If you’re looking for something good to read, here’s a list of my favorite books that I read this year.
Realistic Fiction
The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade—Amadeo Padilla is a thirty-three year old layabout who is hoping to turn his life around by taking on the role of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. But when his fifteen year old pregnant daughter turns up on his doorstep, his imaginary redemption story turns into a real one as he helps his daughter adjust to parenthood, and he helps his mother deal with a terminal illness. While the premise of this book sounds like a downer, there were so many bright moments of insight and humor and resilience that I thought this was one of the best books I read last year.
The Risk of Us by Rachel Howard—When a middle-aged couple adopts an eight year old foster girl, they find themselves tested in unexpected ways.
Motherhood by Sheila Heti—In this autobiographical novel, Sheila Heti examines what is lost when women chose motherhood over their artistic pursuits.
The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray—This is a multi-generational story of siblings raising each other, and the power of family in overcoming personal suffering.
Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson—This haunting young adult novel is about Lia and Cassie, two friends bound by a twisted and competitive friendship to be the skinniest girls in school. But when Cassie dies, Lia is haunted by her friend’s ghost as she, too, must decide whether to join her dead friend, or choose life and recovery.
Vessels by L. L. Rose—When retiree Olivero Russo buys some clay pots from a yard sale and bakes bread in them, the taste of the bread awakens a sensual pleasure in life he hadn’t experienced since he was a boy. This is a delightful story written by a friend of mine. It’s available for free for people who sign up for her newsletter.
Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson—A fatal heat wave sweeps across the globe, killing many in a wet-bulb effect. A political agency based in Switzerland, called “The Ministry of the Future,” takes it upon itself to shift economic engines that have caused global warming toward a new economic system based on environmental restoration, economic equality, and sustainability.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia—The Yellow Wallpaper meets Wuthering Heights in Mexico. This spooky story of a haunted house in the Mexican highlands will satisfy anyone who loves gothic haunted houses, feisty heroines, intergenerational insanity, and masterful writing.
How Long ‘Till Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin—I’ve been a fan of N. K. Jemisin’s work ever since I heard her short story “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints in the City Beneath the Still Waters” on Podcastle back in 2011. This short story collection gathers some of the early work of one of the best minds working in sci-fi/fantasy today.
Minecraft: The Island by Max Brooks—This is a tie-in horror novel based in the Minecraft video game world. I’m not a Minecraft player, but I thought this book was an excellent and entertaining introduction to what this whole Minecraft universe is all about. In case you missed it, the author is MAX BROOKS! The guy who wrote World War Z. I highly recommend the audiobook, which is narrated by Jack Black.
Mystery
A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult—Jodi Picoult is a fantastic issues writer. In A Spark of Light she takes on the issue of abortion and women’s reproductive rights with compassion, humanity, and nuance.
Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty—When the matriarch of a tennis family disappears, the siblings take sides on whether or not they think their father has something to do with her disappearance.
Historical Fiction
Restraint by Anne Hawley—The passionate and forbidden M/M romance between a Viscount and a painter, set in Victorian England.
Warrior and Weaver by K. S. Barton—Astrid and Bjorn come from rival Viking tribes whose hatred runs deep. When these star-crossed lovers are forced into an arranged marriage in order to bring peace to their two tribes, they must each decide whether their desires to protect the living is stronger than their desires to avenge their dead.
Memoir
Theft by Finding: Diaries, Volume One by David Sedaris—Humor writer David Sedaris collects his edited diaries from 1977 (before he was famous) to 2002. I highly recommend the audiobook version, as David Sedaris reads his own work.
All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung—Nicole Chung is a Korean American, raised by white adopted parents in an isolated, and mostly white, area in Oregon. As she grows to adulthood and is on the cusp of motherhood herself, she goes on a quest to reconnect with her biological family and re-examine her identity as an adoptee and as a Korean American.
And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready by Meaghan O’Connell—In this humorous and heartbreaking memoir, Meaghan O’Connell unpacks her and her fiancé’s experiences of becoming parents in their late twenties, when most of their NYC peers were still single and fancy-free. This wonderful book is great for new parents, and for anyone who enjoyed the parenting podcast “The Longest Shortest Time.”
Women’s Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home by Megan K. Stack—Megan K. Stack is an award-winning journalist who managed her “work-life-balance” by living the colonial ex-pat life in Beijing and India. In this memoir, Stack turns her sharp and unflinching journalistic eye towards the ethics of white entitlement feminism…starting with her own conflicted relationship with the housekeepers, cooks, and nannies she employed (all of whom were also working mothers) in order to keep her own career afloat.
Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America by Nefertiti Austin—Say the words “mother” and “adoption” and what mostly comes to mind in America is the image of a married white woman. In this memoir, Nefertiti Austin discusses her experience as a single, adoptive, black mother living in a society that mostly behaves as if she didn’t exist. She also describes the love and overwhelmingly positive experience she had as the adoptive mother of two foster children. A wonderful book. Highly recommend.
The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Non-Binary Parenthood by Krys Malcolm Belc—Krys Belc discusses his experience as a man going through pregnancy and childbirth.
Empty by Susan Burton—Susan Burton’s memoir about her anorexia reads like a passionate Dear John letter to her conflicted relationship with food and her body.
Reserve the Right by Yume Kim—I’m not normally into poetry, but I absolutely loved this collection by my friend Yume Kim because each one feels like a powerful story.
Older, Faster, Stronger: What Women Runners Can Teach Us All About Living Younger, Longer by Margaret Webb—Margaret Webb is a writer and marathon-runner who sets out on a quest to get in the best shape of her life, as a woman in her sixties. This book was an incredible resource on female athleticism, and on what it takes to age well.
