Setting Boundaries As Writers

Today's post is from alum Araceli Esparza* and talks about one of the biggest issues that an author can face, setting boundaries and learning to say "no." Araceli also provides a great quote from another Hamline alum, Jennifer Mazi, and some life boundary exercises.

As writers, we are presented with many options and opportunities to give to a project by using our writing, like even writing for a blog! One way to give the very best of yourself to your writing is by setting boundaries.

Boundaries can help us trim down these options/invitation in to suggestions, and not into obligations that choke our time to write, our time to have for ourselves, and our families.

Writing, teaching, and sharing are all parts of being a writer. When we begin setting boundaries for our writing life, we add value to it, regardless of whether we are published or not.

Our boundaries help us structure and honor our craft, our profession and our choice to read or write. Setting boundaries is a muscle--use it and the stronger it gets.

Having boundaries doesn’t mean you have to close-off your relationships, it means that you can begin to select meaningful relationships. Beginning with ourselves, writers must communicate in our own voice style what it is that we want or desire. Building boundaries is a first step to getting to know your voice.

I asked fellow alum Jennifer Mazi to share with us her experience with writing as a mother and finding balance, boundaries, and time for her writing:

"I used to say yes to everything because I believed, by telling the universe that I was open for business, more opportunities would come my way, which would lead to wild success, that everything would happen in easy ways because of my awesome positivity. 

That kind of naiveté makes me tired even typing about it. Consider me yessed out, which is worse than stressed out. My new strategy is to structure my life around the writing in order to protect my own bandwidth and my family. 

This means I say NO a lot more, and to more people. This leaves me with enough energy to bring my best to both my writing and my kiddos, because if I do right by them, there is a good chance my best will be enough to reach other kiddos one day.

That’s the dream, anyway."

That’s all of our dreams. Each of us have a similar story/dream, whether it's to be published or just nail it.

After publication, most authors never let that comfort level go to high. I have found from talking with other authors and writers, that it’s important to stay hungry. Making space for our writing is a constant battle.

Remember that on the side of pre-publication: 

You can take a break from trying to get published and enjoy the freedom that you can write whatever the heck you want to, and you can submit it where ever the heck you want to.

Tips to do Free Writing:

• You can explore whatever genre, hybrid, heck invent a new meter.
• Ask for space for yourself.
• Visualize the word rejection and blow it up. 
• Paint. Draw. You are an artist. Collage. Redecorate. You are an artist.
• Instead of giving we need to take. Sometimes.
• Writing is giving, and as women, mothers, men, partners, etc. we give so much.
• Ask for quiet time from your family.
• Get some healing rocks.
• Spend quiet time at church.
• Ask for a room with no TV and cut off your laptop from wifi when you are on vacation.
• Read.
• Write like no one will see this!

Write out your writing life boundaries in these three sentences with 3 variations:

People may not ________________________________________

I have the right to ask for _________________________________

To protect my time and energy, it’s okay to ___________________

Thanks Araceli for saying yes to the Storyteller's Inkpot and deciding that this WAS worth your time and energy.  We appreciate it immensly and hope that your advice will be equally helpful for others.

*Araceli Esparza is a poet, budding bilingual/bicultural picture book author, and diversity in children's literature advocate.  An alum of Hamline University's MFAC program, she enjoys blogging about the writers life, her journey to publication, and writing latino children's books.

Alumni Voices with Danette Lane: The Toothbrush and the Pen

Jane Resh Thomas once told me “understanding clears obstacles.” I love the simple truth in this wisdom and remind myself of it frequently.

If there is one obstacle in my writing life that I have earnestly sought understanding for, it is the obstacle to writing every day. I know I do not suffer alone with this problem. Jamie Swenson taught us “how to get [our] butt BACK into that chair” in November, and Jennifer Mazi wrote an open letter to her distant muse just last week. In general, we writers spend a lot of time talking about our problem of not writing.

Why is that? Shouldn’t writing every day feel just as important to us as brushing our teeth?

I have worked on my writing obstacle for years. The easy BIC! fix never cut it for me. Then last month, while exploring various topics for this post, I discovered some blessed understandings that have shifted my writing paradigm. Disclaimer: What follows may only be ridiculous convoluted theories that have absolutely no basis in reality. (But they’re working for me.)

Here goes…

#1: What the obstacle to writing is not. It is not fear (What if I don’t get it right?); it is not doubt (I am not the one to tell this story); it is not procrastination (Today I will make a story collage); it is not laziness (ZZZZZZ); or interruptions (“Candygram!”); or even distractibility (Look! A chicken!). The obstacle is not any of these things--or all of these things. These issues are surmountable.

