A Writer’s Polar Vortex
Here is one of the secret ironies of being a published author: As you move toward launching a book, your writing life is decimated. Those quiet, searching hours of half-starts and rambling experiments, those blessed days of research and play and discovery, those driving weeks of inspiration—as well as months of paralyzing self-doubt that this mess of words you’re accumulating will ever amount to anything—are replaced with two-hour conversations with your copyeditor about the proper formatting of ellipses and coaching sessions on how to use Pinterest to market your new book and the seemingly exciting but actually grueling work of setting up readings. I could whine about all this, but instead I want to make a point: It’s hard to stay balanced—it’s hard to keep writing—when you’re also publishing. Launching a book is its own creative endeavor, as I’ve explored in earlier posts, but it is not writing. I can’t…
Pigeon Holes: How Labels Hurt Writers and Writing
This Christmas my mother gave me a fantastic, hilarious collection of poems called God Got a Dog. In one, God goes to beauty school, falls in love with nails, and opens a manicure parlor. The poems are deceptively simple. Theologically, they’re out in left field, playing with our notions of holiness and embodiment and images of divinity. They are smart, adult explorations of how God works in the world. I adore them. The publishers list God Got a Dog as a children’s book. Why? There’s no way even a precocious five-year-old would enjoy these poems. But they were written by Cynthia Rylant, a Newbery Award winning author, and illustrated by Marla Frazee, a beloved children’s book illustrator. Rylant and Frazee have loyal followings among those who read kids’ books, so I imagine their publicist wanting to reach that loyal following. And so my mother had to go to the picture…
The Next Big Thing
A heartfelt thanks to Elizabeth Fletcher for inviting me to participate in The Next Big Thing, an internet-age ponzi scheme to connect writers to one another. Creative projects incubate in privacy for SO LONG; it’s a relief to get a public glimpse of a work-in-progress—almost a confirmation that it exists. I imagine all the contributors to The Next Big Thing are like chickens sitting on enormous eggs. Squawk! I’ll send you to two other Next Big Thing blogs as soon as I hear back from the writers. Meanwhile, here’s what’s growing in my egg: What is your working title of your project? Hannah, Delivered. Although I’m also considering The Faith of Midwives. Where did the idea come from for the project? My sister is a homebirth midwife living in Taos, NM. She and her midwife colleagues tell the most hair-raising, awe-inspiring stories about delivering babies. Whenever I’d hear them go on…
When to Stop Revising
My mother’s greatest fear for me as a writer is that I’ll never stop revising. When beginning writers learn about revision they always ask, “How do you know when to stop?” My mother, and possibly these students, view revision as a path to perfection—which we know is endless and packed with illusions. I prefer thinking about revision as child-rearing. Even if your twenty-something isn’t fully mature, he’s able to interact in the world on his own. Let him go. That said, most writers (myself included) have a tendency to think their work is done prematurely. My agent worked with me for two years to get my novel in shape. My first publisher asked that I rewrite my memoir with two timeframes rather than three; this took me a full year. So how do we know when to revise and when we’re done? Here are the questions I recommend asking in…
Better the Devil You Know: An Exercise
In a minute you’ll read a writing exercise you’ll hate. Your hackles will rise and a bitter taste will fill your mouth. Every bone in your body will resist it. Here’s my challenge: Do it anyway. A first draft is a beautiful thing. Drafts are well worth growing attached to; they have raw energy, bursts of bright prose, moments of surprise and delight, and a ton of effort poured into their pages. A draft bears witness to our creativity: First there was nothing, and now there’s something. How thrilling! First drafts done well, however, are also flawed. The language is too loose, we’ve explored only one of a dozen approaches to our subject, we haven’t yet landed on what the piece is really about. Anne Lamott advises us to write a shitty first draft, but most of us have no other option. The tragedy is that most writers stop here,…
Spoken/Unspoken/Unspeakable
Mark Doty, in a class on writing memoir, said that three forces are at play in any personal narrative: the spoken, the unspoken, and the unspeakable. The dynamic between these triune forces is what gives a story life. As I understand it, the spoken force consists of the words on the page—that is, the story as we’ve consciously told it. The unspoken force is made up of those emotions and ideas that lurk just beneath the surface of the story; we must “read between the lines” to find what is unspoken. The author is conscious of this material, but for whatever reason has chosen not to name it. The “unspoken” is always accessible to the reader who is willing to work. In the “unspeakable” realm we find all that material for which we don’t have language. Sometimes material is unspeakable because no language exists to describe it. The natural world…
What’s at Stake?
Whenever I begin to work with a writer on his or her project, I always ask two questions. The first is “Why are you writing this?” The answers I get are often similar—“Because I learned things from my experience I want to share with others”; “Because it’s good therapy”; “Because the world needs to hear this story;” “Because I feel compelled.” With any one piece of writing there exist a dozen motivations for writing, and I want to hear the surface explanation—the story the writer tells him- or herself when facing the blank page. But this first response, while honest and important, is never deep enough to sustain someone through the long effort of writing. Nor is it particularly helpful. As a writing coach, I look for the reasons behind the stated reason, the emerging inner story, because that’s where passion and fear and drive reside. I look for motivation…
Generating in Revision
Carol Bly wrote that the essential question we must ask during what she calls “the long middle stage” of writing is, “What more do I have to say about this topic?” Certainly this is a good question to ask early on, when we’ve completed a draft and are unsure where to go next. Usually we’re inclined to begin tweaking the words on the page as we head into revision, but I’d like to suggest instead that the first stages of revision more often than not involve generation. First, it’s good to generate journal entries. Why am I writing this? What’s in it (in the writing process and in the subject matter, NOT in the outcome) for me? How do I feel about my draft? What are my places of discomfort? What am I attached to and why? What might this draft be asking of me? What might it want to…
The Revision Journal
The handiest revision tool I know is an empty notebook. Even the presence of that notebook, silent and full of potential in my desk drawer, influences my writing. Why? Because those empty pages, which I’m saving for the purpose of “seeing my subject anew,” exert the same creative potential as the empty pages of my initial draft. I have this much space (one hundred college ruled pages) to explore my project, adding nuance and insight and depth. And all that space is removed from the rough draft, which usually resides in a computer file—that is, it’s a space apart from my actual composition where I can be brutally honest and unbelievably sloppy. The revision notebook is my happy companion. What goes in it? First, I’ve taken a lesson from Virginia Woolf’s diaries and use it to vent about the writing process. If I’m stuck, I write about being stuck. If…
Why Revise?
Lately I’ve been feeling like a revision evangelical. The majority of my teaching time is spent converting beginning and intermediate writers into revisers—that is, into writers who labor beyond their rough drafts into more and more mature versions, taking their creative ideas through the paces of the writing process until they become polished work. Learning to revise is a huge hurdle to overcome. Most beginning writers never get past the generating stage because revision is too demanding. And most writing teachers shy away from teaching the revision process, I suspect because creating writing prompts is easier than helping writers to jettison egos, generate new narrative structures, and discover unifying themes. Why, exactly, am I hung up on revision? I spend the vast bulk of my own writing time revising and feel revision needs corresponding air-time in the classroom. I’ve grown weary of reading first drafts, no matter how inspired, because…