After enjoying many Jordan Peterson psychology lectures on YouTube, I finally took his Big Five Personality test and signed up for his Self-Authoring Suite, which guides people through writing about their past, present, and future with the goal of learning from the past and present to plan for a better future. Since this in November (and some of us have NaNoWriMo goals to accomplish), the Self-Authoring Suite seemed the perfect birthday present to myself. (I will admit to “opening” my present before my actual birthday.)
Before writing about the present, I was prompted to examine both my faults and virtues. I wasn’t excited about either one. To quote Jo March from the movie Little Women (the line isn’t in the book), “I’m hopelessly flawed.” But instead of inwardly recoiling from a list of my flaws or ducking my head in embarrassment at a list of my virtues, I was able to clinically acknowledge them in the first steps. There was no sense of shame or embarrassment or guilt. The fact that these items were on the list meant that others have them too. And there is strength, and perhaps humility, in numbers. As I read the list of virtues associated with Extroversion and Introversion, I was supposed to select a certain number of virtues that characterize me or are important to me. From my experience with personality tests, I knew exactly where the “extrovert” characteristics ended and the “introvert” characteristics began. I cringed as I saw one of my main characteristics in the introvert section. I struggled to choose the right number of virtues since many of my main characteristics were in the “introvert” section. I read the extrovert section again and again, hoping in vain to find something resembling me up there. Then I had an Oh! moment. The instructions finally bore through the mental barrier society helped build in my mind. I was looking at the list wrong. I double-checked the instructions. Yes, it said to select from the list of virtues. Everything on the list was a virtue. All of the things at the bottom of the list that were clearly part of introversion were . . . virtues. Even though Susan Cain’s Quiet certainly helped me feel less apologetic about my introversion, even though I know that God makes extroverts and introverts alike and uses both equally, even though I’m actually very close to the middle of the extroversion/introversion scale, I still view most of my introverted characteristics as faults. I still feel wrong for not being able to accept every social invitation. I still feel guilty for needing to be home alone to rest. Excited about my breakthrough, I told a more introverted friend about my moment. She stared at me blankly before asking why I thought being the characteristics I mentioned were bad things. Not being American, she never learned that being an introvert was something that needed to be cured.
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I was minding my own business on November 2 when I realized that it was November 2. More specifically, I realized that it was already the second day of National Novel Writing Month, and I hadn’t even decided if I was going to accept the challenge for another year. As exhilarating as writing the first full draft of a novel was two years ago, I couldn’t even hope to participate last year in the middle of a career and continent change. While I’m more settled now, I hate starting things late. I’ve been known to completely skip events if I arrive even five minutes late. So, starting NaNoWriMo late (already behind) was bad, but waiting another year was unthinkable.
The first (technically third) day of writing was amazing. My fingers flew across the keyboard; I updated my Ideas notebook (which is a notebook from the amazing children’s storybook What Do You Do with an Idea); I ploughed through a chapter of revisions. And then the second day came. It’s amazing how much more exciting washing dishes or cleaning out my drains are when I should be writing. Even less productive things like coloring become riveting. Zinsser said that he liked to have written. How much I usually agree with him. But my struggle this month has not been with writing pains but with revision pains. I was at the brink of tossing my whole novel out the window, which would have satisfying dramatics since I live on the twentieth floor. The plot was shapeless and unwieldy. I wanted to cut entire story arcs. I felt like my second-grade self who decided one day to write a mystery story, so sure that I knew the right way to accomplish such an impossibly large task. I don’t remember when I gave up on that mystery story; I just have snatches of the beginning of that memory. Perhaps I tossed those yellow scraps of paper out the window. (More likely, they were thrown out by someone cleaning who did not realize the value eight-year-olds place on odd, tiny things.) Taking a page from my eight-year-old self’s notebook, I spent three days writing the main events of my novel onto yellow scraps of paper—sticky notes. Then I realized that yellow just wasn’t enough. I added green, blue, pink, yarn, highlighters. Now, as I work on my novel revision, I sit on the floor staring at my wall, a pastel and yarn outline. The physical act of rearranging the sticky-note-plot-points and connecting them with green yarn released my brain from trying to keep track of the different threads of the main plot and subplots and themes. Suddenly, I could see in the collage of sticky notes and yarn a unity in the formerly warring story arcs. By dissecting my novel, I unified it. Since college, I have been in awe of Charles Dickens’s ability to write beautifully complex novels serially. Small, insignificant details in the first volume of A Tale of Two Cities seem like a waste of words and an author’s indulgence in pretty prose, but in the end of the novel, each thread comes together with precision. Staring at my wall now, I wonder if the inside of Charles Dickens’s brain looked like my wall. Or perhaps, his walls were also a web of paper scraps and yarn. Recently, I was checking my newsfeed to make sure that America still existed and saw an interesting headline about reading. (Admittedly, I’m not sure whether to call it a headline or not since I really think the article was not news. In our information deluge, it’s hard for me to determine what to call some of these things that are included in my newsfeed, especially since most of it is hardly newsworthy.) In the article, the author shared that she thought of herself as a reader but recently realized that she doesn’t actually read.
