The Magic of Coffee

I don't know if this is the case for most coffee drinkers, but I can remember the exact week when coffee became a centerpiece of my life.  More importantly, it became a centerpiece for my writing life.
I was living in Ireland at the time, going to grad school for writing, and one of my classmates and I decided to take a trip to Venice for part of our spring break.  Venice, if you haven't been, is an incredible city -- everything there is old and winding and colorful and haunted.  Just put your camera up to your eye and, no matter where you are in the city, you have an instant post card photograph.  And when Kate and I went on our trip, it was also deserted.

If this doesn't make you want a hot cappuccino and a good book, I don't know what will.

Sadly for her, my friend came down with one of the worst sinus infections I've had the misfortune to see, and so I spent much of my time in Venice wandering the narrow, twisting sidewalks alone.  Which sounds bad, but really, it was kind of a magical experience.  I had plenty of time philosophize and take photos and brood.  And one of the things I did, being so inspired by the romantic nature of the lonely city, was write.
What I wrote, for the most part, was not particularly good, I'm afraid.  Some core scenes of my novel did come to fruition there, but so did a lot (I mean a lot) of really, really, really bad poetry.  But that caffeine is no joke, and when you're shaking with that first coffee euphoria, you write whatever comes into your head because you haven't learned to filter it yet.
I felt like the greatest writer that ever lived.  It was magical.

I'm a genius!

Once home, I was converted.  Coffee was a way of life for me, and the coffee shops I frequented in Dublin are among the places I miss the most.  I imbibed the juice of the enchanted bean with the fervor of a religious zealot.  And the pages and pages I filled with enthusiastic scrawl while is sat along the canals of Venice, sipping an espresso -- those felt to me like a gift from another plane.  I had met the gods, and they were highly caffeinated. All those people shaking in their pews in small, rural churches, the ones bowing down again and again and again at the Wailing Wall, the whirling dervishes spinning around and around and around in their white skirts -- I felt something like that.

The blogger in her natural habitat . . . a coffee cup.

And yes, it sounds dismissive of those people, or like a severe exaggeration of my caffeinated inspiration, but I assure you, I mean every word.  And yes, it was because I drank way too much of the stuff and it had made me high as a kite, and no, I don't generally get quitethat much out of coffee these days, but maybe you can see why I love it so much to this day, why I rarely go a day without at least a couple cups.
This very minute, if fact, I am sipping coffee from a favorite mug.
But don't take my word for it -- history is full of famous writers, whiling away the hours in tiny cafes.  Everyone from Ernest Hemingway to J.K. Rowling spent their early days bouncing from cafe to cafe, mingling with other writers or scribbling out their seminal works.  Ever walk into a coffee shop and notice that everyone there is on their computer?  Maybe they're onto something.

Good ole Ernie. The coffee may be Irish, but the cafe is Parisian.

Here's the science-y explanation:  The caffeine in coffee binds to the adenosine receptors in your brain, which are responsible for making you feel sleepy.  When the caffeine hits, BAM!  The adenosine can't get to your nerves and you feel more alert.  Caffeine also blocks reabsorption of dopamine in your brain (dopamine is a neurotransmitter that activates the pleasure centers in your brain), which is part of the reason you get that euphoric high when you drink a cup. You can find more information on the science of caffeine here.

Coffee sends your neurons to a rave!

But there's more!  Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, talks in his book about how relaxation help encourage creativity in our brains by turning down the volume on a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  This part of the brain is basically responsible for impulse control, which is terrible for the creative mind because it gets you second-guessing yourself and stops your brain from allowing you to follow your thoughts wherever they take you.  While I'll admit that caffeine is not physiologically a relaxing substance (it's actually a stimulant), the coffee shop is a very relaxing place.  Think about it: people gathered around to chat or read, enjoying pastries and sipping warm drinks.  It's all very calm.  The ambient noise of keys clicking and hushed voices, pages turning.  Strangers stop to chat with each other.  Your guard goes down in a place like that.  So what happens?  That damned dorsolateral prefrontal cortex takes a nap while the rest of your brain is just waking up, stretching, and getting down to business.

