The Curve

There are some things that I find it impossible to do if I think about the fact that I’m doing them.

Usually they’re things that involve some kind of muscle memory. When I was skiing all the time there were days where I felt transformed, like I was flying and I was completely present and in the moment, in that zone – unless I started to think about what I was physically doing.

Getting to the point where skiing was fun meant that I had to endure a few seasons where I was awkward, frequently frustrated and often terrified. I had to get past that learning curve so I could finally enjoy the sensation of that controlled fall through space.

Writing feels that way: reason #8,752 for writing often, even when the writing sucks.

A couple of things that flitted into my consciousness over the last couple of days scared me a little. I read some blog posts that focused on specific craft ideas. It wasn’t new information. It was the kind stuff I’ve read about many times and yet when I thought about how or if I was using these techniques, I came up blank.

I don’t know.

Yet?

The reason I was scared was because I realized that the snippets of work I might feel bold enough to think have the potential to be good are the snippets that come to me when I’m in the zone. As soon as I become conscious of using words to a certain effect, it becomes obvious and the work feels contrived.

When I revise, I become more aware of sharpening certain images or ideas to reinforce what I’m trying to convey. I know that when others critique my work, they sometimes point out the effectiveness (or not) of something I’ve done and I’ll realize they’re right even though I didn’t consciously include that word or that image or that description. Oh yeah, I meant to do that.

I have a theory that the reason that Scott’s new abstract work feels so powerful is because a good abstract painting requires that the painter have a mastery of all the skills needed to do a traditional, representational painting, only he has to intuit his way through the abstract. He knows if the color harmonies are correct and if the composition is balanced because he has an innate understanding of those concepts.

If we have an underlying appreciation of the visual arts, we know the painting works when we look at it, but we don’t know why.

Books on writing craft don’t talk much about the importance of years of experience in writing, but perhaps there’s a reason for that. We want things that give us results now and there’s no shortcut to practice and experience. Perhaps it would help us to set more realistic expectations and motivate us to write more and work harder to get good at what we do if we thought of writing as a long apprenticeship. Actually, that's helpful to me, but I know it's not the path for everyone.

There are plenty of people who can write well enough to get a book published, and if that’s the writer’s goal, there’s nothing wrong with that.

I’m talking about writing well. I’m talking about my vain wish to have a reader touched by my words or to have a reader thinking about my characters even when he’s not reading the book. I’m talking about a reader losing himself in the work and entering John Gardner’s fictive dream. I keep remembering a scene from the movie, Amadeus and a monologue that the Salieri character delivers:

“While my father prayed earnestly to God to protect commerce, I would offer up secretly the proudest prayer a boy could think of: Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate Your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world, dear God. Make me immortal. After I die, let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote. In return, I will give You my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life, Amen.”

My aspirations aren’t quite so grand, but I can confess to a fantasy where someone, somewhere writes a review of something I’ve written and confers some kind of literary approval on it.

When I attended Carleen Brice’s book launch party for her debut novel, Orange Mint and Honey she talked about writing the book over a period of six years and she talked about completely rewriting it multiple times. I was truly comforted to learn this. I had a secret fear that good books might come pouring out of other writers at a speed and a rate that I know myself quite incapable of.

While blogging has far more advantages than disadvantages in the form of creating community, the public nature of our efforts creates a small disadvantage.

When will you finish it? When will it be published? I sense from well meaning friends a certain impatience and maybe even disappointment that I don’t move more quickly. I think about The Foundling Wheel, my Dickens Challenge work in progress and I know that my goal is to finish it. For now, that’s my only goal. I don’t know if I’ll want to rewrite and revise and edit it once I come to the end. I don’t know if that’s its purpose. I know the project is teaching me a lot about writing, but I don’t know if it’s my first book.

When I say that my eventual goal is to publish a novel, I mean it. Eventually. I don't know when. I don’t know which novel that might be. I don’t know if it’s the one I’m working on, one of the two I’ve set aside or one I don’t know about yet. I just know I’ll know it when it comes to me. Maybe I’m too idealistic. Maybe this means I’m not a real writer, whatever that is.

Sometimes the lack of validation feeds the self-doubt that I and all of us have from time to time – but I also suspect that self-doubt never goes away no matter how much external validation we get about our writing. The blogging community gives me enormous validation about my emotions and about the process. For that reason, I keep coming back. I think that eventually, the only true validation about the worth of our own writing has to come from ourselves.

