"Don't Crash, Please": Relinquishing Control as We Trust the Full Moon to Guide Us
Hi there, kids, parents, adults, tweens, and werewolves: it’s the full moon again!
This month, before we dig into this moony rumination, I have two writing-related announcements:
I’m doing a free Webinar on “Revising and Selling a Memoir” on Monday, 2/26, from 7-8pm EST, with the Orange County Library in Orlando, Florida, on Zoom. Please feel free to register and tune in, if this is a topic that would be helpful to learn more about! I will have many places during our hour chat for folks to chime in with questions.
Also, if you are in the mood for a last-minute boost to your writing practice, I’m teaching a Flash Memoir Writing Class with the Writing Co-Lab (my first class with this wonderful teaching organization) that starts Tues 2/27 and runs until Tues 3/12, on Tuesdays from 7-9 pm EST.
Basically, next week is going to be a giant writing party — all day, all the time!
In the meantime, I have been struggling but breaking through some resistance to revise my novel, re-embedding my endnotes in the Taiwan book to prepare it for production, and attending AWP, the raucous writing conference that has shaped me a great deal as a writer over the last two decades.
Here are a few highlights:
AWP was a blast! I hung out with my writing group, moderated a panel about publishing books with big and indie publishers alike, and met some wonderful Taiwanese authors and movers and shakers through the magazine and website TaiwaneseAmerican.org. We all could relate to the experience of having to define what Taiwanese American identity is, and had an amazing Taiwanese meal to celebrate the Lunar New Year at Chewology, a Taiwanese restaurant in Kansas City. Leona, the Editor in Chief at TaiwaneseAmerican.org, wrote about our gathering here: https://www.taiwaneseamerican.org/2024/02/gathering-taiwanese-american-writers-at-awp-2024-i-wish-i-had-this-community-growing-up/
If you’re a writer who has never attended AWP but is curious about learning more, it’s the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference. I wrote about attending AWP for 10 years for the Brevity Blog, um, ahem, 7 years ago: https://brevity.wordpress.com/2017/02/14/in-search-of-lost-swag-my-decade-of-awp-conferences/
A few more highlights of the past month:
Revision is GOING!!! The novel is moving! I did get inspired, after all, but it’s a slow process, since I’m trying not to introduce more chaos into this next draft. In the past, with messy drafts, I often spent my second (or third or fourth) draft of a book or shorter piece burning things down and composing again from scratch. In this case, I’m not doing that.
I have this pretty clear sense of who my characters are and what this story is, but everything just needs to get more specific, more conflict-driven, more impactful, more REAL. The characters need to tell me who they are when they’re NOT on the page, and why they are fully formed humans and not just ideas or archetypes or gestures, and what their whole stories are. My attempt with this novel is to have every character you meet go through some kind of transformation, even if it is small, even if it is not momentous or life-changing (as I hope the transformations of the main characters will be).
There was a great AWP panel that one of my perennial favorite authors Rebecca Makkai was on, about the jobs that characters have, and it gave me some real inspiration about cracking open a character who I was having trouble seeing clearly.
So the work continues.
On that note, on to tonight’s theme: relinquishing control! Part of this past month has been getting a real dose of reality in terms of what I can and can’t achieve at this moment in my life. And while full moons are about manifesting, and drawing deep into our energies to push forward, and blossom, and let go of unhelpful energies, I am really taking this month to surrender and just do the best I can to write when I can, and be there for other moments in my life when I can.
I think of that moment in the movie E.T., when Elliott has E.T. in his bike basket, and they are biking through the woods at night, and ET helps to make the bicycle fly past the moon — and while Elliott is steering, he is now being powered by magic far beyond his grasp and understanding. And he just surrenders, and they fly over the Redwood forest, and he whispers, “Please don’t crash,” as they approach the earth again.
Sometimes, we have to relinquish control on the full moon, and let ourselves feel our way towards our next writing moments, and the next chapters of our lives. So that’s where I am today. Hope you are warm, happy, healthy, and making the most of winter. The light is returning! It’s almost spring.