This was the strangest giveaway. Last time, I had to pick from a hat and turn away tons of people who didn’t get picked. I hated that, or so I thought. This time, I can award spots in the course to all three of my commentators–and I know (from my tracking) that a bunch of other folks came by but left no calling card. Not sure what to make of that. I know times are rough, but this was a FREE class.

I have had students say that they were not at all sure about learning via telephone at first, but my classes are warm and fun, and we get a lot of great thinking and writing done, too. So people who try it, even with reservations, come to like it.

Anyway, there’ll be other offers. Meanwhile, though, I’m thrilled with Kimberely and C(h)ristine — who both have great web sites — and a favorite client of mine, Gretchen, who’s writing a soon-to-be-bestseller that is also a very important book. Congratulations to the three of you. You’re joining a fine little group and we are going to write some excellent sentences. Yes, sentences.

You know where that leads . . . paragraphs . . . stories . . . whole novels . . .

Last week we ended up working on techniques for introducing characters. Ever stumbled across a line in a story that leaves you gut-punched? We take lines like those and break them down, imitate them, build the muscles to make our own knock-out prose. It sounds simple, and it is simple. Not easy. But straight-forward and worthwhile.

All right. So get in touch with me, my winners. Sometimes just playing the game is all you have to do! And for the rest of you lurkers, I have a tidal wave of new insights. But I’m saving those for a morning writing session. Afternoons, the bamboo out my window flickers hypnotically, and every rustle lulls me toward a nap.

Pick your time for writing. There, that’s a great writing tip. Give it your very best time–mornings, for me–and relegate everything else to those times when the muse would have to shout to get your attention.

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” . . . or you write a book and while you write it you are ashamed for every one must think you a silly or a crazy one and yet you write it and you are ashamed, you know you will be laughed at or pitied by every one and you have a queer feeling and you are not very certain and you go on writing. Then someone says yes to it, to something you are liking, or doing or making and then never again can you have completely such a feeling of being afraid and ashamed that you had then when you were writing or liking the thing and not any one had said yes about the thing.” –Gertrude Stein

I just had a wonderful conversation with someone who said yes to my goals. She is successful in her own right and she gave me some great advice. I know it is great advice because it is advice that Angie has been giving me for years, advice that makes sense and it practical and doesn’t require anything impossible. And yet because this person said it to me, I got all fired up and ready to go. She said, make a plan. Even if it is a bad plan, it will be something to go back to when things aren’t going well or when you don’t know what to do.

A long time ago, when I first wanted to write a novel and I had no idea how to begin, my wise and wonderful sister Nanou asked me to think about how I’d accomplished other things in my at-the-time realatively short life. Well, I’d accomplished other things by a contorted method of examining every option I could think of it excruciating detail until I finally plunged in one direction. It was torturous. She said, “It sounds as though you do a lot of mapping and planning, and that this leads you to take action.” This was more than kind, but in any case, it set me in a direction that worked quite well for me, indeed.

There’s a wonderful book by Kennith Atchity called A Writer’s Time, that became the perfect road map for a planner like me.

Now it is time for me to make a new road map for a new project. I won’t say too much about it right now, except that it builds on the great online community that has been growing out of the courses I am currently teaching in novel writing and (upcoming) revision.

Around the time that David Foster Wallace killed himself, Terri Gross replayed a part of an interview she did with him some years back. He seemed so scared to step outside of the generational cynicism that dogged him and yet so trapped and frustrated inside it. The conversation reminded me exactly of my graduate school days, the fear I’d had of being sentimental. It’s a terrible place to be, though, because life packs some serious wallops, and pretty soon you don’t know how to address all the feelings you are having that turn out to be common and human, because common + human = sentimental, and sentimental has somehow become the worst thing of all to be.

Of course, the sentimentality that is problematic is a more glib approach to feelings, a desire to tap into emotion without earning it, to push the reader somewhere instead of taking her there. And it’s a tough line to walk, no doubt about it.

But the people who are succeeding–on a variety of fronts–are optimistic, organized, and aware. I am thinking of this woman I talked to this morning who has made herself into a successful wealth manager, but also of Jamie and Laura who have shepherded their baby son Simon through a harrowing ordeal of months in a hospital.

In order to be optimistic, organized and aware, you have to risk sentimentality, you have to risk the muck of human feeling and the dangers of communicating it, to yourself and to others.

I know that out of the exhaustion and surprise of becoming a parent, I really had to earn those feelings that are most frequently described as “automatic” or “maternal instinct.” I had to develop a conscious relationship to those feelings through getting to know these two beings who’d been placed in my hands. Now that they are with me in abundance, I revel in the joy of them. I don’t worry if it is cliched to think my kids are as gorgous and brilliant as anybody on earth; I do notice the texture of it and the specificity of them: Charlie’s joy in saying, “No” in his rumbling baby voice. “No! No!”  Leo’s intent focus as he stacks blocks higher than his own height. Charlie’s witty repartee, as when it is time for good-night songs and he knows what is coming: “Rowrowrowrowrow.” Leo’s process of deciding which car seat he wants this time, heaving himself out of one and into the other, rolling back and forth between them.

