"Build it, and they will come"

Jeremy's presentation reminded me of this today.  Jane Vandenburgh talks about the build-it-and-he-will-come dynamic in writing.  I remember chuckling as I read the reference, but it was toward the beginning of the book, so I kind of forgot about it until today when Jeremy referenced it.  Vandenburgh writes:

This is the terrible truth about the book you want to write: The only one who understands what all this entails is you.  And the only way you're going to discover what this is, is by writing it....This may seem hard because it sounds circular in its logic, as if you're being asked to use your hand to draw the picture of the hand holding the pencil that's drawing the hand holding the pencil....A novel has mystical, self-generative properties -- it wants to prove itself to you if you can relax and let it.  (page 11-12)

This is the think I love about Vandenburgh.  She lets you know it's okay that you have absolutely no clue what you're doing and where you're going.  In fact, she tries to convince you that it's better that you have no clue.  I think there was no better time in my life to read this book.  Not only was the book useful for my interim project and the novella that I will be writing, but I think the book has taught me something about life that I wasn't expecting.  I'm going to graduating in a few months, and I'm still not sure what I'll be doing.  Now, I like lists and plans and routines and being able to predict things.  But Vandenburgh's advice about writing made me think about my time at Wofford.  At Wofford I have learned things and experienced things that I could have never imagined as a freshman.  I have built a set of skills and passions throughout my time at Wofford, and I can only hope that the opportunities will just keep coming.


In other news, I've been tweaking my presentation (thanks for your help, everyone!) and working on my paper.  Until I started writing my paper, I didn't realize how much I had learned and done over interim!  Though most of it was reading, I feel like I've learned a lot, and I'm really excited to get started on my novella.

And she brought with her a bunch of dirty rugs

Today I've been working on my paper and thinking about my presentation.  I'm sad interim went by so quickly, but I'm happy that I'll get to continue this project during the semester.  I'm hoping to keep up with this blog throughout the semester as I work on my novella and take the novella workshop.

Here's what I wrote this morning.  I saw a woman walking out near Converse the other day, and as soon as I saw her I thought "I know you.  I've met you before."  Really, I'd never even seen the woman in my life. I felt like I was seeing a ghost or magic, a crack in this dimension.  She was a character I had written.  In fact, she was the grandmother in my novella.  I didn't know it until I saw her walking down the road near Converse, but I'm certain it's her.  And she brought with her a bunch of dirty rugs.


Grandmother looks like a penguin when she walks.  Her arms arm straight and stiff behind her and she leans back as if every step forward is a struggle to keep from staggering backward.  Her whole body sways as she walks, like a pendulum on a grandfather clock.  Ever since she lost her hair, she's wrapped a bandanna around her head.  Today she has on the pink one with little green flowers.  It's fabric from a dress she used to wear back before Lola was born, back when Sandy was young and she was young.  But her teeth are still good, and she's proud of that.  Everyday she wears a long skirt, and everyday she pulls the back of the skirt up between her legs and tucks it in the front of her waistband.  Lola always asked her why she didn't just wear pants.  The way she wore her skirts made her look like she had on a big diaper.  Grandmother would always laugh and wink and say "Maybe I do."

Grandmother thought the remedy for everything was beating the rugs.  Lola was convinced it was Grandmother's way of forcing her to get the chore done.  But she couldn't deny the fact that she always felt better when the sun went down and all the dust that was in the rugs was now in her hair and stuck to her arms and lungs.

The morning after Clayton was in the accident, Lola woke up to find all the rugs hanging over the chain link fence in the backyard.  Lola never knew how Grandmother was able to pick up all those rugs by herself, much less sling them over the fence, but she often prayed for the day she'd be too weak to make it out the door with one of them.

Grandmother was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs with a broom.  Usually, Grandmother didn't help, but that morning, she brought an old mop out and beat those rugs until Lola feared she might pass out.  The dirt and dust flew around them.  Lola's whole body hurt.  With every swing of the broom, she thought she wouldn't be able to do it again.  Then she'd be rearing back to bring it down again.  Grandmother started coughing, but she didn't stop.  That's when Lola knew how bad things were.  She knew Clayton must be in trouble.

How to build a runabout

Vandenburgh says research is a way of stalling, an excuse for not writing.  She writes:

Bodega? In California, where I live, a bodega actually means something that more approximates storeroom.  Around here, in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood, the little store on the corner is more likely the tienda; the open-air market's a mercado.  The bodega?  It's a wine bar in Europe, while in the big cities of the East Coast, only the corner grocery, the bodega, would hold a character like GiGi.  Why do I mention this?  Because it's so very easy to get sidetracked as you enter the House of Plot in all these writerly diversions, whereby you allow your story to be linguistically hijacked, so you can stop doing what you're doing (which is being confused) and go do a little research.  It's all so very interesting!  It's also stalling.  We stall because we're afraid to commit to the upward trudge, to confront the vast amounts of darkness at the top of the stairs, to take this darkness in, to admit that it pertains to us, to admit the first thing about the monumentality of what we don't know, that we cannot find out by using conventional research methods.  page 63-64

This may be the historian in me talking, but I don't quite agree with her here.  I find research inspiring and helpful when I get stuck.  Research can create characters, situations, and even worlds that you could never imagine otherwise.  I often find myself researching animals, birds, insects.  I like what they can say about people.  I guess her main point, though is to not get so caught up in research that you forget to write.

