Good Enough, Smart Enough...
One day last summer I was on my way to the library when I ran into my neighbors chatting with a visitor in their driveway. Herb and Hazel introduced me to their friend, and said excitedly, "Camille has published novels!""Well, isn't that something," the man replied. "My daughter writes paranormal romance. She just got a two-book deal. Six figures. What are the names of your books, and how many copies have you sold?"Not only does this line of inquiry make my skin crawl--as if my sales figures are the whole point of what I do!--but this man was quite obviously trying to make himself feel like "somebody" through his daughter's accomplishments. I extricated myself from the conversation as quickly as I could, and walked away feeling as if I'd somehow been violated. This man was literally in my face, comparing me to his daughter, eager to prove that she was the more successful writer. If I'd been subjected to this type of talk at the age of 12 or 13, I would have run home and cried.
Everything will make you feel small if you let it. Don't let it. *Lesson #788 in not comparing yourself to other authors.-- Nova Ren Suma (@novaren) May 23, 2012
When I was a young teenager I came across a piece of advice that changed my life: don't compare your insides to other people's outsides. I can't remember where I read this--it may have been Go For It!, by Judy Zerafa, that classic pep-talk-in-a-book--but it was so true and so obvious that I might have literally smacked my forehead. Middle school had felt like an endless cycle of classmates' mean-spirited jabs and wanting to make myself unrecognizable. You probably know how it was--as if getting contact lenses, braces, and jeans from the Gap would stop the catty girls from drawing dogs on the chalkboard and labeling the doodles with my name, or throwing paint chips at me in art class while our teacher's back was turned. These kids were just as insecure as I was, and making fun of a more sensitive classmate was their way of coping with it.I got to high school, armed with that inside-outside insight, and stopped caring so much what people thought of me. I still occasionally got made fun of, but I knew those taunts had everything to do with the insecure person hurling them, and little if anything to do with me. I enjoyed academics and art classes and after-school sports. I got excited for college. I didn't feel inadequate anymore.And I don't feel inadequate now. No matter how many times people ask me pointedly "how well" my books are doing, no one can make me feel inadequate ever again.
Great Book #98: A Room of One's Own
Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.
Virginia Woolf and I did not much like each other on our first meeting. It was junior year of high school, and when my English teacher gave us a choice of novels I picked To the Lighthouse. Her characters did much too much mooning about, stewing in their own selfish concerns. How that book exasperated me!This time around I am older and therefore more patient, and so I revel in the product of Woolf's rich and fertile mind even when she cannot seem to finish a paragraph. This is not just a book to inspire women writers; it is a book for writers and readers and thinkers of both sexes.I'd always assumed A Room of One's Own was a sort of manifesta, and if it is, it was written in the very highest spirit of feminism. The only men Virginia Woolf ridicules are those pompous middle-aged professors of her day, who try a little too strenuously to assert their intellectual superiority (see also epigraph). Lesser male writers, she says, are preoccupied with themselves, while lesser female writers cannot write without concern for the expectations and opinions of others. Genius is not something we can only admire in rich white men, though Woolf recognizes and reveres it in the great writers of the past who happened to come of privileged backgrounds. Women writers have just as much potential for greatness, so long as they possess what Coleridge called an "incandescent mind": a mind free of all bitterness and distraction. This, of course, is the tricky part--the reason this book needed writing, and why A Room of One's Own is just as relevant today as it was in 1928.
The reason perhaps why we know so little of Shakespeare--compared with Donne or Ben Jonson or Milton--is that his grudges and spites and antipathies are hidden from us. We are not held up by some 'revelation' which reminds us of the writer. All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed. Therefore his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded. If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded...it was Shakespeare's mind.
As for the necessity of an independent income and a lock on the door to one's own work room, you know I'm a fan of Bukowski's air and light and time and space--the gist being that an artist creates regardless of circumstances. But Woolf makes a good point, quoting Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in The Art of Writing: "What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne...of all these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men; and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well to do." A poor poet, concludes Quiller-Couch, "hasn't a dog's chance."Of crucial importance, too, are opportunities for travel and independent experience. Woman or man, any writer who cannot leave the house will suffer from a stunted imagination. As Woolf writes of Charlotte Brontë, "One sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire...She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?"Which brings us back to the "incandescent mind." An incandescent mind is also an androgynous mind, Woolf writes--what Mary Gordon (in her foreword) calls "a pure vessel...for the transmission of reality." Male writers should strive to use what feminine impulses they find inside themselves, and vice versa. The sexes need each other, are inspired and invigorated by each other; neither is superior.
