Roar! for powerful words

I was minding my own business this morning, sipping coffee, reading blogs, trying to keep Lucy from sitting on my keyboard or spilling coffee on my keyboard or banging her cute wee hands on my keyboard, when suddenly I saw my own name. Jen from Jen's Page. Right there on Creaturebug's site.

At first, I thought, "Neat! She tagged me to give out some writing tips. I can do that!"

And then, I thought, "Shoot. I'm supposed to give out some writing tips. That means I have to come up with some."

But I plunged in--after all, I am a professional writer. So what if I do my writing in fits and starts throughout the day while my girls run around the house dressed like princesses, spilling Cheerios everywhere? (I also often wear pink fuzzy slippers while I write. That's really professional.) My local newspaper and a small-circulation parenting magazine may not be high-profile media outlets, but media outlets they are, and pay me for my writing they do, so I can safely say: I am a professional writer.

So here are my highly professional writing tips, written while wearing my slippers:

1. Writing does not start when you sit down at the keyboard.

Or when you pick up your pencil, in case you're old-school like that.

Writing starts when you're unloading the dishwasher, or stirring the soup, or walking the dog, or whatever it is you do, and that first little wisp of an idea floats through your brain.

Sometimes those words have to stay in your brain for awhile before they're ready to come out. I do some of my best writing in the shower. I remember one time in particular, back in my crime-reporting days, when I was really struggling with how to take an entire day's worth of testimony from a murder trial and distill it into a 15-inch story. I went home the night before my deadline with nothing written, then got up in the morning and had one of those Eureka! moments in the shower when a great lead just came to me. I no longer remember what this fabulous lead was, other than that it contained the phrase "Mr. Murder Victim's bloody body." Ahhh, crime reporting. The good old days.

My subject matter is no longer quite so dramatic, but I still frequently compose a post in my head before I write it out. Things flow better, for me, if I sit down at the keyboard with some half-formed ideas, and a few sentences I really like, rather than sitting down with nothing and trying to force it.

So if you're stuck, don't be afraid to walk away from your writing for awhile. It's not going anywhere. Your mind will be working on it even if you don't quite realize it.

2. Learn to love the red ink.

I don't care how good you think you are, or how much you like what you've written. It can be better. Seek out good editors and beg them to be ruthless. It may hurt when you see that they've crossed out all the phrases you thought were cleverest and words you thought were prettiest, but you will be a better writer for it.

This was something I had to grow into, believe me, because I tend to take criticism very personally. I will never forget the first time I turned in a story to my college newspaper and experienced the wrath of the red pen in full.

You see, I went to a very small high school, with a very loosely-organized newspaper, and it was a truth generally acknowledged that I was The Stuff, when it came to writing. I wrote something, I turned it in, it ran as-written, and everyone praised me to the skies. This was the way things worked, forever and ever, Amen.

Then I went to college, and my first story got handed back to me bleeding, as they say. I think my face must have expressed my shock, and I'm pretty sure my eyes welled up with tears. I definitely remember my editor patting me on the back and telling me that it was really good, for a first try.

Since that day, I have learned to treasure good editing. If you don't have anyone who can criticize your work, then learn to be your own editor. Omit unnecessary words. Abhor cliches. Polish it until only what's good and pure and shiny shows through.

3. Don't be afraid to try something new.

If you ever read the early pages of this blog (and it will not be a scintillating experience, should you choose to do so) you'll see that I wasn't quite sure what I ought to say at first, nor how I should say it. Eventually, over the course of about eight months, the blog evolved into what it is today: a place wherein I write about the bits and pieces of my life, especially mommy life, and often try to give things a funny twist.

This was a big change for me, because I NEVER used to write in the first person, and I never tried to be funny. Never in all my high school or college or newspaper reporter days did I once write a column that showed off my personality at all. Nope. Just the facts, ma'am. I didn't think I was creative enough. I was afraid to try.

But then I started opening up a little more on the blog. And people started commenting on it. They liked me! They really liked me! I still think my most prized comment of all time came about a year and a half ago, when Jeremy wrote "You are so funny!" in response to a post about my gall bladder.

I experienced the same thing with poetry. I had not written a poem in approximately seven years, when I stumbled upon the Poetry Thursday blog. It took me months before I got bold enough to share a poem of my own, and even after that I did so rarely. Poetry is such an obscure, subjective, and deeply personal craft, that writing a poem at all, much less putting it out for public consumption, feels a bit like shaving your head and exposing your hairless self to the world. Well, maybe not that dramatic. But you know what I mean.

Poetry Thursday is sadly defunct now, but I've been thinking I need to discipline myself to have my own once-a-week or once-a-month poetry day, just to force myself into creativity again.

Now that I've posted all these tips, I must admit that this blog is often a free-wheeling thing and I do not always follow these tips myself. I am not very good at editing myself, and I hardly ever seek outside criticism, and I rarely get bold enough to try new forms of writing. But they are good tips, nonetheless, and you should give them a try.

If you want some really great tips, check out "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White; "Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamott; and the Poynter Institute.

And to complete the exercise, I'm supposed to tag some people to share writing tips of their own. So, if they feel so inclined, Devon (an English teacher and fellow lover of fantasy literature and good writing in general); Jen M. (a reporter at the D-H who has the gift of taking even the most routine, basic story and turning it into something eminently readable); Mike (an editor at the D-H, who took more time than any other editor I've worked for to help me polish my writing skills); and Goslyn (another reporter-turned-mommy, whose writing style I love) can pass the ROAR along.