What about you? What is your process for starting a new project? Where do you begin?

For myself, I have a very vague idea of what my next book will be. First I thought it was going to be nonfiction. Then I realized that I never read nonfiction and get really bored reading nonfiction and that all I really care to read are literary novels. So then it occurred to me that maybe I need to take my nonfiction research and turn it into a novel. I like that idea! But I am SO SO far from beginning a draft. I haven’t even begun to research it let alone come up with an outline or a plot. Oy. I get anxious just thinking about the process. And I envision myself (maybe this will be a self-fulfilling prophecy) taking years to really figure out a) What it is I want to say b) How I’m going to say it (plot), and c) What style I want to say it in. Maybe if it were my full-time job I could whip off a draft in a year, but with two kids, freelance editing, blogging, and finishing up what I hope will be the last revision of my memoir, I see it taking more like 5. And in five years, Tawna Fenske, and all fast writers like her, will have whipped off another six books, two or three of which will perhaps get published.

What about you? Are you a lightning speed writer like Tawna Fenske or a pokey poke writer like me? Do you wish you could write faster than you do, or are you happy with your pace?

This year I turned 40. I hadn’t done a backflip in two years, but I knew I had to do one this year. I’d spent 24 years working up to it. I was scared, like Jane Fonda, but I did it. (As Jane says, “I did it! It was lousy, but I did it!” And then I did a front flip, which I’m terrible at. And another and another. My brother started giving me tips, and I felt like I was 10 again, in my living room, doing cartwheels and asking my dad to rate them 1 through 10. My flips aren’t great, but it was empowering to know that, at 40, I can still do them. So I returned home to California, I rented On Golden Pond, and it’s still a great movie, even with Jane Fonda’s deep tan and Farrah Fawcett hairdo. And what did I learn from this experience? That it’s really empowering to set a goal and to achieve it. If I can do a backflip at 40, I can finish my book and get it published. And so can you. Even if it takes 24 years.

Here’s a video of my lousy backflip, despite Kristen’s advice that no one over 40 who has kids should be seen in a bikini (note that this is shot from far enough away that my stretch marks, cellulite, and flappy stomach are obscured):

Backflip from Meghan Ward on Vimeo.

The sandwich method always works best: Start by saying something positive, followed by your constructive criticism, and then end with another positive comment. The reason for this? It’s important to give the writer something she can work with (”I found myself losing interest at the bottom of page 3″) without making her want to give up writing altogether (”YA fantasy novels don’t really interest me.”)

Writing groups and workshops take on different formats. Typically, a group of people (anywhere from 3 to 12) agrees to meet every week or two at which time they will critique a chosen number of works—usually two or three for a 2-3-hour meeting. The works are handed out a week beforehand (either in person or by e-mail), giving the readers a week to read (preferably twice, once straight through and once while marking up the ms) the works.

The night of the meeting, the format could go a couple of different ways.

In my former writers’ group, there were about six people, and we met every other week. We worked in a circle, taking turns giving our verbal critiques while all the other writers, including the writer being critiqued, remained silent. After everyone had spoken, the writer being critiqued could comment and/or ask questions. The reason for the writer being silent during the critique is that writers tend to get defensive about their work and want to explain why they did this or that. The point of a critique, however, is not for you to defend the choices you’ve made, it’s for you to hear the opinions of others and then decide whether or NOT to take their advice. The more experienced the writer, the better she is at distinguishing which advice to take and which not to take. A good rule is that if several people agree about something, you should probably take the advice seriously. That does NOT mean they are right (40,000 Frenchmen can’t be wrong, but five writers can be). At the end of the verbal critiques, we all handed over our written critiques, some a couple sentences written in chicken scratch and others a one- to two-page typed analysis of the plot and characters. That was left to personal choice.

