Showing posts with label writing process. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing process. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
New Interview at Ink Drop
I was pleased to have the opportunity to talk shop with Kathy Reinhart (author of The Red Strokes among other novels--http://www.kathyreinhart.com/) at Ink Drop Interviews. You can read the full interview here.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
When You Are Struggling to Stay in a Writing Routine
The other day a good friend and former student (thanks, Jessika) emailed asking for the name of a classmate who had a writing process she had always remembered. I came up with the name almost immediately (something nothing short of astonishing given my poor recall for names). I remembered likely because this classmate's writing ritual is one I shared frequently with other classes through the years. I tended to rely on this story when students were full of complaints about writing blocks, or when they simply weren't producing. Call it motivation; call it embarrassment; call it what you will. They tended to remember her story, as I have, all through these years.
She remains an inspiration to me. Her name is Leslie. When Leslie was my student, she had returned to college a couple of years before after taking some time off having nearly failed college once before. In the intervening years she had served her country in the military, she'd married, had become a mother. When I knew her she volunteered an extraordinary number of hours at a local middle school on top of her own courses. She worked evenings delivering pizzas. She raised children. Several times a week she drove one son over an hour to the nearest city with a good children's hospital for leukemia treatments. She was a remarkable student and a remarkable woman. She was serious about school and she was serious about her writing.
Taking me at my word about the need for consistent work habits as a writer, that year she set her alarm to go off early in the morning. I mean early. Like 4:00 or 4:30 such that she could get some writing time in before the rest of the house woke up and she had to start making breakfast and kid's lunches and get ready for her own long days. One of her sons caught on to her quickly and soon tried to join his mom in the early morning dark and quiet, brought with him his own pen and pad and wanted to join her in writing. She insisted that he needed his sleep. And since the plan for alone time to think and to write hadn't panned out, she left the house. She started writing in the play fort her husband had constructed at the top of the slide for the kids. This was Colorado in the winter. It can get cold in a Colorado winter. Her methodology: for every page she wrote, she rewarded herself with another blanket.
And how she wrote. Before the semester was done, not only was her growth as a writer with each piece she submitted to the class, she sold a piece to a national magazine.
My charge to future students was simple: if Leslie could find a way to write, they could.
On the bad days, I remember her lesson for myself. I have time now. I have a warm place, indeed a room dedicated to nothing but writing. I don't have a child battling cancer. If Leslie can write, I can find a way to write today.
She remains an inspiration to me. Her name is Leslie. When Leslie was my student, she had returned to college a couple of years before after taking some time off having nearly failed college once before. In the intervening years she had served her country in the military, she'd married, had become a mother. When I knew her she volunteered an extraordinary number of hours at a local middle school on top of her own courses. She worked evenings delivering pizzas. She raised children. Several times a week she drove one son over an hour to the nearest city with a good children's hospital for leukemia treatments. She was a remarkable student and a remarkable woman. She was serious about school and she was serious about her writing.
Taking me at my word about the need for consistent work habits as a writer, that year she set her alarm to go off early in the morning. I mean early. Like 4:00 or 4:30 such that she could get some writing time in before the rest of the house woke up and she had to start making breakfast and kid's lunches and get ready for her own long days. One of her sons caught on to her quickly and soon tried to join his mom in the early morning dark and quiet, brought with him his own pen and pad and wanted to join her in writing. She insisted that he needed his sleep. And since the plan for alone time to think and to write hadn't panned out, she left the house. She started writing in the play fort her husband had constructed at the top of the slide for the kids. This was Colorado in the winter. It can get cold in a Colorado winter. Her methodology: for every page she wrote, she rewarded herself with another blanket.
And how she wrote. Before the semester was done, not only was her growth as a writer with each piece she submitted to the class, she sold a piece to a national magazine.
My charge to future students was simple: if Leslie could find a way to write, they could.
On the bad days, I remember her lesson for myself. I have time now. I have a warm place, indeed a room dedicated to nothing but writing. I don't have a child battling cancer. If Leslie can write, I can find a way to write today.
Monday, April 25, 2011
On Writing
So we think we cannot write. We don't have enough time. Our lives are too stressful. We are "blocked." The words are coming too slowly. We can't get the language right. The images in our head have become a chaos. The lines we compose in our head when we think we are not writing disappear and never reappear...
I don't know how many times I have said such things, aloud or within my mind. How often have I complained about the "struggle" I am having with writing? And then there's this little reminder: Jean-Dominique Bauby dictated the entire text of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by blinking his left eye. Paralyzed by a massive stroke, he composed the book in his head at night from his hospital bed and then dictated the book using a process called "partner assisted scanning" where the person taking dictation recited the French alphabet slowly over and over and Bauby blinked when the right letter was reached. The average word took nearly two minutes to spell out. He died within days of the books publication.
