Quick Lit Hit: Writers on Writing

Cheryl Strayed (aka Sugar!) gives a few helpful words on writing and giving up the idea that everything you write needs to be the best thing ever.

Knopf Doubleday has a whole series of these short videos from writers on their YouTube channel. It's both a great resource and a nice example of publishing embracing all the internet can offer in the world of books.

How to Wake Up at 3:30am and Love It

1. Be on vacation. Even if only a mini one. Lay out your clothes the night before. Yawn. Smile at yourself in the mirror despite the messy hair or the blurry, sleepy eyes.

2. Things will look weird in the dark, but roll with it. Jump when you walk past a pond and hear a bullfrog. Say, "What is that?" Be alarmed about the unknown creature and walk quickly towards your adventure.

3. You must be with friends. Any kind will do, but the sweet funny kind that buy you blow-up mattresses from Target and drive you an hour through the dark morning, the kind that you do not see often enough, work particularly well.

4. When you see the balloons for the first time laid out on the driving range at a golf course run towards them saying things like, "I didn't know how big they'd be!" and "Ballllloooooons!" until the people in charge heard you back to the group.

5. Take photos. Instruct your friends and long suffering boyfriend where to stand. Repeat "Tequila!" over and over again, because that is the name of your balloon, and because everyone loves tequila.

6. Notice the following things: the damp grass, the occasional golf ball under foot, how loud the flames are, how the balloons swell and slowly lift into the air.

7. Climb into the basket!

8. There will be other people in the balloon. People will be chatty and a group of women from Texas, who are out a Winetastic day, will flirt with the balloon pilot, leaving you to your corner of the balloon, shifting around with your people for the best views, to lean into each other and grin and say, "This is epic!" and "Ohmygod, look!" and "Let me take a photo, this is too gorgeous, can you believe we're in the sky!?"

9. Except for the Texans and the on-and-off again burst of the burner it is quiet in the balloon. Notice the following things as you drift over wine country: The green landscape, the shadows of balloons against the hills, the way, how ridiculously happy you feel to be where you are.

10. Instagram the moment.

11. Look down.

12. Look around.

13. Don't be self conscious about becoming a broken record. You're right. This is fun. You are loving it. Go ahead and let the experience fill you up and float you away like the warm air contained above your head.

14. Keep taking photos!

15. At some point, you'll drift towards the ground. Enjoy these moments. Hold hands. Grin at your friends. Watch the earth get closer. Wonder, just before you touch down (and maybe after), if you're on the ground or not. A team of people will come to pull your balloon to a resting point.

16. Climb out of the basket.

17. Follow the morning up with a champagne brunch. Eat some extra bacon.

18. When, days afterward, you return to your normal life and sit cross legged on your bed to download photos to your laptop, you will barely remember being tired, will barely recall the wave of exhaustion that you hit you later that night. Watch the few seconds of video you captured. Begin scheming for your next flight.

(For more of my photos, check out Flickr. Also, if you can't get enough, read Lauren's thoughts and Kamel's, too!)

My Best Friend's Wedding (Shower)

This weekend I watched my best friend open wedding gifts.

I've been meaning to write about the fact that Vanessa is getting married since she got engaged over a year ago. It was a weekday evening and I was sitting on the couch with Jeff. We were watching an episode of "Law & Order" on my laptop. When my phone rang I had to push myself up from where I was slumped against the back, my legs hanging over Jeff's knees.

I paused the show and Jeff raised his eyebrows at me. It was the first day in April, the first game of the season for the Minnesota Twins. It was unusual for Vanessa to call instead of text.

We grew up two and a half blocks from each other and a grade apart. I think we fought once and stopped speaking for a week or two, but that time is hazy for me, a strange blip in what was otherwise a continuous loop of phone calls, sleep overs and trashy magazines we walked to the gas station to buy along with big bags of Cool Ranch Doritos. Because I was always trailing behind Vanessa from school to school, and because she was a theater kid while I joined the debate team, we did not always have the same friends or schedules. But we would meet in the middle, teaming up to do a Dramatic Duo routine on the Speech team one year and always only a couple blocks away. When I was gone at summer camp I would write her long letters and when she wrote back she would include pages torn out of magazines and gossipy updates on my crushes.

(We were cool kids.)

When I answered the phone I heard her take a deep breath and then say, "MARGO! You answered!"

"Yes," I said, "I answered!"

"Well, it's just that I called my mom and she didn't answer and then I called my dad and he didn't answer!"

"Vanessa? If I'm the third call after your mom and your dad... does that mean you have something exciting to tell me?"

Vanessa laughed and laughed. In all iconic Vanessa stories she laughs and laughs. There was the time we went to a movie and afterward a friend who had moved away found us and said, "I knew you were in the theater because I recognized your laugh!" Two of the games we played at the wedding shower involved drawing, and every stick person representation of Vanessa was accompanied by either a huge silly grin or a halo of ha ha ha's.

"Yes, I do," Vanessa said. "I'm engaged!"

I don't remember what I said next. Probably "Oh my god!" and "Congratulations!" and "What!? Tell me the story!" and "Yay!" and I'm sure we laughed and squealed a little. What I remember is feeling, suddenly, like I was thirteen and laying on the fold out bed in Vanessa's dark basement, imagining our grown up selves, promising each other that we'd be best friends forever and each other's maids of honor, obviously.

We didn't go to the same college and for a long time after high school ended we didn't live in the same city, sometimes not the same state. I was in California when she met her fiancé and New York when he proposed. Many of the guests at the shower were family and friends from parts of Vanessa's life that I haven't been a part of, from college and her first job and local politics. You can't imagine all the people you will meet, when you are young and it seems people are mostly knowable, your friends names called off in alphabetical order at the start of every school day, adults easily tagged with a Ms. or an Uncle or a parent of so-and-so. You try to imagine it. You puzzle over it as you fall asleep at night. You speculate. And because you are eleven or thirteen or sixteen, you get it wrong.

But maybe not entirely. If you asked thirteen year old Vanessa who would be handing her the gifts at her wedding shower, she would have said, "Margaret." 

"Obviously," my thirteen year old self would have agreed.

And so I did. However unknowable life might be, it's good to know we got this part down.

(We are still pretty cool.)