In Conversation with Midge Raymond, Author of How to be an Everyday Writer: Tips and Prompts
This week author and publisher Midge Raymond, whose newest book is How to be an Everyday Writer: Tips and Prompts, offers us some of her quickie prompts and answers questions about her career and writing.
Sheila
Midge, you have succeeded in publishing collections of short stories and novels and you have wonderful nonfiction essays out there. You’re also busy publishing with Ashland Creek Press. Why did you take the time to write How to be an Everyday Writer: Tips and Prompts?
Midge
Since I was young, I’ve wanted to be a writer. And when I was young, my vision of “being a writer” was something like this: I’d live in a big house in New England—somewhere on the coast of Maine, perhaps—and I’d write in a sun-drenched, top-floor room overlooking the Atlantic.
My reality of being a writer is more like this: writing in cramped railroad flats, cafes, and libraries; struggling to find time before and after showing up at the day job; and taking years to finish even a ten-page short story.
Yet this is the reality most of us writers face—we need to fit in our work around Everyday Life. And this requires that we become Everyday Writers. While most of us are told that we should (or even must) write every day in order to be successful writers, we’re not always able to sit down to write every day. Yet we can still become successful writers.
I wrote Everyday Writing: Tips and Prompts to Fit Your Regularly Scheduled Life to help all writers do just that—achieve their goals without sacrificing their day jobs, their families, or their sanity. Below are a few writing prompts from the book, along with tips for how you can use these prompts to train yourself to become an Everyday Writer…even when you’re not able to write every single day.
Sheila
Although you are busy and your writer’s life doesn’t match the one you fantasized of the writer, the list of publication credits on your website is impressive as is the number of those pieces published in literary magazines and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. How do you handle the submitting side of the writing life? Is there an “everyday submission” guide you could write?
Midge
The submitting side is just as important as the writing side for those who want to get their work out there—and it’s also very time consuming! I find that submitting is a great way to stay connected to my life as a writer when I’ve got writing time but little or no creative energy; it’s the perfect task when you’ve set aside some time but are feeling creatively burned out. I keep spreadsheets of every story I submit, and I usually send a new story to about five journals or magazines at a time—I find that this is enough to give the story a chance, but not so many that if it gets accepted quickly I’m scrambling to let editors know. And as rejections come in, I’ll send more out. My advice for submitting would be similar to my advice for writing: Read literary magazines during your regularly scheduled life to stay connected to what they publish, devote as much time as you can to the process, and the rejections galvanize you and the successes inspire you.
Sheila
What for you is the difference between writing fiction and writing nonfiction? Can you tell the genre of what you are about to write? What allows you to know?
Midge
Though I have a background in journalism and have written a lot of nonfiction, I’ve been drawn almost entirely toward fiction in recent years—my main interest, even as a magazine and newspaper writer, has always been in telling other people’s stories, and this is what fiction allows me to do. Yet I love what I can do with nonfiction in terms of passing along what I’ve learned about writing, publishing, rejection, and everything else about being a writer—that is what most of my nonfiction is about these days. When I was just beginning to write stories and send them out, I was always so appreciative of those authors who wrote about the process and shared their tales—so I hope that with Everyday Writing and other articles I can offer the same sort of encouragement that I’ve received.
In terms of how to determine genre, i.e., whether a piece is going to be a story or a novel, this is usually something that I know immediately; whenever I begin a story, I always know where it’s headed, where it will end. So if I don’t know the ending, I know it’ll be a longer project. And sometimes it’ll happen in a completely different way: I find that I’m not ready to let go of characters from stories. I’ve written an entire novel based on a short story I wrote years ago, and I’ve been thinking about expanding one of the stories from Forgetting English into a novel. I get curious about where these characters will end up, what they’ll do next!
Sheila
You have become a publisher of other people’s work as well as an author. Does the publishing venture encourage your writing in some way? What is your favorite part of being a publisher, especially in light of how changing the publishing world is at this moment in time.
