1. The party was about 80 people and comprised several different families, among them, two brothers named Donner (Jacob and I forget the other one), one of whom was the “captain” of the party, giving it its name. The reason I don’t remember the name of the other Donner is that the Donners are hardly mentioned in the fictionalized Snow Mountain Passage. The story is told from the viewpoints of Jim Reed, the “real” leader of the party according to Houston’s novel, and his daughter Patty.

2. The party traveled from Illinois to California along with dozens of other wagon trains of people who were migrating West—many toward Oregon and many toward California. For a variety of reasons, the Donner party fell far behind and ended up being the only party that didn’t make it through the mountains before the snow storms hit.

3. San Francisco was called Yerba Buena until 1847.

I won’t tell you too much more, but this is a fabulous book, so if you’re looking for something to read, pick it up! And if you don’t want to read about cannibalism (unlike me, I DESPERATELY wanted to read about the cannibalism), don’t worry, it’s a very small part of the book, at the very end.

A side note: I bought this book because the author, James Houston, was at the Squaw Valley Writer’s Conference when I was there in 2007, and I had him sign it for my dad. Since then, Houston has died (last year, in April of 2009). I’m anxious to read his other books.

Coincidentally, an up-and-coming mega-author named Justin Cronin, author of The Passage, came to The Grotto for lunch this week. Cronin, who won a PEN/Hemingway award in 2002 for his novel Mary and O’Neil, decided after graduating from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and writing two literary novels that he wanted to earn a bit of money. So he sold a post-apocalyptic vampire trilogy for $3.5 million. Oh, and that’s not including the $1.5 million movie deal with Ridley Scott. I’d say that’s a bit of money. I’m not a fan of vampire novels (although I’ve never read one, so it’s not really fair to say I don’t like them), but I’ve already purchased The Passage because, from what I hear, not only is it a great story, but the writing is terrific as well (how can it not be written by a PEN/Hemingway award winner?)

So there you go. Two books. Two passages. What about you? Read any good books lately?

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?

Pros

It’s VERY easy to buy a book. It’s easier through iBooks, but it’s not difficult through Amazon either. I haven’t tried the B&N app yet. Just one click and you own it. And you’re reading. Right there in the palm of your hand.

It’s great at night. If you’re in bed and don’t want to turn the light on because a baby is sleeping or your husband is sleeping or you’re in a tent and it’s really not comfortable to read with the battery pack of a headlamp behind your head, it’s fantastic.

Full color photos! I bought a cookbook through iBooks (you can’t do this with Amazon or B&N) and it has all the same graphics and color photos that the real book does.

Cons

It’s VERY easy to buy a book. Just one click and you own it. And you can’t return it. And it’s charged to your credit card. And you can’t pass it on afterward. I bought two books that I probably shouldn’t have. One I already owned in the paperback version but wanted to be able to read at night with the lights out. The other was a cookbook I wanted to take traveling without packing it in my suitcase. I used both for about five minutes each. It’s just too easy to make impulse purchases, and $10 here, $5 there, and $15 over there add up fast.

It’s great that there are so many things the iPad can do, but the drawback is that only one person can use it at a time. When I was on a four-hour plane ride and gave my iPad to my toddler to play games and watch Kipper to keep him from screaming and kicking the seat in front of him all flight, it was a godsend. Except that I couldn’t read any of my books. Fortunately, my 10-month-old was too busy jumping on my lap to let me read anyway. Still, on the return flight, I took a paperback along.

A lot of books aren’t available through iBooks yet, so you have to get them through Amazon. Which isn’t a bad thing, but the interface isn’t as nice (no color and the page doesn’t look like a real page.)

As much as I love my iPad, I still kinda prefer reading real books. Something about the feel, something about knowing what page I’m on, something about looking at the spine to see how far along I am in the book, I just love. I’ll keep reading iBooks, but I’ll keep reading real books as well.

What about you? Do you have an iPad? How do you like the e-reader function?

