Generally I am a creature of habit.  Habit is where my comfort zone lies.  Like many novice writers I struggle to create a pattern to write consistently.  It isn’t a matter of lack of desire, or lack of time, or procrastination.  It’s a matter of habit.

Graham Greene was once asked if he wrote my creativity or routine (or close to that).  His response was that he was fortunate in life in that creativity found him at 9:00 am every morning at his typewriter.  Greene touched on the key.  Inspiration and creativity don’t strike a writer out of the clear, blue sky unexpectedly.  It happens when we work.

Recently my content/development editor suggested I needed to add two chapters to my manuscript to further character development and set up events that occur later in the novel.  Intuitively, I knew his suggestion had merit but I didn’t have a clue where to start.   The lack of self-direction became the perfect excuse to delay working on this project.

We agreed to meet for lunch and for some reason I told him I would have the chapters for him when we met.  This promise became my deadline.

The deadline did the trick.  I sat down to write and I fell into a natural pattern.  Write four hours in the morning.  Take an hour lunch break.  Work for two hours after lunch.  Quit every day by 3:00 pm.  It worked!  I completed the chapters after about three drafts each and was able to deliver them when we had lunch.

I discovered that I had hit my stride, a pattern of work that fits for me.  I’ve been looking for this for years.  I’m so relieved I finally found it.

Share with me your story of how you hit your stride – or didn’t.

Back in March I learned what happens to a person when your blood sugar soars to four times the normal level.  You can’t get enough water, which results in – well – you can guess.  That means you don’t get very much sleep because you’re up 15 times a night, so you are also always tired.  After doing the weekly grocery shopping I needed a two hour nap in the afternoon.  You are always hungry, especially for sweets.   The miracle is that you lose weight – fast.  I lost 8 pounds in two weeks – a new lifetime record for me.

I had been “pre-diabetic” for six years and able to manage life with good diet and exercise.  Then, overnight everything changed.  The doctors and nurses can’t tell me why it happened – it does so your energy is best spent learning about your new lifestyle.

I didn’t need to change diet very much and because the high glucose wracked my body I was ordered to stop exercising until after my blood sugar was under control.  When I was allowed to begin exercising again it was at a snail’s pace, five minutes of walking a day, three days a week.  The plan I was given increased the exercise over an eight week period.

With spring/summer about to break in Wisconsin at my house it means gardening and yard work.  I’ve decided to turn the clock back and mow with a manual lawnmower.  Fiskar’s makes a high tech manual mower that sharpens the blades as it mows and the grass forward rather than back so the grass gets mulched at the same time.

 I’ve divided my lawn into three mini-lawns and it takes about 30 minutes to mow each.  I get work on legs and arms by manually mowing and even work up a sweat.  So, I call this my Fiskar’s Therapy.        

The Strange Case of the Missing Visitors (to my website)

I receive detailed monthly statistics from my website provider, Ipage.  In particular I keep track of the number of visitors.  In April I was a member of the Success Panel at the UW-Madison Writer’s Institute and I provided by website to everyone.  With over 300 attendees, I expected a spike in the number of visits to my website.

To my shock and chagrin there were 251 LESS visits in April than in March.  How can that be?  Can I conclude that my participation in the Success Panel was a failure in attracting conference attendees to my website?

I freely admit that I don’t understand where all my visits come from.  Since June 2012 I’ve averaged 1216 visits per month.  In April 2013 I had 489 MORE visits than my monthly average (the initial 4 months of 2012 were bleak).  Taking that view April doesn’t look so bad.

What’s the right perspective?  Can anyone in Social Network Land (SNL) help me out?  Should I be tracking other data such as:  number of pages or number of hits?  And what happened to 251 visitors?  Anyone who can help me out with this will be greatly appreciated.

  

I believe, if we are honest with ourselves, all artists would agree that creativity is a mystery.  For centuries the common belief was that creativity was something external to the human being and the lucky few were visited by the external power more or less on a regular but whimsical basis.  We can site the Muses for the Greeks, the concept of genius for the Romans.

 Jung gave us a different view with the concept of archetypes and the collective unconscious.  As I devote more time to creative endeavors I find that the unconscious kicks in especially when I sleep.  While on vacation we’re having the living room painted because it requires skills I just don’t have and am not interested in learning, especially because the project involves painting a stair case.  To prepare for the project everything must be moved out of the living room and all the artwork taken down.  When the job is finished there will be a great opportunity to re-organize both the furniture and the artwork.  One evening I actually dreamt of how the living room could look if placement of the furniture was radically changed.

Maybe it doesn’t sound too dramatic but it’s the process that is important.  I viewed re-organizing as a puzzle to be solved and then let go of it so solutions could bubble up.  I use the same technique when I write.  Recently my editor suggested two significant changes to the plot by suggesting two characters be introduced earlier and given more back-story.  His concern was that the characters were a bit like cardboard and one dimensional.

Both characters are critical to the story since once is the protagonist’s best friend and the other is his lover.  I “slept” on the editor’s suggestion and developed two new chapters each based on one primary scene to introduce both characters much earlier in the book.  To make sure I on the mark with the suggestion, I e-mailed my editor with a very rough synopsis of the two new chapters and he confirmed it was exactly what was needed.

How or why does this work?  I really don’t know.  I have learned, however, to pay attention to it.  I would like to learn how the creative process works for other writers.  Reply to this blog and share how the creative enters your work.

  

Several years ago at a Writer’s Institute Conference I was convinced of the wisdom of having one or more beta readers for my novel.  The first person that had the job I didn’t know.  It was a relative of a friend I met at the conference who swore by his sister-in-laws skills at reading and commenting on fiction.

Several weeks after submitting my manuscript to her she sent me a three page, scathing e-mail that ripped my manuscript and me apart.  It was very personal and disturbing.  She closed her written critique by stating she hated historical fiction and felt she had wasted her time in reading my manuscript.  My friend was embarrassed and I felt I wasted my time in letting a stranger serve as a beta reader.  Lesson learned – ask someone you know and trust to be your beta reader.

I asked my friend Rob for his help.  He was thorough and insightful and helped me with theme and timeline but he insisted on telling me what the title of the book should be.  In fact, he obsessed about the title and would even call me for weeks with his latest rendition of what the title should be.  That should have been a warning to me but I didn’t heed it.

After getting a galley back from the publisher I parted ways with in February I asked Rob to serve as my beta reader again.  Again, he took about three weeks to give it a good read and took copious notes and made many notes in the manuscript.   I also gave him a copy of my latest version of the back of the book blurb.  When he called me to arrange a time to meet to review his comments he proudly announced that he had re-written my back of the book blub.  What?  

Making comments, suggestions, having a discussion is fine.  But re-writing just isn’t acceptable, it crosses the line.  My friend is a song writer and we discuss his songs, I make comments and suggestions but I’ NEVER re-written the music or lyrics to one of his songs.

He also claimed I had a number of misspellings.  One he constantly corrected was Midleton (one d) a city in Ireland east of Cork and the location of the distillery making Ireland’s finest single malt whiskey.  He corrected everyone to Middleton (two d’s).  He didn’t take the time to ask me about the spelling or research it himself, he was arrogant enough to correct me.

So, as you might imagine, I’m searching for a new beta reader.  Anyone interested in being a beta reader to help a writer?