Expelled from Reddit Despite an Enthusiastic Reader Response

Part I

In SC where I grew up, even a few, barely there snowflakes inspired rapturous joy. They rarely stuck, but sometimes those tiny flakes surprised me, and I would wake to find the ground miraculously coated in white.

 That, I thought, is the way I feel now.

The previous day I had submitted a blog post to Reddit and that night as I slept, it had snowed page views. Mixed with them was a blizzard of “up votes” and liberal raves.

They had floated down only softly during the afternoon.  Early the next morning, when I was still in bed, my husband said. “Do you want to hear the drum roll?”

I did. The blog views from the writing sub-reddit were close to 1000, with 22 comments and almost 100 up votes. The most views I had ever had for a post until then was around 100. Reddit liked me.

And I loved Reddit.

Encouraged, I continued to post my work on Reddit with similar results. Knowing my posts would get many views, I would spend 8 to 15 hours each on the three or four page articles.

In some of them I tried to address what I thought were important gaps in advice given by many writing professionals, things that had confused me for a long time and kept me from writing.

Some authorities, for example, said to figure out what publishers or readers were “looking for” and how to please them. Others said, “Write what you love, and your passion will come across to the reader.”

For a long time, I believed both points of view. But no matter how I tried to reconcile these two approaches, they did not harmonize.

I wrote about my resolution, which ended my creative block which followed a manic episode, and that was, write what makes you happy; write for yourself. I wrote about my experience in "Writing Fiction: the Problem of Trying to Please.”

Over 100 up votes and torrents of praise and encouragement rolled in.

Came over from Reddit. Dug this. Keep on keeping on.

Fantastic read. I'm bipolar too and it's good to know that there's a way to break out of the funk and get back to writing. Thanks for writing this :)

The feeling that I got from this was one I had almost forgotten. In college I had tutored students in writing and I had always loved hearing that my advice had raised a grade.

Not that I would have minded if someone had liked my writing enough to buy my e-book, but only two visitors out of thousands actually did. Still, the encouraging and thoughtful comments were more than enough reason to continue.

In Reddit, the pattern continued. I would submit something, the views would accumulate, and the next morning my husband would announce the amazing new total.

Responses to my work were overwhelmingly positive, despite at least one “troll” for every post.

Posting was not always easy. Reddit has moderators who will “kick you off” if they deem that your post is “spam.” At first I thought spam only meant direct advertising or junk mail.

But Reddit has rewritten the definition to mean any original material submitted by its creator. However, not everyone on Reddit accepts this viewpoint, and moderators have flexibility in enforcing the only-post-others “rule.”

Sometimes my individual posts would be jettisoned for this reason, but usually not.

I continued to write about writing, following advice given to me when I first started my blog: Write what you are passionate about. I submitted to other sub-reddits, too, with equally enthusiastic responses, before something happened that changed everything.

It began my controversial defense of Mathew Inman, a comic who had been bullied into pulling an offensive joke from his website. As an admirer of his work, I thought his intentions had been innocent and that the joke should have stayed.

I posted it on the humor subreddit, and there was an explosion of responses, mostly positive, although I received my first angry mail on my blog, too.

My husband, who had been monitoring the traffic, came to me and said, “Some good news and some bad news. You got kicked off. But the good news is that in one hour you got 500 views, over 50 comments, and over 100 up votes.”

If left up, it would have been, by far, my most popular post. “Why did they kick me off it the post was doing so well?”

“The moderator said you were spamming your blog, only posting yourself and no one else.”

Reddit had a learning curve. I had no problem with posting other people, but the listed “rules” mentioned this nowhere.

I decided I needed a break from Reddit anyway, so during the Christmas holidays, I searched for other aspiring bloggers to promote.

During that time, I also wrote a new post called, “How I Lost My Guilt and Became Addicted to Writing.”

Reddit readers had told me that my post, “Writing Fiction: the Problem of Trying to Please,” had inspired them. In response, I wrote about my experience of overcoming block in greater detail and focused on a different aspect: how the idea that I “should” write drained away the fun of writing and caused block.

However, I decided to hold off on posting it to Reddit until I had posted some other writers first. I wrote another post later, about rough drafts, but did not post that to yet Reddit either.