I once read an interview with Frank Conroy about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The interviewer asked him if he could tell which of the writers would go on to be published and which would be successful. He said he couldn’t. Talent and potential have very little bearing on whether or not a writer can go on to finish and publish a successful book.

As time goes on, I am learning to trust myself. I feel a huge learning curve still ahead of me and I’m at peace with that. It’s my path and no one else’s. It doesn’t frustrate me. I’m in no hurry. I’ll write what I’m meant to write and learn as I’m meant to learn.

Does my lack of a sense of urgency reflect a lack of drive or of passion? I don’t think so. In the seventies, Paul Masson’s famous advertisement coined the phrase, “We’ll sell no wine before its time”.

I feel that way about my writing. It’s not time. I’ve often heard writers talk about how much bad fiction is published and how often they’ve read books and known they could write better. All true, but that’s not what drives me. I confess, I want to write something good and only time and more and still more writing will tell me if I can.

But that’s just me. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe my expectations are too high.

For those of you both published and unpublished, how important is it to you that your work be perceived as good? Is it enough to provide your readers with escape and entertainment? Can you recognize your own shortcomings due to inexperience, or trace a path from inexperience to a gradual or sudden improvement?

Why are you writing that book?

One Hundred Paintings, One Million Words

I often discuss problems, discoveries and emotions related to writing with Scott. I learn a lot from his experiences as a painter and from what he’s observed as a teacher.

It's not uncommon for beginning painters to become frustrated at their limitations. He always tells them the same thing: Talk to me when you’ve done a hundred paintings. I’ve noticed that novelists will often say they’ve written a million words by the time they’re published.

I was sharing with Scott that I’ve been surprised at what’s come out of my participation in the Dickens Challenge, and that contrary to what I used to think, a little pressure in the form of a weekly deadline seems to actually help, not hinder creativity.

Writing to a deadline has also helped me to get over my frustration at not being Joyce Carol Oates. If you saw my reading list from 2007 you’ll know that I’m a big fan of literary fiction. Reading great prose shouldn’t be a bad thing, except that it leaves a beginning writer, like me in the horrible position of knowing good writing when I see it, and consequently, feeling entirely inadequate because I can’t create it. The Dickens Challenge eliminates that stumbling block because it demands simply that I produce a chapter a week to the best of my ability. That doesn't leave me time to tweak and fiddle and polish, but it also doesn't allow me to fall into the trap of trying too hard either.

When I explained this problem to Scott, he nodded and said perfectionism breeds paralysis. Yes, yes, yes I agreed. How foolish it all seems when I consider the millions of words that the authors I admire probably wrote before I was able to read their work.

My reluctance to put pen to paper because I have such high expectations of myself would be like a beginning painter finishing two or three paintings and then being unwilling to start on a third unless it was certain to be as good as a Vermeer or a Renoir.

Scott gave me a further bit of insight. A well known painter once said that each time he begins to work, his goal is to create a mediocre painting. This allows him to paint good and sometimes great paintings, but the key is that it allows him to begin.

The time constraints of the Dickens Challenge have had, I think, a similar effect on me. In my mind, I’ve defined this as an experiment to complete a chapter each week and eventually finish the first draft of a novel. Not a great novel or even a good novel, just a completed novel. Timothy Hallinan has a great series of posts on finishing that really gave me the inspiration to focus on this simple, but critical goal. Since the time constraints for the Dickens Challenge force me to work by the seat of my pants and there is no time to edit and polish, I’ve freed myself of nearly all expectations. Lo and behold, this has made the writing far more pleasurable than it’s been with either of my previous attempts at writing novels. By publicly posting the work in progress, I have truly gotten over myself and I've given myself permission to write whatever wants to be written.

Although I know good writing when I see it and I prefer to read literary fiction, I’m well aware that I don’t write that way. I don’t know what my style is. To my surprise, Scott said that he wouldn’t expect me to have developed one yet. Painters learn through a process of conscious and unconscious imitation and after many paintings, an artist eventually discovers his own style.

I think writing tends to be a little less imitative than painting is, but I don’t think we can avoid being influenced in our writing by what we read. Since I read pretty widely, I have no idea what that might mean for me. I'll have to keep writing and find out.

