blog – Meg Dowell Writes

This Is Something I Don’t Normally Do …

Nov 20, 2015 Meg Dowell2 Comments

Maybe this is a little selfish and maybe it won’t mean much or anything to you. But I’m feeling a little overwhelmed today. It’s one of those frustrating days when I have a lot of creative energy and a lot of ideas and not very much extra time to spend working on most of them.

I am working on a special project coming up in December (more details coming soon) in addition to updating this blog, writing a book, my podcast, etc, etc, and since I’m a little pressed for time and sort of anxious about my monstrous to-do list, I’m going to combine a few of these things so I can provide you with some content that may, or may not, resonate with you in some way.

So here’s a little creative writing for your enjoyment and my sanity. If you’re not interested, that’s okay, and I can assure you this isn’t something I currently do or will plan to do very often here, but Novelty is all about writing, and sometimes, that means you get pieces of my brain in the process.

Enjoy. Or don’t. I’ll be back with a regular post tomorrow.

Treehouse

It’s the end of the school day

You’re holding back tears

You’d think this would have ended

After all these years

You climb up to your treehouse

And within the hour

You’re a warrior princess

Scaling the tallest ivory tower

Protecting the innocent

From the fire and the lies

Of the kings and queens and nobles

You’ve come to despise

You’re confident and strong

You’re powerful and brave

But you’re afraid to climb down

When you know things will never

Be quite the same

In the large crowded hallways

On a Wednesday afternoon

You’ve avoided the danger

But you fear it’s coming soon

You don’t feel safe

Outside the walls of your treehouse

The words breathed like fire

Meant to take you down

Are too much to bear

When you’re already tired

From the battles you’ve fought

Against the queens you once admired

You try to blend in

They always single you out

You’re not a princess or a hero

You’re nothing, you don’t count

But inside your fortress

You’re invincible

You can be who you want

You can conquer the world

When nobody sees you

It’s just better that way

When it doesn’t matter

That they’re all beautiful

And you’ll never be the same

Everyone has their own way out

Their own way to escape

From the pain and the doubt

So write your own story

It might never come true

But at least you’ll always have

A little more faith in you

There will always be those

Who don’t ever approve

Of the brave things you say

Or the nice things you do

Keep your chin up

Even when it’s impossible

Then run to your treehouse

And become unstoppable

Even for awhile

Think of how many days

You’ve already made it out alive

I bet you years from now

You’ll be glad you survived

Maybe you won’t be

The ruler of a kingdom

But you can still be a hero

To those who need to hear

They’re still worth the world

It’s the end of the school year

It’s been a long time

Since you’ve climbed up to your treehouse

Without needing to cry

It’s great to pretend you can conquer the world

But the words don’t burn quite so much these days

Love&hugs, Meg<3

Image courtesy of pinterest.com.

Meg is the managing editor at College Lifestyles magazine, a guest contributor with Lifehack and a guest blogger for Food & Nutrition Magazine. She is a seven-time NaNoWriMo winner and has also written for Teen Ink and USA TODAY College. Follow Meg on Twitter.

Dear John [and Hank]: I Am 23

Sep 30, 2015Sep 30, 2015 Meg Dowell1 Comment

I am 23.

Maybe to you that doesn’t mean much. Maybe to you it just means I’m an early ‘90s baby and rocked out to Hilary Duff in my tweens (because, why not?). I collected Beanie Babies and had one American Girl doll (Molly FTW!). I was right in the middle of high school when YouTube became a big deal but was too self-conscious to hop on the content creation bandwagon.

I am a recent college graduate. I majored in English. I write a lot.

So basically, at the moment, life is its own special circle of hell, and I’m not sure how long it’s going to take to find my way out of this dizzying labyrinth of unemployment, lack of fulfillment and, well, nothingness.

Some days, to be honest, the only thing that keeps me going is being able to say I am not only 23, broke, jobless, tired, invisible, but also, I’m a Nerdfighter.

I suppose I’m not the only lost soul who has stumbled upon your work in all of its varieties and found enough value in it to want to say around forever. There’s something about joining an online community of people who understand and like the same things you understand and like that makes all the hard parts of life easier to sift through.

