Useful Writing

I recently realized that I can do multiplication in my head until I get to the 7s, 8s, and 9s. Anytime I multiply one of them by any of the other two, I have to stop and think. Why? Because I can remember being very excited about learning multiplication tables up until I got to the higher numbers. Then I lost interest.

Similarly, I am an okay touch typist with letters, but have to look at my fingers to type numbers. As a teenager with no manual dexterity, learning to type was a humiliating and taxing experience. I finally got all the letters mastered but when it came to the numbers I figured I’d be writing non-mathematical things. I lost interest.

My first novel is unfinished. I lost interest. And I don’t believe it would be resurrect-able without major work, because it’s a suspense novel about a kidnapping, dependent upon the isolation of one of the characters in an age before cell phones. The first thing today’s reader would ask would be, “Why doesn’t she use her cell phone?” The novel isn’t useful.

The poet Marge Piercy emphasized that she wanted her poetry to be useful.

“What I mean by useful is simply that readers will find poems that speak to and for them, will take those poems into their lives and say them to each other and put them up on the bathroom wall and remember bits and pieces of them in stressful or quiet moments. That the poems may give voice to something in the experience of a life has been my intention. To find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our lust, our losses. We can hear what we hope for and what we most fear, in the small release of cadenced utterances. We have few rituals that function for us in the ordinary chaos of our lives.”

I lost interest in numbers because they didn’t seem useful to me.

Join me in the recesses of our own hearts, each of us. By what rubrics, on what bathroom walls, do we find proof that our writing is useful, according to Piercy’s definition of usefulness?

Art is Community

Writing is a solitary pursuit. Long hours holed up with ideas and a blank screen, sympathizing with God’s ex nihlo brand of creation. The loneliness is deceiving. In the midst of it, the writer almost believes she is, after all, alone. That the ideas she spins are hers alone and she bends low over each one bidding it grow. Almost. But anyone who engages in art in any way knows there is no aloneness inside this place. That art is, in fact, an act of community.

A writer tells a story, and if she does it well, it will be the story of her aching place (keeping in mind that the aching place isn’t always about darkest pain, but also about the grandest ache of all; selfless love). The story goes ‘out there’, into the eyes of readers, into their minds, under their skin. And the reader discovers she too has an aching place though she’d never been able to express it before. She believed her aching place was alone, hidden, private. But art exposes that lie. We are not alone with our feelings, we share them. They mingle together in the air we pull into our lungs.

In A Scream Goes Through the House, Arnold Weinstein says it this way:

“[. . .] art [. . .} offers us a shocking new picture of human arrangements, a picture that is insistently collective, relational, and extended. In art we can find and tap into a reservoir of feeling, and this encounter not only breaks open our solitude but also makes audible and visual to us the emotional lines of force that bathe individual life, separate us, yet connect us to one another.”

The power of art via story (the novel, or otherwise) is something to be treated with extraordinary care. There is an implicit obligation in the creation of art, not just to the art itself, but to the culture we live in and to the people of that culture. We cannot be content with a world filled with mere entertainment (I’m not against entertainment), when we can be a part of a world filled with meaning and connection (which offers a whole new level to what it means to be entertained). Neil Postman was a media critic who wrote extensively about media of all kinds: “When cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when a people become an audience, then a nation finds itself at risk.” This quote was in reference to TV in particular, but there’s a grain of truth for writers as well.

If art is the true connector of people, as Weinstein argues, then Postman’s observation rings clear; we have the opportunity to connect with each other on a deeply human basis, far beyond the water cooler giggles over the base behavior of the newest reality TV star (I’m not against water cooler giggles), or the worn out story of a woman who can only find wholeness if loved by a man (I am not against being loved by a man). Rather, the solitary writer can reach into the world, sharing her secret aching place, watching as it twines together with the fabric of other people’s souls and stretches out beyond the limits of what time can show her. She can write and share herself, and receive to herself the art (aching place) of others in order, as James Joyce says in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “That I may learn in my own life . . . What the heart is and what it feels.”

What thoughts do you have on art as community? What is the obligation of the artist/writer to the culture she/he partakes in? How have encounters with art given voice to your own aching place?

A Picture Worth A Hundred Words (Or So)

Patti, Debbie and Sharon inspired me last week to pay more respect to my life-long tendency to people-watch, and to weave stories from what I see.