Eureka! We have found creative stimulation, and it is inside that mug!

One more factor, I think, contributes to the writer-in-a-cafe phenomenon, and that is the starving artist quotient.  All artists, I think, benefit from a change of scenery, and coffee shops allow us to got to a place that is not our home, where we feel comfortable, and where we can stay warm, sheltered, with adequate facilities, for hours and hours at a time without spending a ton of money.  While I would never suggest that a person stay all day in a place and only buy one cup of coffee (it's just rude, people), you can buy yourself a cup every hour or two and stay perfectly within the bounds of polite society, get your work done, mingle with other artists (because, who are we kidding, that's who else is there all day) and not break the bank.
One of the greatest things I got out of my coffee addiction while I was in Dublin was the Fellowship of the Bean.  This was a group composed of three of my classmates and I who would walk down to the local Starbuck's (don't judge--it was right on the bay, and the closest good, local-owned coffee shop was a twenty-minute bus ride away) every Sunday after our hangovers wore off and stay there until they closed the place down.  We're talking, five or six hours sometimes.  It was lovely.  Just four friends writing and talking and reading and pumping black, beautiful coffee goodness into their bodies.  If I could've taken it intravenously, I would have.  Those were some of the most productive days of my life, and spent with people who are some of my best friends to this day, despite the miles between us.

The Fellowship of the Bean.

This is what coffee has given to me.  And for that, I am ever grateful, and ever reverent (say that three times fast--if you're caffeinated).

*NOTE: I am in the process of moving blog to Wordpress.  I plan to have phased this site out by the end of May, so if you want to continue subscribing to Rachel Writes A Book, mosey on over here and subscribe.  Thanks!*

Go Ahead. Make My Day.

When I tell people I'm a writer, there are three questions they usually ask, which I will list in order from least annoying to most:
1) What do you write?

I write words, y'all.

This question is generally not very annoying, except for the fact that I have to answer it all the time.  They're being polite, making small talk, and they probably won't push the question much further because, who are we kidding, they're more interested in telling me about themselves.  I tell them I write fiction and that's usually the end of it.  They nod and tell me that's nice and move on.  Where it really gets annoying is when they push the subject, which leads me to the second most annoying question:
2) What's your book about?

So, how do you like my book?

I know that, as a self-employed person who should be constantly trying to promote their work, I should take this question as an opportunity to try and sell the book.  But this doesn't really work for a few reasons.
First, I am not a good businesswoman.  I would venture to say that most writers are not naturally geared toward business; that's what makes them good artists.  It's a big struggle for the artistically inclined to see their work as a product to sell rather than as the result of blood, sweat, and tears.  That's why we have agents and managers and so on (if you can get them) -- to help us hopeless artists with the business-y side of writing.  While I'm trying to train myself to be more of a capitalist when it comes to my work, 90% of the time, I don't see the point.
Because, again, most people are not really interested in helping you further your career or giving your novel to that guy they know at Random House -- they're just trying to make conversation.  And since I am now working on other projects, I'm kind of over telling people all about my first novel.  I think this must be sort of what child actors or one-hit wonders go through every day; talking about that one thing they did a long time ago.  Yes, I am proud of my novel.  No, I don't want to tell you all about it.  And you probably don't want to hear it, either.
Note: If you do want to give my novel to that guy you know at Random House, I will tell you about my novel until you tape my mouth shut.
3) Are you published?

I'd like to tell you about my failure.

