Day 30: Marching into the Void

By guest blogger Lenore Gusch

Back when I was still a student, complaining about being in school, how all of my time seemed to go to studies that didn’t have anything to do with my writing, and how much more creative I could be if I just had more time to myself, everyone warned me that life after graduation would be different, and maybe not in the ways I wanted. No more deadlines. No more workshops and writing prompts. No more interesting literary internships. No more instant writing community at my fingertips. My motivation to keep at it would have to be entirely my own.

It was true. I graduated, and suddenly was writing into a void. The writing community that had nurtured me for four years went missing.

Many of us on the March have been lucky to keep in touch with our writerly friends from school or to find our own new writing communities. (I still send drafts and story ideas back and forth with a few of my close friends.) Some have been even luckier to go on to MFAs, lead their own creative writing classrooms, or find other careers that foster their continuing to write. But I suspect that out of the fifty-six challengers this month, there are just as many of us who are not surrounded by a single other writer in our day to day lives. (My boyfriend sometimes jokes that he is illiterate, which, although completely untrue, still sends chills down my spine. He rarely reads and never, ever writes.) Many have other full time careers, significant others, and/or families commanding their attention. (Lots of it!) And still, we write on. For some reason, we insist upon it.

A lot of the posts on this March have been about doubts. “Why am I doing this?” “Am I crazy?” “Is my writing any good?” “What is the value of art, anyway?” Some of these are easier to answer, like the first one. Revisit Jennifer Simpsons blog to see why a whole slew of writers are sticking with this insane endeavor. Some of them are more problematic, like the second one. (Only you can tell you how truly neurotic you may or may not be, and why, and if you’re really crazy, you probably won’t be able to tell!) I tend to get hung up on the last one. What is the value of art? What is the value of writing? Why is it important that we tell stories to one another? Are there better things I should be doing? I have a deep belief built from groundless faith that it IS important. That it is, perhaps, the most important thing that humans can do while they’re stuck here together on the earth. But when it comes to articulating this to a society-at-large which is less and less invested in art as a measure of success and happiness, I often falter.

As a student, I had a built in excuse when I needed to go “work.” Now, when I have to explain to my boss why I don’t want to work full time at the douchey steakhouse downtown, or why I don’t want to go to yet another family dinner with my pseudo-inlaws, I can’t play the student card. I just have to be a degenerate recluse who isn’t motivated by things that make sense, like making as much money as possible, finding a career, starting a family, yadda yadda yadda. Instead, I’m just messing around with this weird hobby that few people really “get.” (I thought about writing a whole post on how society tends to measure success, and how we fit in—or don’t—as writers, but it goes down such a bitter rabbit hole that I thought better of it.)

Still, we are compulsive. We are crazy. We are going to do this thing no matter what, right?

Playing by the Mississippi river. Absolutely not writing.

 

All that being said, I will be the first guest blogger this month to confess that I totally, utterly failed at reaching my Writer’s March goals this time around. Partly, it was just bad timing. The busiest month of the year at the douchey steakhouse is March, and I was working twice as many shifts as I usually do, which left little time or energy for anything else. Then, I spent a week in New Orleans with my two best friends and my illiterate boyfriend, where I ate and drank and napped to excess, cooked, read, took pictures, biked around the city exploring and listening to great live music. I had a wonderful, wonderful time. I never picked up a pen the entire time I was there. So partly, it was timing, but partly I was unwilling to be that crazy degenerate recluse who skips out on that breakfast with friends or that last beer in order to go home and write. I didn’t demand it.

We’ve established during this month together that, for whatever reason, this writing thing makes us happy. It fills some need in us. My advice is: embrace the fact that you may, indeed, be a crazy reclusive degenerate. Stop justifying your motives to yourself and others. If you need to work less (ya know, for “the man”) and write more, demand it. If you need more time alone, demand it. If the only way you can produce anything is with Ziggy Stardust playing on repeat at top volume, demand it. Society be damned! When you start to do more of what makes you happy and fulfilled, low and behold, you will become a more productive member of society anyhow. You will become a better lover, parent, and worker because your neurotic, creative itch will be scratched, and then you can contentedly go about other things.

Now that I’m getting ready to march out into the void again, I regret that I didn’t take more advantage of all the lovely advice and writing prompts this month. I wish that Writer’s March could last all year. I want to run around screaming “No! Don’t leave me! Don’t go! I don’t want to be alone again!” But the spirit of the March can carry on!

I try to read something, write something, and play at least one instrument every day, for any amount of time, even if it’s just five minutes. It’s sort of a mini-March that I keep in mind all year long. Here are some things I do to that help:

• Set goals. They don’t have to be as extensive as what you chose to do in March. They don’t have to be daily. But as Sam keeps assuring us, they really do help.
• Keep in touch with your writer friends. (Some of these bloggers have their own blogs you can follow, for example.) Even if they are only virtual, remember that you are not the only crazy one. Exchange work if at all possible, and if you’re lucky, find people who will give you honest critiques.
• Buy a book of writing exercises, or look them up online, and play with them when you don’t feel like working on other projects.
• Ask friends for writing prompts (even then non-writerly friends) and then give them the results (even if they don’t care).
• Read as much as possible. I always think of reading as brain-food. Without enough brain-food your brain will be too hungry to write when you sit down to do it.
• Remember that you don’t need to justify what you’re doing—to yourself or anyone else. 

