Put It In A Drawer

and do something else

I am a person who has no patience. I am sure that can be extremely irritating to people because I am also stubborn and I often think I know best. It’s not a fantastic combination. I am working very hard at listening more carefully and understanding that there can be more than one way to a solution.

When it comes to writing, I operate similarly. Sometimes I write pieces in one fell swoop, and it feels like they’re perfect and need no editing at all and they should be published immediately. I must have heard the phrase “put it in a drawer for six months” a thousand times and I always thought, well, maybe that works for other writers, but definitely not me.

But it does work. I found that out the hard way: I had surgery about three years ago on both of my hands. I could not write, I could barely type, and I needed help with almost everything. I continued to teach and edit, but I simply could not write. My hands were casted and bandaged. I wasn’t worried about my manuscript, because it was, in my mind, complete. It would just have to wait for querying.

A year went by. First one hand recovered, then the other. When I picked my manuscript back up, I had my writing group read it “one last time,” and I realized immediately that there were issues. In the year that I didn’t look at my book, one or both of the following things happened:

• spending my time teaching and editing helped me apply what I taught to my own pages because my eye got sharper

• not having eyes on it for a long time helped me see flaws I could not previously see because I was too close to it

When my hands healed and I could start typing again, I took a peek and was disheartened. My manuscript definitely needed another round. Just glancing through it, I could see places that needed cutting and rewriting. It was humbling and also exhilarating: I was a better writer! I had learned, and maybe even by osmosis.

Long story short (or TL;DR): I’m doing it one more time. Third time’s a charm. Then, onto querying.

This month I have an essay in Hippocampus. It’s one that I’ve worked on for years and I’m really proud of it. I wrote it, it was rejected, I workshopped it and rewrote it, submitted it. It was rejected again, so for a while I gave up. I loved this essay. I knew it had potential and couldn’t understand why no one else saw that! I decided to forget about it for a while, and then I went back and edited it again, had my writing group read it and give me the most brutally honest feedback they could muster, and I incorporated it all. Then I submitted it again, and this time it was rejected with feedback and the option to resubmit. I edited it one last time, and here it is. I hope you like it and I hope it shows you that a piece can be rejected seven times and accepted on the eighth, and in a magazine you’ve always wanted to have your creative nonfiction appear in, at that.

In other news, I am teaching Memoir In Progress, an eight-week course at GrubStreet starting at the end of October. It’s Mondays from 10:30 - 1:30 ET. I am also teaching a two hour master class at James River Writers called Bringing Order to Memoir Mayhem on October 3rd. Join me!

Also, I will be participating in two residencies next year! One is at the Ou Gallery on Vancouver Island, and the other is at Ricklundgården in Saxnas, Sweden! I am hopeful that I can use one to polish and query and the other to work on my next project, which is really already in the works!

I have been racking up the points because I’ve had to travel a lot this summer, and to nowhere especially exciting: Reno, Phoenix, Virginia, etc. On one flight I sat next to someone who was wearing flip flops (no!) and eating fish (please no!) so here is a photo of me hiding in my hoodie and trying not to barf.

Speaking of putting things in a drawer, I decided to take a break from figure skating this season to focus on my family and my writing. I loved skating with team last year but I felt a little spread too thin and needed to set that aside for now. It was a hard decision but the right one.

How has your summer ended up?