Character and Plot Development with the Enneagram

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Creating fully felt characters and weaving them into a satisfying plot can get a little complicated. The enneagram can help.

What is the enneagram? 

A system of nine personality types representing distinct strategies for relating to the self, others, and the world. Compared to other systems, the enneagram is particularly useful because it explains personality rather than just classifies it. Enneagram describes what motivates people. This is everything when it comes to character and plot development in fiction.  

In Fiction

To create good stories, our main characters need desires, strengths, fears, flaws, and a direction for growth. Having a system that clusters these necessities based on real humans helps tremendously in conjuring believable characters on a blank page. 

In the first chapter, protagonists start with a desire. Oftentimes their external desire and internal desire are out of sync, irregardless these desires drive the character into the plot. The strengths of the character help the protagonist forward, while the fear and the subsequent flaws prevent them from realizing their goal. In the climax of the novel, the character will have faced their fear and overcome their flaw to transform or not. The enneagram can help us with all these core pieces. 

Here is my cheat sheet on the nine core personality types compiled from www.enneagraminstitute.com and a smattering of other resources and conversations. I find it helpful to see it all in one place.

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A Classic Example

In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby, an enneagram three, starts with a singular desire - to win Daisy Buchanan. He devoted himself to acquiring money, power, and prestige in order to capture her attention and admiration. He focuses on his material success and image, even recreating his past to fit his image, to feel valuable to Daisy. His drive and focus helped him accomplish amazing things. Unfortunately, he is also in love with the idea of Daisy, not Daisy herself, and true to the common pitfall of a type three personality, he does not realize or accept his true value. By failing to see his inherent worth, he does not transform at the end of the novel. 

Relationships

Our protagonists don’t exist alone. The enneagram also describes how the different personality types react and relate to each other. Anyone on #teampeeta (type two) out there? Or will anyone admit to reading Fifty Shades and loving the Christian (type eight) and Ana (type two) dynamic?

Enneagram twos and eights are both action-oriented and love to provide for others, but twos tend to be people-oriented, empathetic, and indirect while eights are practical-minded, direct, and independent. Oh, the juicy conflict they’re in for. Luckily, they also embody some kernels to one another’s transformations. An eight can help a two prioritize their own needs while a two can help an eight feel love and express empathy. 

Voice

Enneagram also helps with the most allusive aspect of craft--voice. Voice represents the authenticity, relatability, and candor in the story. Without a prolific model in your head, developing a consistent voice that matches the character can be tricky. Understanding the motivation behind the personality can provide the needed authenticity.

Figuring out a character’s enneagram type and then finding examples of that type is an excellent way to research voice. If you are writing a whimsical four, listen to the audiobook of Anne of Green Gables. Or if your four is a bit darker, explore Loki from the Marvel comics or read Wuthering Heights.

In Life

Even more than craft, the enneagram helps us understand ourselves. It is easy to assume that our strengths come easily to everyone or that people inherently value the same things. With the enneagram, we can more deeply appreciate what we offer the world and bring to our writing life. Do you have great capacity to research the depths of a topic like a type five might? Do you have an uncanny ability to know how your characters are feeling in every scene as a type four might? These are gifts to be celebrated. 

Seeing our flaws is just as valuable. It can be hard to look directly at the darker parts of ourselves, but the enneagram proposes some potential wounds that underlie the flaws, spurning empathy rather than shame for them. We can see that everyone has wounds to heal. Does overthinking your plot lead you to write and anxiously rewrite the inciting incident countless times (type six)? Could several other hobbies be distracting you from focusing on the book you truly want to write (type seven)? Could your need to get absolutely everything correct hold you back from sharing your creativity with the world (type 1)?

Most importantly, the enneagram helps provide a direction to grow towards. The path of transformation is often counterintuitive, so it is helpful to have it spelled out clearly. As uncomfortable as it may be for a seven, focusing on one thing and facing challenging feelings might be what brings you joy. For a nine, maybe confronting the forces in your life will be what actually brings you peace. And for those tough eights out there, maybe revealing your soft and vulnerable self will create true strength. If you are your own protagonist, what do you need to transform?

In cultivating some examples of enneagram types for authors and characters, I was surprised to find some of the greatest protagonists in our culture were created by the authors with possibly the same enneagram type - Jay Gatsby, Harry Potter, Holden Caulfield, and many Austen heroines. By understanding ourselves, we may be giving life to a most profound protagonist on the page. 

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Caution

Limiting any person or character to a short list of attributes can be detrimental. While the simplicity of the enneagram is a strength of the system, just working from the cheat sheet and applying it with rigidity can result in flat characters or troupes. The enneagram has great nuance with each type having subtypes and wings, so if you find this primer useful, dive deeper to more fully understand yourself and your protagonist. Learn about childhood wounds, reactions under stress, and what true support from a mentor might look like. The application of this information is vast and nuanced, enjoy the journey. I look forward to reading all about the characters that come alive from it.

References

Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson

The Enneagram Institute www.enneagraminstitute.com 

Ergonomic Writing Set-up

 
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Since the start of shelter-in-place, I have been writing in my bedroom because it is the only child-free space with a door, which I prioritized over a table. Every morning, I got out of bed and made my desk. Working from bed was cozy at first, but after three months my body hurt.

My neck could no longer look to the left, my back seized, and the inside of my elbow ached, which is apparently called golfer’s elbow. Since the coronavirus is not going away any time soon, I invested in a workstation. I thought I would share my simple ergonomic set-up in case any of you can’t look to your left either.

To help my neck:

My monitor needs to be at eye level while sitting straight. The average human head weighs 10-12 lbs while sitting upright. As you tilt your head forward, your head increases weight and exerts more strain on your neck. A simple 15-degree tilt increases the weight to 27 lbs, a 30-degree tilt to 40 lbs, and a 60-degree tilt, the angle of looking at a cell phone or book, exerts 60 lbs of strain on your neck. 

