Red Island House: An Interview with Andrea Lee Gary Percesepe Andrea Lee is the author of five books, including the National Book Award–nominated memoir Russian Journal; the novels Red Island House, Lost Hearts in Italy, and Sarah Phillips; and…
Write Dangerous, or Write Safe?
The January/February 2016 issue of Poets & Writers magazine features a stimulating essay by author and writing instructor Tom Spanbauer called “Dangerous Writing: Go to Your Battlefield.”
“To write dangerous is to go to parts of ourselves that we know exist but try to ignore,” Spanbauer writes. “Parts that are silent, and heavy. Taboo. Things that won’t leave us alone.”
NaNo FAIL; Or, How Cello Lessons Had No Impact on My Ability to Write a Novel
Last November, I posted about how taking cello lessons inspired me to participate for the first time in NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Since then, a lot of people have asked me how the experiment panned out. I’ve been waiting—partly from shame, and partly for the enhanced perspective that is the reward of time—to admit that I failed to produce a complete novel in a single month.
The last few days of November were excruciating. I woke up on November 30th with my inner voice screaming, “You failed! You are a failure! A fail-y, fail-y FAILURE!” Like I’ve said before, my inner voice is a jerk.
How Cello Lessons Convinced Me to Do NaNoWriMo
There is something liberating about doing a thing you enjoy, even if you know you aren’t doing it well. It feels like skinny-dipping in the town fountain, or giving someone the finger: there’s a defiance, a recklessness to it. If you are a perfectionist, that is.
If you too are a perfectionist, you understand that it goes beyond high personal standards; perfectionism can be crippling. There are loads of things I’ve shied away from because nothing mortifies a perfectionist like a learning curve. We want to be excellent at everything, right from the get-go.
To wit: This was supposed to be The Year I Wrote a Novel. I’d made this promise to myself before; my hard drive is chock-full of false starts. Invariably, somewhere along the way I’d realize what a mess I was making. I knew the middle part, maybe, but not the beginning or the end. “You’re wasting your time,” a little voice inside my head would say. “Stick to short stories! You’ll waste decades of your life writing a stupid novel no one will publish. You’ll be the most embarrassing kind of person in the world: a novelist manqué!”
My inner voice is a jerk.