One cannot thinkwell, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in thespine does not light on beef and prunes. --V. Woolf-- Camille DeAngelis (@PettyMagic) May 23, 2012
A Room of One's Own is a delight, even as it asks us to stomach unpleasant truths on every page:
And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty...dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world's notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them...if anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.
We will go on writing, of course, in the face of indifference, skepticism, illness, economic hardship, and whatever other difficulties life may hurl at us; and if we manage to create something of value, something resulting from but not marked by aforesaid trials, some reader someday may even call it genius.(Check out my 100 Great Books list here.)
Printed!
Notes on a Revision
A few weeks ago I finished the first draft of my new novel. This was BIG. For more than two years I'd stumbled through a string of false starts, and though I was trying to "trust the process," some days that's easier said than done.Finally, finally, everything began to fall into place, and writing good prose felt effortless again. I also went back over the novel and story fragments I'd written in the meantime, and realized that it's quality stuff after all--it just needs more time to marinate, the same way this idea needed two and a half years to make itself write-able.As you know, I'm a big fan of Anne Lamott's chapter on "shitty first drafts." Just get it down, nobody but you is going to read it, you can fix it later. Along the homestretch the message on this postcard advertisement (for the Church Street Boxing Gym) became my mantra:
Truth be told, I haven't worked this hard in a long time--not since I pretty much made myself ill finishing the first draft of Petty Magic. I'm sniffling my way through this revision too, but this time the only deadline is the one I've set for myself, and I feel downright exuberant. People often say that writing a novel is a little like giving birth, but I wonder if the comparison is apt for a different reason--when the birth is over, you forget how much it hurt, right? I find myself reading over my draft unable to remember any of the rough days, those times when the complexity of what I was attempting sent me into the library stacks looking for somebody else's novel to escape inside. If you don't count the incubation period, this manuscript came together ridiculously quickly--300 pages in four months!--and reading it over feels a bit like walking through a dream. But of course, you have to count the incubation period. I couldn't have written it so quickly back in 2009.
work work work work work work (daydream about future book covers) work work work work work work (daydream about future book deals) work work-- Nova Ren Suma (@novaren) May 8, 2012
I love revising. I relish all this filling in the gaps, rejigging scenes, picking up the dropped threads, building timelines and calendars (so my characters aren't aging backwards or talking of things that haven't been introduced yet), and fact checking with TimeandDate.com, the Online Etymology Dictionary, and Dr. Google. Last week I spent a very enjoyable half hour in front of a microfilm machine reading the New York Times headlines from Sunday, November 28, 1915, and what I learned replaced a whole lot of XXXXXXXXXs in the manuscript.
More @nytimes ads from 1915: Smart apparel for stout figures--The Eager Internal Bath Appliance--Avoid that breakdown: Take Wincarnis!-- Camille DeAngelis (@PettyMagic) May 17, 2012
It's still a long way from perfect, but I'm getting there, in my gleeful nerdy way. And it feels really, really awesome.
Unmagnetic Prosetry
While I was planning the writing workshop at my local library I had the idea of doing something like magnetic poetry, but using the opening 300 words from some of my favorite short stories and novels. I didn't tell my participants which story the words had come from until they'd reconfigured them into something totally different. I just love the idea of using the exact same words to make an entirely new story. Ah, the magic of language!Here's the one I did:
I was hampered slightly by the words I didn't have (all right, so I cheated a little), but I was still pretty tickled with how it turned out. Can you guess whose words I rearranged?
Jedediah Berry! (Now when is that man coming out with a new novel?!)It's a little labor intensive (I used a tiny rotary cutter to cut up the words), but I still think this is a great way to loosen yourself up--and once you have the words in a Ziploc bag you can take them out and make something new whenever you like.
Great Book #9: Fahrenheit 451
Sierra and I knew we were going to be friends before we met, and I guess I've always the same way about the work of Ray Bradbury.I know, I know. HOW have I not read Bradbury before now? Everyone knows he is a visionary, but he is also the author of some of the most staggeringly gorgeous prose I have ever had the chance to savor:
One time, as a child, in a power failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon...
