On Hemingway and Hope

I fell in love with reading at a very young age and was so excited when I got to high school and was required to read novels for English. I loved every book assigned—except one. The Old Man and the Sea and I did not get along.

Ernest Hemingway’s Pulitzer-prize winning novella tells of an old fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without a fish. He finally catches the biggest one he’d ever seen or even heard of, only to have sharks eat it on the way home. When he gets back to his shack at the end of the story, he’s lost everything.

Teenage me was so angry when I finished the book. I hated it. To me, there was nothing more depressing than working your butt off for something only to have it taken away. I thought it was the worst ending of any novel ever and after reading a few more by Hemingway, I decided that man hated happy endings.

Which is why it’s funny that I now teach The Old Man and the Sea to my sophomores. Why in the world would I assign a book I hated when I was their age?

When I started teaching, I knew I wanted to help students fall in love with reading. I was aware that not everyone loved to read, but I wanted to change that. What I didn’t know was how many of my students would actively hate reading. Some of them actually spend way more time and effort avoiding it than they ever would just reading the dang thing. But I also wasn’t aware how many struggling readers I would have. Years ago I had a class that consisted of twenty boys and two girls. I have no idea why it turned out that way, but it did. This being Louisiana, the majority of my students was avid hunters and fishermen. The majority was also several grades below where they needed to be in reading. So I chose The Old Man and the Sea because it was short, easy to read, and accessible on several levels.

Obviously I feel it was the right choice, because I still choose to teach it every year. I love seeing my students succeed, seeing their pride at not just finishing a book, but understanding it. Who knew that the book I hated the most in high school would be the one I spent the most time with as an adult? But because I’ve spent so much time with it, and because I am no longer sixteen, I see it as a very different story indeed. It’s not depressing; it’s hopeful.

If you had told me this years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. I read the book and saw nothing hopeful in it. That’s because as a high schooler, I didn’t want to believe that you could work hard for something and come away empty-handed.

As an adult, I know how very real that it.

The theme of the novel is “man can be destroyed but not defeated.” That is one of the most hopeful statements I’ve ever read, but it took me years to realize it. Life is hard. If you’ve lived it long enough, you know this to be true, no matter how lucky or privileged you are. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, sometimes life is just going to throw horrible things at you. You have no control over these things. You do have control over your response to them.

The old man went eighty-four days without a fish, but he went out every single day anyway, believing that today was his day. When he hooked a fish bigger than he could fight alone, he did not give up. When the sharks attacked, and he began losing his tools in the fight to save his fish, he did not give up. When he realized he was not going to bring the fish in, when he was bloody and bruised and more exhausted than he had ever been, he still did not quit.

The fact that we humans are capable of this kind of fight, this kind of determination, is the most hopeful thing of all.

It means we have the strength to keep going when faced with life’s adversities and disappointments. When we realize we will never get to be a parent. When we pour ourselves into our writing and fail to snag an agent. Or it fails to sell. Or it sells but no one reads it. Or people read it and hate it. It’s a helpful reminder when you’ve spent months training for a race only to have it storm all during said race. We can keep going, keep fighting, even when we are sick, or sorrowful, or so beaten up that we truly don’t think we can stand again.

We can’t control the world, but we can control our response to it. My response is to keep moving because I believe that even if I am destroyed, I am not defeated.

Huh. Maybe Hemingway did write a happy ending after all.

Run Your Own Race

 I’ll never forget watching the Women’s 2004 Olympic Marathon. It was the first Olympic marathon I’d ever seen, and it was even more special to me as I had run my first marathon not long before. I got up early that morning to watch it live. Two of my running idols, Deena Kastor and Paula Radcliffe, were in the race.

Watching that marathon was, and still is, such an emotional experience for me. I got chills watching Kastor strategically move from eighteenth place to third. As she moved from fourth to third, I jumped around my living room with joy. She ran her own race, not knowing how many women were in front of her. She didn’t even know she was in third place until she ran into the stadium. As she realized that she would be the bronze medalist, I cried.

This video is a bit long, but it’s worth watching. I still get chills, I still cry, every time I see it.

I often compare writing to running on this blog. It’s true in countless ways, and writers can take a lesson from Deena Kastor.