Good luck out there. I’ll miss you!

 

Day 24: Showing up really is half the job—Book it

By guest blogger Bob Sabatini

As long as I could remember, I wanted to write a book someday. Longer than that, even. I recently came across papers from my elementary and middle school days, and what do I find over and over again? Spiral notebooks with some scribbled sketches—I hesitate to call them illustrations, exactly—on the cover over a very carefully lettered “by Bob Sabatini.” Once I could steel myself to open them up, what did I find? A title page on the first sheet, and then—I kid you not—a table of contents, with chapters listed as “Chapter I” through at least “Chapter X” and space for yet-to-be-determined page numbers, followed by somewhere between five to ten pages of almost illegible scrawl. Following that, I’d find some notes, some doodles, a few half-completed homework assignments, and a whole bunch of blank pages.

That was where doubt crept in. “You’ll never be a writer,” it would whisper, “this isn’t any good.” It was the same story with a number of the writing projects I attempted in the years off between graduating high school and beginning college, I’d spend weeks outlining a story or diagramming character interactions, and then I’d start writing, get discouraged, give up, give it another try only to get more discouraged.

By the time I discovered that there were such things as creative writing classes, I’d hit on the notion of the short-form work. I remember saying glibly “I can get a good beginning and a good ending, but I have trouble with the middle, so I’m just bringing the two together.” Ok, so now that book that I’d write “someday” would be a collection of short stories. Except… my doubts were still wearing me down. I’d start fussing over my short stories, even the shorter middle sections wouldn’t cooperate with my excellent beginnings and endings, and I was still not getting anything finished. By the time I transferred to UNM, I’d given up on the dream that I’d ever write that book.

Ok, so how do you explain this?

This is me holding the final printer’s proof of my new book, A Play a Day Keeps the Grey Away. Clearly, something has changed. And as much as I’d like to tell you that change was brought about by some magic bullet or non-prescription pharmaceutical, the answer is about as prosaic as it gets. The answer, in fact, is something not exactly the same but freakishly similar to Writer’s March.

In the fall of 2009, I was in a playwriting class, the only objective of which was to have a 10-minute play ready for an undergraduate showcase to be performed the next spring. And on October first, I already had a 10-minute play mostly written. I had a fantastic beginning and an earth-shattering end, and I was fussing and fretting over the middle. In a one-on-one meeting with the instructor I was told, “Bob, you’re drunk on this piece.” He advised me to put it away before I worked it to death, and then gave me the most productive homework assignment I’ve ever gotten: “On Monday, I want to see ten pages of something completely new. I don’t care if it’s total crap, just as long as they’re new.”

What I decided to do was to write a miniature play, a scene, or some dramatic moment every day. Because the day I was given the assignment happened to be the first of the month, I decided to extend the project through to Halloween. So, just to review, one 31-day month, a commitment to write every day, a clearly stated daily goal and a ban on fretting over whether what I’ve written is “any good.” Sound familiar to any of my fellow Marchers? The result was 56 pages of new material, and—somewhat shockingly—very little of it was crap. It was one of the most freeing and generative times in my life, and once it was over, I was in a creative space that allowed me to write, very quickly, a completely new 10-minute play for the festival, better than the one I had been fretting over.

On a whim, I decided to try again in October 2010, and again found it to be a wonderfully creative and rewarding endeavor. What had once been a 10 page assignment became an annual tradition. In November of 2012, with four years worth of October plays threatening to bust the seams of the pronged folder I was keeping them in, the thought struck me, “there’s enough here to make a book.” All from making a commitment to write and then seeing that commitment through.

Now, those same doubts still whisper to me occasionally. “Your book is self-published,” they say. “It doesn’t have the cachet of having been ‘discovered,’ you won’t sell a dozen copies,” and so on. And here’s what I say to those doubts:

Some (play)Writing Prompts:

1—The “White Elephant” in the room.

This is an exercise in working out how characters avoid talking about what’s really on their mind. Decide on two characters who have some hot-button topic (for absolutely no reason at all, I’ll give “abortion” as an example) which is very much on both of their minds, but which neither wants to discuss. Write a page or two of dialogue (and nothing else) in which the topic in question is never directly mentioned.

2—Dust off the White Pages

Open a telephone directory to a random page. Scan the names you see and look for the first one that jumps out at you. If you see the name of someone you know, keep looking or go to a different page. Once you’ve found a name, write it down. Examine the name for some time without really thinking about it. Set that timer Sam made you get for 10 minutes and write a monologue: what that person would tell an audience about him/her self if she/he were one of your characters.