There are no more such moments of wonderful newness and mystery in the world of Fahrenheit 451, in which firemen burn all books because literature makes people feel confused and inadequate. Feelings are messy and opinions only lead to nasty disagreements. Isn't it so much easier to refrain from thinking at all? Instead, people while away their time with interactive reality TV on a screen that wraps around one's entire living room. The government perpetrates atomic wars while people sit on their couches reading their lines in soap operas about nothing in particular. (Did I mention this book was published in 1953 and first appeared in short story form, as "The Fireman," in 1951? Talk about visionary!)Bradbury mentions in one of his introductions (written in 1993) that he did have the 1933 Bebelplatz book burning in mind as he developed the idea for this story, but Fahrenheit 451 isn't ultimately a cautionary tale about censorship. It blows my mind that Bradbury could have foreseen the stupefying effects of excessive TV watching YEARS before televisions became a universal fixture in the American home.
How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you?
I know this is going to sound crazy, but the most disturbing passages in the novel aren't the scenes in which a woman chooses to die in a blaze along with her books, or the novel's protagonist, Guy Montag, torches his boss; they're the scenes between Montag and his conformist housewife, Mildred. Bradbury's satire is no less potent for its lack of subtlety:
No matter when he came in, the walls were always talking to Mildred."Something must be done!""Yes, something must be done!""Well, let's not stand and talk!""Let's do it!""I'm so mad I could spit!"What was it all about? Mildred couldn't say. Who was mad at whom? Mildred didn't quite know. What were they going to do? Well, said Mildred, wait around and see.
Yup. Ridiculous. And this is simply horrifying:
He felt her there, he saw her without opening his eyes, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of cataract unseen but suspect far behind the pupils, the reddened pouting lips, the body as thin as a praying mantis from dieting, and her flesh like white bacon. He could remember her no other way.
Montag's transformation into a free-thinking individual happens through late-night walks with his teenage neighbor, Clarisse, whotriggers the thought process that will eventually unravel his sad shamof a life. "You laugh when I haven't been funny and you answer right off," she tells him. "You never stop to think what I've asked you."
He felt she was walking in a circle about him, turning him end for end, shaking him quietly, and emptying his pockets, without once moving herself.
Montag stashes books (he's got a few already hidden in the air conditioning vent when the novel begins), reads them, attempts to prod Mildred into the same intellectual awakening, and contacts an old man named Faber with the tools and contacts to begin laying the groundwork for a rebellion. Meanwhile, the fire captain, Beatty, sends the eight-legged mechanical hound with its terrifying needle of death sniffing around Montag's house, and the plot hurtles toward its inevitable conclusion.Bradbury, as I've said, was frighteningly prescient, and not just about reality TV; at one point Montag nearly finds himself the victim of joyriding children, who run over pedestrians for sport. It's not exactly The Hunger Games, but there's no denying that growing up is way more dangerous than it used to be. And have I mentioned that this novel was written in the early 1950s?There were a couple of head-scratching moments--daffodils in November, what? And how can these houses of the future be fireproof when Montag's house goes down in a matter of minutes?--but whatever, it's a masterpiece and I'm still kicking myself for not reading it years ago.I watched the 1966 film adaptation the day after I read the book, and this comment from the IMDb forums sums up my thoughts pretty succinctly: The first film, although trying to be faithful in spirit, really was a mess of an adaptation in my opinion, more of a sixties pop culture film. (Apparently there's a big-budget Hollywood remake in the works.)Bradbury wrote in one of his introductions that he was actually satisfied with the adaptation, and looking on the upside I guess they could have thoroughly ruined it. The trouble with filming an inner awakening is that...um...you can't. Take this great line, for instance:
He felt his body divide itself into a hotness and a coldness, a softness and a hardness, a trembling and a not trembling, the two halves grinding one upon the other.
There are so many more wonderful passages that are completely lost to the screen, and the actor who plays Montag doesn't help his case when he can't even pause to consider Clarisse's simple question: are you happy?Also, I missed Faber and his nifty "green bullet" that enabled telepathic communication between the two conspiring bibliophiles; in the film he appears in a public park for only a few seconds when Montag pats him down for illicit books (our hero finds something suspiciously book-shaped in the inner pocket of the man's trench coat, and lets it slide). Instead, an older version of Clarisse becomes Montag's partner in subversity, no doubt because Julie Christie is easier on the eyes than a retired English professor. Technology and budget constraints must have necessitated the omission of the mechanical hound, the result being a disappointing lack of tension in the climactic scenes.I will admit, though, that the final scene of the film is pretty perfect: rebels of all ages ambling through the woods in the falling snow, reciting the books they have learned by heart.
So if you haven't yet read Fahrenheit 451, do it! Read it NOW! It's hands-down my favorite on the list so far.