That being said, I've been researching boat building today.

A big part of my novella is going to revolve around building a runabout.  I've never built a boat before.  Actually, I've never really built anything.  I don't know where the idea for the runabout came from.  But I'm sure it has something to do with watching my father build Volkswagen engines when I was younger.  My father always has a project, so, naturally, the father in my novella is going to have a project that his daughter, the main character, is going to become interested in.

Though I don't want to get too technical in my novella, I would like to sound like I know what I'm talking about.  I've been trying to familiarize myself with the basics, such as framing, planking, battens, jigs, and the technical terms for boat parts.  Here are some websites that I've found particularly interesting:

http://www.glen-l.com/designs/hankinson/buildingmahogrunabouts.html
http://www.bronkalla.com/layout.html
http://intheboatshed.com/index.php?option=com_glossary&Itemid=67
http://www.thelittleboatshop.com/rascalrunabout.html

The wonderful thing about writing...and interim

Greetings from Kiawah Island! Yesterday afternoon my mom called and said I should join her at Kiawah Island, where she's representing ETV at the English Teachers Conference.  I packed up my bag and was on the road within the hour.  I've been walking on the beach, reading, and writing all day.  It's nice to get away from Spartanburg for a little while.

Silly me! You can be a academic and creative writer at the same time!

Somewhere in my past, I was told that creative writers aren't good academic writers.  Creative writing is emotional, imaginative, exciting.  Academic writing is dull, tedious, fact-driven.  I believed this so much that I was terrible at writing academic papers throughout high school.  Self-fulfilling prophecy is a tricky little thing.  Then, in my freshman Humanities class, I read Rewriting by Joseph Harris, and I could suddenly write academically.  I usually don't like to use words like "suddenly," but it's appropriate and necessary in this case.  Rewriting taught me to write a college essay overnight.  Okay, maybe a semester, but that's still pretty fast.  I've learned many things since then about academic writing, and I still have much to learn, but that book talked about writing in a way I could understand.

Over the past four years, I've developed a process for writing academic essays.  I thought most of that process stemmed from what I learned in my Humanities class, but now I'm beginning to think differently.  I begin writing an academic essay with quotes that I find interesting or that I'm puzzled by.  I then write everything that comes to mind when I read each quote.  Once I've done this with about five or six quotes, I begin to find a pattern, a focus, an argument, the thing that I'm interested in.  This is my prewriting, my shitty first draft.  Only then do I start organizing my thoughts, making them more complex.  Finally, I can write topic sentences and my thesis.  This process has always been exciting and fun for me, not dull and tedious (most of the time, at least).

After reading Jane Vanderburgh's chapter about Plot, something clicked in my mind.  Creative writing and academic writing aren't that different at all!  Why had it taken me so long to realize this?!  Sure, fiction and essays each have their own set of challenges and rewards, but the process - the root - isn't that different -- at least for me.  Vanderburgh talks about Story the way I think about beginning an academic paper with quotes.  You start with a bunch of seemingly random episodes that you know will somehow come together and reveal something to you.  Once you've got the story, you can start thinking about Plot.  Plot has to do with structure, with emphasis and meaning.  Vanderburgh writes:

The job of your novel's plot is to show us -- by way of demonstration rather than by pointing out and shouting -- this echoic, repetitive, gathering sense by which we gradually move toward an understanding of significance.  (page 76)

Here, Vanderburgh could be talking about the second step of my academic writing process.  It's the moment when I start to understand what my argument is going to be; I start forming more complex ideas, but the outcome -- the thesis -- is still unknown.  Vanderburgh continues, "Story tells us what happens, while plot tells us what we're to make of these events" (page 76).  Here, she could be talking about finding the thesis, discovering the real argument.  This process is enlightening and frustrating, and I often find myself thinking "this is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life."  But the thesis is always there, waiting almost.  Sometimes I have to rewrite my whole paper, find new quotes to support the thesis that I've discovered, but it's different than the first time because I have direction.

I think that this connection between creative and academic writing has always been evident to my subconscious, it just took awhile for me to say it out loud and believe it.

So what, right?

Well, I think that this has made the big scary monster called Plot a lot less scary.  One the first day of short story workshop last semester, Professor Cox asked us what we thought we were good at and what we thought we were bad at in terms of writing.  I said I was most definitely bad at plot.  The thing about plot is that it just seems so darn seamless and easy when you read a book.  When I read novels or short stories, I can't ever imagine creating those situations, those worlds.  When I start a story, I'm always worried about plot right off the bat.  My mind is blank, frozen in panic.  At some point, I get frustrated and just focus on the characters or the setting and eventually the plot comes sneaking onto the page without me realizing it.  This is exactly what Vanderburgh is talking about when she talks about Story and Plot.  I have to let the story show me the plot, just like I have to let my thoughts of individual quotes show me my thesis.