I think we can find our way to words.
I don't know how many times I have said such things, aloud or within my mind. How often have I complained about the "struggle" I am having with writing? And then there's this little reminder: Jean-Dominique Bauby dictated the entire text of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by blinking his left eye. Paralyzed by a massive stroke, he composed the book in his head at night from his hospital bed and then dictated the book using a process called "partner assisted scanning" where the person taking dictation recited the French alphabet slowly over and over and Bauby blinked when the right letter was reached. The average word took nearly two minutes to spell out. He died within days of the books publication.
I think we can find our way to words.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
A Matter of Perspective
Last night my wife and I watched the wonderful HBO biography film "Temple Grandin." I've followed Grandin's work in the past and have heard several interviews with her and have long been fascinated by her. An autistic, Grandin has revolutionized the cattle industry by designing cattle-friendly apparatus that help move the animals from feedlot through to slaughter in a humane manner that focuses on keeping the animals calm. A repeated line from the film is "Nature is cruel but we don't have to be." She developed radical new ways of managing cattle by close study from their perspective, literally by dropping to all fours and moving through pens and chutes and by watching the patterns of milling cattle. An autistic who thinks entirely in images, she is capable, in essence, of seeing like a cow. Put plainly, she thinks differently from most of us. She offers an entirely different perspective. Indeed early in the film Grandin is depicted (in a stunning performance throughout I might add, by Claire Danes) in her first year at boarding school when a sympathetic teacher watches and listens closely enough to begin to recognize some of the patterns of her thinking process and then challenges her with a science experiment to explain how an optical illusion that shifts perspective can make two identical objects look of different sizes.
There are valuable lessons in the film about accepting people who are different from ourselves, about challenging our own patterns of thinking, about how we define intelligence, about how we should support the efforts of our children and how we meet their needs, about how we see our food sources...the list could go on. But what does this have to do with writing? Everything. So much of writing, both in fiction and in nonfiction, is about trying on other skins, as one of my poet friends likes to say. To succeed in portraying with authenticity the desires, thoughts, goals, worries, and philosophies (to name but a few qualities) of other people, be they fictional or real, we must come as close as possible to understanding how they think, just as good teachers must recognize that in any given classroom they have any number of individuals who will access the material that one is attempting to teach in radically different ways. We can't get all the way inside some one's skin no matter how hard we try, but try we must to enter an other's mind, to enter their very thinking processes if we wish to portray in them in a manner that feels authentic and believable and if we truly wish to access their interior lives.
And still there are other applications to be learned here as well. Among them is this: it is inevitable in a writing life that we will encounter problems within manuscripts that will seem insurmountable obstacles. Very often the only real way across those obstacles is to think about them in entirely new patterns, literally to change our perspective. Sometimes this means reconsidering the cause of the problem. The problem that may seem linguistic in nature may have its real roots in character psychology. The problem that may seem a matter of ill-defined character may actually be one of structure. The thematic flaw may prove simply mishandled within the language used to express it. The solution that is revealed when you think you're at the copy-editing stage may be one with its true roots all the way back to a needing a different narrative point of view. The point is we must be open to re-imaging text at times. We must see it from new perspectives. A universal need in all revision for writers of every type of material is a kind of perspective-based optical illusion--the need to step outside the writer's vision and achieve success in reading the material as a reader will do. Failure to do this will always result in a failed text.
(And a postscript--the film "Temple Grandin" can prove instructive to the writer as well, for its creators had to imagine ways to convey Grandin's perspective and did so with innovations that are clean, artistic, effective, and entirely transferable to the writer producing text.)
There are valuable lessons in the film about accepting people who are different from ourselves, about challenging our own patterns of thinking, about how we define intelligence, about how we should support the efforts of our children and how we meet their needs, about how we see our food sources...the list could go on. But what does this have to do with writing? Everything. So much of writing, both in fiction and in nonfiction, is about trying on other skins, as one of my poet friends likes to say. To succeed in portraying with authenticity the desires, thoughts, goals, worries, and philosophies (to name but a few qualities) of other people, be they fictional or real, we must come as close as possible to understanding how they think, just as good teachers must recognize that in any given classroom they have any number of individuals who will access the material that one is attempting to teach in radically different ways. We can't get all the way inside some one's skin no matter how hard we try, but try we must to enter an other's mind, to enter their very thinking processes if we wish to portray in them in a manner that feels authentic and believable and if we truly wish to access their interior lives.
