On Being a Writer: Downsizing the Workload

The downsizing of my workload is coming.

In May, I retire from the day job. I’m a little on the early side, but it was just time to retire.

The decision started to be made about a year ago. The discussions with everyone involved (lawyer, accountant, etc.)  started about then. I told the company in June that I was looking at the spring, but I gave them a range of September to April. Early May is the final date.

Planning for retirement is work. Meetings, legal stuff, accounting stuff, financial planning stuff, medical benefits stuff, lots of stuff, paperwork, phone calls, emails. My wife has done most of the work, but all kinds of things have to be talked through and decided.

But now it’s starting to become real.

I will miss the people I work with. I am part of a digital team, and they are good, skilled, competent people to work with.

But I am not one of those people who have to be pushed out the door. For me, the door won’t open fast enough.

The next part of planning for retirement is planning what I’ll be doing. Writing, most certainly. Perhaps some volunteer work. Seeing more of the grandsons (with Number 3 coming in late May). Continuing to work with my online colleagues at Tweetspeak Poetry and The High Calling. Perhaps doing some freelance work in social media and speechwriting. Plus whatever the Lord decides to move in my way.

But my focus is narrowing considerably. And that’s a good thing.

Retirement may actually help me decide what I want to be when I grow up.

Ann Kroeker, in On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts (co-authored with Charity Craig), describes the experience of a friend who was gifted in both music and communication, but had to make a choice in college for her major. “She ended up choosing communication,” Kroeker says, “Everything else dropped down a notch. She had to limit herself to fully develop herself.”

That’s what I feel is happening with me right now. Retirement is in effect forcing me to limit myself, forcing me to focus, forcing me to answer some questions.

How serious do I want to get with poetry?

What do I do with all those Dancing Priest manuscripts gathering pixel dust on the computer? Michael and Sarah have a coronation ahead, right? And more children. And upheavals with both the church and the government. And then their children have stories.

Aside from those, another manuscript is waiting for me to decide what to do; it’s tentatively entitled Plain Sam. And an extended outline called Summer of Joe. And a novella about a musician and an attorney.

And the poetry. Always the poetry, bubbling, waiting, wondering.

This is where my heart is. And the time for focus and developing is imminent.

For the last several weeks, I’ve been discussing On Being a Writer by Ann Kroeker and Charity Craig. This chapter, “Limit,” is the last one in the book. Finishing it is like leaving a good friend. If you’re looking for a book about writing filled with common sense, experience and wisdom, this one is it.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

On Being a Writer: Rest

I’ve invented a word: “misculturalized.” It describes being born, raised and living in one culture when you’re probably better adapted to another culture. And the culture I should have been raised in? The one that celebrates naps. Spain. Mexico. Argentina.

How could I have been born in United States, the country that hates – hates – naps? Think of everything we miss when we succumb to temptation and take a nap: getting work done; staying busy, looking like we’re staying busy; and rest.

Rest.

While I love naps, I have a hard time with the word rest. And rest from writing? Can’t happen. It’s too much of who I am. At least that’s the excuse I make. To myself.

And yet.

We’ve several beach vacations – Gulf Shores and nearby Orange Beach. Some with kids, and once empty nest. On the empty nest beach vacation, I’d wake early each morning, walk down to the beach, rent my umbrella and chair, and sit, reading. To be honest, it was a project – the second time I had read the unabridged version of Don Quixote. And I was doing it because my high school English teacher who taught our class the novel said you should read it three times in your life – when you’re young, when you’re middle-aged, and when you’re old.

Sitting there on the beach each morning, listening to the sounds of the waves and birds, feeling the heart, smelling the salt of the gulf, I read the Cervantes classic. And it seemed like a very different book than the one I read when I was 17.

Even though I was technically doing something, it was still rest. Sitting for long stretches of time and reading, finding myself transported to Spain in the late 1500s, and tilting at windmills, was restful.

It was the kind of experience Ann Kroeker describes in On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts (co-authored with Charity Craig). She finally convinces herself to go with her kids to a family camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and she finds herself reading and resting.

“At camp,” she writes, “I sat a lot, often with a book but just as often with nothing. I sat at a picnic table. I sat in an Adirondack chair. I sat on a beach towel on the sand, on a couch in the lodge, and in a folding chair by the calm, cold water of Lake Huron.” She did go jogging one morning.