Any questions about my published status automatically make me want to hit the asker.  This is mostly a result of my frustration with not being published (except for that one short story years ago), but it's also just a rude question.  It's like asking a childless person why they don't have kids or asking a stranger how much money they make.  It's a sore subject, I'd venture to say, for most writers.
And the ones for whom it is not a sore subject probably are published, in which case, trust me, you won't have to ask them whether they've got a book out there that you can buy.  It'll be the first thing they say to you on the subject.
There's also the fact that this question suggests that the writer's worth is being judged based on whether or not they've been published.  Not only is this unfair, but it makes them feel like a failure when you bring up the subject.  You are reminding them that nobody has valued their work enough yet to print and distribute them, and you are bringing up all their insecurities about their career.
I know this stuff probably makes me look cranky, but I don't care.  I bring it up here because I'm not exactly sure why these questions irk me so much.

I'll be nicer if you'll be less annoying.

Perhaps it's because, to me, writing is very personal.  I don't like making casual small talk about it in the same way I don't talk to strangers about my sex life or my political views or my spiritual beliefs. It just feels too intimate, to close to who I am at the core.
Maybe this is unprofessional; I don't know.  Do stock brokers hate talking Wall Street with people who don't invest?  Do veterinarians want to talk mange with the checkout lady at the supermarket?  Maybe I don't like talking about writing with strangers because most strangers don't know the first thing about writing.  They don't read, they don't write, and they don't really want to.

When you finish reading, we'll talk about it...backwards.

I have no problem talking about writing with my friends (although I'm sure they wish I would stop sometimes).  And I have already talked about my love of talking books with strangers who know about books -- it's one of the highlights of my day when it happens.  Does this make me a snob?  Probably.  And I know I could avoid people asking me these questions by neglecting to mention my being a writer at all.  But wouldn't that be a betrayal of who I am?  A denial of my dreams?  And shouldn't I allow for the possibility that these well-meaning strangers do have something valid to offer on the subject?
Because, as annoying as the questions can be, they do open up a whole world of discussion that might very well make my day a good one.  If I can just bring myself to give people a chance.

*NOTE: I am in the process of moving blog to Wordpress.  I plan to have phased this site out by the end of May, so if you want to continue subscribing to Rachel Writes A Book, mosey on over here and subscribe.  Thanks!*

The Years of Busting Ass

A few months back, I was feeling pretty rotten.  I was frustrated with the lack of interest in my novel, worried that I had chosen the wrong path when I decided to focus on being a writer, and starting to wonder if I had what I takes to be successful in the publishing industry.  I spent three years of my life working on something that perhaps no one would ever read, and I was spending a lot of time asking myself what the point of all that hard work had been.

Invest in a duster so at least your book appears to be getting some interest.

Then I heard a story on "To The Best of Our Knowledge" (which is an excellent radio show/podcast from Wisconsin Public Radio), and it put all my frustrations into perspective.  The story was an interview with psychologist Carl Dweck, who had recently published a book called "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success."  You can listen to the story itself here, if you're interested.

Image of the book in question, folks.

The gist of Dweck's argument is that people respond to failure in two different ways:  some people fall apart when they fail and some people learn from their failures.  To the people who fall apart, success and failure are measures of worth: failure means they are not intelligent, not talented, and that they never will be.  They avoid challenges for the fear of being proven to be unworthy (or incapable) of success.   But the people who learn from their failures seem to look at them as obstacles they have overcome, as lessons they have learned.  These people seem to thrive, almost, on failure, to become energized by it.  They understand that abilities, talents, and intelligence are not attributes a person is born with, but attributes that develop over time and with practice.  Talent is less like the bones in your arm, which are more or less always going to be the same (nutrition aside) and more like the muscles, which get bigger and stronger the more they are used.

Better start working on those brain muscles.

In some ways, this argument fits quite nicely with my Dorothy Parker apply-the-ass-to-the-chair philosophy; you will only ever get there if you work hard to get there.  But what happens if you work hard and you don't get there?  It feels sometimes like a hamster on a wheel -- the hamster might think it's going somewhere, but really it's just running in place.  Dweck argues that we need to look at our failures as a chance to learn something about what we're going for.  Why didn't it work?  What did we learn from the process?
We spend too much time focusing on where we want to end up (in my case, well-respected and widely-read novelist) and not enough time thinking about the process of getting there.  Even when we look at people we admire, we don't see the younger version of those people who stumbled along the way to their success.  We don't look at their struggles, their failures, and say, "Look how persistent they were!  Look how hard they worked!"  We say, "That person is a genius."  Or worse, "That person was destined for greatness."