That’s when I had a similar epiphany. I think of myself as a Writer, but let’s be honest: there are many days that I chose watching tv re-runs over writing. I, too, think of myself as a Reader, but since my overseas move, I read less and less. (In my defense, I keenly dislike reading on a screen and brought only five books with me.) I think of myself as a Musician, but I more often choose to relax by taking a walk instead of picking up my guitar. (My primary instrument is piano, which didn’t fit into my suitcase when I moved; the guitar could at least take the place of my carry-on.) A new co-worker and I met over lunch the other day, and she asked me how I spent my time. I opened my mouth to casually say, “Oh, I read and write and play the guitar.” But no words came out. My neglected blogs nudged me in the elbow. My novel draft cast me a dirty look. Speaking of dirt, a thick layer of dust muffled my guitar’s laughter. And my five lonely books seemed to be crying for their families packed away in storage halfway around the world. Apparently, who I think I am is different than who I say I am. Words are powerful. So often I doubt positive words that other people say about me, choosing to believe that they are just being polite or kind. Instead, I treat the negative words I say about myself as Gospel Truth. “Oh, I’m not an adventurer.” “That’s so unlike me.” “I am not a kid-person.” “I could never do that.” And, yet, a friend recently challenged me on my tendency to box myself with these words of power. Instead of pointing to how I feel about kids or adventures, she pointed to my actions. I say I’m not an adventurer, but I moved halfway around the world and regularly (albeit accidentally) embark on short adventures over here. I say that I’m not kid-person, but I absolutely love joining my friend for family dinner, which naturally includes her kids, who inexplicably like me. Much of what I have done this past year are things that I claim are “not me.” But apparently, they are because I did them. I’m still musing over this new Me, feeling a little like Peter Callahan as he tries to figure out whether he likes Jell-o when the hospital orderly brings him lunch. This much I know: although I longed for Bilbo’s invisibility ring, I hosted a social event for fifty people this weekend. Although I would rather engage in an intellectual dual with the dragon Smaug than teach small children, I volunteered to teach small children at camp this summer. Perhaps that is because in spite of all my self-identifiers (Teacher, Writer, Socially Awkward, Coward, Invisible), I remember the only identifier that changes all of the others: Follower. Who I am in Christ is far greater and different than anything I am on my own. Only in Him can I be a People-person or Brave. Or perhaps, the truth is that in Him, those labels and their power diminish because He enables us to change and be what we are not. I do not have writer’s block. If I had writer’s block, then I wouldn’t have anything to say. I would stare at the computer screen for hours and come up with nothing to say. I have things to say; I just can’t remember what they were. Mentally, I try to recreate the situation that led to these Ideas. (Or maybe they were Thoughts.) I had just crossed the street coming back from the grocery store. A car had actually stopped to let me by on the cross-walk. As I hopped up to the sidewalk, the Thought popped into my head. I toyed around with the Thought for the rest of my walk home. I remember as I started the last block, the most secluded part of my walk as I pass between a block-long row of parked buses and an overgrown hedge, I decided this Thought was The One for my blog this week.