3—Something poetic

Read a poem, then read it again. Adapt it in some way for the stage. If it’s a narrative poem, put that narrative on the stage. If the poem is more image-based, hold a striking image in your mind and turn it into a physical place. Put characters you write into that place and see what happens. If the poem evokes a “mood” or “tone,”  find ways to exploit/subvert/explore that mood with characters on a stage. The most important thing is to have fun with it.

Incidentally, to see one example of what can be done, you might want to check this play out…

 

Day 23: Sometimes You Just Need To Be Alone

By Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Photo by Tina Roberts

This past summer, my uncle rode down from Canada on a motorcycle tour. He had packed fresh clothes and weather-beaten books into the packs on the sides of his bike, and he rode for days and days, eventually making a looping swish along the West Coast that swung all the way down through the South Bay, near San Jose, California, where he had grown up.

I saw him in Portland, at my parents’ house. My family had gone there for a weekend, and it was really just luck that had us all in the same place at the same time. We are not a family that fears geographical distance.

Still, sitting on the deck one night, someone asked my uncle why he had decided to travel down from Canada in the first place. After all, he was riding completely alone, over wildly varying terrain, with only the wind in his ears for conversation.

“Well,” he said, “sometimes you just need to be alone.”

For me, being alone is like a cookie I can steal – something I grab when I can, and stuff into my mouth in huge forbidden mouthfuls. I had never really thought of it as a need – in fact usually, if I’m being totally honest, solitude can make me feel selfish.

But I do my best work when I’m alone.

It’s a luxury to be able to turn off the swinging, shrieking, merry-go-round of my daily life and sit quietly.

I do it in the evenings, sometimes, when I can hear the sighing of the cars on the road through the window, or the low voices of neighborhood kids, calling softly to each other down the block.

And it’s not even just being alone that I crave – it’s the quiet. I have a little boy and three dogs and two cats and a husband and a full-time job that I love, and my life is many things, but it’s rarely ever quiet.

But I’ve realized that, in order to write anything coherently, I need to give myself the quiet, as a gift. I need to shut off the noise and pull the thick silence over me like a clear dark blanket of stars. I need to let my mind stretch out and wander around, poking at things.

For example, what flavor is the sound of the wind that’s pulling the weather system towards us? When I think about its shape against my experience in this particular moment, what does that look like? Can I write a poem that matches the cadences of the chorus of neighborhood dogs out the window? And what color is their barking? How does it feel to sit here, the spring air leaning in, and listen to them?

So here’s my suggested writing prompt – take it in any direction you’d like.

Pack your worries and cares and everyday issues into the pack of your mental motorcycle – you still carry them, but for now you’ll think about them later. Find a quiet space. Breathe in, breathe out and situate yourself in the room. Look around you and notice the air, or the light, or the way the open spaces in the room interact with your state of mind. Think about how that particular vase on the table feels. Maybe connect it with something else you’ve lived through, or a story you want to tell. Listen to the wind as if it’s a conversation that someone is having – that you get to hear.

Make something happen.

Post by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

 

 

Day 17: The Power of Limited Choice

By Lisa Hase-Jackson, guest blogger

Fear is a familiar feeling to all artists, and writers are certainly not immune. Some of the more common triggers of fear include anticipated failure or, as is often the case, anticipated success. For writers in particular, fear is often triggered just by considering the likely ostracism that may occur from revealing family secrets, or by the realization that what was written in a passionate moment of active imagination will appear to be worthless drivel in the light of day.

Perhaps the biggest fear faced by many writers on a daily basis it that of the blank page. Even assuming a writer can overcome the overwhelming number of possibilities represented by the blank page, there are still myriad choices to make – or choices to rule out – once the page is no longer blank and writing has begun in earnest. Let us posit, then, that the progressive limiting of possibilities which occurs during the act of writing is perhaps the most difficult fear for writers to overcome – for though the writer experiences the anxiety this progressive limiting of choices represents, the underlying reason often remains obscure.

Most writers agree that the first line of any piece determines what that piece will be, as well as what it cannot be. Setting aside academic arguments over what constitutes a poem versus what constitutes a short story, it’s reasonable to suggest that once a writer ends a first line of writing somewhere before the right margin, the work in question can be labeled a poem. Conversely, this small but significant decision to hit the return key before the punctuated end of a sentence reasonably rules out the possibility of such forms and genres as the essay, the article, the epic novel, the play, or even the short story.

And that’s only the first line.

Since each line of a poem necessarily does a great deal of work (or should), the choices made and ruled out with each subsequent line after the first will determine the poem’s rhyme scheme, its form, its overall length, and whether the poem will be narrative, lyric, or something likely to be described as experimental. In the act of writing the poem, then, the poet – whether aware or not – is evoking every craft lesson, every respected opinion, every piece of mythology, and every aesthetic preference they have ever encountered or developed in their respective writer’s journey to this very moment of selective choices. What’s not overwhelming about that? Further, because (and most writers agree) the imagined poem is nearly always better than what appears on the page, the act of writing (and selective limiting of choices) is nothing less than a courageous gesture of considerable mettle resulting in an extraordinary ability to conquer fear on a daily basis.