Strong Like Her: A Celebration of Rule Breakers, History Makers, and Unstoppable Athletes by Haley Shapley—This is a historical survey of female athletes throughout time. From the first woman to swim the English Channel to the Great Sandwina to Babe Didrikson Zaharias, one of the greatest all-around athletes of all time. This book was inspiring and totally enlightening because I’d never heard of most of these women. Strong Like Her is a hidden history of female athletes, and the role they play in securing physical agency for all women. I highly recommend the hardback or paperback versions because of all the incredible photographs by Sophy Holland of modern female athletes.
Women Warriors: An Unexpected History by Pamela D. Toler—A hidden history of warrior women throughout time. I’d never heard of most of these warriors.
Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition by T. Colin Campbell, PhD with Howard Jacobson, PhD—In this follow-up to The China Study, T. Colin Campbell writes about how most of the discussion of nutrition with it’s obsession with micronutrients, ignores the big picture importance of whole foods and the whole diet…much to our physical peril.
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate by Peter Wohlleben—Before reading this book, I looked at trees like they were all the same. After reading this book, I started seeing the trees as individuals, who sleep and communicate and live in family groups on a timescale much longer than my lifetime. This books has totally changed the way I see nature. I also recommend the children’s book version, as it’s very engaging for kids and adults alike: Can You Hear the Trees Talking?: Discover the Hidden Life of the Forest.
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When I was pregnant during the last year of my MFA program, there was a fellow writer who came up to me, looked down at my belly, and sneered, “I could never be a mother. I don’t want anything in my life that would compete with my writing career.”
“If you don’t want kids, don’t have kids,” I told her. “Not wanting them is reason enough not to have them. Every child should grow up feeling wanted and cherished. But being a writer has nothing to do with it.”
Most of the people I know who don’t want kids came to that decision either because of circumstance or after years of soul searching. These people are generous and community-oriented and have very rich friendships, and they are often mentors or part-time caregivers of other people’s kids or elders. They just don’t want kids of their own. I respect and honor their decision and I think society should applaud them for their self-knowledge.
However, this writer-acquaintance of mine was clearly implying that because I was pregnant, I had no brain and I would never produce anything as a writer ever again.
Say what?! What a bunch of malarkey!
I’ve never bought into the idea that a person had to choose between being a writer or being a parent. I can think of a whole list of authors who had children and still managed to write book after book. J.K. Rowling, Nora Roberts, Jodi Picoult, Anne Lamott, Roald Dahl, Ayelete Waldeman, Michael Chabon, Kim Stanley Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Elizabeth Strout, Jennifer Weiner, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Charles Dickens, George Sand, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., John Updike, Pat Conroy, Liane Moriarty, George Saunders, Maya Angelou, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Roddy Doyle, Eloisa James, Diablo Cody, Ali Wong—and these are just the super famous ones I can think of off the top of my head. There are plenty other authors who write for a living and still manage to pick up their child from school on time. There even an interview series called Writer Mother Monster, that is dedicated to showing that being an author and being a parent is not a binary choice.
You do not have to choose between being a parent and being an author. It is possible to do both, if that’s what you want.
However, making the time and space to write while caring for small kids at home does require a greater level of structure, self-discipline, focus, and organization. I wrote two novels before becoming a parent, and two novels after becoming a parent. Those first three books I wrote were not publishable—but the fourth one was. That book is titled, Candid Family Portrait, and it is a love story about a couple dealing with the changes in their marriage after having a child as they try to figure out how to pursue their dreams in a world that has a very narrow view of how a family should be. I wrote the book during the years when my son was 3-6 years old and published it during a pandemic. It took organization but it was possible.
In case there are other parents (or prospective parents, or writers with busy lives) out there who want to write, here are some tips for getting your first draft written.
First, understand the difference between fast and slow work strategies
A few years ago, economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote a book titled Thinking, Fast and Slow about two modes of thinking. System 1 is fast, instinctual and emotional. System 2 is slow, deliberate, and logical.
I haven’t read this book yet, but just from reading the back cover I’m pretty sure the same applies to creativity—or at least my experience of my creativity.
Fast creativity is those flashes of energy that have you running for your notebook so you can jot down an idea before it escapes. Slow creativity is the meticulous, detail-oriented trudging kind where you spend hours trying to fit a square peg into a round hole until finally, it fits. Fast creativity is a dance floor on a Saturday night; slow creativity is church on Sunday. Fast creativity thrives on distraction and chaos; slow creativity demands focus and order. Fast creativity is inspiration; slow creativity is perspiration.
Radiolab has a couple of lovely podcast episodes about creativity. The first one is titled “Me, Myself, and Muse” and includes an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert before the publication of her book, Big Magic. “Me, Myself, and Muse,” has a bunch of wonderful anecdotes of what fast creativity feels like and how a person can make space for it (and set limits on it) in their lives.
The second great Radiolab podcast on creativity is called “Radiolab Presents: TJ & Dave,” which is an interview with two improv artists, TJ Jagodowksi and David Pasquesi, who have an act where they walk on stage with no notes and no scene and just perform based on whatever comes to them in the moment. Every single night is different. The way they think of themselves is as conduits, where stories just arrive and they get to share space with them. They have a film-version of one of their shows titled Trust Us, This is All Made Up. This shows that creativity doesn’t have to be tortured or constantly revised, but you do have to be mentally present for it.
You are going to need both kinds of creativity to finish a project, but your ability to access the slow kind is probably going to depend on childcare, at some point. (Although there are plenty of workarounds if you don’t have access to childcare.) Just know that ahead of time and plan your work accordingly.
For me, fast creativity is best for getting ideas and writing first drafts, and it has been relatively easy for me to fold this type of creativity into my daily life. Slow-creativity is often about planning, rewriting, and editing, and it’s easiest for me to access that analytical part of my brain when I have large, predictable uninterrupted chunks of time. During the times in my life when childcare wasn’t available, I would get that quiet time during the couple hours in the morning when I was the first person awake in the house.
Here are some other tips on harnessing fast creativity.
