jen larsen dot net » reading, writing, no arithmetic

regular person

jen larsen — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:00:56 +0000

I surprised myself yesterday when I realized I’ve written two books. That’s not, like, a lot of books. It’s a very small number of books, in fact. It is more than one, which is its distinguishing characteristic, but it’s a lot less than, say, fifteen.

But two books feels like a respectable number of books to have written. Manuscripts to have finished. I sat down, and on two separate occasions, plus a lot of bonus occasions for editing, I sweated through several hundred thousand words. Sometimes I wonder why my hands ache and my forearms are tight and I get this pain in my wrist, but that’s only because I am very forgetful and even not so bright, sometimes.

Two books is huge, though, considering the fact that even though I wanted to be a writer when I was a kid (I have this whole story about discovering that books were written by regular people and that I, too, could be one of those regular people and how it was a magical discovery that changed my whole life, blah blah blah) but I never wrote a word when I was a kid. Maybe a couple of words. Maybe a page or two. I was not one of those kids who was always scribbling, who wrote forty-three books in crayon and stapled them together and kept them in a trunk.

I wrote a soap opera for some friends when I was in high school. I think about two pages of a story to impress a boy at some point. In college, I wrote creative essays and some poems. After college, I wrote about a chapter of something I was calling a novel except it was really a lie because all I ever wrote was that chapter but I kept revising it and making people read it. I started to do a thing called Online Journaling that everyone calls blogging now, and that was my major creative outlet. Wait, creative should be in quotes. “Creative” outlet. There we go.

For whatever reason, I had this conviction that I was a writer and that I wanted to write when I grew up and that I was really totally great at writing, but somehow I never managed to write a single goddamn thing. And yet I applied to graduate school to get an MFA in creative writing and they let me in—on the basis, if I recall, of that single awful chapter of that pretend novel I was pretending I was writing.

In school, in my very first graduate course, I wrote a truly terrible not-memoir, which was basically me rehashing all the online journal posts—blog posts—I had been writing about moving to San Francisco to go to grad school. It did not have a beginning or an ending but I decided to call the first page the beginning and the last page the ending and hope no one noticed. It was called “tectonic” because that was a pun. Then I wrote a short story and it was a miracle! Because I started something and finished it and it was—bad. It was pretty bad. (Every once in awhile I pull it up to try to revise it and then I laugh a lot and put it away again.)

Then more stories. And I finished them! And I got one published! And I cried! And I thought, holy wow, maybe I am a writer! Check this shit out, yo! However: I didn’t write unless I had an assignment. And having to write a thesis-slash-novel almost killed me. I wrote the same chapter over and over and my long-fiction workshop professor kind of hated me and then hated me more while he summer-advised me during which I gave him the same chapters over and over again and then I threw my hands in the air and ran away crying and dropped out of school. But I came back. And I took another long-fiction workshop and then another and somehow, I wrote that thesis, and when I sat back and looked at it, I realized I had written a book. A book!

It wasn’t (still isn’t) a good book. But I wrote it. And then I didn’t write anything again for about four years, I think, except an occasional online journal entry (blog), and then a blog about weight loss surgery.

Then, I wrote a book about weight loss surgery. It took three years to write that fucking thing and I cried a lot during it because it is hard to be honest about how awful you can be and the horrible mistakes you’ve made. And in the end, I wrote a good book. I know it’s good. It’s honest and it’s the best I could do to say important things about body image and weight and the psychology of fat. I am proud of that book.

And maybe that’s what broke me. Because I’m writing again. That eleven thousand words is now about 16,000 more words on the young adult novel I’ve been writing and it’s almost finished, I think, close to it anyway, and I’ve written four more short-short stories and there is a feeling inside me that is very akin to happiness and satisfaction or maybe even joy. I can call it joy, I think. I’m going to go ahead and do that.

