filling the well

Writer Seeks Experiences

February 27, 2019 By Barbara O'Neal 27 Comments

If you’ve been reading WU for a few years, you might remember a blog I wrote called Saying No to Say Yes, about my long-held desire to visit India. Please notice the date, which was November 2015, over three years ago.

I finally made it there in January this year. It took me that long to work up the courage to go by myself, because no one wanted to go with me (one friend just couldn’t make it work). I joined a small group foodie tour, but I made my way there on my own, and spent the first two days alone in my Dehli hotel.

It was terrifying. It was exhilarating. Dehli was a slam to the senses, so insanely different from any place I’ve ever been that I reeled with it at first. On the way from the airport, I practically giggled over seeing cows ambling and tuk tuks putting and dogs trotting and brightly painted buses packed to the gills and women walking along in such ordinary ways, each wearing a sari more beautiful than the last.

Dazzling.

It was wedding season, so the air was filled with firecrackers, and one night in Jaipur we chanced upon a wedding party dancing down the street with a groom on a horse. We feasted on thalis and learned to make proper chai and…oh, so many things.

I wrote to myself on the way there, “I don’t know what I’m looking for. I don’t know what I’ll find. But I have to do this.”

My personal life has been completely insane with family crisis after family crisis the past three months, and one portion of it exploded the day I was heading to the airport. Everything was packed and I was taking a walk before calling an Uber when I heard the news.

For a long, painful moment, I wondered if I should stay home. My heart ached with the need to be present for everyone else because that’s who I am, Demeter, the nurturer (in case you never guessed).

But no. I decided, made a conscious choice, to put myself and my hunger first. It was entirely for my imagination, for the girls in the basement, for the fifteen-year-old I once was. I knew the crisis would be ongoing and I would be twelve (and a half) hours opposite my family.

In a way, it might have been a relief to claim a family emergency and stay home. By departure day, I was filled with worries of a million varieties—what if I hated it, what if it was awful, what if I hated everyone on the tour, what if, what if, what if….? [Read more…]

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Winter Rest

November 22, 2017 By Barbara O'Neal

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the earth is bedding down for a long winter’s nap. The daylight hours are short, shorter, shortest, and the nights are long and cold. Bears are hibernating deep in their caves. Deciduous trees have shed their leaves. In my garden, all life has fled underground, where energy is being stored for the next season of growth.

We humans are meant to bed down, too. If we follow the wisdom of the earth, we’ll go to bed earlier, sleep a little longer, eat good soups and soothing stews. It’s a good time to let go of hard striving, and step back to consider what is, and what might be, and what we’d like to grow in the spring.

As writers, creative beings, we must have fallow times in order to produce good work. Winter reminds us that we can’t grow all the time. What does that look like?

Winter is a good time to read. A lot. The early dark and unkind weather means we’re trapped indoors. Instead of pushing to outline a new book or write another three pages today, consider reading a new book, or a lot of new books, all kinds of things, unrelated to any project that’s brewing—or maybe all related to a new project. Remember the pleasure of going to the library and bringing home a big stack of books? I don’t know about you, but I’d bring home all kinds of things, mysteries and romances and historical sagas and whatever else caught my eye. In those days, I didn’t realize books were curated by those who pronounced them good or bad, I just read. And read. And read.

What would happen if you gave yourself permission to read all winter, the way you used to read when you were a kid? Don’t read what you think you should–read whatever you want. Every evening, in a chair and then in bed, maybe in the bathtub in between. What would that do for your nerves?

What might all that reading do for your writing?

Another thing you might consider is—seriously—getting more sleep. Maybe move up your bedtime by an hour, incrementally. See how it feels. Often, we’re staying up to fill some imagined need to cram more into the day, but usually, it’s just a lot more nothing. YouTube or Facebook (guilty) or binge-watching something. What if you just gave it up and slept instead, like a hibernating bear, giving your body and your soul some downtime? Sleep gives your brain a chance to scrub the floors, organize the bits and pieces of everything you’ve gathered, work on the sticky plot points that have been bothering you. It also gives your body a chance to repair broken points, heal some tears and take out the trash collecting in this spot or that before it turns into something serious. [Read more…]

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Good Company

October 23, 2013 By Barbara O'Neal

(Apologies for being late getting this up!)

