Julie Chibbaro

Today we have a guest blogger, Laura Zam. Laura is an award-winning writer and performer who has created five one-person plays. She has performed at the Woolly Mammoth Theater, Theater J, The Kennedy Center, and The National Theatre, among others. Using humor, Laura is currently working on a book about the aftermath of sexual abuse. She teaches creative people how to empower themselves and make a living doing what they love. Her website is www.laurazam.com

LAURA ZAM:


I have a hobby!

This is great because I’ve never had a hobby before. Historically, during my free time⎯in between job commitments⎯I’ve worked on my writing projects. To the outside eye, my writing probably appeared to be a hobby (it certainly looked that way to the IRS). But that was not the case, not to me. See, I was trying to make a career out of this. According to my dictionary, a hobby is “an activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure.” No, writing was not done for pleasure. Writing was done so I could move ahead and seriously realize my dream life. This was not a hobby at all.

I am happy to report that my career has picked up. No longer am I carving out free time for my writing projects; I’m now doing them full-time. This means writing is my job. And like all jobs, it’s work. Don’t get me wrong. Writing has always been creative and fun, but like all work, it has also been part of a larger context of professional goals. And now, especially, writing is filled with deadlines and circumscribed by discipline: I basically work a 9 to 5 schedule. By the weekend, I definitely need a break.

You want to know a secret? A big advantage of doing a job that you love is that you get time off from it too! I’m talking about glorious Saturday and Sunday. No, wait, there’s all that cleaning to be done ⎯of house, clothes, car, and in-box. Begrudgingly, I’ve given Saturday over to that. That leaves Sundays when I absolutely must recharge. In the past, I’ve found a variety of lazy Sunday activities that don’t involve a computer or complicated sentences: long walks, going to the zoo with my hubby, brunching with friends. But everything changed last weekend when I discovered a hobby⎯multimedia collage!

Keep in mind what I said above: that a hobby is done purely for pleasure⎯ meaning only for one’s self. I mention this again because I have absolutely no talent when it comes to the visual arts. And that’s great.

See, what I’ve discovered in having a creative outlet with no aspirations attached⎯no expectations, no perfectionism, no skillful knowledge, no nothing⎯ is that this activity has a freedom that writing will never have for me. Might this alternative artistic play be necessary? Maybe it’s a way to strengthen connection to one’s muse, just like when couples go on vacation (leaving their ordinarily stressful lives together) so they can bond with each other anew. Yes, multimedia collage might just be a way for me to continuously rediscover my creativity lover.

I hope so because it’s fun, and I even made it functional, putting my collages in a book that also includes my goals and action steps for the year (OK, I can’t get too far away from my aspirations – so sue me).

If you’re looking for a fun way to reignite your creative spark, try an art form at which you suck. And if you find one that uses glitter glue, even better.

I'm not sure how other people do it, like those writers who churn out trilogies as if they wrote them on the bus to work, but for me, novel writing, or any other kind of writing for that matter, doesn't come easy. I'm a bleeder, a writer who takes forever to understand her own text enough to know what comes next. For me, writing is a process of gathering -- not just gathering ideas, but a quiet gathering of the senses. To be able to visualize something that is real, true, honest, I have to wait. Wait until all the details come, and all in the right order. Oh, sure, I can slap something down on paper easily enough, but it just ain't so good. Not until I've done my gathering do I feel that channel, that vein of gold that I know is working.

Sometimes it takes time to know what my instinct is telling me.

I wonder if other writers or artists or musicians have this sense of gathering. I think it's like being ready for something -- you need to make a big move in your life, quit a job, leave a spouse, start down a new road -- you wait for that gathering, of energy, of spirit and power. Then, when the time is right, you do it. That's how I write.

So, my question is, how do those other guys and gals do it, the ones who churn out trilogies on the bus?

I was going to give up. Not everything, just all the stuff I do that keeps me competing in the rat race: the facebooking, the blogging, the writing nice letters to strangers, the internet research about other blogs and how to connect them to mine, the internet research on how to get publicity for my book, or how to be a guest blogger, or how to rate high on technorati.

Yikes.

Writing, for me, is a process of being "inside" myself, and all those "outside" things -- the begging for attention from people who are mostly too busy to really pay it -- was starting to take away from my ability to look "inside".

I had to decide what was more important, the blogging or the novel-writing.

That sounds dramatic, I know, but that was how I felt. I thought I had it all figured out -- I would go "inside" and do my intense novel-writing in the morning. Then, in the afternoon, after I'd blown my wad, so to speak, I'd do all the "outside" business. And it worked, for a little while. At least I thought it did. But after writing about 30 pages, I realized that my writing was starting to take on a kind of surface sheen -- I wasn't going inside deep enough to get to the heart of the matter in each and every scene, for each and every sentence, down to the souls of my characters, into the pit of their very beings. I was too busy flipping from novel to internet and back again, distracting myself, staying outside when I should be going into the deep, dark depths of my within.

Bad.

Writing for me, when I do it well, is a process of gathering. It's a matter of being so bored by the nothingness around me that I am forced to look inside and really examine the topics that press into me. It's about sitting here and doing nothing until it comes. Being present. Not being entertained, or distracted, but sitting in the quiet of my own self until I know how to proceed.