But when I tried to post another blogger to Reddit, I made an alarming discovery. The link disappeared from view as soon as I posted it. I was not allowed to post others, let alone my own work.

In fact, no one else could post me either. My account was dead, and when I created a new account, nothing changed; my entire blog had been permanently banned.

 I was back to my core readership of about 35 people.

It did not matter that Reddit readers had overwhelmingly liked my writing and that many said my posts inspired them or helped them get “unstuck.” I had posted own writing; therefore, I was “spam.”

Losing access to the Reddit audience was painful. I had written my newest post especially for the writing sub-reddit audience as a direct response to the comments I had gotten from “Writing Fiction: The Problem of Trying to Please.”

Discouraged, I managed to wean myself from the Reddit audience. Due to a December layoff, a lot was happening at the time that demanded my full attention

I decided to write more traditional journal posts for a while.

With so much going on around me, the general depression over my ousting thinned, dispersed, and finally settled into a bland acceptance.

I could still write, with or without Reddit, and I forgot about it as much as I could.

Part 3
One day as I was exercising, Donnie came into the room. “I just posted you on Reddit,” he said.

“Huh? You what? How?”

“I changed your domain name to match the name of your blog. You have four up votes.”

“Which one was it?”

“How I Lost My Guilt and Became Addicted to Writing.”

 The computer became my hearth that day. The flakes drifted down during the afternoon, gathered strength, and continued overnight. By the next afternoon, the post had received the strongest response yet, with over 300 up votes. These were some of the comments:

Wow. On a subreddit full of lists and "rules" and sincere-but-lackluster attempts at inspiration, I finally found what I needed...I'm legitimately excited right now. Thanks, OP. I... love you. 

Damn, I didn't even know how much I needed to read this until I was halfway through and I realized how much I identified with the author. I feel more like myself than I have in a while!

I was this close || to dumping all of my writing reddits and declaring that maybe I would return when I retire... I loved this once. Maybe I shouldn't give up just yet.

Thanks for posting this, it gave me much needed hope!

Holy fuck thanks for this.

I read the comments more than once and answered the ones posted to my blog. I always felt grateful when people made the effort to respond to what I wrote. I was thrilled to be back on Reddit, even if it was as an outlaw.

Not long afterward, my life took a dramatic turn and I moved to another state, so I delayed trying to post anything else.

But after I moved to Florida I wrote a post about drawing from stress for inspiration.

When I tried to post it on Reddit, under a new account, I was instantly kicked off with two damning words from a moderator:

Blog spam.

All of my frustrations of the previous two months came to a head. I was tired of the assumption that junk mail and self-posted material meant the same thing.

Although the words were “blog spam,” I translated them to mean a classic barnyard term, so I had to respond.

I wrote back and asked what the moderator, called DisconinjaJesus, considered “spam.” I made the point that there were no calls to action in my post, no sales pitch of any kind.

It bothered me that Disconinjajesus had labeled my heartfelt effort as junk advertising when I saw it as part of a dialogue about something I loved. Pointlessly, I added that my post was the product of multiple drafts.

Ninjadiscojesus responded: Directing people to your blog – increasing traffic etc Multiple drafts – jesus wept 

The sardonic remark begged for a snarky reply. I knew better but could not resist. I wrote:

Well, Jesus (the non-disco one) did say it was a cardinal sin to post links to your blog in the hope of “traffic.” I stand corrected.

I have since asked myself if I would have been permanently banned again if I had played it cool.

But the implication of calling my work “spam” was that I was ruining the user experience with my posts. The readers did not seem to think so.

The problem with calling self-submitted work “spam” is that it slaps a judgment on its worth without even considering its content. It does not follow that original material submitted by its creator is necessarily  exploitative.

Real spam wheedles, demands, and gives nothing to readers in return. It is not the same as giving away a labored-over product in the unexpressed hope that its quality alone will speak for itself.

Calling it all “spam” is fuzzy semantics.

Despite my personal issues, I still go to Reddit sometimes. I like to read what people have posted, but now I wonder about all of the other posts, the ones no one ever sees. Are they all “spam?”

