Word After Word

Oh it’s a terrible terrible moment!  No writing in seven days. I feel as though a major organ, like my liver, has been taken from my body and any moment now, I’m going to lose my heart, my head.  It’s a ditch of despond, an air of despair, a hard month.  Back to basics. I’m buying some hair conditioner, travel size, and a 79 cent notebook this afternoon at Meijer and I have my list of magic always-work assignments from Abigail Thomas (see blogroll). I’ll write this afternoon: about my dad and the Weird Perfect Collision– Jacob is reading the part of Gloucester in King Lear.  I can also write a little bit about trying to watch Casablanca again, a movie I have never ever been able to watch with much comprehension and I just figured out why: I can’t tell Victor Laszlo apart from Rick.  Crucial, crucial insight.  Also, a lot of men in uniform. Very very advanced viewing for face blind people. What cracks me up is how hard I try to watch these movies, how I keep forgetting I am not going to follow things easily. It takes me awhile to figure out who is who, by what they say, what they are doing.  Ingrid is with BOTH MEN! Tricky.

This is the thing about face blindness. We never know when it’s happening–everything always looks like how it looks.  There’s not a question mark above the heads of the People Who Are Being Confused with Other People, any indication this may not be who you think it is.  I never feel confused at the time. I watch Casablanca and think, okay, new character, all will be revealed in good time.  It all looks normal. 

The not writing every day is confusing and frustrating and hard to sort out. I’m not recognizing myself.  I’m unhappy with my work. I read it aloud this morning and of course I hate it–it doesn’t sound like how I thought it would. 

This is the riptide of not writing.  You get sucked away from the Good Thing and it will take at least three days of work/writing/swimming to get back. Note to self: swim with the current not against it.

Hello, Georgia!

Art wrote me late, late last night. I read the email his worried email this morning while I was making Jake scrambled eggs. (Jake didn’t want eggs, as it turned out but I’m in a lucky great egg-making phase, they are coming out so good these days who could not eat them—is it the full moon? He ate them anyway and said thanks so sweetly (I do warm the plate in the microwave), I almost burst into tears. That would be the full moon.)  But poor Art. He was freaking out.

It sounded so familiar.

“What do I do about the structure? Where do I put the daughters? How am I going to get it all in? I have too much. I don’t see how plot point one is going to feature

Exactly. I have this EXACT same problem with my book, too.

This Structure Worry is part of the quality of writing a book. When you are stressing about structure you are writing your book. This is what it actually is like. Structure doesn’t make sense. It isn’t out there, perfect, waiting for us to assemble it like a bookshelf from Ikea. Art (not my friend art, but the other kind) doesn’t come from Ikea. 

Writing a book is designing.  You build the structure, you make it yourself. It’s not out there. It’s like the old sculpture-hidden-in-the-marble-block thing. You have to discover the thing you are writing while you are writing it.  Not relaxing.  Not clear.

So I reminded myself and Art of what I know: yes, you have to have a plan. No, it will not work.  (Like playing a video game.) Most of what you do will have to be re-done (like keeping house).

And, it’s very, very hard to conceive of the structure in the abstract. You have to know what you are doing, and have no idea what you are doing, at the same time. Art is worrying about all the right things.

Plan. (Don’t get stuck in the gap between these two words) Write. Then adjust the plan. (It is so easy to say this and so annoying to be swamped by all those pages and plans and notebooks and books on writing.) Art is in the swamp. It’s the right place.  It’s a grey area.

Caring about aging parents is very like writing a book.

I am enrolled in a graduate level seminar and I haven’t completed the prerequisites for it. It’s titled: Aging Parents. There are no texts, there’s no teacher, and every single part of it is a grey area.  It’s impossible to feel certain: here’s a good step! Yes, I’ll close these accounts. Even little steps, like “I’ll fax this doctor” are much more time-consuming than they “should” be and will they bring results? No way to know.  It’s all a grey area and I am turning grey.

Hard, hard, hard.

And so exactly like writing a book I can’t even get over it. You just never really know if you are doing it right, if it is going to matter, if anyone in the entire story is going to be happy. It’s just really a very grey area.

Clear eyes, pure heart.

I am under the influence of Friday Night Lights: Clear Eyes, Pure Hearts and Texas Football. I’m lonesome for

The writer often mistakes herself for a sole entity. No. No, no, no.

It’s confusing for us. We aren’t on the field, physically. There’s not a locker room, apparently. There’s not a coach with a chalk board and cool plays named “8 7 Trojan Horse” and “Twister 3 5 A Go.” There’s not a coach telling you how you are part of something and that you have to stay all connected to each other in order to Be Perfect. There’s not a timer, a score, the taste of blood in your mouth, fifteen thousand people in the stands, or finals that everyone—everyone—else is going to strive to be in. Shops do not close down and put signs in their windows Closed for Game Heather Is Writing. Go Heather! signs are nowhere to be found anywhere.