So while it may seem logical that artists fear a lack of choice, it is in actuality this strategic limiting of choices through the act of creation that triggers fear for most writers. And though it is most decidedly difficult to do so, writers must make consistent effort to avoid brooding over choices sacrificed and believe with conviction in the choices they have made.

Gather your mettle now and try one of the strategic choice-limiting writing exercises below:

1. From a literary magazine, of which most writers have dozens, select ten words you DO NOT usually use in your writing. Use these ten words in a poem, perhaps one per line. The more foreign they are to you, the more interesting the resulting draft will be (and the more fun you will have writing it).
2. Formal poem construction strategically limits choices for you, leaving your creative mind room to focus on other aspects of a poem. Most poets find traditional Sonnets relatively rigid while Pantoums and Villanelles are considered by some to be a little more flexible. Experiment with these and other forms regardless of your opinion of their merits.
3. The blitz is a form that makes choice elimination particularly fun. Follow this link for directions on how to construct a Blitz Poem: http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/poetic-asides/poetry-prompts/poetic-form-the-blitz-poem.

 

Day 15: Pewter or Brass?

By guest blogger Bob Sabatini

decisions, decisions…

There are some important considerations that go into the design of a house. Especially if it’s going to be someplace you’re planning to spend a major chunk of your life, a place where you’ll be entertaining friends and family, a place where, just possibly, you’ll be raising a family of your own. Should you paint the kitchen eggshell or mother-of-pearl? Should the cabinets be maple or cherry? Should the handles be pewter or brass? These are all decisions that will make an impact, not only on how a visitor may perceive your home, but also on your own state of mind. However, there is a time and a place for everything, and the time to make firm decisions on these questions and countless others… is quite a bit later than the day you start on the foundation.

It’s the same thing with writing. Details are important. They can make or break your story (or poem, or essay, or script…) but you can’t let them get in the way of the writing. I’ve had numerous discussions with writing friends who have shared works in progress with me. What I’ve found in more than one instance is that the friend in question will ask my advice on details as minute as the question of whether the cabinet hardware should be pewter or brass. They are trying to make chapter 1 absolutely perfect… before they’ll even think about chapter 2. In other words, they’re tidying up the kitchen before they’ve even begun wiring the living room. What I also generally find is that the writer in question is—more often than not—having difficulty writing.

Writing is about polishing fixtures and spot-painting. But it’s also about mixing concrete and cutting drywall. It’s about making messes. You’ll have plenty of time to clean up later, but you’ve got to get that frame built first.

So, an exercise:

(Except this isn’t really new. It’s based on suggestions made yesterday by Jennifer Simpson, myself last year and Sam two years back—re-framed to fit the house metaphor.)

Get hold of a wrecking ball!

If you are at a stage in the construction of your work where you’re not ready to polish up those lovely cabinet handles, and if you’re having trouble writing it, give yourself permission to break down some walls and try something else. Try writing a piece you’re having trouble with in a different genre. If your dialogue seems forced, try imagining it on a stage and write it as a script. If a prose character seems flat, put yourself in his/her head and write a persona poem. If your novel is refusing to move from one room to the next the way it should according to your very carefully plotted-out floor plan, then by all means tear down a wall and see what’s on the other side. Maybe your “house” never wanted to be a house at all, maybe it’s a skyscraper. Local zoning ordinances don’t apply to your writing.

 

Day 9: Obsession Is Not A Problem, It’s A Cure

A Guest post by Randi Beck Ocena

Somewhere in my head, there is a filing cabinet full of things I want to find, learn, peruse or pursue.  These projects vary from the ephemeral to the interminable and when I do chance to swim through them, I often find myself lost in a vast sea of library stacks research, internet archives, paper trails, and hazardous materials, or caught up in some precarious experiment requiring a double boiler, gum mastic, and power tools.

(In the end, this will have something to do with writing. I promise.)

Among the more recent interests: testing various sizes of spade drill bits, mapping with astrocartography, tracing my family lineage, investigating a string of local missing persons, and memorizing the Tsalagi syllabary by heart.

Sometimes there are more spontaneous projects.  For example, I once carved the likeness of Boris Karloff into half of a honeydew melon.  It took over an hour.

I have collectively filed these projects under Distractions, Creative. But when I really get interested in something, It becomes nearly impossible for me to leave it alone. I go to bed and wake up thinking about it. I’m easily consumed by my interests and my wife can testify to my single-mindedness.

Recent conversation:

Sam: “What do you want for dinner?”

Me (squinting at digitized family tree): “…hm?”

Sam: “Dinner? What do you want for dinner?”

Me: ”Hey I think my great great great Uncle Ephraim might be related to Elvis”

(20 minutes later)

Sam: “Did you switch the laundry?”

Me: “Soup is fine, thanks.”

