” . . . 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 . . .

To be honest, I had barely read a blog before I got ready to start blogging myself. I was perhaps a bit suspicious of the medium. It’s true that ever since I was a child, with my first Hello, Kitty journal, I could not keep a diary without imagining a future reader. In fairness to the vanity of my young self, the diaries I was most familiar with were those that had been published–Anne Frank, for example. In any case, the blog circumvents the necessity of pretending you are writing for reasons of personal growth, even as you become most aware of your desire to grow, personally.

I have admired writers who are willing to grow in public. Michelle Tea is a wonderful example. She is prolific and talented and has written with a work ethic I envy and then gotten her work out to a growing public (via spoken word tours–the infamous Sister Spit–and publication) since she (and I) was quite young. This means that she’s gotten better, and broader, in front of that public.

Yesterday in the car, Angie played a part of a podcast for me in which the speaker made an important distinction between the natural, healthy dissatisfaction a writer or creator feels towards the work he or she has done and contempt for that work. There is slippage between the two, and contempt does no good, since it casts doubt on the worthiness of everything you do or might do. Dissatisfaction, on the other hand, will push you to stretch, to grow. To try something different. (Although the boys were not interested in (their or my) listening to the entire podcast, Angie tells me that it was from Accidental Creative, which seems like a great group.)

I considered publishing my daily writing of this NaNoWriMo novel that I’ve been working on for the past twelve days (not including today, yet) and which I will be writing for at least the next eighteen days. My idea was to post a sort of blog-style rough draft of this fictional story in installments, much as Dickens published Great Expectations and other of his novels. Then I remembered that I am not Dickens. Actually, I just thought that the pressure of writing a novel in thirty days might not withstand the additional pressure that the novel be readable.

Another part of me, though, longed for the tension, excitement and sheer storytelling demand an audience would create. Shahrazad had no time to erase her efforts and throw up her pages in despair. Shakespeare purportedly scribbled lines on some Elizabethan index cards and handed them to his actors. The ur-storyteller caveman had to create some serious questions in his listeners or risk being tossed out of the cave. And not just Plato’s cave.

In general, I have been guilty of revising for too long, if there is such a thing. I have let dissatisfaction slip into contempt. The problem is, of course, that with each new book (or draft), one learns more, one grows as a writer, and so that book inevitably becomes the product of a younger, less experienced (if also less despairing) writer. I think I made the same mistakes with having children–I waited nearly until the deadline had passed, wanting to get it right instead of merely to get it done. But with writing and children, I have learned that there is much to be said for getting it done as a path to getting it right.

Then, too, watching little people grow in public, it becomes clear to me that nothing can eclipse the brilliance of embracing wherever you are in the moment. I think of Charlie clapping his little hands together in self-approval when he shoots a basket or puts away a toy. I think of Leo’s pleasure in learning to say the “O” in E I E I ____. We delight in them when they can hold their heads up and then when they can play peek-a-boo and then when they can feed themselves a bite and then when they can walk and then when they can say an animal sound and then when they can make a joke and then when they can read a book . . . and they learn to delight in themselves, too. At one-and-a-half (or -quarter), no one is looking back and saying, “Hmmm, I didn’t used to be able to walk. What a loser. I should have stayed in until I knew more.”

Whatever its flaws, reality writing has a lot going for it over its fellows in television. I used to worry that people would stop leaving the kinds of informal, intimate written records that our parents and grandparents left–letters and diaries. Blogs are not the same, of course. But this is what I started out to say: I have become a convert. I read blogs now. At the end of the night, for instance, I check in on the progress of the cutest, bravest little guy and his amazing moms at Simon Lev, and I always read Amy Wilensky’s amazing entry at Seven Hundred Fifty Words. I am learning about organization and Serenity for the Self-Employed from Heather Boerner, about How Not to Write from Jamie Grove, and on and on . . . Words have always been my medium, and it is a great pleasure to find this living stream of them at this time when I am most house-bound.

I would love to know: what blogs do you read?