Tina Haapala, Excuse Editor

We're all works under construction “Live fearlessly!” Sounds great, doesn’t it? Until you actually try living that way. Your common sense gets in the way— Well, I must be scared of some things, like driving too fast or stray dogs, right? Or you basically fear what living fearlessly might LOOK like: What will they think of me if I shake my ass in Zumba? These kinds of debates have been playing themselves out in my head for the past year, as I’ve been working on my memoir. Can I "Write Fearlessly?" I felt great in the beginning. I’d discovered a way to work, a type of flexible outlining Brook Warner calls “ scaffolding ” that seemed to set me out in the right direction—yes, direction! I suddenly had one. Great! On to writing. I knew the story. I mapped out the scenes. But, I suppose it is similar to the Cheryl Strayed’s Wild journey—we both knew we were a bit out of our element, but until we run splat into obstacles, we didn’t know how scary it would be.

Don't Give up on Your Rough Drafts Over 10 years ago, I was taking a journal writing workshop through the community center in Mesa, AZ. We were asked to write a "Name Story"--what our names meant to us, what changes our names have been through, that kind of thing. My first idea, the obvious--nobody knows how to pronounce Haapala (I actually wrote about this in "Finding Common Ground" for Chicken Soup for the Soul: Campus Chronicles ). As I wrote out some ideas, I started humming a song. Of course. My name story had to be about the song that carried my name: Tina Marie '73 . My dad had written and recorded it and sent a cassette tape to me in Arizona. I wrote a page for the next workshop. In that page, I talked a little about my parents divorce, a little about being a bratty teenager, a little about music. In the workshop, I played the song to tell the rest of my Name Story. And then, for a few years, I put that page away. It resurfaced when I move...