As a graduate student and someone with major guilt issues, not to mention serious problems with time management in general, I sometimes worry about “wasting” my time (egad, there’s a whole other post in that), particularly when the time I spend actually writing seems brief by comparison. Most writers/artists I know have a similarly vast and eclectic array of interests.  But what good are these odds and ends? Why does one need to find their missing relatives? Or know the difference between the smells of cut cedar, birch, and oak? Or the name of every native wildflower in English and Latin? Sure these things can liven up your writing. But I’m talking about weeks, months, even years of study, not just an hour rummaging Google or the public library. And more specifically, study that has nothing at all to do with your career or financial gain or any benefit beyond your personal interest and investment in it. For our purposes, we’ll call these positive obsessions.

Madness and the Creative Mind

There’s a lot of research out there on the relationship between creativity and madness and I don’t dare venture into all of it right now.  But when I looked into the notion of “obsession” in particular, here is a tiny bit of what I found, drastically oversimplified:

According to most modern psychologists, there are both “positive” and “negative” forms of obsession.  The line distinguishing them may be hazy, but basically, if it makes you want to work constantly at something you love or can’t stop thinking about, you can call it a positive obsession. If it makes you want to cut off your ear, that might be toeing the line. And if it makes you want to cut off someone else’s ear, then you’ll probably want to talk to someone about that.

Here are a few inspiring examples I found of positive creative obsession:

#1: James Cameron: For his latest movie, Avatar, he employed a university linguistics professor to create an actual functioning language for the tribe of blue aliens on Pandora. And one can’t help but be reminded of JRR Tolkien, who spent decades developing Quenya, one of the Elvish languages spoken by the characters in his books, complete with regional dialects, grammatical rules, complex syntactical structuring, and a lovely writing system. As far as I know, Mr. Tolkien didn’t receive any additional monetary gain by inventing an entire language. That was just part of his project, and he was dedicated to it.

#2: Another written testament to obsessive creativity. Here’s a neat book by Lisa Congdon:

“A Collection a Day catalogs all 365 of Congdon’s quirky, obsessive, endlessly curious collections of tchotchkes — erasers, pencils, vintage stamps, mushrooms, receipts, medals, maps, sea urchins, and just about everything in between — in a beautiful volume that’s somehow calming and centering in its neatness, a rare oasis of order amidst the chaos of the everyday stuff that surrounds us.”

#3: A Water and Stick Sculpture by Land Artist, Andy Goldsworthy:

His philosophy: “My approach to photograph is kept simple, almost routine. All work, good and bad, is documented. I use standard film, a standard lens and no filters. Each work grows, strays, decays—integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expresses in the image. Process and decay are implicit.”

The Good News About Obsession:

In an article on positive obsession, natural psychologist and creativity coach, Dr. Eric Maisel says:

“When you obsess, you learn how to extinguish distractions so that you can concentrate. You accept the hard existential fact that if you intend to matter you must act as if you matter. You retrain your brain, asking it to halt its pursuit of fluff and worry, to instead embrace its own potential. In addition, you announce that you prefer grand pursuits to ordinary ones; you stand in solidarity with other members of your species who have opted for big thinking and big doing. And you turn yourself over—even to the point of threat and exhaustion—to your own loves and interests.”

Make Obsession Work For You:

“Embark on a month of productive obsessing, then another, and, ultimately, a lifetime. If you end up with a ballet like Swan Lake, a business like Apple, or a new theory of relativity, congratulations. But congratulate yourself just as much if what you end up with is a stream of brainstorms in the service of a fulfilling life.”

Last Word: 

For the next month, perhaps we should all adopt this attitude toward our own obsessions, whether fleeting or long-standing, but especially toward writing.  Instead of trying to conquer distractions, make it your goal to turn writing into a distraction in itself. Write about something that makes you want to sneak away at work or go to bed late. It is a gift, I think, just to feel passionate about something, anything, really. The fact that you’re reading this right now means you must have the gift too, and that makes me happy.

After this month of March writing madness, whatever it is that causes your heart to race or makes your ears perk up–building a ship in a bottle, learning a dying language, sharpening all your pencils by hand, making found art out of office supplies—whatever it is, go ahead and do it. Let it feed your writing where it will. And feel free to obsess a little. It’s good for you.

 

Mr. Daisey’s Story-Truth

If there’s one thing I never want to be, it’s a liar.

I’ve said many times to many people, “I do not lie.” Sometimes they look at me funny. “But you’re a writer,” they say. “All writers lie.” Trust me, I’m aware of the contradiction, but I stand by my original statement.

Reality can be a fluid thing. Memory, a subjective, slippery lens. I often confuse dream memories with waking memories. I have, in the past, gotten wrapped up in whole universes built on other people’s compulsive lies and my own faulty perceptions. I have become almost phobic about lies and lying, which may explain why I gravitate towards writing fiction. In writing nonfiction, I’m often afraid of all the things I might accidentally skew.

A few semesters ago, I took a fantastic seminar with Greg Martin on works which blurred the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. Among other things, we read Lauren Slater’s memoir, Lying. As the name would suggest, it is based almost entirely off of lies. Even though, throughout the seminar, we explored various ways of interpreting “concrete” truths, story truths, emotional truths, and everything in between to twist our stories for artistic effect, I never got comfortable with lying. I was no Slater. I admired her, but I knew I would never have the guts to go as far as she went. I had no reason to.

