Why We Write

This week has been really hard. My dad's situation still weighs heavy on the family as we try to find a sustainable solution. My living situation has been chaotic and stressful. My career feels stagnant and my work life has been overtaken by other responsibilities. And so, when I opened my email yesterday and found several messages from strangers thanking me for sharing my father's story, it truly lifted my heart.

Writing is a deeply solitary act and sometimes it can be hard to remember why we actually do it. Moments like these remind me: we write to connect. As the incredible comedian Hannah Gadsby says in her new one-woman show, it's important to share our stories. They help us develop a diverse and complex perspective of the world around us--thus cultivating a more compassionate self and society.

I am proud to share my latest essay published in Lenny, a deeply personal account of the journey my family has been on as we navigate the stormy seas of neurological decline.

All my best to you, my lovely readers!

Summertime Update: Northern Europe edition

Hi friends! I’m sorry that every time I post on here, I start with an apology. Since I last posted about our trip to Mexico, I’ve been hanging out in Miami (mostly eating and drinking coconuts that we pillage from the neighborhood) and enjoying the low-key lifestyle of Norbert’s native Germany. When we arrived to Schleswig-Holstein in late May, the region had been enjoying nearly a month of freakishly warm and sunny days. While I won’t complain about the weather, I will specify that this is “warm” by German standards, so my fleece has certainly come in handy.

Solar panels and windmills pepper the rural German landscape

The best thing about our visit have been the glorious display of flowers everywhere—after the horror of winter, plants bloom with a fierceness that is breathtaking. I can’t get over the many different varieties and colors, and I can’t take a walk around the neighborhood without snapping a dozen or more pictures. We’re staying in a small town not too far from Kiel that has lots of great walking trails and a small forest nearby. Up here in the arctic North, where the sun stays up until late, I accompany Norbert in the evening on his runs through the forest—while riding a bicycle, of course.

At the Tiergarten, Berlin

post-run

My other favorite part of Germany are the saunas—ubiquitous, elegant, and relaxing. Unfortunately, I don’t have any photos of our many sauna experiences as cameras are frowned upon in the mostly nude environment. But believe me when I say, an afternoon in the sauna will change your life. Reset your soul. Recharge your battery. Etc, etc. You gotta experience it to believe it! And since we’ve been dealing with our fair share of overly-complicated German bureaucracy, I believe we’ve earned the right to relax!

Here are some pictures of a quick trip we took to the Netherlands!

A horse-zebra!

Cheesing with racing pigeons

The crepe master at work

Bucolic wedding location

I also had the joyful opportunity to visit my family in Belgium. It was a laughter-filled, waistline-expanding weekend. I did my best to see as my relatives as possible, all the while eating as many delicious Belgian dishes as possible. It’d say I was successful on both fronts. Belgian beer, cheese, chocolate, waffles, freshly-made summer fruit tarts—what else can a girl ask for??

And I’m happy to report that, all the while, I’ve been writing. Still not finished with my novel that’s been sitting on the backburner for the past year, but I’ve been writing a lot about my social media sabbatical experience and a little about dealing with my father’s dementia diagnosis. I’ll be sure to keep you updated about these upcoming publications! The freelancer grind can be tedious and frustrating, but I’m excited to be writing and get my work out into the world.

I am also proud to announce that I am working as a writer at Story Terrace, a company that helps people write the memoir of their life. A few months ago, I had the good fortune of spending a few days interviewing my beloved photography teacher from high school who I wrote about a while back in this blog post. Then, I went home with my notes and recordings and wrote the story of her spectacular life. It was a fantastic experience and an opportunity that I’m grateful for.

Thanks all for now, folks! In the meantime, please check out my spanking new website, designed by yours truly! Happy summer, everyone!

Go Team Go: Writing as a Team Sport

This time last year, I was happily banging away on the first draft of my novel. Every evening, I delighted in sitting at my desk and writing my story. I was captivated by my characters, and frankly, enamored withfiction.

Fast forward to the present moment, and it’s way harder to arrive at my writing desk with the same amount of zeal as I did last fall. The honeymoon period is definitely over.

As you all know, I had a summer full of all kinds of adventures, very few of them having anything to do with sitting at a desk and writing a novel. Towards the end of the summer, I was complaining to a writer friend about how little progress I made on my novel. 

“My gears are creaky,” I told her. “I can’t get into it.”

It seemed liked everything I wrote was dry and forced, and I couldn’t seem to get into a groove. (I wanted my strange writing groove from last fall to magically reappear!) She was in the same position with her novel—re-working a full draft—and we decided to schedule a writing date to move forward on our respective projects. She would come to my house and we would hold each other accountable to write for several hours. And write we did, dammit.