It would be nice to see a writing sub-reddit where writers could post their work and have it only judged by the up-voting and down-voting system without any single person deciding what is “best” for the rest of the community.

In that case, no single person would take down posts that most readers clearly want to read and discuss.

Although my days of posting to Reddit are over, I am grateful for all of the encouragement its readers have given me.

As for my blog, even having 30 regular readers is awesome, and I will continue to write it, whether I have 20 readers or 20,000, no matter where I live.

I live in Florida now, and this is my third post since I have gotten here. It is sun-swept and scenic, and a great place to write.

But sometimes I think about other places and the winter days of my childhood. I think about home and those small flakes that I could barely see, and how quickly they could change.

I think about writing. I think about Reddit.

I think about the snow.

Walls Evaporate Sometimes (Short Story)

Note:

This story began with the experience of moving to Ocala, Florida. I had been meaning to do a journal post, which I thought of as the “Here I am, in Ocala” post. However, I couldn’t get excited about it, so I wrote this story instead.

I drew details from my move into it, but I stretched them and invented new ones. For example, I really did sleep on the floor of my new apartment the first night, but not for weeks. The story is fiction but reflects real feelings about leaving an old place and seeking refuge in a new place.

The Story:

 Walls evaporate sometimes, the note said. Soon yours will be gone for good. Leave.

She held the note against her chest. The problem was that she had no other place to go. But she knew the warning -- whoever had sent it -- was true.

It was happening all around her, to people everywhere. It started slowly, with walls that cracked from pressure or buckled from rain. The floors thinned, too, and sagged. In the final stages, the walls became papery and useless.

Then, incredibly, magically, it all went away; the house, what was left of it, just blinked out of sight – vanished.

It was happening to her, too. All the signs were there: the cracks, the easily bruised walls, the straining moan of buckling floors afflicted by heavy furniture, keeping her awake at night. She knew if she stayed, the floor would collapse with her on it, or the ceiling would crash on her head.

There was no place in her area where the House Blight was not happening. Even many of the shelters had succumbed. Some flocked to unsanitary tent encampments. To get away from it, she was told, she would have to move far away.

There were rumors of a distant place where the House Blight could not live. The climate, they said, was too hot for it. They said it was a place of lush beauty near the sea with dense forests and oak trees that drooped with strange playful tufts.

Because the House Blight hated the sun and its heat, she did as she had been advised; she packed up her things, everything she could take, and prepared to move.

It was not easy. She felt too much while she packed. She had grown attached to the house over the decade she had lived there, and now it was going away.

She also fretted over what to take or leave. She thought maybe she should box up her mind with everything else, and take it out again only after she had moved.

She packed everything she could not live without. And her cat. She had to take her cat. A cat was what made a place a home.

She left everything else in her house to her neighbor, whom the House Blight had not touched. “Take it all. Just pay whatever you can.” she said. Seeing her desperation, he wrinkled his forehead and shook his head, as if making a huge sacrifice, and gave her three dollars for most of her belongings, while secretly rejoicing about the profit he would make at his upcoming garage sale.

She spent all the savings she had to buy a used car in good enough condition to make the trip and still had to borrow for other expenses. By moving day her walls were so thin, she could almost see through them.

Unable to afford a moving truck, she spent the morning packing all she could into her new car until at last she got inside and drove away. It was night when she and her cat arrived at her new town.

She found an affordable place to stay in the upper floor of an old inn. The first thing she noticed was how solid everything was. Even before the Blight, her walls had been thin. When the wind blew, the floor rattled and the house shook.

Here, it was different. Only the strongest materials had been used. The floor was solid granite. The walls and doors were heavy and massive. A wind would be no threat to them. Even the Blight would take awhile to burrow through the solid material.

She also noticed how quiet it was: no more crumbling, groaning, creaking things in the night. In the backyard was a pretty lake, with an inviting bench in front.

A neighbor, an elderly woman, was sitting there the first day, and asked her why she had come from so far away. The girl said, “Walls evaporate sometimes. You know how it is.” This was such a common saying in her home town that she was surprised when the neighbor looked at her strangely. “Come again?”