I was reminded of this class the other afternoon when listening to This American Life’s retraction of their story “Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory.” Turns out that Daisey’s monologue about the horrific conditions in Chinese factories that supply Apple is largely fictionalized, and that caused quite a stir since the story was put out under the journalistic standards of “truth.” Daisey came onto the show for an interview and, although the host, Ira Glass, kept fishing for a complete public apology and an admission of Daisey’s lies, he insisted throughout that everything in the monologue was “true.” Maybe some of the events didn’t happen in the order he presented them. Maybe some of the people were composites. But everything happened, he said, more or less. Everything was “true to his experience” in China, and he wanted to convey that experience in a way that would reach people. Really reach them. Emotionally and viscerally. He wanted to stir them to action. As a writer, I get all that. The monologue was originally meant for the theatre, and within the context of theatre, those are legitimate claims. But here, Daisey was in the clutches of a journalistic eye and a very pissed off Ira Glass. More and more of his lies were exposed by the minute.

Part of me sympathized, but I was also horrified at Daisey’s complete inability to express his thoughts on artistic license and emotional vs. factual credibility. Throughout the interview, he continued to lie himself into corners and sounded more and more insane. In the end, all parties concluded that the monologue never should have been aired on This American Life. It had no place within journalism. As a writer, I could care less what the monologue did or didn’t exaggerate, twist, or fabricate, but I was angry that Daisey discredited an entire community of writers who grapple with the ethics of their craft daily. I felt like any one of us who had taken Greg’s class could have done a better job of explaining ourselves than Daisey had, but more importantly, being already mindful of our forms, probably never would have fallen into the predicament in the first place.

(If you have the time, listen to the show, if for no other reason than to learn what not to do.)

Now, I’m not some kind of truth-Nazi or anything. I don’t know what “the truth” is any more than you do. So let us all go and experiment and explore and blur every boundary that we can and twist reality and excavate the story-truths from the happening-truth. But for God’s sake, when we lie, let’s just be honest about it.

 

Lessons Writers Can Adapt from Popular Culture

I have to begin with a “writer’s confession” of my own: I’d love to plagiarize Sam’s post from yesterday. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve known I have this blog entry to write, and I shuffled through ideas for it but repeatedly found myself face up against a wall. I still haven’t figured out a way around, over, or through that wall. I wanted to write about that wall — an admission that I’d run into it — and then Sam wrote about her version of it first. I imagine my wall as a tall and long row of brick cinder blocks; I’m flush up against it, it’s scraping my skin raw, and neither of us appears to be moving anywhere. But I’m responsible for a blog post, so we’re stuck with whatever is about to come out extemporaneously.

My friend Lisa, who did not sign up for the Writer’s March this go-round, happily reported to me this evening that she’d managed to do a march’s worth of successful writing anyway. I confessed that I haven’t. I’ve written a good bit more than usual, yes, but not what I had in mind or as much. I told her I was having trouble coming up with an idea for tonight’s post. She’s been working on a retelling of the fairy tale “The Beauty and the Beast.” She said, “Why don’t you write about the Beauty and the Beast of writing?”

“Then I’d be stealing your idea,” I said.

“You have my permission.”

So, yeah, I could write about the beautifully romantic notions of what it means to be a writer — for instance, the glorification of the “starving” artist — and the beastly agony that is the real work, but no, no thanks, not tonight.

I watched Dancing with the Stars tonight. I have learned to love this show. It’s happy candy. This is the only second week of the new season, and the dancing is already notably better than in past seasons. But some of the “stars” are nervous, stiff; their limbs fly every which way, they miss the beat (sometimes most of the beats), they lose their place, and their performance smiles are often coupled with a deer-in-headlights look in their eyes. I like this show because of those dancers, because I get to see celebrities I may or may not recognize doing something different, something out of their comfort zone. And I often get to see them progress in their abilities.

I was talking with a student today (Ava, who is also doing the Writer’s March) and mentioned the cut-and-paste process of revision. You don’t do this on the computer. You take your manuscript and a pair of scissors, and you cut after every scene or, if you’re feeling especially bold, into the heart of the scene. Then you lay out these physical pieces of paper in a new arrangement. You shuffle them again and again until you’re forced to consider new ways to develop existing scenes and obviously new ways to structure the overall piece. Ava shuddered at the thought of doing that to her manuscript, and I admitted I’d rejected the idea outright when my own teacher recommended it to me. It sounded like so much work. But my real problem with it, I know now, was that I was doing something outside my comfort zone. I wanted then and still want to be able to write a manuscript successfully from beginning to end. Dear readers, I inform you that that has never actually happened. Only once did a fairly solid draft of a five-paged essay come out in a mostly usable form. As it turns out, every time I’ve dared make the mess of cutting up a printed-out manuscript and laying out the pieces on a table or on the floor, it’s worked to my advantage — or rather, to the advantage of the manuscript needing scrupulous revision.