FAQ: Outlining and "Prewriting"
What is your "prewriting" process like? Do you outline?"Outline" may feel like a dirty word, but I think you'll find it's a very necessary step in the process of writing a novel. My friend Nova answered this question on Formspring awhile back, and it turns out she and I have the same M.O. First we write--that initial burst of feverish getting-it-down--and then, once the story is crying out for some order, we go back and build the structure.Initially, though, it's a very open-ended, right-brained process. My "prewriting" phase involves a lot of scribbled exploration of the possibilities ("yay, a premise! now what if she does this? then what will happen?") and initial research--on human cloning, witchcraft in folklore, Spiritualism, or what have you. The research component is crucial, because that early reading often triggers Very Important Ideas (as opposed to nice little details I might slip in here or there, if I can--though I'll get plenty of those as well). I'll write more about research in a future post, and for a peek at my Mary Modern "prewriting," see here and here.This "tank-filling" phase generally lasts for at least a few months before I actually begin writing the first draft, and by that point the story has taken a more definite shape. I like to think that holding off writing until I have some semblance of a plot in mind means I'm not throwing out dozens of pages in the editing process.So I write and write, and eventually I start feeling the pull to order. My novels tend to jump back and forth in time (oh, all right, they ALL do! I'm incapable of writing a chronological narrative!), which means I'm putting a plot together like it's a jigsaw puzzle. Dozens of threads (anything from major character arcs to something as seemingly minor as a chewed-up old sofa) need to be followed and developed and ultimately tied up. The outline, however you choose to format it, will help you to juggle all that, so that the balls are still in your hands at the end of the act. Speaking of jigsaw plots, awhile back Unclutterer posted J.K. Rowling's handwritten outline (chapter by chapter, character by character) of one of the Harry Potter novels. You really can't spend too much time getting all your ideas in order!
That said, there's another kind of outline you write for your editor/publisher's benefit. When I submitted the first 90 pages of Petty Magic to Shaye Areheart, she asked that I submit a "chapter flow"--a prose-y sort of outline.
I got an offer based on the sense and tidiness of this "chapter flow." I knew how Eve's story was going to end, although I hadn't quite plotted out all the twists and turns that had to happen to get her there--but that was okay. My publishers just wanted to make sure they weren't giving me money to write a novel I had no clue how to finish!
Writing is Work
When I'm home I write at the public library, which thankfully is only a fifteen-minute walk. There are a few people I see there pretty much every day, and I wonder what their stories are. There's one guy with a long scraggly beard, black ball cap, and a mini-shopping cart full of tattered papers that has a disconcerting whiff of all his worldly possessions. He regularly curses at his laptop. Another middle-aged man spends all day, every day at the computer terminal in the café; and another, who looks to be about my age though he's gone almost fully gray, sits nearby at the DVD station watching crime dramas or episodes of "The Office." Yet another man, also about my age, sometimes reads and sometimes wanders around not looking at anything in particular, as if he's forgotten all about the books. Are they between jobs? On disability? (It's a pretty safe bet the laptop-shouter is.)Maybe I'm nosy, but I prefer to think of myself as observant. Isn't it part of my job?Of course, the ironic thing is that I, too, am a regular, and it's very possible they speculate as to what I'm doing there day in and day out.But you know what I'm doing. I'm writing.Okay, so I'm also checking Twitter and Facebook, flipping through the latest issue of Writer's Digest, and browsing the audiobooks. But I'm mostly, mostly writing.I've been writing full time since 2006. It's something I fell into, because I didn't have a day job to quit when I got my first book deal. All this time I've been feeling that I should try to stick as close to a 9 to 5 schedule as possible--I know a few writers, like my friend Christian, who do—not because it suits my rhythm (it definitely does not), but because it's what people expect, simply because it's how they work. And I'm slowly coming to the realization that I have to stop worrying what people think of me.When I lived in Galway, I had a roommate who was a "mature student," which is what Irish students call themselves when they've come back from a break in their studies. I'd say he was a couple years younger than I was (I was 27 at the time). He'd come home from a morning lecture right around the time I was fixing myself some breakfast, and he'd invariably make some comment about my being home in the middle of the day. In the very beginning, of course, I'd told him I was a professional writer and offered to lend him my books, but he made it clear he wasn't even the slightest bit curious. It was garden-variety ignorance on his part, and not a big deal at all in the cosmic scheme of things, but it did grate on me to hear the television blaring in the sitting room as I was heading out for the library. "Mature," my foot.
