Word After Word

I’m in my nest with my manuscript and we are freaking each other out.  On the page, as I read it out loud, the book is nothing like the book I thought I wrote! It’s so confusing. It’s so like marriage. It’s so like adulthood. It’s so like travel.  “You booked a trip to Italy but you get off the plane in France,” my friend LML. says of this part of the process. “It’s just very disorienting.”

I want to write, like you, a perfect beautiful amazing book with no mistakes.

What’s wrong with my book is a lot: there’s long gabbing sections and the reader doesn’t know what the deal is. What’s important? What’s to worry about, what main thing? (I’m writing about disorientation and confusion.  I wish I had a different topic. I know things have to be made more clear.)  There isn’t enough, I think, reflection and explanation (I hate explanation so I under-write it).  I fear it’s just hard to piece it all together. I want crisp, brief, singing sections, absolutely fulfilling. I think I’ve made a mess.

It’s very hard to a) know what is wrong and b) what needs to be there instead. I don’t feel smart enough to write the book I want to write or dumb enough to let the right one fall out.  I’ve gotten locked into chronology and these narrative streams, these chunks, and I can’t see how to break them out, re order things.

Revising requires staying calm and standing back and redreaming. This is hard to do when being with the manuscript at all is like being in bed with a hive of live bees.

It’s Saturday night. Enough revising. A walk in the woods, which today are featuring mist and a palette of edible yellows–the damp leaves are spot-lit by dull sun and I can see: order. The dog sniffs, guns go off, November writes itself perfectly, without distraction. A stop on the way home at Blockbuster for a distracting movie: bad news. PAPER MARIO has been auto-billed; fifty two bucks to go to the next level. Well, I have Pop Eye at home, and Bluto, and Betty, in their early original unreconstructed forms.

Revision. I wish you were different. I wish I could change a little and it would mean a lot. 

               Beforehand,  obtain a flyer, brochure, or any other material offered, and read the scholar/artist’s statement accompanying the work, if there is one.  Find some work by the writer, and read it in advance.  Talk about it with friends; make some notes.   FIRST PARAGRAPH–write in advance of the reading. What’s this work like?  What’s interesting or unusual about it?  Get a sense of the flavor.  Write about your expectations and reactions. What do you notice in the work that connects with concepts we have been learning in our class?   

When you attend the reading, go with a friend, and get there early so you can take in the atmosphere.  Take some preliminary notes.  Use this as a chance to practice your setting-description skills–describe things and people in killing detail. What are you seeing by way of texture, light, shape, color? Next, eavesdrop. What are people saying?  Tune your ear, practice capturing “stolen language moments.”  Take notes. Write them up for your second paragraph of the report. When the reading begins, listen as closely as possible.  Because you have made the effort to read some of the writer’s work in advance, you will be able to get a lot more out of the reading. It is however perfectly okay to space out. It’s perfectly okay not to like the reading, but you don’t have to tell me that–I want to know what you did admire, what words/sentences/titles/lines/jokes–stood out for you, captured your attention. Jot down ten things you hear, and note why you think they caught your attention. This will be shaped into your third paragraph for the report. 

Interview your friend. The person who went with you to the reading needs to answer a few questions from you about the experience.  Write down what they say.  This is your fourth paragraph.  Conclude with a summary paragraph (fifth) that answers the following: 1.       What did you and your friend conclude about the reading?

2.       Will you read more by this author? Why? Why not? What?

3.       How does this reading rank compared to others you have attended?

4.       Look back at your expectations–what was met? What was unmet?

5.       What’s one thing you learned about being a better out-loud reader of your own work?

6.       What’s one lingering question you have about this writer/her work?  

Why would you want to? It’s a terrible sounding thing: caught up. All bound and trapped and snagged in wires or cords or some kind of cow fence. Yikes amundo.

Don’t do it. Don’t get caught up. Write, now, using the time you have now.

Q., my artist friend said to me the other day, on our way to see David Sedaris, “I’m about to be caught up and then I’m going to get a lot more painting done.” I know Q. is a super genius, and of all people, he probably will get Caught Up and enjoy the binding but for most people—for me—we aren’t ever going to get caught up. It’s a Shangrai-La thing. Caught Up doesn’t exist. It’s not a place. It’s not a destination. You’re not going to be Caught Up or get it and be thankful for that.

When you’re dead, you are essentially caught up.

This is it. This is your life. This is how much time you have.

Adult life is filled with tasks that should be accomplished. This is how our days are. And if you aren’t getting your art made now, looking to the future for space and time is the opposite of a good idea. You must look at the available time for art that exists in today. Forget caught up. It’s not going to happen.  There will always be more stuff.