And still there are other applications to be learned here as well. Among them is this: it is inevitable in a writing life that we will encounter problems within manuscripts that will seem insurmountable obstacles. Very often the only real way across those obstacles is to think about them in entirely new patterns, literally to change our perspective. Sometimes this means reconsidering the cause of the problem. The problem that may seem linguistic in nature may have its real roots in character psychology. The problem that may seem a matter of ill-defined character may actually be one of structure. The thematic flaw may prove simply mishandled within the language used to express it. The solution that is revealed when you think you're at the copy-editing stage may be one with its true roots all the way back to a needing a different narrative point of view. The point is we must be open to re-imaging text at times. We must see it from new perspectives. A universal need in all revision for writers of every type of material is a kind of perspective-based optical illusion--the need to step outside the writer's vision and achieve success in reading the material as a reader will do. Failure to do this will always result in a failed text.
(And a postscript--the film "Temple Grandin" can prove instructive to the writer as well, for its creators had to imagine ways to convey Grandin's perspective and did so with innovations that are clean, artistic, effective, and entirely transferable to the writer producing text.)
Friday, March 18, 2011
Ten Rules for Writing: Anne Enright
Anne Enright (from The Guardian)
1 The first 12 years are the worst.
2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
6 Try to be accurate about stuff.
7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
8 You can also do all that with whiskey.
9 Have fun.
10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.
1 The first 12 years are the worst.
2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
6 Try to be accurate about stuff.
7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
8 You can also do all that with whiskey.
9 Have fun.
10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Roddy Doyle: 10 Rules for Writing
Roddy Doyle (from The Guardian)
1 Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
2 Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph.
3 Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it's the job.
4 Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.
5 Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don't go near the online bookies – unless it's research.
6 Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said".
7 Do, occasionally, give in to temptation. Wash the kitchen floor, hang out the washing. It's research.
8 Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments.
9 Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven't written yet.
10 Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – "He divides his time between Kabul and Tierra del Fuego." But then get back to work.
1 Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.
2 Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph.
3 Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it's the job.
4 Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.
5 Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don't go near the online bookies – unless it's research.
6 Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said".
7 Do, occasionally, give in to temptation. Wash the kitchen floor, hang out the washing. It's research.
8 Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments.
9 Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven't written yet.
10 Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – "He divides his time between Kabul and Tierra del Fuego." But then get back to work.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Rembering the Wisdom of a Mentor
Working on revision today, slugging through fat manuscripts and trying to find their zits and scars and blemishes, I'm reminded of a story a mentor, Don Murray, used to tell about how he could walk into an unfamiliar newsroom, observe reporters at work for the span of walking to the editor's office, and then boast to the editor that he could identify for him who the best writers in the room were. Editors, shocked at Murray's accuracy asked him how he knew. "I watched them while they wrote," he said. "With the good ones, their lips move as they read their work."
I don't always know if my work is good or not, but I know this morning that my lips are moving.
I don't always know if my work is good or not, but I know this morning that my lips are moving.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Vonnegut Writing Rules
In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Kurt Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:
- Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possible.
- Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
- Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
- Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Your Own Worst Enemy
There will be days (weeks?) when you will hate everything that you write. The only real solution I have found to this inevitability is to write some more.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Solitude vs. The Hermit Who Forgets to Shower
I've been having something of an ongoing conversation with two writer friends lately. It's a serious conversation that has important impact on our writing, although we toss in lots of jokes to take the edge off and because we tend to know ourselves and our writerly depressive tendencies well enough to be suspicious of ourselves. We tend to know that we're capable of never leaving the house, of forgetting to shower and forgetting to breath when the world seems suddenly and surprisingly either a) extraordinarily clear or b) baffling in its complexity. The conversation is about a writer's need for solitude--that tremendous gift of personal space for long thoughts (which often suggests either neglecting other parts of our lives, failing abjectly at "normalcy," either having money or not caring about money, and generally swimming against the "see me now" tide of the larger culture). I can only speak for myself, of course. But I need quiet and time alone to write. I'm a slow thinker and I need a certain amount of space and time to allow thoughts to form fully. I need contemplation. Without it, I'm sunk--both mentally in general and certainly as a writer who (don't say it!) values serious ideas. I'm painfully aware that the surrounding world is a cacophony of noise (much of it meaningless) and this cacophonous climate that too often can seem intoxicating. It is a surrounding world that wants action to happen fast, that moves from one thing to the next as quickly as synapses fire, a world that demands attention--all traits that lean against the flimsy framework required by writers asking hard questions about how humans think and work and view themselves and others.
