Write On Wednesday~Pivotal Moments

 In everyone's life there are moments which change the direction of your future.  Sometimes they are under your control, sometimes they are imposed upon you by fate.  The choices you make at these moments can be the turning points which decide your future. 

Write about a

Pivotal Moment

Yes, I know it's Saturday not Wednesday - but I make my own rules (at least here in Blogland), so I'll write when I want!  smiles>

Pivotal moments...the idea for this prompt came to me from a book - of course.  I was reading Lit, the third volume of Mary Karr's memoir-autobiographical series (Liar's Club, Cherry).   About midway through the book, Karr, in a drunken stupor, runs her car off the road.  As her vehicle spins out of control, her mind jumps to thoughts of her infant son  thinking that he'll be forced to grow up motherless, and she realizes her life is skidding as helplessly toward disaster as the four rubber tires underneath her.  From that pivotal moment comes the impetus to get her life back on steady ground - to stop drinking, to pay off her debts, start writing in earnest.  Find a spiritual center.  And these things she does, although not without great and ongoing effort.

Rarely do pivotal moments come with such dramatic force.  I did run my car off the road once, and remember feeling nothing so much as complete helplessness as it spun out of control on the embankment above the freeway.  Did the experience prompt me to change my life in any way?  No.  But whenever I feel as if life is out of control, my heart returns to those brief moments when my life was, quite literally, out of my control, and I was whirling toward near disaster.

But most often, pivotal moments come and go and we never realize that a decision or action or chance meeting or casual word might have had a profound impact on our lives.  It's in retrospect that we can see the lasting effect of a moments encounter,  in looking back over the accumulation of pivotal moments that we  clearly see how they've woven themselves into the tapestry that  becomes our life.

In the aftermath of horrible disasters, you hear stories about people who were miraculously saved because of a chance moment - a father who was late to work in the World Trade Center because he was taking a sick child to the pediatrician, a mother who missed a doomed flight because a meeting ran late, a vacation on a tsunami destroyed resort postponed because of a family crisis.  Returning to Lit, at one point Karr's AA sponsor says to her, "You should be dead by now.  God saved you for something.  What is your dream for your life?"

I think pivotal moments lead us toward our dreams, either purposefully or inadvertently.  We just have to recognize the way they're pointing. 

How about you?  Looking back, what's a pivotal moment in your life?  Certainly getting married, the birth of my first child, deaths of people I love...those are all pivotal, heart stopping, life altering moments.   Other than those,  the moment with the most lasting impact has to be the moment I answered a classified ad in the local paper for a pianist at an area high school.  From that moment has derived nearly every important relationship I currently have (outside of my family).  It led me to my church home, to a multitude of wonderful travel experiences, gave me confidence to go forward into other ventures, including my office job.  It even led me to Magic and Molly!   Pivotal moment, indeed.

Write On Wednesday - Risky Business

Funny topic for me to choose, right?  Y'all know I'm no risk taker.  Probably the riskiest thing I've every done was walk out of a fancy-schmancy restaurant without paying the check.  (long story)  Anyway, I've always played it safe. Chosen the road well traveled by, rather than the untrod pathway.  But there have been times when I've been filled with  a burning desire to "go rogue" ~ I recall my teenage years when I became an anti-war sympathizer (that would be Vietnam war), and a women's rights activist.   But ditching college after freshman year to get married sort of put paid to all my counter-revolutionary tendencies.

The risk taking has remained all in my mind.  These days, I dream about tossing aside my job and going bohemian, living off my savings, maybe traveling around the world a time or two.  Dusting off those novels gathering dust on my "C" drive.  Living the life of the artist...

But I know I'll never be brave enough to take the necessary risks to make that happen.  After all, I was raised to be responsible and practical, to be safe and sound.  Alas, after 50 some odd years, those are hard habits to break.

How about you?  Are you a risk taker? Or not?

It's Wednesday - write about it.

Fresh Start (for Write on Wednesday)

So, I'm back.  Home from my lovely, idyllic time in Florida, languishing around in the sunshine, taking long walks, reading, lolling about in my comfy clothes..

Ah, how sweet it is it was.

But now back to reality, to cold midwestern mornings and chores and work and responsibility.

Deep breath.

It's the New Year, and though I don't make resolutions, I do like to make Fresh Starts.  There is a difference, you know.  Fresh Starts are much more forgiving and flexible than resolutions.  Fresh Starts allow you to forget the past and start over right from where you are this minute.  Fresh Starts can happen every day of the week if you want them to.

Here are some of the things I'm Starting Fresh this 2010:

• Slowing down the pace of my life.  I try to do this all the time, and somehow always fail miserably.  This time, I'm thinking more about my attitude than my actual physical life and activity.  Allowing myself the freedom to let things go, to stop and take a cleansing breath now and again;
• Focusing.  My life feels really scattered an unfocused sometimes, which I think contributes to my sense of being in a huge hurry.  I've identified several reasons for this, one of which I plan to write about in more depth later on, because I think it's something all of us are dealing with.   I need to plan my activity, organize my priorities, and stick to one task until it's finished;
• Doing what I love.  Certainly spending more time with my family and friends is at the top of this list.   Avocationally, music and writing.  Vocationally, making sure I'm using my strengths at work effectively.

