Ending A Writing Year

Officially at least, today is the last day of A Writing Year. Tomorrow I return to my regular job full-time, and resume writing the way I did before -- whenever I can.

Since I know from past experience that "whenever I can" is not very often (except for some regular writing time in the mornings, which I aim to continue), I've done my best to set things up so that I can complete the manuscript of poems I'm working on by the end of January. Out of the 75 or so decent drafts that I wrote this year, I've settled on about 40 to be included in the collection and have retyped those line by line, editing them in the process. I've also started on the Afterword to the manuscript, where I hope to reflect on my experience of the year and draw whatever small conclusions I can from it.

This is not to say that the prospect of ending AWY is entirely somber. I'd say it's bittersweet. The year has gone by quickly, and I can't help but wonder if I used it as well as I could have. In many ways, AWY was my chance to try out a writing life and see if I could make poetry work for me in a more significant way, so in some respects ending AWY represents the winding-down of a certain whirring set of aspirations.

On the other hand, my regular job has grown far more engaging over the past six months, and I think I'll feel relieved not to have to balance my commitment to it and to my own writing any longer. Also, having had an opportunity to devote this time to my writing, I feel satisfied to move on. I started AWY because I felt the undertow of everyday life and knew I'd regret not giving myself a chance to be a poet before it swept me out. Now that I've had that chance, the currents feel less threatening. Writing poems may never be a full-time occupation for me, but it will continue to keep me occupied.

So what's next for this blog? Over the next month I'll continue posting updates here, if sporadically. Once the manuscript is complete, I'll post a link to the Lulu.com page where you can order a copy for your personal library. Then you will be able to judge for yourself whether this was a worthwhile endeavor or in fact a regrettable waste of time. After that, I hope to write a few more things about the process of transitioning back to work, and maybe to shop around pieces of the collection. I do hope to leave the blog up and running for a while, in keeping with my goal of providing a resource to others.

Anyway, that's about it for now. Check back for more over the next few weeks.

Hiking

What a week. Over the last couple of months my job has gotten busier than ever. I've been waiting for the hectic pace to abate but increasingly it seems the new normal, as they say. Except for a few especially chaotic days I've been able to stick to my writing schedule, though the pressure does take a toll.

One of the writing challenges I'm having now is staying loose and permitting myself freedom to wander without getting lost in the woods. In the past my habit has been to pick a direction and write to it, which too often leads to stilted and predictable poems. Yet some of the drafts I've been working on lately go nowhere at all. From the campsite that is their beginning, they try this trail or that, distracted and aimless. The other problem is that they're in a hurry. Predictably, they aren't very good.

So: slow down. Explore, but with purpose. Follow whatever deer path you find rather than hacking your own, and stick to it. Sounds easy, right? But it isn't.

Halfway Through

Now that it's July, I'm over halfway through this little project. Thinking back on what I've been able to accomplish and what I've learned so far, it strikes me that there haven't been any major surprises.

By far the biggest challenge has been effectively balancing my writing time with my work time and, more to the point, conserving enough energy to be able to focus on writing. I thought that writing in the morning, before starting work, would mitigate this challenge. While that schedule has certainly made things easier, I underestimated how difficult it would be to clear my mind of each day's commitments during those morning hours.

I also realize that I was far too optimistic about my prospects for getting my poems published. When I set my goals for the year, I (naively) imagined that I could get into six journals. Having received my fair share of rejection letters before, I should have known better. I've received some encouraging feedback (well, as encouraging as a rejection letter can be), but so far, no dice. I'm tempted to say, a la Rilke, Donald Hall, and many other, wiser writers, that I should not have focused on publication at all, and instead turned inward and used this year to build up a solid collection. But the fact is that my goals for sending poems out have been a significant motivator for me at times when I felt most dispirited; at least then I felt like I was doing something, not just sitting by myself, scribbling away.

Along the same lines, having a group of readers to respond to my work has been essential. They give me an audience--however small--and have consistently illuminated facets of my poems that I had not noticed or fully explored. That's not to say that all of them have been reliable or fast in their responses, but I didn't expect them to be. After all, they're busy people. It has been hard enough for me to find enough energy for this work, and I've carved out at least 20 hours a week to do it.

Looking ahead to the remaining six months, I'd like to be better about not only drafting poems, but completing them. So far I've given myself a lot of room to explore and make mistakes. In my daily writing I feel free to create spectacular poetic wrecks and half-formed freaks of nature. That's fine, but as time begins to become more of an issue, I need to rededicate myself to not just starting, but finishing poems. It sounds obvious, but it requires patience and determination.

Relatedly, I have to start more consciously exploring connections between the poems I'm working on and begin thinking of ways to gather them into a coherent manuscript. I want to emerge from AWY with some kind of collection, even if it is imperfect. That will take work and planning. By November I hope to be well into the process of culling and editing the poems that will be included, which means I only have a little over three months to build up a stockpile of material. Jeezus.