In fact, as we get into the future, there’s more, not less, to do. The body becomes noisier and needier. The car gets noiser and needier, new people need new things from you, the world gets to looking more complicated, your kids have babies—it’s endless! Don’t look ahead for more time. That’s dead center ground zero exactly where less is!

Look to Now. (Eckhardt Tolle provides excellent instruction on this topic for writers.)

Pretend/assume/fake like this is how busy you are going to be for the rest of your life. Make art in the sliver you do have. Then, if you do get “caught up” you actually be free to work. Not bound.  You’ll be able to expand a thing that already exists. That’s how you make time. 

When I was at a writer’s conference last week, I talked to three other professional writers at length and it was interesting what emerged. Each of us writes by hand.  D., one of the writers, a screenplay guy, said, “Yeah if I’m on the computer I just start editing.”   

You can’t write and edit at the same time. You’ll drive yourself nuts. You may never get to your best stuff.

At this same writer’s conference, I talked with forty students. Each of them wrote on the computer. Every single one.

You know Star Power. Before the fans, you can do no wrong. The Wii vibrates and all the sudden, something else takes over and plays the hardest part for you.  The crowd goes wild! 

How do you get it, this Star Power? You hit all the correct notes right out of the gate. You are perfect. You’re rehearsed. You started out really, really, really good and thus you bought yourself some space.

In writing workshops, hitting all the right notes means this: you never miss class, you aren’t late, you’ve read everything, twice, you’ve got things to say—you’ve rehearsed for class.  Your copies are stapled, organized, perfect. You’re really, really good. You’re into it. You’re making contact with us, moment by moment by moment.

Then, when you get the flu, or your muse departs for Bermuda and you are forced against your will to turn in a terrible piece of writing, or your favorite aunt gets sick, or you break up with The Boy, if you’ve got Star Power, magic happens. You’ll notice the teacher, and the class, and life itself cut you some slack. Something takes over and gets you through.

Give the class, the assignments, our interactions, your best stuff right out of the gate. Really work at it. Then, when you need it, you’ll notice the lights are flashing, your axe is magically playing the notes for you, the crowd is behind you, no matter what you do or fail to do. We’ll get you through. You ride on Star Power.

If you miss a lot of notes at the beginning, you’ll notice the other musicians in your band shaking their heads, the crowd grows unruly, your manager walks off stage, hiding her face.

There’s nothing that can be done. Even Eric Clapton can’t save you now.

Adam Elenbaas, local, MFA student at Georgia State College and University, and I did an interview for Reality Sandwich: http://www.realitysandwich.com/face_blindness .

He’s writing a good smart book about altered states; his father is a minister. You could say it’s kind of a collaboration.

In order to explain how one uses the self as a subject and a focus for one’s work, fabulous art writer Peter Schjeldahl quotes T. S. Eliot in his 11/5/07 New Yorker piece on Frida Kahlo and the quote is so wonderful–I want all my nonfiction students to read it. Here’s Schjeldahl:

“Kahlo’s self-portraits are about her gaze, as subject matter, technique, and content. They dramatize sheer attentiveness. They tell us exactly what it’s like to be Frida Kahlo, with, I believe, a superbly indifferent confidence that we will not understand. She confides, but she won’t plead. She makes eye contact not with the viewer but with herself–watching herself watch herself, in an extended but closed loop. T. S. Eliot articulated the truth, regarding all successful art, of a dissociation of “the man who suffers and the mind which creates.”

Hey spring semester students — this is what we are going to try to do.

My student T. desperately wants to know about Structure. So does Art. How does they make all their pages into a story? What’s the Structure? Art emails. T. calls late at night. He’s freaking out.

And so many of the questions I got when I met with students and writers at

I want to know about Structure, too. Sometimes I think the book I am working on has a structure. I’m scared to look though. I’m scared if I look at it, it will apart, pick up sticks.

I don’t know.

No one does. Structure isn’t out there. It’s in the book and you have to write the book more than one time to find it. I know. It sounds terrible. Punishing. Art is making something.  Good art is making something in order to find out how to make it better.

So, structure is inside destruction and this is frightening news to a large voting block inside our brains. All this work and now it’s not done? now you want me to do it over?

Yup. It’s the only way. In order to find the structure for your book you have to write you book and then look at it carefully. This is a cliché but you know that whole thing about the piece of marble and the sculptor takes away what isn’t part of the sculpture, viola, that’s it? Writer Alert! We have to build the chunk of marble, out of words, and then we are ready to begin.

I wrote the first draft of my memoir, Face First, and it was good, it got good readings at good places. An offer to publish it from a terrific press, and another. Chapters appeared in good places, one was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2006.  For me, that is like a hole in one at the hardest course on Earth. That is joy.