Cons

Josh McHugh is the president of Attention Span Media, the social media studio behind two of the most-watched web series of all time, Dorm Life and Simon Fuller’s If I Can Dream. Josh’s experience at the intersection of technology, media and business began 14 years ago at Forbes Magazine, where he chronicled the brainiacs and billionaires behind the turn-of-the-century tech upheaval. Since 2002 he has been a contributing editor at Wired Magazine and a writer for Vanity Fair, Outside, and shelfloads of other publications. He has also worked as a copywriter for advertising juggernauts Wieden + Kennedy and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. A cable series based on his Wired story “Drug Test Cowboys,” about professional pharmaceutical trial participants, was, for a brief, heady time, in development hell at Comedy Central. Josh graduated from Yale in 1992 with a BA in English. His efforts to dunk a basketball are the subject of Dunkumentary, selected for the Short Film Corner at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.

You’ve been a print journalist for the past decade and a half. How did you decide to make the foray into online entertainment?

Short answer: a couple of years ago … oh wait, that’s the long answer. Shortish answer is that four stories I wrote for Wired—one of them a long feature that got spiked—drove me to online entertainment. I was looking to get into writing shows for TV, and found a couple things: 1. that show-biz writing was in the process of being radically fragmented by digital distribution; 2. that social technology was changing the way audiences relate to entertainment—goodbye fourth wall. I had some knowledge of what was going on there on a technical level. So I jumped in.

What were those four stories?

The first was a piece about Oscar Pistorius, a world-class South Africa sprinter who’s also a double amputee. The week the story ran, the Sunday Times of London ran a piece about Tom Hanks wanting the movie rights to Pistorius’ life. The Times piece turned out to be bogus. But that buzz, plus the help of the amazing Josh Davis, a fellow Wired writer, led to me getting represented by CAA on my next piece, about professional human guinea pigs. Drug Test Cowboys, re-imagined as a screwball comedy (think Friends meets Jackass), was held up by the WGA strike and later perished in development heck at Comedy Central.

The third and fourth stories were very technical pieces about the tactical black arts of building social networks and the emergence of identity-control technology (spiked—too geeky for Wired!). These last two, incidentally, were the key to what we’re doing now at Attention Span Media.

What is it you’re doing at Attention Span Media?

We’re plugging the audience directly into the show, using social technology to create a new kind of storytelling. One of the really magical things about attending live entertainment of whatever kind is that there’s an interplay between the audience and the entertainment. At a sports event, the home crowd can have a huge effect on the outcome of the game—like when fans unite to deliberately drown out a visiting team quarterback’s play—calling or heckle opposing players. Think about a comedy club—lots of back-and-forth between the comics and the crowd. Even a play, which is less interactive, feels like a more high-stakes experience because the audience could interrupt at any time.

So far, most of what we’ve done hasn’t quite reproduced all of that live-event intensity, but it has introduced something fairly intense that’s not possible with traditional TV: one-to-one interaction between characters and fans. With a pre-produced, scripted show like Dorm Life, the fan-character interaction happens around the core video content, but within the conceptual world of the show. And since fans are coming across the show’s episodes at lots of different times, the ongoing back-and-forth gives a perpetual freshness to the experience.

Now we’re doing something with Simon Fuller’s company, 19 Entertainment, that adds a few additional wrinkles: in addition to building out the social tech world of the show (cast members interacting with fans on FB, Twitter, MySpace), the show is live 24/7, and there are opportunities for the fans that show the most dedication to have live conversations and to form relationships with the stars.

Before we talk about your joint venture with 19 Entertainment, tell me how Dorm Life is more interactive than other TV shows. I heard in an interview that the characters have FB and Twitter accounts, and that the actors themselves are behind them. Is that the type of fan/character interaction you’re talking about?

The key is not simply to have a presence on a bunch of social platforms. Even that takes a bit of managing—for starters, you need to make sure the characters’ info and behavior is consistent across the various networks. Having the actors handle interactions with the audience is ideal, because they’re used to spending time in the characters’ skins. So when you, as a fan, send a message to your favorite character on Twitter or in a comment on Hulu, and that character replies in a consistent, believable way, you’ve just been welcomed into the world of the show.

Some network TV shows are dipping their toes in this area. Mad Men has done a great job of fleshing out the world of the show via Twitter. Or I should say their fans have done it—initially AMC (Mad Men’s network) tried to threaten fans who were tweeting as Mad Men characters, but some clever person at AMC prevailed and the company did a 180, throwing its support behind the tweetelgangers.

The Big Bang Theory (CBS) is also enjoying the efforts of some really creative and talented fans, who are tweeting as the shows characters, in character, communicating with each other and with the rest of the fanbase. Glee (Fox) does a decent job of sending out in-character tweets, but you don’t see the degree of interaction that’s there in the other two shows.