What she was doing was engaging in mental rest. We have to take time to let our minds rest and regenerate.

Our minds, like our bodies, need a Sabbath.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been discussing chapters of On Being a Writer by Kroeker and Craig. This chapter is entitled “Rest.” There’s one chapter left, and I’ll discuss it next week.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Make a Little Plan, Stan

I’ve talked before about how my two novels, Dancing Priest and A Light Shining, came to be written. Inspired by a song, the story for both was written in my head for four years. When it came time to write it down, it poured out – gushed is the operative word – for almost 250,000 words. Ultimately, I cut the equivalent of one novel from two. The editing and rewriting process essentially lasted for six years.

Along the way, the outlines, drafts, and ideas for six more novels using the same characters came into being, ranging from a 4,000-word treatment to a 70,000 word manuscript. And somewhere in there came two entirely different novel ideas, one becoming a 60,000-word manuscript and the other a 1,000-word summary. And wouldn’t you know it, but the ideas for three more novels in the Dancing Priest series have been rattling around my head, following the same process as the original – creation in my mind as I go to sleep at night.

And did I mention the 30,000-word novella?

This is not exactly what I would call a deliberate writing plan. Including the two that are published, this would mean a total of 14 books.

It makes my head hurt just to think about it.

I think of these manuscripts, these words, the characters waiting in the wings, so to speak, and I’m not sure if there will even be another play. I’m working on the third novel in the series, but I’m plagued by all the usual doubts.

My plan will likely be something like “just plow right on ahead.”

I work in a company where this absence of planning would be anathema. Planning means control, and whether they realize or not, all corporations were created with the idea of control. Control your market. Control your environment. Anticipate anything and everything. Everything is a process and everything has a plan. Measure the results of your plan.

Corporations take a function like mine – communicating with the great, messy, unruly, uncontainable, obnoxious and unwashed public out there, and especially these days with social media  – and expect it to control that environment. Result: #totalfail. The communications revolution we’ve been living since the creation of the worldwide web has, if nothing else, proven that no one can control anything. In fact, it’s not about control any more, if it ever really was. (Watch what happens when you tell big company executives that it’s not about control; it’s about letting go of control.) (Result: #careerfail.)

The way I’ve written all of my manuscripts may very well be compensating for the writing rigidity I’ve experienced at work. I’ve let inspiration move me. In one form or another, there are likely some 500,000 words of published and unpublished manuscripts, with at least that many words to go if all of these books ever see the light of day.

Yes, I need a plan. And I need to take to heart some words I just read about planning your writing.

“Some stories can’t be written now” says Charity Craig in On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts  (co-authored with Ann Kroeker). “They don’t fit together, or they compete…Or maybe the stories refused to be written. Either the story is not ready, or I’m not ready to write it…having a plan doesn’t mean having all the answers.”

Having a plan doesn’t mean having all the answers. That may be one of the most encouraging things I’ve read about writing. Ever.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been discussing On Being a Writer. This chapter is entitled “Plan.” I can’t recommend the book highly enough – it’s filled with wisdom for any writer at any stage of their writing career.

Illustration by Francisco Farias Jr. via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

On Being a Writer: What I Learned from a Gargoyle

Ask my wife this question: “Is your husband an extrovert or an introvert?”

And she would say one of the following:

“You mean the guy who totally freaks at the idea of a cocktail party where you make small talk? Especially cocktail parties where he doesn’t know a soul?”

“You mean the guy who thinks a group thing is having two or three books to read at the same time?”

“That guy?”

A few years ago, I attended a two-day conference of the Missouri Writers Guild. I did not know a soul. Not one. I hadn’t even heard of any of the speakers, the published writers attending, or the agents and editors attending. Not a single person.

High anxiety time.

I had signed up for an editor’s critique of a work in progress (the prologue to what became Dancing Priest; I cut it entirely from the published book). I had also signed up for a pitch session with an agent and a group reading and critique session.

The editor was encouraging; the agent was not (he was looking for the next Twilight manuscript, and was touting the merits of a novel about a late night radio host who happened to be a werewolf on the side). But it was the group reading and critique session that was worth the price of the conference, at least for me. And it was something that I taught myself.

