What makes a writer a writer?

 

    What makes a writer a writer?  

September Muse Column for The Greater Canton Writers' Guild    

                                                              By M.Saylor 

                                                                                           

When one thinks about the typical writer, what comes to mind? Do you think of the old guy chomping on cigars and rat-a-tat-tatting on an old manual typewriter in a smoke-filled room somewhere in the back of the house, or the attic or basement so no one bothers him? Or perhaps a more genteel vision of a woman sipping tea in her garden and writing in a journal? Silly, isn’t it?

Writers come from all facets of life and have their own eccentricities and personalities, but we can all agree on some basics that make them writers such as,

1)    They have a curiosity about the world (and ask the most questions about absolutely everything, much to the annoyance of everyone around them.) Their desire to know is insatiable. The adage “not my monkey, not my circus” does not apply to them.

2)    They have thick skins – a much needed thing to get over/through all the rejections until they get to the one ‘yes’ that starts their career in earnest. (It ends up being a numbers game.)

3)  They are self-motivating. Writers write alone- and that’s how it should be. We are solitary people so it stands to reason we have no cheerleaders standing behind us saying “Go –Go – Go! Keeping writing Carl – you can do it – yeah!” Weird visual, huh? Real writing takes discipline to keep on regardless of how one feels about it. We also need to know our limits – when we’ve hit the wall and need to back off for a while. But then we always come back. We always come back to our writing. Why? Because we have something to say. And why is that, you ask?

4)    Because writers are opinionated. Anything less, and it is just a hobby. In general, if a writer does not have an opinion, he has no voice – and thus, nothing to say! End of story.

5)    They have an endless supply of optimism and ideas. There is no shortage of things for the writer to write about. Ideas come to them because writers are always mulling things over.

6)    We love paper – at least us older writers do. We always start everything off line, then move on to the computers for the second draft. And we probably have stashes of paper laying everywhere around the house. Right now I’m looking around me and finding four stacks of papers, books, and notebooks. And I’m in the dining/living room area. (My REAL jenga-pile of papers is on a footstool next to the bed.)

7)    And we love our words – a little too much. We have favorite words and sometimes we resent editing when it removes words from what we’ve written. But remember that thick skin you need to cultivate – right? What matters is not our words so much, but our message to our readers.

 

And we love talking to other writers; we need other writers, for no one understands a writer except others of his own kind. For our sanity and encouragement, I urge everyone to develop relationships/friendships with other writers. It’s how we ground ourselves and our writing. And if we’re serious, it holds us accountable.

In Defense of Standards

Not All Words Are Created Equal

 Words have the power to lift us up, give comfort and hope, and encourage us on this journey called life. They also have the power to drag us down and destroy us. The type of words you use are important. They also show the world who you are, inside.

 Censored

 Why is it that artists, writers and musicians abhor that word? Perhaps it is because we feel that censorship is being held to another person’s standards that we may or may not agree with. Just who decides on what our standards should be? And WHO decides who decides? 

A plumb line is an old workman’s tool that was used to determine straight vertical lines. It was the standard. Without that plumb line to guide him, the buildings that were built would not have been exactly vertical and would eventually fall down.

In all other areas of our culture, we applaud standards. We need standards – in law, medicine, agriculture, and construction. And if we’re good parents, we want to know what’s in the movies, video games, and tv programming before we allow our children to watch them. So why is it that we reject them here?

As adults, we will also be held responsible for what we digest in the form of entertainment, music, and what we read. Words matter no matter what form they are in.

 What Happens When There are No Standards?

When there are no standards, no absolutes, there is no consistency in anything.

When there are no standards for which to judge anything, we end up relying on our feelings - the most volatile, subjective, ego-centric, and temperamental of all the human traits. Left up to the individual, no one would be able to agree with each other on anything of importance.

Isn't the point of writing to communicate to the widest audience possible? A writer cannot do that if his writing cannot be read and understood clearly due to slang words, bad grammar, poor spelling, and using offensive language - such as unnecessary profanity. Most people would read the first line or two and stop if they had to wade through such nonsense and garbage.

 The Problem with Profanity

The English language has an enormous amount of words encompassing various shades of meanings. For a writer's character to be angry, the writer has many choices for his words in which to show a varied range of that emotion from being mildly upset to an unadulterated rage, but it is the actions of the character that pulls the reader in. What is happening? Using swear words turns the focus off the character and his actions and puts it all on a profanity-driven scene meant to shock the reader. Those unnecessary and unimaginative words then become the focus and a distraction from the story.

When there are no standards, there is nothing held up as the ideal, something to strive for, and as a result, all pieces of writing become extremely subjective.

 So Now What?

So how does a writer then stand out from his peers in a highly subjective world? By shocking his readers, of course. In the quest for attention, one writer after the other attempts to outdo everyone with shock value, and this soon becomes a race to the bottom of the dung heap.

 

Confessions of a Yarn Addict

 

Confessions of a Yarn Addict

I blame my competitiveness, although it did start out innocently.

“Beth is going to teach me how to crochet”, my bestie, Laura, confided one day over the phone.