So in order to keep looking left, I need to stop looking down for long periods of time, which is impossible to do with a laptop alone. To solve this there are two options, add a monitor or use a laptop stand to raise the screen up to eye level. The stand could just be a stack of books (god knows I have plenty of those), but I went with a foldable stand by Roost to maximize desk space.

To help my wrists and arms:

My elbows need to be bent at 90 degrees or a little less and close to my body, and my wrists need to be parallel with my forearms. With my laptop on a stand, this necessitated a separate keyboard and mouse. My partner has a history of repetitive stress injury, so he opted for a split keyboard with a wrist rest and a vertical mouse. I went with a simple wireless keyboard and mouse preferring a lighter footprint despite less than optimal wrist rotation.

To help my back:

My feet need to be flat on the floor with my knees at a 90-degree angle. So I ordered a small desk from Ikea that would fit next to my bed. The desk has a drawer to store my journal, pens, headphones, and craft books so that my limited desktop can keep clear of clutter.

I picked a dining chair because I believed it to be more comfortable than the cheap office chairs, and I couldn’t fit a fancy one. I also prefer sitting without wheels; I feel more stable. I purchased a lumbar support pillow to help my lower back, but you can also ball up a sweatshirt.

I also try to move every 20 minutes, but with small kids, this is not a challenge for me. My partner works at his desk for much longer periods, so he invested in an adjustable height desk and an anti-fatigue mat with raised edges. He bought a small elliptical to walk on while he worked, but it produced an ungodly amount of squeaking, so it has a new home now. :)

To help my mind:

I also added flowers and crystals to my desk for beauty and grounding. I’ve often underestimated these small touches, but they gently stimulate my senses and add a soothing touch of self-care into my day. They remind me to slow down and breathe.

I love the light footprint and aesthetic of my set-up. All the desktop pieces easily fold up and tuck into a small backpack, so when the virus goes away, my ergonomic solution can move with me to a coworking space or the kitchen table. Until then, I’m glad to have a set-up my body needs.

Cheers to looking left!

 

Writer in the Garden

 
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I am between manuscripts, so I made space for some creative cross training and found my way into the garden. While my hands pruned tomato plants, my mind wandered. I started seeing so many parallels between gardening and writing, so here’s a fun list of ten:

  1. Green as grass. An empty plot of earth is as intimidating and exciting as a blank page. You can just plop some seeds in the earth and see what grows, but you might end up with a weird looking garden. I did this with my first novel. I just wanted to write with abandon. It took an entire year and an embarrassingly bad manuscript to learn that there was a thing called plot structure. Sometimes you just have to get your hands dirty, and sometimes knowing the essentials before you start can save you a lot of time and heartache. 

  2. Some seeds are duds. Even after learning craft, not all the seeds you plant will come up. Some seeds are duds and some writing ideas just don’t pan out. It’s helpful to figure these things out early. If a plant doesn’t take root, throw a small fit if you want, but then get another in its spot so you don’t waste an entire season. In the same way, if you can’t manage to get an outline for the idea and the words won’t come, put the idea down and plant another.

  3. Shit is essential. Now, what to do with that dead plant or the ideas that don’t quite work? Throw them right in the compost bin. Along with your pieces of random inspiration and past lived experiences, they will break down and form the nutrients for future plants and projects. Nothing written is ever wasted. Two or three of my failed novel ideas have merged to make a manuscript more original and complex than its pieces.

  4. Keep it interesting. Have you ever walked past a yard full of just one plant or had to eat an entire tomato harvest day after day? These experiences can be stunning and delicious at first, but then they get boring. Variation is just as important on the page. Different characters need to play off one another, emotions need to vary between scenes, and dramatic actions need to escalate to hold the reader’s attention. 

  5. Weeding (exasperated sigh). While planting is the fun part, pulling weeds is essential if you want flowers to flourish. Otherwise, the extraneous will crowd, starve, and shade the beautiful. Revision can be tedious, especially getting out the small mistakes with tender roots that spread everywhere, but this is what makes novels great. This is the real work of writers. Also if I am ever confused about which words are weeds and which are flowers, beta readers and editors are super helpful.

  6. Waiting is work. I am guilty of digging up seedlings because I just couldn’t wait. And then, of course, I killed them. Once I complete a draft, letting my writing rest saves its life. It allows me to loosens my attachment to the story and prevents me from ripping the whole thing apart before I see its true beauty. Coming back to the work, I see things with a fresh perspective, which is always better than the old one. After waiting, I can remove the bits that aren’t working and come up with some truly creative solutions. Let your work rest and something beautiful will rise.

  7. Clip your flowers for more to grow. When I first started writing, I hoarded my ideas. I didn’t let my protagonist do something that a future character might want to do. Then I learned to use everything. Creativity is a well that refills over and over again. Plants put out so many more flowers when they are clipped. Use your ideas, don’t save them. Also cut flowers look gorgeous on a writing desk. 

  8. Screw the squirrels! Sometimes success depends on the elements and defeat on the freaking squirrels. Having entered the business phase of writing--the pitching, the querying, the marketing--I see that some good books don’t make it to readers for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the work or the writer. The publishing world is a tumultuous and unfair beast, but just because aphids eat your kale, don’t stop planting vegetables. We can’t control certain elements of this process, and that sucks, but you write because you must write. So onward.

  9. Turn, turn, turn. I used to plant in the spring and harvest when things were ready, then start over again next March. Now I’m learning about planting for all the seasons to come. The layers of beauty you can achieve this way are far greater than just touching the soil each spring or plopping perennials in and never coming back. In the same way, draft after draft after draft of a novel will add more thematic development and character complexity. It is tempting to stop, but if a trusted reader or editor says to keep going, give it a rest and see what more can develop over another season. 

