Facebook: Time-wasting guilty pleasure, or writer’s oasis?

Do you ever sneak onto Facebook, guilty that the tiny amount of time you linger there might have been better spent composing haikus or writing postcards?

I’m here to tell you that such guilt is unnecessary if you can view Facebook as a potential writer’s resource. Not only can you use FB without guilt, you can even feel justified in using it on a regular basis.

I’m not saying that you should go on and spend hours each day taking every FB quiz or playing every FB game that comes along. (Although, occasionally, you'll need to know such valuable information as your Gilligan's Island character.)

There are several uses I’ve found for Facebook. The first, and the most compelling for me is:

Facebook as an electronic diary

A few weeks ago, I was feeling glum that I hadn’t written a journal entry in months, not even in the pocket-size calendar I’d bought to record the occasional minutiae of daily life. (I always miss this stuff when I don’t write it down, months down the road. I find it comforting, in retrospect, to see what I was doing or thinking on a given day. Such info is also handy for writers who want to write about a real and particular day in the past.)

Then I realized I’ve been keeping an ongoing, electronic journal on FB through postings on the status line (aka the “What’s on your mind?” box). Of course, some of the time, I’ve attempted to be clever, but, more often, I’ve written down what I’m doing, much as I would in a regular journal, although, of course, more succinctly. Status lines, when taken as a cumulative whole, can reflect natural and cyclical patterns, from hot, humid days to snowed-in January afternoons.

And keeping a FB-based electronic journal doesn't require a lot of time. Most days, I go in, do my two minutes in FB to update my status and to see who/what else pops up on my Home page, and then I go off.

Here are some recent entries/comments. I’m posting them here mostly to show that none of these is especially profound. If I tried to be profound, I’d never post anything:

likes this cool, cloud-covered, humid morning.
August 14 at 9:08am

watched as a long black snake slowly slithered down the window ledge this morning.
July 30 at 4:44pm

lingering by the window, waiting for the sudden red buds on her hibiscus to bloom at any moment.
July 23 at 10:04am

is re-reading the Collected Stories of John Cheever, looking for a happy ending.
July 14 at 12:44pm

is going to D-Day beaches today
June 28

saw the sun for five minutes this morning. Oh well, at least I'm saving money on sunscreen.
May 6 at 11:24am

is watching the clouds roll by (the weather is changing here every five minutes)
April 3 at 2:04pm

spent the afternoon cleaning dead growth out of the herb garden in 70 degree weather—just 4 days after sledding in the backyard
March 7 at 7:35pm

Helpful hint:

If you decide to do this, you might want to download/keep your status lines every 2-3 months. In attempting to go back five months, I had to scroll down through screen after screen, and click on "Older Posts" at the bottom of the page. As the updates got older, FB became less cooperative, often not uploading the older posts the first one or two times I clicked on it.

OPTIONAL EXERCISES:

1. Gather up all your status lines from the last six months. Copy into a word processing program. Put in page breaks between months. Add other things to each page, whether from a paper calendar, an email or a paper journal, trying to arrange by date. Print and put in a notebook marked "Journal."

2. Gather up your status lines from 2-3 computer screens. Copy them into a word processing program. Add only a sentence between each and try to compose the opening page of a short story, or a poem.

NEXT POST: Facebook profile pages as fodder for fiction

Book of changes

The day after I wrote my last post in the DMV, I "threw" the I Ching while sitting in the car on the way to North Carolina, to ask why I haven't been able to write this summer. "Threw" is a relative term here. In the past, one would throw three pennies to determine whether the lines in the I Ching hexagram were yin or yang/broken or unbroken; and, in the distant past, one threw yarrow stalks. But I was actually just picking cards from the deck that came with my recently-purchased "The Lost Art of I Ching" set.

Perhaps I should offer a disclaimer here: I approach fortune-telling sources like the I Ching and tarot cards with a creative and open (but hopefully not gullible) mindset. I like how ideas and images can materialize where there was only a blank table before. I think such tools can help people—especially creative people—make decisions, not by any direct advice, but with whatever pops up in the subconscious as a result. If you laugh at the results because they seem ridiculous, that in itself is your answer. Such a reaction can perk up the mind to come up with less ridiculous possibilities.