Twelve of us, all unpublished writers, sat around a large circular table. The session as led by an agent, a gravelly-voiced woman from New York City who might have been the original for the stereotyped agent.

We had to bring two copies of our writing with us, one for the agent and one presumably for each of us to read. That turned out to be half right. The agent received one copy, and the person sitting to our right received the other copy. We were going to read our neighbor’s manuscript. When the agent explained that, with a mischievous smile, 12 faces around the table looked suddenly terrified.

It’s one thing to read your own words aloud. It’s quite another when a total stranger is going to read your words aloud.

We passed our manuscripts to our neighbors on the right. I quickly looked over what my neighbor had given me to read. My heart sank. It was bad. Poor sentence construction, Grammar mistakes. Misspelled words. And it started with a gargoyle atop something local cultural institution’s building deciding to come alive by throwing pieces of itself at below on the sidewalk below. (I’m embarrassed to say that I thought it might be a great fit for that agent and his werewolf.)

The readings were rather perfunctory. We were all somewhat unnerved at the idea of reading each other’s words aloud. Eleven of us played it safe and read in mostly monotone voices. I didn’t. I knew I had to do something to save this awful piece of writing sitting in front of me.

I read it like poetry. I used a mildly dramatic voice, with inflection and emphasis and emotion.

When I finished and looked up, I saw the agent staring at me, She knew exactly what I had done; she had followed along the text as I read the words aloud. She knew I had taken Charlie Brown’s pitiful Christmas tree with its needles almost gone and turned it into some his sister Lucy would be proud of. The author sitting on my left was wide-eyed at how her words sounded aloud.

I realized what I had done – I had taught myself a lesson. And the lesson was about voice and emphasis, about how reading aloud was a very different proposition than writing, even when the same words were involved. I also taught myself something about point-of-view, and that a manuscript might benefit by adding poetic elements to it.

“At some point, we can make room in the world, and in our lives, for the presence of other writers,” says Charity Craig in On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts  (co-authored with Ann Kroeker). “Why not? We will sit next to them at conferences, see their names on Facebook, find their comments on our blogs. We’ll recognize their work in the publications that rejected ours. We will buy their books. And find ourselves in their words.”

She was exactly right. I found myself in the badly written words about a gargoyle coming to life on top of a building.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been writing about On Being a Writer, which I can’t recommend highly enough. This chapter was entitled “Engage.” 

Photograph by Charles Rondeau via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

On Being a Writer: Discovering Who You Are

When did I first decide I was a writer?

Perhaps it was when I was 10, and wrote a mystery story longhand.

It might have been the summer before I started journalism school in college, and I had to teach myself to type (it was a required skill for journalism). Or later that same year, when I received a B+ on my first class assignment with the note, “Not bad for a cub.” Or when the grader for my American history class gave me an A on a test, with a scribbled “well written essay” at the top of the first page.

I know that by the time I was writing speeches for other people, around 1975 or 1976, I was also writing short stories.

For more than 35 years of my career, I’ve been involved in speechwriting. It’s perhaps the toughest job in corporate communications (or any other kind of communications). You’re writing for another person. To do your job well, you have to write like that person speaks. That means you have to listen more than you talk.

Speechwriting is also a rather anonymous, despite the tendency of presidential speechwriters to rush out with a memoir as soon as they’ve left the West Wing of the White House. Someone else takes credit for everything you write in a speech. That is, unless the speech doesn’t go well. Then it’s all your fault.

Most people in communications hate speechwriting.

If you’re writing for the CEO, you have to keep reminding yourself you’re not the CEO’s friend, or even his or her colleague, no matter how friendly the CEO might seem. You’re there as a professional writer. I’ve seen several careers flame out because the writer though he or she was the CEO’s friend, chatting the CEO up, repeating things the CEO said, sharing the CEO’s jokes. All of those activities tell everyone that the writer has a bad self-image, and is seeking to inflate his or her importance.

I didn’t mind the anonymity. I did mind being at the CEO’s beck-and-call on nights and weekends. I did like the largely solitary work. I didn’t like the politics surrounding the CEO’s speeches. One CEO I worked for was so sensitive that he had one hard and fast rule: no one in the company could see his speech drafts unless they came and asked him face-to-face for permission.

