I’m humbled and amazed by Mary on so many levels and the best part is that I met her through my blog. It’s relationships like this that make me realize just how blessed I am to have this forum, to write every day, and to know people like Mary. The world needs more people like her.
Late at night after a long day and in the wee, still-dark hours of the morning, I’m often at my computer – reading, writing, and researching for one of my personal projects. They are labors of love – every bit as much labor as love. Every once in a while, the doubts creep in. I hear the hurtful comments of people who doubted, and probably still strongly doubt, that I’ll ever be able to do anything significant as a writer. That little voice of self-doubt pipes up in agreement.
When this happens, I think of the remarkable Maya Angelou who has long been one of my idols. When I was 31, first moved back to New York, and decided to work on becoming a writer, I learned that she also decided to focus on her writing in New York City when she was 31. Prior to that, she worked in the performing arts though with only limited success. The same was true for me. Her strength, determination, and work ethic kept her going, reaching, and striving. She has been a wonderful role model for me, in my writing and my life.
And with her example, I close the door on the doubts – my own and those of others – and just keep working, as hard as I can, with as much authenticity and passion as I can muster. She’s right. Nothing works unless we do, and I’m not afraid of work. I like it. I revel in it. I believe in its power. It raises me up and becomes its own reward. In those times, I realize that the only way to make my writing work is to keep going.
Here’s what’s amazing about art – we begin to create it for ourselves and it ends up being for others. One of the production designers on my play, Sing After Storms recently told me, “I feel like this play was meant to be. It’s exactly what I need in my life at exactly the right time.” These words met me like a brick wall. They made me look up and take notice. I thought I was writing and producing this play because it means something to me when actually I wrote it for so many others, some of whom I’m just meeting now and others I have yet to meet. And that feels damn good. It’s a gift that keeps on giving to everyone it touches.
Arthur Miller gave up the theater after his play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, flopped horribly on Broadway. It ran for only 4 performances in 1944. He attempted to write novels after that, and they flopped too. So he went back to the theater and several years later finished the Tony Award-winning play All My Sons, one of the most beloved, heart-wrenching, and successful in theater history. It took him 5 years to write it and was his first successful production. At the time of its debut, it was panned critically save for Brooks Atkinson’s review in the New York Times. Mr. Atkinson is often credited with rescuing the piece from failure. 2 years later, Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in 6 weeks and it won the Pulitzer.
Miller said this about watching All My Sons for the first time with an audience:
“The success of a play, especially one’s first success, is somewhat like pushing against a door which is suddenly opened from the other side. One may fall on one’s face or not, but certainly a new room is opened that was always securely shut until then. For myself, the experience was invigorating. It made it possible to dream of daring more and risking more. The audience sat in silence before the unwinding of All My Sons and gasped when they should have, and I tasted that power which is reserved, I imagine, for playwrights, which is to know that by one’s invention a mass of strangers has been publicly transfixed.”
It would have been very easy for Mr. Miller to give up writing after his early string of failures. At that point, there was no reason to believe he would ever be successful. And yet, he kept going. He kept trying as he worked menial jobs to make ends meet while remaining passionate about his craft. All he had was raw determination.
Maybe you’ve tried to do something and it wasn’t as successful as you wanted it to be even though you gave it everything you had. Maybe you’re thinking about throwing in the towel and getting a new dream. You’re in good company. At many points, Miller considered giving up. How could he not? But he didn’t. He started again. He took the second step, and it’s that step that made all the difference, for him, for us, and for the American theater. Follow that lead.
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Wise Bread is a site that celebrates living well on a budget and I’m overjoyed to announce that I’m officially a staff writer for this site that I have long loved and admired. I’ll be posting a few times a week on a wide range of topics including food, travel, technology, personal finance, design, and career. My first post “How to Spend Less on Everything in 2014” is now live. I hope you’ll check it out.
Frugal living is how I make my freelance life work. Its principles pervade how I eat, where I travel, what I do, and how I think about money. It’s about saving, spending on things that matter, and smartly using the fuel of money to fund a life we love. It’s about eliminating wasteful habits and expenditures that are draining our bank accounts and limiting our freedom. I’m excited to share the journey with you!