Like Kastor, we must run our own race. We have to focus on our pace, our course, not who is ahead of us. Kastor put in the work long before it paid off. Writers have to do the same. We must work hours, days, weeks, years, before we see the fruit. We have to do what is right for our story, our career, instead of focusing on what everyone else is doing. Stop worrying about how far behind you feel, how much faster other writers seems to be at drafting, revising, snagging book deals.

The great thing about writing is that it isn’t a competition. It doesn’t matter how many other writers have crossed their finish lines; there is room on the podium for anyone willing to put in the work.

Write a great story. Improve your craft. Learn. Create. Grow.

So many runners don't finish a race because they go out too fast. They get caught up in other runners' paces instead of their own, and eventually, their bodies can't keep up. They were running someone else's race, and it usually ends badly. I am quite certain that plenty of good writers have quit or become disillusioned because they spent too much time watching what others were doing instead of focusing on their own path. But Kastor's bronze medal just proves that great things come to those who put in the work and run their own race. You just may surprise yourself at how far you can go.

Don't Quit Your Day Job

I need routine. Crave it. Thrive under it. I’m a teacher, so one would think that I would get so much writing done in the summers. One would be wrong.

I do get plenty of writing done in the summers—some summers more than others. But I find that my writing is often so much better once I go back to work. I believe it’s a combination of having only a certain about of time to write (versus having all day and frittering half of it away) and being forced to think about something other than writing eight+ hours of the day.

So often, writers dream of the day when they can quit their jobs and sit at home writing their next novel while surrounded by leather-bound books, fire crackling, sleeping dog at their feet. (That’s not just me, right?) And often they feel that they won’t be a “real” writer until they do it full time.

To that, I say bullshit. Yes, lots of writers are able to write full time. That works for them. Even more have day jobs—some out of necessity, others out of creative need.

I can only speak for myself, but judging from my writing life the past few years, my writing is better during the school year, when I’m listening to the cadence of language and having interesting conversations and keeping my mind busy until it’s time to pour myself onto the page.

You are living your life right now. There is no when, no waiting room. Your life is what you make it in this moment. In this moment, I am a teacher and a writer, and because I am both, I am better at both.

I started school yesterday. I’m exhausted. My feet hurt. It’s only 6 PM here and I’ve been craving bed for over an hour. But I’m also fulfilled, and in the last couple of days, I’ve managed to find the spark my revisions were missing.  In that respect, I went back to work at both of my jobs.

And in this moment, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Reconnected

As my summer is approaching its end (seriously, I go back to school in two weeks), I thought I’d share what I learned from my social media break.

I’m happier when I’m productive. I already knew this, but I needed reminding just how much this really affects me. In the six weeks or so while I was (mostly) away from social media, I managed to get so much done around the house. I cleaned closets and the oven, scrubbed tile, organized. Surprisingly, these things made me happy. I’m strange, I know. But there is just something about being able to see progress. As a teacher and writer, the pay-off is often years down the road. A small seed planted will grow, but damn it takes a long time. But scrubbing tile shows results immediately. I like that instant gratification. Thirty minutes organizing my closet made me feel a lot better than thirty minutes refreshing my feed.

I also managed to do a quick revision on my newest project. Now that my CPs have had their way with it, I’ll buckle down and do a major overhaul. I’m looking forward to it. The quick revision would have taken a lot longer had I been procrastinating on my phone.

I missed chatting with Twitter. I was definitely disconnected from current events, as I rarely turn the tv on in the summer and almost always get my news from Twitter. This was great in that, for the first time in a while, I was in a good head space. I found I’m less anxious when I’m not on social media all the time. I love the conversations and varied voices on Twitter, but sometimes it is just sensory overload, especially for someone who teaches school all day. I’m always dealing with current events, chatting about them with students, playing devil’s advocate. It’s hard to do that all day and then see that all evening without becoming extremely anxious.

I’m glad to have crawled out of the cave. I hope to do a better job at balancing online and offline time. I want to take what I learned this summer and keep it going without having to cut myself off completely.

I know what I need to live life well: running, writing, measurable progress, silence and solitude, breezes and sunshine. I need time to think without outside voices crowding my head. But I also need collaboration and stimulation. I need to be challenged and aware. I need balance. I want to be present.

Above all, I want to create. But I’m not going to lie: I really miss Candy Crush.

"You Can't Add Awesome"

Copies of RECLAIMED revisions.