Two books, a lot of little stories. I haven’t written much for how old I am and how long I’ve thought about writing, but feel like maybe I really am one of those regular people, the kind who make books.

eleven days

jen larsen — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 06:54:01 +0000

Eleven days into 2012 and I’ve already written a little over eleven thousand words on the manuscript I’m trying to finish, plus a handful of thousand words on little short-shorts that aren’t very good but are satisfying to write. In these past eleven days I have written more than I did in the past eleven weeks prior, and suddenly I feel like a useful member of society.

Not that anything I’m writing is useful or will benefit society in any appreciable way, unless you would like to argue that the making of things, the exercise of the almost certainly unique human ability to create things that are purely aesthetic in nature, adds a little bit of spark to the world and helps to rev up the spiritual engine of life that keeps us all moving forward in this crazy world of ours. Or not.

But despite going crazy, despite feeling like every day’s a struggle right now (and it won’t be forever, but when you’re struggling right this second—that is really remarkably difficult to remember), I have this to point to and say oh, hey, look. Look at that. That is pretty fucking cool. The fact that I am writing every day is pretty impressive to me, anyway. It’s something I’d like to keep doing all the way through the year, an unbroken string of days.

Ideally, on December 31, 2012 I’d like to sit back and say, “Despite all the hardships that befell not only me but the earth, like when gas got really expensive and I lost both my thumbs and the zombies rose up and fully half the ocean was drained away into space by a giant striped bendy straw, the origin of which we are still struggling to understand, I still wrote every single day, a minimum of five hundred words but more usually about a thousand words, with the occasional three to ten thousand word marathon days that are such a luxury and a pleasure, and for which I would have gladly given even more thumbs, if I had had them to give.”

That is my dream. It’s a simple dream, but I am nothing if not kind of simple.

on writing

jen larsen — Fri, 20 May 2011 03:45:44 +0000

Sometimes the thing that makes me want to write is the feeling of the keyboard under my fingers. There is something intensely pleasurable about the sound it makes, the spring of the keys and the feeling of rapid-fire creation. Even if I’m writing something as simple, as silly as a post to put on my blog, it is a feeling of satisfaction to watch the words appear.

A computer is supposed to be so much less a physical way to write—I think every single book on writing I own, especially the cheesy, touchy-feely ones that believe writing has something to do with expressing your innermost unique and precious soul, has a paragraph or entire chapters about throwing away your computer, or at least setting it aside, and picking up the pen. For you see, it is only through the pen on the paper, the actual movement of your hand across the page, something to do with your breath and your heart and the loops on the ends of your lower-case Fs that makes you a better writer, a more spiritual one, more in tune with your special body and your flower-petal inner beauty that can only be expressed in poetry or something.

Maybe it says something about me, about the way I write or the way I think about writing or the way I am not a snowflake built of glowing crystals fashioned from pure self-esteem, but I think that typing is so much more in tune with the way I think, the way I construct sentences, the way I lay words down on the page, one after the other. I used to do it unconsciously; Now I’m a lot more aware of the impact of the words I choose, the combinations I create, and something about the rapid-fire ticking of the computer keys suits that, propels that, propels me across and down to whatever finish line I’m looking to cross.

I don’t think pottery, or painting, or music or any other kind of art form is considered in quite the same ooshy-gooshy way that writing is considered, and I wonder why that is. As far as I can tell—because I can’t pot, or paint, or play—there is nowhere near as much mysticism and breathy, soul-delving spiritualism built around any other form of expression. Is it because writing is so much more democratic? Is it because anyone can write? Anyone can put together sentences, and everyone believes their sentences are the best sentences. Very few people can oil paint the hell out of a canvas, and most people who pick up a paintbrush or a pen, I think they’re pretty aware of how badly they suck, if they don’t have talent.

I’ve always wanted to be able to paint, or sculpt or play or dance or do something spectacular. There is something unspectacular about writing; there is something a little sad about it, too. There’s either a blowhardy kind of bravado about it—the teenager writing goth poetry calls herself a writer—or something shy and tragic and secretive—writers afraid to call themselves writers, as if there’s some kind of test they have to pass, or a performance standard, or a set number of material accomplishments involved. Writers writing novels who are afraid to call them novels because why—they’re afraid of being mixed in with the goth poetry writers and nanowrimers who submit their first 50,000-word draft to agents across America?