So no more excuses, academics! You can write creatively, too!

Fairy God Witches

Today, I started The Architecture of the Novel: A Writer's Handbook by Jane Vandenburgh.  Even though I'm only about 50 pages into it at this point, I wish I had read it the first week of interim.  In the forward, Anne Lamott says "This book is going to ruin your excuses, and your tendency to procrastinate" (page xiv).  I think this - excuses, procrastination - is what I've been struggling with most during interim.  Every morning I find myself distracted by anything that isn't my computer and the blinking cursor.  I've cleaned out the refrigerator, the pantry; I've even organized my closet.  I've had to force myself to sit down and wait for the moment to come when I forget that I'm sitting down at all.  Of course, I didn't quite believe Lamott when she said Vandenburgh was going to make me want to sit down and write.  But by page 6 I was only half-way reading the words on the page.  The other half of my brain was thinking, escaping, occasionally returning to the page in front of me only to flint off again into the realm of inspiration.  I think Vandenburgh would agree with Goldberg's idea that "only writing does writing."  She writes:

We seem to encounter our characters - their speech, their looks, their complex and interesting situations - instead of inventing them: The good-time girl living upstairs from the bodega already has her own story, and this entire story comes to us expressing an entire world of narrative context (page 6).

Reading this, I thought about the characters of my novella naturally for one of the first times this January.  For the first time, I wasn't panicked at the thought of having to write a novella about...something.  Somewhere, the story already exists, the story is already happening, has already happened.  This thought freed me from the panic, and I felt like I could actually write.

Vandenburgh breaks writing up into three elements: Plot, Story, and the Mechanics of Narrative Time.  Writers rely upon these "three weird sisters who crouch together over the pot of narrative, whispering as they concoct the future, making it up out of a pinch of this and a pound of that" (page 7).  Plot is the glass, Story is the water in the glass.  That is, "Plot has in its bag of tricks all the ways we manipulate narrative time: flashback, flash-forward, expositions, digression, backstory, narrative pauses, the bridges and ellipses" (page 273).  The story, on the other hand, forgets about language and structure and beginnings and ends and all things plot.  A story must be believed in and become a reality before anything else can happen.  The mechanics of narrative time "make certain that all parts of the novel hang together and remain coherently united" (page 8).

Vandenburgh says begin a novel by writing the story, which means you have to begin by writing scenes or episodes.  You write one scene "that lies somewhere in the neighborhood of what might turn out to be your storyline" (page 28).  Then you write another scene.  Each of these scenes must be active, present; they occur for the sole reason to tell us that something is just about to happen.  The key to story is to remember to offer "no opinions, no asides, no digressions or tangents, and allow no character to think long thoughts, since thinking great long thoughts almost always goes against a story's need to its next piece of action, and is usually a way of trying to import background" (page 47).  Another key is to not reread what you've written, because you might start to rewrite and worry about plot.

You seek always to create intimacy, to get deeper in scene, to go further, to sense risk, to feel an ever-stronger sense of narrative immediacy, so you borrow directly into narrative time to see for yourself what your story holds.  There will always be a reason your story has asked you here, as the scene contains something it needs for you to find (page 53).

Once you've written down scene after scene after scene, you have a provisional draft.  Only after you have a provisional draft can you begin thinking about your novel in terms of plot.

Syntax: an exercise

Try this. Take one of your most boring pieces of writing and choose from it three or four consecutive lines or sentences and write them at the top of a blank piece of paper.


My roommate is asleep on the couch with her dog and my feet are cold even though I just turned on the heat.  I would put on socks, but my roommate is sleeping on them.


See each one of those words simply as wooden blocks, all the same size and color....Now for about a third of the page scramble them up as though you were just moving wooden blocks around.  Don't try to make sense of what you write down.


Roommate couch dog turned socks roommate them sleeping cold though even on my would socks heat couch with her on but dog on even are and though just heat roommate my asleep is I put but them I is the couch dog are though I cold feet on roommate my turned heat feet but sleeping is my would even are cold her the dog asleep dog couch with I socks sleeping them cold sleeping and are though turned is asleep even I heat


Now, if you would like, arbitrarily put in a few periods, a question mark, maybe an exclamation point, colons, or semicolons.  Do all this without thinking, without trying to make any sense.


Roommate couch dog turned socks. Roommate them sleeping, cold though even on my would socks heat couch! With her on but dog on even are and though. Just heat, roommate my asleep is I put but them I is. The couch dog are though I cold feet? On roommate my turned heat feet. But sleeping is my would even, are cold her the dog asleep, dog couch with I. Socks sleeping them cold sleeping and are: though turned is asleep even I heat?


Now read it aloud as though it were saying something.  Your voice should have inflection and expression.  You might try reading it in an angry voice, an exuberant, sad, whining, petulant, or demanding voice, to help you get into it.