We can do our thing, writing, and no one knows.  This is verging into the Venn diagram titled Mental Illness.  There’s some overlap in the slough of despond called Alone With Paper.

*

When I am stuck I try all my moves. My super plays. Plays I’ve practiced over and over and over just for times like these. You gotta know your moves. You must have a play book. If you do not have moves yet, you need to get them.

How?

Pretend you are an inspiring, pressurized coach who will lose his job if these pages don’t see the light of day by Friday. It’s crunch time. What would you do if you only had one day to write? How would you do it? Make a list. Call out the plays. Loud is good. There is a team in you; is it under-trained? does it mistakenly think we do not play football aka writing your ass off 365 days a year? (Yell.)

Your players will come. They will. They’ll get to it. They are dying for a coach with vision, who convinces them he knows what he is doing. (It’s fine if you do not really have any clue what you are doing. You are part of the team, okay? Get over yourself.  If you do not respond well to your inner coach, hire a new one one you can work well with.  If you aren’t creative enough to do that—make up characters in you to support your work, how on earth are you going to be creative enough to write a book?)

When I have the Structure Meltdown (like Art’s) I huddle myself up and start yelling and jumping around on the page–go go go go hustle up boys get your head in the game!

Problem Solution Listing!  (The book to read: Robert Ray Weekend Novelist)

Write the easiest part next! (The book to read: 100 Demons by Lynda Barry)

Write by hand! (If you are suffering under too many pages, you should be writing by hand—many structure problems will solve themselves using this method. Expect the team to hate it. Give them suicides for whining.)

Build it Build it Again!  (you can’t know the perfect structure in advance. You are going to have to write it, and then re do it after you see what you have.)

Stop Planning Write the Best  Hard Part You Can’t Write  Next!  (The book to read: From Where You Dream, Janet Burroway and Robert Olen Butler) 

Go team!

I was in the bookstore looking for a book to take on my upcoming trip and I found the new Best American Essays, 2007.   Then in the back pages, “100 Notable Essays,” I came across my own name and I could not even believe it. My piece, ”Tell Me Again Who Are You,” is one of the notable essays! 

Quality engineers study completion. They are process artists, masters of removing the obstacles that block a person from doing something she wants to do. If you aren’t writing, and you want to write, consider Quality Control. Be an empirical kid, fascinated by process.

So many great books don’t get finished because we writers don’t live in a culture of completion. We often work alone. No boss, no supervision, no deadline, no rules, no mom, no secondary check. Without meetings, reports, deadlines, updates, stakes, or consequences, we are happy. But is the work? Are you finishing things?

Three pieces of Quality are useful. Simple, common sense:

1. Clarify Future
   State and
   Current
   State. You want to write a book (future state). Current state is you work two jobs, have kids, and your aging mother in law lives in the room where you used to have your office.  How will your book get written? You’re going to need a really clear, good, realistic plan. Or it won’t.

2. Timeline, Small Steps. Like Toyota, I have a sticky board—mine is a 90 cent piece of posterboard with sticky notes on it. The sticky notes are in order—they each contain one step, one part of what I need to do to write my book.

How will you get from your current state (not writing the book) to your future state (it’s done)? You list out all the steps, and then put them, in order, on the board. The quality people are geniuses at this. They take into account emotional blocks, time obstacles, where the paper clips are stored. They analyze fear. They factor in lunch.

Quality is simply looking at what is. (The reasons your book isn’t getting written are probably large, complicated, and real. It’s unlikely you are procrastinating, lazy, untalented, and wrong.) 

What are the small steps to get from where you are now to the book written?  What if your writing time was, for awhile, spent examining the process and breaking it down into tiny, tiny steps. And then putting them in order, in real time?

3. Every Morning Meeting. Every morning you have a five minute meeting (with your team if you work at an office; for us, it’s a meeting you have with yourself and your writing project). Review where you are. It’s the same meeting every day. You can never miss the meeting. One, two, three—it goes fast. What are you supposed to write today? New obstacles? What got done yesterday? Good? Problems, impediments? What are the steps?

      You can spend a lot of time creating new systems (I do) and they won’t work if you don’t use them.

            If I don’t clarify and resolve the obstacles, nothing will change.     

            If I don’t give myself good daily writing assignments, little gets written.     

            If I don’t review, I will drift. 

While my computer did scary stuck things, I was staring at my desk, at my copy of Joan Didion’s beautiful, stunning, brilliant memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. The cover simply has her name and the title on it, and most of the letters are black, but four are a different color. It took me awhile to notice the colored letters spell J O H N.  The name of her husband. Who dies. Launching the year of magical thinking.  Whoever thought of this secret love letter–thank you. Ah. 

