Ex-lawyer performs in community college dance show

And other May updates

It’s been about a month since I gave a global update on how things are going with science fiction writing. As with my April update, I write about what’s going well and what’s been challenging with writing life. Personal updates at the end.

What’s going well:

I performed in my school’s dance show. 👀

I'm the girl doing piqué turns across the stage, right to left

If you told me 18 months ago, when I was in the fugue of early motherhood, while I was still dispensing milk from my boobs like a soda fountain for my infant son and carrying around stretch-marked loose skin on my abdomen, that in 2024 I would be on stage performing ballet for hundreds of spectators I would have laughed in your face. But that is, indeed, what happened.

I signed up for a ballet class at Skyline College, the place where I’ve been taking creative writing classes. I have loved—adored actually—dance since I was a small child. As an adult, I tried to keep up with dance when I could, but being a lawyer and being a mom got in the way for many years.

I haven’t been on stage for a dance performance since 2016, when I was living in D.C. I was part of Nootana—an Indian classical fusion music and dance company.

A 2013 Nootana show (I'm the girl on the right)

I’m a performer at heart. I’ve often said that my favorite part of practicing law was the “stand and deliver” aspect. I really loved presenting oral arguments for judges. Up in front of people, I kind of become my fullest self.

So I did the ballet show—in my mid-30’s, post-child, and in the worst shape of my life. I was up there on stage, pushing myself to be seen, and not be embarrassed. I was inspired by a few of my dance classmates. One in particular is a woman in her 60s who has been taking dance classes at Skyline for the last 40 years (not exaggerating!) She’s been taking dance there since the 1980’s and has performed in almost a hundred shows by now. I hope I have her poise and grace when I’m her age.

As of May 22, 2024, I’ve written 23,973 words of my science fiction novel.

Not bad considering that I started this draft on March 21. That’s an average of 532 words per weekday.

The last week or so I’ve struggled with my inner critical voice telling me the story I’ve conceived isn’t worth telling. But the victory is that I’ve pushed past that voice for the most part and have gotten words on the page.

Some of those words are good, but mostly they’re bad. This stage in novel writing is more about me just getting the ideas down. The ideas alone will amount to at least 100K words. After that, I will have to climb the mountain of making the prose actually good.

I have a writing goal: the first draft of my novel will be finished by September 24, my birthday. It’s the best birthday present I can give myself this year. The first draft will be at least 100K words, so I’ve been using the word count as a marker of my progress. I’m almost a quarter of the way through, so that’s a good sign.

I was published in a literary magazine.

I mentioned this in my post from a couple weeks ago, but a couple of my pieces were recently published in Talisman. My poem even won a prize.

There’s something wonderful about having my writing out there, outside of my head and on physical pages. My novel is so hidden and mysterious at this point (even, at times, to myself), that getting some bit of my creative voice out to share with the world is wonderful. I have also found writing for Substack to be gratifying for that reason.

I’ve made some cool new writing friends.

I’ve been really encouraged and warmed by how effortless it has been to make new friends who also love writing. In my creative writing class at Skyline, I met my friend S who is a mom of two elementary-aged kids. Though she studied Comparative Literature at Berkeley and has always loved to write, she chose a more practical career in speech therapy and gave up on creative writing until more recently. She was also in my ballet class and was in the dance show with me! She and I have bonded over writing and motherhood and on being in this particular stage in our lives.

I have also made friends with A, an Indian woman in her 70s who taught high school science for decades until she decided to go to law school at age 60! She is studying creative writing as a way to tell the stories of her childhood in India and to share some of the oral mythologies she learned from her elders. I had tea at her condo in Pacifica today. S was there, and it was so lovely to be in the company of these wonderful, wise, creative women.

View of the ocean from A's place

I’ve also been making some cool acquaintances (someday friends?) here on Substack. I’m just so pleased by how much my yearning for friendship and connection is reciprocated. I feel the universe has helped me feel less lonely in a career path that I thought would make me feel isolated. It has been the opposite. I can be my full, authentic self in this career and say the things I truly feel. It has been the most liberating experience.

What’s not going well:

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.

The inner critical voice has grown louder in the last few weeks, partially because I’ve been reading a lot of books about the craft of writing and realize how much I don’t know. How Socratic, right? The wisest person knows that they know nothing. I suppose I haven’t been very wise. Before I started trying to intentionally learn writing craft, I didn’t think about whether I actually knew what I was doing—I just started doing it.

