Last Freelance Assignment: Poetic Ending

I hesitantly clicked the send button this afternoon on the last freelance assignment--at least in this phase of my career. I'm not searching for any more writing assignments at this time. At first, it was in a push to finish a complete draft of my novel. But now it's even more imperative I cut down on my expectations for myself-- a baby is on the way.

This last assignment was really quite poetic; my last story was the first one I wanted to write, the one that compelled me to start writing again. The topic of pregnancy loss. In that more than 2-year period, I've mostly hit a brick wall on getting to write on that topic. I got to write about from a pro-life point of view in Celebrate Life; that was good, but it didn't have the breadth to make all the points I wanted to, nor did it reach a large general audience. It was a "preaching to the choir" kind of article!

While battling constant hunger pangs of morning sickness and fatigue, this article took more than twice as long as normal to write. Also, because the topic is so important to me, I labored over every word. For something less critical to me, I'd have more easily cut the length and turned it in--but for this, I agonized over more creative ways to fit more and more content into fewer and fewer words. Obsession is the word that might best describe. I spent the past 2 weeks shaving a few hundred words.

Getting this article in print will be my zenith, in some ways; it was completing a primary goal that got me started. But in other ways, it'd be funny to call this one my zenith--it is certainly one of the lowest paying assignments I've ever done! Both because the publication, a newspaper-run magazine, pays extremely low in comparison with other magazines, but also because I put so much extra labor into it. If you figure out my hourly rate....oh well, I really don't want to know I am going to get paid less than a dollar an hour, or something like that!

As in many things, a writer decides success not just by the money made. In this, my success is counted in getting the stories out there. I interviewed four phenomenal women who have lost a baby to miscarriage, stillbirth or early infant loss. Of course, the benefits to me go beyond the money. I learned a lot in interviewing them. Some people have a very dismissive, cavalier attitude toward pregnancy loss; I know the deep wounds that response creates. Most people just don't know what to say/do and most people stay silent, isolating the woman who just experienced tragedy. If my article can educate and help communities understand a little more about the experience and the kind of support that helps a woman piece her life back together and rise whole again, then getting paid little monetarily is worth it to me.

So here's a nice bookend to my freelancing career of my early thirties...Maybe I'll take it up again in the future. Who knows....

Now, once the morning sickness stops, I'll get back on the project of that novel....


Other published articles:
Choose Your Best Birth Options

Cloth Diapers Versus Disposables: Switching Systems

Are Schools Expecting Our Kids to Read Too Early?

Chef Jamie Oliver Versus School Lunches: Where Do The Dietary Guidelines Come From Anyway?

When writing a dreaded assignment is better than writer's block....

I was working, gung-ho, on the novel, week after week, doing no other kind of writing. And now, I'm at a dead stand-still. I have no idea where to go next. Writer's block to the extreme. But the problem isn't really about transmitting thoughts from my brain to the paper. It's about decisions. I can't write anything until I make some decisions about what will happen and when. I don't want to slow down though--I'm on a goal to finish the first draft by the end of July!

I once said that writing other things, such as articles, was something I did to help handle writer's block. Well, funny, it actually is helping. If in no other respect than in keeping me from idleness during the block!

Many months ago (maybe Nov/Dec?) an editor assigned me an article on pregnancy loss, due mid-July. A while back, I said I was done freelancing for now, to focus on the novel, except for one assigned piece. Well, this is that piece, a piece I've been wanting to write for two years. One of the reasons I started writing articles was because I felt passionately that miscarriage in particular is not covered well. But after 2 years of getting nowhere as far as convincing an editor to let me write on the topic, I finally get the assignment...and I don't really have the passion to write it anymore. In recent weeks, I've been seeing July as a guillotine--it's the month of my novel deadline as well as this article. Well, I don't want those 2 to compete. I decided I should just write the article and get it done early, so I can then really focus on the novel. I decided to start working on the article the first week of May.