So now tell me about your joint venture with Simon Fuller’s company, 19 Entertainment.

With 19, we’re designing and running the social media environment around Simon Fuller’s new “post-reality” show, If I Can Dream, about five aspiring young artists living in Hollywood. Major differences between Dream and the reality shows you know:

—it’s running on Hulu, on its own website, and other spots on the Web—not on network TV.
—there is real-time interaction between the cast and fans, using existing social technology and some new tools we’ve designed and created for the show.
—the show is live, 24 hours a day, on this amazing website that lets you pinpoint each artist’s location inside the house, then “fly” into the room you select, giving you the choice of viewing it through any of the house’s 50-odd HD cameras.
—there’s an ongoing audition process, sort of a massive multiplayer game where auditioners and promoters rise to the top to get consideration for a spot as one of the If I Can Dream artists.

What are the new tools you’ve created for If I Can Dream that allow viewers to interact with the cast members?

1. We worked with 19 Entertainment to create a Twitter app specific to this project, but that could easily work for other real-time entertainment. The app takes tweets we filter from the incoming stream of fan questions, cleans up the punctuation, reformats them and displays them on big screens inside the house. The aspiring artists then respond to the questions live, on-camera.

2. We’ve also done a lot with the customized short-link system we created for the show: iicd.tv . Basically, any content that gets shared from the IICD site or the IICD-related accounts on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter automatically shorten URLs into custom IICD links.

Here’s one for you: http://iicd.tv/WrtrLnd

That not only makes it easier for fans to share links to IICD content on text-constrained platforms like Twitter or SMS, it also gives us data on which content is being shared and viewed the most—and on which fans are the most effective sharers.

One thing we’ve been encouraged by: raw enthusiasm for the project is just as important as “online influence” measured by number of followers, etc. That means that an IICD superfan with a relatively small number of followers who tweets about the show and the artists with real feeling can be more effective in getting a lot of other people to check it out than a fan with a very large follower base who isn’t as perceptibly enthusiastic.

3. To keep track of the entire fanbase and figure out who the superfans are, we use Attent.io, the audience-development system we’ve built. We use it to pinpoint all of the conversations related to a show, pull those conversations in and look at who is behind the conversations. The fans who are the most engaged get attention from the show in the form of replies to their comments online, Twitter follows, retweets, onscreen shoutouts or visits to the house.

Not to flog the company name too hard, but attention is the coin of the realm here. It makes for a really effective quid-pro-quo system: bring attention to the show and the show will bring attention to you.

Now that If I Can Dream has been running for a while, what are some of the
challenges you’ve faced in designing and running the social media environment for the show?

The challenge that sets IICD apart from things we’ve done in the past is the fact that it’s happening live around the clock. Like a telethon, but with hot people in their early 20s. With Dorm Life and some other projects, we’ve specialized in adding responsiveness and interactivity to scripted entertainment. But the fact that the IICD storylines are evolving from minute to minute—as the aspiring artists struggle with their careers, deal with each other and interact with fans—has caused us to develop a new skill set: real-time story
editing (19 Entertainment refers us as their “social media producers”).

Another challenge: making sure the superfans continue to feel the love from the show as the overall IICD audience grows.

Luckily, social media helps us distribute attention both broadly (FB wall posts and general tweets) and in a more targeted way (@ mentions and direct messages, video shoutouts).

For example, in addition to the daily live Twitter sessions we produce, we’ve also had cast-offs from each week’s episode of American Idol come to the house for special Twitter sessions. We handle 3 to 5 times as many tweets in the AI castoff sessions as the regular ones; which makes sense—the castoffs bring a chunk of the 15-million-person Idol audience with them. Most of these special evening sessions end up making Twitter’s top 10 “trending topics”—meaning that while they’re happening, they are among the ten
most-discussed phenomena in the world. On Twitter, that is.

But we’ve managed to keep the long-standing superfans from mutinying because we give them VIP status and involve them no matter how high the volume of activity. And as a result, a handful of people who opened Twitter accounts specifically to interact with If I Can Dream now have decent followings and online influence scores of their own.

Some of these former nobodies have developed much better online influence scores than I have, come to think of it. Excuse me, I have to go tweet now.

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.”

The Wall Street Journal has a great article about vanity press going digital.