The moral of the story:


We think in sentences, and the way we think is the way we see.  If we think in the structure subject/verb/direct object, then that is how we form our world.  By cracking open that syntax, we release energy and are able to see the world afresh and from a new angle....Though "I eat an artichoke" sounds sensible and people will think you are sane, you now know that behind that syntax structure, the artichoke happens to also be eating you and changing you forever, especially if you dip it in garlic-butter sauce and if you totally let the artichoke leaf taste your tongue!  The more you are aware of the syntax you move, see, and write in, the better control you have and the more you can step out of it when you need to.  Actually, by breaking open syntax, you often get closer to the truth of what you need to say.  Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones, pages 77-80.

"We wake up in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it" or why I write

This week I've been reading Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones.  Goldberg writes because she would die if she didn't.  For her, writing is religious, awkward, present, physical.  Writing is something that you come to with your whole body, not just your imagination or mind.  When you write, you should "let your whole body touch the river you are writing about, so if you call it yellow or stupid or slow, all of you is feeling it" (59).  Throughout the book, Goldberg reminds you that "writing does writing."  The writer disappears and simply transcribes thoughts and ideas.

So much of Writing Down the Bones has to do with the necessity of writing.  Writing forces you to "deal with your whole life" (4).  It teaches you to be present, patient, vulnerable.  It teaches you to think big enough to let people eat cars.  It allows you to know everything. It lets you be the wing of the crow that left and will not return.Writing means you get to live everything twice.  You listen.  You say "we have lived; our moments are important."

This made me think about why I write.  What is it about writing that makes me want to keep writing?  I think a lot of it has to do with discovery.  For me, writing is like discovering the Niagara Falls for the first time.  I begin by walking through the woods.  At first I only notice the things that are familiar to me: the pine trees, the squirrels, the smell of rotting leaves, the crows, the brownness and the greenness and the greyness of it all.  I want to turn around, find another path that will lead to something exciting.  I take a break and I eat and I begin walking again.  Then I slowly start to hear rushing water, but I don't know where it's coming from.  It's faint and it takes me awhile to understand that I'm hearing rushing water.  And suddenly, I'm standing at the Niagara Falls, and I can't hear or think.  I begin to realize something about myself or the world or death or life or leaving.

I write about family and loss, and mostly families dealing with loss.  So when I discover something, it's not profound or life-changing or even significant.  I discover why the father has to leave at the end, or why the woman finally let's go of her dead child, or why the son gives in and lets his father believe that his mother is still alive.  But I also, and perhaps more importantly, discover the importance of birds, of dusting crumbs off a table, of misplacing the phone, of a person's yard.  For me, it's not that I would die if I didn't write.  I just wouldn't be amazed by all the small routine things we do everyday, and I really like being amazed.

Why do I even try?

Excerpt from The Unvanquished by William Faulkner

"I thought it was late," I said.  "You haven't been to bed even.  Have you?"
"No," she said.  "I've quit sleeping."
"Quit sleeping?" I said.  "Why?"
She looked at me.  I was as tall as she was, we couldn't see one another's faces: it was just her head with the short jagged hair like she had cut it herself without bothering about a mirror, and her neck that had got thin and hard like her hands since Granny and I were here before.  "I am keeping the dog quiet," she said.  
"A dog?" I said.  "I haven't seen any dog."
"No.  It's quiet now," she said.  "It doesn't bother anybody anymore now.  I just have to show it the stick now and then."  She was looking at me.  "Why not stay awake now?  Who wants to sleep now, with so much happening, so much to see?  Living used to be dull, you see.  Stupid.  You lived in the same house your father was born in and your father's sons and daughters had the sons and daughters of the same negro slaves to nurse and coddle, and then you grew up and you fell in love with your acceptable young man and in time you would marry him, in your mother's wedding gown perhaps and with the same silver for presents she had received, and then you settled down forever more while your husband got children on your body for you to feed and bathe and dress until they grew up too; and then you and your husband died quietly and were buried together maybe on a summer afternoon just before suppertime.  Stupid, you see.  But now you can see for yourself how it is, it's fine now; you don't have to worry now about the house and the silver because they get burned up and carried away, and you don't have to worry about the negroes because they tramp the roads all night waiting for a chance to drown in homemade Jordan, and you don't have to worry about getting children on your body to bathe and feed and change because the young men can ride away and get killed in the fine battles and you don't even have to sleep alone, you don't even have to sleep at all and so all you have to do is show the stick to the dog now and then and say Thank God for nothing."

"Only write what you know"

In high school, I was told to only write what I know.  I guess this was another way of saying "only write what is real."  I always found this annoying but also believed that it was true, and I repeated it often.  It was annoying because my childhood turned out to be boring compared to the childhoods of my peers.  The sole tragedy in my life was when we had to put the dog to sleep.  Everyone else had divorced parents or an eating disorder or murdered fathers.  They might have had better source material, but I had a grandfather whose motto was "never let the truth get in the way of a good story."  So, instead of writing about taking the dog to the vet and petting its head while the vet injected it with drugs, I wrote about how my father ran over the dog and how much I hated him for it.  I killed a lot of animals in stories during high school, because I knew what it was like for an animal to die, and people seemed to like those stories.

