SCBWI Midwinter Conference

Tomorrow I’m leaving for NY to attend my first SCBWI Midwinter Conference as Regional Advisor Coordinator. This is one of my favorite events of the year—second only to the Summer Conference in Los Angeles—and I’m looking forward to seeing old friends, meeting new RAs, chatting with my wonderful editor, and of course having dinner with my daughter!

I don’t know how much time I’ll spend in the sessions, to tell the truth. I’d never say that I know everything about writing, but I’m at the point now where I think I might know everything that someone can tell me in an hour-long workshop.

I hope I find other people who have left a day job for writing or illustrating. What do you want me to ask them? Leave a comment and let me know!

On the Way to Becoming a Real Writer

Thanks to Linnea Heaney for this week’s guest post.

I didn’t see it coming.

About four years ago, I was laid off from a state-wide education position and the opportunity I had been wanting since college appeared at my front door. All I had to do was open it and step out; but I was lost and my compass broken.

I’d been speeding along, paying my children’s tuition and trying to stay sane. How could I unlock my brain from workplace thought patterns? I kept going out the back door with its turnkey and well-worn path. It was not going to be easy. On the good side, my husband had a job and the kids were just about out of school. Gradually, I realigned our monthly budget. Still, my mind was stuck in the eight-to-five foggy world.

Then a friend mentioned she needed a mural in a reading corner for children, but couldn’t justify allocating money to hire a noted artist when the money should be spent on books. I remarked off-handedly that even I could paint a mural, and I wouldn’t charge anything. My head must have been elsewhere because I was shocked to find myself being asked if I really would paint the mural. I agreed.

I jumped off a cliff without anything to catch me on the way down. But my brain clicked and intuitively my hand sketched freely on brown painter’s paper. The brain-to-hand-to-pencil connection worked wonderfully.

Unlike the academic writing I had been doing, the mural process seemed more similar to the creative writing I needed to do. Taking one step at a time pushed my creative spirit along. The actual painting took place over a few Sunday afternoons when I worked in solitude. Up and down the ladder I went, applying color in freeing strokes. I was in flow and flying, I had found my creative self. And isn’t that the reason we write and draw: to find our true selves?

Over the next months, I attended workshops and SCBWI conferences. I started writing children’s manuscripts all over again. While working one-on-one with an editor at Chautauqua, I began to learn how to move a story forward. I found a key while listening to a presenter at a workshop based on Julia Cameron’s books. On the way to becoming a real writer, I unlocked and threw open doors and windows. I found myself and in the process found my writing and my voice.

The next manuscript I revised was one of my oldest stories, a picture book, and it quickly received two publisher rejections that summer. It was the story closest to my heart, but I put it in a drawer and continued writing my first novel. Three months later I accidentally ran into the workshop presenter at a bookstore event. The manuscript in the drawer was mentioned. By the next day she had read it and, ultimately, it was published at Hunger Mountain, VCFA Journal of the Arts.

Out the front door I step every day, searching for truth in my writing. Opportunities come in the most unlikely ways: not really planned, they present themselves as possibilities and wait for me to open the next new door. They launch me—sometimes not very high, but I am flying. I am a full-time writer and author.

Linnea writes for young readers and those searching for a voice. She does presentations on story voice and emergent literacy. Hiking on mountain trails, in the high desert, and in the little corners around America are part of her journey. Her blog, "Linnea's Illuminated Notes," considers writing, children's literature, and early literacy.

The Last First Day

Last Sunday night I had one of those nightmares like the ones that you had when you were a student and you dreamed that it was the last day of the semester and you suddenly realized that you had completely forgotten about a class you had signed up for, and then you had to take the final without having shown up for a single lecture or read a single assignment.

Only now that I haven’t been a student for decades, the dream had changed. This time, I had forgotten I was to teach a class until the last day of the semester.

I recently had a similar dream, where I had to take the SAT exam in chemistry. Luckily, though, the questions were geared toward non-science people. I remember that one of the questions was, “Why are chemistry sets a popular gift for children?” and I correctly chose “E: They’re not.”

So I woke from that one feeling triumphant. But the one where I forgot an entire class—I woke up so horrified that even when I realized it was a dream, I still felt awful.

The residue of that dream added to the strangeness of going back to work from winter break the next day. Twenty-eight years at one job sounds long enough, but when I break it down into fifty-six semesters—wow. Fifty-six times—and that’s not even counting the years I spent as a TA—I’ve walked into a set of classrooms with new faces in them, new expectations, new books, new techniques, new courses. And this is the last one.

The beginning of the semester is always challenging, as students come and go, drop a class, add one, switch sections or levels. I try to learn all my students’ names by the end of the first week, a task made more difficult as my gray matter shrinks with age but also a lot easier in the last few years because of the class photos I can access. But it’s exhilarating, too, as I feel out my students and find their strengths and weaknesses, as I try to set the tone for the semester: lively and relaxed, but with the expectation of hard work. A hard balance, as is the balance between formality and approachability.

So I kept examining myself all day to see if the awkwardness I felt was just the usual gear-shifting, or if it had to do with my recognition that this is the last time. And I just don’t know. I’ll have to wait until the semester is well underway before I can really tell.

I’ll let you know.

Dry Run

I’ve always had a few weeks off between semesters, but this is the first time I’ve looked on winter break as a dry run for retirement—or at least, the first time when retirement has been imminent. Just over four months now!