So, off I go, into a new year, a new decade, with all its new beginnings. 

 How about you?  Do you have a Fresh Start in mind? 

Write on Wednesday is making a Fresh Start...check it out.

Revision Redux

The revision process continues to be on my mind this winter- notice I said "on my mind," meaning I haven't done much more than think about it. The whole process of novel revision seems terribly daunting. I've been collecting other writer's thoughts on their process of revision, hoping to get inspired, and it worked to some degree. I've started revising a short story I wrote last winter, hoping that by "practicing" on something smaller, I'll be less intimidated by the work involved in revising the novel. Here's some food for thought regarding the revision process...as you will see, every author approaches it completely differently!

"I start on the first page. Then, I rewrite that page twenty or forty times until it's right, and then it's finished. Then, I go to page two and I do the same thing twenty or forty times." Stephen Dixon

"I go over what I've written, but I'm not making major changes. I'm just fixing it by making minor changes that might have a big effect. I hardly throw anything out." Jayne Ann Phillips

"I do twenty or thirty drafts. I'm a big reviser. I go back...and polish the beginning, then I force myself to go through page by page from beginning to end, over and over again." Amy Bloom

"I go through with a very cold eye to cut out everything that can be cut without loss." Thomas E. Kennedy

"I polish as I go along. My habit is to perfect individual sentences, individual paragraphs, and individual pages, and when I think they're as good as I can make them, I feel free to go on to the next part. So when I write the last sentence of the last paragraph, I'm done with the book." Kent Haruf

"I do a great many drafts, no matter what it is. This means letting it sit for a few days before looking at it again, then doing it again, then letting it sit and doing it again. I let my friends read drafts after the first ten or twelve. My early drafts are sketchy in the most important ways - everything vital is left out - and they're wordy in other ways - there's all this extraneous material that doesn't matter. So the revisions are in both directions." Andrea Barrett "I do a lot of revisions in fits and starts. When I write, I barrel through from beginning to end, and then back up, and if the beginning isn't working, start over. Once it works, I write through to the end, and start revising, and, if necessary, trash the whole thing, and start over." Myla Goldberg

Writer Bug posted some great revision advice which she picked up at her last residency. She talks about picking 15 areas you want to work on in your manuscript, and then going through it 15 times, focusing on one area each time. Some things to work with include: verbs, redundancy, verbosity, vagueness. She also advises reading the story aloud, which is a great idea.

As I've begun revising my own work, I've been taking one paragraph at a time, revising each sentence, looking for better words, paring down wordiness, then going on to the next paragraph until I've finished the page. Then I re-read the page and see how it flows. Once I've done each page, I'll go back and re-read the whole thing to see if I need to make structural changes.

So, how about you? Anyone else out there in the process of revisions? If so, how's it going?

Write On Wednesday -Staying the Course

Yeah, I know it's Sunday (soon to be Monday, actually). But it's been that kind of week.  Starting out with an extra hour last Sunday was blissful, but I could have used at least 25 hours every day this week, and then maybe, just maybe, I might be on track. This week's Write On Wednesday topic focused on this thought:

The outcome of the election is a good reminder of the way dreams come true.  But geting there involves not only the courage to embark on the project, but the strength to stay the course when the going gets rough. How are you doing with staying the course toward the fulfillment of your writing dreams?

In my work life, I've become quite good at completing big projects.  My office job requires multi-tasking on numerous levels, and I've learned to keep a daily list of the things that need to get done, and calendar deadlines for future project due dates.

At work, I know I must stay the course - other people and our business depend on me.

In my musical life, I developed a method to see me through the long weeks leading up to concert time.  Early on in my "performing" career, I learned that I needed to feel extremely well prepared to forestall those performance anxiety attacks that lead to jittery failures on stage.  So I made sure I practiced a lot, practiced so much that my body could do the work required even if my mind went into nervous overdrive.  I worked hard so that I felt confident, and so that my "muscle memory" could take over onstage if my nerve should momentarily fail me.

In my writing life, things are a bit different.  I find it easier to "slip off course" because (1) there are no deadlines looming; and (2) no one is depending on me to deliver a finished project.  So my writing dreams get put on the back burner in deference to other responsibilities which take priority.

The conclusions here are quite obvious, aren't they?  In order to "stay the course" and complete tasks to my satisfaction, I need the impetus of deadlines and personal accountability to others.  So how do I find those in my writing life?

Blogging provides a certain amount of accountability - many times I've been tempted to throw in the towel on this writing habit, but my blogs and the people I've come to consider my friends in this arena hold me accountable.  This week's Write On Wednesday was a good example. In the crush of election excitement, work deadlines, and preparing for a trip out of town, Wednesday was gone before I knew it.  So skip it, I told myself...who cares?

Well, Bobbi, and Oh, and Corri...people who emailed me or posted about missing this weekly place to talk about writing and explore the way creativity works in their lives.

So perhaps staying the course is grounded in the perceived value of the task-not just to the individual involved, but to the community at large.

So thanks for keeping me on task and helping me continue along the road to achieving those writing dreams.