Applying to Clarion West

This time last year I was busily revising my stories that I would submit with my application to Clarion West. 

It was my third time to apply to the workshop.

This doesn't mean I'm a worse writer than those who got in on their first try, or that I'm a better writer than those who weren't accepted for the workshop. It just means that last year I was at the right place in my writing life for me to benefit the most from attending Clarion West.

I'm thankful to the judges who didn't accept me the first and second times that I applied, because I was not ready. It's easy for me to say that now, after I've been to Clarion West. But I still remember how it felt to apply and not be accepted. I was terribly crushed each time I received the rejection email. I felt ready. But looking back on the stories I submitted, I realize now that I wasn't.

The first year I applied I submitted an excerpt of a novella, with a synopsis of the ending. It was a story that my graduate classmates had really liked, it was fantasy, but it had no structure and no emotional core. I applied to Clarion West at the last minute, using a version of the story I hadn't looked at in weeks. I felt like I had it in the bag. I wasn't accepted. 

The second year, I submitted a literary short story (by literary, I just mean that it didn't contain any speculative element). This was an earlier version of a short story I eventually sold. It was a fine draft of the story. It had an arc, real characters, things happened. But it didn't have specific details, and there were parts that needed to be cut to get to the real heart of the story. I applied once again feeling like I had to be accepted, and once again I received a rejection email. This time, however, my rejection email had an additional line added, prompting me to apply again next year as my story had ranked highly with the judges. 

The third year, the year I was accepted to Clarion West, I spent the entire month of February working on my submission stories. I revised, edited, and revised again two stories. One was a story that had an experimental structure. The other was a short piece that was lyrical and intensely emotional. Both had elements of fantasy. In essence, I worked on two stories that displayed my strengths and interests as a writer. I showed my style in these stories. And although they did not have the best structure and I have revised them post-workshop, they were a clear impression of my writing abilities. I submitted. I decided not to get excited. Then Neile called to tell me I was in. 

Clarion West is open for submissions for their annual writers workshop. This year the instructors are Mary Rosenblum, Hiromi Goto, George R. R. Martin, Connie Willis, Kelly Link & Gavin Grant, and Chuck Palahniuk. The deadline for applying is March 1st. You can find more information on applying here. 

If you're thinking of applying, then go for it. Even if you think you can't afford it, or that you won't get in. If you'd like to go, please take the time to apply. Clarion West is an amazing experience, and people will help you get there if you're accepted. 

And if I may suggest, write the type of story that you love. Use the writing devices that make you smile and keep your fingers on the keyboard late into the night. Because if you love writing it, there's a good chance that the judges will love reading it, too. And as much as you can bear, spend less time looking for Clarion West blogs, and more time revising and editing your stories. You'll have all of March to spend daydreaming about what it will be like at Clarion West. 

And if you don't get in, try again next year. And the next. Writing isn't a race against other people, it's a personal journey. The only person you're competing with is your past selves, to be a better writer each new day. 

Good luck to you! I hope you find yourself at Clarion West this summer. 

The view of Seattle from one of the Friday evening parties at Clarion West 2011. 

{NOTE: I do not have any insider information on how the participants are selected. These are just my personal feelings about how my submissions progressed over the course of a few years. Please take this information as one person's viewpoint, and follow your own instinct when making the choice about your submission stories. :) Good luck again!}

Real Letters

Mary Robinette Kowal's recent post, The Month of Letters Challenge , has gotten me thinking about communication. Specifically, how we share ourselves with others through language, images, memory. 

I have a sticker on my laptop, right beneath my keyboard. It says "real people write real letters." I can't remember where I got it, other than that it had something to do with a zine, or zine-like project. 

Years ago, before grad school, I made a zine every month or two and mailed it out to my family members. It was called "Frazzle," and it wasn't super interesting. It had some doodles, some news about my day to day life, a photograph or two. I was twenty-five and terrified that the people I loved did not have any idea who I was. So I made these little missives and sent them out, hoping for some karma of personhood to flow back to me.

A page from Frazzle, Issue # 1

When I got to grad school, all of my extracurricular creativity stopped pretty quickly. I was reading two books a week, reading my classmates' stories and critiquing them, plus reading for the class I taught. Grad school was wonderful - I learned so much in just a few years. I'm thankful everyday for my chance to have had that time.

