February 26, 2014
ADVENTURES IN NEW YORK CITY
The SCBWI Conference Day 3
The Gala Dinner and Meet
& Greet last evening were very pleasant.
I finally found my Regional Advisor and met some others from
Minneapolis/St. Paul area, including a man who had been in my second critique
group. He read the opening of his wonderful
Middle Grade novel he’s working on based on a painting he had seen called Vegetarian Vampires.
I met a woman who lives not far from this
hotel and has been working for several years on her book for Middle Graders about
the coral reefs with a cast of intriguing and hilariously fishy characters. I ran into several women who I had met in the
critique circles. One of them, Doris,
had such a great story twist on Goldilocks that I could easily see her the next
Mo Willems. I have a collection of
business cards now in my briefcase. New
friends.
This morning I find a
platter of GF bagels on the Bagel table and the Food and Beverage Manager is
standing nearby. I smile at him. In his thick New York accent he says, “I
thought of you this morning and even though I was told to only bring them out
if asked for, I thought I’d put out this tray anyway.” Just then a young woman comes up and sees the
tray with its little sign and says, “Oh!
Oh I’m so excited! I’ve been
having to go out every morning to find my own food!” The Manager and I smile at each other.
The first speaker is author
Kate Messner on The Spectacular Power of
Failure. This has been the theme of
my life the past several years: how to live with, release, or generally not be
undone by the fear of failing. Actually, it might be more accurate to say it
has been the theme of my life. Like,
forever my life. And most of my life I
failed spectacularly at overcoming my fear of failing because I was trying to
overcome it. You can’t overcome, i.e.
win out over Fear. If you try and land a
punch it’ll beat the snot out of you. If
you try and run away, it chases you down and eats you up alive. I learned some years back that the only way
to not be controlled by it was to do the lion and the lamb thing and lay down
and take a nap on it’s belly. Except I
was too scared to shut my eyes.
Learning to deal with the
Fear of Failure that has controlled nearly every aspect of my life has been a
long pilgrimage for me. I guess I’m not
surprised to meet up with it again here at the Conference. Kate obviously said a lot of noteworthy
things since I have five pages of notes from her address. But a few jump out at me asking for stars and
circles.
Be brave. It’s okay to
be afraid. If you weren’t nervous about
what you are attempting, it wouldn’t be worth doing. You can’t have brave without scared.
As artists we set goals, and then we move the bar on
ourselves…’I will write 10 minutes a day…finish the book by…get an agent…get
published…win an award…if I could just.’
There is no end. When we keep
moving the bar, we cheat ourselves out of the pleasure of small successes. Notice those small successes! Celebrate them!
Athletes and engineers and children “fail” a lot and accept
that as part of the process. The only
way to achieve what they’re trying to do is to try, fail, adjust, learn, keep
going, do it again…over and over until they get it right. We as artists need to have the same attitude.
Never, never give up.
Nikki Grimes, author of
middle grade fiction written in verse is our final speaker of the day. She speaks so beautifully, it is difficult to
believe that once she was in the audience—new, hopeful, frustrated,
scared. She tells her story and she
advocates for us to be patient with ourselves and our learning process. Like anything beautiful, we have to be given
time to grow, time to ripen, time to become—and so does our art.
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