The Writer's Lifestyle & the Laws of the Harvest

I remember years ago when I read Stephen King's On Writing the sentence I hated most in that book: "You must not come to the blank page lightly."  I realize now that he wasn't accusing me of that, but telling me what I shouldn't do, but for some reason when I read it I know I felt, "You haven't brought your best work to the blank page yet.  You're still just doing it lightly.  Stop and start over."  And it was that which made me so angry that I devoured every last word of the rest of his book.  It was a very good book, but I still didn't understand what coming to the blank page lightly meant until recently.

As I've been working on "Crimes of the Umbramancer," I realize there are times that I have come to it very lightly.  I've come to the blank page writing out of obligation.  I've come to the blank page writing out of need.  I've come to the blank page writing out of fear.  And you may sit there and say that that's not coming to the blank page lightly, but I would have to disagree, because I know that when obligation, need, or fear are the primary motivators of my writing that it sowing seeds for later writing.  And when the seeds sown are seeds that eventually drive people from writing, the writing is light.  It didn't lay seeds that could reach into the soil of life and build a lifestyle.  It didn't lay seeds that could reach the depths of the concrete jungle of publishing and build me a career.  It didn't lay seeds that could touch the hearts of an audience that would care about what I wrote.  I approached the blank page lightly.

By John W. Lawrence

During NaNoWriMo when I originally wrote the first draft, I never sat down one day and came to it lightly.  Instead I came with hope, love, and enjoyment of what I was doing.  I started out blogging that same way.  But it has been hard and I'm still learning lessons about what it means to come to things "lightly."  Recently I came across a quote that really got me thinking though, from a book called The Seven Laws of the Harvest.  I would like to share those laws with you in hopes that they help you as much as they have helped me since I ran across them.

Wild Rose Seeds

Let's start with the first law: We reap only what has been sown.  What does this mean for us as writers?  It has a lot to do with the emotional sets we choose when we go out to do any writing project. If you write out of obligation, what you are sowing is that you want to write out of obligation.  That can create positive pressure to write, but what if it doesn't?  What if you find yourself unable to write because you are obligated to do it?  I think this often happens to us young writers, because we want certain things to happen on a specific timeline.  We obligate ourselves to write instead of enjoy our writing.  We stop enjoying the process, the adventure, and the story and get caught up in all the details such as "I have to take that adverb out", "That isn't going to be realistic", or my personal favorite "This isn't good.  I should start over."  Stop sowing obligation and start sowing joy again.  We write because we love it.  Some of us will be able to make a living off of it.  Others of us will entertain our children with our stories.  All of us should be invested in making a life out of it.  And life is meant to be enjoyed.

White Wild Roses

The Second Law: We reap in same kind as we sow.  If you want wild roses you plant a wild rose seed, not a rose seed.  If you want a thoughtful research paper for a paper on genetics you do good thoughtful research on genetics, not research on how many hours it took you to get to the end of Halo Reach.  If you want to have a book loved and read by many, you spend the hours writing that book.  What you sow will be the same kind when you go to reap.  And you cannot reap the full benefits of something you did not sow.  When you cook the microwave dinner you don't reap the benefit of the feeling of having cooked a meal for your family, you reap the feeling of convenience.  It has been my experience that we sow what is easy and complain during the reaping season about not getting the rewards of sowing something hard.  If you really want something beautiful, you're going to have give hard work to make certain that it comes to pass.

The Third Law: We reap in a different season than we sow.  So many things in life come so easily. The internet equals instant knowledge.  Our microwaves equal instant food.  Our televisions equal instant entertainment.  But we so frequently forget that in those endeavors we are reaping the reward of what someone else sowed.  And when we buy into that thinking, we forget that to really get the best things in life we have to give them time, nurturing, love, and work to bring them to life.  Writing a good novel is like raising a child.  We sow the seeds and a child is born.  Then it takes eighteen to twenty years of work to make certain that child becomes a good person.  The season of sowing is eighteen years away from when you reap the full benefits.  A good novel requires the same kind of dedication and love.  (Just hopefully not eighteen or twenty years worth.)