Two weeks ago, I retreated to Lake Tahoe with a dozen other long-time writers. It was part retreat in a gorgeous setting (right on the beach, quiet thanks to the low-tourist time of year, mountains, water, even snow), and part business meeting as we wanted to meet to discuss the changes in the business and trade info and try to understand how we each fit into that shifting model. I came home with a completely edited book, a brain overflowing with ideas and thoughts and plans, and a sense of connectedness. To my fellows, to my sister-writers.

Last year, I went on a retreat like this for the first time and found it immensely nourishing. I wrote a ton, talked in depth with other like-minded writers, and slept like child. It was illuminating to realize how powerful that retreat from every day life could be, but more–how much I enjoy the company of writers. Up until last year, I’d really only spent that much time with writers at conferences, and that is an entirely different kind of world. High-powered, good clothes, better shoes, the need to be on and present and well–that part of ourselves who protect the delicate, easily-wearied-by-company writer within.

Retreats are quieter, set apart from the noise and chatter and dizzying elevator rides of a conference. In both cases, I retreated to a big, comfortable “cabin” on a lake, cheap because a bunch of us split the cost. In both cases, we agreed ahead of time to have no expectations of cooking, though we ended up eating dinners together in both, sometimes at the cabin, sometimes wandering out to a local village restaurant. There was an agreement to adhere to a dress code of pajama bottoms, pony tails, and yoga pants…all the way up to jeans, if you really had to dress. We walked and talked, we walked alone, musing over the wonders of the natural world. [Read more…]

Boundaries and Burnout

April 24, 2013 By Barbara O'Neal

I have been noticing lately that the word, “work ethic” has been coming up a lot among writers, all of whom seem to be pursuing the vast pots of wealth seemingly just on the other side of a completed manuscript. No longer do you even need a contract to hit the big time—just look! Every week another superstar explodes out of obscurity onto the top of the e-book charts, then the New York Times. Every month, another Horatio Alger, another starlet, another Big E-Publishing story.

Watched pot by Brandon Christopher Warren There are also those writers (and I am one of them) who have made a lot of fast cash on books that were out of print for ages. The potential is gigantic for new work, building on that old work. Many of us still are writing for New York (again, I am one of them) and also trying to feed the “yawning maw of the Internet beast,” as one friend of mine put it.

A lot of opportunity. A lot of possibility.

A lot of pressure, and a lot of potential for burn out.

One of the things you learn by simply staying in the publishing game for a long time is that today’s sudden superstar may or may not be writing and/or publishing three years from now. In a decade, who will we remember? Who will we still be reading? I’m startled by the big money publishers are paying out to untested writers—how can they possibly know if that writer can follow up with a second, third, fourth book? I hardly blame an author for taking a great deal, but again—it’s a lot of pressure.

I’m also astonished by the schedule some of us are setting up for ourselves—doubling the word counts every day, adding to the number of books published each year. I get it—I am doing the same thing—but in the back of my brain, I keep hearing the foghorn warning of — [Read more…]

The Post Book Crash

May 26, 2010 By Barbara O'Neal

Last month, I finished my new book, How To Bake A Perfect Life, and sent it off to my editor and agent, who are both speedy readers. By the time I polished up a couple of talks for a conference and returned home, they had turned it around, and I plunged into revisions. There’s a fairly tight schedule here (the book is out December 28), complicated by the fact that I’m traveling for nearly all of June, and we had to get everything done before I leave.

Over the past week, I’ve noticed that I’m indulging in all things wordless. I walk around my neighborhood and spy catkins hanging from an aspen tree. They’re backlit by morning sunshine, making all the tiny hairs glow. The sight seems incredible, extraordinary, and I shoot twelve pictures of them with my phone, first with the regular camera, then with a funny little app called Hipstamatic, which has brought me no end of delight. Bemused, I wander on, my brain quiet.

A few days later, the sun is out, spring is finally arriving after the long, cold winter, and I gorge on bedding plants at the local Lowe’s, which have “distressed” plants for .50, and I buy everything pink. Dianthus and dahlias and snapdragons. For hours I plant in wordlessness, soaking in the sunlight, drinking in the endless, minute variation on this single color, pale to dark to vivid. The smells of earth and lavender fill my empty heart. [Read more…]