“They evaporate. The walls. They go away. At least where I come from, they do.” The lady shook her head, pursed her lips, pulled her purse into her lap and rose. As the lady shambled away, the girl tried again: “Not all at once.” But the lady did not turn, only hurried her steps. “The Blight eats them slowly,” she whispered, the words trailing away.

Unheard, she went to her new home.

Her new home had a fireplace and big closets and a high window so that she could sit in her living room and watch the clouds, just as if she were outside.

Despite these luxuries, she had no bed at first, so she slept on the hard floor for the first few weeks until she could afford one.

Money was tight. To make matters worse, a nasty note appeared in her mailbox from the person who had sold her old house to her, demanding that she continue the high monthly payment. She called and told him she could not afford to pay for an evaporating house plus rent. He said, “Well you should have bought the House Evaporation Insurance.”

He had a point; she had to grant him that.

She unpacked her things. The cat began to sniff everything and decreed the new place worthy by rubbing against the door posts and scraping its claws against the carpet.

After finding a new job, a temporary one, she bought some bargain furniture and had it all moved inside.

She felt a click of satisfaction as they days went by. There was nothing she could have done at her old place she could not do here. Caught up in her routine, she barely saw her surroundings anymore, the lake or the fireplace or the clouds.

She wondered if anything had really changed, except the walls.

One day while reading, she shut her book, put it down, and left the inn. She wanted to see more of her new town. She had heard there was a beach nearby. She bought a map and set off in search of the ocean, which would show her once and for all that she really was in a new place.

As she neared the beach, she began to see more palm trees. The wind rushed against them, and they leaned away from it. The buildings were scattered far apart, allowing her the first glimpse of the sea.

Far away, it was quiet, but on the beach, she neared the ocean and its sounds opened up. The waves roared and splashed and pulled away. The wind grabbed her long hair and pulled and whipped it against her face.

She thought about the home she had left, but could only summon vague images.

The House Blight was a thing of the past, a distant memory, and all that mattered now was this, the cresting, splashing, and pulling back, the wind in her face, the sand on her feet.

The place she had called home was far away, and she wondered if she would ever feel home here. But maybe all she needed was a place to sleep, and walls.

Which walls surrounded her was unimportant, as long as they stood. Outside, inside; what did the words really mean?

At night she took comfort in the thickness of the walls, the heaviness of the bricks. Until she began to hear the rumors.

Sometimes, in this town, people said, the ground collapses without warning. It is the heavy solid things that are most in danger, the things that press and weigh that most easily fall.

Giant signs, plastered everywhere, proclaimed the new horror, a word she dared not speak. Sinkhole? See the Sinkhole Guy!

She could not believe her bad fortune. A new House Blight was upon her! Even when neighbors told her that sinkholes only affected a few, she would not calm down.

She considered moving again. She even packed a few boxes. She remembered her fear of the ceiling collapsing, knew too well the treachery of shelters meant to protect.

Where could she go where she could rely on surfaces to bear her weight or walls to hold the ceiling?

She thought about her sturdy new walls that blocked the rain and wind, appearing so stable.

And she remembered the ocean, too, so near, with all of its wild beauty, unpredictable, unsafe, but still comforting in the rhythms it did have.

She sighed in resignation. Walls evaporate sometimes, she thought, and the ground -- it turns out -- sometimes disappears.

But for the time they were there you had to trust them, the ground that might give way or a ceiling that might fall. The timeless strength of walls and surfaces was an illusion. But it was one you had to have.

She began to unpack the boxes she had filled in her haste to escape the Sinkhole Blight. As she did, she thought of the ocean, alive and constantly moving.

Meanwhile, her walls and floors stood still, and she congratulated them for that.

Writing Through Stress and Upheaval

During my recent move to Florida, certain people have done something unthinkable; they have ordered me to take a break from writing. “At least for a few weeks,” they said. “Until everything settles down.”

No one has ever ordered me to take a break from eating or breathing but writing is dispensable, they say, not something I need to survive.

It is true that packing up the entire contents of a house in a week does not allow for many other activities.

But I decided to keep writing anyway, even if I only had time for a sentence. Why? Because once I let writing go, even for a little while, the idea of starting back becomes a daunting Momentous Event. Expectations soar for my brilliant moment of return. Anxiety gathers.