In my MFA program, we had twelve people in a workshop and we met every week. Rather than work in a circle, however, everyone just jumped in when she had something to say, everyone but the writer being critiqued, who remained silent. This format allowed for back and forth discussion: “I loved the scene in chapter one when the protagonist knifed her boyfriend in the neck,” “I totally disagree, I found the violence in that scene gratuitous,” etc. Some of my professors (but unfortunately not all) required that we start with the positive aspects of the manuscript, which was great until ONE person said something negative. Then suddenly the floodgates opened and everyone pounced on the opportunity to give negative critiques. Why? Because it’s SO much easier to give negative critiques than positive ones. SO MUCH EASIER. Whether a piece is magnificent or terrible, the flaws tend to be glaring. It’s much more difficult to articulate what works about a piece than what doesn’t. SO, the minute someone says that first negative critique, it’s all over. The writer is lucky if someone throws her a positive comment at the end. Once the pack of hungry dogs have been corralled back into their den, leaving the writer to lick her wounds, written critiques are handed over, this time with a minimum one-page, preferably typed, critique. (A copy of the critique goes to the teacher and counts toward the critiquing student’s grade, so they’re usually fairly thorough.)

Whether in a group/workshop with format one or format two, it’s important to leave the writer with some positive feedback to take home. I knew one woman who, while being critiqued, marked a check for every time she heard a positive or a negative comment. Her “negative” column was four times as long as her “positive” column, and it had nothing to do with her writing. (By the way, I DON’T recommend this practice. It’s terribly destructive to your self-esteem.)

The job of a critiquer is not to decide whether the writer should give up writing, and not to tell the person what she should write. It’s not her job to REwrite any portion of the person’s work either (not even sentences or phrases). It’s simply to tell the writer what works, what doesn’t, and what are some suggestions for improving the manuscript. If a person doesn’t like the genre at all, that person has to 1) Critique the piece as objectively as possible 2) Consider moving into a writer’s group that includes only the genre she does like. For example, if everyone in your group is writing sci-fi and you’re a literary fiction writer, maybe you need to change groups. If not, you’d better learn to critique sci-fi without being biased toward the genre.

What about you? What experiences (good or bad) have you had with writers’ groups? What did you learn from those experiences?

1. Aim to write a bad book (or bad story, or bad chapter). This will eliminate your fear of writing crap. It will shut off your internal editor and allow you to just sit down and write, no matter what comes out.

2. If you’ve already written a bad book (or a so-so book, or a good book), and you’re in the revision stages, aim to make this draft just a little bit better. Don’t expect this draft to be the final draft, or a great draft, or even a much better draft. Just aim to make it a little bit better than the last draft.

3. Break your big goals into bite-sized, manageable tasks. Make them so small you will eliminate all your fear and resistance. For instance, if your goal is to write 1000 words today and you really really really would rather clean the gutters, try writing just 100 words. Still want to clean your gutters? How about 50 words, or even 25? Once you get started, you’ll find yourself writing much more than you expected.

4. Write in a journal. These could be morning pages à la Artist’s Way, or they could be typing on your computer about how sick you are of your book, how much you’d rather be outside, how you have a million things to do, how you need to make more money, etc. Just get it all out so you can move on.

5. Find the fun in writing again. Remember why you first started writing? It was fun. And reading was fun. You loved it and thought it would be much more fun to write for a living than to clean gutters. Now that you’re finding yourself applying for gutter-cleaning jobs, think back to when writing was fun. What was fun about it? Inventing bizarre stories? Getting revenge on ex-girlfriends by turning them into villains in your novel? Take a break from your WIP to write something fun. It could be a poem, a sci-fi story, a children’s story—anything. Fall in love with writing again.

6. Put your WIP aside for a while and write something else. Work on a short story for a while, or an essay. Don’t set it aside for too long, but sometimes you need a break. I did this last week. I started a new book and about half hour into it, I missed my WIP. I closed the document and went back to work on my book.

7. Take a break from writing for a while. Give yourself a chance to miss writing. Don’t set goals; there’s no point in feeling bad about yourself if you really need to take a break. Give yourself a finite amount of time—a week, a month, whatever you need. Use that time to do some things you’ve been missing out on. Take a vacation, get some exercise, cook some gourmet meals. Then get back to work.

8. Research. Spend some time researching your WIP. Gathering information is a fun and easy break from writing and will serve you when you sit down to write. But limit your time researching so that it becomes a means to get excited about writing again and not as a means to procrastinate.

9. Eavesdrop. Spend sometime sitting in cafes eavesdropping on conversations and taking notes. This is a great way to learn to create authentic dialogue and it gives you an excuse to drink tea and eat chocolate croissants.

