I have a confession to make. Every time I read an author’s bio I become insanely jealous. Authors always seem to be nestled in valleys or perched on mountains, surrounded by adoring spouses and a gaggle of little ones who don’t need any help wiping. When the bio says “She has five golden retrievers” I can quite plainly see them all sitting obediently at the author’s feet in her well-appointed writing room, their coats gleaming from a meticulous brushing. I can see said-author tapping away at her computer keys, glancing up every now and then to gaze contemplatively at the mountain/valley/ocean view from her writing room. A knock on the door.

“Honey, would you like a fresh cup of coffee?”

“Yes, my love. Are the children behaving?”

“Like angels. Don’t worry your pretty head about them.”

Ahhh.

When you squish an author’s life down to three or four sentences, you can’t help but make it sound enviable. Tidy, picturesque. No bad smells. It’s just not fair.

Never, NEVER does an author bio say:

“She lives in a house which is perpetually being renovated by boozy, perspiring construction guys, located on a woody road plagued with black flies in the summer and black ice in the winter.  She is surrounded by her loving family who do not pick up after themselves and leave the soy milk out of the refrigerator all night. Her poorly-groomed dogs have chronic ear infections. She spends her days trying to find time to shower. Oh, and also, she writes.

See, now THERE is an honest author bio. That’s all I’m saying.

Today is the day! Spilling Ink, A Young Writer's Handbook is finally out in stores. To celebrate the book's launch, my co-author Anne Mazer and I are hosting a book giveaway contest on the brand new Spilling Ink web site. As a special treat, illustrator Matt Phelan is inaugurating the site with a fun and fascinating post on our Creativity Blog. Go on. Have a peek at the new Spilling Ink site!

Yes, there is a connection! Take a peek at my new post at MacKids Blog to read more.

Photo by Alan Ward

“Oops!” I thought. “What did I say?”

I felt like I was a guest at a family dinner and had just asked about their Uncle Herb. And Uncle Herb had recently been found in the local 711, licking the salt off the hot pretzels while dressed in a cowgirl costume.

Many author visits later, I now understand that there is often a battle of the wills when it comes to revision. The kids hate doing it. The teachers know that you have to do it in order to get things right.  Heels dig in so deep you can actually see the indentations on school floors.

Not to be wishy-washy, but I do understand both sides of the battle. For instance, I have tried several times to knit a sweater with no success. You know why? Because I hate do-overs. If, by accident, I purl a row instead of knitting it, the prospect of having to unravel the whole darn thing and do it over makes me want to scream.  It just seems like a colossal waste of my time. Instead, I get out my L.L. Bean catalogue and shove those pesky skeins in the back of my sock drawer.

On the other hand, writing is ALL about do-overs.  I not only appreciate the power of revision, but I have actually come to enjoy it. It’s all about perspective. In our new book Spilling Ink, A Young Writer’s Handbook, co-author Anne Mazer and I try to help young writers find enjoyable ways to reconnect with their stories, and to take the agony out of the do-over. Below is an excerpt from the book that focuses on revision.  Anne and I  hope that it helps make those heel marks in the classrooms just a bit shallower.

Excerpt From Spilling Ink; A Young Writer's Handbook (Flash Point; Pub. Date March 30, 2010)

The View from the Boulder

Writing your first draft is like taking a long, meandering hike through unfamiliar countryside. You don’t quite know where you’re going. You pass through crummy little towns that turn out to be captivating, walk down promising roads only to discover that they’re dead ends. You keep taking wrong turns and have to backtrack and start all over again.

At the end of the hike (or sometimes when you are only partway through), you perch yourself on a huge boulder. From that height, you can look down at all the places you have been and can see where you got lost and where you found your way again. The view from the boulder gives you perspective. 

When you are ready to revise your story, you are sitting on that boulder.

You need to have the view from the boulder to really see what your story looks like and to figure out how to make it better. Trust me, you can make your story better. All writers revise their work, often many, many times. It’s nearly impossible to get a story just right with the first draft. I revised this section on revision four times!

Here are a few reasons new writers (and not-so-new ones) often feel squeamish about revising.

1. “I’ll see all the things that are wrong with my story!”

You will but that’s okay. You have the view from the boulder now and can see your story much more clearly. When you understand what went wrong, fixing things is not such a scary process.