This focus on the need for solitude is an old topic among writers, one perhaps best articulated by Virginia Woolf. I, at least, need a room of my own to work. It's the balance point that becomes difficult if one has a lifestyle that allows certain room for contemplative time, for in my experience, with such time and space it is easy to fall entirely into the work, to become swallowed by the book you are writing and largely loose touch with the remainder of the world. It's easy as well to become to caught inside the mind and all those shouting voices, those contradictions and chaotic arguments. It's important to resurface. The most important writers must also be full participants in the actual world if they are to write effectively about the human condition. We have to participate in community. Real community. Increasingly, because nearly all of marketing now falls back upon the writer individually, there must be participation in that larger, less real community of the marketplace as well. These are competing forces, the need for quiet and solitude and the need for interaction and stimulation, and they are forces that shouldn't be taken lightly. Finding balance between them isn't as easy to accomplish as the outsider might think.
I am a great believer in balance in all aspects of my life. We are a culture full of people who too easily get knocked off balance, a culture that tends to go to extremes, for better or for worse. I've always preferred finding the middle path. And in this instance, finding a balance point between participating in a culture and contemplating that culture is a requirement for my personal approach to craft. Part of the trick becomes finding working mechanisms that help me maintain such a balance, tricks that usually come down to little, common sense things like staying on a firm writing schedule, putting writing first before listening to the cacophony of noise out there, taking the long view with writing by working everyday within the immediate, choosing writing projects that can I can remain passionate about throughout, saying thanks each day for the people in my life who believe in me and allow me space to pursue this maddness called writing.
This focus on the need for solitude is an old topic among writers, one perhaps best articulated by Virginia Woolf. I, at least, need a room of my own to work. It's the balance point that becomes difficult if one has a lifestyle that allows certain room for contemplative time, for in my experience, with such time and space it is easy to fall entirely into the work, to become swallowed by the book you are writing and largely loose touch with the remainder of the world. It's easy as well to become to caught inside the mind and all those shouting voices, those contradictions and chaotic arguments. It's important to resurface. The most important writers must also be full participants in the actual world if they are to write effectively about the human condition. We have to participate in community. Real community. Increasingly, because nearly all of marketing now falls back upon the writer individually, there must be participation in that larger, less real community of the marketplace as well. These are competing forces, the need for quiet and solitude and the need for interaction and stimulation, and they are forces that shouldn't be taken lightly. Finding balance between them isn't as easy to accomplish as the outsider might think.
I am a great believer in balance in all aspects of my life. We are a culture full of people who too easily get knocked off balance, a culture that tends to go to extremes, for better or for worse. I've always preferred finding the middle path. And in this instance, finding a balance point between participating in a culture and contemplating that culture is a requirement for my personal approach to craft. Part of the trick becomes finding working mechanisms that help me maintain such a balance, tricks that usually come down to little, common sense things like staying on a firm writing schedule, putting writing first before listening to the cacophony of noise out there, taking the long view with writing by working everyday within the immediate, choosing writing projects that can I can remain passionate about throughout, saying thanks each day for the people in my life who believe in me and allow me space to pursue this maddness called writing.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Read a Bad Book
If I start a writing day by first reading something, I tend to read work that I respect, work that inspires me, that reminds me why writing matters and of the role books can have in our lives. I still subscribe to such a theory and advocate its application. However, after a conversation with my oldest daughter about an ethnography she was assigned early on in a graduate course, I am reminded that there is merit and instruction in doing the opposite—read a BAD book.
Why waste your time, you are inclined to say. Well, one could offer the argument that I recall no lesser writer than William Stafford once made, that reading a bad book can bolster your confidence to write a good one. There is something more, I think. It is something that requires you to read differently, for if you are reading a bad book as part of your writing development, then you must identify, specifically, what makes it so bad. Here you can’t just dismiss opinion or consider your reaction a matter of taste, you really have to identify how and why the book fails in its writing. (Remember, there are books written badly on important and compelling subjects and those who wish earnestly to have value, as well as those that simply offer bad “B” movie treatments of tired, weak-limbed, I’m-not-pretending-not-to-waste-your-time wood pulp destroyers.) You must get analytical and study a bad book with the same intensity the smart writer studies a good book. Once identified, the hard part is not repeating the same errors.
Try this useful exercise the next time you are frustrated, but don’t give it too much time because not only are there droves of good books you need to read, you’ve can’t afford another excuse to delay returning to your own work (remembering that it might just take a great deal of bad writing to ever get to the good stuff).