Funny things happen though. I hit this intense writer's block for my novel on Monday, so I charged into preparing the article, a week early, and without really planning it, I'm further along than I'd ever intended. I'm in the interview process, not the writing process yet. But it's very good--I like being productive and not wasting time entirely--writer's block or no! And another good thing is, though I didn't feel any great push to do it, the passion to cover the topic is coming back as I work on it. There are times I really just don't want to revisit that, a dark memory in my own life. I know it's not an article I can write by phoning it in; it's going to require some emotional involvement and I think that's why I was balking at it. I'm past that experience, or so I think, with 2 healthy, living children, and I no longer need to write about it for my own therapeutic reasons. But I do still think it needs attention; therefore, I'm glad I'm coming around, warming to the assignment again.

So here's to writer's block on my novel that actually made me PREFER to write on an emotionally tough topic for a magazine. Writing an assignment always go better if my attitude towards it is positive.

Other articles I've written:
Choose Your Best Birth Options

When Miscarriage Means Labor

Fire Retardants Found in Babies' Umbilical Cord Blood Associated with Developmental Delays

Vulvodynia: Is The Pain Just in Your Head?

Making People Like Your Antagonist

I gave a great writer friend some chapters to read a few months ago. She said something that struck me as surprising then, but that makes total sense to me now. She said she wanted everything to be written from the point of view of Curt, one of the male leads; she wasn't really interested in what Maizy thought. (I had the point of view about 50/50.) That surprised me because when I began the germ of this story, it was Maizy who I identified with--it was her story in the first place. My sympathy lay with her. So how had I let her become someone a reader didn't want to know more from--someone who was static, uninteresting and, really, trying the reader's patience in her obstinacy to change?

My story doesn't have a classic villain. Maizy is not a villain. But I do have protagonists and antagonists. And really, Maizy is an antagonist to all my other 3 lead characters, to varying degrees, and at different times. My story is about a real family, albeit maybe a pretty dysfunctional one.  Maizy is an antagonist so often in their lives that somehow I think I've lost how to paint her in any positive light, to make anyone like her. How did that happen, when I first found her as my sympathetic character, and Curt, in my mind, was kind of an idiot, irresponsible, someone who came and messed everything up? Well, now that I think about it, I knew I had my work cut out for me in making him likable. I didn't want the reader to hate him. I wanted to show that he could redeem himself. Well, I guess I've done such a good job at elevating him, to make him likable, that the process by which I did that had put Maizy in a less likable light. Curt has sort become the hero of the story I've written so far. I find myself with 2 challenges: how to make his son Asher rise to that level as well and how to make Maizy someone we like.

I read in a magazine article recently about not making your villains one-dimensional. There needs to be something that makes us identify with them, something that makes us see them as human and understand, on some level, his/her motivations.

SO that's my task for Maizy. I need to get into her mind more, I guess, and let us find ourselves identifying with her fear or her paranoia that leads her to do the things she does. We may not agree with her choices, but we should identify with her fears.

But I'm finding it really hard to write her. I've been writing a section of her life I never intended to write. I was going to have the only revelation of Asher's childhood come through his memories of the past, and then, it'd be up to the reader to decide how much we put stock in his memory. But now by having to write a number of years from her and Curt's point of view changes the reader's perception considerably. I find myself grappling with the questions of how to make her--is she really abusive, borderline abusive, or is Asher just so sensitive that he just perceives her in ways that makes him feel she is? I find I don't like choosing. I liked it better left to the reader to interpret how much try trust Asher's memory. But whatever I do, I have to strike a very difficult balance--Ash has to have survived something tough enough to have caused the effects in his personality that we see evidenced in him as an adult. And yet, whatever that is, I don't want it to make us hate Maizy so strongly that we no longer care about her point of view or her. Wow. How do I get myself into thee messes. Why did I have to pick such a formidable challenge for my first novel???

Another challenge is figuring how I can sustain the tension of their relationship through all the years of their marriage. Maizy can't be a one-note Nellie. I can't have the entire sucess or failure of their marriage rest on one thing about her.  I realize too that Curt has to be culpable too. I show him as such a hero in the first number of years, but he also can't be staticly heroic.
I really have to show Maizy's strengths as well as Curt's flaws. 