You’ll also be amazed at how much you got right. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself thinking, Hey, that was some pretty slick dialogue or That description of the twin-engine plane crash in the African bush was kind of . . . well . . . dare I say genius!

2.  “Writing the story was the fun part. Revising is sooo boring.”

Hardly. I’m not saying it isn’t frustrating or difficult. It can be. But boring? Nope. Revising is like doing an elaborate, interactive puzzle. You rearrange some pieces. You toss some away and add new ones that you create on the spot. You try out different endings and see where they take you. It’s actually fairly entertaining.

While you’re having a cut-and-paste party, though, try and save all your drafts so that if you wind up wanting to use an earlier version of something that you changed (as I often do), it’s not lost forever. That will just make you cry.

3. “My story is perfect just the way it is.”

It’s not. Sorry if that sounds rude, but chances are pretty slim that your story is without a single flaw. This business of creating universes out of thin air is pretty tricky. A lot can go wrong. Personally, I can revise a book dozens of times and still find things that need improving. That’s why I almost never reread my books after they’re published. I always find things that I wish I had caught and changed when I was revising. 

4. “I just like to write the stories for myself. I don’t care if they’re perfect.”

Fair enough. People like to write for different reasons, and some people don’t care if no one else ever reads their story. If you are one of those kinds of writers, you may decide to skip the whole revision thing and no harm done. However, if you’re the kind of writer who wants to have readers (as most of us are), you should probably have a second, third, and fourth look at your story to make sure it’s read-worthy.

If you want to read my blog post about this cover, take a peek at the wonderful MacKids Blog.

So how do we ever get our metaphorical porridge “Just right”?

I took a wonderful crash course on Time Management five years ago. It was called child birth.  Shazaaam! Talk about porridge being too hot! Literally overnight, my relationship to time altered. Fifteen free minutes was a find. An hour? An eternity. I was time travelling like they do in those old sci-fi movies where a year on certain planets translated to five minutes in Earth time.

So when people ask me how many hours I write every day, my only answer is, "It depends which planet I’m on."

When I am first starting a book or when I’ve hit a tough spot, I’m writing on Planet Shawn. I have named this planet Shawn because when I was a waitress there was a busboy named Shawn. He was the slowest thing going. In fact, we called him Slow Motion Man. When you needed a table cleared and reset in a hurry, watching Shawn plod along made you want to pull your hair out. Or pull his hair out. But miraculously, in his Slow Motion Man way, he managed to get the job done.

 When you are writing on Planet Shawn, you are operating in a thick, viscous atmosphere. Your thoughts will be as limp as a Dali clock. Yooouu wiiiiill taaalk liiiike thiiiiiiiis.  You will labor over your work for what feels like hours but when you return to Earth your coffee will still be hot. Don’t fight it. Don’t second guess it. Time travel is often not an “at-will” sort of thing. Just plod along like Slow Motion Man and get the job done as best you can.

When you are in full swing and your words are spilling out effortlessly, you are visiting Planet Depp. I have named it Planet Depp because I like Johnny Depp.  On this planet the sun always shines and you are a genius. Time goes into hyper-space. You will frolic through your work for what seems like an hour, but when you return to Earth an entire day has passed. I love this planet. I don’t get there as much as I’d like to.

So how do you transport from Planet Shawn to Planet Depp?

Well, desperation seems to help. While I was simultaneously nursing my baby and typing to meet a deadline that was three months overdue, I started on Shawn then speedily moved on to Depp. But that’s pretty stressful, not to mention uncomfortable.

Nowadays, with my son in kindergarten, I cannot rely on desperation as much. Instead, I have come to understand that dogged, sustained focus can transport you there too. It lacks the drama of those “Beam me up, Scotty” moments, but ultimately Depp is the reward for putting up with Shawn. For not reporting him to the management.

And of course I do spend quite a bit of time writing on Plain Jane Planet Earth. No, it doesn’t have the psychedelics of Planet Depp or the artistic angst of Planet Shawn, but Earth is a serviceable, work-a-day sort of place. And it’s operating on “real time.” So when pressed, I’d say that if I write for two to three hours a day, Earth-Time, I feel like I’ve succeeded. And if I can’t get to Planet Depp, well, there’s always Netflix.