So I’ve been observing my habits more closely than usual. I know it’s not a realistic simulation, since I had to make syllabi for my classes, deal with book orders, handle a few bureaucratic matters, etc., but it’s as close as I’m going to come.

Results? I turn out to be very sporadic about writing. Some days I sit and type for hours, but on others, I squeeze out a sentence or two and run dry. I wish I had a routine—but there are so many to try (word count per day; number of hours per day;  number of scenes per day), and each one takes a long tryout time, and I’m afraid I’d get frustrated and quit before giving each a fair shot.

I remember hearing Sharon Creech speak shortly after she won a Newbery for Walk Two Moons. She said that after she had achieved this great success, she decided to take a writing class, because she couldn’t believe it was anything but a fluke. After a few lessons, she called her agent in a panic and said, “I’m doing it all wrong!”

The agent replied, “Sharon, your process is your process. Honor it.”

So I guess that’s what I’ll have to do: honor my process, unsatisfying as it seems. If I’m the sporadic type of writer, I guess that’s who I am.

Right?

Staying Unemployed: It's Not as Easy as You Think

My friend and SCBWI Regional Advisor Mary Cronk Farrell contributed this week's guest post.

Thanks so much, Tracy, for the opportunity to guest post. My experience is not about quitting my day job, but about withstanding the pressure to get one. It’s about going for years between book contracts, making no money and still believing in myself.

When I took leave from my job as a TV news reporter to raise my three children, I intended to go back when my baby was a year old, two, then three, then when he started kindergarten. Somewhere along the way I polished off a dream. I wanted to be a real writer. (Whispered aside so TV people won’t hear. In a weak moment I may decide I do need a real job.)

I loved being my own boss, working my own schedule, choosing my own assignments. I loved that reading books was all in a day’s work. Sad to say, my baby was nine before my first book came out. Then I published two more books in the next two years. So what if my only income was a royalty statement for thirty-dollars and twenty-nine cents?  Surely, soon, my next book would be published, earn out, go into a second printing. Who needs a day job?

Then I hit a dry spell. Five years passed and I didn’t sell a book. My oldest son went to college. I visited schools, spoke at conferences, focused on improving my craft, wrote one manuscript after another. My daughter went to college.

I should mention here, I have a patron. My husband has a steady job with health benefits. At no time was I a starving artist. We downsized, moving across the state for a lower cost of living. We had the necessities, but we lived on what we called the “Farrell Austerity Measures.” We bought second-hand, learned to replace broken windows and fix appliances. One of our two cars was stolen and we didn’t replace it. I enjoy cooking, so we rarely eat out. I make our bread from scratch and grow vegetables. Family vacations are drives to visit relatives.

My husband worried about retirement and student loans. He believed I’d topped out as an author. He fretted about home maintenance. I said, “Give me a year, and if I don’t sell a book, I’ll get a job.”

I swear that was the fastest year of my life. But it was enough time to realize writing was more than a career for me. It was a way of being in the world. Whether I ever published another book, writing was how I made sense of life, how I discovered myself.

When five years turned into six and then seven, I never stopped believing in my next book. More importantly, that was no longer the point. I wanted to spend my hours being what I was—a writer. I see how the geese fly south too soon, how a budding branch can snap, a voice grow faint.

Every so often, I doubt myself. Internal whispers urge me—get a day job. I feel guilty not helping support my family. I get depressed. Other writers bid me keep on.

Mary Oliver asking, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” and reminding, “You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried/with its stiff fingers at the very foundations.../It was already late enough....”

Vanita Hampton Wright warning, “Expect to be misunderstood. Perfectly fine people will think you’re wasting your life if you don’t get a real job that gives you a nice retirement package. Perfectly loving friends and family will keep waiting for you to grow up and get over this phase. Well-intentioned religious people will worry about your dealing with dark and uncomfortable topics.”

It's not fun having less disposable income than most of my friends, living in my 1970's kitchen and bathroom, wondering how my daughter will pay her college loans. Getting that social security statement showing I haven’t made money in twenty-years? That’s really not fun.

But for today, I find courage to spend the working moments of my life writing, following my passion, being true to my creative calling, living in joy. That’s my day job.

Mary Cronk Farrell just received a contract for her first YA nonfiction book, forthcoming from Abrams in 2013. Her novel Fire in the Hole (Clarion) is a Notable Children’s Trade Book in Social Studies, a New York Public Library Best Books for the Teen Age, a Bank Street College’s Best Children’s Book, and winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award for best juvenile fiction. Mary blogs about history, literature, and demons and other dark holes of the writing life.

This 'n' that

Miscellaneous musings this week.

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Definition of the "Saturn Return," according to the all-knowing Wikipedia:

“With the first Saturn return, a person leaves youth behind and enters adulthood. With the second return, maturity. And with the third and usually final return, a person enters wise old age. These periods are estimated to occur at roughly the ages of 28-29, 57-58 and 86-88.” I got married at 28 and will retire at 57. I guess wisdom awaits me at 86.

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Here's an interesting article reminding us that even if we look on ourselves as artists, publishing companies are a business, and it would behoove us to remember that.

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Thank you, Ryan Gosling:

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Some cautions about viewing retirement through rose-colored glasses.