That cut out a lot of requests from people to “just give the draft a quick read,” usually spoken with an ingratiating smile.

Speechwriting taught me to write with a voice, and that the best speeches were the ones that expressed emotion in the right way and in the right places. It taught me that the most critical part of the job was not the writing but the listening. I learned to listen, and listen hard. Speechwriting also taught me to interpret, and how, for example, to translate a rant that I didn’t know how to write into a CEO’s unspoken fear of speaking to a minority audience. And it taught me know when the time had come to confront the CEO about his abuse (you don’t do something like that lightly or without a lot of forethought about the possible consequences).

I had also been around the speechwriting life long enough to know that it is very rare for a speechwriter to write effectively for both the CEO and his or her successor. Too much baggage can get in the way, and usually does. So you have to know when it’s time to do something else.

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Ann Kroeker (co-author with Charity Craig) says that “writing is more than what I do or coach. I discover who I am.” It teaches you about how you think, how you react, what you believe is important, what cannot be compromised, and what is superfluous.

What you read on a printed page or computer screen, no matter what the subject might be, tells you more about the writer than what is written.

Photograph by Linnaea Mallette via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

And the Word is: Platform

The year 2013 was not the easiest for me or my family.

My mother had to be moved from her home of 58 years to a retirement home, which meant the “breaking up” of her house and the breaking up of where her three sons had spent most of their formative years.

Work, normally a state a barely controlled chaos, dropped the “barely controlled” and went through severe regime change and was rather suddenly “under new management.” Work demands on my time escalated, and sharply.

I was trying to get a book manuscript completed (what was eventually published as Poetry at Work) and I know I was driving the editor frantic (on a good day) and off the cliff (on a bad day) as we struggled, or I struggled, to get it done. I was also trying to promote my second novel, A Light Shining, published right at the end of 2012. That was three books published in two years.

I wasn’t think a lot about marketing and promotion.

I don’t have a household name. I don’t have three million people following me on Twitter, or hundreds of thousands of likes on Facebook or Google+. I’m not on the public speaking circuit.

To use the word that is the Holy Grail of agents and publishers everywhere, I don’t have a platform. Or if I do, my platform is barely big enough to hold me and two or three friends.

Publishers like authors with a pre-existing platform – it helps guarantee sales, and publishers like to make money. That’s how they stay in business. It makes perfectly good business sense for a publisher to contract with, say, Justin Bieber, rather than a more literary author. (It also provides an interesting commentary on the state of American culture, but that’s another story.)

For an author, it’s only marginally easier if you write non-fiction rather than fiction. Self-help has been a major publishing category for much of the last 100 years. If you have a method or a formula that will seemingly help lots of people do something they want to do – get hired, lose weight, deal with difficult relatives, conquer depression – then you have a pre-existing platform and audience. And the publisher may help you find it.

But you, the author, have to work at it. I know the writer’s mantra – “I’m a writer not a marketer” and “I’m an introvert not a gifted public speaker” (been there, done that) – but the fact is that self-promotion of what you write isn’t a luxury. Even the best and biggest publishers won’t do that for you, unless your name is Jan Karon, Max Lucado or Karen Kingsbury in Christian publishing or Stephen King and James Patterson in general publishing.

So what about the rest of us?

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Ann Kroeker (co-author with Charity Craig) has something simple yet profound to say about this, and based on her own experience: “Promotion and marketing – whether speaking, radio interviews, social media interaction – are best positioned as an extension of the original book (or story or poem) a writer felt compelled to write down and submit for broader distribution.”

In other words, the promotion and marketing you do for your writing is simply an extension of the story you’ve already written.

I stumbled partially (and rather marginally) into this with A Light Shining. To help promote the book, I interviewed the two lead characters as if they were real people (and for me, they had become essentially real people). While this didn’t result in a massive increase in sales (in fact, I’m not sure of it increased sales at all), it’s this kind of approach – understanding that your story doesn’t stop at the end of the book – that will lead you in the direction of creating and building a “platform.”

And this, too: your reading audience isn’t going to magically find you. You have to find the audience.