Do I forget to be awesome sometimes? Of course I do. But there’s always another video or Tumblr post or podcast episode to get me back on track.

Speaking of podcasts, there’s a reason I was inspired to write this post today. It’s not that I don’t enjoy writing ‘letters’ to people who inspire me even if they’ll never read them. I just haven’t been feeling very inspired lately. I’m exhausted. I’m working really hard and don’t have much to show for it. It’s getting old. I feel like the world keeps spinning and everyone is on an epic adventure except for me.

I feel like I’m going in circles, always going, but never actually getting anywhere.

I meant to bring this up. But someone else’s Dear Hank and John question already did.

First came this:

“I think that the hard part of creation is getting past the part where you’re doing it and no one’s paying attention, because you’re not that good at it.” –Hank Green

And next came this:

“You gotta take a certain amount of pleasure and joy in the act of making something.” –John Green

They might seem like simple statements taken out of context. Maybe even obvious ones. But they meant something to me. They inspired me. You inspired me. Again.

It’s hard to remember to love what you do when you don’t have a choice. If I just sat around, only applying for jobs I didn’t really want, with nothing to fill in the gaps, I don’t know where I would be. I had a job I loved, but like many things in life, it was temporary, and it’s gone.

So I write. And I set goals. And I try. And no one is paying attention.

I struggle every day with wanting to be a successful writer, wondering if I’m any good at it, knowing I can’t be 23 and support myself doing it, wishing things had turned out differently. I had a completely different dream and it was taken away from me before it even had the chance to see the world. Do you know what it’s like, trying to put all my pieces back together, trying to convince myself it’s all going to be okay?

Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. This is how life goes. I feel like, if I was ever going to give up, it’d be now.

I won’t, of course. How could I? I still love writing even though I never feel like it matters to anyone else. It matters to me.

Would I still write if no one ever read it? I do it every day. I participate as an audience member even if I don’t have an audience myself, because watching other people create content inspires me to create content, regardless of whether or not it’s important to someone else.

I’m a lot of things. I’m definitely not a quitter. I’m a fighter.

I may not be the best at what I do.

I may not be the best at anything.

But I’m only 23. Maybe I’ll get better. Maybe it will all get better.

Even if it doesn’t, at least I know who I am. At least I know what I love. At least, in the grand scheme of the online universe, I am not alone.

Best wishes,

Meg

Image courtesy of youtube.com.

Meg is a twenty-something workaholic with a passion for writing, coffee and health. In addition to her status as an aspiring novelist, Meg is the managing editor at College Lifestyles magazine, a guest contributor with Lifehack and a guest blogger for Food & Nutrition Magazine. She is a seven-time NaNoWriMo winner and has also written for Teen Ink and USA TODAY College. Follow Meg on Twitter.

never forget.

Sep 11, 2015 Meg DowellLeave a comment

For awhile, this website went through an identity crisis. And after months of planning, when it finally emerged from its cocoon and finally became the writer-centric place it was always meant to be, I made a promise to myself. I promised I wouldn’t make it about me.

But every once in awhile I still have to step back, break from my normal flow of content, do something different. I don’t think I could have gotten through today without stepping away from what you might normally expect to appear on your feeds or in your inboxes, to address what’s on our minds and hearts today.

The thing is, I don’t really know what to say.

How do you even put something like this into words?

If you’ve taken a basic psychology course before, you might remember learning a little about how kids’ brains work. Basically they’re very self-centered, not because they don’t care about other people, but because that’s all they know.

I think that day, 14 years ago, was the first time I grieved for someone other than myself. I didn’t know what that was supposed to feel like at the time, of course. It’s scary when you’re just a little kid and you feel sad and upset and worried about people you don’t even know, when you don’t feel safe, when you don’t understand where all those feelings are coming from.

This #NeverForget hashtag trending today didn’t really resonate much with me at first. Of course we’ll never forget, I thought. How could we?

