Word After Word

It’s the difference between store bought cookies and from scratch. Everyone can tell. 

In the class where I fast read the first drafts, three stood out. It wasn’t necessarily that they were better (Lauren’s piece was awesome,

As the students were working, I went around the room and asked these three authors—did you write this by hand?

Yes.

Yes.

and

Yes.

100% accuracy. It was wild. I couldn’t believe it. The three stories that stood out (still plenty of things to work on, but they had that total engagement with the present sensory moment we’ve been working so hard to achieve, and the other stories did not have that quality).

So then I asked Lauren and

I stopped the class. “We have to talk,” I said. “Are any of you working on the computer? Drafting your piece there?”

Every single other student in the class raised a hand. All the other pieces—red light pieces—were composed on the computer where it is too easy to rush, too easy to delete, too easy to overwork a passage, to easy to write straight from the head blah blah blah.

Astounding. It was so easy to tell the difference. There was no grey area, there was nowhere to hide.

During a three hour class on Thursday, the students are in two groups, doing a guided workshop. While they are working, I fast read each story. I wanted to give them some feedback. Tell them, essentially, what grade they’d get if this was the draft they turned in. 

I was sitting there trying to think of how helpful or unhelpful it would be to get a C on your draft. Even a C that didn’t count. Would that improve your ability to write? Encourage you to spend more time on your story? Create a crisis of confidence? Cause the student to lose faith in my ability to discern fantastic writing? I didn’t want to give all As and Bs. I wanted to give the students some signal they were on the right track, or not on the right track. A helpful signal.

Numbers? A 1, 2, 3? Then I’d have to explain the system, which would be A B C.

The clock was ticking away. I still didn’t have a plan. Rhonda’s Stop/Start/Continue thing was in my mind, rattling around helpful. That would be helpful feedback for me as a teacher.

Signal—then it hit me. Red light, stop this story; yellow light, proceed with caution, you are in dangerous territory, or green light, keep going you are right on track. I could draw a quick rectangle with the lights, and indicate which applied to this writing. So I did that. I think it works fabulously well.

“How’s my driving?” Grades should be a signal offering the student information on how well it’s going and A B C grades do that.  But they don’t offer any insight in what to do next. The traffic light does. If it’s not going well, instead of lamenting the D, you need to stop, pull over, conference with the teacher, reread the book, follow the directions (write by hand!). There doesn’t need to be a cop around for you to get that information—red light, stop—from the traffic light. You don’t need a ticket. The information alone is very helpful. Slow down. Slow down. Slow down. Attend to your pace. Go with the flow of the unconscious. 

That Red Light Green Light is also a children’s game pleases me. I remember playing Red Light Green Light under the palm trees during recess in Mrs. Varner’s first grade. The goal was to get to that twisty crazy palm whose trunk went horizontal for such a long time. For no reason. It was the greatest tree, the perfect tree, the tree that could become anything you needed it to be.  Exactly the goal of writing fiction. Get to that impossible imagination tree. That sweet funky memorable singular thang.

The best teaching strategies come to us in the moment, on the spot, when we are dreaming in front of fifteen people. Just like writing. The best stuff comes only when we’re in it, way down in it.

From Rhonda Collier, I got this idea for gathering information from students at midterm.

Tell me what you want me to stop doing, to start doing, and to continue.

(This would be good in relationships and workplace scenarios too.)

Chapter Three is my favorite chapter. I’m proud of this chapter. If the textbook is a novel, this chapter is the short story that contains the whole.

It’s so easy to remember bad things and so much harder to remember great things.

A student came by during office hours yesterday. He’s had a rough patch and he’s thinking about a fantastic next move, a move that is brave and brilliant and difficult to explain to parents: graduate school in game design. I’ve never met a student better suited to this quest. But for him, the present and the future are both incredibly complicated and confusing right now. So I was really stunned when he said, “Every incoming freshman should have to take your class, Writing True Stories.” He said that’s how he found his voice as a writer—for fiction, term papers, online, everything. And also how he found a way to write and think about messy life. 

I spend so much time dwelling on the mistakes I make. I am taking this moment to dwell on a thing we did that was good, really good. And this is why we are doing all this daily writing. It matters. Like eating well, like meditating, the daily writing helps everything

She was writing about a fight with her mother.

We’re in Chapter Two of the textbook. Chris is from far away; everyone else in the class is from here , so we adore Chris, we think she is spectacularly interesting and she is.

She explained how she felt, and she had these great insights on the dynamics of being far from home and not, because the fight is still in her, and she’s missing these people and its so complex because she left on a bad note and so their great qualities show up now, as she trudges around our snowy little ivied campus, in Technicolor.

I had her come to the board. She drew her living room, where the fight took place. I kept trying to get her to say what she heard that night, say what she saw. “Focus on a feature,” I said, trying to get her to look at her mom.

(I wonder what the class was thinking during all this. I should ask them. I should ask them to say here.)

Chris said, “I stormed out of the room and ran upstairs.”