“That’s nice. It will give you something to do this winter”, I replied, then explained how my aunt once showed me how to chain stitch more than twenty years ago – and then walked off. Hmm, I thought. That was before google. “I think I’ll look that up”, I announced.

I promptly found a gold mine on the internet, and was quickly sucked in, watching tutorial after tutorial. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from all the wonderful patterns and colors. Being an artist, I discovered my personal paradise.

I soon found myself at the fabric store visually taking in all the colors before me. One skein of yarn became three, then seven. After that I may have lost track of my purchases. Every morning and evening I sat on the couch crocheting one afghan after another like a madwoman.  Weeks, then months went by, as the small pile of yarn in the corner more than tripled in size.

“What are you going to do with this one?” My husband eyeballed yet another queen-sized afghan as he looked at the pile of them I had accumulated on a dining room chair.

“Your nieces are getting married”, I replied without dropping a stitch.

The yarn pile in the living room grew exponentially that winter and we soon lost track of our chihuahua as she had burrowed beneath it in order to keep warm.

“I think your yarn pile is moving”, my husband announced as he walked by one day. We looked at the top of the small mountain of yarn. It was quivering, then a round chartreuse ball that teetered on the very top of it rolled off landing at his feet.

“I’ll do something” I promised as he rolled his eyes and walked off.

 I either had to stop going to the yarn store or find a better place to keep it, I decided. I had to do something fast. I ended up purchasing clear plastic bins at the hardware store. I’ll color code the bins, I thought. That worked until I had too many of several colors. The bins were overflowing and I needed to get more. Eventually those six bins became ten, then twelve. I refused to buy more, just on principle. My son would occasionally go down there just to count them to report the current total to my husband. Large shopping bags full of yarn were then stored precariously on top of the towering bins in the basement. My husband was afraid to walk between them, fearful they might fall on him and he would suffocate in the basement and not be found.

I was a full-blown addict by now, not only to the yarn itself, but to collecting patterns, pattern books, and the act of crocheting. I physically needed to crochet. Without a project to work on, I would sit on the couch at night with a hook in my hand, just twitching.

“What’s going on in the basement?”  my husband demanded one day.

“Uh, nothing. What are you talking about?” I cringed, holding my breath.

“Your yarn seems to be multiplying down there in the dark. Is there any funny business you want to tell me about?”

Shortly after that, my son became adamant I stop buying yarn; we were running out of room. So, naturally, I fell to plan B: sneaking it in when no one was looking. I would take my shopping bags directly to the basement and later bring them up as if they had already been down there. They’re men, they’ll never notice, I told myself. The thing was, the piles and bags were still growing and I was running out of room upstairs, also, with all the afghans I was making.

“I need to go to the yarn store” I announced one day.

“What for?” My husband peeked over his newspaper in alarm.

“I need more yarn.” I managed to say without blinking this time.

“You have plenty downstairs.”

“It’s not the right shade of blue and I’m on my last skein.” I waved the skein I had in the air.

“So, you’re telling me that in all those thirty-plus bins of yarn down there, you don’t have another one of those skeins?”

“They might be discontinuing it”, I insisted. “If so, I’m going to need at least ten skeins. I have this color in a few other unfinished projects, you know.”

My husband took a good look at me and let the subject drop. Thank goodness he understood at that moment that my sanity was hanging by a single four-ply strand of yarn. He rolled his eyes and continued to read his newspaper. Had he challenged me on that, it wouldn't have been pretty. Trust me.

Please Don't Speak to The Writer!

 

Please Don’t Speak to the Writer!      

Writers write because that is their preferred method of communicating to others and the world in general. The ideal writing job is to be isolated from our subject and “everyone else” out there in our noisy world.

Writers don’t make good diplomats or sales people. We don’t do small talk or schmooze. Most of us don’t like crowds or large gatherings of any kind – even sometimes our own family. It’s not personal, it’s just the way we were made; to be alone to mull things over. And yes, we have a tendency to overthink things sometimes.

Most writers are akin to hibernating bears - solitary, clannish, and grumpy when crossed. Writers are only garrulous within their sub-species – other writers, where they talk endlessly over tea about their genres, sentence structure, and the oxford comma.

There are two main types of writers – straight up journalists – the who-what-where-when-how-and-why crowd who can only deal in facts and reality, and the creative writers who walk among the general population constantly toying with an endless supply of ideas in their minds and birthing whole other worlds within their imaginations. Sometimes you’ll find a writer who is a mixture of those two worlds who can easily cross genres within a single breath.

Writers are always thinking and observing and can be obsessively busy even while sitting still in a doctor’s office. Sometimes they are so preoccupied with internal dialogue that they often resent any intrusions or distractions to their thought processes.

Writers are often like that unassuming rock you kicked over in the forest – nothing to look at on the upside, but teeming with activity, ideas, and life underneath if you happen to stop and take a closer look.

And sometimes we don’t have the most pleasant of personalities, but we’re often left alone to mull, so we don’t get much practice.

The best writers are their own worst salespeople. We don’t schmooze, remember? We often get tongue-tied when we attempt to sell our work with a sales pitch. But when provoked, the only thing sharper than our tongues is our pen, or keyboard, and we have learned to wield it wickedly.

