“Well why in the world would anybody write a novel then?”

(Don’t get me going on the reaction I get when people find out I edit Irreantum for free!)

When I started out as a fiction writer, I honestly had no intention or expectation of making ANY money. I wrote for the love of it, and the idea of getting published in a magazine someday–even without payment, even if only thirteen people ever read the dang thing–seemed to me to be wholly adequate. Well, even more than wholly adequate. It seemed to me to be absolutely thrilling. I’ve been surprised over and over again when people seem so disappointed for me over my lack of writing-generated income. (Sometimes I feel like saying, “Hey, congrats on finishing the Salt Lake Marathon. How much money did they give you when you crossed the finish line? None? Seriously? So why d’ya do it then?” But that would be seriously catty and unbecoming, and I’m all about being uncatty and becoming.)

So my question for you: How do you approach writing and earning a living? Given the gender definitions in Mormon culture, is the expectation to earn a living with your writing–or at least buy a swing set–even more weighty for men? (I’m guessing yes.) In what ways have you managed to turn your experiences as a writer into cold hard cash, either directly or indirectly?

And speaking of cold hard cash: Enter the Irreantum Fiction Contest and/or the Charlotte and Eugene England Personal Essay Contest. The deadline is May 30th. You could win some money, honey!

Followed, quite possibly, by a smack upside my head.  Or a swift kick in the heinie.  Both of them are warranted.

Last week, at the behest of an old friend for some photos, I went through a box of high school stuff that has been sitting in my parents’ basement since, well, high school.  I was amazed at what I found, at what I had saved, and wondering how I knew I would want these things later.  I found pictures of old friends from elementary school that made me stare, letters to old friends that made me crack up, and love letters from an old boyfriend that made me blush.  And, of course, there were my journals.

I picked up one journal that spanned the summer of 1993 to the summer of 1995.  Two tumultuous years of my young adulthood, fraught with all of the expected angst of a person who is desperately trying to figure life out, to make good decisions, and navigate relationships.  And as I sat up well into the night, reading about these two years and all my forgotten drama, I just wanted to shout, “Enough already!  All this whining is giving me a headache!”

And it was whiny.  Wow was it whiny.  But apparently I knew it as whiny, and I defended it, saying that I only write when I feel whiny, because then the writing helps get the whiny out of my system, and that my life isn’t really as messed up as it seems in my journal, but I just write when I’m stressed and feel out of control, and that tends to happen when I was dating somebody, so really, my old journals sound like I’m schizophrenic and obsessed with boys.

Which, I suppose describes most teenagers.  But, I digress….

Like I said, I stayed up late into the night reading that journal. I was fascinated.  It was amazing the things I had forgotten, things I’m sure at the time I thought I would remember forever.  There were names of people I didn’t remember, couldn’t recall, people who had entered my life, influenced it, and then left.  There were events I recorded that I couldn’t remember participating in, conversations I don’t remember having.  My favorite, though, were my descriptions of relationships, and the transparencies obvious to me now that were much too opaque to me then.

Let’s just say if I had seen the movie, “He’s just not that into you”, that would have explained a lot.

Anyway, I’m wondering if other people keep journals like this, and if they mean something to you after the fact.  After my husband’s grandmother died, I had a chance to peruse some of her journals, and it was, again, fascinating to see glimpses of a woman I hardly knew.  I found myself wishing she had written more, just so I could see her life better.

However, reading it felt a little strange.  Intimate, like I was violating some part of her privacy, even though she was no longer on the earth.  I suppose all journals feel like that.

So tell me, do you keep a journal?  Why, or why not?   I know there is a lot of guilt associated with not keeping a journal–is it because a prophet told us to, and if we don’t do what the prophet tells us to do, we feel guilty?  Is journaling something that is hard for you to do, or something that is easy, natural, and, if you’re like me, necessary for your sanity?  Do you journal regularly, or sporadically, when the urge strikes?

If you do keep a journal, what kinds of things do you write about?  I know one friend who described the weather at the top of every entry in his journal.  I couldn’t ever figure out why he did that, especially since he lived in Boston at the time.  Seems to me there would be only one thing to report:

Weather=cold.

Call me crazy, but I find schizophrenic relationships much more entertaining.

Last Monday morning, I opened the door to the pediatrician’s office and sighed. My kid was scheduled for a well visit, but every other kid in the packed room suffered from the same unspecified viral illness. Bracing myself for two inevitabilities– a long wait and sick kids two days later, I treated myself to the best reading material available, a copy of Cookie magazine well past its expiration date. I thumbed through the pages for a while, then settled on Pilar Guzman’s editorial, in which she talked about telling her mother that she and her husband were expecting their first child.  The gist of the story (I wish I’d snuck the magazine out in my purse so I could quote the editorial verbatim) is that although Guzman was in her thirties and both financially and emotionally stable, her mother wasn’t excited for her. She kept asking her if she was sure she was ready. And Guzman went on to say that she thought her mom was reacting based on her own lack of readiness when she became a mom, her own marital failures, and her own self-absorption. She said some good stuff too, and came to a positive conclusion about her mom as a grandma, but the criticism was there, in black and white.

The thing that totally caught me off guard? The picture of her mom, snuggling the now-preschool-age grandchild, smiling from the middle of the page. She must have read what her daughter had written, criticisms and all, and been okay with it. At least okay enough to have her picture published in a national magazine.

That so would not happen at my house.