Me, working. Don't believe me? Read chapter 25. I know it sounds ridiculous to think that someone who is self employed isn't working just because they don't work on somebody else's schedule. After all, what's the point of being self employed if you can't make your own hours? Someone who's never been self employed isn't necessarily going to understand that, however. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, also known as the Yarn Harlot, touches on this in an excellent essay on people's tendency to confuse "work-at-home writer" with "stay-at-home parent."
...I absolutely concede that it is pretty amazing to be able to go to work in my underpants, but I feel like after almost a decade of trying to balance my culture's perception that I'm unemployed with the reality of having a full-time job, I've decided it's a diaper of a different colour.
Actually, the really sad thing is that the clueless mother who asserts the author doesn't need summer childcare, is herself self employed.Although I don't have children, I found myself getting really excited over this piece, because it touches on an (albeit minor) frustration I've been nursing for years. It annoyed the hell out of me when I was feverishly trying to finish writing my guidebook and a visiting relative kept making remarks about my being anti-social. It bugs me when someone asks for a favor during the day, because after all, I don't have anyone to answer to. And even though he doesn't mean anything by it, it niggles at me when my grandfather jokes about my being "retired."
The ability to use what flexibility the job granted me was amazing - but the difficulty of having that work respected, and protecting the time to do it was almost impossible.
Maybe the trouble with being a writer is that everyone else thinks they can do it too. They could, of course, but how many do? Writing is real work, but people don't see that when working looks to all the rest of the world like staring out the window, reading a book, or scribbling on a napkin.So the next time you see me doing any of those things, will you do me a favor? Don't assume I'm not.[Photo by Kelly B.]
11 Questions
And another goody for a sunny happy Friday: my friend Mieke Zamora-Mackay has just posted a Q&A with yours truly on various aspects of the writing life--daily routine, finding inspiration, to MFA or not to MFA, and so forth and suchlike. Read it here.I'm blogging about writing again on Monday morning. Stay tuned...
Be Remarkable
As a student, you often learn your most enduring lessons outside the classroom. When I was doing my M.A. in Writing at NUI Galway I remember a particular meeting with my fiction teacher, Mike McCormack, and something he said that completely redefined how I would view my work--and myself as a writer--from then on.At this point I was fresh off my two-year stint at HarperCollins, nearly twenty-four, with a completed manuscript (that is, my practice novel), an agent, and a big ol' stack of rejection letters. My agent had recently explained to me via email that we could either start sending the manuscript out to small publishers—the implication being that if I did get a contract with a small house, I would probably never have a publisher like Random House. Alternatively, I could shelve my first effort and work on a new novel—and since I was already doing that, the choice had apparently made itself.So I showed Mike some early pages (ahem, very early pages) of Mary Modern, and he said he liked what I was doing, mixing science fiction and nostalgia with something kind of neo-gothic, and that very few writers he could think of were interested in this sort of genre bending. (This was back in 2004; of course we can think of a few more now!) We talked about novelists like Pat Cadigan and Connie Willis. "You have to create a place for your book on the shelf," he said. "Write something that no one else could ever think of writing."I know it's cheesy to say "write the story only you can tell," but that really is the gist of it. Don't write for "the market"; don't write a version of somebody else's commercial success. Write the novel that would be your favorite, if someone else had written it. A delightful little paradox, eh?[This post was inspired by Jane Friedman's "5 Things More Important Than Talent," a Writer's Digest blog post from June 2011. Yup. This has been sitting half-written in my drafts folder for that long.]Petty Magic shelf photo by Cheryl Tan.
The Laughter of Sanity
I have another guest post up on Nova's blog today! I hope you enjoy it. (You can enter to win a copy of Mary Modern, too!)
A very long time ago, when this thing was a mattress, many babies were made upon it.
Scribbling Away in Cartagena
(Reading D.K. Broster in the hotel hammock. Couching at the Door is an excellent collection of creepy stories!)I'm home! Pretty much every trip I take seems like the best ever, and Colombia is no exception. I've got plenty of photos and stories to post, but for now I just want to show you how I spent my last three days in Cartagena, after Kate went back to D.C. and Sierra home to Bucaramanga.I wrote. A LOT. Don't look too closely at the scribbling—it's still a rough draft—but you get the idea. I went down to the hotel café for coffee, headed out to a vegetarian restaurant for lunch each day, and one afternoon I took some time out to visit the Palace of the Inquisition, but for the most part I just wrote. Leaving my laptop at home was a very good idea. (You can pick up WiFi at most hotels and cafés in Colombia.)
