Tag: writing

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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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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.

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Thought for Day 16: Keep the Drama on the Page.

This was my favorite part of Julia Cameron’s THE RIGHT TO WRITE (which I am about to finish after I write this post). She says:

For a writer, personal drama is the drink of creative poison.  For a writer, the willing engagement in power struggles is an act of creative sabotage

(p. 41).

This is the truth.  We are living in world of crazy people–all people are crazy. It’s true! All people are self-absorbed. Especially artists. Especially talented ones. You included. Me included.  That doesn’t mean we have to contribute to the world’s craziness.  Our writing can and should bring order to this–help us process and perhaps contribute to the eradication of all hate and harm by acknowledging hate and harm, by getting a handle on it.  If you must act on drama, journal about it.  Save it for your characters’ conflicts.

We don’t have a choice about whether drama will get into our lives but we can learn how to deal with it before it takes over us and prevents us from writing. Here are three ways we can keep drama from interfering with our work:

1. Do our best to avoid it. 

We can start by being careful how we handle other people–especially in romantic/physical situations.  In all of our relationships, romantic or otherwise, avoiding drama looks like keeping other people’s best interests at heart. Pretty simple.  This doesn’t always work, though. People lie. People keep important information from us.  Even so, a lot of drama can be avoided if we go at the world with our best intentions.

2. Be aware of our own power trips.

Writing can help us acknowledge when we feel powerless.  Sometime we will. This is just going to happen.  But by acknowledging this, we can prevent ourselves from using whatever power we have  to harm others.

Do harm to your characters instead. It will make for a much more interesting story.

3. Rise above criticism.

People are going to say mean things to us, or mean things about our writing. Not all criticism is constructive.  But an important aspect of being a writer is having a thick enough skin to sort through criticism and pull out the constructive stuff.

4. Remember that people are time and energy.

Avoid the ones that waste your time and energy.  That doesn’t mean you have to be mean to them.  (See #1). Be respectful.  Love everyone. Even so, loving everyone doesn’t mean handing over your time and energy for them to sabotage it. Sometimes the most loving thing you can to for a person is to leave them alone to their own devices.  Loving someone sometimes means acknowledging that you can’t fix them. It means letting them learn how to fix themselves after you’ve treated them with your best intentions. Ultimately,  you choose who you spend time with and who you think about.

Got drama? Shake it off. Bring it to God, if you are prone to do such a thing. Acknowledge when you need to ask for forgiveness from folks.  Don’t expect anyone to apologize to you when they have hurt you. No matter what, know that you are bigger, more complex, more beautiful than whatever is trying to get in and sabotage your work.  Ultimately, we decide what to worship (what to give power to).

For more information, listen to David Foster Wallace’s speech to Kenyon College:

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Thought for Day 15: Find a Rhythm.

I used to be a tap dancer. Not one of those jazz-hands tap dancers.  My tap teacher’s name was Otis Brown and the last thing he let his students be was stiff.  He never told us to smile.  He is on my shortlist for favorite people I’ve ever met, though, because he was seriously as cool as his name suggests.

I’m thinking about him and tap dancing because I’ve lost my writing rhythm this week.  It’s the first time I can remember (and this sort of shocks me, given that I’ve been writing semi-consistently for about a dozen years) that I’ve actually felt the urge to have a regular writing rhythm. I’m pretty good at binge writing (talkin’ 20 pages a day during spring break blues…)  But now, without a deadline, I want to hunker down and make myself write regularly.

Here’s a few tips I’m giving you and myself about how to find a writing rhythm, inspired by my tap dancing years. (Side note: I confess I still tap out those routines I learned. I tap when I’m standing in lines or I’m alone in elevators, or with my index and middle fingers on my right hand when I’m bored).

1. Listen for the rhythm.

This translates to being honest about our schedules and finding a writing time that we can actually manage to keep.  We might have to start slow (single time step, y’all), before we can tackle more extensive routines. Nothing helps me feel more like a writer than when I actually keep the writing time I scheduled.

2. Adapt when the rhythm changes.

This translates to acknowledging that change happens.  In a tap routine, this is a very good thing because it keeps the dance interesting.  In a writing schedule, this is a very frustrating thing that makes me want to pull out all my hair.  But I’m saying, let’s keep our hair on our heads and be gracious to ourselves when we have to switch it up a little.  The most important thing is that we write.

3. If you lose the rhythm, get back on track without showing it on your face.

Nobody will ever know if you don’t show it on your face.

And now, here’s my favorite tap dancer in the whole world (next to Otis Brown, of course), for a little inspiration to be awesome.

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Thought for Day 14: Means to an End

A good friend told me this recently and I’ve been trying to pass it on to everyone I know:

As writers, or people who work in any field, we have a choice to make.  Either we see our work as an end or we see it as a means to a bigger end–something more significant, something larger about ourselves and the world we live in.

If our writing is the end, a bad review can destroy us.  A rejection letter can make us skip a meal (or waste an evening of sleep on a devoured tub of ice cream–pick your grieving style). If someone tears our work apart, we might quit the work all together.