It's been years since I threw the I Ching. I occasionally threw pennies in my dorm room, hoping for answers to my love life, or lack thereof, but was turned off to the I Ching a few years later when some people I knew in Santa Cruz consulted it day and night, for guidance on every action they were supposed to take. But I liked the look of this small boxed set when I saw it in the bookstore, and I had a hankering to consult something beyond my usual circle about my creative frustrations: at $7.95, it was cheaper than going to a therapist.

My card set advised me to state my question clearly and to select two cards: the first card would be to answer my question; the second would be how the answer would be transformed. Somehow, in my mind (I can't find it in the book now), I thought I was supposed to select a third card, for the question unasked, which I did.

Q. When am I going to have the time to write? What should I be doing right now about that?

Card One:

5

Xu

Needing

Bide your time. Attend to necessities.

Card Two (transformation/change):

8

Bi

Allies

Create alliances and systems of mutual support. Strengthen bonds, connections, and relationships.

Card Three (the unasked question):

17

Sui

Following

Allow attraction to guide you. Learn from all you encounter.

These results pleased me, and gave me a sense of ease about my busy, errand- and work-filled summer. I am attending to necessities, as I should be. At the same time, I realized I need to start looking for systems of mutual support, which, for me, means attending a writer's workshop and/or meeting other writers as soon as possible.

I have no itch to consult the I Ching again, anytime soon, but I'm glad it's there, in my nightstand, if I need it.

Postscript: I thought that my advice to writers to consult the I Ching for questions about creativity was going to be new and unique; and, I had planned to write a post in the near future about using the I Ching and other forms of randomness/divination (like randomly selecting pages in books) to help writers come up with story ideas. But it turns out that at least two other writers have beaten me to it. I googled "I Ching and writers" just now and found two books on this topic:

• The Writer's I Ching: Wisdom for the Creative Life, and

• The I Ching for Writers: Finding the Page Inside You

(I don't know whether these are worthwhile books or not; I'm just noting their titles.)

There is probably, also, somewhere a published story or a poem based on I Ching hexagrams or a particular I Ching reading, which I've also thought about doing. I suppose that just because it has already been written about or may have been done already, that's no reason not to do it again, or differently. I realize also that the possibility that what you're writing has already been used/discussed/approached is something all writers must face in everything they undertake, but that they're never going to write at all if they think about it too much.

The once-a-week writer, more or less

In my last post, I described feeling crazy unless I write on a regular basis. And then I realized, after I uploaded it to the cyberworld, that it was the only thing I'd written in a week.

It's been like that all summer. Not only have I not gotten to write much, but I haven't even gotten to some of the necessary/piddly stuff on my To Do list from early July. My closet is crammed with things I haven't had time to put away and I've been grabbing whatever shirts and pants are most accessible when I get dressed.

This busyness of adulthood is not something I could have imagined in the humid, lazy summers of my youth, when I could read a book a day, and lay in the grass staring at the clouds rolling by without anyone scheduling me to be somewhere, nor with any trace of guilt about needing to do something else.

Now I look at the clouds through the car window when I go somewhere, or at the pool, while watching my daughter, scanning the sky occasionally for storm clouds.

I don't know why this summer has seemed busier than summers past. I'd hate to think that it's because I spent two weeks in France at the end of June and I'm having to pay for the time lost the rest of the summer. I had editing and volunteer work to attend to, while my daughter was in camp for only a week—which meant that during those five, lovely free hours each day, when I went to the computer it was not my own words I was working on; I had to suppress the flow of thoughts that wanted to come out of me. (Even when I watch TV late at night, it is in short spurts, my mind too tired to do anything creative).

Seeing my busy-ness, my teenage son remarked a few days ago, "It really must suck to be an adult." Realizing this, he seems to be trying to make the most of what is perhaps his last unscheduled, work-free summer. I hear him typing at the computer, late at night, long after the Internet has been turned off for the evening.

I wrote this originally on a notepad, with a gel pen, while sitting at the DMV, waiting for my son to take his test to get his learner's permit. I may be the only person here glad for the wait because it's the first time in a week that I've had spare time and no excuse not to write.