But in that moment of silence this morning, leaning over my kitchen counter, I realized how clearly I remember it. How much do you remember about being nine, really? Not much. But I remember my friend Matt telling me a plane had crashed, asking if my dad worked in Chicago (he did), I remember not understanding at first how big of a deal it actually was. Until I did.

No one should have to understand something so real, so horrible, when they’re just a little kid.

We’re going to share a lot of pictures today. We’re going to keep using that hashtag today. Not because there aren’t other ways to express how we feel, but because it’s so, so hard to put how we feel into words that convey it all, universally, for everyone.

I wasn’t personally affected by this. I’m not sure I knew anyone personally affected, anyone who lost a family member that day. But when your entire country is hurting, how can you not? It’s not wrong to grieve. It’s not wrong to stand over your kitchen counter and cry.

Maybe that’s all we can do. Share photos and hashtags and hugs and tears and memories.

It’s so hard to write about things like this. The whole time I’ve been sitting here, nothing I’ve written feels like it’s been the right thing to say. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe there isn’t a right or wrong thing to say or a right or wrong way to express how we feel.

I won’t forget. None of us will.

But we can keep writing, even when it’s hard, even when we don’t know what to say. Putting things into words doesn’t mean those words are going to say everything. Sometimes silence is okay. Sometimes silence is just what we need to remember.

Eventually we do have to lift our heads and move forward again. If words are enough to help us do that, we’ll just keep on writing them.

Take care. God bless.

Never forget.

Love&hugs, Meg<3

Image courtesy of Novelty Revisions.

Meg is a twenty-something workaholic with a passion for writing, coffee and health. In addition to her status as an aspiring novelist and Grammar Nazi, Meg is the managing editor at College Lifestyles magazine and a guest blogger for Food & Nutrition Magazine. She is a seven-time NaNoWriMo winner and has written several creative pieces for Teen Ink. Follow Meg on Twitter.

How A Flat, Minor Character Accidentally Became a Major Villain (Midweek Novel Update #16)

Sep 2, 2015Sep 2, 2015 Meg DowellLeave a comment

Nothing ever happens the way you expect it to. Not even when you’re the one supposedly in control of the story (or that’s what you like to think, anyway).

For awhile, probably for the first month I worked on my current book, I found myself stuck: I had a basic plotline and a nice cast of round characters to keep it interesting. I had some suspenseful plot points and a few key individuals keeping some pretty big secrets.

I didn’t realize until about a month into the project that what I needed was an opposing force—a character who would, in some way, interfere with all other characters’ “missions” as the story progressed.

Then came the hard part: figuring out which character was, secretly, going to turn out to be the villain once the series progressed.

Something I’ve noticed about the way I write is that my writing time is pretty much the only time I don’t focus on doing things perfectly. Curse of the Type A overachiever and all that: it doesn’t apply when I sit down and crank out a whole mess of words. I don’t believe any piece of writing can ever be perfect. Revisions are meant to improve and enhance, but as I’m working on a draft, I’m much more focused on getting words out than I am on always making them the absolute best.

So at one point I randomly added in a character—something I don’t usually do, because my character list is typically laid out in my mind before I start writing. In passing during a flashback, I needed a character in the background of a scene who would add to the drama and make my MC’s reaction more believable.

Soon that character showed up again in a different scene (I don’t write in order; I skip around depending on which scene or part of the book has been running through my mind that morning) and became a minor character who only needed to serve as a FOIL to my MC. No big deal. She had a first name and a cringe-worthy personality and that was all I needed at that point.

The more I wrote, the more I realized how important this minor character needed to be to my MC, which quickly turned into a quick back story about how the minor character had shaped my MC’s competitive personality and eventually left her friendless and betrayed.

But it turns out this character, who started out as an extra of sorts, has a few reasons for being a bad friend, a control freak and, seemingly, destined to be crowned ‘most likely to succeed.’ Ulterior motives aren’t supposed to be obvious to the reader. I guess they’re not always obvious to the writer, either. At least not at first.

Since figuring out these motives, though, it’s been probably too much fun weaving in pieces of the truth through each chapter. One of the later books in the series will be titled Heroes; for some reason, it never occurred to me that to have heroes in my story I’d need at least one villain to act opposite them.