After Cartagena I took the bus to Bucaramanga to hang out with Sierra for a week and a half or so. (I went with her to school and watched her teach! She cooked fabulous vegan meals and threw a dinner party in my honor!) I got a lot done in Buca too, but there's definitely something to be said for self-imposed social isolation when you're looking to--figuratively speaking-- kick your own took. Nova sometimes books a hotel room for a weekend so she can write non-stop, and I'd really been wanting to try it myself. I managed to find that essential combination: an inexpensive but comfortable hotel (i.e., where I can sit for hours and no one will bother me), no company, and no WiFi. That was all I needed.
Once I'd written enough to feel that glow of satisfaction in the afternoon, I treated myself to a shake. Mango + spearmint = BLISS!I'll tell you more about what I'm working on once I've actually finished the draft. Until then--more about Colombia! (And Turkey too, I still haven't finished blogging about Turkey!)
FAQ: Writer's block
Over the course of my whirlwind day at Mount Calvary, several questions popped up again and again, so that I'd have to pause (wait a second, didn't somebody already ask me this?) before I remembered that I was talking to a new group of students (duh, that was last period!) So I figured I'd answer some of those frequently asked questions again here on the blog.
QUESTION: How do you deal with writer's block?
I've observed that much of the agitation surrounding the unfortunate phenomenon of "writer's block" comes from comparing oneself to other writers. Maybe your friend is excitedly scribbling away in his notebook beside you; maybe you've heard of some other writer who begins a new story the day he puts the final polish on the previous one. Why can't I be that productive? Every idea I come up with is garbage, just one cliché after another. Will I ever feel that thrill of writing a nice piece of description or dialogue again? Hah. I DOUBT IT.
You're putting so much energy into fretting about having no ideas, it's no wonder you can't come up with any!
So A, stop looking over at what your neighbor is doing, and B, don't try so hard. I know that's easy to say. You might end up trying too hard not to try too hard. So stop trying. Read a good novel, or go to an art museum, or follow the thread on a fascinating line of research. (What did people do for entertainment in the 18th century?...puppet shows, Punch and Judy...magic lanterns...Fantasmagorie..."A Trip to the Moon"...etc., etc.) You'll have so much fun falling down a rabbit hole that you'll forget your frustration entirely.
I don't actually believe in writer's block. Yes, I've gone for a year or two between novel projects, struggling through a few false starts along the way, but I choose to see this stepping in the dark as part of the process, not a hindrance to it. Of course it can be very aggravating when the pieces are taking what feels like ages to assemble themselves, but during those periods I've never thought of myself as "blocked." I prefer to think of those "fallow" periods as "filling up," which is what you're doing when you're enjoying somebody else's book or painting or film, or working on a story that is preparing you for the real magnum opus. You're discovering, again, all that's important to you, and in the meantime all those marvelous little pieces in the back of your head are going to assemble themselves into the outlines of a story.
It will happen, I promise—but only when you're not worrying over it.
And if you don't quite believe me, consider this. I told you in this post that the story attached to that "brain dump" would probably never amount to anything. Guess what? I was wrong. It just needed a couple of years to sort itself out!
(This may be my last post for awhile. My sister and I are leaving for Colombia tomorrow!)
Great Book #71: A Good Man is Hard to Find
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
--Flannery O'Connor
The first time I came across that quote, the last sentence was missing, which of course distorts the writer's intention. For years I had the idea that Flannery O'Connor was a shameless elitist, and so I put off reading her. Later on, when I was living in Galway, I came across an old paperback copy of A Good Man Is Hard To Find at Bell, Book & Candle. It smelled slightly of mold, but that didn't put me off, because living in Ireland your books pretty much always smell like that. I read the title story and felt like I'd been kicked in the face. I couldn't crack the book again for almost three years.
Mrs. Pritchard could not stand an anticlimax. She required the taste of blood from time to time to keep her equilibrium. (from "A Circle in the Fire")
A few months ago (thanks to a recommendation from Paré) I read Ann Napolitano's novel, A Good Hard Look, which is a fictionalized account of O'Connor's life in Milledgeville, Georgia. It's beautifully written, and--what do you know?--it got me all psyched up to re-tackle A Good Man is Hard to Find.
These short stories are, as I tweeted back when I was reading them, a tall drink of vinegar. Most of her characters are selfish and ignorant and capable of the most horrifying acts, be they violent (escaped convicts shooting a carful of people one by one) or quietly heartless (a man denying that he knows his own grandson to a bunch of strangers). People do detestable things like this every day. Does that make it human nature?