More focus, more finished poems, and more work towards a manuscript. Sounds about right. I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

An Off Week Before a Week Off

Lordy. It's been a whirlwind of a week so far, and I've been shamefully unable to hold the line dividing my writing time and my work time. It doesn't help that I'll be out of town all next week (heading to the Pacific Northwest to visit Jen's family and see my sister graduate), a trip that I'm looking forward to but that also requires a lot of advance work on the job side of things. So, apologies for the lack of new posts.

Despite the craziness, I have been able to draft at least a few poems over the last several days. Now it's just a matter of getting them revised and typed up. Before I leave, I hope to get a new batch out to my readers, at the very least.

Strategies for Not Working

Writing part-time and working part-time has generally made for a good balance. I feel like I have enough time for writing but am still connected to and invested in my job, which I honestly enjoy. I expected that I would have some difficulty maintaining a boundary between the two; after all, my job is fast-paced and I work from home, so that boundary is really just a click of the mouse on my Outlook account. I worried that my own neurotic tendencies and workaholic nature would get the best of me, and I'd find myself laboring on a proposal when I should be drafting poems.

I've found those anxieties to be warranted, at least to some extent, but not in the way I expected. Not working is easy; not thinking about working is another matter altogether. It comes down to an imbalance in expectations and pressure. No one but myself is holding me to account for my writing, but I'm accountable to a number of people for doing my work. If I don't write, nothing much happens. Maybe two or three of my readers will ask what's going on. On the other hand, if I fail to do my work, I will get in trouble and eventually be fired (and rightly so).

So keeping my morning writing time free of work tasks is generally a simple matter of refusing to open my work email or open the folder on my desktop that holds all my work-related files. But on weeks when work is hectic--when I have too many deadline-driven projects and time starts to become an issue--just focusing on my writing can take real willpower. Reading Keats this morning, my attention kept wandering ahead to my to-do list for this afternoon. It's a frustrating experience that has motivated me to find ways of clearing my head. Here are some of the things I'm doing:

• Making work lists: I'm being more diligent than ever about tracking projects at work and clearly listing out daily and weekly priorities. I find this helps me avoid some of the mental hand-wringing that happens when I'm worried about forgetting something.

• Setting daily/weekly writing goals: In addition to the overarching goals I set for myself at the beginning of AWY, I'm trying to come up with smaller, weekly goals to keep myself on task. The hard part here is not allowing myself to get away with busywork -- going through the motions of writing without actually investing myself in it, purely for the sake of meeting the goal.
  

• Changing my writing environment: I'm a creature of habit but that doesn't mean I can't recognize a rut when I'm stuck in it. This doesn't necessarily entail huge changes, but small adjustments, like where I sit when I'm writing (since it's spring here in Chicago, I've tried writing out on our back deck a few times) or putting some quiet music on (jazz or blues I prefer -- nothing with lyrics, which are distracting).

• Righting the pressure imbalance: In other words, doing things like redoubling my commitment to sending out new work to my readers, or asking my wife to demand to hear new poems from me at the end of every week -- anything to balance out the pressure I feel to get my job-related work done.

• Practicing rigorous focus: Which is not to say I know how, exactly. But I'm trying to find ways to block out all thoughts of work during my writing time. For example, I've discovered that reading aloud, or at least moving my lips with the words, decreases the chances that I will space out. The rest is a kind of mix of meditative practice and sheer stubbornness.
  

Having listed out these strategies, I notice that I'm still essentially accommodating my behavior to the demands of my work (without addressing what may be real issues on that side of things as well). So I should say another thing I'm doing is communicating more clearly with the people I work with about my capacity to take on new projects and meet the demands I face. To date, they have been flexible and understanding when I cry uncle.

Irritable Reaching

Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952.

"A painter like Pollock," John Ashbery writes in his essay The Invisible Avant-Garde, "... was gambling everything on the fact that he was the greatest painter in America, for if he wasn't, he was nothing, and the drips would turn out to be random splashes from the brush of a careless housepainter. It must often have occurred to Pollock that there was just a possibility that he wasn't an artist at all, that he had spent his life 'toiling up the wrong road to art' as Flaubert said of Zola."

No one wants to spend life "toiling up the wrong road." So the question becomes, how do you overcome those doubts? How do you know if you're the real thing or a sham? What separates the amateur (in the least derogatory sense of the word) from the artist?

Lately, as has consistently been my bad habit in poetry as well as in life, I have been jumping ahead of myself and thinking about what will happen at the end of A Writing Year. I can't help but dwell on what's next. Does writing become just another hobby, something to do at night or whenever I can find a few quiet moments? Do I cease writing poems altogether, having had my year to make it work and failed to find that elusive, undefinable proof that I Am A Poet And The Struggle Is All Worthwhile?

