Crossing That Bridge: Facing the Troll that Lurks Beneath -- Tribute to a New Year

I approach this New Year with a mix of excited anticipation and anxious trepidation about the writing process and all that I wish to accomplish.

I love new beginnings--taking stock and looking forward--and I have many writing goals for developing the craft and my writing life. But I've also noticed each day my mind loops through the same self-defeating cycle with something like this:


1. an insatiable longing and burning desire to create and 'go public' -->
2. an overwhelming foreboding for the task of sorting or starting -->
3. a critical self-doubt that suppresses all writing confidence & visionary insight -->
4. a self-defeating lack of follow-through that leads to writer's block and depression -->
5. a self-fulfilling prophesy that affirms the Inner Critic ("See, I knew you couldn't do it and shouldn't even try!") and her best pal, Paralysis ("You're right. Why bother?") -->
1. an insatiable longing...

The antidote? For a while I tried ignoring (i.e. suppressing) that critic and even supplanting it with a more encouraging voice. It isn't fair to focus only on the 'failures' or fear and not the successes--and there have been many! But no matter how many cheerleaders I have in my corner, that internalized voice of self-doubt continually tries to block my way of accepting the calling and challenge of being a writer. It's a mean and persistent little thing, like a troll that lives under the bridge I keep trying to cross.

So, just like the writing itself, I figure the best way over the bridge is to move across it, step by step. Rather than fight, cower or run away from that vindictive voice that lurks underneath, face it firmly and lovingly like you would a defiant adolescent. Find out what it needs, embrace it and move on. But don't let it stand in your way. As Jane Anne Staw suggests in her book Unstuck: A Supportive and Practical Guide to Working through Writer's Block, letting that voice speak out loud or on the page allows us to identify its source. Imagining it as an innocuous five-inch doll with fuzzy hair helps too.

photo credit: Nancy McCubbin

I realize that inner naysayer seeks my attention with its warnings ("This bridge could collapse--it may not hold the weight--you might not make it across--better to stay back!") in a misguided attempt to protect the frightened part of me that seeks comfort in security rather than risk. But nobody ever wrote or published anything without risking.

As Jessie Morrison wrote on the Writer's Digest blog, MFA Confidential:

"It’s that willingness to risk exposing our inner selves to strangers, with all the inevitable judgment that entails. When you’re writing something you care about... you’re acknowledging an essential truth about yourself. You’re revealing some of the deepest-down things within you, and exposing your own raw heart."

Dear Reader:
What critic lurks and holds you back from your pursuits? How can you address and move past it? What "deepest-down things within you" are worth risking exposure to express?


Look forward to the next Tribute to a New Year posting on celebrating success and outlining new goals!

Nominated to National Literary Competition

My nonfiction piece, What It's Like, was nominated by University of San Francisco for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) 2011 national contest! The AWP's Intro Journals Project is "a literary competition for the discovery & publication of the best new works by students currently enrolled in the programs of AWP."

I wrote and revised the story in my MFA program's autobiographical intensive during summer 2010. I submitted it, thinking, "Why not? I've got nothing to lose." The final judge who chose my piece (judged blind, without names) among the three nonfiction finalists also happens to be my current workshop instructor, Associate Professor David Vann. His Sukkwan Island, taken from his book Legend of a Suicide, just won the prestigious Prix Medicis award from France. Vann said he could tell my revision process paid off because the piece was "polished." Graduate school, and diligent work, does make a difference!

Girl Reporter

In one week I landed my first five freelance assignments and started my internship at a literary agency, all the while continuing my day job at the children's center and going to graduate school "full time." Yikes. Tomorrow I attend a daylong writer's conference. So that leaves tonight and Sunday to finish all my school work (i.e. lots of research/writing), two freelance projects and blogging for hire. Double yikes!

Be careful what you ask for.

Though part of me is edging toward panic-mode on the time constraints, I'm thrilled about the opportunities that bring me closer to living a full time writer's life. My first assignment is to cover holiday gift ideas from local vendors, and I had a grand time this afternoon playing Girl Reporter: taking notes and photos while sampling chocolate truffles, chatting with an artist at a gallery, fingering home-made wool clothing and poring over hand crafted items, from fountain pens to beeswax candles.

Look forward to future updates and insights on the publishing industry, freelance reporting, the conference workshops and the MFA!

Memoir and Memory

In my MFA's autobiographical course, the truth of memory and how it is reconstructed in writing has been a theme throughout. Whether writing autobiographical poetry, fiction or nonfiction, it is acknowledged that by containing a memory through form we change its meaning. As adjunct professor, David Booth, put it: "Memory corrupts the thing remembered."

I have found that as I write from memory, the thing remembered initially becomes more vivid. In that associative frame of mind, more memories emerge from their cobwebby corners. However, as I develop and carve scenes through a conscious crafting of words into sentences and paragraphs, these reconstructions become distinct from what "I remember" and the line blurs. The imagery, dialog, characters, action, reflections I render - all create new meaning so that my stories take on the effect of looking at a photograph: I can no longer remember if it's the memory I recall or its representation.

Learning to Write

I wrote the following passage sixteen years ago. I read it again this morning as I embark on my first writing assignment for the MFA. Somehow, remembering we all had to learn to read and write helps me step forward to cross another threshold.

"The little girl stands hesitantly at the threshold to the classroom. Peering in, she sees desks in rows. No more playing in the pretend house with the sink and stove and the plastic fruits. No more sitting in a circle on the carpet, wedged between her best friends while the teacher reads a story.

The girl knows that desks mean schoolwork, real work. Not like playing office, scribbling pages of important make-believe documents. In these desks there are real notebooks. She will have to learn to read and write real words and the pretending time is over.

But first they sculpt animals from papier-mache and print their hands in clay. When she learns to read it isn't all at once but slowly sounding words on the page, and the pretty books still have pictures. She likes using the big brown pencil, the way her fingers curl around it to form the letters in her name, to write her first short story about the bird with the broken wing that she cares for and sets free."

Sustaining a Life as an Artist

"You need to figure out what kind of life you need in order to sustain your art," said fiction writer Thaisa Frank last Saturday at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

The college offers an MFA in Writing and Consciousness - one of three graduate programs I was recently accepted into. Frank spoke on a panel of four local writers and artists to a room full of eager students, many of them from the adjoining Creative Inquiry/Interdisciplinary Arts program. My good friend -- taiko performer, visual artist and blogger Yurika Chiba (art here) -- also attended the event, called 'Sustaining a Life as an Artist'.