Commentary Archives - Page 28 of 30

My Daughter: My Most Important Work-In-Progress

September 3, 2015 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

If all goes as planned, I am currently sitting in a quiet house. My daughter will be in school for the first time this school year. And unlike the last three years, this is full day!

So I am likely reveling in the silence and pondering a nap.

I am also thinking of this wonderful child who is such a mystery to me. She is full of contradictions:

She loves to go barefooted all the time, yet loves to dress up in pretty dresses.

She is fearless on the jungle gyms, yet scared of toothpaste.

She is confident enough to walk up to any kid on the playground and ask to play with them, yet fragile enough to sometimes cry because her art is not good enough.

She will remember a fact from a book we read 4 months ago, but cannot remember what she did this morning.

She is stubborn and unshakable, yet brimming with empathy and love.

This is the child who I walked to her first day of Kindergarten today. Who is equal parts excited and nervous. Who is simultaneously certain she knows it all, while fretting that she doesn’t know enough.

My child, who has grown up so much in the past year. She is no longer the baby who first went to preschool 3 years ago. She is not even the same child who entered preschool last year.

She is her own person, her own self.

She is my most important work-in-progress and the greatest enigma in my life.

This child I know so well—yet not at all.

I love her more than words can say and am so proud of the person my daughter is becoming.

And now, for that nap.

Summer Wind Down

August 27, 2015 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

For those of us with children, the beginning of summer meant a huge shift in our schedules and more demands on our time. Which translates to less writing time—and often more frustration.

Now the end of August is here–the summer wind down. In some places, school has already begun. This time next week I will be luxuriating in the quiet of my home as my daughter has her first day of school. This is also her first year of full-day school, so it will be strange and exciting for both of us.

I know I will spend the first few days of school “wasting” those precious 6 hours of quiet time. I will do things I want to do, like photo projects, genealogy, reading, and maybe even napping. I know because I have done that every year for the past 3 years of preschool. After those first few days, however, I will set up a schedule so I can use that time to the fullest.

During this last week of summer, however, things are winding down. My daughter’s last swim lesson is this morning. Our final vacation is in the books. Lazy days are ending as the school ramp-up begins—forms to fill out, lunch accounts to be opened, school supplies to be bought, first-day-of-school clothes to be chosen.

While the return to school means a return to schedules, the start of September also brings a gear-up in writing. After an (unintentionally long) summer hiatus of my critique group, we finally met again this week. What a pleasure it was to see all the comments peppering my manuscript! To talk shop with others as thirsty for camaraderie as I.

And maybe now I can finally shake the last of the summer doldrums that grip me every June. With no more lazy morning lie-ins, no more redolent hot afternoons, and no more sitting by the ocean (even if it’s only in my head), my mind should snap back into focus and get back into top writing shape.

I feel the way I always did as a kid—I loved summer when it started, but was always eager for school come September!

Does September mark a shift for you? Or are you past the point where you experience a summer wind down?

The Night Owl and the Alarm Clock

August 20, 2015 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I am a night owl. Some people are sun worshippers, but I love the moon. I find a healing and peace in moonlight I can never find in the light of day. I love the quiet of the night. No phones ringing, few cars driving, no people talking. There’s something about the night that lets my soul relax and frees my mind.

Unfortunately, school is upon us. And while I am looking forward to having my daughter in all-day school for the first time, it also means getting up earlier than I like. This entire last year of preschool, my daughter was in the afternoon class, so most mornings were late-rising, slow-moving affairs. Now we will have to rush through the mornings to get to school.

I realize that rising at 7 AM is not really that early by most people’s standards. My mother rises at 5:45 AM. I have a friend who gets up at 4 AM. When I worked in corporate America, I got up at 6 AM. So 7 AM is not too bad.

Except that I am a night owl and anything before 8 AM seems obscene to my body clock.

My mother insists that a night owl can become a morning person—she claims she did it. I have a 5-year-old, so I have (until this year) been getting up early and at odd times through the infant stage, the toddler stage, and the 2 years of preschool before this one. I can tell you with authority that my body has rebelled every step of the way. There is no morning person emerging.

We are slowly moving Kinder-girl’s bedtime back so she will wake up easier and earlier in the morning. It is having the desired effect—she is waking up earlier. However, I as her mother have not been smart enough to move MY bedtime back yet, so I am suffering the consequences.

This is because my best creative juices flow at night. When the world goes to bed, my brain wakes up. My focus is better and I can fall into my imagination more easily. Perhaps it is because of the closeness of sleep at that time, but I am less inhibited and my inner editor tends to be quieter.