Today - even though it's Monday - let's have some fun. Let's pull an old photo from the public domain (click here for a larger view), and weave a paragraph around it. We
ladies will go first, and then, please, dear readers, do join in.

I'll go first:

So far as she cared, Frank could keep the house with all its dusty carvings and stained glass windows. What Meredith and the girls needed was a whole lot of distance. And her husband's Packard was a distance making machine; she'd learned that just a week ago. Seven days wasn't much time to learn to drive, and the first seventy-five miles over the Cascade Mountains had been a bit rough. Lily and Pansy didn't mind, but Alice had just this moment decided that she wore the pants in the family. She didn't like eating Jujubes for breakfast. She didn't like sleeping in the car, and she didn't like her mother's driving. Well fine. Let her take the wheel a while. They only needed distance.

I know the only way to say this is to say it fast and straight out. And the only way to do it without tears is to do it in front of an audience. The girls barely count, because to them there never was such an adventure as this. But while Daddy's off collecting his pay, which he hopes will take us a few more counties west -- pay for a job so beneath a man of his goodness and ability I might add ... a job not even Denny Parker, the scoundrel of Broken Hollow, would have taken before the world lost its footing -- I'm just gonna say it out loud to Mama. Then I'm catching the Greyhound back home. Because I'm not leaving Jess. Not ever. Not with the likes of Naomi Bidwell waiting to show him her dimples. And a whole lot more.

Mama and me gave up sleeping in the rumble seat and counted enough shooting stars for a lifetime of good luck, something I wasn't expecting to gather on a camping trip with my cousin Betty. Just goes to show there's always a silver lining, just like my daddy keeps telling me. With so much luck in our pockets, Mama decided she'd had enough of camping and wanted to go home. Even with Betty sticking her tongue out at me every few minutes, the thought of going home made my stomach sour. The pineys smelled so fresh and the air lay soft on my skin. Back home the air made my skin sticky. And the smell? Let me just say I lived downwind from Grundstetner's hog farm. No matter how many times I yelled Fresh strawberries! nothing ever changed.

Aunt Lucy's eyes went all squinty when Mama told her to drive us home. "Are you kidding me, Raelyn? We're almost to the farm."

Mama climbed out of the rumble seat. "We ain't talking about this here." She tipped her head toward the lake and Aunt Lucy followed her. More than anything, I wanted to follow along, but sure if I did, Mama would tan me good. The tanning wouldn't hurt as much as stupid Betty laughing and snorting at me, trying to hold back my tears.

Betty looked at me with the same squinty eyes of her mother. "Your daddy's a bad man."

It didn't make no sense to waste words on Betty. She believed whatever she wanted to. And
the wronger she was, the more she believed it. In two shakes I was out of the car. I pulled her baggie pants to her ankles and pushed her hard into the dirt. If I earned a tanning, I wanted it to be for something worthwhile, so while Betty bawled, I ate her candy bar.

"She ain't coming back. She got into his truck and they lit out." Georgia squinted toward the horizon. "Probably in Idaho by now."

Clara huffed and tucked her hands beneath her arms for warmth. "You don't know nothin'. She wouldn't leave. She promised Mama she'd watch out for us."

Daisy started to cry and Clara pulled her close, wrapping their Mama's old quilt around her shoulders. "Now look what you done. Don't cry, Daisy. Aunt Sadie wouldn't leave us."

Merle snorted. "She'd leave us if it wasn't for the money in that valise."
Georgia reached down to the floorboard and opened the latch on the valise. "Like I was saying," she pulled it open to show the black emptiness, "she's gone, gone."

It's funny what you think about when the moment you've been waiting for actually comes. I should have been rehearsing what I planned to say to her, should have been going over the words in my mind so I'd get it right.You only get one chance and after what she'd done, I wanted it to be perfect. But I wasn't practicing my speech as I walked toward Velma's Packard. I wasn't even thinking about my daughter who Velma had taken more than four days ago. I tucked Velma's own daughter, Bea, behind me pulling her along as I walked through the trees toward the woman who had ruined my life. And all I could think about was how strong the pine smelled, how it was nothing like the pine-in-a-bottle stuff I used to clean my kitchen floor. How real things aren't anything like we imagine they would be. How Velma's Packard looks peaceful sitting in the middle of a circle of cars. Like maybe it's a camp out and we're all here to experience a wilderness weekend instead of a posse to take back my girl from this crazy woman. As I put my hand on the roof of that old Packard and open my lips to say something--all that fills my mouth is pine air.