I don't know how I'm going to do it yet--this is my blog to write through the problem. I guess I have to try to reveal more of her emotions in those early days, show some of her pain so we see she's scarred. I guess I need to throw in some stuff from her childhood. Flashbacks, maybe, but short ones. Just snippets. And how she's feeling right after Jared's death. I've just not really dealt with that. I wrote that part of the novel when my idea of the novel was quite different. I need to go back, now or in draft 2, and beef it up, get into Maizy's head, intimately. I think I did a good job of letting the reader see her vulnerability and fear after Asher is conceived and she's scared for her future. I need to reread that and go back and infuse that kind of stuff into earlier parts of the novel.

Online articles I've written:
Choose Your Best Birth Options



High Fructose Corn Syrup: Thirteen Reasons to Avoid It

Green Tea Anti-Oxidants: How Do They Actually Fight Cancer?

5 Rookie Mistakes in Novel Writing I had to Slay (Thanks Joyce Magnin!)

Here's a list of things I slowly absorbed over the past year, though they were all told to me in one 20-minute conference with novelist Joyce Magnin last March.

1) Don't try to be too mysterious in your novel's opening. I've read in other places too that your reader should know what the character is privy to. (Well, I see some exceptions to that, but in general I'm beginning to get the overall principle.) I was sooo guilty of this.  I didn't want to name Maizy's husband/the baby's father mentioned in the prologue's first paragraph. What the reader got was a lot of confusing "he" pronouns--some referring to the father, some a newborn baby. I had this hangup about not naming the man in the prologue because the first chapter went back in time to when Maizy was with a different man, and if I named the man in the prologue, the reader would instantly know that relationship in chapter one was doomed. I thought by not naming the man in the prologue, the reader would  be able to meet the rest of the story with the ability to wonder which man she'll pick. It sounded good to me, for years, but now I get that frustrating ambiguity doesn't serve much but to add confusion. Besides, my prologue carries enough ambiguity--the point is to make you wonder what happens to the baby and what she did that she feels so much guilt--those are the hooks my novel needs.

2) Don't dump a lot of back story in the your novel's beginning. Save as much back story as you can for later, sprinkled in bits and pieces as you weave the rest of the forward-moving story. My prologue had once been 30 pages--all from a short story that I wanted to keep in tact. A lot of it was back story. I cut it down to 9 for this conference and felt quite accomplished. But in the conference, I remember feeling like I was back in school, at the desk of an English teacher with a red pen, as Joyce sliced through paragraph after paragraph with a pen: "We don't need to know this yet." Slash. "Not needed." Red slash.  "Not needed." Ouch. But a year has gone by, and I see she was right. There was actually very little that the reader needed in that introduction. The reader didn't need to know how Maizy got where she was--yet.

3) The reader doesn't need to know how your character got where she got--yet--but he/she does need to know where she is now! My opening was scant on setting the scene and developing atmosphere. Joyce said I needed to spend more time on world building. Up to that point, I'd been so focused on following earlier advice to shorten my prologue that I'd been cutting, painfully cutting, to shorten the word count. But I'd been cutting the wrong things and preserving things that were better sprinkled throughout the rest of the novel.

4) De-clutter dialogue. Especially in the opening, my dialogue was cluttered with all the details I was trying to squeeze in--characters' appearances, mannerisms, emotions, etc. It was so full of information, the conversation moved very slowly, the reader constantly asked to process new information and yet not lose the momentum of the conversations. Joyce also took her pen and slashed through my synonyms for "said." I've read it in books before: "forget what your high school creative teacher taught you." Writing declared, retorted, implored, reported, spat, enunciated, replied, etc., should be rare. "The reader doesn't really notice 'said,' but the other words slow her down," Joyce said. Dialogue should move, not bog down, generally.

5) Simplify sentence structure. I'm super good at writing very complex sentences, with proper punctuation and everything. But what's good for poetry and academic writing is not necessarily good for contemporary fiction. Sentence variety, yes. But I was really burdening my prose with over-long sentences. Maybe Twain is noted for it, and countless writers before have had paragraph-long sentences, but it's hard to pull that off in today's publishing world.