I’m sure that this Thought was profound and deep. Perhaps I was contemplating humanity (or its absence) in the produce section of the grocery store. That’s a toss-up: The produce section seems to collect both wonderfully helpful people and obliviously self-absorbed people. Or perhaps it was an ode to the beauty and persistence of spring flowers growing in the cracks of the sidewalk. But, I guess I can admit that my Thoughts sometimes lack profundity and are sometimes just whimsy. So, perhaps my Thought was really a flight of fancy. Perhaps it was one of the many Ideas for a children’s storybook that I will never write. (These Ideas jump into my head all the time just begging to be turned into storybooks. Unfortunately for them, my fingers learned how to type and forgot to learn how to draw. And storybooks really are nothing without pictures. My poor pictureless Ideas are probably sorry that they jumped into my head instead of an artist’s.) Oh, wait! Part of it is coming. It had something to do with . . . my blog and Robert Browning. That can’t be right, but it does sound like me. Oh, there’s another part! It has to do with the weird dream I had in which I was engaged to the guy that I refused in real life. (Huh, this has nothing to do with the grocery store.) Oh, ha! It was a humorous anecdotal piece about my complete inability to read “I’m interested” cues from guys and the messes I get into because of that. Throw some cross-cultural miscommunication into the mix, and you’ve got yourself an interesting conundrum. I’m not sure how Robert Browning fits into this, but I know he was part of the punchline. Perhaps, he wasn’t the punchline. More likely I was admiring his forthrightness. In his first fan letter to then-stranger Elizabeth Barrett, he says that he loves her poems and that he loves her. Straightforward. To the point. Clear. No confusion. No wonder he got the girl. This month has been a battle of words. Since my current novel’s draft is in the mail to me, I didn’t want to start working on the new novel idea that popped, quite unbidden, into my head last week. So, to keep myself from working on either novel so that I’m ready to work once the mailed draft arrives, I have taken February as a writing challenge month. I missed NaNoWriMo this year—too busy surviving my career and address change to add intense writing to that month, but I wanted to devise a similar, non-novel challenge while I wait for the mailman.
My writing challenge: each day I must write something creative based on whatever chapter of Proverbs I read that morning. Once I had this idea (on January 28th), each morning I woke up excited to start, but I was disciplined and waited until February 1st. That’s also almost when I stopped the challenge. Oh, I hear the voices and even see their words on the page. I could hear faint echoes of the Fool, describing his life in a Robert Browningesque “Portrait of My Late Duchess.” I saw the limerick on the page of the Sluggard, his hand buried in his bowl of porridge, too tired to put the food in his starving mouth. And, in a moment of ambition (or hubris), I saw the Sonnet Corona of Wisdom’s Call. But as soon as I start writing, the voices and images hide. I fought with rhyme and meter for three mornings as I forced Wisdom’s Call into iambic pentameter. My satisfied grin when I finished a line of the first (and still only) quatrain faded when I realized that it ruined the rhyme scheme. After coaxing the line to end with the right rhyme, I remembered that the idea I had just written was supposed to be in the third quatrain, not the first. One rather snide voice in my head—my inner Literary Critic—sniffs at my work and asks if I think I’m Edna St. Vincent-Millay. A cynical voice—my inner Social Critic—laughs and asks whether the modern reader would even notice whether I followed the strict sonnet form I’m fighting for. I tell them both to be quiet since they are talking louder than the creative voices I’m trying to capture on the page. Since neither is very polite, they don’t usually listen. Add to this inner conversation William Zinsser’s voice since I’ve been rereading his On Writing Well this month. Even though his work focuses on nonfiction writing, his insistence on precise language guides my poetry writing. His voice reassures me, too, that we writers are not writers: we are rewriters. His admission that he does not like writing but rather likes to have written is exactly how I feel each day as I stare at the blank pages of my poetry challenge notebook. Were I not expecting my polished, sparkling Sonnet Corona to unfold on the page with perfect precision, I would be able to write a sloppy second quatrain. While I know that I will have to rewrite and rewrite my sonnet into a semblance of elegance, I am paralyzed because the messy attempt will ruin the perfect potential of my idea. While I doubt Solomon was writing about the art of writing, I find no truer words to describe my pristinely empty poetry pages than “where there is no ox, the crib is clean.” Even though I haven't been writing much fiction since my move, I still hear "voices in my head." (If you are a writer or friends with a writer, you understand me. If you are not a writer or do not often talk with writers, you might be reaching for a straightjacket. I'm