If writing is a means to an end, and not the end itself, then we can take criticism, no problem.  Our story draft is a stab at something bigger.  We write, we enjoy the process of writing, and then we close our computers/notebooks and call it a day.  It’s a better day because we’ve written.  Hopefully we’ve made a discovery or two in the process that keeps us joyful, or at the very least, inquisitive.

If our writing is a means, we don’t beat ourselves up or get discouraged because we didn’t hit a certain word count or time stretch that we’ve made for a day’s goal.  We can say, well, there’s always tomorrow. Tomorrow our work will be waiting for us, that means to a bigger end.

Of course we should write the best we can.  Of course we should put as much of us into our work as we can manage.  But we don’t do this because the work itself brings ultimate satisfaction.  We do this because the work brings us toward something bigger.

What is that bigger thing?  Well, isn’t that what we’re all here to try and figure out?

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Thought for Day 13: Embrace the Waste

I don’t know about other MFA fiction graduates, but I think the most daunting thing about not being in a workshop, and not having a committee waiting on a draft, is the fact that we have no deadlines. I’ve already written about this (Thought for Day Three), but today I’m thinking more about how the lack of having a deadline changes my attitude towards writing.  Here’s my thought: embrace the waste.

(Just like it says on the title for this post!)

This thought came to me after reading Dorothy Allison’s interview in a book called Novel Ideas.  Allison talks about different tricks she uses in taking a fresh look at her manuscript for a revision.  She puts it down for a year.  She writes entire sections in a different perspective (character or narrative perspective, like from first to third).  She does a whole lot of writing and then tosses that writing away–none of it goes into the final draft.

I will remember my committee-chair (Elizabeth Stuckey-French) the most by one phrase she loved to say, again and again: “Try it and see where it goes.”  This is a lot easier to do when we don’t have a deadline approaching. (ESF taught a really good class about novel writing that I was super lucky to take. In fact, that class is why this Novel Ideas book is on my shelf.)

Maybe other people had different experiences as students, but I wrote with a lot of pressure to get it good the first time.  Not get it right, but get it good.  Get it good enough so it wouldn’t get slaughtered during workshop. I taught 45 students and was often taking three classes at a time while I was completing my MFA. I didn’t really have time to waste a lot of pages trying things.

Writing while a student has shaped my perspective in a bit of an unpractical sort of way: I feel like I have little sense of how much work actually goes into completing an entire book, especially a book that I want to be not only right and good, but amazing. I think a big part of writing an amazing book is allowing ourselves to try things and see what happens.

Let no possibility go unexplored.

This post, I suppose, is sort of a confession.  I suspect that if I were a better student (and I suspect that if I didn’t take the teaching so seriously, which I just could not figure out how to do), I would have made more time to waste pages.  Now, the ability to just write a bunch of pages for the mere act of discovery sounds like a tremendous gift.  Nobody’s waiting on my novel (except my close friends and family).  It feels luxurious.

It’s also really, really scary.

Being open to possibilities takes a lot of courage.  This is why, I believe, fundamentalism is closely related to fear. Any kind of fundamentalism, religious or secular.  Chin up, writers. And by writers, I mean me. Time to march into the unknown.  And by the unknown, I mean, the possibility of making a discovery while wasting a bunch of pages.

And waste is probably the wrong word.  Each sentence we write is productive, because it means, simply, that we are writing.  The only waste a writer has is the sort of muck/guilt/fear that piles up after not having written in a while.

Recommended Reading: Novel Ideas (Second Edition) by Barbara Shoup and Margaret-Love Denman, University of Georgia Press:  2009

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Thought for Day 12: No Self Pity

The Miracle Worker, which I understand is the brunt of lots of our (US American) culture’s jokes, is one of the most important plays/movies for me.   The two protagonists, Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, inspire me with their resilience.  Helen Keller’s thread is about her journey to discovering language.  Language, for her, is the door to God and freedom from the prison of her impairments.  After this deaf and blind kid made the connection that water is called water, she went on to write books and preach and have a whole public life of inspiring people.

It’s Annie Sullivan’s story, though, that is inspiring me today, particularly with a line she says in the play/movie, the best line, in my opinion: “No, no self pity. I won’t have it.”  This has got to be a mantra for us writers. We have a lot of reasons to pity ourselves but we must resist them all in order to write.

Watch this scene and see it as a metaphor for certain days of the writing life:

You, the writer, are Annie Sullivan.  If you’re going to be a writer, you have to have that kind of resilience.   You are not allowed to give up when you get your fifth rejection letter in one week.  You are not allowed to give up when somebody breaks your heart and you don’t feel like writing. You have to write when you’re tired.  You have to finish your current writing project, even when it seems like your writing project is scrambling up the chimney to get out of the room. You have to chase after your writing and sit your writing down to eat, even if it’s darting towards the door and collapsing beneath the dining room table kicking and grunting.  Sometimes writing feels like force-feeding a spoonful of eggs to a deaf and blind girl who is just about to spit the eggs in your face.   Writing, no matter what the form, is going to feel like this on some days. Be like Anne Sullivan. Deal with it.  And no self pity.