“This above all: To thine own self be true.” ~ Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Maybe your creative projects have taken a backseat to other parts of your life. Maybe you aren’t making the progress you want to make in the time you’d like to make it. Don’t beat yourself. And please don’t give up. People whom you will never meet and never know could gain so much benefit from your creativity. If you love the work, then keep at it. Bit by glorious bit. Here’s why:
When I say Shakespeare, what do you say? Theater. Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet. Playwright. Old Globe. All of these are probable, wonderful answers. Shakespeare made a life in the theater and he made a living in real estate. He wrote plays because he loved to write them. I was shocked to recently learn this and I want to share it with you for a very specific reason: your career does not have to define your legacy. What you do to make money and pay the bills doesn’t need to consume you. You can choose, independent of your paycheck, how the world will remember you. Your title does not determine your passion, nor does it dictate where you place your heart, loyalty, and energy. Those are choices, and only you can make them.
Shakespeare could have easily thrown himself into his real estate work and abandoned his writing altogether. He could have relegated himself to be a laborer who didn’t have time for creative pursuits. And we would all be worse off for that choice. It took a long time for him to stabilize his finances so that he could spend the majority of his time writing in his later years. Creative pursuits are like that – we do as much as we can when we can out of our sheer desire to make something that matters. If that sounds like you, don’t despair. You’re in good company; the Bard felt your pain. He kept going. So should you.
“Writing fiction can be difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.” ~ Stephen King.
I’ve started working on a few more play ideas. Writing fiction in any format is a strange and fascinating process. Over the Christmas break I finished The Playwright’s Guidebook by Stuart Spencer and he spends a good deal of time delineating between the story you want to write and the story that needs to be written. I wrestled with this concept when I was working on my play, Sing After Storms, over the summer. I kept trying to force my characters down a road and they fought me so hard that eventually I just let them do what they wanted. I stopped trying to save them from themselves. They were right and I was wrong. That was a big learning for me and it’s what makes fiction so distinct from nonfiction. There is structure to fiction but it’s so entrenched in the narrative that you can’t see it. The story builds the structure as it goes if the writer gives the characters the room they need to develop.
I’ve heard that there are writers who believe their stories come through them, as if they’re taking dictation from God in fully formed ideas. I’m not one of those people. My stories show up in fits and starts and sparks. I’ll hear sounds or envision scenes without any idea why they showed up, and they often appear at the most inopportune times – in the shower, while I’m walking Phin, at 4am when all I should be doing is sleeping. I rarely know where they’re leading. I just follow along, taking note of what’s interesting on the long and winding road that appears. To write fiction, we have to completely let go and let the story carry us wherever it’s headed.
I try to stay right there at the edge, peering over until I almost fall down into the abyss of the plot. These stories need telling and even though I don’t know why at first, I write them down as best I can. That’s what happened recently. I was working on an idea, happily plunking along when I started thinking about an entirely new character in a completely new setting. I kept trying to ignore him as I worked on my other idea and then he started invading my dreams. There he was, in the snowfall, his nephew trailing behind him. He seemed burdened, dark, and imposing. And alone. Terribly, terribly alone, even when he was with other people. I knew he was hiding something and it took some time for me to find out what it was. And then I found it, in a dream I had on the plane coming back from Florida to New York City the day after Christmas.
My eyes welled up when I learned what horrible pain he was hiding and what he would confess. It was awful and beautiful and for a split second I thought about finding a way to shut him up, to make him take it all back. But it was too late for him. And for me. The train was already pulling out of the story station and I needed to board it, to follow it to the end of the road, even though I wanted to run in the other direction. I couldn’t. He already had me in his grip. I have to take the journey with him. My curiosity is too great and I can’t let him go alone.
This wasn’t the story I wanted to tell right now but it’s the story I need to tell. I have no idea why just yet. I just know it’s there and I am the only one who can hear it. So I write it down in bits and pieces, and then do the hard work of cobbling it all together, of weaving the strings of words into one cohesive path. I feel lucky to have this job because it shows me that I really was meant to be a writer.
I write to think clearly and to stay aware and awake. Being a writer has helped me to see the world with more hope. It’s helped me excavate my own past for lessons I can carry forward into my future. It’s also given me the great good fortune to dig into stories, some known and some not so known, to give other people hope, help, and inspiration. I write to help people let go of their disappointments, to embrace their opportunities (even if they don’t readily see them), and to show people they are not alone in their experiences. I write to learn, to piece together disparate data points that lead me to new discoveries. I write to make a life and make a living that’s infused with meaning and purpose.