not crazy: I know the voices are fictional characters, and I only listen to them when they tell me to get coffee.) Especially during my first weeks here, I heard a running internal monologue from a fictional immigrant. As soon as I heard her first words--"I am not trapped"--I knew that eventually I would write her story. But at the time, her words and experiences resonated too much for me to bear writing them, or worse, reading them. Many times in these past few months, I have told my friends, "I'm off to the coffee shop to write." And when they asked what I would write, I told them, "I've had this story idea in my head for weeks now. I need to write." Once I got to the coffee shop, I would open a new document, stare at it for a few moments, and then catch up on email. So, this weekend, instead of catching up on email (what I was supposed to be doing), I finally wrote it. Here it is: "Not Trapped" I am not trapped. Every morning, I remind myself this as I watch the sun rise over the water in brilliant beauty. Far below me, by the water is a park, peacefully drinking in the quiet light before the city wakes up and forgets this ineffable moment of stillness in the maddening rush to go place and do things. I long to slip downstairs and across the street to wander in the park. But I can’t. Uncertainty crowds out any pleasure the park would bring. The stress is not yet worth the reward. Leaving the sunrise behind me, I go to the kitchen and then sigh when I realize that I need to buy groceries. Back home, shopping was so fast and easy. I didn’t even realize how much independence shopping required. Here, I feel like a lost child. I linger over breakfast, putting off the day’s chore. Really, the wait just lets the tension build, so I grab my purse, shove my feet into my shoes, and leave the security of my apartment. The streets are already crowded with vehicles, but I hardly notice. Navigating my way around fellow pedestrians on the sidewalk takes more energy than I had previously thought possible. My purse knocks against a lady as I pass her. I open my mouth to apologize, but then shut it and keep walking. She won’t understand my words anyway. At the next intersection, I see two men in uniform on the other side of the crosswalk—police? Soldiers? Even though I have done nothing wrong, I feel nervous. I haven’t been here long enough to know all their traffic laws. What if I accidentally break a law without realizing it? When the crowd of pedestrians start to cross the street, I carefully position myself in the middle of the group and keep my gaze down as we pass the uniformed men. Tired by the time I reach the store, I can’t even think of what to buy. I know how to cook, and shop, and clean, and all of those chores that are so much a part of independent adult life. Moving to a new country showed me just how much mental labor is involved in those chores. Knowing what to buy and how to find them are skills I haven’t learned yet in this place. I know some of the language here, but what good does it do me? I know “grocery store,” but grocery store signs have business names on them, not “Grocery Store.” The same is true for restaurants and pharmacies and every other shop I would want. I know that these buildings are businesses, but I’m not brave enough to venture into the buildings to see what is inside. The only reason I know which one is the grocery store is because a friend showed me. And once inside, I can’t read the product labels. Most product labels don’t have just one word—“olive oil,” “sugar,” “salt.” No, they have a salesmen pitch on it and health buzzwords. And all those extra words swarm around the key words that I need to find. My mother back home has food allergies. How relieved I am that I do not have to read food labels as carefully as she does. And my brother is a picky eater. It’s good that I am the one who came here. When I buy the wrong food, I eat it anyway because I don’t feel like going back to the store in the hopes of finding the right thing. It takes me an hour to pick out the few items I need: soap, vegetables, and salt. I gave up on several items on my list, which is okay because I can’t buy much since I have a twenty-minute walk back to my apartment. Outside with my bag of groceries, I dodge vehicles and pedestrians, working my way through the parking lot to the sidewalk. Everyone else seems to know the rules for whose turn it is to go. I still haven’t learned these rules. And I do not know how to apologize when I break them. Back in my apartment, I put the food away. It feels nice to be in a space that I understand. I stare out the window down at the park below. It would be nice, I think, to walk around there for a while. Right now, I’m too tense and tired from shopping. Maybe tomorrow. After all, I’m not trapped. While I knew that juggling work and a transcontinental move would be taxing, I did not think so much time would pass before I continued writing. Even once I settled into my new home and new job, technology proved to be illusive at best. So, here I am at my new coffee shop (because what writer can write without a local coffee shop to hang out in?) and finishing a post I started over four months ago. (Actually, I don’t remember where I was headed with that post, so I’ll table that one for a while longer.)