(written August 6, typed into Blogger August 11)

The writer's eternal question

It's the eternal question: do I pay bills, or write a blog post? Leave the dishes in the sink, or write a journal entry? Do laundry, or start a short story?

Sometimes, I choose to ignore all the petty little things that compose a household, and then someone informs me (usually the very morning they need it, like this morning) that they don't have clean socks or clean underwear. Or someone walks into my dusty house and I can almost hear their silent tsk-tsking.

I imagine this is why there were so few female writers in the past, at least among the lower classes, because they had no one to wash their laundry or clean their dishes. Writing used to be a luxury for women; maybe it still is.

I made a joke out of this in a very small magazine, in a special issue called The Lost Poetry of Women (and other people). [The issue was published 15 years ago, so obviously this has been a recurring theme in my life].

In one piece in that issue, Mrs. Gautama Buddha complained,

Buddha

I hear you are growing fat. What else happens to a man

who sits around doing nothing all day?

In another piece, "The Annotated Shopping Lists of J.R. Smith," the housewife Jane Reed Smith's shopping lists from the 1950s were mined for the poetry she scribbled in the margins, such as:

I just know that, sometimes, the dishes be damned, I need to write, or I start to feel an underlying grumpiness that's almost like a bad taste in my mouth. If the days become weeks, I almost feel that I'm going crazy. I've been like this since I was a teenager, when I was stirred to write bad poetry and narcissistic journal entries in the quiet of my room late at night.

I finally recognize and acknowledge that I've got to express myself in written words on a regular basis–talking is never enough. Other forms of creativity can tide me over for a few days, but I always feel an urge to get back to writing, like a need to get back home, to the natural home for my thoughts.

Popularity

“Had-i-lay, did-i-lay, had-i-lay, pood-i-lay.”

These words don’t seem significant, yet nearly five million people have tuned in on youtube to see a young man utter this gibberish.

This is not the kind of video I normally seek out and I wouldn’t have known about it unless the young man in it, Brandon Hardesty, was featured on a recent cover of the Washington Post Magazine.

The same week the article came out about the popularity of Hardesty’s “Strange Faces and Noises I Can Make” video, my blog counter registered 1,200 hits. That’s 1,200 hits in 13 months; 1,200 hits for 66 posts, sometimes made with thought and great care, vs. millions of hits for one video made in a matter of minutes.

I have never assumed I can win over the eyeballs that watch videos of cute cats or naked sportscasters or goofy teenagers. The difference, of course, is between readers and audience. Reading requires thought, perhaps even a delayed gratification. Watching a video just requires a couple of minutes of your time. And it’s hard to imagine an essay going viral.

In other words, I am trying to console myself with the idea that I am seeking quality of readership vs. quantity. But it’s not entirely true. I still expected that more people would have read my blog by now—it’s been around for almost 15 months.

Yet, truth be told, I’ve done little to promote it, other than having it listed on a couple of web sites for writers’ organizations. I’d rather spend my small amount of free time each week writing it rather than advertising it. And I don’t know how to advertise it anyway, or how to help people find it other than sometimes posting links to it on my Facebook status line.

It goes to a deeper problem I’ve always faced as a writer—do I write for myself, or for an audience? I feel a deep satisfaction when I’m able to complete a story or essay/blog post; it feels like an accomplishment in and of itself. But there’s always another feeling there alongside it, a tiny discontent that can only be appeased if I know that the thing I have created has been seen.

So, I am looking for validation, no matter how happy the process of writing itself makes me. Not fame, but a recognition, a visibility. Without that validation, there’s always a little bit of melancholy, perhaps even a small amount of bitterness, in everything I write.

I don’t think my lack of popularity in high school can be blamed for this, though perhaps it feeds into it a tiny bit, like so many other slights in the whole history of my life, all these things feeding into what it is that makes me a writer. Without that urge for validity, maybe most writers wouldn’t write in the first place. Without that urge, I would write, but the things that I write would be entirely tucked in my drawers and never seen, not even here.

