Breaking the Laws of Nature: Writers as Wizard-Gods of Storytelling (or, This is Why Writing is Hard)

Jul 6, 2015

Here’s the truth: writing is hard.

That first draft you're writing? Hard.

The revisions you're pounding through? Hard.

The creation of characters, the building of a plot, the painting of the setting? Hard, hard, hard.

But here’s the other truth about writing: creating something out of nothing is technically against the laws of physics. It should be so hard it’s impossible, and here you are, DOING IT ANYWAY.

You started with blank pages. Empty nothing on a computer screen or notebook page. And you filled it. You put together words into sentences into paragraphs into pages that are forming a story. You are creating that story out of nothing. You are breaking the natural laws of the universe in order to add your story to it.

You tricky devil, you.

With every word you put on the page, you are making something new. Something purely yours. Out of the nothing of a blank page, you are making people, even entire worlds. Do you realize how powerful you are as you write? Creation is the realm of gods and geniuses. You are a wizard-god of storytelling.

It doesn’t have to be brilliant. It doesn’t even have to be good. It only has to be new. It only has to come from you. That is what makes it powerful. That is what makes you powerful. You are fighting the very universe to create something out of nothing, like some kind of renegade warrior god with words as your weapons.

So, yeah, it’s hard.

But just look at the worlds you’re adding to the cosmos.

For the Times When You Want to Give Up on Writing

May 27, 2015

It's one of the most common questions to writers. Why do you write? ask fellow writers and confused family members and school children and crit partners and fans and random people on the internet. People write blog posts and have Twitter conversations about it. We try to explain it to family members who don't quite get why we spend so much time cross-eyed in front of a computer.

One of the most common answers to that question is, "I can't not write!"There's something inside us that drives us to tell stories and drives us crazy if we don't. It's a matter of soul. We are writers and storytellers at heart, and we can't ignore our heart.

Well. Yes. And no.

I've been writing literally since I could hold a pen. Pages and pages of circles on lined paper before I could form letters, and pages and pages of cat and unicorn and alien stories after I could make words. I have always written, always read, always loved stories. It truly is a part of who I am, a part of my soul that tugs at me. I understand when other people say the same thing, whether they discovered that part of themselves long ago or just yesterday.

But there will come a time when you can not-write. When you want to not-write, when you won't be able to bear anything at all except not writing. I'm not talking about a few days of writer's block. I'm talking months or years.

Those are the months and years of illness, both physical and mental, both yours and loved ones'. The times of financial troubles and relationship troubles. They are the months and years of discouragement and disappointment and rejection and fear and the feeling that you've done everything right, but everything isn't doing right by you. They are the months and years that drain you and wear on you and you just want a break. You want to do anything but put words on the page. That soul that craved writing so much has lost its voice, and it isn't calling out to you anymore. Writing is the hardest thing you can think of doing.

That's when what really matters is that you choose to write.

There's a reason a story really starts at the moment a character chooses to follow the path that's been set out for them. It's because stories imitate life, and in life, it's the choice that matters. It's a moment when we take ownership of a thing. We pick it up and say, this is mine. I will do this. There's a power in that, in openly acknowledging how much this thing matters to us. We're not just being pulled along by the whimsy of a soul anymore. We chose to follow the path that soul is giving us. And when the fire in our soul sputters, the choice is what gives us the power to keep following our path in the dark and the cold if we have to.

Because it gets dark and it gets cold on the writing path. But the other wonderful thing about choosing to go on anyway, is that following that path is one of the only ways to find the fire in our soul again. Instead of your soul tugging on you to keep writing, you will be the one tugging on your fallen soul until it gets back up again.

So if writing is what your soul is driving you to do, if it's the thing you really want, then choose it. This minute. Acknowledge that this is what you want, this is what means something to you, and that you will write your stories. Even if that path changes in the future, choosing this one is what will lead you there. Then when your path goes dark-- even if it's gone dark already-- you know you can keep going. You'll know how to wake your soul up when it's worn and tired.

As for me, I think I've finally gotten to the point where my writer's soul is opening its eyes again. And with the light coming back on, the path is looking beautiful.

My best writing advice: Do whatever the hell you want

Apr 18, 2015



Do whatever the hell you want.







I want to break the rules of viewpoint? DONE.

I want to break the rules of science? DONE.



Addendum 1: It better be damn good.








One of Those Days: Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Month

Mar 18, 2015











Why I Wrote a Character with a Mental Illness: because for a long time, I never knew I had one

Jan 8, 2015

When I was 19 years old and in college, I got very angry for no apparent reason, for a rather long time. I wasn’t angry about anything in particular. I hated the world, hated my major, hated my job, hated the driver in front of me on the road who wasn’t going fast enough. For months, I felt hollowed out, like I had a hole inside me filled with irrational anger that stemmed from a despair that had no source. I cried a lot, I yelled a lot, and felt very lost.

I suppose it feels a little something like this.
It was depression, but I didn’t realize that.

When I was 23, I got married, graduated college, and started my first “real” job. My entire life changed completely, and it was bewildering. Abruptly, I turned from a happy, energetic person into one who cried for no apparent reason and never wanted to leave the house. I went to bed every night for months dreading the fact I had to wake up in the morning and go to a job I despised. I hated myself for being miserable and being unable to snap myself out of it. I was heartbrokenly sure my husband hated me because he’d realized I wasn’t the girl he thought he married.

It was depression, but I didn’t realize that.

When I was 28, I had my second baby. I loved her, but I cried a lot for the first four months of her life. The burden of two children overwhelmed me, and I was filled with constant guilt and a belief that I was failing at everything. I yelled at my children all the time, and that confirmed I was a terrible mother. The tiniest thing added to my load would send me into frantic fits of panicked breaths and pounding heart. One day, driving down the road with my kids in the back seat, I looked at the gloomy world and saw no point in any of it. There was no reason for it to exist, or for me to exist in it.

It was depression and anxiety, and I pulled off the road in shock, finally realizing it.

I went to a doctor and got a diagnosis, medication, and a counselor. My depression and anxiety is cyclical, and is also affected by my Multiple Sclerosis. I recognize it when it comes back now, and have strategies for treating it. But it still unnerves me when I look back at my life, even as a teenager, and see how often I didn’t know that’s what was going on. In fact, when I started writing The Unhappening of Genesis Lee and gave my main character anxiety and panic attacks, I hadn’t reached my own realization of my mental illness yet.

Gena’s anxiety started out as a plot point. But when I recognized that it was something I dealt with too, it changed things—for me, and the book. I rewrote the moments where Gena had her panic attacks, making small changes to echo what my own felt like. That part of Gena’s character arc became so important to me. I tweaked it all the way up until my very last revision with my editor, trying my best to represent it accurately and with a strong personal connection.

Because I wanted to share my own realizations about mental illness. I wanted it to be in the book not as a plot point, but so that maybe someone who didn’t know what they were feeling—like me—might read it and recognize it. I wanted people who don’t experience mental illness to be able to read it and start to understand, even just a little, what it can be like. I wanted to show my character as a real person, someone who struggles with mental illness, but has other parts of her that are good and bad and important as well. There are things that make her strong and weak, things that make her her, and some of them are about her mental illness, and some of them aren’t.

It’s so hard to describe mental illness. Even writing this post, I feel frustrated because it doesn’t really convey the way I feel when I experience it, or how for so long I viewed the world through a kind of distorted lens and didn’t even recognize it.  I’m afraid that even in the book, I didn’t write Gena’s own experience well enough, that I didn’t communicate what it truly is.

But at least I tried, because it matters to me. And it matters to so many others.