Although the busyness of moving was the main reason I stopped writing, another reason was that so much of my life had changed, but I wasn’t ready to let my writing change. Just as I knew that my new home would change me, I knew that if I wrote during this transition that my writing would change, too. And, well, I was sort of afraid that those changes would be permanent. In additional to the schedule change, I’ve had a huge change in my social life. For the first time in my adult life, more often than not, I have dinner plans with friends who love a long sobremesa as much as I do. As much as I enjoy blogging, having regular dinner conversation has been rejuvenating. In fact, as I sit here writing this, I’m juggling three different conversations on social media as we decide the who, what, when, and where for our dinner plans tonight (Korean bbq at 5:00, if anyone’s interested). After a four-month break from writing, I am relieved to return to it. Certainly, my mind is full of different topics and perspectives, but the act of writing is the same. Now that I am writing again, I feel more like I am home here. I feel more like me here. This post is a little shorter than usual, mostly because I’m not sure anyone is still reading my poor abandoned blog. Although I abandoned it for a while, it certainly never left my mind, and I am happy to be back. I realized recently that I have spent so much time revising my novel from NaNoWriMo that I have not posted any fiction on my blog in a while. Okay, fine, I've mostly avoiding posting any of my stories; NaNoWriMo just makes a good scapegoat. So, I decided to share a short story that is about Heidi, the character in the story "Shut Doors" that I shared back in July. This one is an anecdote from her childhood.
Dandelions Usually, five-year-old Heidi did not enjoy visiting her elderly neighbor Mrs. Williams because she was sure that Mrs. Williams’s fat, gray cat was going to pounce on her and scratch her the way it had attacked the poor little mouse toy on their last visit. But each week, her mother checked on Mrs. Williams and insisted that Heidi come visit, too. At least this visit, the cat was purring innocently on Mrs. Williams’s lap inside the living room while Heidi and her mother brought the laundry in. Well, really, her mother Lauri was gathering the laundry; Heidi was busy exploring the yard. She grinned as she watched the dandelions bob in the breeze. Everywhere she looked seemed to be overflowing with the bobbing yellow flowers. Curious, Heidi tip-toed carefully around each dandelion, wondering just how many of these spots of sunshine lived in the backyard. “Heidi,” her mother Lauri, called from the clothesline in the backyard, “Come back over here where I can see you.” Heidi looked up. She had wondered into the sideyard without realizing it. “Coming,” she called, careful to avoid crushing any of the dandelions under her mary janes as she slowly returned to her mother. Lauri smiled as she paused in folding the sheets to watch Heidi’s slow progress. She knew that Heidi had a good reason for taking such oddly placed steps. “Can we go home soon?” Heidi asked once she reached her mother. “Soon. I want to check that Mrs. Williams has supper ready before we leave,” Lauri said as she unpinned the last sheet from the clothesline. She picked up the laundry basket and started walking toward the house, holding a hand out for Heidi. “Mom,” Heidi cried out. “What’s wrong?” Lauri stopped and turned back. “You broke the flowers.” Heidi pointed to the smooshed dandelions Lauri had just stepped on. “You know, Heidi, some people call those weeds,” Lauri said, planning to use the moment to teach Heidi about flowers. Heidi thought a moment and stared at the crushed yellow flower that had amused her earlier. Then she cocked her head in a way her mother was familiar with. “But what does God call them?” And in her mind, the matter was settled. Lauri smiled, and hand-in-hand, they walked to the house, carefully not hurting any more of the dandelions. Trying to write a novel draft in a month seems a rather daunting, but intriguing challenge. But when I first learned about November’s being National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, I was in the midst of grad school, and as much as I enjoy writing, I decided not to participate. My professors would have encouraged my creativity, but I doubt they would have accepted “NaNoWriMo” as a valid reason for granting me an extension on my final projects.