By the time I got to college, people started saying "write what you don't know."  Someone once described this to me as being a hunter instead of a Kamikaze pilot.  Writers who pull solely from their own experience will eventually run out of things to write about or will write about the same things over and over.  On the other hand, writers who research and write about things that they don't know about will have an abundance of writing material.  I'm not sure if this is true, but it has stuck with me over the years.

Over the past year, I have been writing about neither what I know nor what I don't know.  I have been writing about what I never want to know.  My characters are in situations I never want to be in, they say things I never want to say, they make decisions I never want to make.  I don't do this knowingly; I only realized it when reading over what I've written.  With fear, there is always something at stake, and there always has to be something at stake for your characters.  At least that's what I've been told.

Living with ladybugs

Write about your childhood….Exploring and understanding your childhood will give you the ability to empathize, and that understanding and empathy will teach you to write with intelligence and insight and compassion....So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work.  Write straight into the emotional center of things.  Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, pages 225-226.

I read this at the end of last week, and it has stuck with me over the weekend.  It’s something every writing teacher has told me, in one way or another.  It’s hard to dig into your emotional center, though.  I remember when I first started writing I chose to write about things that I could name, things that I understood about my childhood.  I wrote about growing up in a Volkswagon bus and the summers I spent at the lake cabin.  One day, I read over the things that I had written, and I realized I was writing about my father; he was always at the center and I hadn’t even been aware of it.  I still don’t know why I always write about my father.  We have a good relationship.  But I feel like he is the key to my emotional center. 

Sometimes writing about my family feels like betrayal.  Actually, writing about my family always feels like betrayal, even when I write about the good things.  This never stops me, though.  Apparently, this is not a unique feeling.  Lamott refers to this feeling, and she included Sharon Old’s poem “I Go Back to May 1937” in her book, and I can’t help but post it here.  It is a wonderful poem.

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, 
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the 
red tiles glinting like bent 
plates of blood behind his head, I 
see my mother with a few light books at her hip 
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the 
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its 
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, 
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop, 
don't do it--she's the wrong woman, 
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things 
you cannot imagine you would ever do, 
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of, 
you are going to want to die. I want to go 
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body, 
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I 
take them up like the male and female 
paper dolls and bang them together 
at the hips like chips of flint as if to 
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Often, the memories I write about seem to come out of nowhere, and I’m not even sure if they ever even happened.  This happened this morning when I set out to write about how my father used to catch lizards, rub their bellies until they fell asleep, and then would clamp them onto my ears as if they were earrings.  I didn’t even get to the lizards, though.  Instead, I found myself writing about the ladybugs that would infest our house every fall.

Childhood memory

My sister and I spent our childhood outside.  Growing up, we had a big yard with a fig tree and a plum tree and some apple trees that produced inedible apples.  The fig tree was a nice fort in the summer.  We were the kind of kids who ate sand and acorns and made necklaces out of grass and flowers.  We had pet turtles and pet lizards, and we dug up rolly pollies and kept them in gallon buckets.  We were, and still are, at the age when we were scared of bumblebees but didn’t want to admit it to each other.  I don’t know where a child’s fear of insects comes from.  We lived in a house full of spiders and roaches and ladybugs.  The house was old and creaky and drafty.  Our mother had Buddhist tendencies, so we didn’t kill bugs or snakes.  We didn’t even kill the rabid raccoon that lurked around our road one summer.  We set up a trap out by the woods and prayed the dog didn’t get bit.  If we absolutely couldn’t stand the company of a particular spider that made itself at home in the corner of the ceiling above our bed, we would catch it in a jar and throw it out the window.  In the fall, our house would fill with ladybugs.  You could see them flying toward the windows in swarms at any hour of the day.  Any other family would probably call it a problem, but my mother welcomed them.  Ladybugs were the one critter that I didn’t mind crawling in my hair.  I didn’t scream when I found one lost in my bed sheets.  They were cute, I suppose, and harmless.  They were pets for our Barbie dolls. 

I remember one time watching a ladybug crawl over my father’s face while he was sleeping on the couch in his office.  I had gone in there looking for the dog or my sister or a piece of paper.  I felt like I always needed an excuse to go in there.  When I found him sleeping I suddenly needed him for something, anything.  It’s like that when you’re a kid, and maybe even more so when you’re an adult.  I was tiptoeing over to wake him, to tell him I was hungry and wanted a snack, when I saw the ladybug come out from behind his ear.  I knelt down beside the couch, careful not to breathe too hard on my father’s face.  The ladybug crawled along his hairline and down around his eyebrow.  I imagined I was the ladybug, exploring the terrain of my father’s face.  Back then, my father was a forester, so I knew what a topographic map looked like.  I imagined his face as lines and circles.  I moved into the valley of his closed eye, and up the mountain of his nose.  I followed the trail of the ladybug took across my father’s with my finger across my own face.  I wondered what parts of me came from my father.  The ladybug moved across his mouth, and I remember being scared it would disappear into the cave of his parted lips.  It was scared, too; I could tell by the way it kept turning back every time it almost slipped into the darkness.  It occurred to me that my father might lick is lips and swallow the ladybug by accident, so I reached to brush it away without thinking.  My father woke, and I told him I was hungry.  The ladybug vanished into the couch.