I’ve struggled with the knowledge that nearly every published writer I know wrote one, two or three novels before finally publishing. I believe that knowledge has indirectly hindered my ability to finish either of my two unfinished novels (DC makes three). How could I put everything into something that is very likely never going anywhere?

And then it came to me. I have to finish one or two or ten so that I can learn how, so I can find my style and so I can prove to myself that I can do it. How did I not see that before? This doesn’t make me want to take it any less seriously. To the contrary, I understand that no matter what I end up with at the end, I’ll have learned a lot. Maybe it will be something worth taking further, but more likely it will be something to put aside so that the next one will be that much better.

Certainly, it will take me that much closer to a million words.

The Dickens Challenge writers are posting every Monday at their own blogs and on the Dickens Challenge site. The links are listed on my sidebar so if you have the time, please to try to check them out. We have an interesting mix of styles and stories and some incredible writers.

Thank you to all of you who continue to return to read my weekly excerpts. I sincerely appreciate the time that you take to read and comment.

Everything I've described is my experience. Everyone has a different path, so I am curious as to how my recent experiences and discoveries compare to yours.

Where My Head is Tonight

About a year or so before I started this blog, I began a mission. I wanted to write a novel.

Like everything else I’ve ever dedicated myself to, I went crazy tackling every angle in order to learn as much as possible, to write the best book I'm capable of producing. I’d been reading books on writing for a while, but I kept ordering and reading more. I picked up the pace on my reading and began consuming as many great works of fiction as I could. I started to read writing websites and blogs and then I started my own blog. I found a great writing school, joined it and signed up for a week-long retreat. Then I signed up for a novel writing workshop and then another. I signed up for an experimental fiction class, with required reading. Everything helped. I had epiphanies daily. The blog has been helpful in more ways than I can count. Somehow, the decision to share my writing experiences has cemented my resolve and the people I have met and the things that I have learned from them have enriched my life in ways that go far beyond the writing.

And then --

I burned out.

Sometime in 2005 I started writing a story. I was on and off with it, but I worked on it for close to a year. I was 32,055 words into it (I just checked), so I’d invested a fair amount of myself and my time.

Then, after all of my reading and research and just before I went to the retreat in July, I had serious doubts about everything I’d written. The characters were too much like people I knew and although I actually did have a vision for the end of the story, I felt like I could do better. I felt like I’d gone into battle unarmed and it was better to surrender than to withdraw and retool.

I thought about a different story, and then another story. I wrote a couple of short stories.

Just before I went to the retreat in July, I had a story notion I was excited about and I started over again. I’ve been working on it ever since and I’ve been taking excerpts to workshop and I've been getting lots of feedback.

Then I hit a wall. I had a lot of work to do with my day job. The workshop forum was teaching me a lot, especially about editing. All of the sessions, classes, blog posts, craft books and DVDs (I have two on writing) had a lot to offer. The books I was reading inspired me, yet they also made me feel inadequate.

I lost confidence.

After I started the workshop process, I found myself endlessly revising and editing what I’d already written. New writing was coming slowly, if at all. I was self-conscious and worried so much about turning in pages that I couldn’t produce any more.

I went on vacation for a week and didn’t write.

When I came home, I opened up the manuscript I’d set aside and I read it, expecting it to be horrendous.

It really wasn’t all that bad. In fact, what I found was that the first manuscript sounded more like me. It’s rough, but it’s my voice. The characters felt more authentic. While I was working hard at the second story, I was editing my voice and my life experiences out of existence. I wanted my characters to be new and unique and different from me, but I’d subconsciously placed too much distance between myself and them.

Here’s a revelation that came to me. I read too many books that have been written by people who are completely unlike me. Most of the authors I love are people who have studied writing extensively, gotten MFAs and PhDs and teach writing. They tend to write stories with characters in them who are sort of like them. Not all of them, I suppose, but I’ve read (and loved) more books that take place in and around preparatory schools and colleges than you can shake a thesaurus at.

The truth is that there are very few college graduates in my family. I come from working class people. There are some exceptions, but not many. I was enlisted in the military for many years, which makes my background very different from most people and in particular it makes it different from most writers. Things that have touched my life and my family over the years include alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness, suicide attempts, violence, sexual abuse, illness, death, poverty, neglect, closeted homosexuality, infidelity, divorce, crime and imprisonment – you name it.