Isn't brilliance fun?

Nobody is destined for greatness.  Some people get very, very lucky, but most people who wind up great bust their asses to get there.  Their work, their contributions to our society, aren't just some magical extension of their natural genius, but the result of years and years of passionate, bone-grinding, sweat-flooded hard work.  And sure, some people are naturally smarter and more talented than others.  But as a writing teacher I once had said, "If you give me a student with natural talent and a student who works hard and ask me which will be a best-seller, I'd bet on the hard worker every time."
The fact that so many people envision their heroes as geniuses who burst, fully developed from the skulls of gods, makes me really value writers who talk about their failures.  I love to hear stories about now-successful writers who struggled in their formative years, not because I'm a glutton for pain (my love of horror films notwithstanding), but because it makes me feel like the success that I want for myself is not so out of reach.  Stephen King famously wrote about his collection of rejection slips, thousands of them, from the time that he was a child until he published "Carrie."  And most writers have heard, at this point, about Kathryn Stockett's 60 rejections for "The Help."  The fact that these writers learned from their rejections, that they kept evolving and persisting even when everybody around them told them to give up is inspiring.

"I may have been born fully formed, but my brain wasn't."

I can look at my novel and say, yes, I hope it does better, but I can also learn from the things that I have done wrong.  I have lots of feedback from all those agents who rejected my work, and if I stop looking at those rejections as just letters that spell N-O, and start looking at them as tools for learning the business, I have already gained something.  And the years I spent tripping over words and trying to find the rhythm required for writing a novel taught me what kinds of things I need to do to motivate myself to write, what kind systematic approach I should take to writing a piece of work that long, and how to approach agents when I'm ready to publish -- those years were prime learning years!
In the end, who knows where my writing will end up?  But I can't know that until the end comes.  I have years and years and years to go, and right now the years ahead are for busting ass and learning how to get back up.  And that's okay by me.

Daydream Believer

I did not win the lottery, I am sorry to say.  Normally, this would not have surprised me, since up until Tuesday I had never even purchased a lottery ticket before.  But when the jackpot hits $400 million and you have a dream the day before that you are filthy rich and you start watching a movie wherein the hero wins the lottery and a friend of yours randomly walks into your kitchen and hands you a four-leaf clover, you think, "What the hell? I could win this."

I may have gone a bit overboard.

You sit around waiting for the drawing, commiserating with our best friend as she smokes a cigarette and you prance around the back yard looking for dandelions to wish on (I do apologize to my landlords for that).  "What would we do if we won?" you ask each other. You wouldn't tell anyone, so you could keep your friendships and families intact, you'd keep your crappy job and even crappier apartment, but you'd pay off your student loans and donate money to charity and, every now and then, buy a couple bottles of Dom just so you can spray the foam all over the place.

This could be you.

It was definitely better before the drawing.  When my friend Chrissie and I were sitting around musing about all the freedom we would have, all the worries that would disappear, and the secret rich girl parties we would have together, wearing thousand-dollar gowns and flambée-ing caviar just because we could.  I was so excited.  Just for a few minutes, it was possible that all my biggest problems could just vanish, in a snap, just like that.

Of course, I didn't get anywhere near a winning combination of numbers that night, nor did I get one last night, even though I bought more tickets in a desperate attempt to hold onto the dream.  The thing is, I can see now why people go so lottery crazy.  Why they pool thousands of dollars for a chance at the freedom that being filthy-freaking-rich can afford you.  It's not that they really believe they will win -- at least I like to think so.  It's that they get caught up in the dream, in the  fantasy.  They imagine how they will react when they see that, yes, they have the winning numbers, checking and double-checking, tearing up and breathing fast turning to jumping up and down and screaming, to (is it possible?) self-urination as the reality sinks in.