Why waste your time, you are inclined to say. Well, one could offer the argument that I recall no lesser writer than William Stafford once made, that reading a bad book can bolster your confidence to write a good one. There is something more, I think. It is something that requires you to read differently, for if you are reading a bad book as part of your writing development, then you must identify, specifically, what makes it so bad. Here you can’t just dismiss opinion or consider your reaction a matter of taste, you really have to identify how and why the book fails in its writing. (Remember, there are books written badly on important and compelling subjects and those who wish earnestly to have value, as well as those that simply offer bad “B” movie treatments of tired, weak-limbed, I’m-not-pretending-not-to-waste-your-time wood pulp destroyers.) You must get analytical and study a bad book with the same intensity the smart writer studies a good book. Once identified, the hard part is not repeating the same errors.
Try this useful exercise the next time you are frustrated, but don’t give it too much time because not only are there droves of good books you need to read, you’ve can’t afford another excuse to delay returning to your own work (remembering that it might just take a great deal of bad writing to ever get to the good stuff).
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Time
Writers have few real needs. It can be a simple, fulfilling life. The commodity I need most is time. Time to write. Time to think. Time to love. Time to live.
I have learned to edit in short bursts and breaks. Certainly research can be done in lots of settings and in bits and pieces. But to truly create text, to find stories and hear characters, I need the luxury of uncommitted hours, a long enough stretch of time to find my way. We all have busy, crazy lives. To write is, for me, to run against the grain, to slow down and think with depth, to look into the dark corners. There is no greater gift than that of time if one tries to lead this writing life.
I have learned to edit in short bursts and breaks. Certainly research can be done in lots of settings and in bits and pieces. But to truly create text, to find stories and hear characters, I need the luxury of uncommitted hours, a long enough stretch of time to find my way. We all have busy, crazy lives. To write is, for me, to run against the grain, to slow down and think with depth, to look into the dark corners. There is no greater gift than that of time if one tries to lead this writing life.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
When the *%^&(* Flows Without End
So what does you do when you can’t string three words together without it sounding like the equivalent of fried shit on a crisp Ritz cracker? The cracker isn’t enough to pull this off. A full sentence simply scares the hell out of you. You’ve written pages and pages of excrement.
Welcome to my present writing life.
Well, if you really can differentiate the excrement from the cream, you are off to a good start. Sometimes a smallish fire is worthwhile. There might be catharsis in the burning of manuscript pages. (I picture Toby from “The West Wing” now, burning speech drafts in his office and suddenly wish I smoked cigars—reason enough to keep an old Zippo around.) Don’t burn just anything. You might need some of the shit. But still, knowing when you suck can help. If you can separate the pages that need burning from the others, you’re already off to a good start.
Not great advice? Step two: remember that crazy, lovely, lonely, brainy Georgian who made art out of simpletons, yes, good old Flannery O’, and you will be reminded that you’ve got to stay in the chair. Sit down. Face the page. Maybe, okay, quite likely, write some more shit. But you’ve got to do it. Face the blank page. Stare into the empty air. Pick up the pen. The only real way through is to produce work.
In the meanwhile, change form if it helps. Write in a different style. Use a different technology. Write in the journal rather than on the stack of manuscript pages. Post to the blog. Sometimes you can trick yourself into quality by changing the venue or fooling yourself into lowering your standards (because really you are aiming to raise your standards—you just need a springboard into text).
Be productive in other ways. If you are being judgmental about the text you are failing to produce, maybe all that negativity is actually perfect for going backwards and facing the story that you said was done but that you know in fact really isn’t done because it has that one fatally flawed scene, or is it that whole damn chapter of the novel that you know you’ve let slide on every revision, every reading, acting as if the good teeth around the festering, infected, pus-filled decaying one won’t really bother you (or kill you for that matter if you wait long enough). Maybe it’s time to tackle what you’ve been putting off. Hate your work at present? Then go hate the work that can really cause good work harm.
Finally, basics like reading. You’re producing shit. Read more. Read the good books, the hard books you keep putting off. Learn from them. Study them. There are days where it is important you read more than you write, if for no other reason than to prepare for the days when you will write more than you read.
Think I’m full of it? Probably. But what have we got to lose?
Welcome to my present writing life.
Well, if you really can differentiate the excrement from the cream, you are off to a good start. Sometimes a smallish fire is worthwhile. There might be catharsis in the burning of manuscript pages. (I picture Toby from “The West Wing” now, burning speech drafts in his office and suddenly wish I smoked cigars—reason enough to keep an old Zippo around.) Don’t burn just anything. You might need some of the shit. But still, knowing when you suck can help. If you can separate the pages that need burning from the others, you’re already off to a good start.
Not great advice? Step two: remember that crazy, lovely, lonely, brainy Georgian who made art out of simpletons, yes, good old Flannery O’, and you will be reminded that you’ve got to stay in the chair. Sit down. Face the page. Maybe, okay, quite likely, write some more shit. But you’ve got to do it. Face the blank page. Stare into the empty air. Pick up the pen. The only real way through is to produce work.