This is a midweek rambling post about a story you haven’t read yet, and I’m being a bit too vague. But as I mentioned above, no piece of writing is perfect and sometimes it’s healthy just to rant about the crazy things our characters do to us.

Tell me I’m not the only one constantly bullied by my characters …

Love&hugs, Meg<3

Image courtesy of Novelty Revisions.

I Made a Huge Mistake, and I’m Glad (Midweek Novel Update #12)

Aug 5, 2015 Meg DowellLeave a comment

I knew I was going to regret it. Yet I did not change my mind.

Inspiration sparks from a lot of different places, and last night, my inspiration appeared in the middle of my twice-per-week, two-hour T.V-watching block (I don’t like watching T.V. very much, but there are a select few shows I can’t live without, so). But of course, I was in the middle of watching T.V. So I wasn’t going to stop doing that to get up and go write, even though I should have.

A scene popped into my head, one that would help connect a few of the loose ends I’m trying to tie together as I continue to (slowly) form the major elements that make up my novel-in-progress before filling in the gaps. At the time, it really was a good idea, and I knew I needed to write at least some of it before the inspiration driving it faded away.

Even though I was inspired, even though I knew I should jump back into my story regardless of all the other things on my mind (and, you know, T.V.), I didn’t write. That scene continued playing out in my head until I went to sleep. If the story had a happy ending, I would have woken up this morning and written it anyway, no problem.

But the moment I sat down to write earlier this afternoon, I knew the scene wasn’t going to play out the way I had dreamed up in my head the night before. I just wasn’t “feeling it” anymore. All those inspiration-induced ideas just seemed silly. I started questioning whether or not the scene belonged in the book at all. And I did write most of it, but I’m still not happy with it. Not the way I would have been if I would have followed my inspiration back to my laptop instead of putting it off.

I talk a lot here about how sometimes it’s okay to force yourself to write, and sometimes, if the words just aren’t coming to you, it’s okay to leave your writing project alone for the time being and focus on something else. But something I don’t feel I’ve covered enough yet is what to do when you are inspired, when you really need to write something down, but the timing is just wrong.

Not busyness. Not that you’re on a train without a pen and your phone is dead. I mean when you could totally get up and go write, even for five minutes, but you are sitting in front of the T.V. and it is going to take a black bear crashing through your window to get you to move.

I don’t like admitting that I’m wrong or that I’ve made a mistake, but the thing is, I still do. Because I’m human, I’m an unpublished author, I am no better than any other wannabe writer out there. I write about writing because I think, hope, others might be able to benefit from it. I don’t do it because I think I know everything or because I have all this experience. Not even close.

So I have to admit that what I did last night, not writing when there was nothing significant preventing me from doing so, was a mistake. But the thing is, I’m really, really glad I made that mistake.

Like I said, I don’t think about this kind of writing barrier as often. I tend to think about “life event” road blocks and time constraints and just not being able to get ideas out of our heads the right way. Sometimes you just don’t want to write right now, period. And that’s a problem.

And now, not only am I hyper-aware of it: I know that I never want to let anything like this happen to me ever again. And maybe I can help you overcome this problem, too, if you even realize it’s a problem (maybe it’s hard to pinpoint the exact reason why we’re not writing when we want to be).

I’m learning right along with you, do you see? This is why I keep publishing posts even though not a lot of people read them. I don’t need a big audience. I’m in it for those who want to grow as writers, and if I end up growing too, everybody wins.

I like it when everybody wins.

Love&hugs, Meg<3

Image courtesy of Novelty Revisions.

A recent graduate with a B.A. in English and a completed major in nutrition, currently seeking a graduate degree in health communication, Meg is a twenty-something workaholic with a passion for writing, coffee and dietetics. In addition to her status as an aspiring novelist and Grammar Nazi (and the mastermind behind this site), Meg is an editor for College Lifestyles magazine and a guest blogger for Food & Nutrition Magazine’s Stone Soup. She is a seven-time NaNoWriMo winner and has written several creative pieces for Teen Ink magazine. Follow Meg on Twitter.