Git in the back, she told me. Git out right now, she’s ordering us all right now. Now git back in. Rearrange that quilt so the hole shows. No, these clothes aren’t stupid they’re vintage. I can hear you when you mutter stuff like that under your breath. Yes, people used to wrap up their heads like this – you wouldn’t really want to travel for hour after hour with the wind whipping your hair follicles in circles till your scalp felt like it had been sandpapered, would you?

No, the car doesn’t have to run, this isn’t a movie.

Pullease. Just sit still for one more take.

And if I catch you texting one more time. . .

There are plenty of other girls that would like to get their start. Ever heard of a resume?

You’re not looking at your mom glaring at you, but I am.

Just sit still.

Just sit still.

Good grief.

Paying Attention to Detail

I had a writer's imagination long before I had a clue I could write, before I ever thought I might one day write a book. I had imaginary conversations with people real and fictional, and wondered if anyone I knew did the same thing. I was pretty sure it wasn't normal, but I was loathe to give up the practice. Then, when I began to write, I felt like a part of me had clicked into place and, finally, there was a valid outlet for all the imaginary things that went on inside my head. It seems I was "in the writing frame of mind" that Debbie wrote about before I knew there was such a thing.

I've always been a people watcher. I was the quiet one in the class or the crowd, soaking in the details of everyone around me. For a long time I thought it was the artist in me paying attention to detail -- and it was. For years I drew, then painted, and people were always my subjects. But I wanted their faces to say something to me. (Here's a typical drawing from way back when.) But my people watching was so much more than the active eye of an artist. It was learning the intricacies of characterization; the multi-faceted layers of story. It was growing into the realization that "story" is a way to communicate what's important to me (as did my artwork), hopefully in an intertaining way -- unlike the novel I'm currently reading, which is nothing more than a treatise on the author's pet issues. Notice the plural form of the noun? In fact, it reads like a checklist of what's near and dear to her heart (please forgive the cliche). It's as if she fashioned a garment for the sole purpose of having a framework on which to attach her favorite sequins. It is, in fact, a popular novel, but not with me, even though this is an author whose other books I've loved.

That's not what I mean by writing about what's on my heart.

The posts this week, as well as the comments -- we learn from you too! -- reminded me that paying attention to the world around us involves all the senses. That was driven home on Wednesday as I stood waiting for my take-out order at Panera Bread. (If you've never had their Frontega Chicken Sandwich, you must!) An elderly couple crossed my path on their way to a table, and the first thing that I took note of was the woman's red hair -- the color of which cannot be found in nature. I was also aware that the stark color didn't go with the loose folds of powdered skin that hung from her face, or the stoop of her shoulders, or the arch-support shoes she shuffled in. But again, people watching doesn't stop with the eye. And in this case it also involved my nose, as they passed with a conflicting array of scents: perm solution, spray starch, and perfume that hasn't been advertised in glamour magazines in decades. Those smells were definitely at odds with the fragrance of freshly-baked bread and homemade soup that filled the eatery, but they took top billing in the space I occupied for a good ten seconds or more.
I also love catching snippets of conversation when I'm in a public place. They're such great springboards for characters and scenes. Even things my family and friends say find their way into my novels. Those who know me well, know there's nothing sacred, nothing "off the record." Ever.

So what about you? When did you know you were meant to write, and what dimensions has that added to the person deep inside you? The one no one knows but you.

The Writing Frame of Mind

I appreciate Anne Lamott’s advice and Patti’s candor in challenging us to remain inspired and in the writing frame of mind. It’s imperative to keep a notebook nearby. I’ve written before about my handy-dandy notepad that lights up when I pull out the pen. It’s great for those ideas that come at the edge of twilight sleep. I keep a journal with me for my current WIP with lots of lined pages for jotting down ideas as they come and space to stuff a timeline & photos of the characters. It’s messy – I don’t encumber the flow with neatness or organization, except that I may have tabs for setting, characters and plot. I’m the only one who sees the jumble of illegible words. Unfortunately, for me inspiration never comes when I’m sitting with my notebook in my lap drumming my fingers on the table.

