Word After Word

(They are kind of like my sons. They are kind of like my little brothers. They are mostly my sobrinos these days…the little nephews. I’d be lost with out them, the sons of my ex-husband. I would be like the lone conifer at the Saugatuck State Park.)

So Jake and his brother went out west (”army of two”! was the theme phrase of the trip, it appears) and climbed Mount Ranier. They ran out of water on the first day. A ranger gave them purification tablets and they took her photograph. For food, they took forty pop tarts. It was the worst experience of his life, Jacob said. Absolutely the most miserable thing conceivable. His brother, all boot camp buff, scrambled up the mountain like a flea. Jacob said all he really wanted to do was turn back. And not fall into a crevasse. He likes saying crevasse. (We all do.)

“I’m going to be talking about this a lot,” he told me the day after he got back. “It’s all I will talk about for the rest of my life. Talking about how horrible it was is the only pleasure I can wring from this nightmare. Milking it now. And getting ready for it. That was good, too. But the thing itself? Horrible.”

I just love this so much. It’s the artist’s way. We have the experience, but eh…it’s just the experience. It’s after, mediating the experience, shaping and dramatizing and going over and over the experience, making it into a thing that will last, that can be carried around–magical super power art. Knowing the experience is so much better, often, than the experience itself.

The trip’s theme question (prompted by a visit to a big cat ranch) was which would kill you faster, a lion or a tiger shark?

“Jr. [shark] talks a lot,” Jacob [lion] said. They fought about it. Lion, tiger shark. For four days. At the top of the mountain, they talked about it. The photographs show lunar despair. And kids in goggles with pop tarts.

1.  We want to be published so it feels like it matters. We don’t care if we are ready or the work is ready. It’s like sex. It just seems like a really great idea to have happen.

2. If you are alone in the evening and your heart is broken, that is a good time to write. (But not about your heart probably.) But grief screws with concentration. And so does joy. A boring life, this is the writer’s goal.

3.  Rick Moody writes every day, but what about? How to keep the projects going and finish one on Friday and start on something, deep, slow, serious, worthy, fabulous, the very next day? This is called genius. Good writers have a plan.

4. Talk like you talk to your best friend. Don’t encode the work, don’t try to turn it into writing. Stay with the true thing you yearn for and worry and know and do not know.  What you want to explain about the work goes in the work.  Resist the urge to tell yourself what triggered it, what it is. That goes in the work! Put your secrets and the plain things in the first sentences.

5. People who talk to a child at least once a day have an easier time focusing on their work.

6. Don’t decorate. Instead, collect things that you like (it always feel more like items find you). They will always match. This applies to the living room and it applies to the poem.

7. Slice time into smaller parts. Slower, slower, slower.

7b.  Tango moon!

I have been so sunk under the demon named Structure these days. Fretting not working, outlining, not really working. Succumbing, not outlining. Listing most what I hate about the book. It felt like my good self divorced us—and I was left with a terrible me, all alone.

Friday, for the first time in my life I considered not writing, not finishing my book. This felt like contemplating suicide. Friday was a dark day. A very dark day. Much darker than Luke’s darkest day day which, admit it, has a great sound track, laced with whimsy and also Lorelei, unlaced.

I didn’t mean to, but all the sudden I started an essay about dating and it was so fun to list all the dates and relish the horror, loving not mocking all I feared. Because I wasn’t supposed to be writing the essay, the work fell out of me. For three whole days, I wrote the essay, always saying after each sentence, one more, then I will work on the book, I will, really.

Playing is so much better than not playing. I played my way back into you know what. Structure problems?

His new book The Half-Known World is a must read for all fiction writing or any reading students.

(He had a .9 GPA, earning my immediate confidence.)

Boswell was a terrible fiction writer at first. In one of the chapters of this perfect book he explains how useful it was, being terrible, to his growth as a teacher.

We practice what’s easiest for us, my yoga teacher said in class last night. Not always what needs practice.

I think about writing, and how I generate new scenes, scenes, scenes, scenes. Love to write scenes. I like to make pieces. What I need to practice, what is hard for me: wholes. Sequences. Brilliant summary, external action reflecting internal action, the townscape reflecting the interior of the life within, and all this a seamless whole. I need to practice tightening scenes, the hook, the make-point moment, the button.

But it’s so fun to generate and much harder to tend.

(Most gardeners do this, too. Easy to practice New Planting: go to Jonkers and buy three new astilbe. Shiny and new. All filled with their astilbe possibilities. But what is needed is attention to everything already in the garden, the rampant ivy, a great clearing. Harder to practice.)

“First, there is the barrier between image and language,” writes Irving Yalom in Love’s Executioner. “Mind thinks in images but, to communicate with another, must transform image into thought and then thought into language. That march, from image to thought to language, is treacherous. Casualties occur: the rich, fleecy texture of image, its extraordinary plasticity and flexibility, its private nostalgic emotional hues—all are lost when image is crammed into language.”

“Great artists attempt to communicate image directly through suggestion, through metaphor, through linguistic feats intended to evoke some similar image in the reader. But ultimately they realize the inadequacy of their tools for the task.”

I love this passage, and I think a lot about that “march”—getting the image in my head, in all its fleecy fullness, onto the page. But I don’t think we “cram” the picture into words. I think we use words—they don’t even feel like words when I am writing—to press the image out, to roll it out. Words aren’t thoughts, when writers work at this image level. They’re strings, pulling away the curtains, revealing only what is there, what was there all along.