10. Reread your WIP. I find that reading my book helps me in three ways. 1) I find myself automatically editing and before I know it, I’m working on my book again. 2) It makes me realize that my book is good and WILL sell one day. 3) It helps me stay connected to my work in a way that is resistance-free. There is NOTHING scary about reading, so I can put in a few hours on my book without much effort at all and, like I mentioned in 1), before I know it, I’m writing again.

11. Read other books. Underline/highlight when you read. When you come across great passages, fabulous descriptions, apt metaphors, take notes. Reading good books will help you to become a better writer, and it will get you excited about writing again.

12. If all else fails, check out Jerry Mundis’ methods for fighting writer’s block. He has an audio seminar and an out-of-print book that this writer raves about. I asked Sean Miller, by the way, whether he still thought Mundis’ strategies for fighting writer’s block worked now that three years have passed, and here was his response: “Three years gone, I still wholeheartedly endorse Mundis and his method. Without it, I don’t think I would have finished my doctoral thesis in a timely fashion with a minimum of stress.”

1. Sleep
2. Watching movies
3. Going on dates with my husband
4. Reading more
5. Making more money
6. Spending more time with friends
7. Cooking more
8. Exercise
9. Gardening
10. Cleaning out the basement (I really want to do that—it’s a disaster)
11. Organizing photos
12. Hiking, rock climbing, yoga
13. Shopping
14. Fun family activities

Of all the things I give up, the ones I miss the most are #4, #12, and #14. I don’t give up time with my kids. I have two days, and sometimes three, that I work, but I’m with them the other 4-5 days, and we do a million activities together. That’s important to me. They’ll only be little once, and the first years go by so fast, and a book isn’t worth missing out on that. But what I do miss is the group family activities I give up on the weekends. Every weekend since I started my $100 a week goal, my husband has watched the munchkins for one day while I stay home and write. They go to the Tilden Park steam trains, to Fairyland, to the Bay Area Discovery Museum, and I sit in a dark room staring at my laptop. But these past two weekends I took a break from my WIP, and it was really nice. We went to the museum one day with friends. We went to the San Francisco Academy of Sciences one day. We spent a day in the backyard playing in the kiddie pool and sandbox. (I played in the kiddie pool while my husband finished building the sandbox.) The problem with taking breaks is that I find it really hard to start working again. It’s like going on vacation and realizing, “Wow! Life doesn’t have to be work all the time! It can be FUN!” and not wanting to go back to work the following Monday.

So what about you? What do you sacrifice to write? And when do you take breaks to have fun?

* * *

The Beginning

I’m standing in the storefront window of Anne Taylor at the Twelve Oaks Mall in Novi, Michigan, trying not to fall asleep. A woman reaches out to touch the sleeve of the wool plaid blazer I’m wearing.

“Oh, my God, she’s real!” she yelps, when I flinch. “Betty, look! She’s real!” She takes a step back and points at me.

“Oh, that’s fabulous,” Betty says. “You can hardly tell.”

I’m freeze modeling, which means standing like a mannequin in a shop window all morning with ten-minute breaks each hour to change clothes. I was chosen because I’m a member of the Twelve Oaks Mall fashion panel, a group of high school-aged models who do fashion shows for free. Now three young girls, about twelve, are standing outside the window, pointing and giggling.

“Look, she’s falling asleep,” one says, as I struggle to stare motionless ahead. And now here comes my mom and my sister. My sister’s the one who got me into this, the one who wanted me to model. I’ve never had any interest in fashion, let alone modeling. My favorite outfit is this long blue skirt that I wear knotted on one side with a white shirt, white leggings, and white cowboy boots. I look like I walked straight out of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but it’s comfortable. My sister, however, has plans for me.

“You’re tall and skinny; you should model,” she said to me one day.

“Why would I want to model? Models are dumb.”

“Who cares? You could make a lot of money. Just do it for a while, make a ton of money, and then you can do anything you want.”

“Like how much money?”

“One of my students makes $800 a day doing Dominos pizza commercials, and she’s 17. She’s got enough money saved to go to college already.”

I hadn’t thought about how I planned to pay for college yet—I knew my Dad couldn’t afford it on his own—but $800 a day! I could buy a lot of things with $800 a day—new clothes, a car, another trip out to California to visit my brother.