  10. Let’s live forever. Research reveals that gardening is a common activity in regions of the world where people live very long and satisfied lives. Gardening reduces stress and provides physical activity, Vitamin D, and healthy food. While writing does not provide any of these things and has caused plenty of stress in my life, it still heals my soul. I’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating, creativity is self-care. So take care of yourself - garden and write :)

 

Writing Wounds

 
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Characters have wounds - painful past experiences that stay in their memory. A failure, betrayal, injustice, loss, rejection, or disillusionment. Due to their wound, characters develop maladaptive beliefs and behaviors, aka flaws. At the core of a story, the protagonist must face her wound and overcome her flaw to achieve her goal. If successful, this emotional journey creates a gift, which is often the antithesis of the wound. 

For example, in facing a lifetime of class discrimination and pressure to save her family through marriage, Elizabeth Bennet develops an exaggerated amount of discrimination against a wealthy and prideful man, Mr. Darcy. By recognizing her wound and flaw, Ms. Bennet finally achieves the coexistence of romantic love and personal freedom. 

Like our characters, writers have wounds too. We face harsh and personal critiques, discouragement from family and friends, shitty writing conference experiences, and countless rejections. We enter this journey with wounds and pick up more along the way. These wounds then influence our behaviors. For example, if a writer faced flippant criticism by a trusted person early in her writing career, she may feel very reluctant to seek feedback again or try to make everything perfect before getting help on her work in the future. So, asking for a friend, what do we do?

It’s hard to see ourselves as clearly as our characters. Novels are neat and immediate, but lives are long and messy. So if we get inexplicably blocked at particular points in our process, these sticking points might be helpful flags that something hurts inside. 

Understanding how the brain stores and recalls memories can help. Implicit memory is automatic recollection in which we use past experiences without thinking about it. We don’t need to consciously remember how to tie our shoe - we just do it. Explicit memory is when we intentionally remember something using long-term recollection. “Oh remember the first story I ever wrote in third grade about a banana who learned to ride a motorcycle.” 

Things get tricky when painful memories get stuffed into our implicit memory and we automatically recollect them and respond to them in our daily lives without even realizing it, then our wounds become flaws. If we can catch this, we can move memories from implicit into explicit memory by thinking, feeling, and talking about them. In examining our wounds and acknowledging their cascade through our lives, we have a shot at healing the hurt and receiving the wound’s transformative gift. 

While this is simple to say, it is not easy to do. Our characters take entire novels to do this and often require dramatic plot twists to recognize and accept themselves. Lucky for us, we don’t require the torture we inflict on our characters. I found a self-reflection process to be really helpful in bringing implicit memories into explicit territory. 

I stumbled into one of my own writing wounds recently. After completing a manuscript, I hesitated in contacting some professional editors to take it to the next level. It’s always a vulnerable act to share our art, but it still felt inexplicably hard to draft that email, so I went looking for the wound. In a quiet space, I recognized and allowed my fear. I felt it rather than judged it. Then I investigated my memories and found the experiences that needed to move out of the unseen space inside of me. 

Growing up as the youngest kid in the house, I got the message that no one wanted to hear what I had to say. I collected experiences in my academic and writing career that reinforced this belief. I tend towards perfectionism and feel anxious about sharing my work as a result. But I don’t want to move through life as the wounded little sister. So I’ve been comforting the ignored girl and the hurt young woman from my past and recognizing the lie which I came to believe that my voice isn’t valuable. I imagine that if I keep doing this work, the gift of prolific and authentic writing awaits me. That’s quite the incentive.

If we can walk our characters through this transformation, then don’t we deserve a shot at it too? Big hugs for our writing wounds everyone.

List of Ten: Free your Creative Mind

 
Art Credit Jane Ray

Art Credit Jane Ray

Every once in a while my mind gets stuck in a loop of cliche. For the life of me, I don’t have a fresh idea to bring to the table and all I can do is pick the low-hanging fruit. In writing about a young girl from a small farming town in the 1950s, I asked:

  • Where should a scene take place? House, farm, truck...ugh.

  • How should I up the stakes? Lying, cheating, stealing..ugh.

  • What is my protagonist’s dream career? Teacher, nurse, secretary...ugh.

After struggling with this bee in my bonnet, I found a simple yet solid technique to escape cliche. I call it a List of Ten. 

“What is a list of ten?” you ask.

Whenever you get stuck try this: get out a sheet of paper, write the problem at the top, and brainstorm ten solutions. Most likely, the first three or four ideas you scribble down have been the answers that you’ve been mulling over and over. Since you are not satisfied with these solutions, you must keep going. 

“Ten why ten?” you ask.

The List of Ten works because it combines divergent and convergent thinking, which are the cornerstones of creativity. Divergent thinking generates multiple ideas from one starting point. The divergent process of creating a list requires you to use the associative or daydreaming region of the brain. You write at least ten solutions, no matter how ridiculous, because this forces fresh energy into the problem. With all the cliche out of the way and a list left to complete, I reach further. After hitting number seven, the technique really pays off. For example, in thinking about the career dreams for my farm girl, I clear out: teacher, nurse, secretary, and seamstress and finally get to zoo keeper, lingerie designer, and Russian spy. 

“But those are just unrealistic answers,” you might be thinking. “Where is the real solution?”

Now that you have fresh ideas, you must bring them back to your novel. This is where convergent thinking comes back in. Convergent thinking combines multiple pieces of information to form one solution. When I am stuck, I am trying to converge with too few, stale ideas. The divergent process of creating a list gives you fresh ideas to converge on in order to arrive at a creative and cohesive solution.

Yes, some of the solutions on your list will fall into the bat shit crazy camp. For example, I don’t want my farm girl aspiring to be a Russian spy, leading me out of historical romance into spy thriller territory, but maybe in converging on a solution with these wild solutions, I get the idea that my protagonist has a best friend who is Russian and experiencing loads of discrimination and abuse in the cold war era. So this list can infuse energy into your book, beyond the sticking point you are trying to solve. The solution could be one of those initial answers, but with the addition of this new friend, the real problem of a lack of conflict is exposed and the fight for this new friend solves it. 

