Editor’s Notebook: Look what I just made! On writing Pride.

May 2023

The circle closes. For the second time, I and my co-editors have published our final essay in the 7 Sins of the Writing Life series. With Pride—the good kind, Cheryl tells us, that Aristotle recommends—we conclude our celebration of the collaboration ten years ago that brought us together. Ultimately that collaboration led to the creation of Waterwheel Review, and we’re damn Proud of that.

Cheryl asks: In your writing life, do you experience Pride-as-self-confidence? Or Pride-as-arrogance? Maybe you suffer from Pride-as-undue humility?

I’m not sure if this is a sign of self-confidence or arrogance (it’s definitely not undue humility) but I’m with Aristotle and consider Pride in my work a virtue. Putting my all into everything I write is the key, I think, to why writing keeps me sane. It allows me to put to good use my perfectionism and tendency to ruminate. Of course I’m Proud of that!

Give Cheryl’s essay a read and see where you fall on the Pride scale.

I’ve enjoyed re-reading this series and applying the insights in each piece to my current writing life. Every essay still feels relevant. But in different ways, surely, given how much has changed? To put a bow on this project, I posed a couple of questions about the 7 Sins, now, a decade on, to Cheryl and Suzanne. To be fair, I replied, too.

Which of the 7 Sins has been your biggest challenge since you wrote these essays?

“Lust is equal parts motivator and taunter,” says Cheryl. “I have lusted to create my version of a writer’s life, and I’ve made it happen. But my pursuit has stifled my family’s financial growth. It’s challenging to continue pursuing work that doesn’t pay.”

Suzanne says Gluttony is currently her biggest challenge. “I could produce more drafts if I weren’t so hungry to work over the lines in my current one.” Her writing time is so scarce, having a draft of anything feels lucky, and she can’t let it go. “This one shiny golden draft exists—I can’t even recall how it came to be—and now I want to spend all my writing time digging into it, smoothing it out, expanding, selecting, lengthening, l-e-n-g-t-h-e-n-i-n-g.”

I’m with Cheryl on this one: Lust. In the ten years since we first published the 7 Sins essays, my Lust for All Things Writing Life distracted me too often from my own work. It took the long disruption of the pandemic to teach me that. In the last year, Wrath has been my biggest challenge, as I explain in my answer to the second question below.

Do any of the Sins look different to you now?

Cheryl sees Pride very differently because of the essay she wrote about it ten years ago. “Seeing myself in Aristotle’s ‘undue humble man’ was painful to accept.” Since fully processing that personal revelation, she’s used it to work through the intense feelings of shame that have been central to her poetry. “Shame is stealthier than I ever imagined. The journey has been long, but today, I can say that I’m Proud of the work I’m doing.” 

These days, Envy looks very different to Suzanne. “When we first published the series, I didn’t have a book published. Authors with published books made me Envious.” Now she has three books published herself, and she’s seen how authors get their books published in a surprising variety of ways. “I feel like one of a dedicated crowd, and the Envy has dissolved.”

I have to come back to what I wrote here about Wrath last month. Whenever I’ve experienced Wrath as motivation to write short stories, soon enough the anger was displaced as I became engrossed in the fictional world I created. That’s how I used to experience Wrath in my writing life. But the Wrath that propelled me a year ago into a nonfiction project does not get displaced as I write, it gets examined and re-examined, expressed and elaborated, broken into bits and pieces and then rebuilt. Sitting with all that Wrath can be draining and depressing. The Wrath can take over the prose, too, so I have to be careful about that.

My final 7 Sins sign-off: May you indulge and enjoy all writing sins forevermore. And may you write well today.

In September we kick off our fourth season of this magazine. How that happened, I will never understand, but I couldn’t be more grateful, and I look forward to all the discoveries waiting for us in the fall. For now I leave you with my favorite line from the 7 Sins series, from Cheryl’s essay on Pride: “The writer’s eye never closes.” No, it doesn’t.

—Claire Guyton

Editor’s Notebook: Mad and getting madder. On writing Wrath.

April 2023

I’m very sorry to say that I can’t remember the last time I lived three days in a row without being angry. And usually not just angry. Furious. I bring it on myself, and I’m going to have to keep it up because my work depends on it.