The Fourth Law: We reap more than we sow.  Think of a single seed of corn seed.  If you plant this you will get one ear of corn that has at least 600 kernels.  So the yield you get for each seed of corn is at least six hundred fold.  An acre at 84 rows of corn will plant at least 22,000 stalks of corn.  And if you consider each stalk to only give you one ear of corn that becomes 13,200,000 kernels of corn.  So the return on what is sowed is huge.  It gives you good reason to practice.  And make sure you do all you can to take care of what you have sown.  Because when the time for harvest comes, you are going to be pulling in a lot more than what you put into it.  And that is a beautiful thing.

The Fifth Law: We reap in proportion to what we sow.  Back to the corn analogy, if you only sow a half acre of corn at 11,000 stalks and only get 6,600,000 kernels you got what you deserved.  You can only reap what you actually sow.  A master pianist didn't get that way because they played piano once when they were a child.  No, they had to practice and work at that talent until they nurtured it into a gift that could touch lives and enable them to find an audience to listen to their music.  Writing is the same way.  We reap in proportion to what we sow.  Our seeds are different so some of us may reap the benefits of writing poetry for our families.  Others of us may make careers out of our writing.  What makes all the difference in the world is the fact that we sow enough seeds to get the return we are looking for.

The Sixth Law: >We reap the full harvest of the good only if we persevere; the evil comes to harvest on its own.   Often times when we sow our seeds, we will discover that weeds come in and try to grow along with our harvest.  Even though this can seem bad, we can't stop this process.  The good and bad seeds both desire the same ground to use for their growth.  What we can control is where we nourish and strengthen.  If we spend our time nourishing and strengthening our good seeds until the time comes to harvest we will be able to take the good part and destroy the chaff.  As writers this means we have to invest in our story until we finish it.  If we spend all our time revising, editing, and in other words not getting to the end of our story we will lose it.  However if we strengthen it along the way and learn what we can from the process when we get to the end we will be able to remove all the ugliness we are able at the end.

The Seventh Law: We cannot do anything about last years harvest, but we can about this years.  So you failed last year to get your harvest to come to pass?  Or you didn't get the book written?  Well guess what?  That's okay.  There is this year.  Don't make the same mistakes this year that you made last year.  That is one of the best parts about this entire process.  You learn from it the entire time.  If you learn you reap the benefits of greater understanding of yourself and how you function.  You know what you need to do to motivate yourself to write.  (Like I motivate myself with saying I can have an orange soda each time I write.)  The past is there to learn from, the future is before us to prepare for, and today is for us to act.  Make this year the best you can make it.  Plant hope to become a better writer.  Plant love for storytelling.  Plant an enjoyment of sharing your heart with others.  And as you plant those things this years harvest will be different than last years.

To date this has been the best year I've ever had writing.  And I've loved the majority of it.  I just had to learn a lesson about what it means to come to the blank page with intent to make a story that I love, instead of writing out of obligation to anyone or anything.  Writing is my lifestyle.  I am getting better at living this lifestyle all the time.  And I know that one day, that investment is going to get me what I really want.  An ability to touch the hearts of people with the words I write.

This is two bits.

That's my two bits for this week.  I'd love to hear about your two bits.  Tell me about the kinds of harvests you have had writing.  Good ones, bad, or somewhere in the middle?  Hope everyone has a wonderful week!  I'll catch ya later!  Peace.

The Rain: A source of ebb and flow.

Ever felt like the heavens just opened up and poured out all the pain, worry, and negativity of years upon you? I think that's where I've found myself for the past month. And it has really bothered me. I had wonderful plans for doing Camp NaNoWriMo and JuNoWriMo, work with my writing group, and getting through some particularly hard scenes in my fiction and everything concerning my writing came to a screeching halt as this hurricane began in my life.

I usually write to be able to get through the storms anymore and when the hurricane came I found myself completely blocked. I couldn't blog, when I tried to work on my story it all felt wrong, and piece after piece of my life just fell out of place. And you know what, today a piece just fell that I didn't think I could take. And after a difficult conversation with someone yesterday, the storm should have washed me away. But it was that piece that is washing away in the grand scheme of things that brought me here today to write. Because this is the first time since the hurricane began that I've seen a better tomorrow. Perhaps that means I'm in the eye of the storm. If so that means I need to get myself prepared for the other side, because I'm not about to let myself fall apart for a hurricane that I'm going to survive.