Getting Lost In Our Stories is What Brings Them to Life

Aug 3, 2015 Meg Dowell5 Comments

I’ve just always been a storyteller. Storybooks and fairytales were never quite enough to satisfy my sense of adventure and curiosity when I was younger. So like many children do, at some point I just started making up my own stories.

Imagination has no limits. I could think up any series of events I wanted, and it was so real to me, almost like it was really happening.

Then, probably through all those essays we had to learn to write in middle school, I discovered that like playing with my Barbie dolls or Beanie Babies, like drawing pictures, I could take the stories circling around in my head and bring them to life, through putting words onto a page.

When you’re so young, and you’re just starting to figure out how to piece together a story with a plot, characters, and some kind of beginning, middle and end, it doesn’t matter that you’re not writing very well. No 10-year-old is going to write a story without making mistakes, leaving plot holes, sometimes maybe not even really including a plot at all.

So when I say I’ve been telling stories for forever, I’m not at all implying I’ve always been good at it (or even that I can be good at it now). Refining writing skills literally takes years. I just never gave up, and kept writing even though I knew I wasn’t the best, kept writing, even though I knew my parents and teachers were probably just being polite with their compliments.

Kept writing, even though deep down I knew I might never be good enough.

Then one day, some day, I learned how to get lost.

Not lost in the grocery store (thank God) or lost in a crowd, but lost in a story. So drawn into what you’re writing in the present that it pulls you right out of where you’re sitting and you find yourself in a completely different time and place.

It doesn’t happen every time you sit down to write. Sometimes you do have to sit back and really think about what you’re doing, where you’re going with this, whether or not you need to keep that.

But every once in a while, when you start an ongoing chain of dialogue or there’s an intense scene ahead of you, something happens. You almost watch the events as they begin to play out on the page. You can almost here the characters speak their “lines” in your head. You are there, in that moment. You are in two places at once: at the control booth of the story, and part of it, simultaneously.

It’s hard to come back. But when that scene ends, or someone or something interrupts, you always do. I don’t know about you, but I very rarely want to. I don’t write to escape, but every now and again, it’s a nice perk, isn’t it?

No, when I’m writing a funeral scene, I don’t wish I was there. When I’m writing about grief, I don’t wish it upon myself, too—but you get swept up in what’s happening, before you even realize. So whether happy or sad, intense or gradually building up to it, you’re committed to getting pulled into everything, without warning.

But when we get lost like that, something else happens: we stop second-guessing ourselves. It’s easier to see what’s the most realistic thing that will happen next. It’s easier to engage in a stream of consciousness so deep that even if we consider for a second whether it was a good idea for Character X to say that, it’s already gone, and we just let it be.

That’s how you know you’re okay. That you’re not going to hit a wall anytime soon. That your story is there, somewhere deep inside you, it just has to come out in pieces. It takes a little writing, a little resting, and then some more writing (and repeat).

Is it always the best work we can do? No. Maybe it never is.

But in those moments we let the ideas run the show, that’s when it comes to life for real.

And I would not give that up for anything. Ever.

Love&hugs, Meg<3

Image courtesy of Flickr.

If You Can’t Write for Fun, Write to Learn

Jul 27, 2015 Meg Dowell5 Comments

Writing isn’t always fun. That’s just the way it goes. No matter how much you love it and want to strive to improve your skills and write more captivating content, there will always be moments you wish you didn’t have to.

And really, technically, you don’t.

But that doesn’t mean you can, or even really want, to stop trying. With so many other things to balance on top of your personal writing time, it’s very easy to just put it off, tell yourself it’s okay, you don’t feel like it today but maybe tomorrow. Writing does require some brain power, after all, and sometimes your brain just wants to rest.

Maybe you’re one of those people who loves to learn. No, seriously: they exist. Learning comes in more forms than sitting in a classroom and taking sloppy notes. Whether you know it or not, writing is a form of learning, too—one you can engage in anywhere, whenever you want. This might be the kind of motivator you’ve been looking for to give your writing a little push.

Research those random facts you’ve always wanted to know

Then, write about them. Researching “at random” is something we all do when we’re bored (aka, procrastinating), but you can use this tactic to your advantage if you haven’t been in the mood to write lately, even though you wish you were.