Unfortunately, that takes work, work that isn’t strictly writing. Seeing is as an extension of your writing, part of the same creative process, will help.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

On Being a Writer: Writing and Publishing

I started reading a novel recently where what mattered was being published. I stopped after four chapters. The writing was bad. What got it published was lust dripping from every page. I suppose some authors would be thrilled to write like that if it meant being published.

I wasn’t. You might call me the reluctant novelist.

I worked on my first novel, Dancing Priest, for years before I showed the manuscript, or even the piece of the manuscript, to anyone. I wasn’t uninterested in publishing it; I joined online groups, followed what everyone was saying about publishing, followed the blogs of agents and publishers, sent our query letters to agents, and talked to editors and others writers. And I was reading a lot of fiction, both in the general and Christian genres.

I attended a writers conference, and even had a session with an editor who had read a portion of my manuscript and then a group reading session with an agent and other writers. Both sessions were personally encouraging. I kept at it. I even kept writing after an awful experience with a review and an editor that taught me that Christian publishing was little different than general publishing. It’s a business, like any other business, and it is business considerations that rule over everything else, including what kind of quality is published.

So when a small publisher approached me and said they had heard I had a manuscript, I said no. It took almost a year of prodding before I finally agreed to let the publisher see it. When they came back with the offer to publish, it took six months for me to agree. I was still reacting to that negative experience, and I also understood what kind of effort would be required to market and promote the book. I already had a full-time job that was about 50 percent more than full-time job.

We went ahead and published. And I was right to have been worried – the amount of time required was huge, in reverse proportion to the result achieved. The same thing happened with the sequel, A Light Shining.

But I learned, and I think I learned a lot. And that made the entire experience worth it.

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Charity Craig (co-author with Ann Kroeker) quotes author Anne Lamott, who frequently sees people at writing workshops who are less interested in writing and more in being published. “The problem that comes up over and over again,” she says, “is that these people want to be published. They kind of want to write, but they really want to be published. You’ll never get to where you want to be that way, I tell them.”

Charity and Ann both describe their own experiences with trying to be published. Both eventually got there, but not because they wanted to be published. They wanted to be writers first; they wanted to tell the story they had in them to tell. They both eventually realized that sometimes, and perhaps most of the time, it’s better to concentrate on the writing and making your story the best it can be before rushing out to try to get published. And sometimes life intervenes, and your writing dreams get put to the side.

The writing is what matters.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

On Being a Writer: Writing

In 2013, a study by three researchers at the University of Toronto suggested that people who read literary fiction are more comfortable with ambiguity, tend to avoid snap judgments and can deal better with disorder and uncertainty. Publishing in the Creativity Research Journal, the researchers found that reading fiction may help people open their minds. (You don’t have to read the entire study; a short and succinct article in Salon translates the study from the original Academic-ese.)

Business executives don’t read novels to help them make decisions. But perhaps they should read novels to help them understand the culture around them. They might make better decisions as a result.

I’ve spent a career writing non-fiction – speeches, articles and essays. And I read the business stuff I had to read – The Wall Street Journal and a multitude of business and trade publications. But I also read a considerable amount of fiction and poetry, and the understanding followed was reflected in my career work. I don’t think I could have written  a lot of what I did without having read Charles Dickens, for example, or The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (as bad a novel as it was, it changed the laws governing food production).

Reading fiction and poetry also leads me to ask myself questions, like “what are you trying to say in your own fiction?”

I have two published novels and a third is in the works. I would be kidding myself and everyone else if I claimed to have had specific themes in mind when I started writing. What I had in my mind was the story at hand, a story that kept insisting it be told. I wasn’t thinking of grand ideas or themes; I was completely focused on telling a story, this story that often seemed to have a life of its own and characters who did things I didn’t plan on them doing.

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Charity Craig (co-author with Ann Kroeker) says this: “We have something to say that can come only from us. Though we often find ourselves, our lives, in the pages of others, what’s missing? Where is the story, the perspective, the hope that only I can express? I can look and look for it, but I’ll never find it until I sit down and write.”

I can reread those two novels now, and I can see the themes and ideas. But they were not, and are not, intentional. But they are there, and I don’t really know what they are until I sit down and write:

There is nobility in the world. There are people who know, who live, what it means to serve.

It is possible to act honorably, no matter what trials or disasters one faces.

There is evil in the world, but it will not overcome the good.