But I lost the zen of creating for the pleasure of the act. The happiness of sending something scruffy-necked and not quite perfect out into the world and moving on before life stopped me long enough to convince me that it wasn't good enough. Creating words and images that weren't necessarily story, just themselves.

So I'm going to take Kowal's excellent idea of writing a letter every postal day in February, and tweak it a bit. I'm going to make one page every day in February. At the end, I'll put them together into a zine and mail it out to anyone who wants to read it.

If you'd like to get an issue of Frazzle: The Return, leave a message in the comments below. I've opened up the commenting restrictions so that anyone can leave a comment without logging in.

Or email me your mailing address at jenni.moody@gmail.com (don't forget the dot between the first and last name). :)

I hope you take advantage of this challenge as well, to spend time with a piece of paper and your favorite pen, sending yourself everywhere you'd like to go.

Strange Southern Thing: Snow and Stars

It snowed this week. Not enough to stick, or to let kids out of school early, but enough to keep people off of the roads at night. The snow covered the roof and hung in the bush-branches.

Alaska snow is large and fluffy, maybe not always, but that's how I remember it. The snow flakes would float down like forest spirits and land on your coat. They were as big as a thumbnail and as thick as lace. You didn't need a microscope to see the branching patterns.

Alabama snow, on the other hand, is usually small and vaporizes the moment it touches anything. You don't really get to experience it as snow unless it builds up over a few days of heavy snow and freezing temperatures, which usually doesn't happen. So Alabama snow is more of an especially mean winter rain.

But this week the snow here in Alabama was a bit different. It looked like, well, DippinDots.

These little balls of snow-stuff started falling, and they bounced all around the yard.

And watching this weird snow reminded me of Stars Fell on Alabama, the old book that my history buff friend showed me back in undergrad. He told me that the book was about this big meteor shower that fell in Alabama, and that afterwards everyone was very proud of the event. They liked to brag about it, and would tell northerners that the stars falling on them had made them so strange.

A few years ago this motto was on the license plates for the state. And I loved having this phrase replace the "Heart of Dixie" slogan. I imagined all of these people in Alabama proudly driving around, knowing they were weird and being okay with that.

I am trying to honor this weirdness in my writing. Trying not to write characters that I think everyone would be comfortable meeting. Because those aren't the people I know, and they aren't the ones I want to live with on the page.

Writing Rhythms

I'm up to my neck in short story revisions at the moment. Which means less of the fun "I'll fix this problem later!" typing, and more "Crap, how do I fix that problem?" staring at my computer screen. I have twelve stories I'm mending at the moment, making sure that the stories have forward movement and clarity, their backs sewn up into fulfilling arcs.

There's a lot riding on these twelve little stories. They comprise my thesis for my MFA degree. When they're finished, I will have to defend them in front of a panel of university professors. My thesis and its defense will determine whether or not I will be able to graduate with my MFA degree. And I need my degree to get a job teaching composition (and hopefully someday creative writing) at the community college and/or university level.

I have also taken the "all or nothing" approach to finishing my thesis. I quit my job working for a non-profit, where I worked 50+ stressful hours per week, and am now living on my student loan. So I have to make these days, hours, minutes, and moments count. Because I am paying for them, with interest.

The problem with this is that I have a hard time stepping away from work. Even if I am not physically sitting in front of the computer, my mind is still working away at my story problems. It's difficult to turn off the "how do I fix this story?" stress level.

Recently, I tried implementing a new kind of writing rhythm into my daily writing schedule. This advice came to me from Ellen Sussman's article "A Writer's Daily Habit: Four Steps to Higher Productivity" published in the Nov/Dec 2011 issue of Poets & Writers. 


One of Sussman's suggestions is to use "the unit system" :

Each unit is one hour of time. For the first forty-five minutes of that hour, you write. You do nothing but write. You don't stop writing. Then, no matter where you are at the forty-five-minute mark, you get up from your desk. You take a fifteen-minute break and you do something that lets you think about the work but doesn't allow you to actually do the work. 