Most often though, you find a novel solution to a sticky problem because you just couldn’t get out of the rut of the first three cliches. It often doesn’t drastically change the shape of your novel, but you can finally move on. And sometimes one of the solutions takes you on a wild ride of a girl picking peaches in the fifties who finally decides to follow her dream of designing racy lingerie and taking on the raging patriarchy that is trying to reassert itself after a depression and world war.  

“But I don’t wanna,” you say.

It’s amazing how when I feel stuck. I fight even the idea of a List of Ten. Just a simple exercise feels both ridiculous and arduous. I resist because it’s not only my novel that’s stuck, but my feelings are stuck too. Maybe it’s self-doubt, a lack of inertia, or a harsh inner critic. These things take more than a List of Ten to resolve for real, but the technique can circumvent them by pulling you back into creativity, fun, and momentum.

You can do this. And this will help. Even if it doesn’t solve the problem, it will get you closer to a solution. It will help you shrug off the debilitating state of stuck.

“This worked so well!” you exclaim after finally trying it.

Hooray! You don’t even have to be stuck for this to be useful, try this when you want to level up your imagination. When you want to take an ordinary scene and spice it up, make a List of Ten. I even use this tool for my real-life decisions - planning activities, buying birthday presents, or deciding on my dreams. After all, I am my own protagonist. 

“I love this blog! How do I subscribe?” you ask.

You are too kind. Writing novels is a long term investment and I don’t get too much validation, so it means the world to hear you say that. You can enter your email here, and I’ll send future posts to your inbox.

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Creativity as Self-Care: Writing in the Time of Covid

 
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As shelter-in-place orders spread, I started to see this strange pressure on the creative, “Now is the time to write the next great American novel.” And then came the rebuttal to this argument that the amount of anxiety in quarantine is not compatible with creativity. Well, I offer something in between. 

I propose that creativity can be a form of self-care right now. The pressures are all too real. Creativity shouldn’t be another one, but at the same time abandoning one’s creativity means taking away a tool, an asset, a coping strategy. Now more than ever is when we need to hear our souls sing. Whether through poetry, pottery, or print making, connecting with that higher part of yourself can make this time bearable.

In my experience, the more time I spend away from my artistic endeavors the crazier I feel. My primary creative expression, writing, feels like medicine. It flushes out the toxins. While expressing my ideas and imaginings, my writing also expresses the blight from my system. And right now we need all the healing power we have at our disposal. 

I hit a hard place this past winter and started doing all the things that doctors tell you to do: exercise, eat well, sleep well, go outside, but I had forgotten about an essential piece of life until a friend reminded me. “Joanna, have you been writing?” she asked. I opened my novel the next day and a bit of relief rushed in. I realized that creativity is my self-care. Writing allows me to connect with my soul, but unfortunately, it’s one of the first things I let go when life gets hard.

We all need to escape. The Netflix binge is necessary in these times. We need to rest and retreat, but when your mind becomes mushy from endless episodes, excessive napping, or obsessive news consumption, try reclaiming your own creative power. Carve out some generative time for yourself and see how that makes you feel. 

If you work from home, shut off all notifications for a bit. If you have kids, use some nap time or screen time in order to feed your own soul. You could even allow these time-boxed departures to be a structure for you to get as many words on the page or as many songs in the air as you can. Despite the higher activation energy required, you might feel a lot better afterwards. You might feel lighter, you might feel your own power, you might feel hope. 

When you do create, create without pressure to produce. You don’t have to discover the law of gravity or pen a work of genius. Creating with the ego at the forefront doesn’t usually end well even under normal circumstances. Instead, create to care for yourself and banish the expectations and critics (inside and out). You just need to give yourself the space to talk to your soul. 

If you can’t manage to find blocks of time (I’m looking at you full-time working parents), let your mind play while you are doing the mundane tasks of cooking beans and feeding a baby. Play with ideas in your heart while your body does what it needs to do. What would that melody sound like? What wounds might drive my protagonist? How would these colors blend?

And if you are totally exhausted and can’t manage any of this, just survive. I wish I could hold your hand. This will end, and we will create on the other side. 

 

Let It Be Easy

 
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Elizabeth Gilbert posted her top ten tips for writing the other week. And #10 really caught me.

“Be willing to let it be easy.”

For the past several months, I’ve been dreaming up and outlining my second novel. And last week, I was ready to get going with the first draft, but I paused at the start. Eyes squeezed shut and teeth clenched.

Writing my first book felt like a battle with little victories and lots of struggle. I think all the fight came from fear. Was I doing it right? I applied that question to every part of the novel and every stage of the writing process.

Is the first chapter right?

Is my character development complete?

Is this detail historically accurate?

Is the plot moving too quickly? Too slowly?

Is this joke funny?

Is the ending satisfying?

Ugh, exhausting. Thank goodness for my unrelenting drive to write and my dear, patient writing friends that scooped me off my keyboard over and over again. I produced a first novel I feel very proud of and now as I start my second, I braced for the onslaught again.

Then came Liz’s #10 tip. Let it be easy.

Intellectually, I know that the first draft is crap. Anne Lamott really drove that home for me in Bird by Bird. Writing a first draft lets me find the story. It helps me meet the characters. It lets me test out the plot. But I don’t think I really allowed that for myself.

Energetically, I was still feeling like I needed to get it right. I’ve received the advice to write badly, but that didn’t land the way “easy” landed. ‘Let it be easy’ bypassed the judgement of good and bad. The advice invited me to check in with my energy not my craft. ‘Let it be easy’ let me set aside my judgement, and therefore my fear, and just write.

In my experience, the hard came from the judgement, and really the inappropriate judgement about my work. It’s not time for me to worry if I nailed the first line. It’s not time for me to worry if my characters are fully developed. It’s time for me to get the words on a page. Letting that go, allowed me to melt into ease.