If you find something interesting, open up a Word document or a notebook and just start jotting down pieces of what you’re reading about. Give yourself your own prompt and see where it goes. It’s both fun and learning disguised as writing, and it might even lead to a new story idea you can run with for a while.

Develop your skills at your own pace

While it can be healthy to write every day, the world won’t stop spinning if you don’t. The problem with writing “because you have to” is that the deadline and time constraint puts your creativity in a box it doesn’t always belong in.

Writing for work or for school is different, but when you’re on your own, give your work the time it needs, even if it’s sparse. There’s no law that says you have to write a story in a certain amount of time, and when it’s really up to you, let it be your chance to experiment, write in styles you’re not used to, launch yourself out of your comfort zone—all ways to develop your writing skills, and hey, you might even have fun too.

The thing about writing is, it is never a constant. Some days you just can’t stop; some days you spend 10 minutes staring at your screen before walking away to do something else. Some days you write, but don’t feel satisfied; other days you might only write a paragraph, but it’s the best paragraph you swear you’ve ever written.

Sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes it’s not. But writing is like a brain workout that doesn’t involve shoes or sweating, and often without realizing it, you’re always learning something. If that’s the only thing that keeps you going, it’s a pretty good start.

Image courtesy of Flickr.

Dear John: We Read You First

Jul 24, 2015 Meg Dowell1 Comment

Today, especially today, we can’t turn around without hearing about something else amazing you’ve done. Your book is now a movie (yet not for the first time). You’re flying around VidCon like a superhero right now, because to those outside your circle, you can do anything, and you have nothing but positive messages to leave in your wake. You’re in this country. On that talk show. Hanging out with this person. Being awesome, as always. Always.

But you see, John, there’s something we’ve been meaning to talk with you about. We, the ones who have stuck with you since the beginning. We, the ones who were reading your books before anyone really knew who you were and why you were so awesome.

Before we followed you into Nerfighteria, John, we loved your books, and we loved you for writing them, and we want nothing more than to continue to breathe in the products of your literary madness (the good kind). We still love you. However, we can only read and reread your books so many times before we lose our own minds.

John, please. For the good of the people. For the sanity of nerd-saturated humanity. Finish writing your next book. Soon.

It’s not that we don’t love your weekly exchanges with Hank; CrashCourse; Mental Floss; your Twitter addiction (but please, don’t stop tweeting, we need our daily fix). But you can’t forget where you came from. You can’t forget the words that started it all, the stories that shaped your career, the pages filled with inspiration we secretly reread again and again, as if we can’t get enough.

There seems to be a pattern in the timeline of your previous publications of the novel variety, John. And based on what we’re seeing, we don’t like the predictable outcome.

Looking for Alaska (2005)

An Abundance of Katherines (2006)

Paper Towns (2008)

Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2010)

The Fault In Our Stars (2012)

Your first two releases were only a year apart; the third, fourth and fifth: two years between each. It is now over halfway through 2015, meaning it has been over three years since the January 2012 release of your most recent book, and WE ARE SUFFOCATING.

Even if this pattern continued, and the book you may or may not be working on right now somehow miraculously got a 2016 release date, this is still a very long time for us to wait. Remember, we read you before we watched you. Your words are part of us. Forever.

You are honest, John, and you make us all laugh whether we need to or we don’t. But you also understand your audience better than anyone. You know what resonates with us. You know what matters to us. You care about what we care about. Your books reflect that. And reading them makes us care even if we didn’t know we weren’t.

We know life gets busy, and there’s family and adulting and the never FTBA’ing, but you’re a writer. You need to write words as much as any of us, more than many of us need to read them. It can’t be healthy to keep even yourself away from this element of your work. And sure, you’re probably writing a little every day, in cars, on planes, stuck in airports. But promise us you haven’t forgotten. Promise us there will be more words.

Hurry home, John. Write a little. Write a lot. Write because you love it. And because, shamelessly, we need you never to stop.

Love&hugs, your readers<3

Image courtesy of the Hollywood Reporter.