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.