to know them.  That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself.  That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself.  If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.

Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay.  It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself.

Strong words, and mentioned largely for their hyperbole, I mean them to illustrate my point; that is, no matter how much we believe in something, unless there is external proof backing up the belief our own effort or enthusiasm is irrelevant.

So, write if you must (it’s certainly cheaper than therapy!), don’t try to stop if you can’t, and feel grateful for your certainty if you know God had called you to write.

Just remember that He may not be calling that publisher to distrubute your work, and you’ll have healthier expectations.

Learning Humor

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I *really* don’t want one more more thing to investigate– one more thing to learn– but, like I mentioned a while back, I’ve always wondered if I could learn to be funny(er).

Two examples of my inherently serious nature/demeanor:

  1. When the kids were younger and growing more verbal, one of the girls asked me, “Why is your face angry?”  I realized I was concentrating on something and she couldn’t tell the difference between that and angry.  I tried to soften my expression and excuse it by saying, no, Mother wasn’t mad, it was my “thinking face.”  The explanation obviously sank in because they asked several times over the next few weeks, “Mama, are you thinking again?”
  2. My children have made it quite clear to me that it is the role of men to be “silly.”  Mommies and Grandma’s are most-definitely not silly.  (And, most of the time in this family, they’d be right.  I come by most things naturally.)

I was vaguely troubled by the realization that so much of what we find funny comes out of anger (sarcasm, slapstick, thwarted expectations), so I was both relieved and delighted to come across another example of humor in the book I finished a couple weeks back.

Gladwell used improvisational theatre as an example of topic of instant-processing and discussed what made it successful.

In the course of this discussion he compared improv to basketball– pointing out the parallels of working within a set a rules to know how to respond to the people around– while you want to win ultimately you want to keep the game going.

Actors working together on an improv have to agree to a set of rules before they begin in order for the piece to “work.”

The rule that Gladwell emphasized in particular:  One must accept everything that is offered.  The unnatural state that invariably follows can hardly help being funny.

“Think of something you wouldn’t want to happen to you or to someone you love,” wrote Keith Johnstone, one of the founders of improv theatre.  “Then you will have thought of something worth staging or filming… In life most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action.  All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers.  Bad improviser block action, often with a high degree of skill.  Good improvisers develop action.”

~

“The humor arises entirely out of how steadfastly the participants adhere to the rule that no suggestion can be denied.”

In those two summaries– essentially by looking cross-genre– I understood better than I ever consciously did before what to do when I’m looking for a story.  I’m not just trying to be a sadist (though that frequently helps), and I’m not strictly looking instantly for conflict (I’ve complained before that feels like a cheep shortcut).

That is, I’m not looking to instantly make it as huge as possible– two immovable forces– because then, despite its hugeness, it will stall.

In reading the book’s examples of following or not-following the rule, I remembered my one semester of high school drama.

I was most-definitely a blocker.  There was only one improv over the whole semester I was in that went well (probably because this rule was never articulated), and that one should have humiliated me, but it didn’t.  It might have been the only time that semester I was in complete “agreement” and had locked-in with my classmates.

In that moment, having “clicked,” I got a taste of why kids will do stupid things for their peers.

~

There was a near-psychic unity of purpose that frightened me just a little: we were dancing on the edge of “inappropriate,” but winning, and I mistrusted myself for being able so easily to align with those whose character I didn’t trust.

It wasn’t until my senior year in high school that I fully “relaxed” enough to see my peers not as subversive tools of an oppositional force but young humans swimming after purpose and focus the same me.  Until that point I felt resistance to them was part of resisting sin.

On some level this makes me sad– that I spent 2 ½ years on high-alert (approaching fear) of my age-mates– but on the other hand I sometimes think that schooled mistrust was what (ultimately) kept me safe until I developed greater discernment.

And so I’m recognizing that my kind of being funny has a lot to do with trust, because until I trust that a situation is “safe” I don’t relinquish control.

Jay and I (like most couples) have our own humor that hinges on things like looks and lines half-spoken or left unsaid.  But invariably they depend on one person taking a fall trusting the other one will catch them.  That sort of mutual dependence feeds itself, growing stronger and deeper the more times it’s proven.

One becomes “ingrown,” perhaps, but that becomes delicious: “your own brand of magic,”

the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to just a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage…

their response and and your performance twinned.

The jokes over the phone.  The memories packed

in the rapid-access file…

(from Perfection Wasted by John Updike)

This is where my (other) favorite kind of humor comes from– for those times when there’s just not enough brain to be witty, but there’s certainly enough heart to play.