You can’t look at inspiration straight on, as Ray Bradbury points out. “It isn’t easy. Nobody has ever done it consistently. Those who try hardest, scare it off into the woods. Those who turn their backs and saunter along, whistling softly between their teeth, hear it treading quietly behind them, lured by a carefully acquired disdain.” (Zen in the Art of Writing) It’s a bit like love. You can do your best to cultivate the possibility but you can’t make it happen.

I hear where Patti’s coming from. I hate to admit it, but pain is a great leveler. So is the realization of your own mortality. I bumped up against both about 13 years ago when I underwent treatment for breast cancer. There were no instructions. Like Patti, I had to look away from the woman I was at times, but through the process I learned to cut myself some slack. And I knew, overwhelmingly, that God cut me slack, too. Every day. So that not long after, there was a very grumpy man in front of me in the grocery check-out who left a bad impression on the checker. After he left, she made a comment, and without thinking, I said, “Maybe he’s in pain.” Did I have insight into his frame of mind or was he really just an old sourpuss? Who knows? But the next time I write about a sourpuss I can dust it with compassion.

I like to think of myself as observant, but I climbed the front steps yesterday without even noticing that the yard had been mowed and the hedges trimmed while I was at work. My husband shakes his head at me sometimes. I was probably wondering what was thawed for dinner as I crossed the threshold, or whether he’d thought to pick up cat litter. The pressures of everyday life can fit me with blinders and prevent me from being present in the moment. And writing in snatches and stolen moments makes it difficult to look outward and stay in the writing frame of mind. But if I ‘steal’ those moments at the same time every day, I train my creativity to click on at that time. If I park myself on a bench at lunch, I can sharpen my observation skills on the people who wander past.

What have you found that cultivates your creativity and helps you stay in the writing frame of mind? We’d love to hear!

The Writer as the Cheese

Welcome to the continuing conversation on Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Sure, the book has been around for a while, but when have you had a chance to chat it up with fellow writers? This is your chance. No need to read the chapter, although it’s fabulous. You’re professionals. Speak up. We learn so much from you.

The book is organized in five parts, and we’re starting the second part today: The Writing Frame of Mind. My husband would consider this a bit scary. He’s been an observer of my frame of mind for several decades, and, well, he often has to ask, “Are we talking about one of your characters now?”

We storytellers are gifted with a certain set of proclivities, some more finely tuned than others. But there is good news: Those proclivities can be sharpened and refined. And that’s what we’ll be talking about today, the chapter titled, “Looking Around.”

My husband claims to be free of the whimsy gene. Where I see a woman strutting like a hen, he sees only a field of gray smudge. When driving down the highway, I’ll ask, “Did you see that?”

“What?”

“Sorry, it wasn’t ESPN.”

“Oh. Then no, I didn’t see anything.”

Out comes the notebook and I write all about the runaway steer being chased by a cowboy on horseback. Before you think my husband a dolt, he diagnoses lawn diseases at twenty paces. The man’s a genius.

We’re writers. We should be the most observant people around. That’s how we learn about the world and how it works. That’s what Lamott is proposing in this chapter. There are so many quotables in this chapter that I will comment on several.

The writer is a person who is standing apart, like the cheese in “The Farmer in the Dell” standing there alone but deciding to take a few notes.

Lamott isn’t saying to remove yourself from life. Where would we get angst for our stories? Heavens no, she is saying that it’s all there for the taking. Pay attention. Keep something handy to write on or tip-tap on. See the world as your library. You’re always learning, always gathering.

Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense. Then you can recognize others…I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place of friendly detachment toward myself, so I can look out at the world and see all those other things with respect.

Lamott’s theory is this: If you can’t be compassionate about your humanness, how will you portray your characters compassionately, and then how will your readers relate? Who knew being a writer required so much internal work, but it does. It really, really does.

Just as I was gaining the interest of an agent and a publisher, I ruptured a disk in my neck. For 15 months, I lay as motionless as possible to reduce the pain until the docs agreed what was going on. In the meantime, I learned quite a bit about myself, and it was shocking. Pain flays you open and there I was, the real Patti. I had to avert my eyes at times, but then I took pity on the girl and saw that she was doing the best she could. Not coincidentally, I learned quite a bit about God and his compassion too. That blip in my schedule made me a better writer by forcing me to know the real Patti and like her. If I were you, I would skip the spinal cord injury part and make peace with who you are. You’re wonderful! God thinks so. And take notes!