I’m beginning to suspect that there is a secret coven of kindergarten teachers who practice the dark art of prophesying.  They keep all their witchy gear tucked away in the classroom supply closets—Tarot cards under the art smocks, Ouija boards hidden in boxes marked Noodle the Poodle Phonics Game.  The reason I am so sure of this is that kindergarten teachers have this eerie ability to scrutinize wild little creatures called 5-year-olds and see into their very souls. Then they tell the children’s parents all about it at parent-teacher conferences. Of course not all kindergarten teachers can do this. Just the ones who are in the coven.

Eons ago, my own kindergarten teacher decreed that “Ellen does her own thing, and people better keep out of her way while she’s doing it.”

Oh yeah. That teacher was definitely part of the coven. Her prophesy followed me right into adulthood.

Group projects? Not if I can help it.

Club member? Forget about it. I wouldn’t even join Sam’s Club, just on principle.

Then one day I met a woman named Anne Mazer. A lot of you probably know about her, and if you don’t worse luck for you. She’s just terrific. Honest, funny, and oh, by the way, she’s written 44 books, including some best-sellers.

While bringing up two children.

As a single-mother.

Ka-ping! Ka-ping! That’s the sound of bullets bouncing off her Wonder Woman wrist cuffs.

So I met Anne Mazer when we did this crazily wonderful author event together, organized by yet another extraordinary person, author Megan Shull (of Amazing Grace fame). Here is a poster of the event. (Anne’s on the left and Megan is the cowgirl on the right). 

I’m always suspicious when people say something is life-changing. It’s very difficult for people to change. Ask any kindergarten teacher. But this event was a life-changer. The three of us decided to collaborate on a fiction-writing guide for kids. It would have been inconceivable for me to co-author a book before I met these two women. I did my own thing. Leave me alone.

Now I couldn’t wait to do our thing.

In the end Megan had to leave the project because she had some pressing work of her own to finish. That stunk because Megan is one of these charismatic people who you can’t believe has agreed to be your friend.  But Anne and I decided to keep going. We knew we were on to something because for years we had both received so many e-mails from kids all over the world who were asking questions about writing. They wanted to know about things like writer’s block and plotting and developing characters—basically all the things that adult writers wonder about. Anne and I decided to write a sort of Bird by Bird for kids.  

So we divvied up the sections. Anne focused on the Writer’s Brain and I focused on the Writer’s Craft and off we went! I can say unequivocally that I have never ever ever had so much fun writing a book. It was like dreaming and scheming with your sixth-grade friend again, if your sixth-grade friend happened to be a best-selling author.

The other day I caught an episode of Julia Child cooking with Jacques Pepin—the great culinary odd couple. As they chopped and sautéed, they gabbed, laughed, interrupted each other, digressed, and occasionally disagreed. You get the feeling that they are not only there to instruct, they are also there to learn new tricks from each other. I love the way Jacques will sometimes look appalled at the way Julia seasons a chicken, but then he’ll come around and say something like, “Ooolala, I must try zis at home.” Or the way Julia whoops in alarm at Jacques’ addition of anise seed to a vinaigrette, but when she plunges her finger in the stuff and tastes it, she mmmm’s with ecstasy. It’s so genuine, and it all looks like so much fun that it makes you want to go right out and buy a crepe pan.

The way Julia and Jacques worked together reminds me very much of the way Anne and I worked on Spilling Ink, A Young Writer’s Handbook.  We both had years of writing experience under our belts. And though we each had our own very different styles, we were able to toss ideas back and forth and come up with better and more inventive writing techniques and advice together than we could have on our own.  Plus we had a blast doing it. In the end I hope that our readers feel the same way I do after watching Julia and Jacques. I hope they can’t wait to start cooking up a juicy story.

Now that Spilling Ink is all done and ready to hit the shelves this March, I am jonesing for another collaboration with Anne. So in the end my kindergarten teacher was not altogether right. After all, soothsaying is not an exact science. 

P.S. I have joined Sam’s Club and currently have a jumbo box of salmon steaks in my freezer.

I have noticed two curious things since I first started teaching writing workshops for adults:

1. Oodles of people have started to write a novel

2. Hardly anybody ever finishes the novel they started to write

I began to wonder about that. Not so much about WHY people don’t finish their novels; creating a functional universe out of thin air is a pretty improbable thing to do in the first place. What I did start wondering about was how on earth anyone EVER manages to finish writing a book.