So each day, I hit my word count. I am not getting blocked because I can’t get it wrong. It’s easy…for now anyways.

 

Honor Thy Creative Impulse

 
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Creative impulses have been sparkling in my mind - big ones like hosting a creative retreat for women writers and little ones like building a rainbow bookcase.

When these ideas started to arise, I questioned them. Aren’t they distractions from my main gig of novel writing? Should I really be doing all this with my energy given that it’s in short supply as a full-time mom of two?

Turns out, spending time on artistic projects that are separate from your main endeavor strengthens your creative mind. Let’s call this—creative cross training. Creativity is all about generating innovative ideas. Bending, breaking and blending concepts to produce something new, and people who have lots of diverse inputs can do this even better than people siloed in one skill.

Research shows that Nobel Prize-winning scientists are significantly more likely to have artistic hobbies compared to their technically skilled peers. They are 2 times more likely to play musical instruments, 7 times more likely to draw or paint, 12 times more likely to do creative writing, and 22 times more likely to perform as actors, dancers, or even magicians. I wonder what the prize winners in literature do in their spare time.

Curiosity is the driving force behind creative impulses. The force that wonders, “What would red wine and rosemary taste like in fig jam?” is that same force that veers my characters out of cliché and comes up with my plot twists. Embracing these impulses when they show up rather than banishing them as superfluous invites them to come around more often. Even though picking figs cuts into my word count goal, it keeps the mind nimble and inquisitive.

Creative cross training also helps me practice imperfection. And boy do I need the practice. During my first attempts at watercolor, I had to face the nasty voice of my inner critic telling me, not only, that my painting was crap, but that I was crap. Strengthening my resistance to this thought pattern has helped me begin my second book. Returning to the shitty first draft stage after working with polished prose has been hard, but my artistic side hustles are reminding me to relax. Perfection is an enemy of creative endeavors, especially at the beginning.

But what about my time and energy?! In my own experience now, spending time creating has always given me more energy rather than less even in the face of sleep deprivation as a new mom. Creativity is generative. It’s not a zero-sum game. The energy that comes with a creative impulse is not really all that transferable either. When you have the urge to collage a coffee table, it’s not like you can bottle that enthusiasm to do your taxes. So when the energy comes, I let it flow and it often spills over into the next things on my to do list, especially my novel.

Many creatives recommend sitting down to work on your craft every day, whether the muse or creative impulse shows up or not. I agree with this advice. That discipline makes novels happen. It’s the only way that I finished my first book. But the opposite is not necessarily true, ignoring the muse to write and only write is not great advice. Do both. Don’t wait for creative impulses but honor them when they show up.

Creative cross training is not procrastination. Hopefully, creative impulses are showing up just as much for your main endeavor as your side projects or hobbies. If they aren’t, then that might be something to consider. Maybe you aren’t letting yourself embrace the imperfect and the whimsical with your main project like you are with your side ones. Maybe the main and side projects should be swapped. Maybe the joy of the side projects can help you get through a challenging and not so fun part of the main one.

As a busy mom, creative cross training has been especially important. Sometimes I don’t have the space or mindset to dig into my novel but letting myself follow creative impulses that fit into smaller spaces has kept my creative soul humming. I don’t need to do a complete revival when I get the time to sit and write. I am already alive. My mind is primed.

And lastly, but possibly most importantly, following these creative impulses in my life has brought tremendous joy. It’s so easy to belittle them as silly ideas, but they bring light and sparkle to the mundane and the difficult. This is neither silly nor superfluous. This is everything.

So I have become a disciple of my creative impulses. I trust them. I follow them. And I can’t recommend it enough. Pick up some hobbies. Dabble in something new, something superfluous, something pointless and see what might come of it. You know that itch to learn the ukulele. Or that idea in the back of your head to knit a sweater for a stop sign. Go for it. It might set you free.

 

Save the Bookstores!

 
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I have a thing for books. All things book actually – paperback books, hard covers, libraries (bonus points for the little free ones), book blogs, book jewelry, book T-shirts, bookstagram, and of course, bookstores.

One of my greatest joys in life is an afternoon saunter through a bookstore. Almost any bookstore will do. Even that crazy metaphysical one with all the crystals – okay, okay, especially that one.

It’s everything from the smell of the paper to brightly colored covers to the reverent quiet chatter of readers. And then there’s the part about being an aspiring author. Bookstores support writers and writers support bookstores. When authors schedule a book tour, who do they call? Bookstores. Preserving our independent bookstores helps preserve a market for our labor and a base for our tribe.

Well, with my huge thing for books, I have no idea why it has taken me so long to arrive at this this particular realization—if I want bookstores to stick around, I have to BUY BOOKS FROM BOOKSTORES.

My millennial butt has become extremely reliant on amazon especially because getting out of the house with two small kiddos in tow is tough. The immediate gratification of wanting a book and having that book delivered to my doorstep the very next day is also awesome. But. Not as awesome as the aforementioned afternoon saunter.

So I’m making a commitment. I am going to buy 90% of my books from my local independent bookstores. Even if that means ordering it from them and *gasp* waiting several days for it to arrive. This will mean, not just one, but TWO trips to a bookstore. How did I perceive this as a problem in the first place?

If you share my love of all things book and have money to spend on these delights, consider this commitment for yourself. Save the afternoon saunter in your hometown.

(Oh and then consider putting those books in one of those little free libraries after you’re finished so someone without the money to spend can enjoy it too.)

**A special thank you to my local bookstore, Mrs. Dalloway’s, for the SHOP LOCAL pin.

 

Thank you Margaret Atwood

 
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When I was pregnant with my daughter, a friend warned me not to read The Handmaiden’s Tale. Feeling emotionally tender at the time, I heeded her advice and shelved Margaret Atwood’s iconic work for the future. A few years later, the urge came again. I just needed to read it, even though I was pregnant again with another little girl.