Maybe it’s because night time is for dreaming, and writing is but a waking dream.

Any other night owls out there? How do you cope with living in a morning-person world?

The Black Belt Writer

August 6, 2015 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

Writing can be terribly subjective. One reader loves your every word; another reader wants to use your book as kindling. Sometimes I wish writing came with an objective measurement to see how you’re advancing—like Karate.

My daughter took up Karate this summer, and I’ve found myself having conversations with her that I have with other writers. Most recently, we had the “don’t compare yourself to others, just to your own progress” talk. She was worried that she would always be a white belt, because others were better and farther advanced than she.

We writers go through similar feelings. Heck, it’s hard not to compare yourself with other writers, especially when these are other writers that you know personally. It’s easy to think that you’re not succeeding, that you’re never going to get “there” (wherever “there” is for you). That you will be a white belt forever. So the only way not to drive yourself crazy is to stop comparing yourself to other people, and mark your progress against your own past. Is this writing better than what I wrote last week? Last month? Last year?

But how do you mark your career progress in this subjective field? In Karate, moving up to the next belt has two components: physical and mental. It’s not enough to learn the techniques of the moves—you also have to display the right attitude, with discipline, focus, and respect being high on the list.

The same is true of writing. We learn the techniques (save the cat, hero’s journey, kill your darlings, etc.) and work to improve them. We practice and practice until each clumsy new technique becomes a subconscious movement in our work. But that’s not enough to climb the belt ladder. We need to have the right attitude, too. We won’t get far without discipline and focus to get work done and respect for the people we work with—most of all, for our future readers.

So we all start out as white belt writers, and we work and work and finally we feel like we’ve got the craft under control and the attitude is right where it should be. So we’re black belts, right?

Not so much. I’m thinking maybe purple belts—about half way to black.

Because now all the publishing stuff enters into the equation. Now we have a whole new set of techniques to learn (many of them at odds with our temperaments) and a whole new attitude to adjust.

So we dive into marketing and publicity and meeting the public and social media and, oh, yeah, we’re still supposed to be writing somehow, and didn’t I leave my family laying around here somewhere? But slowly we learn the ropes of our new existence, and we adjust our attitude to the professionalism needed to work with agents, publishers, movie/TV producers, other authors, booksellers, and, of course, our readers.

Okay, we’ve done that. So now we’re black belt? Maybe. I’ll leave that up to you. I might consider a true black belt writer to be one who not only lives on their writing but is able to write what they truly want to write. You might choose to award a black belt at publication, or a certain number of books sold, or even when you have written a book that finally matches the vision in your head whether it gets published or not. The definition of success, like so much in the writing world, is personal.

And that is as it should be.

Do you ever wish there was a visible way to tell where you were in your writing career? How do you measure your success?

Summer Doldrums

July 16, 2015 By Kerry Gans 1 Comment

I don’t know what it is about summer, but it makes me lazy. Maybe it’s because we’ve been conditioned since childhood to think of summer as “vacation time” or “time off.” All I know is that when the heat and humidity turn up, all I feel like doing is sitting in a cool place and reading a book—unless I fall asleep, which is also perfectly acceptable.

To add to this lazy mindset, those of us with children know that now you have the kids home all day. This will completely mess with whatever productive schedule you had hammered out during the school year. It will also seriously impede your sitting and reading/sleeping plans.

My child is still young, and that means she wants me to play with her from the minute we get up to the minute her head hits the pillow at night. This gives me a dilemma: 1) Get no work done and play with her all day, or 2) tell her sometimes that I need to work and then deal with the guilt of feeling like a bad mommy.

We’ve been trying to work it out as far as work-play balance, but all I can say is that 6 more weeks of summer just might steal whatever sanity I have left.

Of the two distractions, though, the more sinister productivity-killer is the summer doldrums. I’ll grab my half-hour to work and then…email…Facebook…Word Scramble…a little more Facebook…maybe some Pinterest…guess I should check Twitter…more Word Scramble…now, time to write…what do you mean my time’s up?

It’s unusual for me to not be able to focus when I need to. But something about summer just sucks the motivation out of me. I crave doing NOTHING. And I am not a person who likes to do nothing.

I struggle through as best I can, waiting for the cool winds of autumn to blow away the summer cobwebs. It will come, but right now that shady spot under the tree is tempting me.

How about you? Do you suffer from the summer doldrums? Do you have any tips to shake it off and get back to your usual productive self?