Come winter, our windowsills were mass ladybug graves.  We were never disturbed by the sudden deaths of our buggy friends.  Their deaths were just as much a part of our lives as their constant and mindless fluttering against the lamp shades.  Mother would come around with a vacuum and suck up all the dried out carcasses.  My sister and I would follow her into each room.  It was always a time to sigh and shrug at the inevitable cycle of life.  We’d find the dead bugs in corners and behind the furniture for the rest of the year.  I guess it was like finding a sock you thought the dryer had eaten.  We would sweep them up into a dustpan and sprinkle them across the yard, waiting for the fall.  

Next time, pee at the Texaco

Today I got a bit sidetracked from what I started out to do this morning.  The plan was to write some, read some of The Man Who Gave Up His Name, and start Writing Down the Bones.  Instead, I read George Singleton's Pep Talks, Warnings, & Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers from cover to cover.  George was one of my writing teachers in high school, so most of the advice in the book was familiar and comforting.  I'm glad I reread the book, though, because I was reminded of one of the most important aspects of writing.

Pep Talk No. 67: NEXT TIME, PEE AT THE TEXACO

I fear that there's not enough danger in everyday life.  I'm not talking about gang-related violence and how the ease of buying handguns in America causes everyday danger.  I'm talking about public restrooms.  In the old days, there weren't fast-food restaurants at every intersection on the highway.  In the old days, if a traveler had to use the restroom, he had to go into grimy, strange Texaco and Gulf stations or roadside rest areas.  There was always graffiti in these places that read something like "Want to have a good time?  Meet me here at 4:30."  Then the traveler would look at his watch and see that it was 4:28 or thereabouts.  


Such anxiety and tension causes good fiction.  It's a different kind of tension than when the automatic hand dryer is broken.  So my advice for beginning writers is to pee in dangerous places, always.  Then give your characters that feeling of eminent danger.


This is perhaps the most hilarious and practical advice I've ever received about writing.  So much of writing is introverted and inexplicable.  The process is different for each person, and different things work for different writers.  But I'm not sure anyone could deny the effectiveness of this bit of advice.  Almost any writing teacher will tell you tension and conflict are the most important elements.  But emotions are what make tension and conflict believable and real for the reader.  Thanks, George, for the reminder.

Other bits of wisdom from George:

Pep Talk No. 12: THE ARC OF A SHOULDER


A good story tells us about the shoulder, the dislocated shoulder, the shoulder repaired, and if it's stronger or weaker after the entire ordeal.  Maybe the shoulder now feels more confident about itself.  Maybe it has incredible powers.  Maybe it refuses to move again -- out of guilt, fear, or obsession.


Pep Talk No. 42: THERE'S MORE THAN DNA ON THOSE BUTTS


One cigarette butt in an ashtray means that someone didn't find the setting all that interesting.  But here's the sign of conflict: a cigarette butt smoked down to the filter, alongside a lipstick-ringed cigarette filter that's been stamped out two puffs after being lighted.


An overflowing ashtray is disgusting, even to the most committed smokers.


Pep Talk No. 47: ON POTHOLES


A newly paved road winding through the country is not a story.  A road with a good pothole makes it a story.  A slew of potholes -- kind of like poking that fire ant mount with a stick -- makes it a novel.  Way too many potholes and you have an undrivable road and an uncontrollable novel.


Let's hope I can keep my potholes under control.

School Lunches

...taking short assignments and then producing really shitty first drafts of these assignments can yield a bounty of detailed memory, raw material, and strange characters lurking in the shadows.  So: sometimes when a student calls and is mewling and puking about the hopelessness of trying to put words down on paper, I ask him or her to tell me about school lunches.  Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, page 33.


I decided to write about school lunches today.  Here's what I wrote:

School Lunches

In high school, I took my lunch to school in a dented metal Wizard of Oz lunchbox.  I’d set the lunchbox in my lap and pull my lunch out, one item at a time.  I was the only person at my lunch table – the only one in my group of friends – who brought her lunch to school.  Everyone else paid to eat in the cafeteria.  My mom packed my lunch every morning – pimento cheese sandwich on wheat bread, a cup of applesauce, a slice of carrot cake, a napkin wrapped around a spoon.  My mom always drew an eyeball, a heart, and the letter “U” on the napkin.  I was always proud of that note, and I laid the napkin out flat so everyone at the table could see.  Looking back, I guess that wasn’t the nicest thing to do.  One guy’s parents were going through a divorce, another had been kicked out of his house and was living on a friend’s sofa, my best friend’s dad had just lost his job.

I would sometimes steal fries from the person sitting across from me.  It was a game I played with myself.  I would wait for the moment when the person was looking right at me, and I’d take their fries and they wouldn’t even notice.  It wasn’t that I wished my mom had packed fries in my lunchbox or that I was still hungry.  I just liked seeing what I could get away with while people were looking right at me.  They often noticed, but you’d be surprised at how many times they didn’t.