The best way to teach people about God is to live as God would have you live.

Forgiveness is a gift, a gift to give and a gift to receive.

In this same chapter of On Being a Writer, co-author Ann Kroeker tackles what is likely the most common issues every writer faces – finding the time to write.

There is no such thing as “ideal conditions” for writing. “If I wait for ideal conditions,” says Ann Kroeker, “I’ll get nothing done.”

Exactly.

I have written early in the morning and late at night. I’ve written on airplanes and in hotel rooms. I’ve written on buses. I’ve taken notes and jotted down ideas at symphony performances, in business meetings, and listening to presentations. I’ve written longhand on paper and in journals, in bed, at my desk, at someone else’s desk, in cars (when someone else was driving). I’ve written on hikes and on trains. I’ve written in the back of taxi cabs. I’ve written whenever I squeeze another moment for writing. I’ve written when I had the flu.

There are no ideal conditions for writing. If you are a writer, you write.

It’s like breathing.

Photograph by Ken Kistler via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

On Being a Writer: Noticing

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Ann Kroeker (co-author with Charity Craig) gives some advice courtesy of another writer, Dorothea Braude, in how to engage memory: set aside a short period each day: when you will, by taking thought, recapture a childlike ‘innocence of eye,’” the state of wide-eyed interest you have when you were five years old.

Ann, like the rest of us on the planet, has to do more than simply sitting and thinking to recapture that “innocence of eye.” She has to write her thoughts and observations down, using whatever is closest at hand – a journal, a Word document, phone of tablet apps, or whatever else is handy (I’ve been known to write thoughts on grocery lists).

I carry a journal with me just about everywhere I go, including business meetings, church worship services, and the gym. In the one I’m carrying now (its predecessors safely stored on a bookshelf above my computer), you might find rough drafts of poems, quotes (like the one by Dorothea Braude cited above), my notes from a poetry reading with Billy Collins, sermon notes, and odd facts like “During August 1914, the Times of London received more than 100 poetry submissions about the war every day.”

When my wife and I went to Amsterdam and Paris for a belated 25^th wedding anniversary trip, I carried a travel journal with me, dutifully recording each day where we went, what we saw, where we ate, and what we bought. It was not only helpful for correcting faulty memories later, it was also useful for helping to keep track of expenses and anything that might have to be declared for Customs.

I did the same thing these past three years for our trips to England. Except these travel journals are slightly different. In addition to places visited and places we ate, they also include drafts of poems written while on a train to Oxford, notations from ads on the tube in London, a few comments about Salisbury Cathedral, observations from a walk in St. James Park, and any number of things I noticed and didn’t want to forget.

I can’t say I actually recaptured that “innocence of eye” from when I was five years old, but using the journal as an extension of my noticing things has contributed immeasurably to my writing.

Photograph by Ha’anala 76 via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Husband, Father, Grandfather, Deacon, Editor, Team Leader – and Writer

In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, Ann Kroeker and Charity Craig ask this question: To what extant have you arranged your space and time to honor your writing?

I joke with my wife that Billy Collins is one of two poets in the United States who makes a living from poetry. When she asks who the other one is, I tell her I can’t remember.

Expanding from poetry to writing in general, how many novelists actually support themselves by strictly writing? Likely more than you find in poetry, but it’s equally likely that the number can be counted – it’s not huge. James Patterson. Stephen King. Some romance writers.

The number is finite and knowable.

For the rest of us, we likely write whenever we can cram in a minute or 30 minutes or an hour. I write whenever I find a moment to write.

I've told the story of how my first novel, Dancing Priest, came to be written. for the first four years of its existence, it resided inside my head. Initially, I never intended to write it down. It started with a song I heard, and the image of a priest dancing on a beach. I developed the story as a mental narrative, and delved deeper into it once I started biking. A number of scenes in the novel were created and elaborated while I rode Grant's Trail in St. Louis. 

I was also doing a lot of traveling, including a regular monthly trip (sometimes more frequently) to Alabama. Airline flights and nights in hotel rooms afforded the time for writing. Two hotels in Oxford, Alabama, provided the physical space for the writing of Dancing Priest from 2004 to 2007, the mental and physical narratives overlapping during this time.