Meg Waite Clayton has a great series of posts on how writers get started. Start with Part I and read all six!

After the New Yorker released its 20 Under 40 list (I’m honored to know three of them—Daniel Alarcón, Yiyun Li, and ZZ Packer—Ward Six released a 10 Over 80 list, including Beverly Cleary, Harper Lee, and Elmore Leonard. Check them both out!

Rachelle Gardner at Rants & Ramblings has an inspirational post for writers eager to get published. And her guest blogger, Susan DiMikele, says there is no good time to write.

JD Moyer teaches you how to get luckier, and, what a coincidence, Meg Waite Clayton’s guest blogger Julie Compton writes about luck, too!

Simon over at Constant Revision has a fabulous post on the cycle of blogging.

A friend sent me this great New York Times article on 50 Fancy Words. Thanks Herzel!

Samuel Park has a great post on why writers irrationally dislike their WIPs.

And Sierra Godfrey has an interview with New York Times bestselling author Allison Winn Scotch.

Have a great (HOT if you’re in the Bay Area) weekend!

When I was seven, I started a book of poems, all handwritten on that gray paper you get in grade school to practice your penmanship and bound by a black piece of construction paper. I wish I could find that book now, but I do remember the first poem I ever wrote, titled after my sister’s boyfriend at the time:

Bruce the Moose
Bruce the Moose
Had a rubber goose
Bruce the Moose
Just Loved Dr. Seuss
One day Bruce’s Moose
Got Loose

You’re probably asking yourself, “Wait. I thought Bruce was the Moose.” Well, it just so happens that Bruce the Moose had a pet moose.

By second grade I was winning contests. Every month we had a reading contest. We had to record how many minutes we read non-school books at home, get our parents to sign the paper, and turn it in to our teacher. I won the contest every month. I entered a creative writing contest with a story called “Christy Goes to the Olympics.” I have no memory of what that story was about, only that I wished my name were Christy and that I wanted to take gymnastics with my friends, but my mom wouldn’t let me because she thought I’d break my neck. So through my story I got to live my dreams. It came in second place after my friend J’s “How The Leopard Got Its Spots.” J is now a Hollywood producer.

Later, in middle school, I remember reading “The Most Dangerous Game” and LOVING that story. It was so gripping, so full of suspense. I wanted to write stories like that someday, to entertain. In high school I grew a bit disenchanted with reading because we had to read so many “boring” books like Grapes of Wrath and a ton of Shakespeare. I began reading the Cliffs Notes before exams. Then, I graduated and moved on my own from the Midwest to California and began devouring books again. I read everything I could get my hands on—from Sartre and Hesse to Vonnegut and Hemingway. There were so many good books out there! I couldn’t read fast enough, and spent the time I wasn’t reading browsing the shelves of bookstores.

By that time, I was living abroad—in Paris, Milan, Munich, and Tokyo—so I was constantly on the hunt for the local English-language bookstore. I hated to part with my books, so I shipped boxes home via boat once I accumulated more than I could carry. I was very lonely much of the time, and books kept me company. In them I found friends, and I felt less alone. Many days, you could find me either in the fiction aisle browsing for authors I hadn’t read or in the self-help aisle looking for guides on how to be happy. I read books like The Tao of Pooh, Seat of the Soul, and The Greatest Salesman as well as works by Anais Nin, Graham Greene, and James Baldwin. Instead of writing short stories and poems like I did when I was a kid, I wrote in journals. I wrote everything from grocery lists and appointments to rants about how much I loved or hated my life, depending on the hour of the day. Here’s a journal entry from a time when I was living in Germany and had more free time that I liked:

” I used to do everything quickly Now I take my time. I go to bed early & Get up very early. I take a long shower—washing my hair & shaving my legs each morning. Then I have a slow breakfast with toast, orange juice, sometimes meat sometimes muesli & an apple. Afterward I drink a cup of tea. Then I wash the dishes. All of this takes time. And that is my goal. To lose time.”

Eventually I got interested in creative writing again. I read Syd Field’s Screenwriter’s Workbook and started to jot down notes for a screenplay. I wrote a farce about models called “The Hanger” in which supermodels are magically teleported to Supermodel Planet after they retire, where they spend their remaining days rescuing Earthlings from fashion disasters like VIPs (visible panty lines) and stocking with runs. If I’d entered it in a contest, it probably would have won a prize for the worse screenplay ever written. I wrote a short story, too, about a Native American in Paris. I can’t remember the details, but I have a copy that I translated into French. It could probably win an award for the worst short story ever written. I had no idea how to write. I had never taken a class, and my English wasn’t good because no only had I not gone to college, but I had spent the years after graduating from high school living in non-English-speaking countries studying French, German, and Japanese. I was thinking in French, dreaming in French, and having trouble remembering even some basic English words.