The few times someone asked why I didn’t eat the cafeteria food, I said it was healthier to eat a lunch from home.  I didn’t tell them, but it was also cheaper to eat a lunch from home.  They weren’t the kind of people who would know that, though.  They had summer homes and beautiful hair.  I bought my clothes at Wal-Mart and my lunch box was from a thrift store.  I didn’t want them to think I was rich – it’s not something I’ve ever pretended – but I didn’t want them to look from my pimento cheese sandwich to their fixed up hamburger and say “Want to split it?  I’m not that hungry anyway” or “Hey, I’ve got a few extra bucks left in my account this month, want anything?”  They were the kind of friends who would do that, and I was the kind of friend who didn’t want them to.  

Now, who knows if any of this is usable material?  There's no way to tell until you've got it all down, and then there might be one sentence or one character or one theme that you end up using.  Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, page 37.

What I've posted here is only my school lunch experience during high school - particularly 9th and 10th grades.  I could write pages and pages about school lunches - the warm, damp trays, the floppy pizza, the impossibly complicated milk cartons that left fuzz in your mouth, the boy with the mullet who got a bloody nose that dripped all in his creamed corn before he realized it.  I've never written about school lunches before, but it seems to be a fruitful place to go to for inspiration.  

Describe a character's bedroom

I decided to post what I wrote this morning!  The prompt was to describe a character's bedroom.  Lamott suggested this as a way to make characters more real for the writer.  Even if the description doesn't fit into the final draft, it is good to know where a certain character goes at the end of the day.  Here, I've started to describe the bedroom of the main character of my novella.  Her name is Lola, and she lives with her grandmother.  Her mother died when she was young, her father doesn't come around much, and her brother has gone to prison.  I guess the only other thing you need to know is that her and her father started building a boat together the last time he came home.

Lola's bedroom

Lola’s bedroom had become a shrine to the people who’d left her.  She did not have a single picture in her room.  She’d taken them all down five years earlier when she realized that her mother would look nothing like the picture if she were still alive.  She was more interested in the things people touched, the things they cared for, the things that they wanted to survive in the world without them or because of them. 

Her mother’s cactus sat on the windowsill in a terracotta pot.  Come winter, she’d have to transfer it to a larger pot because it had grown so much during the spring and summer.  In the months before her death, Lola’s mother had taught her how to care for the plant, as if she knew she wasn’t going to make it to the summer.  Her mother showed her how to fill the plate under the pot with rain water once every two weeks, and told her she needed to keep the plate dry on the days between watering.  Her mother told her to never water the cactus in winter, even if it shrunk and shriveled up, because it was resting.  “Even if it breaks your heart and you think it’s going to die,” she’d said, brushing the hair out of Lola’s eyes.  “It will let you know when it’s ready to be fed.  When the weather warms up, start looking for growth.  It’ll be sure you know when to water it.  You just have to be patient.”  Lola had been taking care of her mother’s cactus for seven years.  Hairy buds were starting to form on the plant, and in a few days the cactus would bloom.  The flowers were deep purple with dusty yellow pollen at the center.  On the third day of the blooms, Lola would cut them and take them to her mother’s grave so she wouldn’t have to watch them die.  Pretty soon, the winter would come and the plant would rest and Lola would want to rest with it.

Over her bed, Lola had hung the board of wood her father had written “Freedom” on over and over again, in different handwriting, different sizes, different colors.  They’d decided to name the runabout “Freedom,” so he’d practiced writing the word on a scrap piece of wood to see what they liked best.  He’d written the word eleven times on the wood in green, gold, black, and red.  They’d decided on green block letters outlined in black.  Lola had liked the red and her father had liked the gold, so they’d decided to go with neither, just to make it fair.  Her father left before they could actually write it on the boat, so Lola had written the word herself.  She wrote it in cursive with red paint, and once the red paint had dried, she outlined it with gold.  She had thought about mounting the board that now hung over her bed on the back of the boat, but she thought she might burn it instead.  When she couldn’t bring herself to throw it in the fire, she hung it over her bed.

After her brother went to prison, she’d moved all his records into her room.  They were stacked up on her desk, and she listened to a different one every day.  She thought she’d be listening to Led Zeppelin forever, and then one day she picked out a Bob Dylan album and it’d been in her CD player for two months.  It had stood out to her because the case was broken and the little booklet was falling apart.  Her brother must have loved that album.  She turned it on after dinner every night and would listen to it all the way through before falling asleep. 

I had to research cactus care for this exercise:

http://windowsillcactus.com/wc_echinopsis.shtml

http://www.cssainc.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=314

A more concrete plan

Yesterday I went shopping for books, so I now have a better idea of what exactly I'm going to do over interim.  Here's a tentative plan:

Week 1: Read Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird.  Read Revenge, a novella by Jim Harrison.  Complete a writing exercise everyday.

Week 2: Read Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.  Read The Man Who Gave Up His Name, a novella by Jim Harrison.  Complete a writing exercise everyday.

Week 3: Read Architecture of the Novel by Jane Vandenburgh.  Read Legends of the Fall, a novella by Jim Harrison.  Complete a writing exercise everyday.

Week 4: Finish my presentation and final paper.