The recession blues, all over again

Back in 1982 and 1983, I was making my slow way out of college. I wasn’t in a rush because I couldn’t imagine what I was going to do with myself once I was officially graduated and I didn’t want to leave Santa Cruz. My undergraduate thesis (on the Fourth Book of the Aeneid) was my excuse for lingering in paradise for another year, though I ended up expending more energy on scrounging money for food and rent than I did on research or writing. The thesis itself was written in a flurry, 60 pages on a manual typewriter, typed nearly non-stop the last week of the spring semester, still not totally finished the day I stepped up to the podium on campus in my silver go-go boots and free-box black dress to receive what turned out to be only a roll of paper. The actual degree was mailed to me a few months later, after my advisers had read the thesis and awarded me honors for it.

During those two years of lingering, I worked as a sort-of governess, a housecleaner and a babysitter. I tried to do elder care, which would have garnered me an actual paycheck, but the old lady died the day after I first showed up to her door. (Being Santa Cruz, my sometimes-psychic kundalini yoga teacher unexpectedly came to her house the exact afternoon I did, without my telling him I was going there; it seems he had been her counselor at one time in her life, and he just happened to visit her that day to check on her. He took me aside and whispered to me, “Her aura is black; she will die tonight.” And she did.)

It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried to find meaningful work, or better paying work. But jobs were slim and hard to come by. Paradise had its price. For every job listing, dozens of people showed up. People who were qualified to over-analyze Beckett and Joyce were taking jobs at the campus library or in bookstores—if they were lucky. To get a job at Bookshop Santa Cruz or any of the other independent bookshops around town was a mark of prestige. More likely, those lit majors worked at the bagel bakery or restaurants or, worse, at the cannery or the chewing gum factory. But I couldn’t even get a job as a waitress. I showed up at restaurants, wet from bike rides in winter rainstorms, wearing my thrift store clothing, to receive a firm no. I hadn’t worked as a waitress for a few years, and there were many more people available who wore better clothes and had kept their restaurant resumes active. Or they had connections.

I applied to be a copywriter for a computer software company (turned down immediately when I confessed I’d never used a computer), a waitress at various cafes and restaurants, a bus boy at India Joze (I couldn’t pick up enough weight to manage it), a cook at a tofu burger restaurant. No-no-no. No one wanted me. [That was the year my friend, Chandra, and I made collage postcards that we didn't know how to sell.] At one point, I took a part-time job at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, operating a spinning, tilting ride that played an 8-track tape of Fleetwood Mac over and over, all day long, but I left it to work as a live-in babysitter for a doctor and his wife out in the woods of Soquel, for $300 a month and a small, kitchen-less cabin to live in. That job was washed away when the 1982 winter floods brought mudslides and impassable roads.

I managed to squeak by, my last few months there, until the end of the spring of 1983, but once I finished my thesis, it grew harder and harder to find reasons to stay, especially with most of my friends going on to graduate school or internships and jobs elsewhere, and a new crop of students rushing in. Not knowing what else to do with myself, I followed a boyfriend to Idaho and was surprised that I found work there as a preschool aide and a bookstore clerk (though I only made $4/hour, and had no insurance.)

Maybe it’s always a little difficult to find meaningful or well-paying jobs in a college town because there are so many other students looking for work, and maybe it was doubly difficult in Santa Cruz because it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world—redwood forests and fields of wildflowers and grasses, blue beaches below. But the recession of the early 1980s also, surely, played a part in my inability to find a job. Yet, I didn’t know this at the time. I thought that’s the way it would always be for me, never having really actively sought work before—that I was unemployable, and back to my elementary-school standing of being the last kid chosen for the team. The lesson I took from the experience was that writers/artists really don’t make money, no matter what they try to do.

I think about those desperate months every time I read a newspaper article these days that discusses the economy and references 1982 as having the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression, and thereafter. That recession had a long-lasting effect on me. Whenever I apply for a job, I never assume that I will be hired; I lack the presumption of being wanted. 

I wonder if there are young people going through similar emotions these days, especially writers and artists who are already wondering what they can do in the marketplace with their skills, maybe not wanting to be in the marketplace, anyway, except by necessity. It's hard enough being a writer anytime, but recessions are hard on creative people. It's hard to face rejection in nearly every facet of your life. So, it's especially amazing to witness the people who keep at it, who plug on, year after year, no market ready to welcome them, still somehow sure that what they are doing needs to be done, what they are writing needs to be said.