She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick. (from "A Temple of the Holy Ghost")
Reading these stories you feel dirty, exposed, raw. It's not as if the author has pointed at some dark, cruel part of you that you'd rather keep hidden—her characters are usually so mean spirited that I'm hard pressed to see anything of myself in them at all—and yet, they resonate. I finished this collection months ago, and I haven't brought myself to blog about it because I can't quite figure out why they resonate. Yes, of course each story is astonishingly well written. There's not a superfluous word in the book. On the level of craft, they are absolutely beautiful stories.
Have you ever actually had a tall drink of vinegar? I did recently, when my dad left a stainless steel pitcher he was rinsing out with vinegar on the kitchen table. Thinking it was full of water, I poured myself a glass, took a gulp, and swallowed it with eyes bulging even though my brain was screaming at me to spit it out.
I found water, real water this time, guzzled it out of a clean glass, and kept shivering and making faces for a good half hour. Well, now I know what a tall drink of vinegar tastes like, I thought. And I won't ever forget it.
Ideas, part 3: Using Them
I meant to finish up this series months ago. Oops. First off, some refresher links:
Ideas, part 2: Keeping Organized.
There is one terrific source of ideas I neglected to mention in my first post: dreams! Even one perfect detail in an otherwise nonsensical dream can lead to something useful. A few years ago (it must've been 2007), I dreamed I was standing in a graveyard outside an old stone church. Out of nowhere a man on a bicycle appeared. He was dressed like a jester, with an elaborately embroidered red-and-white suit covered in tiny bells and an enormous headdress with animal horns coming out of it, and he jingled as he pedaled around the headstones. He wasn't sinister at all; I just remember watching him and being fascinated by the general bizarreness. He pedaled around the corner of the church and, just as he was about to hit the side of the building, the back wheel of his bicycle went up into the air like he was descending into the ground, and he vanished.I wish I could dream stuff like this more often—you know, the kind of dream that still makes its own peculiar kind of sense when you try recounting it to someone (as opposed to the garden-variety dream, in which the narrative only holds together while you are still dreaming it). Anyway, that bicycling-jester-in-the-graveyard dream inspired this paragraph from the Petty Magic Christmas chapter:
Another concrete example of source to story is the time I overheard a pair of avid cyclists chatting on the PATH train, which I blogged about here. (I still chuckle over that one whenever I think of it.)Other times I go out into the world knowing exactly the kind of experience I want to have, just so I can write about it.
(Written during a trip to Nuremberg in December 2008.)Finding a use for good ideas seems like the effortless part; it's the keeping your eyes and ears open and jotting down anything interesting that may take a certain degree of mindfulness and practice.Write everything down, even if it's just a word or phrase you like the ring of. (Skullduggery. Thaumatrope. 'Dead, yet speaketh.')Write it down even if it doesn't have anything to do with the story. It might. (Christmas cards. Chaos = self organizing. Gingerbread recipe?)Write it down even if it (seemingly) doesn't make any sense. (Mr. Pants. Marsh bandits. The corpse and her impostor.)The act of writing it down puts the idea in play, adds it to the pot, or whichever metaphor you prefer. Let it kick, or bounce, or stew, or mingle. One idea may prove itself the kernel of the best poem you ever write, and another will never amount to more than words on a card; but it may be years before you can tell which is which, so you might as well write everything down.Ultimately, if it's a really great idea, you don't end up using it. It uses you.
Meta
Sometimes I feel like I should write about writing more often: drop hints about what I'm working on, offer advice for aspiring fiction writers, be honest with you about my insecurities and the potholes along the road to, through, and beyond publication.* That's what other authors blog about.But I don't want to tell you about what I'm writing. I don't want to spoil the surprise. I like to leave the man behind the curtain, where he belongs.**I do, however, enjoy writing about the process. I'm always inspired by Nova's blog posts, and when I saw her on Friday night I told her that my blog wants to be just like hers when it grows up. She pointed out that my posts on The Practice Novel and finding an agent were interesting and useful (yay!), so right now I'm feeling fired up to be more consistently so. I sometimes feel like I'm blogging just to amuse two people--my sister and myself--but I guess I can't really say "oh, hardly anybody reads my blog" when what I'm putting up is often the cyberliterary equivalent of dancing a jig on a subway platform at four o'clock in the morning. It's not a waste of time because I get to laugh at myself, but it isn't much good to anybody else. (Is it?)So if you are reading this, tell me: what do you find interesting? What would you like me to write about? I'm going to keep blogging about my travels and my knitting and vegan recipes and whatever else makes me happy, but I still want to know what else would be interesting and useful to you. I'm aiming for one writing post per week from now on...but what specifically, and what else?* Actually, a post on this general topic is forthcoming at the end of the month--another guest blog for Nova!** Funny thing--Sarah sent me a link to this NYT article, and in it a reader says the same thing in explaining why she doesn't follow authors on Twitter.