Drama Queen

 

                                                 Drama Queen

What do you get when you cross a Chihuahua with a Jack Russel Terrier? A tightly wound and wired little bundle of nerves and hair. She was my little drama queen, Katie of the couch.

This puppy came into our lives one June day in 2003. I had promised my boys I would get them a dog. They wanted for one for years, so I brought them with me when I answered the ad for a chihuahua mix. Since this was going to be an inside dog, my only stipulation was that it be female and small.

The first time we saw her, she was barely four or five pounds and playing on the sidewalk trying to lick up the ants.  The boys fell in love with her and we spent the next fifteen years on a wild rollercoaster of events with her.

The first thing we discovered was that she, being a chihuahua mix, had an iron stomach; nothing much fazed her, except baths. Her first bath was traumatic because it was given by a thirteen-year-old boy when I was at work. He had no other choice because she got stuff all over her and it smelled. He didn’t know that you can’t leave puppies alone for one second in big tubs. I got an emergency call from him saying that Katie went under and he couldn’t revive her. I think I broke every speed record getting home and her to the vets, all the while Jay was in the backseat attempting mouth to snout resuscitation. After what Katie tried to eat, that was an act of love. She recovered and we took her home the next day. The next six months flew by and as most dogs do, she loved people food. She stalked it. We found out the hard way not to leave food unsupervised – she would often grab something from our plates and drag it behind a chair to eat. She once ate a whole chipotle sandwich. 

Katie had a favorite toy she loved to death – it was a cloth monkey that she would shake senseless just to see all its arms, legs, and tail flail about while growling. When I took her to be spayed it was too late. As the vet was checking her out, I pointed out that I was concerned her teats were swelling. “Uh oh”, he said. I had to swear up and down she hadn’t been with any other dogs. “Well, then,” he informed me, “Looks like she’s going through a false pregnancy – we have to wait for this to run it’s course before she gets spayed.” That monkey never left her side for the next six months.

This dog was an acrobat. She learned how to position herself on the back of my husband’s chair to hang over his shoulders in her efforts to intercept popcorn from the bag on its way to his mouth.

She also learned to balance herself on the back of my couch that was in front of my picture window. She loved soaking in the late afternoon sunshine. And during winters she practically baked herself in front of the heater grates.

Katie had a propensity to throw her hair in all directions when she was stressed, much like a cornered porcupine. One holiday my brother, whom Katie had never seen, walked in through the front door, his voice booming hello to everyone. Katie took one look at him, squealed, and dove onto my lap. After she managed to pee all over me, she sealed the deal with a quarter of her hair.

In the last five years of her life, she was on heart medications as she became progressively weaker. One rainy day in late September, she fell on her side and couldn’t get back up. Her breathing was erratic, but she held on until her boys got home. It was a steady rain the night she died and the boys insisted she stay at home. She was buried just after midnight. Lanterns lit the area in the backyard while the sound of shovels could barely be heard over the pouring rain carving her final resting place. A bit melodramatic? Yes. But Katie wouldn’t have had it any other way. Sweet dreams, my little drama queen.

 

published in Jackson Living community magazine October 2020

Blessings and Thankfulness

Blessings  and Thankfulness

Blessings come in all sizes and many forms, but the one thing they have in common is that they are all the good things in our lives.  For most of us, what we have been blessed with we become accustomed to and generally take them for granted. Health, home, family, communities, and opportunities. We don’t think about them too much until we cross paths with those who are not so blessed.

What we often don’t realize is that sometimes true blessings come in the form of something that is withheld or doesn’t materialize – something that we may have thought we wanted or needed.  What do most of us do when that happens? That depends upon our disposition and perspective.  Because none of us can foresee the future, we don’t know what the potential outcome would be for any of our actions or inactions, but for those that live by faith, we trust that everything will work out, regardless of what comes our way. That car that cut you off, or that phone call that prevented you from leaving your home at a particular time and delayed your arrival by minutes. You don’t know what that prevented.

The synchronicity of the timing in our lives is a divine mystery that is hard to fathom. How each of us arrived at this particular point in life is the direct result of a complex series of events for which we all need to be thankful.

Thankfulness is a state of mind.

Thankfulness isn’t relegated to one day of the year. It is the state of your heart and mind. This is what determines one’s level of contentment in life. When we express our thankfulness, our brains release serotonin and dopamine, which in turn, make us feel better. Being thankful also helps us get through the inevitable struggles we all face from time to time in this journey called life.

 

Thankful people are healthier.

Researchers have found that when we are thankful, we have higher energy levels. This also strengthens our heart and immune systems, and those benefits have the potential to lengthen our lifespans.

Thankful people are happy people.

There is a direct link between thankfulness and happiness, health, and well-being. It’s on our focus. When our thoughts dwell on what we do not have we see everything else in a negative light. Our thinking changes, and over time, it affects our quality of life.

Cicero once said, “A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all the other virtues.”

Blessings to all.

 

published in Jackson Living community magazine, November 2020