A while back I wrote a post called Saying No and Saying Yes, about how hard it is to turn down invitations, whether they’re social or professional.

I turned another one down this past week. It made me think again about why it’s so hard. I wrote then:

An invitation suggests that the sender values you and/or your work, and for that reason alone, it can be hard to turn one down. And when you say yes, you almost always get additional positive feedback: so glad you’ll be able to participate! can’t wait to see you! looking forward to your contribution! Etc.

When you consider turning down an invitation, it’s hard not to worry about the implications of the refusal. If it’s a professional request (especially one with $$ attached) you might face the traditional freelancer’s fear that if you turn down work, you won’t get offered more work ever again. If it’s a social invitation, you might worry about giving unintended personal offense by your absence. But if you keep saying yes to new things, you necessarily limit the energy and time you have left for everything that’s already a part of your life.

While I agree with what I wrote in 2009, I also think I left something out of my analysis. We’re trained — and by ‘we’ here I somewhat mean everybody, but I especially mean the female-socialized subset of everybody — that we should do useful things with our time.

How do you know if a thing you’re doing is useful?

Well, we’re also trained to seek external validation.

So if someone else says they want you to do a thing — and that they want YOU, specifically, to do it, because of your unique talents — it is difficult not to decide that yes, absolutely, you should do that thing, right away. Because you’re needed!

In other words: saying no can feel really selfish. And arrogant. Really? You think the manuscript you’re working on is so important that you can’t (fill in the blank) for this incredibly worthy (person/organization)? Who do you think you are? 

And if you’ve spent a lot of time getting that external validation by doing things other people want you to do, it can also feel scary to say no. Because saying no means turning away from something you know you’ll be rewarded for in favor of doing something that may not feel rewarding for a long time.

So how do you do it? In the case of my most recent refusal, recognizing two things helped:

• how much time I’d already contributed to the entity that wanted more
• how long I’d been saying I wanted more writing time, but then saying yes to doing things that would mean I’d have less

Semi-related: Katie Lane has an excellent post on how to say no to doing things for free: “How to Not Die From Exposure“, and Mette Harrison has wise words about how to define success as a writer (hint: not by what other people think).

But as hard as it is to do, saying no isn’t the point.

You say no in order to grant yourself more time.

Once you carve out time by saying no, you need to fill it with what you wanted the time for in the first place, and avoid the infinite sidetracks that will immediately present themselves; like housework, or blogging.

At the risk of resembling the spring bloom on the bottom right in the excellent botanical guide by Dylan Meconis pictured above, I want to talk a little about how yoga is helping my writing.

I take yin yoga classes. Someone today called it naptime yoga, and it’s true that it’s  almost entirely done seated or lying down. It is challenging, though. You hold each pose for three to five minutes. You definitely feel it.

But as satisfying as it can be physically, and I generally do come out of class feeling significantly bendier, what keeps me there week after week is the way I disobey the instructor.

See, one of the classes I attend is on Sunday afternoon. Sunday has also become the day on which I’m most likely to get a solid amount of writing done. So I tend to show up having spent the time immediately preceding on my manuscript.

Yin classes are quiet. Because you spend so much time in each pose, your mind is likely to wander. The teacher makes gentle comments to bring you back to the mat. One I’ve heard many times: “Drop out of the stories in your head.”

I do the opposite. As I lean back into saddle pose, wincing or smiling depending on how tight my quads are, I drop into the scene I’ve just been working on. As my muscles first protest, then gradually relax, I often find I’ve figured out what happens next.

This is not substantively different, I realize, than thinking about your book in the shower, or while you ride your bike, or when you’re in bed on the edge of sleep. These are all times when your brain can go sideways productively, bypassing the top-level chatter of anxieties and errands to get to wherever the story comes from.

But I love the getting away with something feeling I get when the teacher tells us to drop out of the stories, and instead I drop in.