There’s something so solitary about writing, and something about that which makes it particularly, peculiarly subjective. Something that makes people critics, and ridiculous, and shy, and overbearing, and embarrassingly self-conscious. Kind of idiotic. Something that makes people who write (writers?) write long, rambling posts about writing, reaching for some conclusion that doesn’t actually exist.

Writing is the reason that expensive writer’s conferences and expensive, week-long writer’s workshops with expensive mentorships for sale so very popular, and so populated. By which I mean—writing being the way it is. Writers being the way they are, good and bad, self-conscious and self-important and a little in between.

It drives me a little nuts, and I thrive on it. I write, and I find myself avoiding calling myself a writer. I type madly away on my keyboard, enjoying the way the keys click, and they way the words stream from my head to my hands without any intervening thought. I wonder if anyone can tell. I wonder if it’s a good thing. I wonder when I should start really calling myself a writer with any sort of conviction, or if I ever should, or if we should all, from the goth poets to the the fan fictioneers, to the idiots writing or trying to write epic poems and novels and memoirs. I wonder if this post would have been any different if I had discarded my keyboard and taken up my pen and my words throbbed along the page with my heartbeat and my breath. I wonder if that would have been the time I managed to finally share my special body and flower-petal inner beauty that can only be expressed in a blog post or something.

all about me

jen larsen — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 22:28:40 +0000

If I stick to my schedule—and I am dorky enough to have carefully written out a schedule—I will be finished with the second rewrite of my memoir come Saturday afternoon. On my schedule, there is a note that says “SUN: Day of Rest.” And then a space, and then below that, “MON: Line edit begins. “ And if history repeats itself, as frequently it does, I will finish the line edit fairly rapidly, ask various people for feedback on my manuscript, and then panic and sit all alone in the dark for two years without touching the thing again.

It’s getting a little embarrassing, how long this thing is taking me. I know I shouldn’t compare myself to other writers. I know that that is a short ride to a long hell inside my head. I know that beating myself up for being lazy, or scared, or scared and lazy all at once in a dizzying strawberry swirl is no use, at this point, and I should quit worrying about how it looks that I’ve taken so long and quit imagining that I’ve done something wrong, and just get back to the writing. That’s the important bit, right? Of course it is! The play’s the thing! Fucking etcetera.

I am so tired of writing this book that is about me and all my interesting opinions (note: they are not that interesting). I could write something else! But I’ve got to finish this book. Why? I just do. I have to write down all the stupid bullshit I have in my head about weight loss surgery and the math and the duringmath and aftermath. I will incorporate feedback and edits promptly and with great efficiency. And then my agents will take it off and do magical agent things and come back with some kind of news for me.

I am assuming it’ll be “bad” news (because everyone knows that publishing rulez), because it’s safer that way, and because then I don’t have to think about all the non-writer things that happen when you publish a book, like “having to talk to people” in the name of “self-marketing.” But if someone wants to publish it, I will have a party, I will not lie to you. It really would totally rule.

However, if no nice publisher with many good qualities is interested? I will by-god self-publish the thing even if that means I Xerox it and then throw it up in the air on a windy day in a crosswalk, and then I will burn something in effigy—a pair of my fat pants? A pair of my skinny pants? A small eskimo child clutching a pine cone? Something symbolic, I dunno—and then I will move on with my life. I will stop being stuck in this run of 9 or so years of my past that I’ve been wallowing in for so long, and I will find new things to think about and new things to say and new things to care about.