(Photo--My graduation day, Cowell College, UCSC, 1983).

Solitude vs. the beautiful, chaotic hum

I’ve just returned from being out of the country for two weeks. During that time, I didn’t write anything but a postcard to my mom, assuring her that I was still alive. I attempted to write a couple of short emails to business contacts, when I had a few stolen moments on someone’s computer, but the French keyboard was so frustrating to use that I gave up (or, rather, gqvé up) after a couple of sentences. [A blog post appeared here last week through the miracle of Blogger’s post-dating feature—I’d written it before I left on my trip and it automatically uploaded while I was gone.]

The weird thing was that I didn’t feel a desire or need to write. This is an unusual feeling for me. Since I have known how to use a pencil to shape letters and words, I’ve had a persistent urge to write my thoughts down, though in recent years that urge has been satisfied by writing weekly essays rather than the daily journal updates of my youth.

I wasn’t experiencing any kind of creative constipation, but felt like some other, more visual/experiential part of my brain had been activated. I only wanted to take photos and make short movies of Parisian scenes, and to walk and take it all in—to eat luxurious meals, feel the breeze on my face, listen to street music, smell the pastries and chocolates—without attempting to describe any of it.

Perhaps in order to write about something, a writer must step back, set herself apart from things in order to filter and describe them. But in France, especially on the streets of Paris, I wanted to be a part of the beautiful, chaotic hum. Maybe if I’d spent a few weeks there I would have grown tired of it, or would feel a need to step back and return to the deep solitude I seem to only achieve during the writing process.

Now I am back in my quieter neighborhood, looking out to a narrow forest of oak trees from my bedroom window. My cat purrs on my bed, birds are speaking urgently to their kin outside. It is calm and maybe a little dull, but somehow it is stimulating for me—or is stimulating another part of my brain that was inactive during my European adventure. Thoughts and ideas for essays I could write began pouring out of me the day after I got home, especially after this morning’s walk on the sleepy streets around my house. I am suddenly a homebody, wanting to hang around the house, eat simple salads, pull weeds in my yard, and write. I am no longer yearning for pastries and people-watching on the Metro. I want to belong right now to a large but invisible community that is quiet and shaped by words, to seek immersion in ideas not crowds. I need both things—noise/conversation and quiet/thoughts. Finding the balance is an ongoing event in this writer’s life.

(Photos by Beth Blevins)

Another one bites the dust

An alternative title for this post might be “And then there was one” because I am shutting down my other, remaining blog, Quotes About Creative Women—at least for the summer.

I started QACW because I wanted a place to hold all the quirky and moving quotes I’d read over the years, from Barbara Kingsolver talking about leaving Kentucky because she was flat-chested to Joni Mitchell talking about her grandmothers. I thought that the blog would be another way to connect with friends, whom I surely thought would want to add quotes of their own, or share their favorite women’s quotes; to sweeten the deal, I promised to link to the web pages of contributors—but, alas, I only got one submission.

I also wanted to experiment with using a blog as a database—most of the women (and the few men) I quoted are listed alphabetically using a subject term that maybe I created myself: “writers—Doe-Jane,” which Blogger indexes alphabetically (if you use commas, as in most standard cataloging, Blogger separates each word as a distinct subject term). Hey, I have an MLS, so I might as well put it to use. I found that I didn’t want to index just by last name when I posted quotes by both Alice Walker and her daughter.

But the main reason I started that other blog (along with what was once my cooking/food blog) was to make money. Yes, ha-ha, I’ve discovered that blogs don’t make money. You’re supposed to get a penny every time someone clicks on a Google ad link in your blog, and then you get a check when you reach your first $10. As you can guess, I never reached it. I also added Amazon-links to the books I quoted (not just to make money, but to promote the wonderful books I was discovering), but I made no sales. [Just for the record, I’ve never tried to make money on Writing Home, so I still have some integrity left.] 