(The Unfinal Assignment is below….a few posts down….here’s Kay’s response): 

“The voices of doubt were very aggressive. Lots of, “what’s the point? It’s not Friday.” Lots of ragging on me for falling behind and being sick. Not nice, these demons of doubt. It took me a while to stay still. I noticed I got up a lot for strange reasons before I could get started. Like, it was imperative for me to find the phone charger so I could charge my phone while I worked. This was not at all imperative, of course. The distractoid demons were full force. The mean ones kept chiming in “you screwed up. this is whack. this is pointless. don’t bother.” So I charmed myself. I charmed myself into the space, a desk in the downstairs facing a window with a view of spring green trees and sunlight, by lighting some candles, laying out feathers, amethyst and rose quartz and turquoise bears, and aromatherapy. I dabbed lavender and patchouli on my temples, back of my neck, wrists and third eye. I made myself tea, gorgeous tea, soaked rose, jasmine, and orange tea leaves. That is how I got myself to settle.  I tapped into that pregnant energy. I got my blue index cards out. Delicious blue cards. I began with a method on the blue card “sons.” Sons were quick to conjure. Lots of sons floating around. And then came Bob. I wrote a big lettered slow method on my friend Bob. It was golden to be with Bob, because he died when we were nineteen. After the method, I began to write poetry for him. I kept seeing him with long strands of wooden beads around his neck. which I never knew him to wear in life, but they really suit him.  The blue cards were great launch pads for poems. I wrote about the lads I lived with on the mountain in Oregon last fall. They wore thick sweaters and smoked pipes by the pond. All in all, a delightful time.”
I have these moments when I am so hungry to write, as though I wrote nothing for the last month. It’s always only the beginning.
 

Really, Toss It

Once I was in a conversation with an extraordinary and famous chef. She said something during the course of the chat that has always stuck with me. “Never hesitate to throw out anything. Just throw the whole thing out. Toss it. Don’t get obligated to the thing.”

In writing, I see my students and myself laboring over ugly, nasty, spoiled, or just plain dull concoctions. Really, we need to toss out more. We need to just move on.

Notice the famous chef didn’t say “Start over.” She didn’t say “Try it again!” She didn’t say “Always carefully read the directions and follow them to the letter!” She said only one thing: Toss it. Don’t get obligated to a failed dish.

In other words, when something doesn’t come out right, You haven’t messed up. You haven’t failed. You haven’t brought upon yourself an opportunity to self lacerate, self macerate. You don’t need a class, or easier recipes. You just need to toss it with complete and total joy and freedom. (We are afraid to do this. Afraid of waste, afraid of chaos, afraid of an empty plate, nothingness.)

But that’s what the famous chef is talking about it: freedom. If you aren’t able to move very quickly and sturdily past mistakes, you won’t enjoy cooking/writing enough to keep doing it frequently enough to see improvement, to keep the joy boiling. The freedom to fling the muffs out—out of your writing room, out of your vision, out of your life, your memory—that’s what is needed. Don’t file the duds. Don’t belabor or revise weak work, work that bores you, work that is heavy, forced, dull, tasteless. Burn it, fling it, throw it away. Don’t start over.

Go play: make a tasty snack.

The bad writing? Blow it off. Blow it all off. With a giant loopy grin on your face, fearlessly, hurl those fallen cakes, those sodden biscuits, that terrible swamp off rice. Away with it. Wanton waste. Get it away from you.

How did you get yourself to the desk?
I walked over to the Albion College atrium which is this room with
massive window walls, stage lights, a wooden staircase, pterodactyl
skeletons, and a wave simulatior
How did you keep yourself there?

I sat down, pulled up one of the tables and wrote, then spiraled then
wrote some more
What did you battle?

Demons, all sorts when I ripped the band aid off, self doubts, self
worries, thoughts of deserving the blame
How did you succeed?

Went slow, kept writing, addressed each demon in a way in the writing,
then wrote another game seen where the hero triumphed over the
villian, then spiraled, then wrote a story of all of us on the
Endeavor, plowing head first through a storm

“What writers want is time to write!” a brochure advertising a summer writing retreat exhorts.

No no no no no no no.

They do want time to write but it’s not what is needed.  What is needed is something to bound the work, a Square or other Shape. (For many writers, the workshop itself would be that shape, but it isn’t about time, it’s about space. Big difference.)

Most professors I know (but not all, such as the amazing gifted ND, but certainly me) greet a giant uninterrupted block of time with a strong vision for kitchen renovation and a new proclivity for napping, blogging, Wagner, etc.

I can work today because I have in front of me fifteen pages, printed out, which I dragged along in my purse yesterday on all the errands—the chicken store, the camera store, the garden shop (there is a monkey there, Mingo)—just in case there was downtime, like the car died or we were stuck behind a train for a couple of hours, and I had time to work. I kept the file open. Literally. I have the pages here on the desk, and I know what I am supposed to do today and how to do it, more or less.

Sarah asked me so how long do you have to work to get a star? It doesn’t matter how long I work, only that I do my best, bring my best concentration to the book that day. It might be ten minutes or it might be thirteen hours. Time doesn’t matter. Shape matters.

It doesn’t usually work to say “I will work for four hours a day this summer.” What works is to say “Tomorrow, I will work out the sequence of beats in the Schulers bookstore scene. Then, I need to sort my cards again for the scenes in Part Two. If I have time (which means energy for more concentrating), I can start the next scene.  There’s also all the little notes I took over the last 48 hours—in the tub, in the car, in the middle of the night—and I can feather in those little bits.” In my books, I call this “Wake Up Working.”

Rarely do I feel I am working hard enough. When I hear N and