Besides, even writing one sentence means thinking about my story or article. It is more likely, then, that I will think more about it as my day goes on, and when I finally do return, I can easily pick up where I left off.

But there is another reason for writing during upheaval. Often, it is during times of stress and change that my writing goes best.

Many things happen which are beyond my control, but writing takes me to a place where problems, no matter how difficult, have concrete solutions, and I am likely to channel the my thwarted energy into writing.

My best writing year was the sixth grade. It was probably no accident that this was also the year I was bullied by a gang of girls, and going to school had become a frightening everyday hell.

I was forced, by law, to go there. Writing became a refuge that year, a protected playground. It gave me a place where I could move around and breathe freely.

The teacher encouraged me by giving the class weekly creative writing assignments, all dealing with point of view: Pretend you are a flea. Pretend you are a car. Pretend you are a slave during the Civil War.

The message was clear. I could be anyone, anything, if only for a time. A wizard, a dog, a thief.

I always received praise for my stories, but what I remember most was how my writing changed. Gone were the fairy tales, the ghost stories, the talking animals inspired by cartoons.

In the new books I was then reading writers could do something amazing: they could recreate thought flow, spin words into minds. Reading was ESP. It was mind reading.

Excited, I struggled to create that same effect in my writing and began to play with interior monologues.

My style changed. My new characters, whether animal or human, felt and thought, eased pain with humor. They hoped and guessed. They could be happy about sad things or sad about happy things.

This change may have happened without the daily stress of being bullied, but the need to write was more urgent because of it. Writing was not just about being “good.” Beneath was a quest for something else.

Many years later, as a hopelessly blocked adult, I remembered the writing I did in the sixth grade, and that became a guide for what I wanted to get back to.

Back then, writing was not about “being a writer.” It was about experimenting and discovering a place of freedom in a classroom where I had none.

As a child I only wrote made up stories. I wish I had kept a journal back then; it would be interesting to read it now. Written observations of true events take on new meaning over time.

I have kept journals since college. When I packed to come here, I found a small mountain of them in my closet and had to decide whether to take them.

They are hard to throw away because reading them is like going back in time. I can see exactly what I was thinking about, hoping for, or worrying about in 1996 or 2001. As I read, I wonder, did I really think that, say that, want that?

Writing in a journal as events unfold means facing insecurity head-on. It means writing blind, with limited knowledge, stumbling into an uncertain future. As a reader, I have knowledge that Old Me would have desperately liked to know. In this superior position, I know exactly where the events described will lead.

At the time of writing, my record of experiences often seem boring, but many years after writing them, I have gone back to find them transformed. Time, it turns out, adds layers of context to even trivial details.

For example, I kept a journal during a severe depression, and I could not foresee a time when I would ever not be depressed. Back then, I seemed capable of only making the most trivial mundane entries. Ate lunch. Read a book on astronomy. Played a video game.

I was writing mechanically. However, I went back many years after I had recovered and reread what I had written.

The astronomy book I had read, one of my boring journal details, was significant. Reading about space, dark matter, and other planets had focused my attention away from myself.

It reminded me that I was living on a rock that orbited a star, in a universe whose origins were mysterious. Afterward, I checked out more books on astronomy, including Cosmos by Carl Sagan. The book was riveting, a lyrical homage to the universe.

I woke up one day, many books later, and thought, “I get to read Carl Sagan today.” The sun, which I now knew was 93 million miles away and whose light took eight minutes to reach earth, had risen. I was eager to get out of bed. My depression was over.

My “boring” journal had a plot – a conflict, a struggle, and even a resolution, but at the time of writing, my recovery was too slow and I was unable to see it.

Rereading old journals allows me to recapture detailed memories long forgotten. It reveals recurring themes and patterns. It shows me that I have solved seemingly unsolvable problems before and that I can do it again. It motivates me to write every day.

Writing every day, through any circumstance, makes writing not just an activity but a way of life. Stability is unnecessary.

Life is inherently unstable, and writing is not something I want to take a break from, whether I move to a different state, country, or planet.

Upheavals, whether large or small, are just waves among thousands. Writing is a way to capture or transform them before they roll onto the shore and disappear.

