This document summarizes writing advice from a class on getting started with writing. It provides tips on being careful with advice, focusing on doing work rather than just reading about writing, creating your own opportunities, sharing your work publicly, and learning to collaborate. It emphasizes trusting your own voice and journey as a writer above following rules, and not being afraid to take risks and put imperfect work out there.
1. May 7 2014: HSSS Writing Class
Getting Started
How to Get Your Break
Artwork by Austin Kleon
Monday, May 5, 2014
2. I don’t know anything.
✤ be careful of advice. (the
curse of homeowner/builders. and
kristi birnie, https://
ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/what-s-
your-job--kristi-birnie--colourist-at-arc-
teryx-174552750.html, the skiing
lawyer judge, and jason fried https://
signalvnoise.com/posts/3124-give-it-
five-minutes )
✤ “There are two things in this world
that take no skill: 1. Spending other
people’s money, and 2. Dismissing an
idea.” Jason Fried
Monday, May 5, 2014
3. There’s lots of writing wisdom
out there.
R: Annie Dillard: http://
www.brainpickings.org/index.php/
2013/08/09/annie-dillard-on-writing/?
utm_content=bufferf1b44&utm_medium=soc
ial&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign
=buffer
L: The Holstee Manifesto.
Monday, May 5, 2014
4. be careful of it.
motivation vs procrastination
✤ Read it. Dip into it. But know that spending
too much time reading about writing, rather
than reading, or writing, is a kind of twisted
procrastination.
✤ Squamish Nation mentality re totems being
reclaimed by nature, vs our veneration for
the great white masters.
Monday, May 5, 2014
5. most of it needs a 2014 twist.
gen flux.
Austin Kleon
Monday, May 5, 2014
6. if there are any rules,
these are my top 5.
✤ 1. There is no special training. (The QC with the English degree,
James McKinnon)
✤ 2. Learn to live on nothing. Get another trade or source of income.
Keep your integrity. Don’t sell your reputation for rent.
✤ 3. Create your own internships and opportunities. (Penny, Edible
Road Trip, Porter Fox and happy marriage kickstarter.)
✤ 4. Don’t wait to be discovered. No one is coming looking for you.
✤ 5. Ask questions. Respect people’s time, consideration, stories.
(Sherpas.)
Monday, May 5, 2014
7. learn how
to pitch.
✤ what is the story?
✤ why now?
✤ why you?
✤
http://lisarichardsonbylines.com/2012/07/09/what-
editors-want-time-machines-genius-talent-and-
awesomeness/
Monday, May 5, 2014
9. trust your own curiosity/voice/
journey.
✤ Your vulnerability is
your strength. See:
Cheryl Strayed.
Monday, May 5, 2014
10. learn how to collaborate.
✤ it’s really hard.
but it makes you
employable.
✤ writing is about
ideas. not just
words and
column inches.
Monday, May 5, 2014
11. do stuff.
don’t be afraid
to suck
✤ Don’t let fear of sucking preventing you
from putting stuff out there. It’s okay to
suck. It’s necessary, liberating, useful. If you
only do things you’re good at, your life and
opportunities just get narrower and
narrower. Every learning curve always
involves sucking. If you can be at ease with
that, it really helps. In advertising, there’s a
phrase that gets bandied about a lot: if
you’re not failing, you’re not trying. I think it
gets misunderstood. I think it’s not really
about failure. It’s about pushing through the
suck. Being willing to say something stupid.
Ask a question. If you’re not defensive and
awkward, if you’re game, you’ll usually
trigger someone’s nurturing instinct. Plus,
everyone likes to share what they know.
✤ All my opportunities as a writer, I attribute
to being a climber. Who sucks.
Monday, May 5, 2014
12. share your work.
A letter to my favourite yogi.
Julia, I left something at the studio tonight after your
class, but I don’t want it back.
It’s my self-loathing.
I don’t think you’ll have to sweep it up. I suspect it
will spontaneously combust without me there to feed
it.
Yeah, you really kicked my ass tonight.
That was a tough session. The toughest part was
turning up. It’s hard coming back to yoga after two
years of no practice, especially in Whistler where
every body is sculpted and lean.