In the meanwhile, change form if it helps. Write in a different style. Use a different technology. Write in the journal rather than on the stack of manuscript pages. Post to the blog. Sometimes you can trick yourself into quality by changing the venue or fooling yourself into lowering your standards (because really you are aiming to raise your standards—you just need a springboard into text).
Be productive in other ways. If you are being judgmental about the text you are failing to produce, maybe all that negativity is actually perfect for going backwards and facing the story that you said was done but that you know in fact really isn’t done because it has that one fatally flawed scene, or is it that whole damn chapter of the novel that you know you’ve let slide on every revision, every reading, acting as if the good teeth around the festering, infected, pus-filled decaying one won’t really bother you (or kill you for that matter if you wait long enough). Maybe it’s time to tackle what you’ve been putting off. Hate your work at present? Then go hate the work that can really cause good work harm.
Finally, basics like reading. You’re producing shit. Read more. Read the good books, the hard books you keep putting off. Learn from them. Study them. There are days where it is important you read more than you write, if for no other reason than to prepare for the days when you will write more than you read.
Think I’m full of it? Probably. But what have we got to lose?
Friday, July 23, 2010
Seeing Vs. Thinking Part 2
I don’t wish to be misunderstood and have it believed that I don’t believe thinking is important. Quite the opposite. Indeed, part of the potency of writing is that writing offers organized thinking. The finished writing product is carefully constructed, ordered. It is architecture with engineering. What I do wish to distinguish is where and when that kind of formalized thought process occurs. As the cliché suggests, most of writing is re-writing. Revision takes a great deal of concentrated thought. Much of the work of revision is identifying relationships, ordering ideas, pursuing patterns, developing a cohesive, forward-moving, engineered text, only one where the reader can’t quite see all the elements of structural support. But you must provide the ideas legs and means of expression. You must have text first, and I am firmly convinced that over thinking a text before you have the raw materials will keep you from ever producing much of anything. It doesn’t necessarily take much to start or to move deeper within a text, not much more than the ability to see an image or a scene, although this does mean releasing control to the text rather than to the logical mind. That comes later and is equally vital.
We need writers who are clear thinkers. We need writers with ideas, not fluff. For me, the roots of texts exist in such vaguely formed and murky ideas that I must start with images or a character’s or narrator’s voice or a circumstance. It is THROUGH the writing that the ideas begin to clarify and take shape.
We need writers who are clear thinkers. We need writers with ideas, not fluff. For me, the roots of texts exist in such vaguely formed and murky ideas that I must start with images or a character’s or narrator’s voice or a circumstance. It is THROUGH the writing that the ideas begin to clarify and take shape.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Seeing Text Vs. Thinking Text
I find that among the greatest writing dangers for me is to outthink a work in progress. When I catch myself trying to answer questions about a character, about that character’s motivations or thought processes, I get in trouble. Instead I must see. I must see an image, however incomplete, or a scene, or a character in action, or I must hear characters speaking. I only need shadows to write. Once I can see shadowy silhouettes, I can proceed, find the full scene, convey the moment or frozen image for which I have vision, and then, typically, doing so will allow me to see what I must see next or to power through a whole scene or even a chapter without too much thought. It is the translation of seeing through the vessel of the pen that matters, for the pen delivers the language on to the page. Once written, there remains a lot of work to be done, a great deal of development and revision and finessing, but as I then look back to move forward, I realize the logical questions now have answers. I don’t have to ask so many questions now for the people have stepped nearer to becoming whole and can supply the answers. For me, this is one of the great ironies about writing, for I am convinced that writing is about real clarity of thought and I pride myself on producing texts that develop ideas, but the only way forward into those ideas for me is not thinking too much. It is a matter of trust: trust in the self, trust in the medium, trust in the characters, and trust in the nature of the human story.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
On Trying to Write
Today I have arrived at the study seeking morning sunshine, warmth on my skin, natural air, space and time to allow the expansion of stories and ideas that clutter the page and clutter the mind. So I step out onto the little deck that opens from the study. There is birdsong and slanted light accenting the intricate fibers of spider webs. The mosquitoes are put to bed. The day will be warm but the night still lingers in the air.
