Word After Word

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.

Jackie B. is the best reader in the world. I would be lost without Jackie Bartley. She is a goddess and a genius. She’s a steering wheel, a poet, a scientist, a reed, and she knows what is good and why it is so.

PS: Thanks for the delicious chicken, too. The blueberry sauce was so much better than you said it could be. She does not know her own strength.

My bike date stood me up because he had to ride hard and fast. I am slow and easy. I love slow. But ride hard and fast—I understand the need in my bones. And yet I was thrilled to discover how unsad I was to not bike, how much I wanted to go running. I only started biking because I couldn’t run. Now, I’ve been able to run again, following strict safety rules. It’s like running in a challenging foreign language. I can’t just blab blab blab.

            1. Every other day at most.

            2. Feet on frozen bags of brussels sprouts and then rolly ball after.

            3. Only on track at new school, track made of tiny black super sponges.

            4. Slow in brand new shoes.

            5. Ask feet how they are, really each ¼ mile. And listen.

Happily enough, I’m in a slow phase. I’m writing slow. Eating slower. Driving slower. Getting dressed a little slower. Looking longer. (I am also in a cowboy things phase, but that’s another world and not part of the slow thing, it’s just fun—pearl snaps, tiny flowers, kicky skirts, and a cache of hand-crafted bolo ties I came upon in a secret and surprising location. (Bad idea: trying on new cowboy boots in running shorts, but UPS truck pulled up as I was trotting out. I had to try them on, right then. They stood up to the running shorts. That is how great they are. They just looked up and said howdy, no affectation, no judgment.)

I had a foot problem for three years. It might be fixed. (Thanks, Tee!) I’m going slowly because I earned the problem speeding while running, going over the limit. Little Miss hubris. My feet are small and beautiful feet and I was treating them as though they were monster truck tires. I was saying GIT R DUN to my feet. Using a heavy fake accent. Hollerin. And trying to run faster than people who were not even racing. 

Three years ago, I was slow but I thought I was Little Miss Fast.

Now I’m racing myself to see if I can hold a slow pace, really go slow. It’s harder than fast. There’s no kick, it’s not like drugs. It’s more like love, or listening. I have to ask the feet each ¼ mile: how are you really?

So my bike date had to ride hard and fast, and the feet leapt up and said: we can go two miles. No, I said. Really? I was thrilled, surprised, and, after the brief UPS delay, out of there.

There is nothing like running. It feels like the feet are what makes the world spin. The rhythm of it aligns the heart, the sky, the head, and town. There is no other way to do that. None.

The kids in the middle of the track were running around like little goats or animals, organizing themselves around the frisbees and soccer balls and coaches and the sun shone done, and the moon was perfectly halved. I ran around 8 times. Maybe more. I’m terrible at counting laps. They are terrible at counting me, too.  We round.

If I had planned to run, I don’t think it would have been so much fun. It was a secret run. Like the accidental essay I wrote instead of working on my book. It was an instead-of, a gift run, a perfect night in

I came home singing, Olympic-ish, and I kissed my feet on their foreheads as though they were two tiny twin babies. Which they are. My small slim beautiful kind feet. Little tiny bony wings.

Cycling is great. I live for it. But there’s nothing like running. Running is like having a superpower.

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.)

Every writer I know wants big chunks of time in which to work. I’m off teaching for the summer, and then some–I have time now. And, as I’ve suspected, time is good but it is not everything! It’s not exactly what is needed. When I have a whole big giant Tuesday or a freckled loamy looming Saturday ALL HOURS FREE FOR WRITING I tend to falter, freefall, get cranky, and lose my way completely. I want more time when I don’t have it. What IS this all about?

Resistance.

You have to have something to push against, I think. It’s a Capulet thing.

So, I’ve spent this week with Tons O Time getting very, very little forward movement on my project–I’m writing about the same amount as when I have two hours in the early early mornings and a full teaching load. (Comparing myself to some other professors, but not all, this whole Sabbatical Choke is very common.) 

Today, I invented a new way of working. It’s called One Hour At a Time.  At the top of the hour I eat almonds. Make tea. Serve more almonds. Get very very clear about just what it is I will accomplish in this hour. (This is the hardest part, drawing a little square around the work, and going in to that spot super focused.) I pretend that’s all I have: one hour. I am better able to get out of time when I have less time. Time focuses us. But it can also swallow us whole.

Time isn’t the thing.

Getting out of time–losing track of it–that’s what we are after and it’s harder when you have Big Time–it’s like trying to lose Goliath. And when you have little time, little tiny time–it’s so hard to slip into that space. For me, an hour is a good amount of time to run for, to eat for, to write for, to have coffee with a friend for, to bathe or swim for. I love An Hour. It’s like the denim jeans of Time. It fits so many occasions.

Whole days, whole summers, six months–it’s like the Coronation Dress of Time. You will never feel like it’s the right occasion for this Time.

I am learning how to stitch a row of hours together.

Send almonds.

My dog, my father, and my mother are all the exact same age. They’re like my untriplets. I wish they were differently spaced so I could learn one thing at a time, and apply it, with great grace. I want a different preparation. They each have bad backs, bad hips, trouble remembering, and they sleep wide continents during the day. I have my favorites.

“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.

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