It was fun, at least at first, to go out and find new quotes after my initial batch of quotes was posted. I used Google Books and searched for “women and creativity” and any similar terms I could think of. This led me to authors and books I never would have discovered otherwise, which I purchased or borrowed through interlibrary loan at my local library. Through this effort I first read Yvonne Vera, Susan Minot, and Judith Ortez Cofer, among others.

So, I have no regrets that I started QACW, and I hope someday (maybe in the near future) to start adding new quotes to it again, though it will probably not be on a regular basis since I don’t have easy access to a big library, nor time enough to graze lazily through it.

How are people chosen for Writing Home interviews?

If you’re looking for a theme or commonality among the people I’ve interviewed for this blog so far, it’s pretty simple—they are all people I know or have met at some point in my life. I have been happy to reconnect with writers I’ve known for brief periods in my life, as well as to provide a forum for some of my more creative and prolific friends.

For instance, I was so glad to reconnect with Barry Yeoman again, who was a colleague for a short time when I was a reporter in North Carolina in the mid-1980s. And I’ve known Kim Kupperman nearly continuously since we were the “womyn’s” co-editors at the school newspaper at UC-Santa Cruz.

The other thing about the interviews is that each has provided me with insight into how creative people produce and publish their work. A common thread I’ve noticed among them is that many say that they feel grumpy or blue unless they produce something—that they need to write or paint every day or, at least, on a regular schedule. I feel the same way, which may explain why I’m so crabby during weeks when I’m too busy with paid work or household errands to sit down and write for any significant amount of time.

I have a few more interviewees lined up for the near future. However, it is inevitable that I am going to run out of people I am personally acquainted with who could serve as interview subjects. Of course, I’d like to meet other writers, to widen my circle of writer/artist friends, and hope I will at local writers’ conferences and workshops in the next year or so. But until then, if you’re a writer who reads this blog, or if you’re someone I may have met or corresponded with at some point in the past and you’re up for an interview, free to email me at thebethblevins AT gmail DOT com (do the usual substitutions there).

The other possibility, of course, is that I will simply run out of acquaintances to interview and I’ll just let the interviews fade away—which might be OK, too, since it would be one less thing to keep me from buckling down and writing fiction and non-blog essays (no matter how bad they turn out to be.)

Dear Garrison Keillor

Dear Garrison Keillor,

Please hire new writers for Prairie Home Companion and let them breathe new life into it.

PHC is starting to feel like the wheezy old relative you dread to see coming up the walkway because he rattles on with the same spittle-infested stories every week or makes even new events sound moldy.

I never found Guy Noir charming, but I tolerated it for the first couple of seasons, figuring you’d run the gamut with it and be done. But it was introduced in 1995 and it's still on most weeks. Assuming that Guy Noir is at least partially your alter-ego, it’s depressing and awkward to hear him try to hook up with women in his role as a mediocre detective. I know it's a parody of old radio-hour detective shows, nevertheless, it feels a little—I hate to say it—Woody Allen-ish.

As for Life of the Cowboys—I continue to think the whole premise of early American cowboys juxtaposed into modern times is clever, and I wouldn’t mind hearing it occasionally as something you could revive for special occasions. But not every week, please.

There are a thousand other stories and characters that you all could be presenting instead of Guy Noir or the cowboys. Why not have a contest and let young playwrights submit their short radio plays for your ensemble to perform—do a new one every week and have listeners vote on their favorite at the end of the year. Present the winning playwright with an award during the last show of the year and/or give them a one-year writing gig or internship at PHC. Or, at least, solicit ideas for new characters or new skits from your listeners.

Also consider letting writers from a publication like The Onion contribute something once a month or even weekly—something weird and new, presented in under three minutes. Let people submit tall tales or real life stories on tape and fly in the best people to sit there and perform them—once a year or once a month.

While you’re at it, stop relying so much on sound effects to fill the time. Your sound effects people are very talented at what they do. It’s just that they shouldn’t be doing it so much of the time, or they should be doing it in the background, to add depth to the performances.

Even if you did nothing else but your brilliant,  suddenly inspired "News from Lake Wobegon" in each show, it would be enough of a contribution to any PHC. The problem is that I have usually turned the radio off these days before you get there. I miss it.

Sincerely, 

Your past and future fan, Beth Blevins