I will also be thinking about my own novella as I read and write and will research and write scenes as I think of them.

Advice from John Irving: start at the end?

I grew up going to the library every Monday while my sister was at band practice.  I got to know a lot of the librarians during those morning visits. We'd talk about books, and they'd give me suggestions of books to read.  I remember one librarian who always read the last paragraph of a book first.  She said it made the plot more fascinating.  As she read, she'd be wondering how a certain moment or chapter moved her closer to that last paragraph, and she'd note when certain aspects of the last paragraph suddenly made sense.  When she told me this, I was a devout believer in starting a book with no expectations.  I even refused to read the summary on the back of the book.  The few times I did read the last paragraph before starting the book, I felt as if I were betraying someone, as if I were keeping some great secret from someone.  

I think the librarian and John Irving were talking about the same thing, just from different perspectives.  John Irving's advice also reminded me of something Arthur Golden told my short story class when he visited Wofford last semester.  We had read Chekhov's "Anyuta," and Golden asked us why it was important for us to know that Klotchkov was a medical student in his third year.  In other words, he wanted to know what that bit of information had to do with the plot of the story.  Golden explained, as many other people have explained to me over the years, that every character and every detail needs to move the story forward.  So, I guess knowing how a story will end makes it a little easier to understand what details are necessary to move the plot forward.

Anne Lamott talks about plot in Bird by Bird, but I'm not sure she'd agree with Irving's process.  She talks about character, dialogue, and setting, which create plot.  I thought it was interesting that she had a chapter called "Plot" in which she talks solely about character development and a chapter called "Characters" in which she talks solely about plot.  She says "Don't worry about plot.  Worry about characters" (page 54) because plot grows out of characters.  She recommends that you don't fix too hard on how your story will end up, but "fix instead on who your people are and how they feel toward one another, what they say, how they smell, whom they fear" (page 61).  Lamott completely believes in the organic, uncontrollable nature of writing.  She believes in being an observer who listens and watches her characters.  To her, writing is a vivid and continuous dream, and the ending is only slowly realized.  And when we reach the ending, "we need to feel that it was inevitable, that even though we may be amazed, it feels absolutely right, that of course things would come to this, of course they would shake down in this way" (page 61).

Of course, there is no right or wrong way to go about writing something.  Perhaps John Irving and Anne Lamott's advice isn't that different after all.  They both start with a seed of something, what Lamott calls the image inside a one-inch picture frame.  The idea is to start writing.  And I guess you never know how a story is going to begin anyway.  The first sentence you write down might, after many drafts, end up being the last sentence of your novel.

THE writing process

I began writing in high school because I read a classmate's poem that was posted on a bulletin board in the hall and thought "I can do that."  That night I wrote my first poem, and it was terrifying.  And I don't mean the poem (I don't actually remember the poem, but I'm sure I'll find it in a shoe box one day and simultaneously cringe and smile).  The process of writing the poem was what horrified me.  I had never felt so lost and panicked in my life. I wanted to cry.  I knew what I wanted to say, but, for some reason, I couldn't say it.  I suddenly learned the meaning of words I'd been saying my whole life.  It was like learning to speak all over again.  Ever since that day, I've been trying to master the writing process.  That is, I've been writing and writing and writing so that one day the words will just flow out of me and be brilliant.

By the time I realized that the words will never just flow out of me and be brilliant, it wasn't a surprise.  THE writing process doesn't exist, not for me at least.  Unless THE writing process is staring blankly at the walls while you make a list of all the things you have to do, and, after a couple of hours, your write two paragraphs you know you will erase the next day.  As Anne Lamott says in her book Bird by Bird, writing is "about as easy and pleasurable as bathing a cat" (page 3).  I do not mean to make writing seem like torture, though.  Once I find that thing I'm meant to be writing, it is the most wonderful feeling in the world.  I'd still like to find a writing strategy to make that wonderful feeling happen a bit sooner in the process, though.

So, over interim, I'm going to be reading books on writing in order to see what has worked for other writers.  I'm starting with Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.  I started it today, and it's one of the most relatable books on writing I've ever read.  Two bits of advice in particular stood out to me, and I'm going to try to implement them during interim.

(1) "You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day.  This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively" (page 6).  I write at random times -- usually in the middle of the night when I can't sleep or in the car when I'm bored (I don't actually write in the car, but I leave myself voice mails so I can write my ideas down when I get home).  This January, I'm going to try to sit down every morning for a couple of hours and write.  Hopefully, I'll get in the habit of writing every day at the same time, and slowly writing might not be so painstaking at first.

(2) Lamott also talks about writing shitty first drafts and letting go of perfectionism.  Over the past couple of semesters, I've been trying to overcome my perfectionist tendencies.  Lamott suggests writing a horrendous first draft that just gets the words on the page.  In order to do this, you have to let go of your desire to edit and, to a certain degree, even to think.  She calls this the "child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later" (page 22). This will be a real challenge for me, but I'm going to give it a shot because I think it will help me get started and might inspire me to write things I wouldn't write otherwise.  But don't worry, I won't be posting any shitty first drafts to my blog.  They are for my eyes only.