Delicious Highly Recommended Books Read Fall 2007

If You Lived Here I’d Know Your Name         Heather Lende

Safekeeping                                                       Abigail Thomas

Kafka Was the Rage                                         Anatole Broyard

Crashing Through                                              Robert Kurson

On the

The Last American Man                                    Elizabeth Gilbert

The Year of Magical Thinking                           Joan Didion

Mayflower                                                        Nathaniel Philbrick

Wish I Could Be There                                     Allen Shawn

Reading Writing Leaving Home                        

Boys of My Youth                                            JoAnn Beard

Dog Years                                                        Mark Doty

The Big House                                                 George Howe Colt

Waking                                                             Matthew Sanford

In the Shadow of Memory                                Floyd Skloot

The Polysyllabic

Clinging to the Wreckage                                  John Mortimer

Recollections of my Life as a Woman                Diane DiPrima

Breakable You                                                 Brian Morton

In Praise of Small Things                                   Anne Fadiman

Two things. It’s much easier to write about two things than one thing. If you write about two things, you can make gaps and metaphors. Rub two topics against each other on one page and you create fire.

Beginning writers often worry they don’t have anything to write about while tending to forbid themselves from writing about what made them want to be writers in the first place. They want to wait until they are good enough, skilled so they don’t wreck up their best material. Wreck it up.

Here’s how. Take a thing you want to write about but you can’t write about it (too personal, too hurtful to others, the guilty aren’t dead, too boring) (and realize what’s holding you back may be unconscious, as may the topics themselves!). Put this sparky thing with a simple thing, like a typical dinner in your childhood home or rain. Stitch back and forth: write little bits about each thing, alternating short lines or passages or paragraphs or scenes.  Soon you’ll see if you have something. It will show up in the gaps. (If you are just starting out, show the piece to someone who is a really good reader and not related to you. A teacher.)

Writing about two things, always, instead of one thing will amplify your ideas, tease out your internal wisdom, giving your work depth and dimension and architectural interest.

This is another way of approaching The Gaps (see blog entry below). Steer towards the gaps—anything that has a gap in it. You apologized but you weren’t sorry. You saw it but we all pretended you didn’t.

I was taught creative writing two ways. In one sequence of classes, I learned about character, plot, point of view, theme, and irony.  In these kind of creative writing classes I learned to read and my writing absolutely improved. I could not figure out how to do the character concepts, the plot planning, etc. And point of view—it seemed like a mind-bending made-up muddler. I never believed you really needed point of view. Couldn’t I just write? Wouldn’t POV happen, anyway, and then other people could figure out what I had done? Couldn’t my teacher, who kept writing POV! in my margins simply shift her own POV and quit hacking away at mine? Craft worried me. And my writing got better. But I didn’t see a correlation. I never knew what I was doing differently. I never knew what I was doing at all. I was scared to investigate the process. I was scared to do exercises for plot, point of view, character, and theme; couldn’t exercises ruin my sparky natural genius? Waste my time? I wanted to stay pure. Or, be an outsider artist.  I was always afraid writing exercises would teach me to be really good at doing writing exercises.

In another sequence of classes we were asked puzzling Zen-like questions and the teacher drew inscrutable, hilarious diagrams on the board and pointed out what was interesting (art) and what was instructive (bad art). There wasn’t a textbook. The indication was life was the textbook, or the class, or our own depressing stories, or our responses to them or maybe the teacher conferences. The word “craft” was replaced with the word “shape.” Again, I didn’t really know how to apply what was discussed in class, but I wrote and wrote and I accepted that the point of view rules mattered a lot to some (much older) people. I decided to conform to the rules, as one conforms to the conventions of capital letters and lower case.

 About how to learn creative writing. What was it we were actually trying to sit down and do? 

When I was in junior high and failing math (for reasons that had more to do with missing a lot of school because my mother was very, very ill—I liked math and the idea of math, making stuff out of math) I remember telling my mom one night that I was going to write a textbook. I would have all the classes in one book. “If they’d just explain the whole system, and how it all relates and builds on concepts from other classes. If they’d tell you up front where it’s all headed, what the big picture is, then I think I’d get it.” My mom thought this was a great idea for a textbook. 

I wrote The Practice of Creative Writing.  In my textbook, I want the student to learn character, plot, theme, and point of view, but from the inside out, not top down. I wanted to marry the two ways of teaching creative writing into one helpful, practical course. Students have better luck when they write, and then read. They write a story, leaning into layers, working on tension, and then in class the teacher says “This is a great example of point of view. See what happened here?” Aha!

But what might have helped me become a writer, as much as anything else, I could not put into my textbook for new writers. The secret classroom was parties. The craft teachers and the funny diagram teachers all had us over to their generous beautiful professor-y homes for wonderful parties (the craft teacher liked a theme, such as Red; her parties had a terrific point of view). Newspaper writers, sexy history professors, graduate students, editors, random neighbors, speech writers, ex-spouses and pets and long sofas: in the living rooms of our teachers, we tried to converse. They pretended we would be writers and we pretended to be grown ups. That’s craft.