Happy Blogoversary To Me

Today is the one-year anniversary of this blog! Bust out the champagne!

Oh. It's 6 am. Well. Coffee will do. Slip a little something in it, if you must.

Here’s a Blooming Year One redux.

First post: Popcorn

Blog Inspiration: Late Bloomers

Hero's Challenge, Act I: Consult

Foreshadowing: Free the French Fries

Plot Twist: Plot Twist

Hero's Challenge, Act II: A Bloodcurdling Halloween Horror Story

Audience favorites:

The Lost Weekend

We’re Going to Potty Like It’s 2009

The Farm Share Blues

Torn Between Two Lovers

The Perspective Express

Roots and Flowers

Post That Best Describes My Glamorous Life: Baby You’re a Star

Post I Should Reread When I Get Bat-Shit Crazy: Onward Intrepid Writer

Blog words written: 31, 400

Visitors: 2533

Personal Take-Home: It’s been one heck of a year

Hero's Challenges, Act III: to come

With that, I’m out for ten days. Santa delivered (Santa Brings The Heat)—I board a plane for Hawaii tomorrow.

PS We’re dropping Chester off on the way. I'll take pictures.

PPS It might be time to change my bio blurb to the left. Book burning? What book burning?






Aloha!

How's Your Self Control?

An experiment conducted in the 1960s by Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel tested children’s ability to delay gratification. A child was left alone in a room with a plate of marshmallows, cookies and pretzels. She was told that she could either eat one treat right away or wait until after the adult left the room for a few minutes. When he returned, she could eat two.

Most kids snagged one the minute he was out of sight.

The interesting part of the study is that Mischel followed the kids after the initial experiment and found that those who had been able to delay gratification became the more successful adults. The “high delayers” were willing and able to invest the time and patience it takes to, say, get a PhD. (See The New Yorker article Don’t! by Jonah Lehrer)

I am infamous for my ability to delay gratification. If anyone would let me, I’d open my birthday presents the day after my birthday. I presume I was a high delaying child (mom?). I graduated sixth in my high school class, magna cum laude from college.

But at a certain point, I started to question what I was delaying for. Sure, I had the fortitude to get through law school, but did I want to be a lawyer? (An emphatic no). What had good-girl weekends in college to become magna cum laude earned me? When I hit the job-hunting streets after graduation, I found that the answer was the opportunity to rock the world with an $8.75/hour job working the night shift in a home for troubled girls (along with the four million other psychology grads, not a one of us whom was asked our class standing).

That’s the problem. Two marshmallows are only a great reward if you love marshmallows (I think they are yucky).

Instead of the starter job or grad school, I started waitressing. Waitressing is all about instant gratification. Work five hours and receive a fistful of cold hard cash and a free beer. It’s even fun. Imagine that.

But eventually my natural inclination kicked back in. Powerfully. Is there any career more dependent on delayed gratification that writing? After ten years in this business, I say no. You spend months or years writing, wait a possible eternity for someone to publish you, don’t get paid until they do. One recently published essay of mine took eight years to get published (Fame vs. Fortune). And we aren’t going to talk about my book right now, ok: we just aren’t (Book Burning Take Two).

Is it true, then, that the treat of publishing (maybe it’s the pretzel) is still worth it for me?

I can see my name on a book jacket and it looks far more fabulous than a law degree or 1000 marshmallows. But I am also increasingly aware that there is much more to living than succeeding.

And thank goodness for that.

WWMD?

Malcolm Gladwell’s article in the May 11 New Yorker is titled “How David Beats Goliath.” The topic is how underdogs win by breaking the rules and supplanting ability with effort.

“We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity,” he writes. “It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than ability.”

This is what one hears at writer’s conferences all of the time. Don’t give up. Keep writing, keep submitting.

A good friend (one with an agent and a book coming out, incidentally) told me the other day that she thinks I got bad advice from my marketing consult (see Book Burning Take 2). If I truly believe in my project, she said, I should keep submitting. She sent out her stories 200 times before she got a book deal.

Actually, her exact words were: “Tell everyone who doesn’t believe in your book to suck it.”

What will happen next? Stay tuned for the next installment of “As the Memoir Turns.”