The Rescuers: A message of worth

May 21, 2015 By Kerry Gans 1 Comment

If you’ve had a preschooler, you know they go through obsessions. Foods, games, books, films—they will latch on to one until you are ready to scream, then move on to something else. My gal has been movie hopping—first it was Cinderella, then Peter Pan, then The Incredibles, and now it is Disney’s 1977 The Rescuers.

The interesting thing about seeing a movie a billion times in a row is that you see things you wouldn’t normally see in just a few viewings. This happened to me with Peter Pan, when I examined why I like Captain Hook as a villain. With The Rescuers, I suddenly caught a social angle I hadn’t seen before.

Cover of The Rescuers

In The Rescuers, two mice must go to rescue a kidnapped girl. The female mouse, Miss Bianca, is a member of the Rescue Aid Society, an international organization of mice that meets in the basement of the United Nations building and answers any calls for help that come its way. The male mouse, Bernard, is the janitor for this organization.

Every movie is a reflection of its time, and The Rescuers is no exception. Miss Bianca is an adventurous mouse who asks to be given the rescue mission—the first female agent to go on a mission. Every male agent wants to be her co-agent, but she chooses the timid janitor Bernard to accompany her. And this is where I noticed something odd.

We are all familiar with the trope of a character starting the story in a lowly position. Usually, this is accompanied by that character being treated badly and often feeling that they are less than everyone else in society. Then, after they save the world or what have you, at the end of the movie everyone loves them because they are heroes. In other words, being a good person wasn’t enough—they had to show the world “what’s in it for me.”

Disney does it differently. Bernard has clearly been the janitor for a long time. As all the delegates—the elite—enter the building, he is sweeping up. He greets them, and they all greet him, many by name. Never is he snubbed or “put in his place.” He speaks freely to the Chairman, so obviously he has never been told to be seen and not heard. And when Miss Bianca chooses him—over all the fawning male delegates—to accompany her, the company cheers for him.

Had this movie been made today, those cheers would have been boos. Disney has turned the trope on its head. The movie shows in very subtle ways that a man’s (or mouse’s) worth is not in what he can do for you, but in who he is at his core. Bernard does menial work, but he is respected by all the delegates—respected before he has done anything heroic. Respected for being a decent, hard-working mouse.

I think that’s a great message to send to kids. In this day and age, so much of the media message seems to be one of greed—of not asking if this person is a good person, but what that person can do for you. Of not measuring a person’s worth by the size of their heart, but by the size of their bank account.

Perhaps Bernard’s position of respect in spite of his menial job was also a sign of the times. A time when a person wasn’t judged by what you could get out of him, but by what was inside of him. I’d like to think that America is not gone. That we can get back to a time when we respected people for their work, instead of their paycheck. When you didn’t have to be a hero to be a somebody.

We’re all somebody—and our humanity alone is worthy of respect.

Working Vacation: Yes or No?

April 16, 2015 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

View image | gettyimages.com

Some writers work when on vacation, and some prefer to take a break from it all. Of course, sometimes how much writing you can do depends on the kind of vacation you have. If your schedule is jam-packed with sight-seeing every day, writing is not viable. A more leisurely getaway, with more free time, can be a goldmine of writing time.

The main reason I enjoy my vacations to North Carolina is because I get to spend time with my fantastic in-laws. 🙂 The other reason I enjoy my vacations is because there are many more hands to keep Preschooler entertained. It amazes me how much time one little person can suck out of your day! But down there, Preschooler wants to spend her time with Grandma, cousins, aunt, uncle, and Daddy—not boring old Mommy who she sees every day all the time. As an added bonus, since we are not at home, housework cannot take up my time.

And so I get to write. And read. And do other projects like genealogy or photo albums. All the long-term projects that pile up on my To-Do lists at home.

This vacation, I went down with a list of things to do in mind. I completed all of them and then some. Checking all of those items off my To-Do list lifts weights from my shoulders. I can breathe easier, and my anxiety level drops. I feel a sense of success, of completion.

There’s nothing like shortening my To-Do list to recharge me for when I come back home.

So how about you? Are you a working vacation advocate or do you need to leave it all behind to feel refreshed?

Are You Drowning in To-Do Lists

Empathy: Curse or Blessing?

March 26, 2015 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

English: Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I suspect most creative types are highly empathetic. I sometimes think I feel other people’s emotions more strongly than my own. While I do feel things deeply, I can usually control my emotions and focus on what I need to do.

However, when someone else’s emotions overflow, it is hard for me to control myself. At a friend’s mother’s funeral, my tears didn’t flow until my friend’s did. When I hear of a crime, I feel the terror of the victim. During mass tragedy such as 9/11 or Sandy Hook, I go numb with the overload of grief. The reason I have never seen Schindler’s List is because the images and emotions would stick with me far longer than with most people. I become haunted.