Before I read this article, I had been dividing my days into two giant groups of time - working on thesis time and rest of life time. But I wasn't ever able to really transition from one to the other. I'd dread sitting down at the keyboard, because I was stressing over my stories constantly. I would already feel like I'd been working on writing before I even opened up the Word document.

But forty-five minutes - that's a manageable amount of time. I can push myself to be actively productive for a forty-five minute stretch, if I know that I can get up and walk around at the end of it. In those fifteen minutes I do the little chores that let my mind take a break. I feed the cats, do the dishes, check the mailbox. Sometimes I dance. And when I come back to my story on the start of a new hour, I feel newly energized. I don't always have Aha! moments after those 15 minutes, but the knots in my stories are usually a little bit looser, easier to pull apart and straighten out.

Making the transition between conscious writing time, and non-actively writing time, several times a day has helped me step away from the story world more fully at the end of the day. In the evenings I still read stories and novels, observe the world around me, and do all of those other activities that help nourish writing. But I take a few hours to breathe, to tell myself that the stories are coming together. And the next day I'm rested, ready to sit down and start to work.

Even if you only have an hour a day to write, I think this is a great system to try. I know that for myself, it is easier to be productive when I know that there's a break - or a change, no matter how small - looming just over the horizon.

Tools & Talismans for 2012

 My writing goals for 2012 include a few tasks that I've been shirking on, and several new endeavors that will throw me out of my comfort zone:

• Finish my MFA thesis
• Submit these stories until they are published or I run out of suitable markets
• Learn more about writing novels
• Begin writing a novel
• Workshop the first 5,000 words of a novel and the novel outline at DeepSouthCon
• Attend at least one big convention (AWP & World Fantasy Convention are my top choices)
• Continue to workshop stories with my Clarion West classmates
• Read more & seek out new authors
• Be more involved with my local geek community: writing, sci-fi, gaming 

In order to reach these goals, I've got a few tools that I found in 2011 that I will carry into the new year:

• Book: The Productive Writer: Tips & Tools to Help You Write More, Stress Less, & Create Success by Sage Cohen - I love this book. It isn't a craft manual. There aren't essays on how to strengthen your characters or structure your story. Instead, Cohen has written a guide on how to structure your life so that you have the time to write, and gives you advice on how to focus that time. One of my favorite lines: "I have come to appreciate schedules as little maps of the possible to guide us in the deep and sometimes overwhelming waters of time."  

• Podcast: Writing Excuses - 15 mins of fun and inspiration with working authors. It's kind of like eating a quick snack with a bunch of writers at a workshop. I've been listening to an episode before I settle down to write. 

• Magazine: "The New Year's Guide to an Inspired Writing Life." Poets & Writers Magazine, Jan/ Feb 2012 Issue - I admit that I do not always read the articles in Poets & Writers, but the current issue has several articles that I have found very helpful. From revision, to making a reading list, to having a distraction-free workplace, this issue has helped me look at my daily writing tasks in a new light. "It's true that the longest distance in the universe is from the mind to the tips of your fingers" (from Jeremiah Chamberlin's article "Inspired Revision: Writing as an Act of Discovery"). 

• Online Resource: "How to Steal Like an Artist and 9 Other Things No One Told Me" by Austin Kleon - A beautiful, inspiring essay that I return to often. Mind blowing moment: "1+1 = 3" (There's an ad at the top of this page for a book version, but scroll down to read it for free.) 

• Online Image: "You just gotta fight" quote by Ira Glass - I printed this quote, taped it to the front of my notebook, and took it with me to Clarion West. A great reminder that working your way towards your best creativity takes time, so keep making things even if they don't live up to your expectations just yet.

• Writing Groups:  Setting goals means much more to me when I have people waiting on me to reach them. So in 2012 I'm going to make an effort to be more involved with my online and local writing groups. I'll have to have finished stories to show to these groups, and knowing that others will be reading/ hearing my work will encourage me to make sure that work is tight and well-written. 

As for talismans, I've got my Clarion West certificate beside my desk, reminding me that I've reached one goal, and that I can reach others.

What resources are you using to meet your writing goals this year? I'd love to hear about them. :)