When I was in middle school, I would get home from school, play the guitar until dinner, and then, after dinner, hole up in my room and write until bed. I wrote short stories, poems, creative essays, and many discarded novel drafts. I followed this daily writing routine until college, but the demands of school work and the presence of three roommates paused my creative writing through college. And of course, life after college is busy. I still write occasional short stories, poems, and academic articles, but I gave up on the idea of writing novels. I kept saying that I would have time to write later. This last month was the first chance that I participated in NaNoWriMo. Honestly, I doubted that I would be able to get even close to the 50,000 words that equal a novel for this project. But I decided that it was important for me to try. Swearing off television and most books for the month, I used every free moment to write, to plan, to think, and to write more. Because I have to function like a regular human adult for my jobs, I also mandated no late nights. And I was making great progress, until the night I decided to make my character suffer. She had been particularly annoying that day and needed some lessons about life. I smugly wrote a scene which ended in her sleeping outside, then I went to bed. As I drifted off to sleep, I almost laughed with glee at the idea of making her wake up with a head cold. In the morning, I, not my fictional character, woke up with the head cold and lost almost a week of writing. So imagine my surprise that November 30, at 10:30 p. m., I finished my 50,000th word, and an hour later, I completed a full draft of a novel. The novel I finished last week was a story idea that popped into my head six years ago. Every so often, I would pull the idea out fondly, imagining what it would become when it grew up, and then putting it back away in the back of my mind. Oh, the chagrin in realizing that all this time, Time has not been stopping me from writing. I have. One of my favorite teen speakers, Rand Hummel, says, “You’re as close to God as you want to be.” As a teen, I used to think that if only I had more Time, I could devote more attention and focus to my relationship with God. As an adult I began to understand how true his statement is for relationships. And now, at the end of NaNoWritMo, I realize how true it is for so many things I use Time as an excuse for: I am as much of a writer as I want to be. Earlier this week I was perusing some of my old poetry, hoping to cull that mine of raw material for something worth polishing. Rather than walking away with a sparkling new poem, I found a more valuable resource: an epiphany.
My poems fall into only three categories. There are the light-hearted or experimental poems that I write for students, there are the serious poems based on passages of Scripture that I write for myself, or there are poems about school and teaching (that I have no intention of sharing unless my brother Gabe tries to impersonate Anne Bradstreet’s brother-in-law who published her poems without her knowledge). While I certainly knew that I had written a poem marking the beginning of each school year, I had not realized how many other occasional poems I had written about school from either student or teacher perspectives. And just by reading the poem, I can tell which school year the poem came out of, whether or not the lines have anything specific of my experience (which they so rarely do). Even in some of my poetry “experiments” I end up with a school theme. For example, my students and I were working on parodies. Usually when I write parodies, I go to Emily Dickinson. I’m not sure why; I’m not really an Emily Dickinson fan. (I’d much rather read Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets or short poems like “Grown-up”: “Was it for this I uttered prayers, / And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs, / That now, domestic as a plate, / I should retire at half-past eight?”) But to stretch myself as a poet since my students cry foul when I don’t push myself too, I went for the Bard and ended up with this: To teach, or not to teach, that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler, in silence, to allow The barbs and insults of outraged youth Or to fight against of sea of immaturity And, by instruction, end it. To teach, to instruct-- No more—and by the lesson to say we end The ignorance and the thousand natural follies That man is heir to. My examples of more difficult forms of poetry like the pantoum or sestina are also school-themed. And even my favorite epigram is the result of my first teaching experience (and the 19th century British authors I was reading at the time): The leaders here have taken care To ignore the wheel and invent it square. I find it curious that as another school year begins, I still have no poem to commemorate it. In fact, I don’t even have the beginnings of one. Instead, I have a rough draft of a story, in parable style that is capturing my thoughts for a new year. And instead of hiding this one away with the other first-day-of-school poems, I want to share this one and plan to in my post next week. I suspect that this marks a turning point in my teaching career. |
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