Cover of A Swiftly Tilting Planet

I find it hard to explain how vividly I can feel other people’s emotions. In Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Swiftly Tilting Planet, main character Charles Wallace goes “Within” other people. His soul enters other people’s consciousnesses, so he can experience what they experience—physically and emotionally. This is a good way of explaining how I sometimes feel—as if I am inside the other person, feeling what they feel.

Sometimes I think this intense empathy is a curse. It aggravates my anxiety. It makes me wary of social interaction. It makes me want to hold people at arm’s length—although even that precaution is not enough, since even the stories of strangers can bring me to tears.

On the other hand, this sort of empathy is a blessing. It helps me create characters with feeling. It allows me to help people with the kind of help they most need. It helps me relate to people different than me, because I can feel what we have in common. It makes me more compassionate.

In the final analysis, I have to consider this empathy a blessing—because I would rather feel too much than nothing at all.

What about you? Do you find yourself overloaded with empathy?

How to Measure Growth As A Writer

March 19, 2015 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

Writing is art and craft. As such, many areas of writing have an unnerving subjectivity to them. Anyone who has tried to submit a manuscript to agents will confirm this—some will like it, some will not. So how do you know if you’re getting any better as a writer?

Really, the only true yardstick you can use is seeing if your writing today is stronger than your writing last year, last month, last week. Comparing yourself to others is a recipe for angst, frustration, and despair. But even you comparing yourself to yourself can be subjective—we are often blind to our own faults and judge ourselves more harshly than a stranger.

Another way is to find people you trust to give you honest feedback. Hopefully, they will be able to point out where you have grown as a writer, and where you still need work. If these are people well-schooled in craft, you can be somewhat reassured that you are moving in the right direction.

I found one other way to measure my journey. Donald Maass’ Writing The Breakout Novel Workbook. This book, for those who don’t know, walks you through exercises to deepen character, enhance plot, polish themes, and many more aspects of craft to improve your book.

I have used the Workbook in my process for my last 3 manuscripts, and I am currently using it to improve my WIP. The first time I used this book, I remember that every exercise made me gasp, “Why didn’t I think of that?” or “Why didn’t I do that? It seems so obvious!” So the revisions that I came away with were extensive—but much needed.

This time through, however, I am finding that some of the exercises are already complete, in that I did it in this manuscript already, without prompting. There’s still a lot I need to do to up my game with this manuscript, but finding those parts I already did made me happy. It means I am incorporating the lessons from Maass (and others) into my subconscious process. Hopefully this will mean stronger first drafts, which will mean fewer revisions, which will mean faster completion times—without sacrificing quality.

So that is one objective way you can measure if you are improving your craft—if you find that the writing books you use are telling you things that you have already done.

How do you measure growth as a writer?

The Truth About Your Productivy

March 12, 2015 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

Memory is a funny thing. If you had asked me, I would have told you that in my daughter’s first two years, I didn’t write anything new—that all I did was edit works that I had completed before she was born.

I looked back through Facebook statuses from those two years, and I found a very different productivity story.

I was, in fact, amazingly prolific in the first two years of my daughter’s life. I took three extended workshops: Revise & Sell (also called Advanced Novel), Act Like A Writer, and the YA Novel In Nine Months. I revised a middle grade novel. And I wrote the first draft of a new novel. I found posts detailing word counts of between 1,000 and 2,000 words. Not to mention I wrote several blog posts a week and was a member of a critique group.

I wrote quite a lot!

Of course, the anxiety-ridden part of me suddenly thought: What happened? I’m not possibly that prolific now. So I stepped back and looked. I write two blog posts a week–one here, one for the Author Chronicles–usually totaling about 1,500 words. In the last 12 months, I have completed the first draft of a new work, as well as done two rounds of edits for my book that comes out this year. I have also done networking and social media work and I continue to attend the Writer’s Coffeehouse every month—and the occasional writing workshop. I’m now editing the first draft I completed earlier this year, and finished editing a short story that I hope to submit next month.

So I am still writing quite a bit! Of course, now my child no longer naps—back when my daughter was an infant, she slept for close to 5 hours a day. Now she is in school for only 2 hours a day, so I actually have less time to work than I did back then.

What’s the takeaway? I want to tell every writer out there that if you are putting in the effort, you are probably much more productive than you think. You feel like you’re not getting anywhere but I bet if you stepped back and looked, you would be surprised.

I sure was.

Are you ever surprised by your productivity?

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