Midge
Being a publisher keeps me connected to writing in a way that is very inspiring. What I love best about publishing is being able to launch books that truly deserve to be out in the world. When people ask me what books I’ve read and enjoyed most lately, it’s always the books we’re about to publish (and this isn’t just a sales ploy—we absolutely love each and every book we acquire!). Being able to do this for an author is amazing; as an author myself I see our opportunities shrinking, and I’m glad to play a small role in getting great books out there. And, after spending so much time and energy promoting my first book, Forgetting English, I’ve found that I love promoting others’ books for a change and using what I’ve learned to help them do all they can to find their readers. While I truly enjoy every aspect of what we do, as a longtime editor, I’d have to say that working with authors on their manuscripts is the most fun.
Sheila
One more, what is the question you wish interviewers would ask you or the best question they have in your opinion? What is your answer? Why do you like answering this question?
Midge
I love being asked anything that I’d never have thought of—those are always fun questions to tackle. I also enjoy being asked anything that I can ask back, creating a conversation—for example, with Forgetting English, I like the question, “What’s your favorite of all your stories?” not only because it’s a challenging one to answer but because then I can get readers’ opinions, too. With Everyday Writing, it’s fun when writers ask me about, say, a writing ritual or how to avoid writer’s block, because when I ask them the same question, I always learn amazing new things.
Sheila
Well, it’s tempting to give you an answer for at least one of these questions. One way I avoid writer’s block is this: I create and/or use prompts. Having some words or a strategy to start with means I have something to do when I look at the open white document on my screen. So without further ado, let’s turn to the prompts you’ve shared with us.
Midge
Here are a few:
Quickies
These are five-minute prompts that are perfect for the busy writer. Each of these quickies can be done in five minutes or fewer—and if you have extra time, you can take them as far as you’d like. As you’ll see from the nature of these prompts, they focus on the ordinary: the little things in life that surround us but often go ignored. Try to spend a little time each day paying attention to these things, whether it’s a neighbor’s pet or the feeling of being caught in inclement weather. As you learn to observe the world around you more closely, the habit of writing about it will not be far behind.
- Write about getting caught in the rain.
- Describe your neighbor’s cat.
- Write for one minute about each of these words: tangerine, maple, paintbrush, crimson, cottage.
Fifteen-minute situational prompt
This prompt is slightly longer but serves the same purpose as the quickies: to ask you to pay attention to what’s happening around you. As a writer, everything you experience in life is material for your work, so don’t let a moment slip by unexamined. The following exercise is just one example of how to make literary use of idle time—you can do exercises like this one no matter where you are, from the grocery store line to a Greyhound bus.
- While in the dentist’s chair…
- Think about your smile. Do you use it often or seldom? How often do you fake it? What are the things that genuinely bring a smile to your face—and under what circumstances do you find yourself forcing a smile you’re not feeling?
Evening prompt
This writing exercise is designed for an evening off—or any time when you have some quality time to write. And it’s also meant to take you into deep emotional territory, whether you’re writing about yourself or applying it to a fictional character, so don’t skim the surface on this one but go as far as you can with it.
In general, try to fit in at least one morning, afternoon, or evening per week to spend a little time on your writing—even if it’s as few as twenty minutes, this writing time will offer a great boost to your creative energy. As with meditation, even small doses of writing can do wonders.
So, if you could do anything you wanted tonight—from robbing a bank to having an affair—with absolutely no consequences, what would you do? Describe the evening in great detail.
Sheila
Oh, my, I wonder what I will write! Thank you for these, Midge. I also want my readers to know how they can learn more about you and your work and also get to read some online. So thank you for sharing the following links:
- Interview with Erika Dreifus
- Short story, “Lost Art,” from Escape Into Life magazine (this story appears in Midge’s collection Forgetting English).
- Short story, “Floaters,” from Passages North magazine:
- For Kindle readers, several stories from Forgetting Englishare available on the Kindle as stand-alones:
I know that Writing It Real members will enjoy becoming familiar with your work as well as experiencing writing from the prompts you provided for us. Again, thanks so much.