I think it boils down to two things: Fear and Mortification

I’m speaking for myself, of course. I’m sure there are many writers who have far more noble motives for finishing their novels.

After I graduated from college I started writing a novel (for grown-ups). The first six chapters were a cinch. I was cruising on that gorgeous creative urge that gives you super-human confidence.  All you writers know what I mean. It’s the same creative urge that makes people think that raising a kid will be easy-peasy or that renovating the kitchen will only take a week of being inconvenienced. It must be a biological imperative of some sort. Without it, there would be no novels, no kids, and crappy-looking kitchens.

Anyway, surprise, surprise, I hit a wall. Suddenly I had no idea what to write next. Flash-forward eight years.  I am a waitress in a small college town. No, I am a Waitress/Writer. I still haven’t given up the ghost, but man oh man, that ghost was growing dimmer by the day. My novel is still unfinished. All my friends and acquaintances know I am an aspiring writer, and when you are a waitress in a small town, the majority of your customers are friends and acquaintances. Every time I plopped down a bowl of Pad Thai on one of their tables and asked if there was anything else they needed, I felt mortified. There is nothing like being asked “How is the writing going?” by the very people whose water glasses you are refilling.

My ego couldn’t bear it. So I pushed on when I might have just stopped. I kept taking dainty stabs at my languishing novel. It wasn’t much but it made me feel slightly less mortified.

Then providence entered in the form of a punky, smart-mouthed young waitress. She was also a writer, and she also had a languishing novel. So we made a pact. We actually signed a contract, slipped it into a bottle and threw the bottle into Cayuga Lake (which I’m sure is not only illegal, but also ecologically irresponsible). Our contract stated that we would e-mail each other two pages of writing every day, no matter how lousy that writing was, and we would not stop until we had finished our novels.

Guess what?  Both of us finished our novels in about six months, after they had been festering for nearly a decade.

What was the magic ingredient? Fear and Mortification.

We both had enough respect for each other to feel like complete losers if we failed to produce those daily two pages. We held each other accountable, and that, I am convinced, was what made all the difference.

These days I have book contracts to supply me with a steady diet of Fear and Mortification when the creative urge fails me. But for those of you writers who are still waiting for the contracts, I suggest finding a writing partner.

Here are some suggested rules for a successful partnership:

1. Choose someone whom you are slightly afraid of.

2. Decide how many pages or words you are going to produce, as well as how many days a week you will produce them.

3. Don’t worry about the quality of your writing. It may stink for a while. But it won’t always stink. Before long you will be marvelling at your own brilliance.

4. Let your writing partner know which parts of the story or which characters are particularly intriguing. There should be quite a bit of cheerleading going on, by the way.

5. Do NOT critique each other’s work. I feel very strongly about that. A work-in-progress should be handled as tenderly as a baby. Would you poke and prod an infant to see if she has the chops to make a fine adult? I know you would not.

If all else fails, you can always start waiting tables.

snow owl, north country

A new year and a new web site!

Last night my family and I did our New Year's Eve tradition of writing down our wishes for the new year, then burning the wish lists at midnight and flinging the ashes out into the night air. My husband usually does the pyrotechnic part because he is afraid I will set the house on fire, but this year he went to bed early.

"Excellent!" I thought. Now I get to do the burning part.

I couldn't find any matches.

No problem, I thought. I'll just use a lighter.

I stuck the little papers on some tin foil in the kitchen and started flicking the lighter.

The thing is, it's amazingly hard to set little bits of paper on fire with a lighter without giving your thumb second-degree burns. 

When the paper finally caught fire, the flame rose up pretty high and that was when I realized that there was a jar of paint thinner on the kitchen window sill. I was pretty sure that no good could come of that. So I carefully picked up the tin foil with the flaming papers and began to move them to the dining room table.

Dogs get really nervous around flaming bits of paper.

I have two dogs.

So the dogs started barking like mad, whereupon my husband rolled out of bed to see what was going on and found me in the middle of the room holding an impressive bon fire.

Admittedly, it did APPEAR as though I was in the process of burning down the house, but I am sure it all would have turned out just fine in the end. Still, he decided that it was best if he finished the job.

Anyway, wishes were successfully burned, ashes flung, and the house is still standing. 2010 is off to a promising start!

Happy New Year to all of you!!