So I stopped everything. Didn't blog, or check the internet, or really even read email since last week. And I think my writing's improved for it. But I don't want to stop writing my blog. You know why? Because I want to keep examining the writing process, not only mine, but others', and to share it with whoever wants to read it.

But I've got to do that when the time is right. Maybe once a week, or every other week. Same with facebook, or doing publicity. I can't let it take me over. That would be a strange inversion that happens too often to writers and artists -- they become a persona, I think, hungry for outside attention to the point of losing touch with their humanness. I don't want that to happen to me.

Most writers spend too much time alone, me included. This is what happened to me yesterday: I was asked by my editor to write a new bio for my book. I felt that the bio for my last book was boring, and I wanted to juice it up, so I (and my husband) came up with something really wacky and weird, and I sent it off to her. Now, I've never met the editor(s) over at Atheneum, and they don't really know me, so I spent the entire day chewing my fingernails. I couldn't focus on my work. When I tried to write something in my novel, it looked awful. I checked email every hour, nothing. I thought, 'it was too godawful weird and I write weird crazy things, I'm just crazy, I should be locked up and fed mush, why can't I write like Styron or Byron or one of those guys?'

But they were depressed, or crazy, too.

Recently, I read three articles on depression: One about the pills people take, one about the ever-changing terminology of mental illness, and the last about this special part of the brain that takes care of 'rumination,' the behavior of a depressed person that doesn't let her think about anything else but the trauma at hand (like 'does my editor like my bio?') Apparently, lots of therapists try to break the cycle of rumination, but it's lately been discovered that it's good for you, that that section of the brain is dedicated to solving your problems, and if you turn away from your problems just to feel better, you're doing your depressed self a disservice, and nothing will ever get solved.

I don't think this theory works for me. I get into real bad ruminations, like a cow with a big hairy cud of grass. I give someone a chapter to read, I ruminate, I write an email to my agent, I ruminate, waiting for any kind of feedback sends me into a tizzy of rumination (is that an oxymoron?) And I don't think it's healthy. I think I'm too dependent on other people's opinions, and I don't like that. How can I move forward if I worry what everyone thinks? If I ruminate on the outer world's opinions, can I really hear my own?

But writing is about communicating, after all. Maybe it's just part of my process, and I have to learn to accept it.

The upshot of the bio and the editor? I'm driving home with my four-year-old daughter at 6 o'clock at night, blasting Jewish music and singing, when the phone rings. I answer (I know, bad with the driving, but I pulled off the road, I swear!) and this little voice says, "Hi, it's ---- from Atheneum." They never call me. I turned down the music. She asked me for my address to send back copy edits, and I asked her if she got my bio in the morning.

"Oh, yes, it was super fun!" she said.

Relief of the rumination, instantaneous, yes. Ok, she liked it, I'm not nuts, I can move on with my life.

Now I'm just waiting for a reply from my agent to a message I wrote a week ago. Soon as I hear back from her, I'll be able to live normally again. Maybe I need to get out more.

My life has been turned upside down by three feet of snow, which pulled down power lines, cutting my energy source, and cracking trees over my car, garage, and front and backyard, and still, I'm thinking about writing. Wondering how one might write this recent scene -- in the dark at 9:00 at night, the driveway too deep in snow to get the car out, the child asleep upstairs, no heat/hot water, trying to find the candles, flashlights, not scared, not yet.

Why can't I just live it?

But something hit me earlier in the day, and that was how much writing is like laundry. A first draft is like a closet full of clean clothes - ahh, nice and fresh. Then comes getting those clothes dirty, and having them collect as you use them. Looking closer, finding the stains, wearing the stuff, getting comfy in it, then too comfy, then just plain smelly. Finally having to clean them again. This metaphor itself is getting a little stinky. Not quite working perfectly -- I'll have to go back and rethink it. Revise. But I'm not going to, not here, because this is a blog, and it's about showing my process, right?

Today, I'm thinking about disasters, not laundry, though I've been in the same clothes for three days. Is is just writers who think about writing about disasters while they're happening? Or does everyone interpret the world that way? Like when the twin towers fell, people said, "it was like a movie."

I'm going to try the laundry metaphor again. Writing is like any routine or habit -- brushing your teeth, doing dishes -- if you don't keep at it, don't keep cleaning (I guess that I'm thinking of editing as cleaning, polishing) you will just have a big old rotten mess on your hands, and that ain't good writing.

In order to create, you have to be willing to make a mess. Problem with me is, I don't like messes. I'm a neat person, always chasing after my daughter or husband to pick up their crumbs or socks. I like order.

This is my wish list for writing a novel. 1. I get an idea. 2. I plan out the outline. 3. I write the book chapter by chapter the way I planned it out so cleanly. 4. It's done.

This is how it really goes. 1. I get an idea. (No, no, wait, scratch that, it's not working). 2. I get an idea (no, I hear a character in my head), (no, I don't like that one either). 3. I get sick of myself so I close my eyes and just start writing something, anything, for God's sake or I'll go nuts. 4. Scratch that. 5. I write 40 interesting pages, then find out they're not so interesting. 6. I chuck them.

No wonder it takes me so long to write a book.

I got my revisions back from my husband on my Sister novel yesterday. Not so bad, all stuff I can handle. So I am working on that today. At 130 pages, I feel like I'm about halfway there. Pray that I find order in the madness.