This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of –please forgive me—wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds…I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world—present and in awe.

A trip to Africa will do this, so can a trip to the grocery store or out to the garden. Making observations and writing them down will train you to be present and to see the world around you with wonder. Your readers will join you. Here are six things I saw anew today:

• Are the hummingbird vines being stingy, or are they awaiting some clarion call?
• Two grim-faced sparrows wait inside the birdhouse for lunch to be delivered.
• Grocery shoppers lean into their duty, pointing the way with their noses to dinner. Something easy and exquisite, hopefully.
• The woman read the label with such reverence, I expected her to clench the jar of Prego to her heart.
• The sofa cushion smiles with use.
• Nasturtiums the size of lunch plates nod in the breeze.

It doesn’t hurt to have a two-year-old around, either.

How are you as an observer? Are you compassionate with yourself? Do you agree this is necessary to be a good storyteller? I can think of some counterexamples in literature, but I like the idea of giving myself room to grow. And you? Do you see things others miss? How do you cue yourself to be stay in the present? How do you realize compassion for your characters, even the stinkers?

In Their Own Words

I don't feel I have much to add to Bonnie's excellent video post on revision, so I thought you might enjoy hearing what some well-known authors have to say on the subject.

Mark Twain:

"You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lighting too much, the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by." "The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say." (Exactly what our Bonnie said in her post.)

Robert Cormier:

"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile."

Michael Crichton:

"Books aren't written -- they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the 7th rewrite hasn't quite done it."

John Irving:

"More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina."

Thomas Wolfe:

"What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish." (This one gave me that "ugh!" feeling.)

Dorothy Parker:

"I can't write five words but that I can change seven."

John Hersey:

To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over."

William Kennedy:

"When you write ... some things that come very late in the creation change what you were conceiving back when you started. Therefore, you have to go back and revise."

Judy Blume:

"I'm a rewriter. That's the part I like best ... once I have a pile of paper to work with, it's like having the pieces of a puzzle. I just have to put the pieces together to make a picture."

Anne Tyler:

"It all depends on how you count, but I'd say the book (Noah's Compass) took four drafts. That's three longhand drafts before I entered it in the computer, and then I copied the computer version into longhand again. I read that fourth version into a tape recorder and then listened to the tape recorder while I followed along on the computer screen to pick up any minor changes I had made." (Wow, does THAT make me feel like a slacker!) "Ridiculous, I know. But it's more or less the way I've always done it, except for the three or four earliest books which I wrote without revising, under the mistaken impression that revising was a form of cheating. Nowadays, I love revising. I think of Draft One as work and the revisions as play."

Nora Roberts:

"I'll vomit out the first draft: bare-bones, get-the-story-down. I don't edit and fiddle as I go, because I don't know what's going to happen next. Once I get the discovery draft down, then I'll go back to page one, chapter one, and then I start worrying about how it sounds, where I've made mistakes, where I've gone right, what else I have to add, where's the texture, where's the emotion. I start fixing. And then, after I've done that all the way through again, I'll go back one more time, and that's when I'm really going to worry about the language. And the rhythm, and making sure that I haven't made a mistake, that I've tied up all the loose ends reasonably. It doesn't necessarily mean everything ties up for every reader, because some want it one way and some want it another, and you just have to be true to the story, so it's all plausible at the end of the day."

Ann Patchett:

"The way I work, I spend about a year putting a book together in my head. And when it's all laid out, I start to write. I do 95 percent of my revision in the first 50 pages. I'll throw out the 50 pages over and over and over again. Once I get that straight, then I'm on track, and I don't do a whole lot of revision. By the time I get to the end, I'm finished. I'll brush it up, but it goes off."

I enjoyed reading what other authors have to say about the topic of revision (and hope you did too) even though some of the comments are at odds with my own style. I HATE revision. HATE. IT. I do my best to write the first draft as though it were the last one. Whether or not I succeed is debatable, I'm sure. But that's just how I'm wired. That's not to say I don't make changes once I've finished the manuscript, not at all. I just do my best to keep them to a minimum, because, honestly, I can look at a clean screen and my imagination starts to play. But once I've written a page, a chapter, or a novel, I find it incredibly difficult to go back and "flesh it out" or expand on it.

I have so much to learn.

What about you? Where do you fit in to the revision dialogue? You love it, you hate it? You tolerate it? Talk to us.