Have a dedicated app on your phone where you capture ideas to be processed later. Dropbox, Evernote, Scrivener, OneNote, Apple Notes, and Google Drive are good ones because they sync between your phone and your laptop. Don’t make it too complicated for yourself. Just choose one and stick with it.
I have multiple Scrivener projects synced over Dropbox between my phone and my laptop. Each book or story idea gets its own project. One Scrivener project is just for random, unattached ideas that aren’t ready to be worked on yet: I call this my “Story Idea Factory.”
Laptops and tablets are light enough now that you could probably always keep one in your bag. It’s good to always have your project at hand in whatever room you’re in, so that you can rush over to write a sentence down as it occurs to you. I’ve written many scenes, a sentence at a time, with my laptop open in the kitchen or living room.
Analog notebooks are great too. Author Piers Anthony would handwrite his books in a notebook so that even if he were stuck waiting in the dentist’s office for 10 minutes, he could use that time to write the next paragraph or the next idea. One of the interesting things about writing longhand is that it forces your brain to think and build a story sequentially, one sentence at a time, which can be a bit like narrating a movie in your head, slowed down to one-third speed.
Paper notebooks do not need to be charged. They are not connected to the Internet or social media. They won’t beep at you or distract you with a calendar notification. Notebooks are quiet, simple, and always waiting. Other famous authors who have handwritten their first drafts are John Irving, Elmore Leonard, Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, and, of course, all the great authors of the pre-typewriter world: Charles Dickens, Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, Shakespeare, etc.
I also think children see you differently when you’re writing in a notebook or reading a paper book, rather than staring at your phone or a laptop. People complain about how much screen time modern children have, but I think children’s screen time is dwarfed by adult’s screen time—especially if you’re counting work and recreation. Having your children see you unplug is important. It makes your advice more credible so that conversations around technology are less of a “do as I say, not as I do” kind of thing.
For outlining or quickly jotting down ideas, I like using index cards. I get the spiral-bound kind that acts like a tiny notebook so that I don’t have any loose cards floating around and I like how the cover keeps my ideas private until I’m ready to organize them. When I’m ready to work on an idea, I can pull the cards out and sort them to see which ideas connect. I often use index cards when I’m writing an outline.
Author James Scott Bell also talks about using index cards in his writing book Plot & Structure.
David Sedaris keeps two notebooks: a small one that he always carries with him to jot down details and dialog throughout his day, and a larger journal that he uses to turn those scraps into scenes and essays. Once he has something with potential, then he moves onto a typewriter or a computer.
Pro tip: If you’re handwriting your first draft, I recommend:
using notebooks where you can pull out the pages
only writing on one side of the page
starting a new scene or chapter on a new page.
This way when it comes to editing, you can pull whole chapters out, staple them together, and re-order whole chunks of your book on the floor before you transcribe it. The reason it’s important to only write on one side of the page is in case you need to snip a scene or paragraph out of one chapter and tape it into another chapter.
Pro tip: For people who like handwriting, you might want to keep your notes, grocery list, to-do list, or journal in another notebook. Or, a neat trick is to flip your notebook upside down and write from the backside. When the front-side and back-side meet, it’s time to get a new notebook.
There’s nothing more annoying than coming up with a brilliant idea, and then forgetting where you put it, or worse—losing it. Try to clean-as-you-go by immediately putting the note in a place where you know you will find it again—even if it’s just a shoebox where you know you keep your ideas.
Your future self (your slow-creativity self) will thank you.
I keep my index card ideas in a specially-built for 3×5 cards. I have dividers for various categories, like “Dialogue,” “Anecdotes,” “Love story ideas,” “Horror story ideas,” “Favorite quotes,” “Non-fiction essay ideas,” etc. A large project, like a novel, gets its own box.
Keep your current project at the front of your mind by thinking about it first thing in the morning, and right before bed.
One of the tips I’ve found helpful was from Monica Leonelle’s book The Eight Minute Habit, which recommends spending the first eight minutes of your day—before you even get out of bed—working on your book. Dorothea Brande recommends a similar process in her classic book Becoming a Writer. There is something magical about spending the first moments of your morning thinking about your story. This practice can unlock huge amounts of creativity throughout your day.
The way I think it is that my creativity is like a winter lake that is liquid at night when I am asleep, but from the moment I wake, it begins to ice over. It’s easiest for me to break through the ice early in the morning, when I’m still relaxed and dreamy, rather than waiting later in the day for when the ice has thickened and hardened.
Also, the more days that pass between writing sessions, the harder it is for me to break through the ice and get into the flow.
In practice, I either keep a notebook beside my bed, or I have my current project synced to the iOS version of Scrivener on my phone so that when I wake up in the morning I can spend the first few minutes of my morning working on my book, rather than checking email or the news.
I recommend the Hidden Brain episode, “Creatures of Habit,” for people trying to establish a daily habit.
Set daily or weekly quotas to get your zero-draft (messy first draft) written.
A page-count quota, a word-count quota, or a time-quota.
Lots of people swear by the 250-words a day quota, which is about 1 page a day. If you write a page every single day, by the end of the year you’ll have 365-pages worth of material.
I gained a lot from being part of the Magic Spreadsheet Facebook community, which recommends 250-words, or 25-minutes a day. They created a spreadsheet that gamified daily writing so that you get points for consistency, rather than hitting high word-count numbers. The spreadsheet also has a leader-board, in case you feel like being competitive. I’m not part of the official Facebook/Google Spreadsheet group anymore, but I do keep my own private tally on my calendar. I’ve written something or “checked the box” on a writing task daily for over 1,500 consecutive days. (I learned about Magic Spreadsheet from this Mur Lafferty podcast, “At Long Last, The Magic Spreadsheet” and “The Magic Spreadsheet Returns!“.)
Accountability is a great motivator for consistency. For a while, my brother and I were playing a game with each other where I would email him my writing (or editing) for the day, and he would email me a summary of the music he composed. If either of us missed a day, we’d have to pay the other $5.