One of my five brothers (I’m the youngest of eight kids) had invited me out to visit him at Stanford for spring break, and I’d fallen in love with the Bay Area. I dreamt of getting out of Michigan and moving to a place where there were palm trees, where it was sunny in December, and where it never snowed. After much badgering, my sister convinced me to get some photos taken by a photographer her student knew, and things snowballed from there.

First I was stopped by a talent scout from Elite Model Management in New York while out studying at the local library with my friends. She was a Detroit photographer and asked me if I’d had any photos taken. When I told her that I had, she asked if she could come to my house to see them. She talked to my parents and convinced them to let her take me to a scouting competition at a local mall. There I met a sort of model manager, who took me under her wing. She took me to Chicago to meet the agencies there, and they told me I was too high fashion for Chicago and that I needed to go to to New York.

She set up an appointment for me to meet John Casablancas, the owner of Elite Model Management in New York, the largest and most prestigious modeling agency in the world. John took one look at me and told me I needed a nose job. She had me do a couple of test shoots, and the photographer at one of the shoots asked me if I’d ever considered getting a nose job. That clinched it for me. If I wanted to model, I’d have to get my nose fixed. My sister had had a nose job already, so it wasn’t a foreign concept. My friend’s dad happened to be a plastic surgeon, and she took me to meet him. He said he could write it up as a deviated septum so our insurance company would pay for it. All I needed was $200 for the deductible, and I’d be picture perfect. I scheduled the surgery as though it were a routine checkup at the dentist, and then convinced my parents to give me the money. It helped that my sister was on my side.

Meanwhile, the model manager convinced my parents to sign a contract that gave her 5 percent of everything I earned for the next five years. She organized appointments for me in New York, and I went there with yet another one of my brothers, who lives upstate there. The agencies suggested I go to Europe to get some experience and to build up my portfolio. A lot of models start out in Europe because there are so many magazines there—a Vogue, an Elle and a Marie Claire for every country, plus all of their local magazines. Then I could return to New York and clean up doing catalog and advertising jobs.

But I was 16, and there was no way I was going to quit high school and move to Europe, so I gave up on modeling. I did a few local jobs—shoots for The Detroit News and the Metro Times, a fashion show for Xandra Rhodes, and some mall shows here and there, but I gave up the idea of ever making any real money, especially after I lost an auto show job for which I would have been paid $50,000 a year to travel the country extolling the wonders of the Ford Taurus, Sierra, and LTD. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Then the universe conspired to move me to California. First, a friend from school decided she was moving to LA after she graduated and encouraged me to go with her. Then I met a guy who had gone to my high school and moved to San Francisco. “LA sucks,” he said. “Move to San Francisco instead.” Then my brother in New York, after flying me there to do a milk commercial for the American Dairy Association, said, “If you want to go to California, then go. What’s stopping you?” Really? I thought. I can just … go? So I started making plans.

I got a second after-school job to save money for the move. I spent my English classes sitting at the back of the room drawing up plans—how much money I needed, when I would leave, and where I would live and work once I got there. There were details to work out, like how I was going to get to California. I didn’t own a car and didn’t have money to buy one. My parents weren’t willing to help me out because they didn’t want me to go, and I was too young to rent a car. I could have flown, but then how would I take my life’s possessions? I wasn’t going for a couple of months; I was going for good.

Then I ran into the mother of an old grade school friend and discovered that she had plans to move to California, too—to Santa Barbara. I convinced her to move to San Francisco instead, so we could share an apartment. Meanwhile, my sister-in-law got a job in LA, and my brother needed someone to drive his pickup truck cross country from Michigan. I saved money to buy a cap for the truck and had a friend teach me how to drive a stick. All this went on while I was taking the SAT and AP exams, writing college application essays (to please my parents), and acting as the vice president of my senior class.

I arrived in San Francisco on July 7, 1988, and I had a tougher time finding a job than I expected. I eventually got one selling T-shirts at a tourist shop on Fisherman’s Wharf, but I hated it. I wanted to work in a restaurant where I could eat good food and make good tips, but instead I was folding T-shirts all day. I wasn’t even allowed to operate the cash register. My money was running out fast, so I began to sell my clothes and return unused Christmas gifts for cash. Before long, I was dining on 50-cent burgers at Burger King and drinking tap water for lunch. I was broke.