That's not water, folks.

My consolation is that I can write about this dream, and in writing about it, I can make it real.  And the fact that so many people get to wrapped up in the feverish pursuit of lottery pipe dreams makes me think that maybe there's a little bit of writer in all of us, that everybody has a piece of themselves that is forever up in the clouds, wishing, dreaming, believing that it could happen. And that makes me feel a whole lot better about the world.  Is it better than a lottery win?  Probably not.  Is it better than nothing? Hell, yes.

Daydreaming makes you big and strong. In your head.

To Lie Or Not To Lie?

Ever wish you could kill your mental pencil?

A few months ago I waited on some current students from my old high school.  Those of you who know me know that I went to an arts high school, and therefore spent a lot of my teenage years dancing on cafeteria tables and breaking into song in the hallways.  Because of my arts education, I went into adult life feeling pretty optimistic about my future as a writer, like all the true artist needed to get along in the world was heart and stick-to-it-iveness.  Worst case scenario, I'd live in a crappy apartment and subsist off beans and rice for a few years while I wrote my masterpiece.  It was a time-honored tradition; hell, it would be fun!

Well, folks, the only people who think crappy apartments and a beans 'n' rice diet are fun are people who have only lived in nice suburban houses and had their mothers cook for them.  The life of a starving artist sucks.  Hard.

This meal is not even worth writing about.

I hate to admit it, but I have reached a point in my so-called career where I feel the strong desire to burn everything I've ever written, call it quits, and go to work in advertising.  At least I could afford to go on vacation.  Not only is writing harder than I thought, but the rewards are slimmer.  You work for years on a piece, writing, editing, re-writing, re-editing, and when it's finished, you can't even get your friends to read it.

It is not fun, people.

Not to mention the fact that I went into tremendous debt to hone my skills as a writer, thinking that, at the very worst, I would be able to get a job as a copy editor somewhere, or a reader of slush at some magazine.  Little did I know that those jobs do not exist, and if they do, they don't pay!  And if they pay, they are in New York, where the pay is not even enough for a shitty apartment and a big bag of rice!

Art is freedom! Art is joy! Art is living!
Bollox.

So.  When these bright-eyed, hopeful teenagers came into the restaurant where I (still) make all of my money and asked me what it's like to be a real writer, to really Go For It, I told them, "Look around."
What could I have meant?  They looked at each other, perplexed.

"Kids," I told them, "Life as an artist is hard as shit.  You better be damned sure that you can't do anything else with your life, because if you think you can be happy doing any other job, that's what you need to do."

They didn't say anything to me, just shrank into their over-sized suit jackets and their vintage shoes, brushed a lone tear from each of their painted faces and ate their pizza in silence.

As I walked away, I wondered if I made the right call, being honest with them.  Didn't they have a right to their youthful naivete?  Wasn't it their turn to boogie down the street with abandon, to tell themselves that they would, in time, Make It?  Would I have benefited from the voice of reason telling me to think long and hard about the life I was really choosing?

Nope.  Not a teeny, tiny bit.  While I may have thought twice about majoring in Film in college, I would pretty much have done the same thing as I did.

For two reasons:

1) Artists don't like being told things.  They need to discover things for themselves.  That's part of what gives them the crazy life experiences that allow them to create interesting art.

2) I really can't think of another job that would make me happy.  Or, perhaps, given current circumstances, I should say that I can't think of another job that would make me feel fulfilled the way that finishing a story does.  There is nothing in the world that I want to do more, or would choose to do over writing.

I meant it when I told those kids not to go into art unless it was the only thing you could imagine doing.  Because at the end of the day, it's too hard to keep going if it's not truly what you need to do.  The people who just kind of like to write will never, ever outlast the people who need to write.  And if you aren't sure that you need to do it, then don't waste your time and talent starving in front of a blank screen.  Writing will always be there for a hobby.

As for me, I'm stuck being in love with words.

Damn it.