For some reason, I think I believed that since I don’t read a lot about working class people and people with all of those messy problems, that I didn't want to write about characters shaped by those things. I thought I wanted to write stories about the people I liked to read about. The problem isn’t writing about them. The problem is that I can get into the heads of the more screwed up characters so much more easily.

That’s probably the reason that when I think about my favorite writers and books I’ve loved, I always get back to Ernie Hebert, the Dartmouth College professor who came from immigrant, working class roots and writes about working class people in New Hampshire. There is a copy of a speech he gave at an awards ceremony that brings me to tears every time I read it. The Dogs of March remains one of my favorite books of all time.

I’ve thought a lot since I got back from Mexico and I had a long conversation on the phone with a good friend (another blogger) just this week. Not all of our challenges are the same, but we are both struggling with that inner editor. We’ve both had trouble moving forward because we can’t seem to stop questioning what we’ve done so far and whether or not what we plan to do will be any good. We came to the same simultaneous conclusion.

We just have to tune everything out and finish that first shitty draft.

It sounds so simple, but it was so hard to see for such a long time.

A novelist is someone who finishes a novel. I am a person who could be stalled forever if I don’t stop analyzing, questioning, reading and tinkering.

Today, I gave myself permission to write crap. And I sat down and I wrote and before I knew it, I had pages. I don’t know if they’re any good or if they’ll ultimately stay or go and it doesn’t matter. I’m giving myself permission to write whatever comes out, every day until I get to the end.

I’ve learned enough to know that the most important thing for me to figure out is my process. I don’t know what that will be yet, but for now, it’s just to keep going and to finish.

Sphinx Ink linked to a great post by the writer, Timothy Hallinan and it has turned things around for me. Maybe it's even saved me. Of the many things I’ve read about writing, his points about finishing have hit home unlike anything else. He’s got some great stuff here that really resonates with me. He is the author of more than a dozen books and his most recent is the thriller, A Nail Through the Heart

I know that a lot of the people who stop by here are published and have finished one or more manuscript and then some are like me and haven’t done either. I’d love to hear thoughts from you all on the concept of getting to “The End”.

Just Put a Monkey In It

Scott recently suggested that I put a monkey in my story. This was actually much deserved revenge for some suggestions I’ve made to him in the past with regard to his art. Although he certainly doesn’t need my advice, now and then Scott will be working on a painting and something about it is bothering him. It’s usually something that he feels he’s too close to and can’t see so once in a while he’ll ask me what I think is going on with the painting. Most of the time, I suspect he’s bored and just making conversation, but I’m always flattered to be asked and will do my best to help. If I’m not seeing it either, I usually suggest he put a monkey in the painting.

This got me thinking about plotting. It got me thinking about where the inspiration for raising the stakes, or introducing subplots, or deciding what to have our characters do next comes from. Authors are all over the map on this. Stephen King, in On Writing says that he absolutely doesn’t believe in plotting. He believes that stories and novels are made up of narration, description and dialogue. In his process, the germ of the story comes from a premise or situation and he is like an archeologist, who must discover what the story is.

On the other end of the spectrum are the more regimented writers who feel they must outline and tightly plot in order to complete a good story. In fact, King cites the English mystery writer, Edgar Wallace, who actually invented and patented the Edgar Wallace Plot Wheel. Not sure what happens next? Spin the wheel and see what comes up! Perhaps a surprise visitor or a declaration of love or a murder or a long lost relative will appear.

I like the idea of discovering story and of letting inspiration come from the subconscious, but I also believe that sometimes the subconscious needs a kick in the pants to get moving. A plot wheel, a magic eight ball, a maniacal ranting solo brainstorming session (my personal favorite), a long walk, inducing a trance-like state or creating a long list of “what if” candidates can all prove useful under certain circumstances.

Ultimately, whether we’re establishing these things up front, or discovering them along the way, we all need to come up with plot points. I’m still muddling my way through and trying to discover my own process, so I’ve tried a number of these methods with varying success.

Of course, if all else fails, I can always add a monkey.

What process do you use to come up with plot points or ways to raise the stakes and heighten the conflict in your stories?