I seek quiet and find it, seek words and stumble. The quiet helps me find footing. Scrambling to locate toeholds, I jump from a muddled manuscript in progress to a muddled journal. I switch pens. I stare at the horizon. I watch birds in flight. It is easier to turn to the volume of Ted Kooser I have carried through the French doors, easier to venture into his Iowa farmyards than to locate the elusive figures emerging from the shadows of my pen. Easier as well than face the inevitable shadows of memory or the silhouettes that extend into those unknown places of a thousand tomorrows or the equally unknown of the book unwritten. The faces in Kooser are familiar but not mine. The birds we share, or at least many of them. His words are lovelier, his images more honed, but it is language I need. Language and memory and metaphor and idea, and mixing with the sunlight he helps ease me into this dark world of my own making, this density of inky pages and monochrome figures needing to become flesh.
I seek quiet and find it, seek words and stumble. The quiet helps me find footing. Scrambling to locate toeholds, I jump from a muddled manuscript in progress to a muddled journal. I switch pens. I stare at the horizon. I watch birds in flight. It is easier to turn to the volume of Ted Kooser I have carried through the French doors, easier to venture into his Iowa farmyards than to locate the elusive figures emerging from the shadows of my pen. Easier as well than face the inevitable shadows of memory or the silhouettes that extend into those unknown places of a thousand tomorrows or the equally unknown of the book unwritten. The faces in Kooser are familiar but not mine. The birds we share, or at least many of them. His words are lovelier, his images more honed, but it is language I need. Language and memory and metaphor and idea, and mixing with the sunlight he helps ease me into this dark world of my own making, this density of inky pages and monochrome figures needing to become flesh.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
If It Would Have Been a Snake...
When we are deep in the bowels of working on a writing project, does the world really offer up magic to us with astonishing frequency or are we just paying attention? For instance, this week I stumbled upon a William Stafford poem "Ask Me" that includes in four lines the distilled essence of a central theme I've taken 500 pages and 10 years to get right in a novel. Would I have understood those lines without the years and pages? Would I have seen them at all?
I'm honestly not sure. The world does seem full with magic at times. I do know I must be awake to see it.
I'm honestly not sure. The world does seem full with magic at times. I do know I must be awake to see it.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
A Sort of Bio
As you've gathered by now, I write. I write every day. That's the thing, writers write--a complete cliché and the stuff of truth…
…some of that writing has been rewarded and you can find my work regularly in literary magazines, more of it is before agents, stating its case for representation. (For a traditional credits list and information on my books, skip to the bottom of the page—this post, like everything else I do, probably appears backwards. To read my stance on the value of writing, read on.)
I write literary fiction. I'm serious about craft and I have a love affair with language—so much so I have to watch becoming indulgent. I differentiate between the architecture of story from the engineering of plot. Now I recognize this all makes me sound pompous and pretentious. Perhaps I am. However, I think it is vitally important that all artists know who they are and stay true to themselves.
Writing is a way of seeing, a way of being, and it is typically the only way I can consistently make sense of the world and articulate my eccentric and often chaotic mind. I enter my writing knowing that it asks work of its readers—not hard labor, but mindfulness. Writing worth reading is a sacred exchange. It is not television. It is not candy. I like candy, but I want to eat it, not read it and certainly not write it. I believe that fiction is a means towards truth. When I speak about truth I mean, in part, that I wish to know human character, to understand people as they are and as they wish to be seen. The human mind is fragile and potent; it is beautiful and it is capable of doing unspeakable things. To say that I value character-driven fiction over plot is an understatement. A reflective life is more than a string of events, no matter how dramatic those events. There is meaning in living a life fully awake.
Such ridiculously bold statements are some of the essentials about me as a writer. I may well prove myself wrong over time. I'm willing to take that risk, for I want to lead an examined life and for me that means producing writing that tries to examine lives—mine, those in the culture around me, and those who preceded me.
As for the more pedestrian elements about, I offer the following synopsis:
I am a husband and a parent of three grown daughters. Those roles are more important than writing or anything else. I spent twenty years teaching writing at the college level, work that I valued for the contact with students and with their writing. At some point every day for those twenty years I was humbled by something powerful a student wrote, said, or realized. I continue to feel privileged to spend so much of my adult life working within the vibrancy of the unique setting of a university. Beyond teaching, that setting allowed me contact with genuine intellectualism and the perks of coordinating a writing program and a writing conference. I now live and write in one of the most beautiful and largely unspoiled American wildernesses at the edge of greater Yellowstone ecosystem just south of Jackson, WY.
I write primarily fiction, dabble regularly in essays, and occasionally produce really bad poetry. My work has appeared in the following publications, among others, and I am deeply indebted to the editors of such literary magazines, editors who typically toil in obscurity and without pay: Arlington Literary Journal, The Bloomsbury Review, Dogwood, The Externalist, Fugue, Matter, Porcupine Literary Arts, Talking River Review, Tar River Review, Weber: the Contemporary West, Zone 3. I publish under the pseudonym Mark Hummel. I have completed three novels, each radically different from the next. A synopsis for each is available under their corresponding titles in the menu bar.