That's why I'm writing today, and I hope that my blocked period of writing is over. But as I think about all this it got me to thinking about why people have writers block and what keeps them from putting words down on the page. In my opinion writers block is a real thing, but it has a lot less to do with our actual ability to write words and a lot more to do with the emotional state that we reside in.

For example I remember hearing on a Writing Excuses Episode (Season 1, episode 16) once that Howard Taylor once had a block when he was writing Schlock Mercenary strip. He was trying to make it work, but he found himself needing to know the mathematics to how fast the space station was spinning. He did that and suddenly he was able to write again. As I think about that it wasn't an inability to write, it was the fact that emotionally he couldn't connect with flow any longer and that kept him from writing.

Ebb and flow are terms that we typically use when we talk about water, but creativity works in a very similar way. Sometimes the creativity is in high gear and beauty seems to come effortlessly, this state is known as flow. We can create because we have done the work, both mentally and emotionally to be able to flow. However there is also the state of ebb. Ebb is when we are preparing for our work, doing our prewriting, researching, and even when we are exercising.  These are times when we are preparing for flow once again. If we stayed in a constant state of flow our work would actually over time get worse because we wouldn't have anything left after a while to give. Our energy would be exhausted, our knowledge would fail, and we wouldn't have any experiences left to draw upon. Howard's experience was one of knowledge, and because he is a professional he realized what was going on, allowed himself the time to be in ebb and once he had the knowledge that he needed he shifted back into flow.

Buy this book.

Steven King describes a similar experience in his book "On Writing." He talks about "The Stand" and how when he was writing it he had a point where he didn't know what was going to happen next. It was the first time he had ever experienced writers block and he had no idea how to deal with it. After a month or so the answer came to him as to what he needed to do and it drove him through the rest of the novel. It was something that he needed to learn about the process of writing that enabled him to make that book so much better. It was simply that everything had grown quiet in his story and he needed to change up things. He changed them with a bomb. Changing the direction of the story was exactly what he needed to do to produce flow.

An effective means of using ebb.

But when you start to think of writers block as ebb it changes things for you. The first thing it changes is that you cannot think of writers block as a negative any longer. You must think of it as what it really is. It is your soul crying at you that you need something else at the moment. Usually it is one of two things. One: You don't want to be writing right now.  And if you don't want to write right now, that's okay. Go do something else. Exercise, read, or do some research. Do something that helps you get in the mood to write. Or it could be number two: You need to pay attention to what you need right now to be able to write. Sometimes you need to do some research. &Sometimes you need to put your life in order. Sometimes you just need time away from your story. When you are experienced you know exactly what you need, but I am still building my library of experiences in writing and that means sometimes I don't know what I need. But it does mean I need to be patient with myself and allow myself the time to be away.

Some professionals tell you that you need to write through block. And I agree with that.  Just because I haven't been able to make much progress this past month, I've still been writing. Just nothing that I feel I can share with anyone, because I have zero confidence in it. You must be willing to shut the door on your writing sometimes to be able to find out what you need to find your flow again.

For me I have had the hurricane interrupt my life with pain, fear, and worry. It got me to think to ask people about the things I didn't know. It got me to consider whether or not I'm a professional or not. It got me to look in the mirror and make a choice.  I choose to write.  Not because I can't do anything else. I could become a social worker, or a teacher, or even a politician, but none of those even come close to the joy I get out of writing.

So in your journey to becoming a professional, remember that you are going to have ebb and flow. Anticipate it. And find your rhythm, because Writers Block ends the day you understand your writing rhythms. And you can experience regular flow.

Sorry I left for so long. It won't happen again.  I'll be back with you on next Monday with another post. I'm giving myself time to get in rhythm again.  Because I'm going to be patient with myself and give you my best. Thanks for sticking around during my drought. Catch ya'll soon.

This is the OG signing out.  Peace.