And now I’m writing it again. I did the whole thing over. I took it apart, and cut lots of marble away, marble I liked a lot  and made new marble and saw a different form altogether than the one I had started with.  In some ways, I am destroying the original book and making it worse. I’m screwing it all up. In other ways, I’m writing a much, much better book, one I like a lot. It’s different, it’s destructive, and it’s progress, all at once. This the structure secret: structure is a thing you make as you make the book.

You push a little. Structure pushes back.  The two of you dialogue. That’s how you find your book. 

Your book is going to take longer to write than you think. 

Things that impede Structure:

1. The feeling that you are doing it wrong and are bad at plot (you aren’t and you’re not)
2. The idea that structure is something outside of you, to master, later (you won’t master it, you learn it by writing your book, and writing it again, long, slow process—get over it.)
3. Thinking about your structure weaknesses instead of thinking about what’s really cool and interesting about your book.
4. Reading bad cheesy books on plot.
5. Not reading good books and noticing how the good writers do structure: however the hell they want to. AKA link together all the juicy parts and leave out everything that sucks.

You can simplify your Structure worries.

One idea: write a practice book. One that you won’t mind writing over, and then over again, and then over, fully, one more time. It’s like buying a used car and smashing it with a sledgehammer to see what that feels like (really, really good). 

All this is superbly hard and that’s why it’s annoying to we who write when people say: I have an idea for a book.

You have nothing.

Make something you love, wreck it, put it back together, make it and then get back to us. We’d love to hear from you!

Structure problems? Write your book! It will teach you how to write it right. Follow the book, don’t lead it. It knows much, much more about how it is supposed to be than you do, than any other book does; write it and write it over again.  

I just got back from the East Coast. Philly.

I love the East Coast. People are generally glad to be from there. They feel as though they are in the Advanced section of Geography and you, coming from the Mid, are just starting out, enrolled in a much, much simpler section.

Also on the East Coast, people like language and shortcuts (nicknames are their favorite thing of all combining both language and a short cut.)  They also like hard to pronounce things. Like Schuykill. (I still can’t say it or spell it. I thought it was pronounced “shy kill.”)

While they mock you for mispronouncing their stuff, they’re happy to have you move to their towns. They’re fine with chaos on the East Coast.

In the

The East Coast people are secretly glad and publicly glad they are from there, and generally, they are irritated about just about everything else. They are not divided against themselves. They aren’t working against themselves so they are free to direct all that energy out into the world. They’re the mind-bending mix of happy-go-lucky and superbly intense. Oh, I love that combination. It’s like paella. It’s like flamenco. It’s like James Joyce. It’s like Sonic Youth. It’s like Abigail Thomas.  They’re refreshing to be around. They’re intense.

I grew up in Florida, on the East Coast, as far East as you can get—we lived sometimes right on the beach—but it’s not the same as the North East. The south east is the north east washed out, bleached, hung outside to dry and then forgotten about….it’s well lit and pastel at once; stoned + caffeinated. Dude, I had to totally move. 

To the

On my trip to the East Coast everyone who drove me around had a map on a Blackberry or a GPS that talked out loud and as it directed them turn here, do this, turn now, they said, always “I’m not believing you. I think you’re wrong. I love you, little guy, but you’re wrong on this one.”

And, to a person, they went their own way anyway.

My New York Editor Friend, V., said to me on the phone this morning, “Everyone with a bad childhood is writing a memoir about it.”

Again, to myself, I asked: where are the good childhood people’s books? Why are they not getting written? Good childhood = not interesting? I’m unconvinced that’s true. A good childhood–that’s a fascinating faraway place; who doesn’t want to go there?

Her comment “everyone’s writing a memoir” also made me think everyone and their mother. Wouldn’t it be cool if the bad childhood books were shrink-wrapped with Another View?

Maybe not.

I’m reading a really good good childhood memoir right now, recommended to our class by Abigail Thomas: Clinging to the Wreckage by John Mortimer. The title, World War II, and British boarding schools make it sound like it could have to be at home on the bad childhood shelf. But Mortimer (Rumpole) is too smart, too funny, and he likes telling stories too much—what comes through is glorious, hilarious, and shining. I think his genius is in how he exposes human desires, and without taking anything personally, he shows how we derange our lives, all of us, in the service of desire. 

Other good good models? Anne Fadiman, Sybille Bedford, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Adam Gopnik . . .who else?

A bad childhood can be just as boring as a good childhood.

Whatever the proportions of good/bad, other people’s homes and lives and childhoods are always potentially fascinating; this is essentially travel literature, isn’t it? With a good guide, we can go anywhere and see new things and pick up new habits. Maybe “good childhood” and “bad childhood” are terms that block vision. Maybe what we’re interested in is a textured childhood.