Joyce ended my conference saying, "I do think you do have a story here," like she was generously searching for a diamond in the rough. "But you have to learn the basics of fiction writing."

(As an aside, I should tell you I think that was the worst reception of my writing I've ever experienced. I was that kind of student in high school and college who always excelled, whom professors asked to stand and read her writing for the whole class, even when I was a sophomore among senior English majors. To find that my skills didn't seamlessly translate to the world of contemporary fiction was a bit...deflating. But necessary.)

To follow what kind of feedback I got on my revisions a year later, in conferences last week, follow to the blog post "A Year Comparison: Shopping My Novel's Opening at Writers' Conferences."


Articles I've written:
What is a Disposable Diaper Made of Anyway?

Are Schools Expecting Our Kids to Read Too Early?

Hormone-free Milk: Dairy Companies Pledging Not to Use Artificial Bovine Growth Hormone

Chemical Imbalance Theory of Depression Incorrect; Antidepressants Ineffective

A year comparison: shopping my novel's opening at writers' conferences

In my last blog, I talked about a tough conference I had a year ago with a published novelist who took a literal red pen to my work. That blog entry listed 5 Rookie Mistakes for a Novel's Opening, because I made them all, but obviously, was mostly ignorant of them.

That was the worst reception of my writing I've ever experienced. I was that kind of student in high school and college who always excelled, whom professors asked to stand and read her writing for the whole class, even when I was a sophomore among senior English majors. I write and sell articles to periodicals now. I am used to seeing myself as a good writer.To find that my skills didn't seamlessly translate to the world of contemporary fiction was a bit...deflating. But necessary.

It took me a year to absorb all that good advice for my opening prologue. Granted, I could be generous with myself and say that I was busy learning other things about the craft--it's not like I was being obtuse for a year, stuck on those things, never moving forward. I just set the opening aside, let all I'd been told settle, and worked on other things. Then I dusted the opening off and reconsidered it for 2 conferences, one at the end of January which I've written about (learning to write meaningful specifics for characters, and managing time to write), and the most recent one a week ago today. Suddenly, I saw the purpose of my prologue differently in light of Joyce's advice. I shaved my 9-page prologue down to a page and a half. Then I had room to go back in with details to flesh out the setting and atmosphere.

The results? I had three 20-minute conferences with published novelists last week, and constructive criticism on my opening was not at all part of the conversation. One novelist complimented me on the details that painted the characters' house and lifestyle and social class. And another novelist told me my writing was excellent, some of the best she'd seen that day. Amazing how much I can grow and have my perspective changed in a year.

Now that I know what I know, I can't believe I didn't know it before. Or rather, that I didn't recognize it before. Or I think I did know it once, then forgot. But whatever the case, I see I'm making important progress. (Now I just have to apply all I've learned to revising hundreds of pages, some of which I wrote 4+ years ago and that may likely shock me!)


Articles I've written:
Choose Your Best Birth Options

Organic Food: Eight Benefits for You and Your Children

Omega-3 Fatty Acids Protect Against Obesity?

When Miscarriage Means Labor

The risk, the challenge, to obey your characters in writing that novel...

I've been meaning to write this since I went to a mid-winter retreat. There I met an editor and novelist who read my novel opening and heard the two possible ways I had been considering telling the story of my novel:  tell the stories of both the younger and older couples in two separate tracks, or tell everything in the present time period with a lot of flashbacks for the story of the older couple. I even asked for reader feedback on this. As mentioned in that post, what most readers said they preferred was the 2-track idea. I tried for a few weeks, but just couldn't make it work.