I don’t ever write anything unless I believe it and support it 100%. That kind of standard has a price. I have a client that wanted me to write a post about crime in Central Park. This is a perfect topic for me because I live on the park and go at least once a day with Phin. I’m very passionate about the park and I like to share my passion for the place with readers. In the past couple of months, I’ve been alarmed by the crimes reported in New York City’s parks, Central Park included. In addition to analyzing crime stats of Central Park for the piece for this client, I also wanted to include a list of safety tips, particularly geared toward tourists who visit the park for the first time.
The client wants a rewrite. They want the piece to be softer and to position the park as a very safe place as opposed to being more data and safety-oriented. They also want it filled with links back to other parts of their site that have nothing to do with crime. I won’t do the re-write and here’s why:
1.) Crime and safety are not soft subjects and they are not topics that should be sugar-coated. Balanced certainly, but being soft on crime in content development is irresponsible. Readers need to armed with the facts: Central Park is far safer than it was 20 years ago and visitors still need to keep safety top-of-mind. They shouldn’t take safety in Central Park for granted because crime is down compared to 20 years ago.
2.) I’m protecting the site from a potential PR disaster. Let’s say that a tourist reads this “softer” article on crime and is lulled into a false sense of security during their visit. If something should happen to that visitor and they say, “I read on (name of site) that Central Park is so safe and look what happened to me” the site could be held responsible. That’s not a risk I’m willing to take with someone’s safety.
3.) Link loaded pieces, under the guise of content marketing, are no better than spam. A few links are helpful. 20 links in one article looks ridiculous. Whenever I see a piece loaded with links, I don’t even read it because I assume it is no better than a paid advertisement. I think this type of piece crosses an ethical line for the sake of marketing. I’ll leave that to other people who want to write those kinds of pieces. It’s not for me.
I did publish the piece, as is, on Allvoices.com. As freelancers, we cobble together our living from a number of different sources. Every dollar counts and sometimes it can feel like we’re backed into a corner, subject to extreme editing (many times by people who are not writers, nor editors) for the benefit of paying clients and at a detriment to our own standards. It’s tough to walk away from money. It’s even more difficult to walk away from money for work I’ve already done and won’t be paid for because I refuse to compromise my principles. However, I go to bed every night with a clear conscience knowing I’ve helped a lot of people and not harmed any. And that’s much more important.
About 10 years ago, my sister, Weez, had a difficult health issue. (Don’t worry – she is completely healed, healthy, and sassy now.) In those scary days, her doctor said something that has always struck me as quite possibly the best thing that any doctor has ever said to anyone facing an illness. “I don’t fish. I don’t play golf. I am a doctor. This is my hobby. It’s all I do.” For all the talk about balance between work and life, this doctor’s maniacal focus on his work was exactly what my sister needed to hear.
Rather than building careers that we need a break from, that wear us out and deplete us to the point that a vacation is the only remedy, what if we find a way to build careers that build us up and give us energy? What if we all had careers that mattered so much to us that a separation between work and life was unnecessary, unwanted?
I know this may sound like la-la land to some people. It certainly did to me a few years ago, though now this is exactly the career I have. I wake up every day and write. What I used to do as a hobby on the side is now my focus. I write early in the morning and late into the night. I shut it down when my eyes grow tired or when Phineas lets me know it’s time for his late evening walk before he puts himself to bed, whichever comes first. I work a lot of hours, every day, and I don’t mind at all because I work at the craft that helped me build a life I love, no balancing act required.
I want you to know it’s possible. Even if you have a lot of difficulties, even if all you’ve known is difficulties, it can happen. The only reason I can say this with such confidence is because I came from very tough circumstances. Every step on this journey was tough and took a great deal of effort, and that’s okay. I wanted this enough to work hard for it. It takes planning, patience, time, and passion. I have to commit every day to this path, and it’s still not easy. It is always worth it. Every day, I wrap it up and say thank you because I know just how amazing it is to finally be right here, in this place, doing exactly what I love. I’m a writer, a working writer, exactly what I always wanted to be.
Christa Avampato 