The beginning of my writing life was spent in isolation. I didn’t know any other writers, and I was not on Twitter or Facebook. This was both a blessing and a curse. The good part about this was that I worked on my craft. I wrote and read basically in my own little cushioned bubble, and it was lovely inside, all warm and cuddly. Of course, the bad part was that I was missing out on awesome collaboration and conversation, advice I desperately needed, tips I could have used. Some days I needed to be alone; others, I needed to know I really wasn’t.

Once I decided to pursue publication and start querying, I spent a lot of time researching and finally, because all the cool writers were doing it, got on Twitter. (I still don’t have a Facebook.) One of the first pieces of writing advice I saw was “You can’t add awesome.”

It knocked me down a little.

I don’t know who said it, and maybe they were commenting on "you can’t fix a blank page" kind of thing, but if my memory is correct, the conversation went on to say that all the really good stuff has to come out during drafting or it won’t come out at all.

Bullshit.

But see, I was a beginning writer, and I didn’t know how much bad (read: doesn’t apply to me) advice was really floating around out there. I was comparing the crap I was working on with books and words I loved, so I felt very disillusioned to learn that I would never write something worthwhile because I knew just one thing about my own writing: my first drafts were abysmal. Truly. Like I should burn them they were (are) so bad. And while I knew I could clean up the grammar and reorganize the plot, at that point I worried I would never write something with that awesome in it because my awesome never showed up in the first draft.

Of course, now I know just how untrue that is. You can totally add awesome. Sometimes a funny bit of dialogue or a poignant piece of wording sneaks its way into my first drafts, but rarely. I smear that crap all over the page, and then I fix it. Yes, I whittle it down, exposing the good stuff. But I’m going to be honest—there’s not much good stuff to uncover that first go round. I delete and add, delete and add, until the story is a little better. And then I do it several more times before I am willing to even admit to myself that I might have something worth sharing.

One of my favorite lines of RECLAIMED  was added during copy edits. The climax was rewritten (and vastly improved) at the eleventh hour. Neither my editor nor my CPs had told me that the climax was wrong, and it was fine, but there was just something about it that niggled at me. I’d worked on that story for three years, revised more times than I could count, but there was just a small feeling that it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. I couldn’t shake it. And then, on New Year's Day, driving home from the in-laws, one single sentence floated to the front of my mind. It was exactly the missing piece, and I rewrote the climax, even though my line edits were due in just a few days. I do feel that change added to the story.

The writing process looks differently for everyone. Don’t let anyone else’s experience invalidate your own. The end game is the only one that matters--writing a story you are proud of. How you get there is up to you.

Run the Mile You're In

I think one of the most difficult parts about writing is that first round of revision. During drafting I push through, writing as fast as I can and telling myself that I can fix it later. After letting my book breathe for several weeks, later becomes now, and usually, it’s completely overwhelming.

Later rounds of revisions are tough too, but by then your story has a shape and you are just slowly chipping away at a few errant pieces. But that first revision, when you are staring at the huge block of stone that you must sculpt into a thing of beauty, can feel like an impossible task.

For me, I don’t really get a sense of what I want a story to be until I’ve almost finished drafting it. So when I sit down to make it so, there are too many things to fix, too many hurdles to jump, too much ground to cover. I know what I need to do to make the story what I want it to be, but sometimes I doubt whether or not I have the ability to do it. It’s like passing a road sign that tells you your destination is 2,000 miles away. You know where you’re going and that you are headed in the right direction, but man it’s going to be a long drive. Because it’s night. And it’s storming. And you’re tired. And why the hell aren’t you there yet?

I don’t know about other writers, but I find my story in the revisions. Each round uncovers something beneath that stone that I didn’t know was there and teaches me more about my characters and my craft.

In the end, I have to take my own advice. Every year, as my students are starting their research papers, I can see by the panicked look on their faces that they are overwhelmed with the given task. Looking at the whole piece can be daunting. But I tell them they have to write their paper just like they would eat an elephant—one bite at a time. So when I feel overwhelmed with all that I have to do to fix a story, I take a step back and focus on one chapter, one page, one paragraph at a time, and do what I can to make that part better. And then I do it again. And again. And again.

Running taught me that lesson first. 26.2 miles can be an overwhelming distance. You’ve got to run the mile you’re in.