I will write fiction again. Oh my god, I can’t even tell you how lovely that sounds. Imaginary things about imaginary people and imaginary events. Shit will blow up and animals will speak in tongues and the pillar of the universe will tremble and I can go back to being self-absorbed in smaller doses, like on facebook and in blog posts and twitter, and all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well. Ish.

writing again

jen larsen — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:00:32 +0000

I’m writing again. Wait, let me say that with proper emphasis and maybe you will hear the awe and wonder and excitement that surrounds every word in that sentence with a sparkly aura of amazement and glee (and even notice the little shadow behind it that says quietly in a mournful Eeyore voice “but for how long?”): I. Am writing. Again.

I am writing words, that combine into sentences that comprise paragraphs that come together to fill up page after page with prose, that I wrote, that traveled from my head down through my neck and split up at my shoulders and zoomed down through my elbows and came barreling down my forearms and out my fingertips which move like lightning across the keyboard, every day.

Every day, for real. A thousand words, I am aiming for, and a thousand words I usually get, though sometimes less, but also sometimes more than that. I don’t know why it is happening, or how—well, technically I know how, because I’m there when I sit down with my computer on my lap and open up a word processing program and watch the words come out. But the why seems a little like magic.

I have been afraid to talk about it, because maybe talking about it will ruin it. Maybe it will come out like bragging, and maybe the universe will slap me down in a mighty way with the back of its mighty palm. Maybe I am afraid to jostle something with the talking, make someone, something, a somehow aware of me and under that laser-focus, possibly unfriendly attention, I will wither and die and it will all be over and I’ll tell my grandchildren Oh yes, thirty years ago, I wrote a couple thousand words! Wasn’t that nice?

There are certain ways you define yourself—by where you come from, by where you expect to go, by what you do, want to do, have done. I have always defined myself, for the most part, by the one thing I can do, and do well. The one talent I have that I will never truly doubt, the one ability that I possess that makes me feel okay about all the abilities I don’t possess, up to and including being able to walk in a straight line or remember things that happened ten minutes ago. I write. I am a person who writes. I might, if I am feeling okay or even, on sassy days, don’t give a shit about the possibility of someone maybe thinking I am pretentious, call myself a writer. It’s seriously what I do, and it is entirely who I am.

Writers write, though. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve written. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve felt like myself. A couple of years is far too long to go around with a giant chunk of yourself missing, and a huge part of yourself dedicated to feeling bad, feeling guilty, feeling a little lost and like everything is impossible, feeling like you don’t know who you are or why. Worrying that you’ve lost the only good part of yourself, for good, and worrying that you won’t ever get it back.

A promise of a thousand words a day to two friends who are also writers and who have made the same promise, whose projects inspire you. What is making me keep my promise? They are, to a huge extent. But what’s changed in me and for me? What made me say Let’s do this, and what makes me keep doing it? Part of me wants to know so that I can chain it up, tie it down, nail it to a board, promise it candy and money and sweets if it swears to never ever go away again. I am writing, and I don’t want to ever stop again.

photo by Gonzalo Barrientos, Flickr

the amazing interview of dietgirl

jen larsen — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:32:44 +0000

Shauna is Dietgirl. She has Amazing Adventures, and writes not only a so-good blog about them, but also, recently, a book. It is, you will be astonished to learned, called The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl, and it is marvelous–it’s funny, moving, beautifully written, with a cast of wonderful characters and a story at the heart of it that will make you feel, for real, inspired and hopeful. It’s not a book about dieting, about how happiness is only achievable if you’re thin, but a book about health and about happiness. It will also make you want to go sign up for a Body Pump class right now immediately.

Shauna has embarked on a Virtual Book Tour (other stops can be found here), and has answered a few questions that I had for her, though I forgot to ask if she’ll take me home in her suitcase when she returns to Scotland. Shit.

1. In the book you struggle with accepting your body and loving who you were despite your size, and you use a lot of very harsh language about your body and your weight. You could be so mean to yourself, so casually, that it was sometimes difficult to read. Is self-acceptance something you’re still struggling with? Have you consciously tried to change the way you talk about and think about your weight or your body?