The book I’m writing was birthed in righteous anger. Writing the rage allows me to make meaning from it, maybe even art. But to tell the truth about all that anger, I’ve had to study it. Even wallow in it. And I wonder, as I push on, how much Wrath can writing—good writing—contain? Given all this focus on my own fury, I knew I’d read my co-editor Suzanne’s meditation on Wrath, the penultimate essay in our reprised series, 7 Sins of the Writing Life, in a wholly new way.

When my fiction is inspired by anger, as soon as the story takes hold of me and demands to be written, I rise up and away. The fire can no longer hurt because I experience it as empathy for the character I’ve created. When I worked with Suzanne on this essay ten years ago, that’s how I understood and experienced Wrath in relation to my writing and writing life. But my current work; this outrageous business of writing about my own life… well.

I do not rise. The fire hurts.

“[A]s I think about how Wrath acts—a blind, chaotic, and unstoppable force—it alarms me,” says Suzanne, “that should it go unchecked in our writing lives, it could destroy much more than just our writing.” That alarms me, too. “If we let it, Wrath can steal energy from writing, break professional connections, and destroy nurturing personal relationships in the writing community.” Yes, it can! Shall I tell you how I know that? Another time, perhaps.

But: “Productively using Wrath is like burning the underbrush to prevent a forest fire.”

While my work turns me into a rage-archaeologist, digging around in the dirt of my childhood for the evidence that my Wrath started there (it did, yes), I ask myself how to tame the energy of all that anger, how to avoid stoking it for the sake of the page, how to ensure I keep telling the truth even as I burn. So far, the best answer? Learn from the writers willing to show the way.

Are you writing Wrath? Do you avoid writing Wrath? Take a look at what Suzanne and the writers she consulted have to say about this all-consuming writing-life Sin.

And just for fun, here are my two favorite songs about anger. I took breaks to listen to both as I wrote this post:

Next month, when we publish our final issue of the season, we will complete our essay series with Pride.

May you indulge and enjoy all writing sins forevermore. And may you write well today.

—Claire Guyton

Editor’s Notebook: Don’t be so greedy! Maybe.

March 2023

I’ll say it again: Life is short and getting shorter.

Last month, I mentioned that I’ve been gorging on post-pandemic PLANS. What I didn’t say is that all this activity is in the service of my current writing project, which, lately, I’m daring to call a book. I’m still in overdrive, both with regard to my calendar and writing. Every new experience and crowded page is deeply satisfying but I’m hungry for the next and the next after that and the next again. And I’m starting to wonder if Greed is driving me. At least in part. Greed for validation? Readers? Recognition?

Well, I hope so. Because as Suzanne points out in her essay on writerly Greed, the latest in our 7 Sins of the Writing Life series, it’s a sin that can breed success. I’ll let her say more about how that might work. Here, I’ll share thoughts on writerly Greed from my friend Lisa Mayer, who answered the questions Suzanne posed to a few writer friends in preparation for her essay.

What, if anything, do you feel most Greedy for? Name recognition? Earnings? Contest wins? Ongoing book deals? Solicitation of your work (i.e., lack of need to submit)?

OK, I’ll be nakedly greedy: I want to be David Sedaris. There. I said it. 

I want to write my funny little memoirs and POOF! My team—agent, publisher, publicist, and personal snack maker—sends me on the road for six months every year to perform them. Across the country, and then around the world. No hustle, no mustle.

Even five months. Four. Three.

I am SO ready.

Then I call my mother, and read her my latest. And she laughs and laughs until she cries. She forgets her troubles. And that’s enough for me.

Maybe that’s my problem.

Does Greed ebb and flow as writers move through different life stages?

Oh yes. When I was 22, I started in the Advertising Biz in New York City, and there was crazy greed among the writers to be the one to come up with THE BIG IDEA. To be poached by a cool boutique agency and become Creative Director and make THE BIG BUCKS. We still reminisce on Facebook about the good old Madison Avenue days.

I can’t believe I was ever 22.  

Now my greed is pitted against TIME, the scythe, dementia. I’m desperate to get it all down, get it all out. Stories, plays, songs, operas lately and a million-zillion memories. I wake up every morning, and lay awake every night, bulging with ideas. 

It’s a curse.

Do you think you could ever be satisfied as a writer?

Well, that’s a hard no.