This is what we do as writers. We write all around the edges of the hard thing, the true thing, the real thing. “Never avert your eyes,” Kurosawa says. So I had her rewind the scene, again and again and again. She used all the gorgeous avoidance strategies we all use regularly to avoid the real moment:

            –describe emotions and feelings

            –describe insignificant things

            –claim remembering is impossible

            –draw blanks

            –sum up the event from a great distance/abstract the moment

We zoomed in on the dialogue. “What did you say.” She couldn’t remember. Then she summarized a previous conversation, regarding a sibling, something that had happened earlier.   She was bound and determined not to stay in that moment. This is what we do as writers. It’s such hard work to nail yourself to the moment, the one that will reveal everything. It’s very very hard.

But by now, we’d all caught a whiff. We were on the trail now. Her voice had changed—you could see emotions on her face now. Instead of processing them, she was reliving and re- experiencing the moment.

I asked her to listen. Could she hear anyone speaking?

No.

Listen closer. What did you say, what was the last thing you said before you rushed out of the room?

And then she said it.

The words came out in a rush—totally real and felt and pure. It was a great line of dialogue – the best one in the class, to date.   We laughed because it was so true, so dead on accurate and all the sudden we could see the characters and know the nature of the fight and all the emotions on both sides in a way we hadn’t been able to before. Just that one real sentence. It spoke volumes more than all the other writing, which pointed towards this moment, but didn’t ever really capture it.

It was a great moment.

I’m on a vacation from the memoir (not from writing). It’s good.

I really lost my confidence when I finished the draft. I felt I’d wasted six months of my life. The book was so failed in so many ways. This is my third major draft and I could only see the ways I’d made it worse from Draft Two.

I was so happy to return to teaching—so easy! So festive! Students writing really well! So rewarding. Instant gratification. It’s like getting published on a daily basis. It’s like being married again, all safe and happy and secure, teaching. Yum.

Writing a book is like having a dangerous affair. Yikes.

All I could see was horrible parts of the book. All I could want was help, rescue, someone brilliant to fix it. There’s this whole lopsided chunk that I love it was so fun to write but the proportions of it screw up the arc of the book; I can see that, but fixing it means dismantling everything. And then the ending is so rushed. And some people want more face blind research and some people don’t…. I do not feel smart enough to write this book.

But now, working on my essays (an essay about the south, an essay about Alyssa, an essay about dating, an essay about pica, little face blind moments) I’m starting to see that I haven’t done anything wrong. I finished my draft.

And the book went into its necessary hibernation and now its nudging me again, just a little bit here, and there. It’s going to come and get me and when it does I’m going to be so happy to see it. I’m going to know what to do. I’m going to flip from seeing all the ghastly horrors of the book to seeing what’s alive and beautiful and fascinating to me, and I’m going to be able to push it closer to what it wants to be. I don’t know what that is, but I know I’m going to know. 

Was in the classes I took.

Early in the mornings, faced with a deadline (class starting at 9 am, needing to be ready to read my work out loud), working hard, feeling there wasn’t enough time, getting the piece ready to read to a group of people who would listen carefully. Working by hand.

The deadline and the audience-in-waiting focused my mind and energy.

It’s so hard to recreate that focus on our own, in our studios, at home. Genius is figuring out how to create the conditions that allow for that kind of intense focus, that built-in audience which is how you steer your revision.

(So, I’m wondering about requiring the daily writing in my classes….it’s so much easier to concentrate when there is a built-in Reader Waiting. Students: what do you think?)

Reminds me that I need to do what I tell them to do.

Lean into the rub, follow the desire, not think. Not plan while attending to the emotional moves the reader will go through. Follow the desire.

My friend Mary the artist was saying this the other day, too. Have to remember to do in our own studios what we tell the students to do.

Ron said “This is how you do the blog. Get everything you want to say in ten words. Ten word sentences.”

I love an assignment. I love short writing. I love structures and strictures and word counts and forms. And I know the blog entries are long, so so long. “Ten words?” I said. “Like CNN?”

“Yeah.” He said it would be an art and really good this way. He talked about the company president who is mad because no one is reading his blog; the entries are pages long. “One screen max. Preferably less,” said Ron. I counted his words. Five. 

I absolutely agree. When it comes to writing—the shorter the better.

But what I love about the blog is I can publish anything I want to. I don’t have to take a ton of time to make the pieces shorter. I can do them however I want. They are long because I do not have time to make them shorter; the blog is my journal, a rambling conversation with students and friends, a multi-sided private-public process. I don’t care if any reads any of it or some or all.

I thrive on daily writing. The blog gives a shape to that process and it amplifies the process. The blog takes a two-dimensional thing and gives it if not depth spaciousness. It doesn’t need to be read to matter. I’m not doing it to be read, I’m doing it to write.

This is what I love about my students, who can’t understand Anne Lamott’s chapters on jealousy and publication. Be jealous of another writer? The concept escapes them entirely. It would be like being jealous of a fish or a tree. Write to publish? My students write because they love to write.  

This post in ten words? We should do our writing just how we want to.