But I have known you for ten years now and I don’t
think I’ve ever been your student. So I sucked up my
trepidation and your shining face and big embrace
were a good welcome. And once I tiptoed into the
studio, I saw all those ripped bodies and perfectly cut
arms and just vowed to avoid the wall-to-wall mirrors
for the next 90 minutes.
You might be the nicest sadist I know. Steel and sugar
all rolled up in one. A core workout? Right off the bat.
I’m in over my head, here, I was thinking. Julia’s class is a
bit too advanced for me. Whistler is too advanced for me.
All these fucking hardcore intense people are too advanced,
and a little too comfortable in their semi-naked posing, for
me.
But at some point in that 90 minutes, I stopped
thinking that I wasn’t good enough, and I began to
feel this jubilation in the effort, in the pure physicality,
in the slow openings, in the sweat coming off my
forehead in actual droplets. Something shifted. And
by the time I was lying in Savasana, with more of my
body’s salt water leaking to the bamboo floor, this
time out my eyes, I almost felt light. The last time that
yoga made me cry, it was frog pose that undid me.
I’ve left some stuff in this room, I thought, thinking
about whatever it was that I left behind when I
opened my hips up that tiny little bit in frog pose.
What now?
And then I had this weird conversation with myself.
Leave your self-loathing.
Okay. Good one.
No, seriously. Leave it behind.
Okay. Yes. I will. I have. There, done.
Yesterday, I watched Brene Brown’s TED talk on
vulnerability and wholeheartedness and when she
said, “you are not perfect, but you are wired for
struggle, and you are worthy of love and belonging,”
something snagged in me. My breath in my chest. It
came back to me, tonight:
You are not perfect, but you are wired for struggle. You’re
body is not perfect but it is wired for struggle. You are
worthy. You know that you have to practice compassion
towards yourself, first, right?
Yes.
So you’re leaving it?
Yes.
No, seriously, Lis, have you left it? Or are you going to
sneak back in and pick it up, out of habit, because you’ll feel
naked without it?
I’ll leave it.
For good?
Yes.
Okay.
I think I have resolved this, composed myself, when
we roll out of savasana and into lotus, and I get ready
to OM and Namaste and wrap up the session. I think
I’ve made my peace and had a nice little moment with
myself and the tears are done, just part of the
saltwater residue of mostly sweat at my feet.
Monday, May 5, 2014
13. out loud, too.
really.
We didn’t get to start with Oms, you say, so let’s make a
sea of Oms. Let’s finish with eight. But instead of all
together, Om on your own breath, purposely, so there’s a
sea of them. It’s really pretty.
You tell us not to worry if we’ve never Omed before,
that we don’t have to, that it means many things, but
the meaning you like is connected to a discovery that
the sound made at the core of the earth is a deep
vibrational Om.
And so we Om.
I cannot explain the wave of sound that washes over
me, through me, around me. 20 voices, all different
pitches, all resonating. I feel as if the earth has
wrapped me up in a roil of sound and is humming-
thrumming to me, humming some deep ancient
multitonal song that my very cells recognise, a sound
that contains whalesong and bee-buzz and a million
other things I can’t pull out of it.
And the emotion of it shocks me. And it doesn’t stop.
The great wave of love and bliss and relief and grief
that we are making washes over me, floods through
me, bowls me over, buoys me up.
I disappear straight after class because I do not quite
know how to express all these things to you. I slip
through the long wet grass across the train tracks and
back to my car where I pull out my notebook and
write:
Dear Julia,
I left something in the corner of your studio tonight –
my self-loathing. Just want to let you know, I won’t be
coming back for it.
In that great rising sea of oms, I heard that I am
beloved of the earth.
I am not perfect, but I am wired for struggle, and I
embrace the physical pleasure of that struggle, that
my body is capable of it, and I embrace all of our
worthiness, our deep cellular wave-riding worthiness
of being loved.
✤ A counsellor friend explained to me that all our stuff,
emotions, stress, trauma, carries a charge - that goes
zipping around our bodies until discharged by action.
We’re wired, in our lizard ancient brain, to release that
charge by either fight, flight or freeze - there's primeval
versions of that and there's functional versions. And if not
released its building up in us and we need to numb it,
often through a kind of compulsion. I have always used
writing as a way to release the charge - but interestingly
it's in reading the stuff aloud that you can sometimes
discover how much charge it carried.
Monday, May 5, 2014
