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.

The Single Story

This article is worth reading and the TED video embedded within it worth watching. Both discuss the danger of "the single story" and the cultural and personal pitfalls such stories present. The author of the article, Kevin Hartnett, defines the single story as the simple narrative told about [children] within a family. Of course, these single stories exist outside families--they're acquired in schools, churches, workplaces: He's the smart one; she's the trouble-maker; she's the girly-girl, and so on.

Identifying the single story that is used to identify a character by peers, family, authorities is a worthwhile exercise for a writer. Having a protagonist confront that single story could be mighty useful for plot, theme, and character development.

How can the writer identify the single story (stories) a character lives with? As a writing exercise, create various scenes where friends or teachers or relatives discuss the protagonist when he/she is not there. That should help reveal how each community pegs a person. Cross community discussions are revealing too: Write a parent-teacher conference (again, with the protag not present); write a scene where the protagonist's spiritual advisor meets a coach, or a hated neighbor meets the protagonist's piano teacher. And so on. Use the other people in your character's life to explore all facets of the character you are creating.

Turn It Up

Every sound in a scene adds to the story. Sounds create setting, mood, character, and can provide tension. Like endowed objects, there can be endowed sounds—a sound that means more than merely what it sounds like.

Keep a list of human nonverbal sounds, and a list of nonhuman sounds that might be heard, and use them in your writing. Here’s a start…

Human Nonverbal:

Cry of a baby

Sneeze

Burp

Whistle

Nonhuman:

Squealing tires

Gun shot

Wind through a maple tree in autumn

Glass breaking

Now for extra fun—especially if you are writing picture books—try to write the actual sound in words, making them onomatopoeic as possible. Margaret Wise Brown loved to do this in her books The Noisy Book and The Quiet Book. The sound of a truck going over a dirt road: burrippity burrp burrppity. Or the sound of a car siren: Err-u-ahh-err-u-ahh.

Question from Blog Reader

Hello, Inkpotters!

Here's a question for you from the Ask the Inkpot mail bag.

"Can you make suggestions and/or offer exercises for help getting back into a story you are working on when it has been put aside for some time?"

Thanks, Molly

And, readers, if you have a question for the Inkpot Bloggers, please email it to asktheinkpot@gmail.com

Until next time,

Inkpot Administrator

A WRETCHED SENSE OF WRONGNESS

I’m reading a book right now that, like the debate about the list of books for feminist readers of YA in Anne’s post, raises questions about conventions.

The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones covers everything from ADEPTS to ZOMBIES and includes travel guide icons both typical (Food, Lodging) and atypical (Evil, Magic) as well as Official Management Terms, defined as “words which the management has dreamed up for use every time a certain thing, fact, sensation, or person is mentioned.” In Fantasyland, for example, stew (an almost ubiquitous food) is always thick and savory; you get a sense of wrongness or a feeling of being watched when assassins are approaching; and the occupants of hovels always eke out a wretched existence.

Most kinds of writing have conventions, certainly, just as most occupations and avocations have shared vocabulary. So when does convention become cliché? When do we depend too much on convention or cliché to do the emotional work that our characters and scenes should be doing instead?

Just as an exercise, try writing, in any genre, a scene heavily laden with overused words, phrases, and actions. Now rewrite the same scene with unexpected language. The key word is rewrite: my own first drafts are filled with flat language, clichés, filter words. Rereading those drafts, seeing my writing eke out a wretched existence, I am filled with a sense of wrongness. Revision is a chance to make my writing thick and savory.

And watch for other Tough Guides as listed in the front of Wynne Jones’s book, including The Tough Guide to Time Warps (out last century), The Tough Guide to the End of the World (coming soon), and The Tough Guide to Black Holes (unaccountably missing). Did I mention that the book makes me laugh out loud?

STORYBOARDING FOR FUN

Many of you have seen a storyboard for picture books. I thought I’d show you how I use one to revise a novel.

After I have a first draft with some sort of resolution, I write out the crucial elements of each chapter on a post-it. I do this by hand, since it forces me to slow down. I place the post-it notes in a grid on a big sheet of paper. The bigger the better because, like an artist who has to occasionally step back from her painting, I want to be able to see my novel from a distance. Now I can move the post-its around to see how order will affect the story.

In the case of this current novel-in-progress I used different colored notes to represent chapters of backstory. As you can see, the bright orange notes are rather sporadically placed, which tells me I need to question them. Could there be more backstory? Can they appear randomly, or in a clearly, defined and consistent pattern? Should there be more in the beginning and fewer at the end? Are they even necessary? The pink post-it represents a coming together of both the past and the present, which happens only once at the end. The dark yellow post-its are used because I ran out of the other.

After rearranging, I type up the chapter outlines and paste them into the grid. This gives a sense of permanence, even though I can change anything at anytime (and already have). I leave these storyboards hanging on my wall. I stare at them up close and from a distance. I move the post-its around and stare some more. I question every thing a thousand times.

Reading the novel on one piece of paper gives me a visual of the narrative flow. Now I can go back and to those fussy little details that create this big picture, making changes at whim—although this is really not whim at all, but an innate understanding of all that has been processed.I just have to pretend that it is all a whim.

You KNOW what you need to do; you just don’t know that you know—that’s what makes it fun. Try it. You might like it or it might make you crazy. Either way it can’t hurt, and at the very least you do something with your hands that can hang on a wall.