I tried attending classes at City College in the Twin Peaks district of San Francisco, but coming from a private school, I couldn’t stand the way the teacher condescended to us. If we worked really hard, she said, some day we may be able to go to UC Berkeley. Of course I was going to go to Berkeley, you ninnywinny, I thought, and never returned. So there I was, broke, without a college degree, and feeling very very trapped.

“Just call that model manager woman,” my roommate said. “Go to Europe, make $5000, and then come back and go to school.”

So I called her. She set up appointments for me with the three biggest agencies in San Francisco, and all three agreed to represent me. I went with Look because it had the best reputation, and within a week they had me doing test shoots and meeting agents visiting from Paris and Milan. The agents asked me to go to Europe for the shows, whose castings were three weeks away.

“Pourquoi pas?” I said. What did I have to lose?

I stopped in Michigan on my way to Paris to see my family and put some of my things in storage. While here, I agreed to do one last job for the fashion panel, and now here I am, a real mannequin, the French word for “model.” I’m excited to go to Paris. I’ve never been abroad, but I’ve taken four years of high school French, so at least I can conjugate my verbs. I figure with my good business sense, I’ll do well. I plan to model for a year, make as much money as I can, and then apply to UC Berkeley next fall. Until then, Paris, j’arrive!

* * *

L’Arrivée

The taxi driver deposits me on rue Etienne Marcel, at the corner of the six-lane boulevard de Sebastopol. The buildings are dirty but beautiful, their windows like shiny fat women wearing white wooden shutters for jackets and black lace balconies for skirts. Tiny Peugeots and Fiats idle impatiently at red lights while I drag the brown tweed suitcases my parents gave me for Christmas across the street to number 62, the Marilyn Gauthier Agency. I step into the smallest elevator I’ve ever seen, stack my suitcases one on top of another, and squeeze in sideways beside them. I’m relieved to have made it through the airport maze with its giant glass wormholes that suspend travelers over the seven-floor terminal, but I’m worried that Marilyn won’t like me, that she’ll think I’m not pretty enough or outgoing enough, and send me home.

I stare at myself in the full-length mirror as I rattle and hum my way up to the third floor. I examine my new nose, wondering whether Marilyn will notice that I’ve had it fixed, and then pop a tiny zit that has formed beneath my left nostril. The elevator door opens out onto a hardwood floor, and I step out. I’m about to meet one of the most powerful modeling agents in the world, the person who could make the difference between a lucrative international career and a dead-end job selling T-shirts on Fisherman’s Wharf, and I can’t stop yawning, a peculiar response I have to fear.

Inside, a pale woman with thick, dark ropes of hair instructs me to wait on a black sofa beneath a photo of a buxom, almost fat, model. When no one is looking, I stand to glimpse my reflection in the glass of the photo behind me. Together we are the before-and-after photos of a cancer survivor, she healthy and smiling with florid cheeks and golden locks, and I emaciated and pale, my brittle, bleached hair shorn to an inch. I don’t understand why anyone thinks I could model. I don’t look like the girls in fashion magazines. I don’t look like a girl at all with my boyish face and cropped hair. And it’s not like I’m fashionable. I don’t know the first thing about what’s in and what’s out, who’s hot and who’s not. I sit down quickly as two buxom women, one blond and one brunette, appear in the foyer. They’re both wearing décolleté sweaters, knee-length wool skirts, and high heels. In my jeans, hightops, and baggy wool sweater that’s pilling at the sleeves, I’m sorely underdressed for this high fashion capital. I would have changed into something nicer, but I don’t have anything nicer. When the one on the right introduces herself as Marilyn, I see that she resembles the woman in the poster, except that she has dark, curly hair and a hooked nose that my plastic surgeon would have been quick to send for surgery. Her disarmingly sad eyes make me like her right away. Her assistant, Siobhan, has a pug nose and an imperious regard, but a warm smile that makes me like her, too. They look at me and exchange some words in French. I hold my breath.

“Come along, dahling,” Siobhan says in a British accent, motioning for me to follow. I exhale. I’ve passed the first test.

In the booking room, four agents, called bookers, sit around a large, round table—all dressed to kill: Kevin in a designer cowboy shirt, Anne in a fur-collared blazer, Etienne with a silk scarf around his neck, and Ulla in cat-eye glasses. A chair remains empty for Marilyn, who looks like a Balla painting in her constant flurry of motion. I’m taking everything in, memorizing their clothes, their mannerisms, and the intonation of their words. I want to be a straight-A model.