Anticipating Ocala

I am about to move to a place I have never been. My transition will be from Belton, South Carolina to Ocala, Florida.

This may mean taking a hiatus on my blog. I am trying my best to write during the upheaval, but if I do post anything in the next few weeks, it will probably be a journal post like this one, rather than an article.

I will see Ocala for the first time tomorrow when my husband Donnie and I go there to look for an apartment.

I have known for a while that we would be moving somewhere. Donnie was laid off two weeks before Christmas, and getting a good job has been a long – and painful – struggle. Job opportunities in our area have shriveled, and salaries are generally low.

Donnie decided that he would improve the chances of getting the job and salary he wanted if he was willing to relocate to another state – or even country, if necessary. As a freelance writer, I can work anywhere, so I agreed.

Donnie applied to states all over the country, and even Amsterdam. Although most employers prefer local candidates, he got a number of responses, opportunities that brightened and then dimmed into a disappointing nothing.

There has been a lot of waiting, and my vision of the future has been a void, since I have not known where or when or how we would be moving. The beginning of each month when bills were due has felt, every time, like going over a cliff.

But the efforts  – after three months –  paid off, and Donnie finally got a job he really wants that pays well, and has excellent benefits. Ocala ho!

Everything I know about Ocala comes from Google. I have looked at the images featuring old oak trees draped in Spanish moss, and a park called Silver Springs known for having glass-bottom boats and monkeys.

I know Ocala has a population of 53,000. I know it has an Aldi and that John Travolta lives there in a sprawling luxury estate that houses his private jet.

I know that my cat will not be happy.

But for the first time in my life I will be living about an hour from a beach and also within easy driving distance to Orlando.

My mind is filled with Mickey Mouse and rolling ocean waves, my childishly oversimplified shorthand for a place I have never been.

Whatever awaits, it is nice to have a destination finally, even if in my mind it is now only a dreamy collage of photographs.

What will Ocala really be like? How will it affect my writing? In what ways will it annoy me? Will it be weird not having seasons?

In less than two weeks, I will begin to learn those things.

In less than two weeks, I will be ready.

Reclaiming the Freedom of the Rough Draft

In a rough draft, I was told, anything goes. Write it quickly, ignore mistakes, plow on despite grammar errors, keep the awkward wording.

I was told that this kind of writing releases bursts of wild creative energy and honesty, that it is a way to evade the “internal censor” – the nagging inner critic in every writer that inhibits free expression.

Still, for a long time, rough drafts never felt “free” to me.

Every time I read over what I had written – containing a trite expression, a dull sentence, or a falsely dramatic sentence rhythm – I cringed. Unwanted emotional qualities – such as “sentimental,” “preachy,” or “pretentious” – thrust me into a painful examination of my personality that made me dread writing.

Why was suspending my inhibitions so difficult, even when I gave myself permission to let them go?

Maybe because, by the time I had been taught the radical trick of “letting go” in writing, I had been conditioned for many years to avoid mistakes at all costs. I could not accept that there really is no right way to do a rough draft, even though I was writing something no one was ever going to see.

I even had an expectation of what it should feel like when I wrote a rough draft – ideally, a blast of euphoria driven by an insane, honest energy.

This was partly because I had read Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg many times. It is an inspiring book on writing, and she stresses that writing should be wild and free, which I, being bipolar, interpreted as a manic creative burst.

I managed to achieve this kind of inspiration sometimes, but when I was put on mood stabilizing medication for bipolar disorder, my “wild” creative bursts became all but impossible. Concluding I was blocked due to my medication, I gave up writing for years, depressed in part because I could not summon tidal waves of creative energy on demand.

Natalie Goldberg, when stressing the “wild” mental state, intended to liberate writers from fussing too much over their work, and her advice to keep the hand moving across the page and to not over-think is good advice.

But for me “wildness” became just another expectation, and not meeting it was just another way to fail.

My real problem was an unwitting self betrayal. That is, I would promise myself that anything I wrote was okay, that nothing I could write was wrong, but all along I was expecting the writing to be inspired, even if it was grammatically imperfect.

