Here's to pushing through the writer's block and emerging to grow and flower on your own path. This is one of the sunflowers I planted a few days ago, just emerging from under the ground, just after sunrise, Sunday, June 4, 2006. Here's the seedling at noon, in the shade. The sunflower stands on its own, 5:30 p.m. May your own perseverence pay off with a published work!

Spring Cleaning
by Roxyanne Young

The last couple of months I've been dealing with something that I imagine a lot of you writers out there have dealt with at one time or another. Here's what happened. I had the great pleasure of helping out with the SCBWI Retreat in Palm Springs in March. One of my good friends, Alexandria LaFaye was on the faculty, along with one of her good friends, Hillary Homzie, and two editors from New York, Lisa Cheng of HarperCollins (who was our guest at a recent SmartWritersPro teleseminar) and Angelle Pilkington of Penguin (who will be an SWPro guest soon), and it was a great weekend overall. About forty writers had gathered - some old friends, as I've enjoyed this retreat a couple of times in the past and I've met the Orange County SCBWI members before, and many faces that were new to me. It's a weekend retreat I look forward to attending every year. And this time was no different.

But here's the thing: one of the writers there complimented me on one of the essays I'd written in a past Smart Writers Journal issue. I don't know about you guys, but when I'm writing this Journal, I never know if it will actually be read or not. I don't get a lot of feedback on it from readers, so I pretty much put it out there into the ether and move on. But here was someone telling me how much my writing meant to her. It really touched her, she said.

So there, in the face of this person I'd never met before telling me how much that essay meant to her, I froze. I thanked her for taking the time to tell me, but my insides just seized up. I realized that my writing carries weight. People read my words. Real people.

Now, the next thing I write better be as good or she'll be disappointed. And who knows how many others who read and appreciated the earlier essays and are looking forward to the next great thing...and what if what I write isn't great? What if what I write is stupid? What if it's just a self-serving mish mash of ideas that make no sense, not even to me? Oy, what if what I write is just bad? Yikes.

I froze. Not writer's block exactly. Ideas were coming. I just couldn't commit them to paper. I caved into the pressure of having to be good by other people's standards. It was so bad I actually didn't put out a Journal in April. May's Journal did not have an essay.

Granted, I've been busy with the WIN reading and preparations for the big announcement, plus my husband and I are packing to move houses this summer, and I've got some family issues going on on the other side of the continent (both grandparents in the hospital for different reasons, my mother broke her kneecap, aunts unavailable to help...I am seriously compelled to be there, but I'm needed here, too - another situation I'm sure many of you who are of a certain age can appreciate). It was easy to justify, but truthfully, I froze. I got stuck.

So I got busy doing other things. I didn't write. Instead, I immersed myself in spring cleaning. I've been through every closet, every drawer, every nook and cranny of this house, and I've been cleaning. I had three sorting paths: donate, keep, and throw out. I'm a collector. I've got the weirdest collections of things. Rocks from places I've visited, and yes, I can tell you where I picked up most of them. I had albums from the 80's in boxes in the garage. I used to work at Musicland in college, so I had hundreds from all kinds of artists. I had a bunch of pigs with wings - "when pigs fly" - hey, they were cute. I had kept all of my eight-year-old daughter's baby and toddler clothes, toys, shoes, and furnishings thinking that maybe I'd have another baby...well, I'll be 42 in September and I've lost four babies to miscarriage, so the chances are slim. I've kept clothes I wore ten+ years ago and haven't been able to wear for about half that time. I've kept books that I thought I'd read someday...hundreds. Okay, more like three thousand. Boxes and boxes of books. So many boxes of books, I'd have to take three years off and do nothing but read. (Sounds joyous, yes, but realistic? No.)

I had a bunch of vases and other ceramic things that probably meant something to me some time, but as I went through these boxes, I couldn't remember what. I had enough Christmas decorations to festoon three houses. Literally. I had a bunch of t-shirts from concerts I've attended - bands whose songs I can't even remember now. I also had - and this is a little embarassing to admit - but I also had a box full, yes, full, of Leif Garrett memorabilia from when I was madly in love with him as a pre-teen. Ah, the dreams of youth.

This process has taken several weeks. As I cleaned out boxes and cabinets and closets, I filled up eight pickup truck loads of things to take to the women's shelter. I threw out about half that much stuff that just wasn't worth keeping for anyone. And yes, I dumped the box of Leif Garret stuff in the recycling bin. (Okay, I admit, I checked eBay first to see if it was worth anything. It wasn't.)

Giving this stuff away wasn't always easy, but as I was telling my friend, Erica, yesterday, I have a real problem just throwing things away if they're still useful. I can, however, give them away if someone else can use them. So, here, Women's Shelter, please enjoy these boxes and boxes of baby things, the crib, the bassinette, the women's clothes and shoes, the suits from my former life, the sewing machine I've never figured out how to work, and this furniture taking up space in my garage. Use them in good health. Here you go, Library, books, books, and more books, may they be read over and over again and enjoyed by thousands instead of sitting in boxes in my garage waiting for me to get to them.

I kept two of the rocks, though. One is from a trip I made to Maryville Tennessee to see my best friend, Kathy Sandidge, in the Smoky Mountain Passion Play about twenty some-odd years ago. It was a great trip with her mom and a really happy memory. The other is is a rock I picked up at Puget Sound during a trip where my husband proposed to me. That one's a keeper, too.

During the process of all of this spring cleaning, I started eating better and working out more. I've been cleansing my body along with the house. I've given away several hundred pounds of stuff, and lost twenty pounds of me. I was literally removing the clutter from the house and from my body, but I was still cluttered emotionally. Stuck, and not writing.

I also did some work in my long-neglected flower beds. I cleared away the mulch and brought in some fresh potting soil, and I planted some sunflower seeds. I love sunflowers because they're beautiful to look at, but also because you leave them alone and they become natural bird feeders. They give and give and give. Joy, joy, joy, for months. (See the seedling above.)

Suddenly I was feeling less stuck, but I still wasn't writing. Then last week I was reading an article about my friend and critique partner, Candie Moonshower, whose first novel, The Legend of Zoey, comes out in July with Delacorte. Her hometown paper (The Tennesseean in Nashville) did an article about her and in that article, she was quoted as saying that she didn't believe in writer's block. It's a Butt In Chair thing. You sit down and you work.

I also remembered something author Lonnie Bernstein Hewitt told me once: "If you want to change your attitude, change your attitude."

I'm the only person who can make this shift in attitude. I had this little epiphany about 5 a.m. this morning. Sunday, June 4. I hopped out of bed, went and got a shower, did my usual spa day routine (Sundays I give myself a hair treatment, facial, etc. and call it a spa day). I got dressed in some of my comfy writing clothes and came out and turned on my computer and sat down to write this essay.

This is the first real thing I've written since Palm Springs. I hope it connects with some of you. If it does, wonderful. I hope it inspires you to sit down and get back to work. If it doesn't, that's okay, too, because you may remember it sometime in the future when you feel stuck, too. I think it happens to most of us. (Except Candie. <g>)

Now I've got a book proposal to finish and about two hundred more WIN entries to read, and one more closet to clean out.

Happy writing, all! Go dig in the dirt and plant some seeds!
Roxyanne