I’ve also had nice consistency from meeting friends regularly at a cafe (during pre-pandemic times) or daily over zoom. Author Anne Hawley shared her story with The Writing Room about how setting up daily writing sprints with some of her colleagues has really helped maintain consistency and motivation.
James Scott Bell likes to start his morning with a “Nifty-350” words, which he then tries to double later on in the day. He also recommends having a weekly quota, rather than a daily one, because it’s more flexible.
Elizabeth Strout would give herself a quota of 3 handwritten pages of fiction, or 3 hours spent editing. Three pages a day is also recommended by Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way morning pages practice. (Incidentally, Julia Cameron also wrote a book titled, The Artist’s Way for Parents.) I think three pages a day is probably a comfortable amount for most people to handwrite without giving themselves carpel tunnel. Higher daily word counts require more physical stamina, at which point it’s good to switch to dictation to protect your body from a repetitive stress injury.
Ray Bradbury’s quota was 1,000 words a day, or 4 pages. (Or, I’ve also heard him talk about writing a first draft of a story on Monday, the second draft on Tuesday, the third draft on Wednesday, etc. And then he’d mail it on the following Monday and go home and start a new story.)
NaNoWriMo’s quota is about 1,600 words a day, or 7 pages.
Stephen King’s quota is 2,000 words a day, or 8 pages.
Piers Anthony’s quota was 3,000 words a day, or 12 handwritten pages.
Romance writer Bella Andre would write 5,000 words a day, or 20 pages.
Science fiction and fantasy author Rachel Aaron has written a book about how she went from writing 2,000 words a day to 10,000-words a day. (Note: Rachel Aaron is also a parent.)
Some people prefer to count scenes or chapters, instead of words.
Some people prefer counting hours or “pomodoros” instead of words.
For some people, two hours a day in the chair is a solid day’s work, whether they wrote one sentence or 10 pages.
Pro tip: Write multiple times per day.
Pro tip: Rather than constantly keeping track of word counts, you can use Scrivener’s Writing History function to track your writing word counts. For people handwriting, you can just start your writing day by writing the date in the margins.
Personally, I’ve found that it’s better to have a really small quota that I know I can achieve and surpass no matter how my day is going. Mary Robinette Kowal wrote wonderful essay on having three sentences as her quota for a while because “Sometimes Writer’s Block is Really Depression.”
I like Monica Leonelle’s A-B-C method, which I read about in her book book The Eight-Minute Habit. Plan A is your ideal work day. For me, Plan A is a fully written scene that was written, edited, and is complete. (Truthfully, I almost never have Plan A days.) Plan B is your most-likely workday. For me, Plan B is part of a scene, or an outline for a scene, or an editing task, or any measurable bit of forward progress. Plan C is your “Catastrophe Plan” for what you do when your life is chaos, or you’re on vacation, and you just want to check-the-box for the day. For me, my Plan C is 15-minutes re-reading a section of the work and doing light edits, or 15-minutes freewriting trying to get myself unstuck, or planning my next scene.
Plan C days may not look like much, but they are better than nothing. I know that if I stir the pot a tiny bit each day, it’s way easier for me to eventually get back into doing Plan B and Plan A level work than if I did nothing and tried to revive a cold dish. I try to get my Plan C writing done, first thing in the morning before I get out of bed. Then, later in the day, I may plan out another writing session or two to do more.
Be like Andy Dufresne from Shawshank Redemption: just keep scratching at that tunnel and you’ll eventually bust through.
Daily quotas are not the right choice for everybody. For some people, their work schedules, family obligations, or mental chemistry doesn’t work with rigidly trying to work every single day, and trying to force themselves into being daily writers just sends them into spirals of depression or physical breakdown. In Joanna Penn’s books, The Healthy Writer and The Relaxed Author, she writes about how for the sake of your sanity and your body it’s sometimes best to just follow your life’s rhythms. Your health and your relationships are more important than some dumb quota.
Some people have long commutes and can only write on weekends, so they give themselves a weekly quota. Some people only write in November-December for NaNoWriMo and spend the rest of the year editing that NaNoWriMo novel into a publishable manuscript. Ian Flemming famously wrote his James Bond novels during his summer vacations and wouldn’t write anything else during the rest of the year.
Some writers are marathoners, and some writers are sprinters. It’s okay to make peace with how you work best. It’s important to adjust your writing practice so that it fits your actual life rather than pining for some fantasy life where you have no job, no bills, no relationship obligations, and a squadron of servants cooking your food and cleaning your house for you.
Pro tip: Whether you’re handwriting or typing, you will get stuck. Don’t panic, it happens to everybody. You can still meet your day’s word-count quota by freewriting about the problem. You keep your hand or your fingers moving as you do a focused meditation, trying to write your way through the problem. Whenever I get stuck, nine times out of ten, this exercise helps me figure out a solution and get back to writing the scene. Sometimes the fastest way to get back on the road is by pulling over to a rest stop and get your bearings. This can still count toward your word count goal, but mark it in some way, either by putting brackets around it, or by changing the font color, so that when you’re editing you can find these sections easily and delete them, or move them to a separate document. Peter Elbow, author of Writing Without Teachers and Writing with Power, talks about how these writing digressions are sometimes critical to evolution in your thinking so that your finished piece of writing is deeper and more considered than if you’d just stuck to first-level creativity.
Pro tip: Have an outline or a reverse-outline. These are two versions of the same thing. An outline (for planners) is when you plan out your big moments before you write the draft. A reverse-outline (for “pantsers”) is when you write a draft and then have a separate sheet of paper where you summarize the main event of what you just wrote into one sentence. In either case, the point of this exercise is to help you zoom out of the sentence-level writing to get a sense of the big picture and the direction the story is going. Roy Peter Clark, in his book Writing Tools, calls this “climbing up and down the ladder of abstraction.” Dean Wesley Smith also describes this reverse-outline technique in his book on discovery writing, Writing into the Dark: How to Write a Novel Without an Outline.