Reading over my rough drafts was hard, not because of poor grammar, but because they shook my confidence. They showed me just how dull, sentimental, or trite my writing could be, and if these qualities appeared in my writing, which had come from me, I thought I must be those things too.

Sometimes books on writing, to encourage readers by showing how rough a rough draft could be, would present examples, showing shameless sentence fragments and run-on sentences, and thoughts that jumped around – but the models always had an editorial cleanness mine lacked.

No one, it seemed, was willing to show how rough a rough draft could really be. But  fretting over the quality of rough drafts and comparing them was a flawed approach.

I finally realized what was happening. I was generously giving myself permission to write badly. But then, when the writing actually did fall short, I reversed my leniency, castigated myself, and sank into a grim mood.

A rough draft could be bad, I believed, but there were limits. It could be ungrammatical, but not trite. It could jump around without transitions, as long as it was wildly imaginative. It could be nonsensical, but never dull.

I believed that the main goal of a rough draft was to suspend inhibitions so that the creative side would be seduced into writing brilliantly.

I had not really freed myself into an “anything goes” mentality. I had just replaced my expectation of polished, grammatically correct writing with the belief that it should be inspired.

I view rough drafts differently now. I have accepted that rough drafts are not always wildly energetic, and now only view them as exceedingly useful.

A rough draft is only a stage of preparation. It is a way to determine what you want to say before worrying about how to say it.

This is important since creative block often comes from trying to do everything in one step. It is hard to figure out what I want to say and at the same time determine – and execute – the best expression of it. Prematurely judging my rough drafts was causing me to get hung up in the beginning stage, so that I never moved on to developing my ideas.

I had not yet learned that, sometimes, inspiration comes only after writing a rough draft, and that no matter how rough a first draft is, it can still lead to good writing. Even the most sterile rough draft can be useful because when I am reading over it, my imagination rebels at how boring it is and will often suggest exciting alternatives.

Having no expectations at all of how a rough draft should feel or look is real freedom. I know now that anything goes. I still prefer “wildly” energetic prose, but now I view rough drafts as a means to an end, as only shorthand for what I want to say.

For that reason, I can throw them all away after I have completed a writing project and feel no regret.

Although destined for the garbage can, my rough drafts, penned in cheap spiral notebooks, are helpful. When I am rewriting on my computer and I lose concentration as I fret over what to write next, I can reference my rough draft for new content and keep going.

Rough drafts, while useful, do not flatter my ego, but they are the freest, and often funnest, stage of writing. They can be, as I used to think, like racing down a ski slope while everything goes by you in a blur. But keeping the rough draft in its place as a means to an end removes all pressure.

So does recognizing that a rough draft is not really bad but incomplete, in the same way cake batter is an incomplete cake.

As an incomplete expression, a rough draft can be anything – silly, pretentious, sentimental, or dull – and still be useful. Accepting that a rough draft is only an instrument opens the door to creative exploration built on full permission to write anything at all.

The Sort Who Stays

As a child I was always the one who stayed.

I stayed as all around me, others went. Kids I played with moved away and left behind lonely empty houses. My parents, unlike theirs, were content where they were, and not the sort to leave.

The problem was, I was always getting attached to people in my neighborhood – kids, their dogs, or the elderly couple who always offered pink lemonade.

They won my heart and then they left. I imagined the exotic faraway places where they must have gone, places where everything was better. Otherwise, why would they go?

Even as an adult, I have mostly stayed in the town where I was born. I moved only once to spend a year in Atlanta during the Dot Com Bubble of the nineties.

I was unhappy.

Throngs of people crowded the stores and streets, and towering buildings grazed the clouds. It seemed that the bigness of things was what attracted people to the city, like the self-important skyscrapers, the imposing CNN Center, or the over-hyped Coca Cola Museum.

The more I thought people expected me to gawk at the relevance of the big city, the more determined I was not to be impressed with it.

It was only after I returned to my home town that I remembered what I had liked about Atlanta: the lights of the city at night, the amazing ethnic restaurants, the indie movie theaters, even the ethnic mix – I noticed how uniformly white everyone in my home town was when I returned, a sea of pale bored faces.

During all of my complaining about my new home, something had happened beneath my awareness. Atlanta had quietly changed me, and I could never view anything in the same way again.