I don’t know that I’ve succeeded in making the connection to Dancing with the Stars clear for you. Something about pushing yourself beyond what you’re comfortable with to discover other talents or at least other possibilities, that’s the connection I’m aiming for. Try something you haven’t done before when you’re revising. Rewrite a critical section by hand without referring to the original draft. See if anything new and useful results.

More than anything, I’m thinking about Wednesday, the day after you’ll read this post. Wednesday is Lady Gaga’s birthday. If I haven’t told you lately or ever, I’m a huge fan. No, you’re not thinking huge enough. Huger than that. Now think huger. Okay, you’re almost there. Anyway, for the past couple of years, as each semester draws to a close, I’ve brought up Lady Gaga’s musical and performance abilities in relation to writing. Believe me, it matters not one whit whether you like, appreciate, or loathe and scorn Lady Gaga as an artist. My analogy goes beyond that. It’s this: I admire her because she has a far-reaching grasp of the musical and performance traditions that precede her, yet her work also pushes past existing boundaries and shows promise of great advances. Some view her as a Madonna wannabe, but I hear Prince and David Bowie, Queen and Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Elton John, KISS and Liza Minelli, and others too. Some may hear party songs, dance-pop, and see an overmade-up bewigged crazily dressed gimmick of a pop star. I see someone in command of the construction of her persona(e). I could go on. Ask, and I will.

But what I want to emphasize is her knowledge of tradition and her ability to transcend it. I believe that the latter is entirely contingent on the former. Novice writers — all writers — should read, read, read. Read deeply and read widely. Read what gives you pleasure, read what you’re assigned, read what your friends and teachers and other writers recommend, read for pleasure, yes, but also read critically. Study the tradition you’re working in. “Read beyond the syllabus,” one of my professors once told me, which seems the most obvious sort of advice. As you discover kinship with writers whose work you enjoy and/or admire, try to find out which writers influenced them, and add to your reading list accordingly, ad infinitum.

Spend some time this week enjoying and studying the writers who have influenced your work or whom you want to influence your work. Steep yourself in the tradition. Consider why you admire their writing. What themes or techniques inspire you? Which characters live for you beyond the page? Where is a writer’s language most lyrical, most precise? Think about it. Then write.

Me, I’m going to call it a night!

 

Documentation Meditation

I spend a lot of time “writing,” but often not a lot of time producing much of anything. That is, I spend a lot of time journaling and writing letters, but not a lot of time working on and revising real pieces. My Writer’s March goal is to spend an hour a day working on these “real” things to see if I can actually start and finish some fully formed stories or essays. I told myself that journaling and correspondance didn’t count toward that hour.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not still keeping a journal, and that doesn’t mean I don’t find it necessary to the rest of my work.

I’m not as compulsive as some when it comes to keeping a journal, but I do think that regular documentation is key to collecting and understanding future writing material. Extraordinary things happen all the time, if you’re paying attention, and those things should be written down. (You might think they were so extraordinary that you’ll remember them forever. You won’t.)

There’s a crazy man who lives next door to me (Or maybe he’s homeless and lives in the alley. If he lives in the apartment next door, someone must be taking care of him.) who I see occasionally doing strange things like laughing maniacally, seemingly at nothing, outside in the middle of the night, or filling a shopping cart with random objects then pushing it back and forth through the alleyway. After the night of hysterical laughter, which I’ll admit was eerily terrifying, I deduced that he is mostly harmless. He always seems to be in good spirits, and when I see him around now, it’s with a certain protective fondness. “Hey! That’s my neighbor! Or…um…some guy who lives in my alley!” As I was leaving my apartment a few days ago to go get coffee and “do some writing,” (that is, sit around and write nonsense in my journal,) I turned out of the alley onto Coal and into a mysterious traffic jam. There was a long line of cars in both stretching in either direction from Columbia. As I inched forward, I saw that my crazy neighbor had moved one of the construction barriers into the middle of the road and was standing in front of it, smiling, and waving an egg timer in the air. (I’m not making this up.) People were honking their horns and yelling out of their windows. Since we’re in the age of cell phones, I’m sure multiple people had already called the police. I thought about stopping and trying to get him out of the road before he could be arrested, but realized that, though I knew who he was, he wouldn’t know me. I kept driving.

As soon as I got to the coffee shop, I wrote it all down. Who knows if I’ll ever use it in future writing.

When I write about things that have actually happened, I like to do it as if I’m writing a scene, with as much sensory detail as possible and good control of time. I’ve often held on to story ideas for years, then looked back at my journals from when I first thought of the idea to find, in some cases, full passages that can be excavated and put into new pieces.

Over the years, I’ve been hard on myself about the amount of time I spend with my journal, and how little I spend on other things. It seems so…lazy. It doesn’t feel like writing because it doesn’t feel like “work.” It remains daunting for me to sit down and work on these “real pieces,” and I know that I think about writing a lot more than I actually write, but I’ve realized that keeping a journal is the hybrid of thinking and writing and often serves to transition my mind into doing more “serious” work. So it’s not only crucial for documentation, it is also a sort of meditation that gets me into the writing zone.