Pro tip: Don’t lose the flow of writing your first draft by researching every little detail on the Internet. Rather than pausing in your story to look up a street name or car model or what type of tree grows in Florida, just write your question or guess in brackets and move on with the scene. Fixing those small details is a good warm-up or editing activity to do later.
Pro tip: Use a sand timer. I learned about this technique from science-fiction writer, Mary Robinette Kowal. Like her, I have one that’s 15 minutes, because I know that the hardest part of my writing is usually within the first fifteen minutes. I sit down to write, and all of a sudden I have to pee, or look up something on the Internet, or get a glass of water. Usually if I am just in one place for 15 minutes, I’ll get into the flow my desire to run away from my desk goes away. The benefit of a sand timer, as opposed to something that makes noise, is that it is silent and once I enter the flow of my writing it won’t beep and distract me. For my first writing sprint, I am not allowed to follow any of those urges until the sand timer is up. Thirst can wait 15 minutes. Go to the bathroom before you start the sand timer. ;-)
The sand timer is an especially helpful negotiation tool for writing around toddlers and teaching them patience. Small children don’t understand time, but they do understand a physical sand timer where sand from the top has to get down to the bottom. Sand timers can be used for quiet time, or teaching kids how to take turns, or helping them build a daily reading habit. You can say to a kid, “While the sand timer is going, it’s my turn to work. When the sand timer is up, then it is your turn again and we can play.” The sand timers are great.
Most phones have built-in speech-to-text, or you can subscribe to a dedicated app like DragonAnywhere or Descript.
Dictation is great for when your hands are busy, but you have a bit of quiet…like when you’re folding laundry while the kids are napping, or when you’re taking a walk while the kids are in a stroller.
The high words-per-hour of dictation means you can accomplish a lot more in a short amount of time than you could handwriting or typing. For example, you can dictate a 1,500-word scene in about half an hour, whereas that same scene might take 3 hours if you were typing it.
If you want to read more about dictation, I recommend the following resources:
Joanna Penn’s website has a great overview about dictation.
There is a learning curve to dictation (just as there was a learning curve to learning cursive, or learning how to type). It can feel awkward at first to speak the punctuation phrases, but after a while, it will feel normal. You can practice using speech-to-text software by reading aloud from a favorite book, or as a way to transcribe something you’ve handwritten. (I still like to read-aloud a scene from a favorite book as a vocal warm-up before I start my own dictation session.)
From there, you can start capturing notes and eventually dictating first drafts.
My favorite way to dictate a scene is to write an outline ahead of time and then go on an exercise walk for 20-40 minutes, speaking the scene aloud. Sometimes I like using Christopher Downing’s loop-method of performing the scene in 2-minute, 5-minute, and 20-minute versions.
For extra credit, I’d do the “one out,” “one back” technique where I’d dictate one scene on my out-going walk, and then turn around and dictate a second scene on my walk back home.
(Note: As of 2021, Dragon Naturally Speaking only transcribes MP3 recordings in their Windows version of the software. Their Mac version was discontinued a few years ago. Mac/iPhone users can use their DragonAnywhere app, but this only works if you have an internet connection, which kind of defeats the purpose of going on a walk-and-talk. I haven’t used Descript yet, but I believe they can transcribe MP3s. Or, you can use whatever speech-to-text software your phone comes with.)
One of my favorite parts of dictation is that it can turn into improv-acting, where you can move around and can take on the voices and physical mannerisms of the different characters in your story.
Dictation has some downsides, though. Here are some of the hard lessons I’ve learned around dictation:
I prefer to dictate when I’m alone, but I’m rarely alone—The process of getting into character and walking around the living room doing voices is so embarrassing that I prefer to have zero witnesses. This isn’t really feasible during a pandemic when we are working, homeschooling, and always hanging out together. The way I’ve gotten around this is to dictate either early in the morning when my family is still asleep, or while I’m outside walking the dog.
The high word count and ease of creating first drafts has made me spoiled—Writers can get overly attached and superstitious about their favorite pen, or their favorite typewriter…and when their favorite tool isn’t available they can become blocked. For me, I got this way around dictation. I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking, “If I can’t write 3,000 words in one hour…why bother?” The best tool for the job is the one that has me practicing my craft consistently, diligently. My most important writing tool is my brain, not my phone, dummy!
I shouldn’t don’t edit as I dictate—the whole beauty of dictation is that is only for first-draft work. Trying to fix dictation errors while dictating will just cause the software to glitch, the phone to crash, and then to lose everything. I’ve found it’s best to work in two separate phases: the dictation phase, and the clean-up/editing phase. I have found that whatever time I spent dictating a scene will probably be the same for editing that scene. If a scene took me 30 minutes to dictate than it will probably take me 30-60 minutes to edit into a polished draft.
It’s better to “do another take” than it is to try to edit a scene that didn’t work—Sometimes the messy first draft really is too messy to bother editing. When that’s the case, it’s better and faster to just create a new outline and dictate the scene over from scratch.
“If a short story doesn’t pour smooth from the start, then it never will.”
John Updike
“The essence of editing is easy come easy go. Unless you can really say to yourself, ‘What the hell. There’s plenty more where that came from, let’s throw it away,’ you can’t really edit. You have to be a big spender, not a tight-ass.”
Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers
I shouldn’t wait too long between dictation and editing sessions.—Don’t dictate a whole book and think to yourself, “Right. Now I have a first draft and all I have to do is edit it!” I did that and it was a huge mistake! I dictated a 100,000 word “book” in 30 days and then spent 2.5 years trying to edit that monster into a novel. It was terrible. I should’ve abandoned those 100,000 words and re-dictated the book over from the beginning with an entirely new outline (this is ultimately what I did, and what became Candid Family Portrait). Sunk cost fallacy is a bitch. (For more on when to quit and when to stick, I recommend reading The Dip by Seth Godin.)