I started writing the story down in the fall of 2005. Hurricane Katrina, and getting my mother and aunt out of New Orleans, had something to do with it. Perhaps it was seeing the destruction of the place I was born and grew up. Whatever it was, it was Katrina that spurred me to starting writing the story down.

I immediately discovered that thinking a story in my head was infinitely easier than writing it down. The mental narrative included images – what the characters looked like, the settings, even the weather. The written narrative had to account for these things in words. The time required multiplied exponentially.

So I crammed it in whenever and wherever I could – early mornings, late nights, trips. There was no set time, because I was also a husband, a father (and soon a grandfather), a church deacon, an editor, an occasional freelancer – and I had (and have) a full-time job that, like most jobs, is something more than full-time. 

So to answer Ann's and Charity's question, I have no regular time to write. I have only what becomes available, or what time I can make available. So far, that "schedule" has allowed the creation of two published novels (Dancing Priest and its sequel, A Light Shining), the non-fiction book Poetry at Work, this blog, a weekly column at Tweetspeak Poetry, and occasional article for The High Calling. Come the spring of 2015, the time available will radically change – I'll be retiring form the day job sometime in April or May. 

But there’s a second consideration to that question asked by Ann and Charity – the idea of honoring your writing.

I could come up with a longwinded answer, but I think it’s tied to the time devoted to writing – I honor my writing by making the time for it.

I’ll ask you the same question – how do you find the time to write, and how do you honor your writing?

Photograph by Holly Chaffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

On Being a Writer

I’ve been reading On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts by Charity Craig and Ann Kroeker. I like this book for its simplicity and straightforwardness. I like the wisdom Ann and Charity bring to the subject of writing – wisdom born of experience. And I like how each chapter is organized: Stories about writing, and exploration (live, respond, writing prompt, a bonus activity, and discussion questions). And you can ask yourself the discussion questions, or you can ask them in a group.

Here’s one of the discussion questions from chapter 1, “Identify:”

When did you first call yourself a writer?

I thought I knew. Turns out I didn’t.

It might have been when I was 10, when my father brought home from his printing business a bound volume of blank pages. It had a pale green paper cover. Today we would call it a journal. I even know what I wrote in it – a mystery story for kids, about kids, involving secret passages and tunnels (and likely borrowed wholesale from The Hardy Boys).

But then I realized something. What prompted my father to make that book? It didn’t just materialize in his head as an idea. Something told him this would be something I would enjoy. So, clearly, there was some pre-existing event or condition before that bound volume was placed in my hands.

It was likely linked to my family reputation as “the reader.” I was an early reader. When I was six, I pedaled my bike to the local dime store and bought Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion for 59 cents. That was the first book I bought on my own.

Sometime between the ages of six and ten, something happened that suggested to my parents that I might be writer.

However, my father wanted me to be a doctor. That had been his dream, which he was forced to abandon when he graduated from high school in 1933, the pit of the Great Depression. College had been out. Instead, he went to work as a roughneck in the East Texas oil fields.

Charity Craig

I tried pre-med for one year at college. Too much chemistry for someone who was more interested in English literature. I even considered (for a very short time) the ministry. And it was my father who advised against a business degree and instead still do something that would help me earn a living – journalism. (My father had worked for a time in the circulation department of the Shreveport Journal, and after serving in World War II for a trade publisher in New Orleans, which is where he met my mother.)

Was there a moment when I first thought of myself as a writer? Probably, but it’s buried in the mists and fog.

Ann Kroeker

But I can pinpoint the moment when I first said (or admitted) I was a poet. We were visiting New Orleans in 2010, and I was paying for several poetry books I was purchasing at the Faulkner House Bookstore in Pirate’s Alley. The owner looked over the books, and looked at me and said, “Are you a poet?” I funbled with an answer, something like “I write it a bit.” So he repeated his question. “Are you a poet?”

And I said yes.

So if you’d like to know what On Being a Writer can do, just look over what I just wrote. I moved from a description of the book to a question to the search for an answer that took me back to the 1930s and 1940s – before I was born – and then forward. Ann and Charity’s book is simple, but deceptively so. It will make you think, and think hard.

Yes, I am a poet. And yes, I am a writer.

Photograph: Faulkner House Bookstore in New Orleans. The man on the left was the one who asked me, "Are you a poet?"