Midwest '11
I seem to be making a habit of visiting Minnesota and Wisconsin in the autumn. This trip was even better than last year--not only did I get to spend QT with Jill, Sarah, and Maggie and her family, but I also got to meet my cousin, Brother John, who teaches Spanish at a Catholic boys' school, St. Lawrence.
Brother John's colleagues invited me to speak to the English and creative writing classes, which was TONS of fun. You would not believe how nice and friendly and polite these kids are. I may be a grown woman, but I'm still afraid of teenage boys--every time I pass a group of them on the street my inner 14-year-old whimpers oh no, they're going to make fun of me!--so you can imagine how surprised and delighted I was when boys kept coming up to me to shake my hand. "You must be the author! I'm so-and-so. Welcome to St. Lawrence! I'm looking forward to hearing your talk tomorrow."Yup. Seriously.
The students came prepared with questions, so once I'd gotten the preliminaries out of the way (and shown them the engagement portrait that inspired Mary Modern, mentioning that Anna and Paul are Brother John's ancestors too) we spent the rest of each class period doing a Q&A. I think I'll answer some of them again here on the blog, since they're questions I get asked a lot. (How long does it take you to write a novel? How do you choose a point of view? Do you outline?)I got to chat with several of the boys after class too, and they kept asking me for autographs (haha)—even on their jack-o-lantern!
Then I came home, and this was in the mail:
I opened the card, and literally gasped. I'm amazed they could fit this many signatures.
My experience at St. Lawrence really cemented my desire to teach. I don't know that I'll necessarily end up teaching creative writing at the high school level, but I can say for sure that I can't think of anything more rewarding than helping people discover and appreciate great literature while nurturing their own voices.(You hear that, universe? I WANT TO TEACH!)
Things To Do When You're Dead
The South Bridge Vaults, Edinburgh.Read my list over on Nova's blog! It's part of her really fun Halloween guest series, "What Scares You?"
Great Book #11: The Master and Margarita
Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar's vile tongue be cut out! Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!This is going to be one of the shorter 100-great-book appreciations I write, not because I didn't love Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, but because I loved it enough to write about it elsewhere (you'll see). I have vague memories of three Irishmen recommending this book over afternoon pints, all on separate occasions, six or seven years ago. I put it on my great books list, tried to read it, and lost interest midway through the second chapter. Then I met Amy at Squam, who said it was one of her favorite novels of all time and that I must read it PRONTO. (The Volokhonsky/Pevear translation, mind!) So I gave it another chance, and I'm so glad I did.'Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that.'The Devil pays a visit to Moscow; mayhem ensues. Naked women run shrieking through the streets, money rains from a theater ceiling, men vanish out of their offices and apartments (one literally becomes an empty suit), a clubhouse full of hack writers goes up in flames, a fat man in a lilac suit gets stuck in a barrel of herring, a pig flies, a cat boozes and swears and shoots a pistol and rides a streetcar. A fanged minion gives our heroine a face cream that allows her to soar above the apartment buildings, so she can go skinnydipping in a far-off river under the full moon. There are only sane men in the madhouse, Satan throws a helluva party, and all the city's hypocrites (which is nearly everyone) are gleefully exposed. (Crooked bureaucrats are systematically removed from their positions with particular relish.) Best of all, a good woman loves a good man and gets to go on loving him for the rest of eternity....with sorcery, as everyone knows, once it starts, there's no stopping it.The pandemonium in modern-day Moscow is juxtaposed with wonderfully vivid scenes from ancient Jerusalem, which are excerpts of a novel written and burned and re-written (see below) by the eponymous Master (the aforementioned good man). The Master and Margarita is a big glorious "eff you" to Stalin and his repressive regime, and even though Bulgakov had to write it in secret and the book wasn't published for more than 25 years after his death, he managed to create a work that revels in its own "artistic and spiritual freedom" (as the back cover says). Irony has never been quite this much fun.