I had a long TBR pile on my bedside table, but The Handmaiden’s Tale demanded to jump the line. So, I dove in. And I enjoyed it. The protagonist’s voice felt both intimate and prophetic as she whispered her story to me.

Then halfway through, on August 1st, I got a phone call. A phone call that changed everything. A massive aneurysm ruptured in my mom’s brain. My mom, my first best friend. I was on the west coast while she was on the east coast. All I could do was wait. Well, wait, panic, meditate, obsessively call for information, attempt to pack a bag, and tell my mom through the ether than I love her completely.

Thanks to good weather, helicopter airlifts, and surgeons willing to take a chance on a severe case, my mom’s brain stopped bleeding late into the night. Now we just needed to wait some more. Would she survive? Would she open her eyes? Would she speak or move again?

Flights booked and bags packed, I laid down that night and tried to get the rest I would need for the coming day. But my mind whipped around trying to understand what had happened and find a way through an unfathomable new reality. I reached over to my bedside table and picked up Atwood’s book. With my friend’s warning echoing in my mind, I second-guessed my impulse. Should I read this now?

But I wanted to be with the woman they called Offred.

Offred’s situation and my own were worlds apart, but this story understood the loss, the fear, the unknown, the confusion, the pain, the crushing aloneness, and even the splinter of hope in my heart. The book held me long enough that I could close my eyes, and then at some point in the early morning hours I found a bit of sleep.

I woke into my unimaginable existence again – but I felt a little stronger.

Against all odds, my mom survived the night, and I finished The Handmaiden’s Tale at her bedside in the ICU. I haven’t picked up another book since. Once my mom opened her eyes and said my name, I wanted to be in every moment. Week after week, my mom continued to endure risk after risk, surgery after surgery, on her journey to recovery.

When I came home, I had a hard time returning to my work. How can I write? What difference does it make? And then I remembered how Margaret Atwood held me in a way that no other could in those desperate moments. So I picked up a pen.

The Public Voice of Women

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Are you among the first women in your family to have a public voice?

I’ve been listening to Elizabeth Gilbert’s podcast, Magic Lessons. In season two, we meet Hope Hill, a poet who wants to take her work into the world, but fear holds her back. Elizabeth Gilbert asks her to make a list of women in her family’s history who never had a public voice and describe the lives of women that brought her into the world at this moment of history.

Hope describes her mother and grandmother as having many children while working full time and being in unhappy marriages to intense, controlling men. Further back, her ancestors were slaves. She is indeed the first woman in her family to have a public voice.

Some of our mothers may have had opportunities to speak—if their race and class allowed and they worked incredibly hard and they survived the harassment. But with a few noteworthy exceptions, our mother’s mothers and beyond hardly stood a chance.

While the waves of feminism in the twentieth century launched many women into the public arena, the effects weren’t broadly inclusive or immediate. We got to vote, but additional rights and cultural change took decades to trickle through society and still don’t reach everyone, but women kept raising their voices louder and louder.

Then, the internet arrived. Blogs, social media, audio and video sharing, and self-publishing gave us reasonable access to a public voice. Gatekeepers, mostly white men, lost their stranglehold. This, along with the continued fight for gender, racial, and LGBTQ equality, birthed a generation finally capable of speaking to the world without excessive barriers.

Feeling the full weight of our place in women’s history knocked me back. So many of us are the first generation of women with a public voice—no pressure or anything.

In this context, Hope Hill’s fear makes a lot of sense. It makes sense that following centuries of belittlement, abuse, and repression, it takes courage to speak our truth. In addition, having a public voice still does not mean we are safe, for speaking out can earn women death threats. Needless to say, Hope Hill is not alone in her apprehension. I feel nervous simply sharing this post. The question, Who am I to make such claims?, repeats in my head as I write, and I brace for rebukes after each paragraph. Did I get everything absolutely correct? Will this offend? Do I sound stupid? I just won’t post this.

Our fear makes sense, but it’s not leading us in the best direction. I am so grateful for Elizabeth Gilbert, Brene Brown, Chimamanda Adichie, Sheryl Sandberg, and other women for broadcasting the unconditional need for our creative voices in the world. They talk about courage, vulnerability, creativity, and feminism in a way that countless women, including myself, crave to hear. They invite us to find our courage to speak to a public audience, for without believing in our own voices, we won’t use them. And the world needs to hear what we have to say.

Just as valuable as sharing our voice is the ability to listen. Now more than ever, we can hear each other without filters. We can hear the strength, the wisdom, the humor, the beauty, and the compassion of women beyond our neighborhood, school, or social circle. By listening, we can see ourselves in countless lives, especially the lives of women of color whose truth has been ignored longer and silenced harder than any other.

As all of this collides—our right to speak, our means to speak, our courage to speak, and our wisdom to listen—power erupts. I believe that the #MeToo movement happened at this time in history because all these things co-occurred (along with a tipping point of misogyny). Women found the courage to speak and listen. The moment was perfectly ripe, the results amazing.

Not everything will be as monumental as #MeToo. Some movements are small. Some creations are purely for the joy of it. Having been silenced for so long, it might feel like we can only speak about the most imperative issues or that there is too much to say, but we have enough breath for all of it. Share your poems, your jokes, your fashion tips, your life’s purpose, your trauma, your vision. What stories will bubble up now that so many voices are free? What tale does your heart want to tell?

As exciting as this is, our chorus is not yet complete. There are still many women in our society that do not have a public voice. Look around to see who is silent in your community. Women in our country without the correct documentation cannot speak up without great risk to their lives, and women around the world still struggle to gain fundamental rights. We can definitely share some of our breath about this.

We have our voice now—what a privilege, an opportunity, a responsibility to share our truth. In addition to #MeToo, what else do we need to claim? What else can we hear from our fellow mothers, sisters, and daughters? Let us garner our courage and make ourselves proud.

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Daily Creative Meditation: Awareness and Intention

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I love my creative time. Yet when I sit down, I often open the New York Times and then my email and maybe even Instagram (and then back to the New York Times).