Since that initial writing date, all of the progress that I have made on my novel has been with her in the room. Once or twice a week, she comes over with some snacks and we chat for a while before setting the timer for one hour. And every time that alarm goes off, we’re surprised by how fast the time flew by. And every time she leaves my house several hours later, neither of us can wipe the silly grins off our faces. We’re doing it. Slowly but surely, these novels are getting written. It’s taking a lot of time and elbow grease, but it’s happening.

When I told her how different my writing process was for this draft than the first one, she laughed and made a really good point.

“We’re at places in the revision process that are not the most fun,” she said.

We’re not just dreaming up characters and fun situations to put them in. We’re sweating and toiling to turn those whimsies into masterpieces. (Or at least into some kind of finished product. Whether it’s any good or not remains to be seen.)

I still love my characters, but I see how complicated crafting a compelling story actually is. You cannot simply string together a few curious incidents and call it a novel. Readers need so much more than that to connect to a story in a meaningful way.

The storyline I mapped out over the summer is in constant flux. Every time I sit down to write, my perfect plot is in danger of taking an unexpected turn. Characters act out in unpredictable ways. What I thought was the climax has shifted. Characters that I thought were minor have become major, and vice versa. Things come up that I didn’t prepare for, like hurricanes and broken arms. And then what?

The truth is, I’m dealing with a living, breathing animal with a mind of its own. For the first time, I am beginning to understand the fiction writer’s dilemma of striking the delicate balance between controlling the narrative and letting the story take the reins. It’s an amazing and beautiful and scary process.

All the confidence that I had in my novel when I first started has leaked out of my brain, which makes it hard to return to the manuscript with the same gusto I once had. But luckily, I don’t have to feel like I’m in it all by myself. Although I’ve shared work with many writers over the years, I’ve never had an active writing partnership like this one. I’ve heard of other writers who always write together, but I had never seen the value in it until now. I’m grateful for my writing partner who knows when to talk shop and when to get down to business.   

So much of writing has to be done all by our lonesome. So why not try to make it into a team activity?  It's not as if I can't write on my own, but it's just more fun this way! 

Remember! Always use the buddy system!!

Speaking of which, check out my BUST interview with my friend and client, Thelsuice Gonzalez, as we discuss the process of working on her memoir as a team. 

The Wild Art of Journal Keeping

I've been reading several articles recently about keeping a journal - those who do, those who don't, and the surprising benefits of writing about one's life. As a writer of nonfiction, I am often embarrassed to admit that I spend a fair amount of time writing about myself. Well, not necessarily my SELF but different aspects of my life experiences.

My first diary entry! Jan 17, 1994

I have been writing about my life since as far back as I can remember. My childhood bedroom has a shelf full of journals dating back to 1994, when my mother gifted me my first diary at age 7. My first entry stated the name of my best friend at the time as well as a current crush (Jose with blue "ese"). I also noted my five-year-old sister's boyfriend's name  and a piece of hard news: the Northridge earthquake in L.A.

Since then, my journal entries have waxed and waned. Some journals have dates that skip months, even years. Other notebooks, often when I'm traveling, are thick with scratchy pen ink and mementos, and span just a few weeks. Depending on my life circumstances, entries might be long, drawn out soliloquies about life and love. Or, an entry might be a bullet point list of flowers I've learned to identify or a snippet of conversation overheard at the deli counter.

My journal might never be a completely accurate account of every detail about my life, but if  nothing else, it serves to jog my reflective capabilities. What did I do today? What was significant about my waking, or non-waking, hours? (I keep my journal beside my bed to jot down my dreams first thing in the morning.)

Another reason why I continue to scribble in my journal every night before bed is because it keeps me writing. Even if I'm dead tired, I can still manage to squeeze out a few lines about my day. Usually, what starts as a quick list might turn into a deeper exploration of my friendship with a garden snake, or a growing attachment to my daily bike commute. Later, when I'm writing for "real," I often find myself pawing the pages of my journal, looking for certain passages or reflections. As a memoirist, these notebooks become my primary research later on. Still, when I am writing in my journal today, I can never know what moment might be gold to be in a few years time. Interestingly, it is often the most mundane moments that are most significant.

In Robert Olen Butler's book about writing fiction, From Where You Dream, he writes about using your journal as another way to practice the elements of fiction writing; write in scene, use all the senses, incorporate dialogue. This is another great way that journal writing can inform our "real" writing.

Do you keep a journal? Do you keep a hard notebook or documents filed away on your laptop? Do you write every day or only when something great or terrible happens? Tell me about your journal keeping life!

A small sampling of my journal collection