Category Archives: Blogging

What I’m Doing While Busy Not Writing

So I decided if I can’t write, then that’s what I should write about, but it turns out that writing about not being able to write doesn’t make for very good reading. At least, if you write about it while you are still unable to write.

Even for a blog, it’s a little too little of something, and a little too much of nothing.

So my mind began to wander to a book I’m reading by Donald Miller about how his life changed when a previous book he wrote was made into a movie. If you don’t know who Donald Miller is, he’s kind of the male writer counterpart to Anne LaMott, who I’ve written about before. Miller’s earlier book, Blue Like Jazz, was made into a movie after being financed through the organization, Kick Starter, when the original Hollywood financing fell through. Because I gave some money for the production of the movie, I got all sorts of emails and phone calls from people I didn’t know thanking me, and then I got an associate producer t-shirt and a movie poster, and my name listed (with a thousand other people) in the movie credits.

And that got me thinking about Kick Starter, because I actually have a project which has been approved by Kick Starter, to raise several thousand dollars for a number of book promotions that the publicist suggested I do. The way Kick Starter works is that once you start your fundraising project you only have something like thirty days to complete it, and if you fall short of your financial goal, then you don’t receive any of the money people pledged. You can raise more money than you aimed for and get it, but raise less money and your project is a complete failure. So before launching a Kick Starter campaign, you should have all your ducks in a row so to speak, meaning you should pretty much know that you have enough people who want to see your book do well and will give money to help. All that planning and networking scares the shit out of me. So I have a project sitting on the shelf at Kick Starter that I may never launch because I don’t want to fail.

Which got me thinking about failure. Failure is the kind of thing that, if you are afraid of it, then you are pretty much married to it for life. It doesn’t go away with avoidance.

Which made me think about Kick Starter again. Which made me wonder how many people would actually give money to help me promote Alabaster Houses. Which made me think about the thousand fans that I have on the Alabaster Houses Facebook page and how if each of those fans gave only five dollars apiece, I could make my goal. But lots of the fans on the Alabaster Houses Facebook page are in their teens with really angry and sometimes scary profile pictures, which makes me wonder all sorts of things about my book. And while I’m really, really happy, (and a little puzzled) that they like my book, I think it might also be some kind of inside joke, and so I’m not sure I could count on a lot of money from my fans. And I guess I’d also prefer if they are going to be my fans, that they actually read the book if they haven’t, rather than give me money.

So then I started thinking about having a thousand fans, and how that’s not very many compared to people like Donald Miller and Anne LaMott who have tens of thousands of fans. If I had ten thousand fans I would want to stay in my house all the time for fear of running into one of them. Which made me think about failure again, because how much success could I really handle if I’m afraid of having tens of thousands of fans? Which reminded me of what Donald Miller said about fear, that it’s not just “a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.” I never thought my life was boring, but now I wonder if I should ask someone else about it. I feel afraid of all sorts of things, like having someone yell at me for no apparent reason, and throwing a party where no one shows up. Actually that last thing has happened to me. Once I threw a party for another person, and no one but her showed up, and another time I threw a party for two people and every single person showed up except the two people. The only thing worse than having a party where no one shows up is having a party where the people who do show up feel more rejected than you do and you can’t go to bed and cry yourself to sleep because you have to entertain your rejected guest(s).

Writing this non-blog is not helping me feel less depressed, so I’m going to stop now. I’ll try again next week.

The Power and Perils of the Blank Page

A writer with whom I’m acquainted,
Once stared at a blank page and fainted.
For the thoughts in her heart
Were too big from the start
and to put them in words left them tainted.

To an optimist, a blank page is the beginning of something; to a pessimist it may evoke dread. To a writer with an idea, a blank page is a promise to keep. It signals the point in creation when everything is possible, when aspirations are poised on the verge of actuality, and intention has not yet been weighed down by the gravity of the work that lies ahead. But a blank page is only valuable for its potential, for the invitation it extends to the writer. Left alone, it is never more than itself. Unused, a blank page is a travesty, a blight.

Today is January 1, the blank page on which the year 2013 will be written. I have aspirations in my heart for the coming year, and I know before putting a single stroke on the page of today that as the year unfolds, some of my aspirations will change, some will fall by the wayside, some will be grieved and new ones will be celebrated. That is the way of creation. The minute I transform the blank page of this day into a work in progress, I will be faced with regrets; that is inevitable. I will get it wrong. I will need do-overs. But if I become afraid of the process, if I become captive to the beauty of the blank page and forget why it lies before me I will have wasted myself.

My hope for all of us this year is that we recognize the blank pages that lie before us, and that whatever our medium, we transform those pages one day at a time into lives well lived. They may not achieve the aspirations we had for them, but neither will we be found guilty of squandering them.

Happy New Year.