When I asked myself, why don’t I just sit down and start the work I love? I found that I have some thoughts and feelings in need of recognition. Sometimes I feel tired. Sometimes I feel scared. Sometimes I want a hit of validation.

What I really want is an intentional beginning to my creative time, which for me means becoming aware of these feelings, allowing them, and then refocusing on my intention.

Meditation came to mind as a possible solution. I have meditated for years, but I never thought to combine my mindful and creative worlds…until now.

In meditation, we practice noticing thoughts. We accept them and then redirect the mind, rather than allowing it to be dragged away by distractions. It isn’t about denying our desires and thoughts, instead the practice allows us to choose where we focus our attention.

I searched for a guided meditation for writers. I really wanted something simple without music or sound effects. Since nothing answered my needs, I paired up with my soul sister, Leah Pearlman, and we created our own meditation to help begin creative time.

It’s short and sweet (four minutes), so it doesn’t take much time away from our work, but helps us start in a centered place. The mediation begins, asking us for awareness and allowance of our body, our feelings, and our thoughts in the moment. Then it addresses the big challenges that often make starting hard for us– handling distractions, feeling blocked, and questioning our own creative worth. Wrapping up, it reconnects us with our personal intentions—to create—from our core motivations.

I’ve been using this meditation for the past month and found some surprising outcomes. It didn’t magically focus me on the task at hand each and every day, but, more importantly, it helped me see and honor my emotional needs and creative energy.

During the month I used the meditation, I had set the goal of finishing a draft of my novel. So when I did my very first meditation, I was surprised by my inner response to the question: can you open to the universe of creativity? While my novel topped my to-do list, when I paid attention to my creative energy it was surging in a different direction. The meditation gave me the courage to follow it. A beautiful blog post flowed out in under an hour. I love it when that happens. It feels like magic, but maybe it’s just paying attention and aligning with my creative force.

For the first few weeks, I listened to the meditation everyday at the start of my writing time. Initially, I felt rushed by the brevity of the recording, but as a daily practice I came to really appreciate the swift check-in. Different parts of meditation spoke to me on different days, and it helped me identify what needed my attention. Soon the practice of touching in became a pattern without listening everyday. My mindfulness was primed as I sat down in my writing spot. I would listen to the meditation when I felt scattered as a way to reconnect rather than having a daily requirement.

On a few days, I found that my emotional needs for another activity spoke louder than my intention to create. I needed to rest or connect with a friend. Before this reflective practice, I might have taken these breaks, but not without a heaping dose of self-judgment. By really knowing and honoring my needs, I allowed and enjoyed being “off task” and returned naturally to my creative projects when I was ready. This meditation is not a productivity tool, but a support for self-awareness and connection with the creative force inside us.

Leah and I made our mediation available on YouTube, for those that might want to try it out. If starting your creative time on the internet doesn’t sound supportive, I am also happy to send you an mp3 file as a thank you for signing up to my newsletter. We hope you enjoy it.

For the Love of Reading: Classic vs. Contemporary

I always thought I was a slow reader.

In school, I learned to comprehend and analyze great literature. I also learned that reading was tedious. It took me all summer to make it through the assigned lists and hours upon hours after school during the year.

My ‘slow reader’ identity stuck with me all through grad school and into my professional life. It wasn’t until I took a real vacation and went to the beach that I discovered the amazing pleasure of reading. Apparently, I read quite fast—when I love the book.

I realized that The Babysitters Club was the last piece of fiction I chose for myself until adulthood. I missed out on so much joy. I wish I had graduated middle school or high school with the love of reading in addition to my literary analysis skills. I wish I had found books that held my heart and kept me company as I grew up.

Profound works that stand the test of time are critical for a solid education. I don’t want kids to lose Shakespeare or Fitzgerald. And I wonder if helping kids learn to love reading might be more foundational, since if they love reading they might pick up even more great novels on their own.

Looking into the history of young adult literature, I discovered that there was a bit of a dip in the genre around the 90s, right when I would have been looking for this content. Since then, YA lit experienced a golden age and blossomed across categories. There are books about basketball playing poets, cancer patients falling in love, best friend spies and pilots in World War Two. I can’t thank all of the YA authors enough for writing and writing and writing.

Unlike the classics, these books are contemporary, and, maybe more importantly, they center on characters much closer to the age of a YA reader. They still embody the great themes—death, betrayal, atrocity, love—but they might be more relatable to the reader. In addition, the authors of exemplar texts are predominantly old white men. While there is still an aching need for diversity in YA, kids have a much better shot of finding a character or an author that looks like them. And when the book lines up with the reader just right, it might spark that magical, mystical, incredible spark that sets her or him up for a lifetime of reading.

I am making up for lost time now. I devour a book a week. I proudly read all the coming of age stories and high school romances that I missed out on. And I don’t think I’m alone. I know so many adults who fell back in love with the written word after reading Harry Potter or Twilight or The Hunger Games.

Teachers, librarians, administrators, and parents—keep making space for your kids to discover a book that might light them up. Thank you for pointing the way. YA authors—keep filling the bookshelves with words that reach deep into our hearts. Contributing a book to the world that may help people come to love reading is an invaluable gift. Young Adults—let me know if you need a good book to rip through.

If you enjoyed this, subscribe to my newsletter. More fun to come!

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How I Became a Writer

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Some people came into this world knowing what they want to do or be.

We hate these people.

No, not really. (Maybe a little).

The rest of us haven’t always known our purpose. Maybe we have a guiding idea but don’t know how to translate it into an action, or maybe we have so many ideas we don’t know how to pick, or maybe we have no idea at all.

I spent the first decade of my adult life training as a nurse and scientist. This felt as right as it could until I looked up and saw that even if I was as successful as I could be, it wasn’t the life I wanted. That was very hard to accept after years of intensive training and heavy expectations. I didn’t know until I knew. And once I knew, I had to leave. So if I wasn’t a scientist then what was I?