Keats would say these are all symptoms of weakness in Negative Capability, "that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." What is so insidious about these questions and that "irritable reaching" is the way they infect the mind. The question, "is this poem really any good?" spawns others: "Do I know what a good poem really is?" "Do I have the passion and strength to create good poems?" "Is a 'good' poem really enough?" "Why continue when so many others can do better?" Each one adds its small white ribbon until they form a kind of mental straitjacket.

I recognize that all art requires a kind of faith. As Ashbery continues about Pollock's work, "It is a gamble against terrific odds. Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing." I agree with Ashberry that a degree of recklessness is necessary. But finding the confidence to be reckless (or again, call it faith) isn't easy. I worry I may not be reckless enough. I worry I may not be reckless at all.

Back in Action

Did you miss me? Last week was a doozy. Two rejection letters (or rather, one actual letter, but two submissions rejected -- more on that later) and a four-day conference for work meant I was distracted and off-schedule all week. I'm still feeling a bit down and uncertain, but hopefully I'll be able to get back into some sort of rhythm and regain my focus. We'll see. For now, please accept my apologies for the long stretch of no-posts. I know how AWY readers (all six of you) depend on these rants and inanities and I hate to disappoint.

Confessions of a Day-Job Liker

Conventional wisdom suggests that most writers dislike their day jobs. It makes sense, since they work other jobs out of necessity--writing alone (or creative writing alone) generally doesn't pay the bills. Waitressing, copy writing, temp work, teaching or bar tending does. It also makes sense that writers would harbor at least some resentment toward these more remunerative endeavors, which inevitably encroach upon their writing time and sap their energy.

For many, the disjunction between the pay-the-bills work and the do-your-thing writing fosters conflict and anxiety. It's a conflict that essays and movies about writers often fixate on: the day job as obstacle to be overcome, or counterbalance to the interiority of writing time, or uncanny source of inspiration.

What you don't hear about so much is the inverse of this conflict: what happens when the writer's day job is equally appealing/rewarding as the writing itself. Maybe that's because this conflict isn't as interesting ("I like doing this... but I like doing this too! Woe is me!"), but it's one that I've been dwelling on lately.

The problem is, I like my job a lot. I'm lucky enough to work for a well-run national nonprofit organization that engages me in work I care about and feel proud of. Like any other job, mine has its share of frustrating days and can become tiresome, but for the most part I'm happy with it. This summer I'll have been with the organization six years, making me one of the more senior people on staff, and over the last two years, especially, I've been closely involved with some of its most important research initiatives and played a major role in writing policy briefs, book chapters and editorials. The fact that my employers are letting me take time for A Writing Year is just one more reason I appreciate working where I do.

So the conflict for me is not so one-sided; that is, it's not all about finding a way to work around my day job in order to write, but truly finding a balance between my writing and my career (with the recognition that, for now and the foreseeable future, they will remain separate). AWY has been an incredible experience because it has finally allowed me a significant amount of time to devote to my poems. However, there are also days when my other work is equally engaging. I had not anticipated a time when I would be as eager to get to work as I would be to get to my writing, but that has certainly been the case on some occasions.

Although this conflict (balancing time and energy between two occupations I enjoy equally, or nearly so) sometimes makes me feel indecisive, I think it's also liberating. If AWY is a failure, I won't be unhappy going back to my other work on a full-time basis. Frankly, I may need to anyway as my wife and I start thinking about having a baby, which I hear can be expensive. On the other hand, maintaining a balance between these two sides of my life is precarious, and I'm not sure if I can keep it up indefinitely. It can be frustrating not to dedicate myself fully to one or the other, and exhausting to try to do both.

Well, for now I'm not giving up on either, and I'd love to hear from others out there who are struggling with the same problem. Do you secretly love your job? Jot down work-related notes when you're supposed to be writing your play? Let's hear how you handle it.

Beware "the Writer's Triangle"

Freelance writer Caitlin O'Neil has an article in the Mar/Apr issue of Poets & Writers on how hard it is to find time to write: "The Writer's Triangle: Balancing Writing with Living." The "dreaded triangle," she explains, "refers to the metaphorical vortex writers get pulled into while trying to balance making a living, being committed to their literary lives, and staying connected to the world around them." O'Neil uses the article to examine how she and other writers experience, "anxiety, depression and self-doubt--not about our writing, but about how our writing fits into our lives."

Finding time for writing is a real issue that, as the fact of A Writing Year should make clear, concerns me as well. Unfortunately, though O'Neil dramatically recounts various writers' struggles and the results (including "thousands of dollars of dental work" and "a panic attack"), the article as a whole is profoundly unhelpful. It winds down with a few catchphrases seemingly designed to make writers feel better (among them the increasingly irritating cliche, "writers don't choose the task of writing... it chooses them") before basically concluding that, sure enough, one has to compromise and make sacrifices.

To which I can only respond, AND? I don't need O'Neil or P&W to come up with all the answers for me, but it seems like a few suggestions would be in order. Otherwise what's the point? To show we're all in it together? Without any substantive guidance, it just feels like an exercise in self-pity.