When I wrote Candid Family Portrait, there were large sections of it that were dictated. I learned my lesson to keep my writing/editing loops short. I’d outline a chapter, dictate it, then edit it. Only when the chapter was finished would I allow myself to work on the next chapter.
My dictation scene-editing process is now this:
Copy the dictated words into Scrivener
Check my Story Grid Spreadsheet to fill out the five commandments based on what I might’ve learned from my dictation session (I keep this in the Metadata of my Scrivener file)
Separate each chunk of text into labeled beats explaining the tone/purpose of the beat (“stranger knocks at the door,” “ring around the Rosie,” “first kiss,” “running from love,” etc.)
Highlight each beat and do a front-to-back edit/rewrite/clean-up of the scene so that it flows and there are no dictation errors
Read it through. Delete my beat-labels. Highlight any names, places, or timeline details in case they need to be changed later.
Fill in the entirety of my Story Grid spreadsheet metadata. Change the label to “First draft done.”
I use the “Custom metadata” section of Scrivener to set up my Story Grid spreadsheet questions.
At this point, my first drafts are pretty clean because each scene goes through 3-9 cycles of editing before I consider it a professional first draft. My criteria for a working-first-draft scene is that it has all five commandments in it, there are no dictation errors or sentence fragments, it moves the story forward, it reads like its own mini-story, and I wouldn’t feel totally embarrassed if someone read it as-is.
Stay tuned for a future blog post on Slow Creativity strategies for parents.
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And so you know what you’re getting, here are the questions:
1. Candid Family Portrait is told through alternating points-of-view between June and Vince. How did the alternating points of view affect the experience of the story in ways that might’ve been different if the story was only told through the eyes of one character? Did you sympathize with the characters? Which ones, and why?
2. The story begins with a positive pregnancy test and the characters’ anxiety about how having a baby will change their marriage, their careers, and their lives. Did you feel that this central problem was relatable? How do June and Vince anticipate a change in their lives before their baby arrives? How does their life actually change once the baby has arrived? How do they feel about these changes?
3. What do “motherhood” and “femininity” mean to June? How does June view her work? How does she view the home? What does June want from her life? What is standing in her way? What strategies does she pursue to overcome these blocks? Is she successful? Does her definition of “success” change or stay the same by the end of the story?
4. What do “fatherhood” and “masculinity” mean to Vince? How does Vince view his work? How does he view the home? What does Vince want from his life? What is standing in his way? What strategies does he employ to overcome this block? Is he successful? Does his definition of “success” change or stay the same by the end of the story?
5. How do June and Vince experience a shift in status with the external world after becoming parents? How do June and Vince experience a shift in status within their internal, domestic world after becoming parents?
6. How do Vince and June view their marriage (and their place within it) at the beginning? In the middle? And at the end?
7. How do June and Vince view their parents’ marriages? How does this impact their attitudes toward their own marriage, family, and work?
8. June and Vince both view their bosses as mentors, at different times in the story. Are their bosses good mentors? If so, how? If not, why not? How are June and Vince viewed by their bosses, co-workers, and peers?
9. Are there any solutions you can think of to solve this conflict between work and family?
10. Is there a love triangle in this story? If so, with whom or with what? If not, why not?
11. Were there particular passages that sparked your senses? Are there any quotes, passages, or scenes you found particularly compelling? Why did this stand out to you? What parts of the book were unique, out of place, thought-provoking, or disturbing?
12. How is the fairy tale of the selkie used in relation to motherhood? How does the metaphor of “the selkie” change in the book?
13. The Wikipedia definition of alloparenting is “a term used to classify any form of parental care provided by an individual towards a non-descendant young. Non-descendant refers to any young who is not the direct genetic offspring of the individual, but does not exclude related young such as siblings or grandchildren. Individuals providing this care are referred to using the neutral term of alloparent (or ‘helper’).” What are the benefits and drawbacks of alloparenting as a child-rearing strategy?
14. What are the benefits and drawbacks of traditional parenting roles? What are the benefits and drawbacks of reverse-traditional parenting roles? What are the benefits and drawbacks of two-career families? Are there alternate family structures you have seen that were successful?
15. Where and during what time is the story set? How might this story play out differently during a different time or in a different place? How would this story have played out differently if the characters were higher or lower on the socio-economic ladder? Or if they were a different ethnicity?
16. Did the ending offer a sense of resolution to the central problem? If so, why? If not, why not?
17. What new perspective do you have as a result of reading Candid Family Portrait? Was it prescriptive, cautionary, or merely self-reflective on the human condition during a certain time and place in history? Is there an argument made in this book? If so, do you agree or disagree?
18. What do you imagine about the character’s lives, three months, three years, and three decades from when the story ends, as a result of the choices made in this story?
19. If you could meet one of the characters from the book, who would it be, and what would you say to them?
20. If you were to recommend this book to a friend, what would you say?
Feel free to contact me, if you’d like me to virtually visit your book club.
My brother, Raja Orr, is a classical composer who recently had a composition performed at Inglenook Winery. The piece was commissioned by Maritza and Warren Nelson.
The piece is titled “Strings in the Earth and Air,” and it was inspired by the James Joyce poem of the same name. It’s a quartet for violin, viola, cello, and piano.
“Strings in the Earth and Air”
by James Joyce
Strings in the earth and air
Make music sweet;
Strings by the river where
The willows meet.
There’s music along the river
For Love wanders there,
Pale flowers on his mantle,
Dark leaves on his hair.
All softly playing,
With head to the music bent,
And fingers straying
Upon an instrument.
Here is a link to my brother’s beautiful music composition! You can listen to it on SoundCloud, and also watch a recording of the live performance on YouTube.
If you’d like to learn more about my brother’s work, be sure to visit his website, RajaOrr.com and also check him out on SoundCloud, YouTube, and Instagram.
Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets & Advice for Living Your Best Life is an inspiring, crass, and hilarious memoir by Ali Wong, the stand-up comedian who performed both of her mega-successful Netflix specials, Baby Cobra and Hard-Knock Wife, while 7-months pregnant. Baby Cobra was filmed in 2015 while she was pregnant with her daughter, Mari, and Hard-Knock Wife was filmed in 2017 when she was pregnant with her daughter Nikki. In Dear Girls, Ali Wong unpacks her life, her rise to fame, and she offers wisdom on broader questions about working motherhood.
Each of the chapters in Dear Girls, is addressed to her daughters (as adults) as she tries to pass on the wisdom she has learned about work, family, studying abroad, love, motherhood, and all the work she has done to increase the representation of the Asian-American community within the American mainstream. Ali Wong’s greatest weapon against intolerance, misogyny, and racism is to make people laugh.
Large portions of Dear Girls is specific advice for female and Asian-American stand-up comedians (in case her daughters decide to become comedians). The parts of her book I enjoyed and related to the most were when she talks about connecting with her roots through studying abroad and how she met and “trapped” her husband, Justin Hakuta, into marrying her.
The courtship between Ali Wong and Justin Hakuta is especially is delightful to read about because the final chapter of the memoir is written by Justin Hakuta himself. In it, he discusses his decision to set his work aside to be the primary caregiver for their daughters, so that the children could have a stable home life while their mother continues to kick down doors, take names, and lift their entire community. Justin Hakuta’s motivation is informed by his experience of having a nurturing, stay-at-home mother who grounded the family while his famous father—Ken Hakuta, also known as “Dr. Fad,” who is an inventor and famous TV personality—was out in the world increasing Asian-American representation.
Dr. Fad
Justin writes this to his daughters:
“Famous parents are part of the family, but they are also part of a much wider tapestry of relationships made of the people they impact. We have to share them. Your mother, like your grandfather and all other pop culture celebrities, often struggles with balancing the pursuit of her career and craft and spending time with us, and she’s right—it’s tough. I know how to be your mother’s balancing half, and how to be your father, because of how I was raised.”
Justin Hakuta, Dear Girls
He goes on to discuss how his mother, Mari and Nikki’s “lola,” is the inspiration for the father he wants to be, and how he views his marriage with the famous Ali Wong.
“It was crucial for your uncles and me that your lola was a consistent parental presence who helped ground the family. […] Because someone needs to ground a family when fame is so intoxicating. I learned how to navigate the limelight of your mother’s fame from growing up in my house where your lola was the grounding force.”
Justin Hakuta, Dear Girls
This is wise and straightforward advice, especially for men who are married to notable, successful women. Justin Hakuta does not seethe with jealousy, compete with, try to undermine, or try to cannibalize his wife’s success—as, say, Richard Burton did with Elizabeth Taylor; or Paul Newman with Joanne Woodward; or Dezi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Instead, Justin Hakuta mans-up by being the partner she needs to help her reach international success, lift their community, and provide a stable household for their children. Justin understands that the more women and people of color are given space to shine, the brighter the world is for all of us.
Here is what Ali Wong writes about how important it was for her to return to work. Partly it was out of financial necessity (more than once in her stand-up and in her memoir she refers to the prenup Justin’s family made her sign as the best thing that ever happened to her because it forced her to keep working or risk financial destitution if they ever got divorced), and partly out of a sense of injustice for how invisible women still are in the world.
“I really began to rethink my plans of being a stay-at-home mom after I saw that movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi. It’s an acclaimed documentary about the Steve Jobs of sushi in Japan. He is extremely anal about the temperature of rice and the texture of the fish. He has two sons that are his proteges, but it’s very hard for them to live up to their father’s legacy. Because Jiro is so dedicated to the craft of sushi, at night he dreams of sushi. Everybody watched that documentary in awe of Jiro and his singular commitment to the art of fish. I watched that film and thought, Where the fuck is Mrs. Jiro? She isn’t even mentioned in the goddamn documentary. Somebody had to raise those two sons while Father Jiro was busy being a sushi hero. […] What does Mrs. Jiro dream of? Freedom. Recognition. Divorce. I saw that movie and decided that I wasn’t gonna go out like that.”
Ali Wong, Dear Girls
Women are still under-represented in positions of power and influence. Men are under-represented in the domestic sphere. I loved reading Dear Girls because both partners are leaders in their community and role models for all of us. Ali Wong is a leader by shattering stereotypes. Justin Hakuta is also a leader by showing how to be a good father and a supportive spouse to a famous woman. Ali Wong is a role model for purpose-driven women and girls, and Justin Hakuta is a role model for men and boys who want a holistic life that isn’t just a treadmill of work. Sharing their marriage-story in Dear Girls is an incredible act of generosity.
We all know what traditional-marriages look like, but seeing the reverse-traditional marriage celebrated in popular culture is a wonderful, brave new frontier.
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In 2006, when I was in college, I had the good fortune to study abroad in Prague. While I was there, taking a class titled “Gender in a Post-Socialist Society,” I sat near a young woman named Christina. She was from the American Bible Belt and was a deeply devout Christian. Christina seemed to take personal offense to everything discussed in this class on Eastern European feminism.
Christina had all kinds of things to say to our class about marriage and a woman’s place being in the home. She told us she was a virgin, and that her parents had a deeply loving Christian marriage. She said she was only going to stay in college long enough to find a husband. As soon as she found a man who treated her like a princess (just like her daddy did), she was going to get married, drop out, and have nine children, because to her, the pinnacle of femininity was being a mother and running a home—just like her mother had. I remember she had this huge virginity promise ring that her father had given her. It had a diamond the size of a marble.