Thank you, Lisa, for sharing your Greed with us! I’m sorry you feel cursed but it’s a sorry-not-sorry, because I’m glad for whatever drives you to write and share more of your stories.

Next stop: Wrath.

May you indulge and enjoy all writing sins forevermore. And may you write well today.

—Claire Guyton

Editor’s Notebook: Have another slice of pie! Hello, Gluttony

February 2023

Life is short and getting shorter. The pandemic planted that sentence in my brain, and I’ve uttered it many times this year as I’ve jumped into new interests and challenges. While the world has settled into its more usual rhythms and we’ve returned to pre-Covid habits, I’ve been in danger of gorging on PLANS. And, in the countless hours of feverish, late-night writing I’ve been doing—I’m acting like I’m in my early 20s, again—I’m definitely gorging on words.

In her Gluttony essay, the next in our 7 Deadly Sins of the Writing Life series, Cheryl talks first about her over-indulgence in… fewer words. I’ll let her explain how that works. She’ll share, too, how a few other writers encounter Gluttony in their writing lives. These writers answered a handful of questions on the subject, and the answers inform the essay. Given my own recent months of Gluttonous writing, I decided to take a crack at Cheryl’s questions myself:

How does a writer learn when to walk away from a piece and not over-indulge in revision? How do you know when a piece is finished?

I’m lucky in that my writing-Gluttony never takes the form of over-indulgence in revision. I’m a “vertical” writer, so I think deeply about what I’m writing as I move along, and continually double-back to revise. For that reason, my first drafts tend to be very clean, and I typically need to do only 1 to 3 revisions to get myself to a final. I’m done when what I’ve written overlays perfectly the vision I had for the piece. How I know I’ve matched my vision is a bit of a mystery that’s difficult to articulate. When I’ve done it, I feel a kind of quiet euphoria. A rush of satisfaction and faith. I’m so sorry to say this but the answer really is… I know when I know.

Learning to see your vision with clarity that can’t be clouded by someone else’s opinion, and trusting that sense of satisfaction when you’ve created what you envisioned, is key to avoiding losing yourself in unnecessary revision that will only dilute your work. Of course you have to care more about nailing your vision than getting published, which is a big ask for some.

What do you do with those pieces that have been suffocated by your over-revision? Do you revisit? Try to revive them?

As I said above, I’ve never had this trouble. That might be because I’m actively testing revisions as I go. If I cut text I really like but might not fit, I don’t delete it, I drop it at the bottom of my Word file. As I continue with the piece, I’ll periodically jump down to the bottom of the file to revisit chunks I’ve excised. It’s not unusual to realize I’ve got a perfect new place for one of the them, or to be inspired into a tweak of a removed bit that makes it work where it was before. In other words, whenever I make a substantial change to a story, I retain the original material—sometimes I create a new file so I can page back and forth between the two versions—so that I can rework and re-integrate good material anytime.

How about the over-indulgence in an admired writer’s feedback? How does their critique influence your revision?

I always take feedback seriously until I don’t. Meaning that I will make a good faith effort to incorporate feedback but I remain very tuned into my vision as I do so, and the instant I see that a suggested change doesn’t support what I’m trying to do, I abort. I have never over-indulged in feedback.

Is there something else that you over-indulge in when it comes to writing?

I will write until I drop. It’s not strange at all for me to write 8 or 10 hours straight, and often enough during a productive period I will write for 12 or 15. I love being in this kind of flow and will neglect just about anything to keep it going. Most of the time that serves my writing well, if not always my sleep routine or housekeeping or familial duty. And that’s the problem—the neglect of other important things. If I let myself consistently over-indulge in writing time, my life gets out of balance. That’s obviously a problem in itself that needs addressing but of course once I get truly out of balance, the writing will begin to suffer as well.

Is this more of a sin for beginning writers?

Gluttonous revision and solicitation of feedback? I think so, yes. You have to get your writing legs under you before you fully trust your own instincts about when and how much to revise, what writing habits work, how to identify and use good feedback.

As for over-indulgence in writing itself, which is the only kind of writing-Gluttony I experience, probably that’s more of a temptation for experienced writers.

Many thanks to Cheryl for inspiring me all over again, 10 years later, to think about writing-Gluttony.

Next stop: Greed.

May you indulge and enjoy all writing sins forevermore. And may you write well today.

—Claire Guyton