But I actually think that a beginner brain—the naïve mind—is probably the right mindset for a writer. If I waited until I knew all about the craft of writing before I began, I’d never get off the starting line. Part of me thinks I should just stop trying to educate myself on writing and just do the damn thing—learn by trial and error. But the other part of me thinks that I could waste a lot of time doing the writing wrong, time that could have been saved if I had just read a book.

I’ve been doing it all wrong, apparently.

One book that has really thrown me for a loop lately has been Story Genius by Lisa Cron. She makes the radical argument that it’s actually not plot or prose that makes a book good—it’s the character and their particular misbelief (“fatal flaw”) that grips a reader and makes the story worth reading. She asserts that the book’s entire plot should be driven by the character’s flaw—that the plot is simply there to create conflict with the character’s misbelief and demonstrate their change. 

Taking in the implication of this particular argument really threw me for a couple of weeks because I sat back and realized that my novel, as I have plotted it, is not particularly character driven. It is plot driven. That is, I wrote the plot before I conceived of my characters and not the other way around. I kind of went into a bit of a doom spiral where I worried that my story was going to be flat and uninteresting. 

After I started reading Story Genius, I tried to deepen the character for one of my protagonists by giving her a wild backstory that I thought would give her more depth. After I did this, however, I found that I didn’t enjoy writing the story. It felt contrived. My character felt less believable to me. 

After several days of this feeling I listened to my gut and reverted back to the original backstory I had conceived for that character. I fleshed out some more of the details for why her fatal flaw was the way it was, and how it still developed and played into the larger theme for the book. I feel a lot better about the story now.

I went on Reddit and Discord and a bunch of other online writing places to see if everyone agreed with Lisa Cron because I just felt so much dissonance with her puritanical insistence on character-driven plot. Part of me agreed with her. It seems that contemporary literary fiction runs on the character growth story. The most boring everyday settings (e.g., suburban mom life) are gripping when the character has some interesting character flaw that is borne out and the character evolves throughout the novel.

But then I thought of highly successful action flicks (e.g, Mission Impossible, James Bond, Terminator) where the character never grows, but the movie is still great. Sometimes plot driven stories are fun too. Thankfully, people on the internet were also critical of Cron’s argument and had conflicted views on what makes a story good. So I felt less lonely in my perspective.

Even though I don’t agree with Lisa Cron that only character-driven stories are gripping, her book did prompt me to spend more time developing my protagonists and thinking about how the story is told through their particular filter. The narrator’s voice guides the plot and creates grist for the mill. That was valuable.

My kid got sick and it threw my entire schedule.

You may have noticed up top that my word count is of March 22. That’s because I haven’t had a chance to write the novel since that date. My son Zakir had the worst illness that he’s had in his entire life starting on Tuesday afternoon when he had had a high enough fever that the daycare called me to come pick him up early. I’ve had him home with me for the latter half of the week. Zakir’s coughing was keeping him up at night, so my husband and I also didn’t get much sleep for a few days. He was so ill we ended up doing an online urgent care session with a doctor, who told us we needed to take him in to be physically seen somewhere. We booked an emergency appointment with a nurse practitioner at our pediatrician’s office. Thankfully Zakir is much better now.

When my son was crying because of all the pain in his throat and not being able to breathe, I felt so helpless and sorry I couldn’t make it better for him. And this was after he had seen medical professionals and had medicine and food and all the comfort both his parents could give him in a calm and safe environment. I couldn’t help but think of all the parents in Gaza whose children are in pain, and not even from dismemberment and physical trauma, but from daily hunger. I can’t fathom being unable to feed my child. Being a mom has changed me in that I have this visceral feeling of empathy for all children, and I can’t help but see my son in every child’s face. Witnessing the suffering in Gaza has been true torment.

Personal Updates

Surprise, there are none. As I was writing I realized that the “personal updates” category is entirely arbitrary. Everything I’ve written above is personal. So up above is where you’ll find personal updates. I didn’t want to end on a sad note, however, so I’ll leave you with some wisdom from another writer:

"Write what should not be forgotten." — Isabel Allende

See y’all next Tuesday,

Noor