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Thought for Day 30: Don’t Be That Person

I’m thinking a lot about awareness, lately. Self awareness.  Knowing my flaws, being able to take criticism, and working towards self-improvement.  Of course, as you can tell from the way I’ve been writing these blog posts, I believe that most life wisdom can also be translated into writing wisdom.

If you’ve been in a workshop, you know what it’s like to spend 45 minutes talking about someone’s work and then listening to the author for 15 minutes defend their work against all points of criticism.

Don’t be that person.

It doesn’t matter if the story “actually happened.”

It doesn’t matter if the characters dictated the story in some mystical writing process.

Part of serving the work is improving the work.  A huge part, actually.  I’ve seen writers get slaughtered in workshop and then limp around–I’ve been one of these.  I’ve been slaughtered in workshop and then limped to the bar.  I was less mature then.

It’s a matter of maturity, of course, but an ideal writer already knows what the flaws in the story are before anyone reads the draft.  An ideal writer takes unanticipated criticism home, sleeps on it, and then, when the emotional response has dissipated, re-reads the story to see if the critic is right.

Writers must be ruthless at self-improvement–self-writing-improvement.  A professional chooses story over ego. The critics aren’t always right, but a writer who defends their work to critics is always wrong.

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Thought for Day 29: Round Up Your Allies

Being a writer takes a lot of discernment about the kinds of people you let into your creative process.  I can’t imagine being a writer without friends to read my writing.

Allies are people who make you feel confident. They are your friends, first. They want good things for you.  They, like you, are on “team better world.” They are honest but never mean.  This doesn’t mean they are always nice for the sake of being nice, or don’t offer criticism.  But their criticism is always constructive.

Unfortunately, there are some competitive writers out there who want us to feel bad about our writing so they can feel better about their own.  Learn to spot them.  Put them on a list of writing enemies. Don’t let them go near your work.  That doesn’t mean they are your enemies though.  You can still grab a beer with them from time to time.  They just don’t get to be your writing ally.

Your new writing project is a newborn child.  You’re not going to let just anyone hold it.  No one has the right to tell you to kill your newborn child.

Also, ask yourself if you are a constructive critic when someone asks you to read their work.  Are you generous while you read?  Assume that there is something good about what you’re reading and look for it.  Then try to spot what’s getting in the way.  You wouldn’t publish it because … but you would publish it if …

Make a list: who can you trust with your writing? Who brings confidence to your work, wants you to write the best you can possibly write because, well, they like you?

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SONGWRITING MONTH: An Invitation

I have decided, at least this summer, to be a genre-by-month artist.  I did Poetry Month in April and was so happy to see thirty new poems at the end of it that I’m going to try to be productive like that always–by tackling a creative project one month at a time.

May is Revise the Novel Month (as you know). Now the novel’s in the hands of some trusted readers.  I do plan on thinking about it during the month of June, maybe doing some free-writes associated with my protagonists, but I decided that I would dedicate June to songwriting.

I’m a songwriter, too.

I have a Facebook page for my music: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Nora-Bonner/44922051108

And a (really old) Myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/norabonnermusic

I have come up with a Thirty-Day curriculum that’s pretty ambitious. I’m thinking it will require that I set aside at least an hour a day for playing my guitar and then some.  I have geared up for this by playing five songs a day—you know, for the calluses.

Each day this month has a songwriting assignment.  Some of them are to learn songs that already exist.  Some of them are to write songs in different styles.  My hope is that I’ll be able to get through a song without stopping (rather than say, nail it).  I’d like to learn a bunch of songs that I can have in my repertoire for later nailing.

I will post the assignment on my blog and perhaps, if I have time, I’ll also post a link to a song that holds some significance in my life—not sure if it will be related to the assignment.

I will, if all goes well, come out of June knowing how to play thirty more songs than I did when I started.  Ten of these songs I will have written and twenty of them are from other artists.

I invite anyone who wants to write songs to participate in that aspect.  Lots of the assignments are lyric-driven.  I’m a writer, remember? I think about the words first.

I also invite you to share songs and musicians with me.  I want to know what you’re listening to.  I want to know why—the significance of this music in your lives.

I don’t know if anyone will join me on this semi-crazy endeavor but if you feel compelled to do so, please do.

I can’t even tell you how excited I am for this.