But I continued to read, and I continued to write in my journals, and that kept my passion for writing alive. Once I was 26 and applying to UCLA as a junior after completing my general ed requirements at three different colleges (American University in Paris, University of Michigan and Santa Monica College), I applied to film school and didn’t get in. Someone suggested that an English major could just as likely write and direct movies, so I re-applied as an English major and was accepted. I read Beowolf and Canterbury Tales, and The Awakening and Beloved at least three times each. I was happy to discover new books (Maxine Hong Kingston, Octavia Butler), but sad not to read Faulkner or Joyce. I mastered the English class essay and got an A on every one. I wanted to be a creative writing major, but because I had transferred in and the creative writing classes had to be taken consecutively, it would have taken me an extra year to graduate. So I settled for being an English major, switching from English Lit to American Lit in my last semester to avoid having to learn Middle English. I wrote my honor’s thesis on the graphic novels “Maus” and “Paul Auster’s City of Glass.”

By the time I graduated in 1999, I had grown disenchanted with Hollywood. I didn’t have a film degree, and I had PA’d (worked as a production assistant) on a Nike commercial and hated it, and that was the path tho working in Hollywood, PA’ing. I decided I wanted to go to med school and started studying math and science to take a test to enter a one-year pre-med program at Scripps College, east of LA. Then one of my professors said to me, “What are you doing? You’re a writer” and a friend said to me, “Meeg, you’ve always wanted to write. Med school will always be there. Why don’t you give writing a chance? Give it five years, and if it doesn’t work out, then go to med school.” I decided she was right. I should give writing a chance. I decided I wanted to write for magazines, and I applied to a couple in LA. Then I met a journalist who worked for the Christian Science Monitor, and he told me if I really wanted to learn the craft of writing, I should get a job at a newspaper, where I’d be writing every day. I applied to several newspapers and got hired by the Brentwood Media Group, which published six weekly community newspapers, ie, ad rags. I worked there for two years, often staying at work past midnight to write, edit, and lay out the articles for the paper because we were so severely understaffed. I loved every minute.

But the goal of any community newspaper reporter is to work at a big daily paper like the LA Times and to get there, you need to start at a smaller daily newspaper, so I applied to papers in LA and San Francisco and got hired by the Oakland Tribune Company to work in their Fremont office writing for The Daily Argus. I did that for two years, and then I got really burned out. There was no money in journalism, no jobs to be had and no raises to earn. I was racking up credit card debt in order to live in the expensive Bay Area. If I was going to be poor, I may as well teach until 3 and write after work, I thought, rather than getting home at 8 p.m. every night. So I took the CBEST and began substitute teaching for the Oakland School District, probably the worst job I’ve ever had. My glasses were stolen one day. I came home with gum in my hair another. I was constantly calling the security guard to remove unruly students. When I told one student to stop throwing spitballs and sit down, she called me a racist (I was a white teacher in mostly all-black schools). Another called me a “White snow-ho,” which I told her was redundant. And then I applied to grad school.

The thought of spending two years reading and writing was so exciting to me. I had joined a writers group and begun writing a memoir about my years living abroad, and I hoped to use school to finish it. Two years later, I graduated with 100 pages completed and joined the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, where I rented an office and completed the first draft of my manuscript. I spent the next four years getting married, having two kids, and writing three more drafts of my manuscript, which brings me to the present. I’m now on what I hope will be the last draft of my memoir and am extremely eager to move on to other writing projects. I want to write nonfiction books, and I want to write novels. I want to continue to write book reviews, and I want to keep up my blog.

I had intended this post to be titled “Why Do You Write?” but I think my own answer to that question is apparent in my writing journey:

1. To entertain
2. To make readers feel they aren’t alone
3. To teach
4. To widen readers’ horizons, either through the story or the language itself
5. Because it’s what I love to do

What about you? How is your writing journey similar to/different from mine?

What about you? Do you have any writing rituals, favorite outfits, or props?