…some of that writing has been rewarded and you can find my work regularly in literary magazines, more of it is before agents, stating its case for representation. (For a traditional credits list and information on my books, skip to the bottom of the page—this post, like everything else I do, probably appears backwards. To read my stance on the value of writing, read on.)
I write literary fiction. I'm serious about craft and I have a love affair with language—so much so I have to watch becoming indulgent. I differentiate between the architecture of story from the engineering of plot. Now I recognize this all makes me sound pompous and pretentious. Perhaps I am. However, I think it is vitally important that all artists know who they are and stay true to themselves.
Writing is a way of seeing, a way of being, and it is typically the only way I can consistently make sense of the world and articulate my eccentric and often chaotic mind. I enter my writing knowing that it asks work of its readers—not hard labor, but mindfulness. Writing worth reading is a sacred exchange. It is not television. It is not candy. I like candy, but I want to eat it, not read it and certainly not write it. I believe that fiction is a means towards truth. When I speak about truth I mean, in part, that I wish to know human character, to understand people as they are and as they wish to be seen. The human mind is fragile and potent; it is beautiful and it is capable of doing unspeakable things. To say that I value character-driven fiction over plot is an understatement. A reflective life is more than a string of events, no matter how dramatic those events. There is meaning in living a life fully awake.
Such ridiculously bold statements are some of the essentials about me as a writer. I may well prove myself wrong over time. I'm willing to take that risk, for I want to lead an examined life and for me that means producing writing that tries to examine lives—mine, those in the culture around me, and those who preceded me.
As for the more pedestrian elements about, I offer the following synopsis:
I am a husband and a parent of three grown daughters. Those roles are more important than writing or anything else. I spent twenty years teaching writing at the college level, work that I valued for the contact with students and with their writing. At some point every day for those twenty years I was humbled by something powerful a student wrote, said, or realized. I continue to feel privileged to spend so much of my adult life working within the vibrancy of the unique setting of a university. Beyond teaching, that setting allowed me contact with genuine intellectualism and the perks of coordinating a writing program and a writing conference. I now live and write in one of the most beautiful and largely unspoiled American wildernesses at the edge of greater Yellowstone ecosystem just south of Jackson, WY.
I write primarily fiction, dabble regularly in essays, and occasionally produce really bad poetry. My work has appeared in the following publications, among others, and I am deeply indebted to the editors of such literary magazines, editors who typically toil in obscurity and without pay: Arlington Literary Journal, The Bloomsbury Review, Dogwood, The Externalist, Fugue, Matter, Porcupine Literary Arts, Talking River Review, Tar River Review, Weber: the Contemporary West, Zone 3. I publish under the pseudonym Mark Hummel. I have completed three novels, each radically different from the next. A synopsis for each is available under their corresponding titles in the menu bar.
Monday, April 12, 2010
On Publishing (or Not-Publishing)
“…I would advise you not to waste time feeling ashamed for being an unpublished writer. Each time you sit alone and give your most honest and complete effort, you’ve earned the title of writer, particularly on those days when you struggle the hardest, when you spend all afternoon and evening refining an idea or the precise phrasing of a few descriptions, when you’re pushing yourself beyond your own abilities. These hard-fought and seemingly inconsequential victories accumulate over time and make all the difference.”
--John Dalton
--John Dalton
Friday, April 9, 2010
Needing Inspiration
I’ve been struggling these past few days with writing, both in the story I am working on now and in editing old work (badly needed edits, I am realizing). These are times with the isolation of a writing life begins to close in, when the darkness seems near at hand. So you have choices: give up, give in, or get back to work. I try and get back to work. In such times I often turn to the writers who mean the most to me, the ones who make me push myself to be better. I re-read their texts, study them, allow myself to feel inspired by them anew. For me, one mainstay is always Andre Dubus (right). Not only did the tough old bastard write like an angel, he wrote even when the world often ignored him. And he wrote what he wanted to write, stories that moved him, characters who wouldn’t let him go. He concentrated on getting people right, even if it meant facing hard truths about himself and about humanity. One would be hard pressed to find stories more powerful than “A Father’s Story” or novellas that said more than most writers’ novels. Reading him can be like reading a voice that has existed inside my head for years. Dubus suffered hardship—physically (after an accident suffered while coming to another's aid), personally, financially—yet he never backed away from writing fiction that matters. His work sets a kind of standard for me. Some days I think if I could just write one story or one chapter that could come close to measuring up to the quality and precision of his work, it would be a successful writing life. So I read him and I learn. Again. And then I set back to work.
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