Greetings, my creative fellow travelers,
Enough to fill two weeks of living has passed since we last met on the road of words. After a period of intense work on a heart health book and a dietary manuscript, I am delighted to dip my editor hands back into the guts of a personal narrative. I look forwarding to helping its author perform careful surgery. I also started drafting a tool to help writers navigate the stages of revision with awareness and confidence. Next, in pursuit of an ever-richer skillset so I have more to give to clients, I am weighing taking a new editing course a peer recommended. Finally, in the life-is-more-than-work column, I spent Saturday afternoon with a family member doing a jigsaw puzzle and lunching on fajitas.
Poco a Poco
Finding beauty and hope on my agonizing walk to León, Spain. Photo credit: Adam Groves / Ultreya Editorial
Tasks, happenings, encounters, and other little daily doses of color and fragrance … seeds of life are planted all around us, and they wait eagerly for the sunlight of our attention to fall on them.
Unfortunately, too often I mistake the road of life for a racetrack. How about you? Do you pause to breathe deep of where you have just arrived or are you a chaser, too?
For me, the blossoms are tragically easy to hurtle past, the stems so prone to break in my frantic on-rushing. Even when I walked Spain’s 500-mile Camino Francés seven Aprils ago (as a gift of rest and revival to my exhausted spirit), I caught myself hurrying over and over, unable to stand still for more time than it took to eat or change socks or rub my sore legs, even on days when golden plowed fields and irrigation ditches yawned infinitely before me or as I passed through mountains draped in billowing skirts of pink and white and yellow spring flowers.
The Camino is a pilgrimage which epitomizes taking time, but still I hurried. I hurried to stay ahead of an oncoming rainstorm (or to get out of one that had swallowed me in its frigid maw). I hurried to reach a hostel before its beds were all filled. Early mornings when the moon still shone and the townspeople, cows, and tangled vineyards were serenely savoring one breath at a time, I hurried to get away from the approaching noise of other walkers. Sometimes I hurried simply because my body felt uneasy moving slowly.
Yet the most wonderful thing happened whenever I caught myself and paused—a form of insight very hard for me to come by until I incurred a severe tendonitis injury and was told, simple and straightforward, by a trio of Basque woman as I made my limping, cringing way to León, “Poco a Poco.”
My infirmity and their gentle reminder compelled to slow down. Urgency stepped away to wait at a respectful distance. Its clammy breath on my neck evaporated, and my attention unfolded to drink in the moment in which my feet were submerged. And I don’t only mean imbibing the landscape—which was always sweet on my tongue (except in the occasional industrial zone). Like a priceless, prolific bottle of Rioja, I began to savor more than ever the human company. With walking buddy after dinner partner after bunkmate, as I peered into one flickering pair of eyes after another and listened to tongue after tongue sing its private ballad and commiserated over bum knee after blistered foot after torqued-open heart, all throughout my 39-day sojourn across northern Spain I was reminded, over and over, of how untamed, unmapped, wretched, and glorious that other terrain is: the landscape of a face, of the body behind that façade, of the soul within. And I was reminded how every terrain takes time to appreciate.
As I reflect now I feel grateful to you for this biweekly occasion to stop in my tracks, greet you, and walk unhurriedly in your company for a while. This pause sends most (if never all) of my stress and urgency packing for a spell. It helps me to practice esteeming what is—being here in this moment of creative connection with you. Because that is, as I often say, all there is.
I hope that you, too, are able to relish the pause we create here together. Perhaps something in these paragraphs will awaken your desire and capacity to witness and celebrate how rich and full right now can be. And I’m confident that the permission you give yourself to luxuriate in this moment will pay itself forward once you move on to the more obvious constructive tasks that await you, whether it be writing, editing, or anything else on your road of experiencing and making.
Weekly Wildflowers
Do I Need to Know the End Before I Start? Four (More Helpful) Questions to Inspire a Memoir that Captivates Readers … and You. About a month ago I was commissioned by the writers and editors community The Networking Studio to pen an article. Its purpose? To help first-time memoirists get their bearings as they set out to tell their own story. The article is now available on my business blog. Spoiler alert: I am from the “pantser” school—I believe in finding your way as you write. But this still means you need to know where you’re starting from. The tips I offer can benefit writers of narrative non-fiction and fiction as well as authors of memoir.
By the way, The Networking Studio is a lovely, small, supportive creative and professional community. Check it out if you are in need of one! (I get no kickback for mentioning it.)
The Design of Books. Do you aspire to publish your work, or are you curious about the visual design of the objects that fill your bookshelves? Then check out Debbie Berne’s lovely primer, which introduces the layperson to the building blocks of a book’s visual composition. Berne (may she rest in peace) is the type of expert every discipline needs. She speaks clearly, is unpretentious, adores her field, and delights in sharing knowledge.
What are alpha and beta readers? Ingram Spark dishes the goods on the differences and the types of feedback a writer can gather from such readers. I’ve known about beta readers since the Middle Ages, but I confess I had never heard of alphas before I made editing my full-time vocation five years ago. I love that there is always more to learn.
I wrote a review of The Memoir Project, by Marion Roach Smith. From one view this is yet another craft writing book on memoir. The ever-growing pile begs the question, is there anything left to say? But in the spirit of “yes, there is always more,” Roach Smith’s book contains delights for the patient reader.
I briefly meditated on the value of small creative efforts in the face of wholesale creative destruction by AI companies.
Diagrams.net. As I draft a tool to help writers identify what stage of writing they are in and what comes next, I’ve been outlining using this free online app. I’ve always been a big fan of organizational tools, and I’ve quickly fallen in love with this one. It seems to do everything I could want from Visio without the expense. (A program like this may also be useful for mapping story elements like plots and character relationships.)
The final flower in today’s bouquet regards a comment I came across this weekend on social media. A writer I do not know vehemently protested the idea that all writing has a message. He insisted that this was nonsense; that his writing was entirely for fun. I empathize with his distaste for prescriptions. The day before I’d had a long conversation with a friend that touched on my own irritation with genre formulas. But I think my impatience causes me to ignore the ubiquity of patterns. Likewise, I feel this writer’s statement overlooks an essential feature of communication: that it does, in fact, communicate. I suspect that this writer’s real source of grievance was our culture’s mania for obvious and strident messages. In retrospect I might have suggested that his angst and mine have a common antidote: that it is useful to educate ourselves about how a thing usually functions so we can make wiser decisions about when and how we will constructively push on those constraints.
In a way, this is what all good editing strives to achieve. On behalf of the writer, the excellent editor erects a strong scaffolding of narrative and discursive wisdom for the writer to stand on. From atop that scaffold, the writer can then survey and remodel their own work with skill and confidence.
Also, like Debbie Berne, the good editor delights in empowering the writer to elevate their own words to greater heights of insight, polish, and power to connect—whether that connection is meant to send a message or simply to entertain.
And that’s all for today! I figured this was enough to chew on without an additional 3,000 word essay. Until next time,
Ultreia et suseia,
Adam
P.S. - I enjoy genuine connection, so if a thought or question came up or you have feedback on the format of this emerging newsletter, hit reply and tell me about it.
P.P.S. - If you enjoy this newsletter, pass it along!