(I’m also expecting this month to feel a bit like Cash in this song:)

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Thought for Day 28: Strength

If you want to be a writer, you have to be strong.

I have just spent a couple years in what Iyanla Vanzant calls, “The Basement.”  It’s when you feel like a victim.  It’s when you cling to self-destructive people and self-destructive behavior. People walk all over you all the time. The “First Floor” is when you are able to recognize the destruction and start making changes.  I’m on the second floor now, which means I’m learning how be strong.

From the second floor, I can see how living in the basement has affected my writing.  My characters tended to be passive.  The conflicts were unclear–it was hard to tell what the characters wanted.

A good story has a strong character with flaws.  Weak characters with a few glimpses of strength rarely cut it for a good story.  We’ve heard it in workshops again and again: What’s the conflict?  What does the character want? What does the character need to do in order to achieve their desire?

What workshops don’t teach us is that in order to write strong characters, we need to know how to be strong people.

What does strength look like?  It looks like knowing what game you’re playing.

It means you find out the rules for the game you’re playing and follow them.

It means going to work, no matter what.

It means that you don’t get destroyed by destructive criticism.

It means you never give up, never never give up.

It means that you don’t get caught up in other people’s drama that makes you weak.

It means you learn how to adopt a healthy lifestyle that doesn’t contribute to your weakness.

The stronger you are, the stronger your writing will be.  Don’t write characters who are victims.  Don’t be a victim.

To get started, I recommend getting to know Hedwig and the Angry Inch.  Be like Hedwig.  Especially in this song:

 

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Thoughts for Day 26 & Day 27: Listen

Yesterday, I found myself in the company of some improv comedians/performers.  They were brainstorming for a writing project.   These actors were very respectful to each other, and most of them were really funny, but I noticed that they were funniest, not when they were one-upping each other or trying to impress each other, but when they were listening to each other and responding accordingly.  Comedy is timing, as they say, but guess what: so is writing.

Each sentence is a response to the one that came before it. Cutting off a subject and switching to a new one is a kind of response.  I guess the opening sentence is an exception, though I do like that writing trick of starting a story as if the reader is coming into the middle of something.  In order to pull that trick off, the author needs to know what came right before the moment on the page before the first paragraph begins–what’s on that white space that the reader can’t see. Either way, I believe good writing centers on the writer’s ability to listen.  Listening to language, listening to the tone of the characters who are playing the movie out in our head, etc.

I like writing that is language-driven (as opposed to plot-driven), and by language-driven I mean, where punctuation does more than create the meaning of a sentence.  That’s its basic function, of course, but in order to advance to Cormac McCarthy’s level, punctuation becomes a tool for making rhythm happen within a sentence.  We can’t know what sort of rhythm our sentences have if we’re not listening to them.Most of that stuff comes naturally, though.  I’m learning that doesn’t come naturally, and takes bit of effort, is listening during the revision process.  I tend to sort of gloss over the sentences I’ve seen so many times before.  Revision, though, should be the time when I’m listening extra-closely.  If it doesn’t jump off the page, it’s probably a dull sentence.  Dull sentences are probably okay sometimes, by way of emphasizing a sharp sentence, but we have to nail the ends of paragraphs. We nail them by listening to how that sentence lingers in the small space we create with the enter and tab buttons on our keyboards.

Sentences can be quiet and loud (WITHOUT CAPS).  Sentences can be abrupt, or smooth, or energetic.  For more about this, read John Gardner’s THE ART OF FICTION.  He talks about this quite a bit, and recommends poetic technique for the writer (scanning your sentences, using scansion).

Here’s another listening-related anecdote: a friend recommended, as I was putting an ending on my last draft, that I should listen to the kind of music that creates the sort of tone and mood I’m going for.  I sort of wrote to match the rhythm of the music (which was Rufus Wainwright, by the way…)  This worked pretty well for me.  I found that my sentences responded to what I was hearing from my computer speakers.

Okay, so listening to sentences and language is one thing.  There is another aspect of listening for a writer that goes beyond what’s on the page.  I’m thinking of a story Peter Rollins tells in his latest book, The Idolatry of God, where he’s proving that we impose so much onto conversations that we risk closing ourselves off to what the person speaking is actually saying.  He used an example where his friend, who was considering getting a divorce, said that he didn’t want to hurt the children in the same way his parents hurt him and his siblings when they were kids.  Peter Rollins instinctively thought that the guy was posing an argument against his decision to get a divorce–that the guy was saying that going through his parents’ divorce was really difficult.  Later, Rollins realized that the guy’s parents were still married; he completely misheard the guy because he was listening to what he figured the guy was saying, rather than what he was actually saying.