I never want to be in the position of cheerily announcing that things are going super awesome with my fabulous new project, and then find myself wishing I could scrub the post from the Internet’s memory when something about said project goes sideways.

And yet, when it’s been a while since I’ve mentioned here that my work in progress does in fact exist, I become anxious. People will think I’m not doing anything. (Which people are these, exactly? Oh, you know. The ones whose job it is to judge me.)

Or I’ll get an email from a fan asking if I’m ever going to write any more books, sometimes with quite specific suggestions about what I should write next. And while I should feel grateful and pleased that a reader wants new books from me, I more often feel sad and guilty that I can’t immediately produce said books, made to order like gourmet sandwiches.

Which is dumb, and probably I should just shake it off, right?

Instead I’m writing this to tell you that what you don’t see in my posts is not simply the anxiety and guilt described above, but the slow accumulation of words that means, eventually, there will be more books. Dammit.

• Making oatmeal with a lot of stuff in it. Tips: toast the pecans before you chop them. Use frozen blueberries when fresh ones are out of season. Frozen banana works too, and is actually great with the toasted pecan. Do not stint on the cinnamon.
• Working on my works in progress  in longhand, to see if the different feel of pen on paper will make my brain go different places than it does with fingers on keyboard while grimacing at glaring screen.
• Reading A Different Shade of Blue: how women changed the face of police work, by Adam Eisenberg. Specifically, it’s about the history of women in the Seattle Police Department. Really interesting perspectives on the changing role of female cops and the discrimination they’ve dealt with over the years, sometimes compounded and complicated by prejudice based on their ethnic & cultural backgrounds and/or sexuality.
• Listening to The Modern Scholar: The Second Oldest Profession, Part 1: A World History of Espionage by Jeffrey Burds. A line I liked, on the complexity of managing/handling spies: “Rare indeed is the field agent who is a mere executor of his master’s will.”
• Pondering how not to be a clever writer.

I can’t remember when I first heard the phrase, but now I often hear it in my head. I come home, go upstairs with my bag full of sweaty gym clothes, toss them into the laundry basket. No empty trips whispers my brain. So I pack the now-empty gym bag for the next day and take it back downstairs. If I’m really on it, on my way back out I take out the trash, stopping at the car to throw the gym bag in the trunk. (Thus far I’ve managed to avoid putting the gym bag in the trash and the trash in the trunk, but sometimes it’s a struggle.)

I also think about it when I write. Say I have to get the protagonist from point A to point B. What can she be doing on the way that reveals more about who she is? “Put something into your character’s hands,” Franny Billingsley once advised. No empty trips.

Prose Pros:

– Control. Being totally in charge of the world I’m creating.

– Being free to write about things that are hard to draw without fear that I’ll eventually make an artist’s life hell.

Prose Cons:

– I can’t use silent pages, which can be a great way to create breathing space for a reader and convey moods.

– I can’t use the kind of narrative counterpoint that I love so much in comics, when the pictures convey something different from and perhaps in opposition to the text.

Graphic Novel Pros:

– Collaboration. Getting the insight and talent of another creator.

– A graphic novel script doesn’t take as long to write as a novel.

Graphic Novel Cons:

– The script might not take as long to write, but I still have to wait for the artist to draw it, and the artist almost certainly has other projects competing for their time.

– There are still a lot of readers out there who don’t speak the language of graphic novels, who aren’t confident in their ability to parse panels, or are just disinclined to make the effort.

How am I going to decide? I don’t know.

I can already visualize certain scenes very clearly. But does that mean the scenes will be most effective as comics, or that I simply need to convey them as clearly in prose as I’m seeing them in my head?

Other writers of both comics and prose, how do you decide which format is best for a particular story?

I have a Designated Writing Zone in my house. I’ve written many thousands of words in it, and I’ve even blogged about it. But sometimes I need other voices, other rooms. Fortunately Portland has many places where you can park yourself for extended periods of time to work on your manuscript. Here are four I recommend:

Backspace Cafe — This cafe is also an all-ages music venue, so if you arrive in the afternoon and stick around into the evening, expect to experience a shift in the atmosphere. Plus there’s a gaming section, so if you’ve made your wordcount goal and want to reward yourself with some time in World of Warcraft, you totally can.