Guts

Simply mentioning my book for the first time in months set off an internal maelstrom capped by complete panic in the grips of which I considered quitting writing and getting a job at the mall.

This reaction would be amusing if it weren’t so predictable. Since the first, seamless, innocent draft, the thought of editing my manuscript has sent me into spinning anxiety.

I can never decide no matter how much I prod my mind and my soul if this anxiety is a normal reaction to a monumental task like writing a book or a sign that I shouldn’t be writing this particular book.

I recently read in the New Yorker that David Foster Wallace said, “the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies in being willing to sort of die in order to move the reader.” I don’t purport to be on his level (nor end like him), and he wrote fiction, but I will be brave enough to suggest that this statement might be even truer when one is writing memoir.

When I think about what I will have to scrutinize, parse out and reveal about myself to make this book truly good, it kind of makes me want to throw up. It’s exciting to think that this could be possible and moving to an audience, and terrifying to think about how difficult it will be and how, should I fail, I will have simply laid my guts out on the table to be picked apart by vultures.

A Voice in the Crowd

Last week I paused at the supermarket and selected Valentines for the chickens to distribute to their fellow preschoolers. After passing by innumerable boxes emblazoned with mainstream cartoon personalities (likely to please the chickens, but make me gag), I discovered cards emblazoned with fish—as you tipped the card around in your hand, the images moved and shifted.

Clever, I thought. I went home and packaged them up.

Three days later what came home were handfuls of these morphing-image cards--each obviously not one mother’s lofty balk to consumerism but simply this year’s hot item.

It got me thinking about how rare the truly original idea is.

I recently read a New Yorker article that commented on several simultaneous inventions throughout the course of history. Even before the collective thinking of the Internet, people were having the same thoughts at the same time at opposite points of the globe. Or take for example the phenomenon of baby naming—despite that most couples think they are innovative, every year lots of people name their kid the exact same name. (My name was, in fact, the third most popular in my birth year).

This goes for writing topics, too. Sometimes it seems I've had a story idea for all of two seconds before I see it in a magazine. And though I loathe the thought, there is probably someone out there right this very minute writing practically this same blog entry (whoa).

What can we rely on if our ideas are as likely to be in someone else’s head as ours alone? Who gets heard: he who hollers the loudest, she with the freshest angle?

I am banking on honesty and voice. Let’s see where that gets me.

Late Bloomers

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article titled “Late Bloomers” for the New Yorker last year. It was based on work for his book “Outliers” and compared two kinds of creative genius. There are two styles of going about achieving a work of art, he wrote. In the first, a person sees their project fully formed in their mind and sets forth, often at a young age, to achieve it quickly and entirely. The other is much more experimental and time consuming. We (yes, this one is me) thrash about, putting together one version and then another of whatever it is we mean to create; we fail, we fling the last draft into a tree, we beat ourselves up, we get a new idea, we try again. Every time, we are filled with hope that this time we will get it right. Mostly, we don’t. We despair. But we can’t stop working at it. We keep trying. And eventually some of us do get it absolutely, gorgeously right.

There is no guarantee that I will be one to eventually bloom. There is no guarantee that my book will be published someday, or that I will publish some other book instead. But Gladwell’s article gave me a renewed sense of hope. It was nice, in the first place, to recognize myself in a methodology occasionally witnessed to produce great art. I thought myself simply neurotic, insecure and slightly deranged; well, then, so was Cezanne, and look what he managed to do? But even more helpful was an understanding of the bottom line when it comes to achieving success as a late bloomer—persistence. All of that trying and flailing takes time, and also, it counts as practice. The key is not giving up (also one of messages in Bradbury and his write-three-million-words-and-gain-mastery theory, perhaps). Gladwell’s article was also, of course, the inspiration for this blog.

Deep inside, I believe that my book will be published. It might be in ten or twenty years, but someday, I feel that it will be published. I believe this partly because I can’t stand the thought of it not being published, but also because I know that I am self-abusive enough to carry on long past any reason. Allow me to live long enough; allow me to steal enough hours from my children and husband; allow me to demure from other hobbies I might otherwise take up, like guitar-playing or surfing or scrapbooking (well, probably I’d never take up scrapbooking); and I will produce something worth publishing in a book-like object. Trust me.