I find this useful in thinking about writing.  I’m a more mystical type of writer, and by that I mean, I believe that writing is more like uncovering something that’s there than filling up an empty void with words. That’s why, again, I like to think of writing as an act of discovery. Sometimes this uncovering takes a few drafts to get it right.  Once we know what’s there, then we can tweak the language to suit it best.  The language then, its nuances, rhythms, serve the work and the work itself is what we are uncovering.

I blame Madeleine L’Engle for these crazy ideas.  And Julia Cameron and Steven Pressfield, who I’ve been reading lately.  Listening is how we tap into whatever is inside urging us to write (the child of a few posts back).  It’s also how we connect our story to a larger conversation.  We have to listen to what’s in and outside of us, paying close attention, if we want to write great works.

I was listening to this song while I wrote this post, which happens to mention listening in its chorus.  Coincidence?

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Thought for Day 25: What to Write About

This thought comes, again, from Steven Pressfield’s THE WAR OF ART.

I have noticed two major terms writers like to use when insulting other writers:  hack and precious.  I’m not exactly sure what precious means, except I get the impression that it has something to do with the kind of writing one associates with greeting cards.  I’m positive that it is always a matter of taste and opinion because I heard someone call Italo Calvino precious and Italo Calvino is a god.  See what I mean:

Precious, again, is a matter of opinion.

Hack, I understand, especially because Pressfield lays it out for us at the end of this book:

A hack writes hierarchically.  He writes what he imagines will play well in the presence of others.  He does not ask himself, What do I myself want to write?  What do I think is important? Instead he asks, What’s hot? What can I make a deal for?

(152).

Hacks sound pretty smart to me but I still don’t want to be one.  Hence, my poverty.

I found, during my MFA, that I can’t commit to a project that makes me feel like a hack.  I wrote about 200 pages of a novel and then stopped because I let someone see it who said that the writing was unimaginative.  That scared me, because imagination is a pretty big part of my (and your) identity as a writer.  If he was wrong, which I don’t think he was, I think I would have felt that and persisted.  I knew instead that he was right, that I wasn’t at all connected to the language in the book I was writing because I wasn’t really writing it from that, “I must write this!” place.  I didn’t care that much about the characters.  The situation, though interesting, was not really something that I felt like my life’s journey has given me authority over.

Today’s thought is about what to write.  Your intro to creative writing class taught you to write what you know.  I don’t like that phrase much.  Instead, I think “write what you’re obsessed with” is better advice.

If you’re obsessed with something, if there is a sliver of a narrative that you overheard one day and think about once or twice a week, you know enough about it to write about it.  You don’t have to know everything about what you’re going to write.  That’s why I don’t like the advice to write what you know.  Writing is an act of discovery, by gosh, and nothing is more dull than reading a narrative from the perspective of a “know-it-all.”

No. Write what you’re obsessed with.

Write what you need to know more about.  Write about what makes you curious.

My novel that I’m working on now came to me when a mentor asked, “What do you wish you could find on the shelf at a bookstore? Write that.”

There was a time when I only wanted to read the kind of novel I was writing, but due to personal experiences/circumstances/tragedies at the time, I knew that the book I was working on was the last thing I’d go to the bookstore to read.  I needed something funnier.  I needed something more triumphant, more strange, more delightful than what I was working on.

I spent a day grieving.  Deciding to put a novel down for a while (or perhaps drop all together) that you’ve worked on for 200 pages feels like taking a puppy into a field and shooting it in the head because it has some strange disease that you can’t afford to cure.  It’s awful.

I’m guessing that there will be a time, or five times, this current project will seem like a diseased puppy to me.  But I’ve already written a draft, so I am more confident that I have what I need to cure the puppy.  I have more in stock now, I mean. More tools to fix it.*

Plus, I have made it through a full draft so I know that enough about it works to keep going. (I ditch drafts a lot.  A LOT. I don’t recommend that, necessarily, but I also won’t say it’s something I don’t do a lot.)

