The Crazy Story in Your Heart

Oh friends, it's been awhile. It's not the first time I've disappeared from the blogosphere, and it won't be the last, but that's the fun of being a student. You have a couple calm weeks, then suddenly you're up until two in the morning and eating cookies for every meal breakfast and blasting the Backstreet Boys because it's the only way you'll get through and forgetting punctuation--

It's a lot. But I'm done in six days (!), and now that I have a self-declared afternoon off, I want to check in with all of you wonderful people.

It won't surprise you to learn that I haven't written more than the odd scene here or there. Those odd scenes, however, aren't from my WIP. They're from what I've temporarily titled the Crazy Story in My Heat (bestseller, right?)

The story is absolutely crazy and there's no way it could exist as a novel without some serious editing (I'd have to take out the pregnancy and show-stopping number and probably age the characters ten years..seriously.) And when I daydream about it or even write it instead of my novel (which is like 5% more sensible, to be honest), I feel guilty about wasting my time. 

Which is silly, because it's fun, and writers are allowed to have fun. When I'm in writing-mode again, my focus will be my novel, but when I need a break? Of course I'm going to turn to the crazy story. 

Sometimes we forget that writing is supposed to be fun. Sometimes we forget that life is supposed to be fun. Don't be afraid to remind yourself.

When You Feel Like a Fraud

I have been hiding out in a cave, where I have worked on essays, studied for exams, and written a polyphonic piece of nonfiction.

All of this was for school, but one of these things is clearly not like the others. The nonfiction piece was for my creative writing class, the same one which I wrote poetry for a couple months ago. I had less experience with nonfiction than I did with poetry--that is, I had none--and I'd never even heard the term polyphonic until the professor taught it to us.

As I worked on the project, I felt like a fraud. Who am I to write about my life? Who am I to put passages from other texts, including the Bible, into my story? Aren't they too good, too important for it?

Those questions led to others. What am I doing in a creative writing class when I'm clearly not experienced enough for it? How can I claim to have a voice as a writer? Who am I to edit my peers' pieces? What makes me think I can pull this metaphor off? Do I really know how to use a semi-colon? 

Who am I to call myself a writer?

That's a question I ask myself all the time as I work on novels. It's easy to feel like you're faking it as a writer and that, one day, someone will realize how little you know and call you a fraud, because you are one.

But really, we're all faking it. All we can do is use what we do know to produce our best work, and to continue learning. We'll never know everything, and that's ok.

Whenever I feel like a fraud as a writer, "Swing the Cellar Door" by Hey Rosetta! makes me feel better.

I'm sorry to reduce you to this useless imagistic bullshit, but maybe that's all I got

and

I'm sorry to confuse with some foolish thing that misses truth, but maybe that's all we are

and

I'm sorry to abuse you with this ruthlessly sadistic music, but maybe that's all I want, I'm just a really pretentious guy

Maybe all we've got--useless, foolish, pretentious, or wrong as it may seem--is exactly what we need to write some awesome stuff. Only one way to find out.

I felt like I faked my way through my nonfiction piece, but I was truthful when I wrote it, worked hard on it, and took risks with it. That was all I had, and when I passed my piece in, I knew it was enough.

See you on Wednesday, when I'll move out of my cave for four months.

Improving as a Writer

Recently, I posted about experimenting with genre, which was inspired by the poetry portfolio I completed for my creative writing class.

Today, I got that portfolio back with a...

GRADE.


Yes, that is bold, italicized, and underlined. As a scholarship student who needs to keep an A- average to remain a scholarship student, as well as a recovering perfectionist, that is how I view grades. I will not say what that grade was, but that it was one grade point (counting grade points as C-, C, C+ etc.)  lower than I expected. Yes, one whole grade point. If my grade had been the first comment I saw, well, I would not be calm enough to write a blog post right now (and on a writing blog, no less! I would have felt even more unqualified to write this post than I am, and trust me, I'm far from qualified.)

But my professor, bless her, left a comment on the top of the first page that caught my eye before the grade did. She said that my work is getting stronger and stronger.

And then I saw my grade, and was ok with it. Happy, even. To clarify, though I expected to do better on the project than I did, I did not expect to get an A, either. The best lesson I've learned since becoming active in the YA community is how many more lessons I still need to learn. And, though I'm not new to creative writing, I am new to poetry, so of course I wasn't going to master the style in a few weeks.

But I got better. And I think I'm getting better as a YA writer, too. That's not to say that every scene I write is an improvement on the last one I wrote (and that was not the case with my poetry, either), but that, generally speaking, I'm a better writer than I was a few months ago. And I think that's all I can ask for.

What about you? Do you see how much you've improved as writer? Can you recognize and remember that, even if you take a step backwards? Let me know in the comments!