Well, what do you think the editor and novelist had to recommend? Exactly what you readers told me: I'd been hung up on 2 things: 1) that it seemed like a phenomenal amount of work to rework the 85% of the novel already written and 2) I wasn't sure the pacing of the stories would mesh well together. (Oh, I guess 3 things: I was just more comfortable in the point of view of Maizy and Curt when they are older, looking back.) I left the mid-winter retreat encouraged because novelist  Susan Gregg Gilmore really gave me a lot of encouragement, expressly because she talked about just having written a novel in the manner in which I write. She even had to start over, renegotiate a deadline with her publisher to do that phenomenal amount of work. But she did it. It is possible.

Last Saturday, I went to the Lancaster Christan Writer's one-day conference. I met with novelists there too who read my opening and my plan for the structure. Again and again, it was affirmed that the two-track idea for the 2 couples is the way to go. With Jeannette Windle, political suspense novelist, I admitted that in working on fleshing out the story of the older couple, I just felt daunted sometimes because I realized how much I didn't know about their story. Writing periodic flashbacks let me touch down on their story only every few years, even skipping a decade or more. But writing their relationship from a to z, in chronological order to have it parallel the other couples'--wow, is it hard! It's changing the story--eek! My characters are informing me that things I thought they did in their 30s or 40s or 50s are no longer logical or likely--because their 20-something or 30-something actions and situations in life change them in ways that change who they will in the future I imagined for them.

But multiple times, I was encouraged in this hard task, a task that may derail me from my goal to have a complete draft by the end of July. I was also told that my writing is very good and that my opening was gripping. My story gave them mystery. So for all that, I shall take heart and keep plugging away.

An it's not entirely unpleasant. I'm enjoying discovering exactly how Maizy and Curt were in their marriage through the years. It just really frustrated the goal-oriented side of me that still wants the goal to be "be done soon." I have to reprogram my goal to be "do what's best for the story. Just write it, and go ahead and overwrite it even, so you can find the best story."

Other things I write:

Postpartum Depression, Psychological Distress Predicted by Previous Traumatic Birth

Autism Rates Rise; University of Toledo Poises Itself to be Primary Resource for Deluge of Adults with Autism

Fast Food, Junk Food and Obesity Subsidized by Federal Government

The American Diet--Are We All Made of Corn?

No More Freelancing

Ok, I did it. In my last post, I talked about being hesitant to even say aloud what I KNEW I needed to do to give myself a fighting chance at finishing my novel. I wrote the first half of the equation in my last post about time management, admitting I was scared to say, for fear of accountability, what else I knew I needed to do. But, I've been doing it for two weeks, and I'm not dead.

OK, I'm being dramatic, but it did feel like such a hard thing to do: stop freelancing for magazines. I remember, two days after I made the commitment, I spent an hour searching out new magazines and having ideas! And that's exactly what has to stop if I'm going to finish the novel! The nap time novelist and nap time freelancer can't both succeed well right now. I told myself, "It's only temporary." I hope to be done with the novel draft by summer's end, and then, I tell myself, I can do some freelancing again. (Caveat: I'm already committed to one freelance assignment, so I do have to do that, but then I'm done....)

So far I haven't felt too bad about not freelancing. But then, with the slow way the business rolls, I'm still getting paychecks and seeing periodicals come out with my articles. In a few months, that will stop, and I'll reap no benefits, and I will miss them. I still get ideas all the time for articles. But I am disciplining myself to write them down and ignore them for 6 months. Or whatever's necessary.

The benefits of this change is the freedom to really keep the novel's plot and characters in my head space, instead of crowding them out for other assignments. I've found I accomplish much more with them because of this change, confirming this is what I needed to do. I'd been riding the fence between these two applications of writing ever since I started writing again in February 2010. I've been praying, weighing the pros and cons, and stubbornly trying to do both this whole time. I never would have thought back then it'd take me so long to just pick one to focus on.

Here's to finishing my novel! I'm feeling good about my goal. I've been writing nothing but the novel for 2 weeks now. It's good. It's really good.


A sample of my online freelance articles:



Natural Deodorants: Do Any Work as Effectively as Popular Commercial Brands?

Organic Food: Eight Benefits for You and Your Children

High Fructose Corn Syrup: Thirteen Reasons to Avoid It

Job Search: How to Make Your Application Climb to The Top of The Pile