*That paragraph is for the record.  Please remind me of this post when I start talking about my novel like it’s a diseased puppy.

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Thoughts for Days 23 & 24: Your Inner-Artist is a Child & Don’t Flake

Today’s two thoughts are related.

1. Your Inner-Artist is a Child.*

*If you are one of those people who hates children but likes puppies, please free to think of your inner-artist as a puppy instead.

2. Don’t Flake (on your child).

Okay, so number one comes from Julia Cameron’s philosophy on being an artist.  She says that you need to treat your inner-artist (the writer inside) like a child.  Like a child, your writing needs to be nurtured, not just yelled at sometimes.  You must find ways to make corrections without hurting the child too much.  You are aware that you can abuse the child and that the child can grow up all messed up because you let someone else come too close to and abuse it. You have to protect the inner artist child. You also need to have fun with the child. You are aware that your child needs time to play. You need to let the child be funny sometimes and serious at other times. You are also aware that sometimes your child is crabby but that time-outs are a little more civil than beating the child up for punishment.  You must feed the child.  You must give the child a nap to reboot. 

Most of all, you acknowledge that your child is growing–it’s not right now where it is going to be one day.

Once we have that idea down, it’s really important that we learn how not to flake on this child.

This is thought two, by the way. 

Maybe we shouldn’t make promises to our inner-artists.  Maybe we shouldn’t say, “Just you and me, we’re going to work together all day Saturday” if we are going to something else all day–like play with Facebook instead. But the better case scenario is that we teach the child that we can make promises and keep them.  That teaches the child to trust what we say.

Imagine if you had a child who was waiting for the two of you to interact and you were just getting drunk every time you said you were going to hang with them, or just hanging out with your friends all the time instead, saying, “I’ll get to you next week! Next week! I promise!”

I have a special sensitivity about flakes, which comes from the facts that a) I’ve dated a couple and they drove me up the wall and b) my dad taught me to hate flakiness as a profound statement of disrespect.  My dad is always, always on time.  He was also a fireman for thirty years.  In Detroit.

Anyway, in grad school it’s really very easy to be a flake.  We all, from time to time, say we’re coming to something and do not show.   Maybe we just forgot, but we probably didn’t.  We’re just too busy and stressed and too lazy to give the host of the party a heads-up that no, we’re actually not going to make it over.  Again, thanks to my dad, this drives me up the wall.  I hate feeling like anyone is wasting my time.

(I have learned, however, that bringing a book wherever you go is a really good antidote to feeling like your time is wasted while you’re waiting for someone or something to happen.)

I do my best not to flake.  I really do.  I try not to say I’m coming unless I know I can be there.  I try to apologize to those whose readings I’ve missed.  If I change my mind about whether I can go to something, I try to let the host know as soon as possible.  If I have to pull out of an event, I try to set up an appointment right away.  I really try to be where I said I was going to be at the time I said I was going to be there. 

Unfortunately, I do have a gene from my mother’s side of the family that gives me a poor sense of time. Great sense of rhythm, poor sense of time.  Several of us on that side are naturally late to everything–especially the ones who dedicate more time to their artistic side (we are all artists on that side of the family, although not everyone puts that art into practice. Ebbs and flows for most of us.) 

It’s like a war against my genes inside–I feel awful for being late but then, ah! I can’t help it! I’m late! 

It’s stressful.

All of this is to say that I had a pretty humbling experience this week when I came down hard on someone for being a flake and then realized that I am a flake to myself.  To promise myself I’ll do something (like start jogging this summer and quit smoking, or to stop eating sugar because it destroys my mind and makes me crazy) and then not do it is the same as flaking on myself. 

I promise myself I’ll write and then I don’t.

If you’re a writer, I think you understand what if feels like to neglect your writing.  It’s more than guilt.  It feels like this kid is inside:

He’s ready to go. He’s got his cape on and everything.

Our inner artist children are also probably quicker to forgive us than most grown-ups.   If we do neglect the child, we can apologize, move on, and recognize that our pattern of behavior is deeply going to affect the child.

But we can change the pattern. We can always change the pattern.

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Thought for Day 22: Surviving

Sometimes we don’t feel like writing because life gets in the way.  It is precisely for this reason that we have this song:

Push play.  Shake it out.

Laugh at this lyric: “I’m not going to diss you on the internet because my momma taught me better than that.”