Back at my old house, I was glad to be home, and this made me think that, like my parents, I was not the sort who moved away, but the sort who stayed.

Since then, I have stayed for 13 years.

I imagined I would always be here, going places only in my head, reading or writing, with my weeping willow tree in the back yard and all of the windows that give the living room a dreamlike radiance on sunny days.

But since I returned from Atlanta, a lot has changed. A layoff. A bad economy. A dismal job market.

Other states with better opportunities are pulling me away, and my home here will soon dissolve into a memory.

But I remember my mistake in Atlanta, how I had closed myself to all it had to offer when I could have drank it all in. Despite that, Atlanta had imprinted itself on me.

I thought I left Atlanta, but I took it with me, as a stowaway in my luggage. Because of that, I see now that I can leave the house behind – or any other place – and still keep it inside me when I go.

If I move, I want to do things differently this time.

I want to open myself to whatever a new place has to offer, no matter where it is, to take in all of its sights and sounds, to venture into the whirlwind of experience and get dizzy. And if it ever gets to be too much, I can come home again, to the place inside my head, and write.

I am not the person who stays anymore, but no one really is. Life is all about pausing and leaving, moving and being left. But I will never leave completely, no matter where I go.

My attachments to people will stay, and so will the years of experience here that have made me who I am.

Moving to Amsterdam in My Head

“Screw you guys! We goings to Amsterdam!”

This was an email I got on my phone recently from my husband Donnie. Understanding why requires knowing the context.

After a December layoff and a dismal job search, Donnie had an interview in St. Petersburg, Florida last week that went exceedingly well. Getting hired would mean high pay with excellent benefits, with health, dental, and life insurance. The job is as close to ideal as anything can be.

The week has been nothing but torturous waiting, trying to imagine what the interviewers are thinking, hoping but preparing for disappointment.

Some disappointing things have already happened since the new year began, small things that sink my mood when combined: my rejection letter from Harper Collins, my broken aching tooth that needs an expensive crown, being kicked off Reddit without a fair trial.

If the Florida job falls through, our backup plan is to sell everything we own and move to Amsterdam. Donnie has a phone interview next week with a company there, and to save ourselves from the pain of waiting for a call from Florida, we have been plotting our Amsterdam move.

We have even done research on how to get our cat Tubear across the Atlantic and discovered that she will need a passport with a photo I.D.

“Heck,” I told Donnie. “Forget about Florida. If they make an offer, turn them down. Just tell 'em we're moving to Amsterdam.”

Donnie liked this idea and began composing an email on his phone, which he sent me. The subject line said, “Suck it, FL!” with the note, “Screw you guys! We goings to Amsterdam!”

Looking at this note was the best either of us have felt all week.

Every time the suspense gets to be too much, when frustration spills over, we have conversations like this:

"Ready to move to Amsterdam?”

“Hell yeah, Amsterdam!”

“Hash bars, yay!”

“Tubear will love all the herring.”

“We can discover the ancestral roots of our pasty skin.”

“If America won't have us...”

“Amsterdam!”

We never consider that the Amsterdam job may not happen. The images are too wonderful to be spoiled by realism.

I have great visions of how Amsterdam would broaden my perspective and give me exciting new things to write about. I envision myself writing languorous poetry in street side cafes, coasting down bicycle trails, thoughtfully viewing the countryside through the windows of sleepy, rattling trains, vacationing in France during the summers.

Goodbye drugstore dental putty! Goodbye overpriced medications! Goodbye bad healthcare system!

Hello bike trails and flowers and raw herring!

Of course, Amsterdam is far away from here, a dream, separated by an entire ocean and a lot of paperwork. It would mean leaving the safety of a lifestyle I know and embracing an entirely new way of doing things.

It would be kind of like when I changed my major from liberal studies to art my junior year of college. Who knew I would ever do such a thing? No one. Not even me.

But Amsterdam is not the art department. It is far away from anything I know or have experienced. Beneath the flowers and bicycle trails, it is a void of uncertainty. It might as well be Mars.

But I have the space ship of my imagination, and it is Amsterdam bound, docked, and waiting. It does not even needs any fuel.

In my mind I am already there.