The last time I wrote about my mother on a blog, I tried my best not to say anything that she’d take issue with. To cover my butt, I hacked into her Google Reader and marked the post “as read.”  But a couple of days later she found the post, and I got an angry email in my inbox. I’ve posted about her several other times, garnering either comments on the blog or tearful phone calls. Every time I mention my mom in print, I end up groveling.

But I can’t help myself. For one thing, she’s such an interesting character (is it a bad thing when you start viewing the people in your life as characters?) and for another thing, she’s such an important person in my life that I inevitably end up talking about her when I talk about myself.

So how do you balance writing about the people in your life with not alienating them? I recently read Emily January Petersen’s essay “I Love You No Matter What” in the December 2008 issue of Sunstone. She talks about coming to terms with her dad’s homosexuality, and while it’s evident that she loves her dad, her essay doesn’t shy away from the way she suffered because of his identity and his choices. She found the balance, and did it without hiding behind a pseudonym. I don’t know yet how to talk about myself and my family, and be honest, and be fair.

How do you do it? Do you write with your image of someone sitting on your shoulder, keeping you in line? How do find the courage to write the truth as you see it? The pleaser in me would so much rather be nice than be honest. And how do you deal with people being hurt by what you’ve written?

In the end, I’m just afraid of no one showing up to Sunday dinner at my house. But I guess that would be all right, because I’d probably have sick kids.

While ruminating over his “uneven” performance in early debates, Obama said this about himself:

There’s a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It’s part of what makes me a good writer, you know? [But] it’s not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign.

Let’s leave aside the fact that it’s exciting for me (nay, thrilling) to have a President who’s not only adept with the spoken word but is an accomplished writer in his own right. But when I read the above quote, I thought, “Exactly, Barack!” That dang ambivalence does get in the way of being an effective debater . . . or, in my case, (hypothetically) a really really good visiting teaching coordinator. In the same way that one might be able to see both sides when it comes to diplomatic talks with Iran, one might understand why Sister Lundquist didn’t get her visits in during October (she has those four boys, and her husband is always out of town, and there was that sinus infection) and tell her, “Hey, hon, don’t you worry about it. You just do the best you can. Heck, I think it’s cool when people manage to fit quarterly visits in! Besides, your heart’s in the right place . . .”

Do you think there’s a reason I’m not the Visiting Teaching Coordinator? Exactly.

It made me wonder, though, how the quality of “ambivalence” affects us as Mormon writers. I agree with President-elect Obama; an ambivalent nature can be an important asset for a writer to possess. But ambivalence isn’t exactly highly valued in our Mormon community. In fact, it often makes folks highly suspicious.

So what do you think? Does our cultural expectation to eschew ambivalence hurt our writers? And how in the heck do we acknowledge ambivalence in our writing without alienating LDS writers who expect, if not passionate certainty, then at least a solid sense of right and wrong? And conversely, can a writerly inclination toward ambivalence, if taken too far, hurt our testimonies? Can this ambivalence be dangerous? And maybe I’m wrong, and so is our future President. Maybe it’s entirely possible to be an excellent writer without the (curse?) of a vacillating nature.

At any rate, I’d like to know . . . are you ambivalent? (And if so, you don’t need to answer “yes” or “no.” You can say “maybe, kinda, sometimes.”) How has this affected you as Mormon, and if you’re a writer or an artist, what are the fruits of this ambivalence?

• The staff of Segullah wants you to win!! By that I mean that we are pulling for the people who enter this contest.  We never forget the women behind the stories. And many of us (me, at least) are not widely published, and still consider ourselves to be novice writers.   Trust me: we are a sympathetic audience.  We are rooting for you.    Not everyone can win, this is true. But we appreciate each woman who takes the time to share her life with us through writing.
• Contest winners are held to higher standards than regular submissions.  Regular submissions go through a revision process, working with our editorial board to do at least three revisions, sometimes four, before we publish them. However, our contest winners are published as-is, with minor copyediting.   What this means for those who enter is that they need to take the time to send us the very best version possible. Publication-ready. Please, find someone who can see your writing clearly, and have them give you honest feedback.  Then revise.  Then find someone else, and get more feedback, and revise.  Then do it again, as many times as you can before the deadline.
• Do not be daunted if you have never published before! You don’t have to have published anything before to do well.  I speak from personal experience: “Finding Myself on Google,” which won an honorable mention in the 2006 essay contest, was the first essay I’d ever published.  I don’t think that’s true of our other winners, who had more writing experience than I did, but it’s true of me.  You can do this!
• If you’re wondering where to go with your next draft, and having a hard time finding a good editor, read the writing tips section of Segullah’s blog, and evaluate what you’ve got based on some of the ideas there.
• There is no theme for either contest (I’ve gotten that question a couple of times this year, so I wanted to clarify it).  Write about whatever you want that fits in our mission statement.  Read a few back issues to get some ideas of what we are looking for.
• If your essay doesn’t win, it still has a good chance of being published in Segullah after working through our editing process.  For me, one of the best things about my involvement in Segullah is finding people who will critique my writing with expertise, honesty, and kindness.  So if your essay doesn’t win, but it’s accepted for publication, that’s going to be good for your future writing.  You’ll have the chance to revise it under the guidance of one of our editors.  You’ll get published, and become a better writer.  Yeah, yeah, winning would have been better.  But this is pretty good, too.
• Follow the submissions guidelines I linked to above.  Pay attention to word count–our space is limited, and we’d hate to disqualify your essay from consideration because it was too long.

There you have it–behind the scenes at Segullah.  Now get writing!

p.s. I’m happy to answer any more questions you have about the contest in the comments section.

–Emily Milner, Assistant Editor, Segullah