Now get to work.

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Thought for Day 21: Needs

This thought is connected to the one that came before it.

You have what you need right now to make the current “play” for the game.

I think a lot of us avoid trying to reach our writing dreams because we think we aren’t equipped with what we need to be a writer.

If you’re writing, you’re a writer.

That aside, a writer does have needs.  Right now, you have what you need to fulfill your needs.  Dizzy?  Here is what I mean.

a. A writer needs time to write.

Maybe you don’t have time to write at this second.  Maybe you have just enough time to plan when you’re going to write next.  Do that.  And when it comes time to write, do that.

b. A writer needs to learn how to write professionally if he or she wants publications.

There are rules about publishing.  If you don’t know how to punctuate dialogue the way editors want it punctuated, your story is going to get tossed out of the slush pile and into a trash can.  You have to learn that rule and others, proofread your work, and make it professional. There are books that will teach you how to do this.  There are graduate writing programs.  There are conferences.  If you’re serious about your writing, you will go after this knowledge.  But not having the knowledge doesn’t mean you don’t have what you need to get it.  The knowledge is out there.  Start asking around.  You have what you need to start getting that knowledge right now.  Do it.

c. A writer needs community.

Part of that is because of the previous point–you need people who will help bring your writing up to a professional level.  Part of it is because the world outside of your writing world doesn’t give a care at all whether or not you write today.  In fact, the people who love you the most don’t care if you write today (unless they spend enough with you to know how evil and crazy you become after three days of neglecting your writing). Honestly, and sorry if this sounds elitist–most of the world doesn’t really care much about literature.  Part of the reason you’re a writer is because you do care. This makes you odd.  Find other people who love literature. They are out there, and there is a ton of them.

A community will reinstate your love for what you do and give it purpose.  You might need to go back to school in order to get a community.  You might have to search around on the internet for some kind of online community.  Search for it, though.  There are communities all over.

When I lived in Bangkok, I found it to be a place where it was harder for me to access a writing community than, say, Detroit.  I could have done that, though, if I had searched, because there are writing communities in Bangkok.  I had what I needed, though; the online writing community helped my writing improve a lot.  It got me ready for my graduate writing programs, which was the next level.

d. A writer needs to read.

You’re online. You have plenty of stuff to read just because you are sitting at your computer.  Read literary magazines online.  Read forums for writers, writers’ blogs that discuss what they are reading at that moment.  Listen to Michael Silverblatt’s show on KCRW called Bookworm.  That will help you figure out what to read.

Bottom line: know what your needs are. Also, know you have everything you need right now to get what you will need next, step by step.

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Thought for Day 20: The Game

I am a day behind in my writing thoughts but I wrote two today to catch up.

Here’s the thought for yesterday:

Know what game you’re playing and know the rules.

This thought comes from this sermon Iyanla Vanzant preached called “Playing the Game”:

The speech is full of great metaphors about life from baseball and football.  “You have to get all the way up the field,” and “You can’t get the house and the jaguar if you’re only on first base,” etc.  The essence is, know what game you’re playing and know the rules.  If your game is to publish a novel, you have to get focused on “where you’re going in order to get there…”  A rule might be that when you’re trying to write, you can’t have Facebook open in your browser.  It might be that you have to write for two hours a day.  It might be that you have to accrue a team of allies.

You have to get educated.  You have to figure out how the game works.  When it’s time to find an agent, you have to figure out the rules to that part of the game.  Know where you are in the game.  If you’re on first base, don’t expect the celebration of a home run.

If you write science fiction, there are different rules to writing horror.  You know this.  I get a lot of complaints from my friends who write in genres that those of us (like me) who don’t write in genres take them less seriously. First of all, I do write in a genre, it’s called literary fiction, I guess.  I have trouble with that word “literary” though, because there are tons of literary romances out there. There is crossover, but our job is to figure out what game we’re playing.  I am currently writing a literary ghost story.  It has different rules than the book I thought I was going to write–a transnational epic about human trafficking.

Do know that one game is not more valuable than the other. If anyone tells you that you’re style of writing, or your genre, or your interests, is less valuable, they are talking from a POV of taste preference, not capital T Truth.

That said, do know that the games share a lot of the rules.  Don’t worry about whether or not other people think your kind of writing is valuable.  Just play the game that makes you the most excited.