Using our savings, my partner and I moved across country. We landed in the Bay Area, and I tried everything. I farmed, I protested, I coded, I cooked, I designed, I organized, but I still didn’t know. And I desperately wanted to know. Oh how I envied the people that knew their calling to their core, but there was no clear signal in my heart. After a summer of exploring, I started to panic.

I took a break and went to the beach. I used to read scientific journal articles with my feet in the sand, but I heard that normal people read novels. I couldn’t quite remember the last time I let myself read for pleasure. But once I started, I could not stop. I wanted to live inside the fictional worlds I found. Now some people say that, but I really meant it. I felt like I belonged in books. I read. All. Day. Long. Some books I just looped through, over and over again, refusing to leave.

The only thing that finally brought me out of my reading frenzy was the idea to write my own book. I opened up my laptop and started chapter one of my first novel.

But I couldn’t make it as easy as that. Even as I continued to write, I refused it as a vocation. Writing fiction, don’t be ridiculous. Writing is not a real career. Making up stories doesn’t add value to the world. So I continued my search. I craved a sense of identity. What should I do? I tried more things. I foraged, I researched, I volunteered, I knit. I even considered going back to science.

I finally reached a breaking point. I wanted to commit to something, and I just needed to pick a horse and ride it. I leaned on my analytic skills (maybe that’s the reason I got a PhD, ha!). I opened up Excel and made a matrix. I listed my values along the top row: justice, beauty, kindness, family, things like that. Along the side, I listed out all the potential jobs I’d consider. At the very last moment, I threw “writer” on the list.  Then I assigned a number from 1 to 5, indicating how much each potential career fulfilled each value. I totaled the rows. Writing received the highest score. Wait, really? Writing? And because I’m a nerd and really needed to be sure I also ranked the values and produced a ranked score. Writing won again.

I felt a little scared. This is not how I conceptualized myself.

My partner offered a solution. Try it. Write. Commit for three months and stop asking the question “What should I do?” and just do it. This was powerful for me. Trying something new and edgy is hard when you question the whole enterprise every other day. With the financial support of my partner, I committed (just for three months). I let myself write all day long. And when I questioned myself, I looked at the date circled on the calendar and said I can consider all my doubts then.

Eventually I doubted less and wrote more. I didn’t even realize when the three months had ended. I didn’t need to return to the spreadsheet. I still had no idea why writing resonated with me. I still wondered where this vocation came from, but I knew that I didn’t want to do anything else.

People ask me, “How did I choose writing?” It’s strange to say, but I think that writing choose me. Looking back, I see that three things had an important impact on my discovery: the ability to walk away from a career and identity that didn’t bring me joy, giving myself the chance to try all the things, and committing to something I loved in the face of doubt.

Doubt has returned countless times in my writing journey. Apparently doubt is a defining characteristic of a writer. But I just can’t stop. I tried, but I returned over and over again to writing.

I wish I knew, “Why writing?” I still ask myself that. It’s not something I imagined choosing. It’s not something I designed. Even without understanding it fully, I commit because I can’t hardly help it.

Some people came into this world knowing what they want to do or be. Others have the creative adventure of discovering it along the way.

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Who am I?

Who am I? As a writer for young adults, this is a core question in my work. My protagonists strive page after page for the answer. So I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that I keep asking the same thing of myself.

It’s a ginormous question. Even after several drafts, I still can’t put my finger on the solution for some characters. They don’t want to be plopped into a trope: “Nice to meet you. I am the brooding loner with a heart of gold.” But I also need to succinctly move them along a story arc towards greater understanding of themselves and their world.

I’ve been around for over three decades, and I am still asking, Who am I? After each life milestone, I thought I would have the answer. And then when I thought I finally had it, I got it wrong. I’m a nurse! I’m a scientist! I’m an activist! I’m a fiction writer? All these shifts got to be embarrassing. When people asked what I do at a party, I would give a respectably vague answer (aka a lie), “I’m a consultant.” After writing fiction for five years now, I give the courageous answer, “I am a writer.” But the question, Who am I?, still niggles me.

This is the third blog that I’ve started. I resisted writing directly about myself because I didn’t know how to pull all the pieces of me under one idea and what if the answer changes again. I kept waiting for a sense of stability. And in some ways dedicating half a decade to an endeavor is stability, but I still feel so full of possibility.

I am starting to understand why this question is so wiggly. Because people grow. I grow. Identity is something that evolves and evolves. Maybe that’s why so many adults enjoy YA. It’s a chance to revisit the question with vitality and optimism that gets wrung out of us over the years. The evolution of my identity isn’t a result of flippancy or indecision, as many damaging tropes of young women might suggest, but conscious reflection. Each identity, each blog that came before this informed these words. Instead of shame over an evolving identity, I am choosing to celebrate it as a sign of my growth.

But there is something deeply comforting about having a global understanding of who you are and what you stand for in the world. And then sharing that idea in few words. I imagine it’s like having a developmental itch scratched. So I made a list of my passions: writing, books, creativity, feminism, love, spirituality. But I couldn’t pick just one to blog about so I began searching for my unifying theme. A theme is an idea that a writer repeats in her literary work. I know how to write theme, so I could find the theme I’m living.

The answer is me. I am what all these concepts have in common. This is who I am. The word authenticity bubbled up. Authenticity, the degree to which one is true to one’s spirit or character despite external pressure. Or the quality of being who I am. Standing as me.

And again, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that this theme encapsulates my protagonist’s journey too (but it still surprised me). This journey of finding and being one’s true self is what I am focusing on right now. In writing, the way to rise above tropes and create an authentic character is to embrace all her flaws, her quirks, her fears, her desires (even the edgy ones, strike that, especially the edgy ones). So I will embrace all of myself here in my writing under the theme of authenticity.

I hope you enjoy it, but it’s okay if you don’t.

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