Minus the Spine

I’m linking up with Jeff from And I’m Not Lying For Real on this fun meme: 3 Thangs I Learned the Hard Way. Of course, this is a litblog and all so I am gearing it towards that stuff. Basically because it was waaay too hard to edit down all the ridiculous (and vital!) stuff that I’ve learned in the most ridiculously hard ways. (Um like, riding drunk on a moped on a winding road of a Greek island with your two friends on the back is not a good idea.)

1. Books are awesome but they don’t make you popular.

Reading has been both education and escape; it’s made my brain stronger, faster, more empathetic, wiser, more enlightened, funnier, stranger and clearer. Books are like friends in that they make you happy and they make you sad but most importantly they open up the world for you. Books are not like friends in that with them you are (blessedly/hatefully) alone. This I learned in third grade when I started a new school and brought Beezus and Ramona out to recess with me. I sat on the stairs and read, my butt getting cold through my little plaid Catholic school jumpsuit. The two girls that I had tried to make friends with that first week came over and snidely asked what I was reading. I showed them. They called me a worm (as in, bookworm) and ran away laughing. Eventually I stopped bringing the book and played stupid games like kickball during recess (which I sucked at and always hurt my toe), and even became best friends with one of the name-calling little girls once she finally ditched her meaner friend.

2. If you’re not getting rejected then you’re not putting yourself out there.

Let’s just start by saying: I’m getting rejected. This is something that I originally heard in reference to sending your work out to be published but I think it’s pretty valid overall in life. There are those times (hmm, like this month) when I get a handful of rejection letters from literary magazines and short story contests, and yeah that sucks. But the feeling I have when I’m writing and revising and getting stuff ready to send out instead of sitting on my butt watching crappy TV is so much better than the 10 seconds it takes to read: Thank you for submitting your work, however… that it I guess it kind of makes the rejection letters a little less… reject-y. That’s so zen, right? Pass me the wheatgrass. By the way, my story was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Fall short story contest. Always the bridesmaid. *sigh*

3. Don’t write what you know because it really sucks when people don’t believe it.
One of the things I learned during my misguided year as a psych major was that the workings of the brain could sometimes be figured out and sometimes were just totally mysterious. The way that people act doesn’t always fit into the nice little model that we construct. Thus, life is stranger than fiction. Yet we like fiction to answer the unanswerables. Once I wrote a story based on something rather lewd that I had experienced and when it was workshopped everyone was like, oh that would never happen and the main character would never react that way. I couldn’t exactly yell: No, it did! And I totally reacted like that. Because, well, it was supposed to be fiction and it would be kind of weird and embarrassing to admit that that had happened to me. (Sorry for being mysterious, the explanation would just take too long.) Writing what you know isn’t a story. Using your imagination to mash up everything you have experienced, read about and heard and then extracting a single narrative thread from it is a story.

So, I’m tagging The Literate Kitten and BookBabie for this meme.