Support for Victims of Writers

Being a friend or relative of a writer is exceedingly difficult. Because we writers are shameless users of people, we view your lives through the narrow slits of our ambition. Not only is all you do and all you are fodder for our wicked profession, but all you don’t do and all you aren’t and never will be is equally at risk for exposure. We writers make things up and we make things believable, a particularly nasty combination for the innocent by-standers in our lives. Driven by larger than life egos, we believe that what we think, and what we imagine we might think, and what we think we might imagine all belongs on the printed page. Yes we put ourselves in your shoes daily, but only so that we might exploit you as material. We struggle mightily to put aside our quivering qualms about using you because we are chasing the high that comes like a shot of pure heroin when a reviewer calls us “fearless”, “honest”, “insightful”.

So what can a person do to shield themselves from the carnivorous pennings of a writer who lives close at hand? I’ve given some thought to this and would like to make several suggestions.

The best and most effective response might be to become a writer yourself. Wreak revenge in the very same way your writer has injured you, through the printed word. Be better, sharper, snappier than your writer. Become the competition.

Not up for the printed page? Gossip can be a powerful tool. Get on the telephone and talk about your writer to all their friends and relatives. Spread half truths about things they’ve written that you haven’t actually read but that you have on good authority from someone else is about you or someone you love.

Remind your writer that you are vigilantly fact checking everything they write. This is an especially pernicious weapon if your writer writes fiction. Saying things like “I didn’t actually say that,” drives fiction writers crazy.

Take offense on behalf of someone who doesn’t bother to take offense for themselves. This strategy works well if your writer has actually named someone, because they will have had to have gotten permission from that person. Be all about protecting that person from your writer. Find other people who will be outraged on behalf of your duped friend. Taking up this kind of cause makes people feel good about themselves, gives them a reason to get together and work up a righteous anger.

Help other people to recognize how your writer has alluded to them personally. Say things like, “How are you holding up after reading that short story?” Or, “You must be a saint to be able to smile after that last column.” Of course, if someone comes up to you and says this, you must smile and say “Oh I’d be silly to take any of that personally.”

If all else fails, and the writer in your life continues to pillage your life in order to attain fame and profit, you must simply stop living it. Do nothing. I mean this in the most literal terms. Be the most uninteresting, unengaged, lump of a person you can be. Granted it will be a sacrifice, but persevere long enough and your writer will either stop using you or stop being read. That’ll really show us.

Hello blogging. It’s me, Lara.

Sitting across from Lauren Cerand in a cafe in Soho… she’s having sorbet, or maybe I’m having the sorbet and she’s having something else, but she’s saying I should blog. And I’m thinking yes, I will blog. I will enjoy blogging. I will be good at blogging.

Since then, I have been to Venice, to Athens, to Crete, to Mykonos, to Santorini, and in all these places I have thought about blogging. I have blogged in my head. I have blogged about art, about traveling, about the quirkiness of the human race. All in my head. To great success, in my own head. In my own head I have been amazing and articulate.

So now, back in Baltimore, I sit down to blog. First I design my page. I pick colors and fonts. Then I will blog.
It is lunchtime. I change the colors and fonts. It is dinnertime.
It is tomorrow. It is next week.

I sit down to blog.
I have nothing.
This will take some practice. Some discipline. Some courage. Some thought.

Of all the threads of life and work that I muse on all through the day, how can it be when I sit down to write I have nothing? Emptiness, nada, junk, worthless white noise.

Writing is like meandering down a wooded lane. You can be thinking about something, but then a trail of tiny beautiful color rises impossibly out from between a crack in a paving stone, or from the middle of a bank of snow, and you are suddenly thinking about possibilities, about risk taking, about reasons for continuing life in the midst of overwhelming circumstances, and you want to stop walking and put all those beautifully coherent thoughts down on paper immediately. But you can’t. Because there is a reason you are walking down the wooded lane. You are headed to an appointment. Or your computer is back at your home and you are outside of your child’s school. Or you are insanely hungry and must eat before doing anything else, even writing. And so that coherent gem of a thought, that perfect essay or story or poem that presented itself so generously and spontaneously, like a gift wrapped kiss from a lover, is by the time you get around to writing it down, gone. Like the wisp it always was, the merest grazing of neurons in your cluttered brain, a hopeful synapse with no blueprint or recipe for how to recreate it.

Writing is like sitting down to a gourmet kitchen full of ingredients after you have just binged on a Big Mac, and attempting to create an exquisite meal. You must find a way to make yourself hungry again before you can summon the imagination to assemble the ingredients into anything palatable, much less remarkable. Writing is wrestling with the lazy donkey in your stable in order to get him out to the field to plow a furrow in which you fully intend to plant seeds that, when fertilized, watered and weeded, have only the slighest chance of becoming the garden that is the vision in your mind. But meanwhile, you partake of meals that elevate all the senses, you walk through the breathtaking gardens that other people have cultivated and you think, it can be done. These people have done it.

Writing is like that. It is messy and boring and unending and hopeless and insanely optimistic.

I have no idea what blogging is like, but I’m going to find out.