I remember listening to Christina talk at length about how her life was going to go. She had a very specific life script, and so help her, she was going to follow it! As far as she was concerned, the rest of us women in this class were a bunch of abominations for abandoning our God-mandated biological imperatives—to reproduce and be subservient to our husbands.
Some of the other people in my class responded to her with rational arguments and some with hostility.
Me? I didn’t try to argue with her or shame her for her dreams. But I did feel worried for her.
I had grown up in a matriarchy of three generations of working single mothers—all of whom were married when they first became mothers. I knew personally that life is complicated and messy and unpredictable. Having a man financially provide for you is nice, but it isn’t a given—and it isn’t always the preferred option, either. A mother’s income is the bedrock of her family. When all else fails, she has to be able to provide for her babies.
What was it going to be like for Christina if her rigid life script didn’t go as planned? What if she got the life she’d dreamed of and found out it wasn’t as simple or perfect as she thought it would be? What if the man she married turned out to be a deadbeat or an abusive drunk? What if she spent years feeding him and caring for his children, and then when he’d used her all up, he’d abandon her for a younger woman when she was too old to financially provide for herself? What if her husband became disabled? Or died? What then?
I thought about Christina again, years later, when I was happily married. I had found a partner with whom I felt a powerful, explosive love. The kind of love that could be best expressed in poetry. At our wedding, I had asked for Pablo Neruda’s Love “Sonnet XVII” to be read because this was the best way to describe how I felt:
XVII by Pablo Neruda
I do not love you as if you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving
but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close
Twelve years later (and counting) and I still feel this way about my husband.
I remember thinking of Christina and wondering what advice I would give her if she were my daughter. What if she had grown up seeing a happy marriage and always assumed that’s how it would be for her? What if she didn’t get the perfect fairy-tale love of her dreams, and instead had to create her own happiness?
That was part of how I got the idea for “Heart in a Jar.” I wrote this story for Christina. I don’t know where she is now, but I hope she is okay. If I were her mother, I would want her to find a life of happiness, meaning, fulfillment, love, self-forgiveness, and self-acceptance, no matter what her marital, childrearing, or job status turned out to be.
SPOILER ALERT: This is where I ruin the soup by telling you what went in it.
I imagined a heart that would beat in the presence of true love. But what “true love” meant would change to the main character, Anya, throughout the story.
Starting with a cool idea is only the seed. From idea to finished short story took four years of work.
I started attempting to write it in 2009-2010, when I was working as a bookseller at Borders, during the months before it went bankrupt. I worked the early shift then where we would arrive at 5 a.m. and spend several hours shelving new books in the empty, closed store. I’d walk up and down the aisles, putting books in their places and telling the story to myself, trying to figure out how it would work. I’d write on my lunch break, and when I got home from work. I have about 50 pages of handwritten scene, notecards, sprawled notes.
There was a mood I was shooting for in this story. In 2011 I read Ken Liu’s incredible Nebula and Hugo Award-winning short story “The Paper Menagerie.” That feeling of loss and profound emotional impact moved me to tears every time I read it. I was impacted by the love between the son and his mother, and by the son’s denial of self as he tries to fit in. How the paper tiger was a metaphor for his mother’s love, and the magic of her culture. I wanted to use the metaphor of the heart in the jar in the same way.
While I was in my MFA program at San Francisco State, I had this wonderful teacher, Junse Kim, who would get into the fine grit of writing craft. I remember him teaching us about how to use symbolism in our writing, that we ought to treat it like a Pavlovian response to external stimulus: linking an emotion to a physical object, scent, or place over and over again until you can end a story with just the symbol and readers will still feel the ring of emotion without having it to be stated. He was also very generous in explaining how he used this technique in his Pushcart Prize-winning short story “Yangban.” This is also present at the end of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. When Adam whispers “Timshel!” as his dying words to his son, readers know exactly what that means and the impact of that last words lands on you in a wave of emotion that makes you want to hug a puppy and cry.
I wanted to end with Anya kneeling at her mother’s grave, ear to the ground, hearing a heartbeat. But for this moment to make sense, I made a list of all the other moments that would have to happen before. I came up with a series of moments I would need to write about for the ending image to resonate.
This was late 2012. I was able to hold the whole plot in my head, but I still didn’t have the voice and voice is everything. Especially in short stories. This was Anya’s story, not mine. It needed to be told in her voice.
I didn’t have what I needed to write the story until our class was assigned to read the first and last story of Robert Olen Butler’s short story collection Tabloid Dreams. This was it! For anyone who hasn’t read Robert Olen Butler, he has this incredible way of layering stories on top of each other, where it is as if a character is in two places at the same time. They are anchored in the present through a sensory experience, but that sensory experience pushes them deep into a memory of a very intense experience in the past. He uses this technique all over the place in Tabloid Dreams, such as when the man who was a victim of the Titanic regains consciousness as a waterbed, or when another Titanic victim is discovered floating in the Bermuda Triangle and both of the characters are both grounded in the present moment and pulled back to the memory of when they crossed paths on the Titanic an almost fell in love.
That was it! I had found Anya’s voice. Now that I had all the ingredients, I wrote the story in about 40 hours, over the course of several weeks.
When I turned it in, Junse Kim wrote this as his feedback: “This is the first manuscript I’ve received from a student where I subjectively feel that the end drama is earned, that the stakes have been developed.” Yes! I did it!
As for Christina…I doubt she will ever see “Heart in a Jar,” because I’m certain we run in different circles. Even so, I still think about her sometimes and hope she is doing okay. I hope she found the love she was looking for.
For those of you who have bothered to read this far, I hope this gives you a window into what my process is like. Many of the other stories included in my upcoming collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse went through a similar multi-year process of digging and digging and digging, and then finally the dam breaks and it all pours forth in a flood. I have a few more short stories to write to fill out that collection…ideas that have been haunting me for years. I can hear them calling to me. I hope to be able to attend to them soon.
If you want to read “Heart in a Jar,” you can get a free copy by signing up for my newsletter.
