Author: Karen Odden

Here are my 100 words for this past Tuesday (based on real events):
_____
            A stupid busy Monday ahead, and I’m making my to-do list as my son Kyle breakfasts on pumpkin pie (hey, it’s a vegetable). Thirty-one tasks and counting, each of them like a mosquito, small but formidable in a swarm. Return detergent (wrong kind). Write birthday card to Claudia (overdue). Fix vacuum–
            “Mom, why doesn’t anyone prefer me?”
            I look up to find a milk moustache on my talented, funny son. His gray eyes are sober.
            “I mean, at school, I have people to hang out with, but nobody picks me first.”
            My heart plummets, and I lay down my pen.
_____

At that moment, a physical pain hollows out the soft place below my ribs, and I feel like a black chasm–bottomless and ancient and roaring with wind–is opening up in front of me.

After a deep breath or two, I come back to myself well enough to know that there’s no black chasm in my kitchen; I’m standing in front of a countertop that still has a splash of leftover sauce from lasagne last night. I also know that it’s not my son’s present situation that opens the chasm of pain and loneliness and anxiety in me, for my son is safe and loved and has friends and coaches and teachers who think he’s amazing. Not that his feelings of longing or sadness or wistfulness aren’t legitimate; clearly something going on that needs to be addressed. But I need to be careful that I don’t place an old chasm of mine in front of his young feet. 

One of the most challenging things I’ve found as a writer is examining the emotional baggage I bring with me. It is at once the mulch out of which my best, deepest characters grow and also a potential trap that doesn’t serve me well. So the fact that I was bullied beginning in fifth grade (every recess, I’d run to the swings and jump on, so Mary Frances and Renee couldn’t drag me to the mud puddle in the far corner where none of the playground monitors went), or that my parents weren’t relational and resented having to nurture me (“Damn it, Karen, why can’t you do that yourself?”), fuels a YA character who feels like no one has her back. The trap is that not being chosen then can also cause me to give the feeling of not being chosen today more power than it deserves. (I’ve gotten better at taking rejection, but for several years, it had the power to slam the brakes on my writing effort for a day … or a week … or a month.) And when I find that feeling of “wanting to be chosen” in my child, it stops me dead in my tracks until I remember that I’m the mom; I can help here, even if just by giving him a hug and letting him know that I’d choose him over and over again.

People talk about “the desire for acceptance.” But I think that phrase doesn’t reach quite deeply enough. Most of us want to be not only accepted but chosen. By our parents, by our friends, by our teachers. And as writers–let’s face it–we want to be chosen by an agent, by an editor, by readers. But for most writers, there’s rejection. We’re not picked first. Our manuscript isn’t chosen out of the slush pile the first time, by the first agent we query. And then, if we’re lucky enough to find an agent, our manuscript isn’t picked the first time by publishers. Maybe our first manuscript isn’t picked by anyone. Maybe it’s the second one that gets chosen. And then we’re published and we get our first one-star review–and eighty-nine people “LIKE” that horrible review! (This hasn’t happened to me … yet. But I know someone who did experience this, and it made me want to slap the anonymous cowardly malicious reviewer.)

Being “chosen” is a powerful desire. As a writer, I longed for years to have someone reach out to me and say, “This is amazing! I want to publish your work.” But I’m coming to realize that I have to be careful of where that desire is coming from and how it will influence me. Sometimes the best way for me to feel chosen is to do the choosing myself–to work on my novel today instead of dealing with the mosquitoes.

I have a number of amazing allies in this writing process. Today I want to talk about a special group I’ve just joined. A friend who is an editor for a journal in New York wrote to me a few weeks ago to see if I’d like to collaborate with six other writers in a new venture. We would each write 100 words on a given day of the week. The idea is that we must write exactly 100 words–no more and no less. There is no requirement other than that we be respectful of the other writers’ works, and we never share what anyone else writes with anyone outside the group. 
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My day was Tuesday … and as luck would have it, I was going first. (Scary prospect, especially as five of the women were utter strangers. Then again, does that make it easier or harder?) It just so happened that the day before, Monday, I’d gone hiking with my friend Alice, and she told me a story from her past that called up a picture in my head. So I used a bone from her story and fleshed out my invented dialog. Here are my 100 words from last week:

            From the other side of the beige curtain comes a voice, high and plaintive: “I tol’ you, I dunno what’s wrong with her. She throws up. All the time.”           
            I imagine this woman throwing up her hands as she speaks.
            “Cain’t you just run some tests, like, and I’ll come back tomorrow?”
            Another voice, determinedly civil: “I’m sorry. You cannot leave your granddaughter here by herself.”
            “Why not? She ain’t going to know the difference. She’s autistic, cain’t you see that much?” Her voice is thick with disgust.
            Furtively, I shift on the gurney and palm my daughter’s hot cheek.

100 words isn’t very many, is it?

I have to say that this exercise provides a good return on time invested–because it doesn’t take terribly long and demands that I be precise and economical; the hope is this habit will carry over into my other, longer writing as well. It requires me to ask myself which words matter most? Which words can I combine, omit, replace? What are the subtle differences in tone and texture between two words? “Gurney” instead of “hospital bed” saved one word and was perhaps more suggestive of an institution than “bed.” “Moving silently” became, in my final, “Furtively, I shift” because “furtively” felt more anxious, more secretive, and suggested a hint of the guilt that the mother feels because her daughter is ill but not alone, or autistic, or unloved. “Throw up” worked, in different ways, for both the granddaughter and the grandmother–they are linked by blood but dissimilar in circumstance. Too on-the-nose? Too “clever?” Clumsy? Perhaps. I’m not sure. 

It’s Tuesday again tomorrow. So I’m going to sign off and see if I can come up with another 100 words.