I find it difficult to read too! It disturbs me to look back and see how my awful body image clouded every little thing I did. It’s not something I struggle with so much now. I don’t think I consciously tried to change the way I talked/thought; it happened more naturally as a result of my actions. Little things, like getting into weight training when I was 300 pounds, or doing that 5K race… it’s so bloody cheesy but just doing stuff and proving to myself that my body was not a “fat, useless blob” and other terrible quotes got me looking at my body in a different light. The words I used to describe myself became more accepting and positive.

I still have days when I get grumpy with my lumpy bits – your body is such an easy target if you’re feeling down. But I know feeling good about it again is a simple matter of taking care of myself – sleep, good food, exercise. Again it sounds cheesy and simplistic but I need to do those things to keep me feeling good in my own skin. If I don’t take care of my physical health my mental health goes haywire so I have to work to keep it all in vague harmony.
I also think being older helps – life becomes less you-centric so you get a better perspective on things. I can laugh at my character and body flaws instead of feeling crippled by them.

2. Your sister and your mother are both such incredibly vibrant characters in the book. Your sister’s support and the way she kept pushing you to take chances, to take charge, to not give in to your insecurity, was particularly wonderful, and I’m a fan. Does she still live in London and work in posh hotels? Has she considered a career as a life coach, or are your family the only lucky ones?

Rhiannon still lives in London. She’s in marketing now but I will suggest life coaching to her if she ever fancies a change!

Rhi and I have been through a lot of crazy stuff and have always been the other’s calm in the storm, helping each other through our darkest moments. I’m glad that I got to preserve this period in print and let everyone know who bloody amazing she was… she believed in me when I didn’t. She is a good egg. The greatest of all eggs :)

3. I love that your mom had her own story, too–from figuring out her own issues with food, coming to terms with how they affected her daughters, coming to terms with how they had been affecting her her whole life, and finally overcoming them at the end. Is she still walking every day? Still kicking ass and taking names?

The Mothership remains a great character. She’s still walking and has even become a bit of a gym bunny now. She’s found a love interest too — she met him online. It was only a few years ago she was wary of me gallivating around with People Off The Internet and now she’s going to marry one of them!

4. One of the things you worried about in the book was how the people in your life would react to your website; how have people reacted to the book? How have they reacted to how they’re portrayed? How have they reacted to your painfully honest descriptions of your early depression, the binging and the hopelessness?

Those in the book have been happy with their portrayal – I was careful to balance honesty with discretion! Some people were shocked to read about the depression and bingeing and were upset that they didn’t know because they could have helped. In hindsight I feel rotten for not reaching out to people, but you know what it’s like when you’re caught in that fog… you can’t find the energy or words to express what you’re feeling. I couldn’t stand being around myself so the last thing I wanted to do was burden anyone else with my troubles. I think that’s just the nature of the depressed beast.

5. Your book tour is huge and all-encompassing and something that would have scared the shit out of the old Shauna. You are very brave! How are you handling it? Does it ever make you wish you could pull down your blinds and hide a lot?

I’m handling it much now than when the book came out in the UK and Ireland a year ago. Last year I felt rather fraudulent and wanted to hide; all those old Fat Girl Freak Out feelings resurfaced! But I’m glad it happened because I toughened up and finally got it through my head that can’t make everyone in the world approve of me – some people are going to hate you and your book, some will like it, and that’s cool… I just need to make sure I approve of what I’m doing!

Life is far more peaceful and enjoyable since I figured that out that one (I’m a slow learner). I was reading an article in the Sunday Times (UK) recently called How To Be An Optimist and there was a nice quote from Bill Clinton: “We organise our minds to obsess about things that don’t amount to hill of beans. You be free now!”

6. You mention in the book that your dream had always to become an author, and one of the best things about the book was that you see it happen over the course of the story–your confidence and courage growing and your belief in your own talent, plus the fact that we’re holding in our hands the evidence of it coming true. Are you still writing? What are you working on now?

I’m still writing, but right now it’s a load of scrawly rubbish in notebooks. I’m stepping back a little and recharging my batteries and trying to remember that I can write about things aside from the size of my arse :)