 

“Something Amazing”: On a Prose Writer’s Appreciation of Poetry

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Brueghel, @1558

I began my writing life as a poet. I had just turned eight. A decade passed, more, and I churned out hundreds of poems, possibly close to a thousand. But I was one of those self-proclaimed poets who never read poetry for pleasure or edification; I read only what I was assigned and only for symbolic and literary analysis. That’s as much preamble as I will give at this point. What is important is that in my early twenties, after a few rough critiques by actual poets and people who “knew” poetry, I pretty much put an end to our relationship–or at least the pretense of a relationship I had with poetry. Another decade passed, and I found myself working on a Ph.D. in fiction writing. Ours was not a multi-genre program, so the one and only poetry course I had to take was not a workshop (O, thank you, lucky stars!) but rather a class that went by the daunting title of Form and Theory of Poetry.

The class was made all the more daunting by its professor, a fussy fellow with a fussy mustache who made no secret of his disdain for the fiction writers in the program. His reputation preceded him, and those of us in fiction held off on taking the class until we could hold off no more. He was demanding, that man. He expected us to memorize things about poetry: dozens upon dozens of terms, scansion (not only the metrics but particularly the theoretical aspects), the centuries-long history of the sonnet and all its transformations, metrical and rhyme schemes for dozens of types of poems (yes, there was a time I knew the sestina’s intricacies without having to look them up). He gave us tests. He made us write explications of poems, 20-paged papers detailing every choice the poet had made, and no, we could not use outside sources. Had the poet used internal rhyme, slant rhyme, eye rhyme, and to what effect? If the poet wrote in blank verse, in which lines did the poem depart from iambic pentameter, what was the metrical departure, and what impact did it have on the reading? How was enjambment used? Why, aside from the obvious grammatical usage, were certain caesurae employed? What sort of stanzas had the poet chosen, and what impact did the breaks have? What about line length? Did lines end on masculine or feminine syllables, and why? And don’t forget, under any circumstances, about alliteration and assonance!

I am telling you it was frightening. He was frightening!

Part of what was frightening, as you may suspect, was that I’d abandoned my relationship with poetry altogether. I could toss off a few quasi-intelligent remarks about Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” or Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” but beyond that, I knew very little. I dreaded that class.

Then that dreaded professor read Robert Frost’s “Birches” aloud. He’d assigned it to us for one of our first class meetings, and I’d read it diligently, several times, something about a boy swinging through trees or something. All I could think was how ill-prepared I was for this class; I felt my own ignorance. But when my professor read the poem, I understood it perfectly. I followed along as he with his sonorous, reverent voice made music—no, poetry—of Frost’s words. I even got the joke.

Poetry—it’s from the oral tradition, right, so wouldn’t it make sense to read it aloud?

One of the two poems I was given to explicate was W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” I confess that I was dumbfounded by it at first, as with most of the poems we read. I was supposed to scan the poem and write a 20-paged explication with no outside sources. I felt like an impostor. I have no idea how many times I had to read the poem—and read it aloud, hearing its music and rhythm—before I started to grasp it. I could pick out its symbols, sure; I’d done that sort of thing bunches of times in high school and college. But what did it mean that Auden had chosen to begin his poem with a line in which the word “they” had no antecedent? What did it mean that he had provided that so-called antecedent in the second line? How did his 21-line poem’s structure echo sonnet structure, and for what reason? You get the drift.

It was a dreadfully difficult class, and much as I came to love the sound of my professor’s voice as he read aloud the poems he had assigned, he remained a dreadfully difficult professor. But damn it, I worked harder than I’d worked in any other class, ever, and I earned A’s on every assignment (this from a professor who didn’t generally give them), and my fiction professor/dissertation director told me he’d gone and praised me behind my back.

This memory came up today after a conversation I had at work with two MFA students in poetry who are set to graduate next spring. I let them know I’d be glad to be on their dissertation committees if they needed another reader. Then I mumbled a disclaimer about how, despite being a prose writer, I’d still be able to give their poetry a fair read even though I wasn’t as familiar blah blah blah. Why, I wondered later, had I taken myself down a notch or two or twenty, diminishing my potential value as a reader of their work? Even though writing poetry doesn’t come naturally to me, the fact is that I know how to read and appreciate it. I know how to plumb its depths. What I learned in Form and Theory of Poetry stays with me to this day, moreso than most of what I learned in my Ph.D. fiction classes.

Today I’d like to share Auden’s beautiful poem with you, one I can almost quote from memory because I long ago had to write that arduous/worthwhile explication. Read the poem aloud, slowly, feeling the music and the meaning of the words. Pause in your reading when you reach a caesura, not when you reach the end of a line. Then have a look at the painting by Brueghel and read the poem all over again.

Once again, I see I’m writing for an audience of prose writers. Poets won’t need the instructions I gave above! But it’s my wish today to have those of us who identify one way or another, poet or prose writer, seek appreciation from a genre we may shy away from. Now click HERE to read Auden’s poem “Musee des Beax Arts”