Press Club — When a restaurant names its menu items after authors, you know they’re the sort of place you can linger with your laptop. The Press Club also has a fine selection of literary and arts magazines, so if inspiration lags, you can be inspired by the works of others.

Southeast Grind — This coffeeshop, which serves the ever-popular Voodoo Doughnuts among its other snack options, is open twenty-four hours. Need I say more?

Sterling Room for Writers, Multnomah County Library — You need to apply to use the Sterling Writers Room, but the application is short and you can fill it out online. You can write elsewhere inside the Central Library, too, of course — but it’s pretty cool to write in an official Writers Room, right?

There was a time when I made a practice of rereading my old email on a regular basis — when I got, and sent, significantly fewer messages. The exercise was not unlike rereading old journals, but instead of being a record of private fears, it was a way to examine how I presented myself to the rest of the world, or rather the subset thereof that I was emailing. I haven’t done it in a very long time.

Today as I reread, more than anything else I felt like I was getting a sense for how long it actually takes me to complete a book: researching, drafting, revising, the back-and-forth of editorial comments, copyediting, and, eventually, promoting the finished product.

It was both daunting and comforting.

Daunting because so far it’s always been a more drawn-out process than I wish it were.

Comforting because there’s clear evidence that it is a process which does, eventually, conclude. Though by the time it does, it’s already started again for the next book.

It also happens much farther below the waterline than it once did. And as I saw in my rereading, it takes place largely in emails rather than blog posts. Precisely because I can’t predict how long it will take me to go from idea to book, I no longer like to post a lot about the details of where I am on a project.

But every so often I feel compelled to assure the folks who read this (and remind myself? probably) that I am writing. And not just blog posts, either. Going to turn off the Internet and write some more now.

Several times over the past few years, I’ve heard about writers — some of whom are my friends — going on extended writing retreats, being extremely productive, and generally feeling renewed, inspired, etc.

I myself have been very lucky to be able to attend the annual BG Literary retreats. But as amazing as they are, they’re only for a weekend. The retreats I was hearing about lasted at least a week, sometimes significantly longer.

And every time I heard about one of these longer retreats, I’d think: “Wow, I’m so glad they got so much done! That’s so great!”

Okay that’s a lie.

I mean, I did think that, because I’m supportive of any and all strategies that result in more writing from people whose work I like.

But I would also seethe with jealousy. ”No fair!” I would think. “How do they just get to take a big chunk of time and go somewhere secluded and lovely to write?”

2. Revelation

It took me an astonishingly long time to realize that they could do it because they planned to do it. They considered their schedules and other commitments, budgeted time and money, found a place, and carved out a block of time to focus on writing.

3. Decision

Huh. I guess I could do that, too. 

So, I’m gonna. Not immediately. But come November, I will spend ten days in an undisclosed location. If you’ve been reading for a while, this is not the Usual Undisclosed Location, but rather an unusual undisclosed location.  While I am there I will write.

4. Conclusion

Once I figured out that I was a grownup, and as such could actually exert a certain amount of control over my capacity to hermit myself up for an extended period of time to write, it wasn’t hard to plan exactly how, where, and when the hermiting would happen.

The hard part was giving myself permission to plan.

I’m indebted to the artist who put this up in my neighborhood. The gritted teeth, the grim expression — it’s like that, yeah.

You want your writing to process, like with Pomp and Circumstance and fancy outfits. But sometimes what you get is more like processed, as in meat, and you’re trying to assemble ill-favored scraps into something appetizing.

In other news, I’ve just changed web hosts, and a few things seem to have gone missing in the transition. If you’re looking for something on sararyan.com and you can’t find it, please to let me know.