See? These are small miracles for me and likely impress you very little. That’s okay. I am saying yes to my sons and yes to my own hard-earned maternal adoration and yes to my big plans. I am saying yes to the risk of sentimentality in the exploration of human connection. Our pediatricians have a handout that suggests that you give your kids ten yesses for every no, that when you say no, you automatically owe them ten yesses. I think I’ll try that with myself for a while . . .

First, let me admit that I have blithely typed that title in, as if I had advice to dispense, but in fact, I have questions. Slightly desperate questions. But let me start somewhere else.

Yesterday afternoon, I was grumpy. We were trying to find sound equipment for some interviews I am doing, and as usual, we also wanted to equipment to multi-task for several other projects, actual and fantasy. And we wanted it to be very, very inexpensive. But of excellent quality.

The boys, of course, just wanted to play. No amount of singing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” could convince them that driving around in their carseats had anything to do with the kind of fun they were after.

The guy at the audio place (which we chose because it shares the name of one of our sons) was absolutely humorless. It is a rare person who can be around Angie and not crack a smile. And here was Angie with Charlie on her back, dancing around and asking sincere, well-researched questions about audio equipment with humorous asides. No smile. No equipment, either. Just a glass counter, a long hallway, and this guy.

We left. Now it was too late to go to Radio Shack or anywhere else, because the park had risen forcefully to the top of the agenda. So off we went, to Totland, our home away from home. At Totland, we found Amanda and Vivian playing. We met Amanda and Matt in our birth class for Leo, when Amanda was pregnant with Vivian. Vivian can talk and give kisses–which the boys blushingly appreciated. Amanda offered us the loan of Matt’s microphone, which we were able to pick up that very evening, right after we picked up our near weekly Cheeseboard pizza. (Review of Pizza: YUM.)

Right then, while we were ending up with a very, very inexpensive, high quality microphone that we could aquire in the park (the boys approved of that), a big boy came along the cement path “road” at Totland in a large blue jeep decorated with a young punks dot com sticker. Charlie was in his own plastic orange car, but he was focused on honking and steering, and wasn’t actually moving anywhere. Leo was pushing a sort of lawn-mower toy with the little balls inside a plastic window that pop. It was a toy that made me wonder if we could get some sort of vacuum cleaner that he could push around the house like that . . . I got up to steer Charlie to the side of the road and direct Leo over next to Mama, and the dad of the big boy in the jeep said something about how it was hard to get anywhere.

“It’s the journey, not the destination,” I said. I live in Berkeley; these kinds of cliches passed off as insight are exected of me. Nonetheless, as I sat back down on the tiny cement wall, I found myself thinking about that cliche. And how infrequently I take in the journey; how frantic I am about the destinations–all four-hundred-fifty-six of them. Leo pushed his lawn-mower over to the water table and back. Charlie honked his horn and spun the wheel of his car. And I thought, I have no idea what’s going to happen.

I’m too superstitious to write down what I thought next, but it had to do with mortality and not knowing how long any of us would be around. What if this was it? Birds, butterflies and a special raccoon danced in the mural on my left. The guy who lives at Totland after the kids go home came back with his dinner and sat at one of the picnic tables under the oak trees. Angie was next to me, and Amanda came back with her pink iPhone and Matt’s yes to loaning us the microphone. The journey . . . What if this is it?

It doesn’t mean I don’t clean the kitchen (god knows) or write my blog or negotiate with Angie over which lucky one of us will get to take a shower today. It doesn’t even mean that I want to play in the sandbox more than I want to read a book. While I appreciate the opportunity to see the world all big and new again, I do slip back into my grown-up perspective awfully fast and want the kind of entertainment I am used to–with words and ideas at center.

It just swings the balance back to something a little closer to center: the journey and the destination. I’ll give equal value to the part I get to experience, and take a little energy back from the endpoint off where the horizon vanishes.

So, what does this tell us about time management? Maybe that the term forces an approach: management. For Angie’s birthclass, Ange and Leo (3 months old) and I met privately with Nancy Bardacke, who teaches mindful birthing. Nancy told me that I was trying to “micromanage the unknown.” Now that’s pretty much what I consider to be my job description, and probably have since I began, at age 7, to spend my time alternating–every few days–between my mother’s basement flat and my father’s house.

So what I want to suggest to myself and to other writers and parents and other insanely busy people, is that we launch a new field: time experiencing. Here’s one exercise: instead of making a list of what you have to do, make a list of what you’ve done this week that you loved. Or liked. Or just showed up for. Here’s mine:

1) Sat in the front yard playing with my sons.

2) Kissed the back of Angie’s neck.

3) Listened to an interview with Carol Muske-Dukes from the archives of Fresh Air.

4) Donated money to Obama (first time I made a donation to a political campaign in nearly 25 years, since I was a kid).

5) Had a great conversation with one of my clients.

6) Talked on the phone with my friend Katia.

7) Read the whole New Yorker in bed beside the sleeping boys.

8 ) Resolved a traffic jam at Totland in the warm twilight hours of the day.