First up, my writing goals. As some of you know, four weeks ago I mailed my friend in Texas $1000 with a plan for her to mail me back $100 each week if I make my goals and to send that $100 to a charity each week I don’t. I would have eight weeks to finish the revision of my manuscript, after which she would send me the remaining $200 when I turn my ms in to my (freelance) editor. So here’s how things have been going:

The first week, I sat down with my editor on the phone and outlined specific changes I needed to make to my ms. We came up with enough work to keep me busy for two weeks. Those changes included:

1) Incorporating some changes we had discussed to chapter one
2) Writing transitions (anywhere from a couple of sentences to a page) where I have big time jumps in time (rather than simply “Eight months later …”)
3) Adding a new chapter
4) Going through old journals, talking to former models and photographers, and possibly visiting a studio to get details to help add more texture throughout the book, particularly in the new chapter.

I split those things up into two groups of goals and did them over those first two weeks. It was difficult, and I wrote right up to the last hour, but I did it. What I learned? That if I didn’t have $100 at stake, I would have continued to put off the “difficult” things I needed to do, possibly for weeks or even months. They were: writing the new chapter (because I didn’t know what to write), going through old journals (because I’ve done that before and was sure it would be a waste of time to do it again), and calling my former modeling agent (because I haven’t talked to her in 20 years, and was worried she’d wonder why the hell I was bugging her with my petty requests.) How was it doing those difficult things? The chapter was hard. I really just wrote something to make my deadline, and I’m afraid to read it now because it’s probably crap. But I did it. The journals? I did find some stuff I could use, stuff I have no recollection of finding before. And I still have a LOT more journals to read through. The agent? She was nice. She remembered me, and offered to help me out. Nothing has come of it yet, but at least she offered.

The third week, I had a book review to write. I knew that would take up most of my (two days of) writing time, so I made my book revision goal easy: ten hours on ANYTHING, didn’t matter what it was. So I spent those ten hours reading through journals and interviewing models. And I found that—wow—when I have no resistance I can get 10 hours AND a book review done in one week. And the weeks go by VERY fast. When I say no resistance, by the way, I mean that, given the choice between cleaning the toilet and writing a new chapter, I’ll take cleaning the toilet. But given the choice between cleaning the toilet and reading through journals, I’ll read through the journals. No resistance.

Week four was this week. I had a book to edit for a client, a project I’d put off all month to get my other goals done, and the only way I was going to get it done was to NOT set other goals. So my only goal this week (other than to edit the book) were to send my editor my notes and new chapter and to interview one photographer. I haven’t done either yet, but they’re both easy goals, and I’ll get them done.

So I haven’t accomplished a whole lot these past two weeks, but after having had a “break” from revising, and after discovering that I CAN get more than ten hours of work done in a week, I’m going to make my next week’s goal 15 hours and see how that goes. I have four weeks left to finish this revision and, honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to do it. I’m happy I have just four weeks, though, because I’d rather work hard and then take a break than have this drag on all summer.

Another random update was that I’m crazy swamped with work right now and therefore can’t blog as often as usual. That explains why Monday came and went without a Memoir Monday. So like Christmas in July, Memoir Monday will be coming on Wednesday this week. And I’ll be writing shorter posts for a while. Which ain’t so bad.

In other news, I may have finally found a web designer to redesign my site. I won’t hold my breath, though, because I have already had five (or was it six?) that didn’t work out. I’m excited, though, to finally revamp meghanward.com. It’s long overdue.

Lastly, a lot of people have done these alphabet memes, where they write a post each week about a topic starting with each letter of the alphabet. They are memoir posts, and I linked to one last week. I’ve been wanting to do a regular post called Paris on Less (POL for short), and it occurred to me that the alphabet meme may be a good framework. I’ll start with Anorexia (of course, this is a book about modeling) and keep going until I get to … Zoo? Somehow it feels out of place to write about modeling, Paris, and Tokyo on a writing blog, but then again, that’s what my memoir is about. And I love when other writers share their work on their blogs.

So what do you think? Anorexia anyone?

And now we return to our regularly scheduled blog.

So what about you? How do you motivated/trick/bribe yourself to get work done?