#2: What the obstacle to writing is. The obstacle is a basic failure to understand who we are as writers and how we are created to process the world.

Creative writers are a highly intuitive clan. Significant portions of us fall into the “Intuitive Feelers” or “Intuitive Perceivers” personality types when we take the Jung Typology test. This means we gather information using the five senses like everyone else, but we then take in additional data that goes beyond our senses: wispy connections, patterns, relationships, gut instincts. I’m not sure how much of this input we are even consciously aware of. While these pieces of data are not typical facts and figures, they are still a form of intelligence. It’s a mystery how this intelligence is stored within us, but we don’t seem capable of accessing it in the same manner as recalling facts and figures.

#3: The understanding that clears the obstacle. Additional tools are needed to cull and extract intuitive intelligence. Artists use paint. Monks use prayer. Writers pick up the pen. We rely on the writing process to access and free the unconscious knowledge our intuition has gathered and stored. This understanding offers us a serious motivation to write: To not write means leaving a considerable portion of our humanity and intelligence lying fallow within.

So being all I am created to be depends on me picking up the pen every day.

This new level of self-understanding has turned the simple act of brushing my teeth into a strange otherworldly experience. Every morning I pick up my toothbrush, and I see a pen. I pick up my pen, and I see a toothbrush. My intuitive intelligence must be working overtime, making a connection in the relationship between these two implements. Oddly, I feel thoroughly empowered by the visual reinforcement the delusion provides.

           

*

Danette Lane is a 2010 graduate of the MFAC program. She carries her toothbrush (and pen!) back and forth between her residences in Florida and North Carolina.

Alumni Voices with Jennifer Mazi: Open Letter to a Muse

Dear Sharon,

I’m writing an open letter to you because that seems to be the thing to do these days and since we broke up, I haven’t had a single, fresh idea of my own. In fact, I can’t even find proper writing tools in this snowglobe of a house I live in, which explains why I’m scribbling this letter on the back of a Wild Things color sheet from the library in pink marker.

That is how bad things have gotten between us. So let’s talk.

(Come closer!)

Oh, you have somewhere to be?

I get it.

I see you out there, speeding through the woods across the street, blowing your pouty whistle to rub in my face that you are moving forward...without me.

Tracking down the muse: Of course, 
the morning I go out to find her, 
Sharon is nowhere to be found.

I hear you right this instant—the whole neighborhood hears you too, by the way—whining about how I’m not doing my part to woo you, that I’ve been distracted by a four-month long Good Wife binge and what the world is doing on Facebook and untouched stacks of overdue library books.

(In my defense, I’ve read all the picture books, several times, at least. I read Oliver Jeffers’ It Wasn’t Me maybe 92 times this month alone. And I gave The Goldfinch a shot but it was so heavy my arms hurt by page 20 and there weren’t any pictures.)

You say you feel neglected, but the truth is: I don’t know how to woo 240 tons of iron and steel. I miss the version of you that climbed up onto my lap and purred wild word after word into my ear. Now, I strain to even hear you ramming your cars into each other at odd hours, drowned out by the sound of Mahna-Mahna on repeat and four people hollering that they have no clean underpants.

A friend e-mailed the other day to let me know about a free two-hour Scrivener workshop I might be interested in.

Which I would have been, I told him, except I don’t write anymore, and haven’t since you crawled out the door dragging half of my brain with you in search of a clear route west...all because YOU wanted to see what the moon looked like over the Grand Canyon and I wouldn’t drive you.

I guess it’s not entirely true, that I don’t write. I tweet, although I get scared and delete them before people comment. I write Facebook rants about ridiculous tools I need but don’t have, and notes for my kiddos’ lunchbox napkins when I remember. I can manage a decent obituary and the occasional newspaper article, but that doesn’t cover the bills.

Our projects? The ones you and I loved like children, that we named and hugged and whispered to and envisioned in glossy Pantone colors with double-fan adhesive binding before sending off to yet another not-the-right-agent?

I haven’t seen them in months.

If we wait a bit longer, “months” changes to “a year.”

They cry for us, sometimes. (Doesn’t that just break your heart? Do you even have a heart?) We left so many of them dangling on the edges of various cliffs and ravines. They deserved a chance to reach The End, but you needed your own adventure, and I was too tired to drive to Arizona.

I’m sorry. Let’s stop blaming each other. I’ve changed, or at least I am trying: I only watch TV when I fold laundry now; I switched my Facebook password to something so complicated I couldn’t remember it if I were a World Memory Champion; I am reading longer books again, or at least, I will be once I return that stack in the corner to the library.

Just come back inside. My lap is empty, and I’m allergic to cats.

* 

Jennifer Mazi is a 2011 graduate of the MFAC program. She lives in Missouri.