Wandering...

You know what I love about writing novels? One idea lasts a long time. In the case of my current novel, going on two years. Dan Brown took something like six years to put out the book after Da Vinci Code. You get one good idea, and then lots of time to develop it. I never appreciated that. Once you find that one idea, every day that you sit at the computer, the core of your story is already there waiting.

Short stories? Not so much.

Every three weeks, I need a new idea.

And I've never been one to be at a lack of ideas. I have tons of them. A word document full of dribbles and thoughts and glimmers and notes. 

But now that I actually have to sit down and flesh one out. One that has to have tension and stakes that get raised every sentence, and characters that leap off the page in 3D...

nothing works. 

I got nothing.

I sit at my computer hour after hour writing a few words, a few pages, trashing them, staring, starting over, trashing that, more staring.

I am wandering. I am trying to convince myself I am not lost. But I am definitely wandering.

Where do you come up with your ideas?

The Lessening of the Horrible

My daughter is learning the oboe. She's just begun, and even though I played throughout middle school and high school, I'd forgotten how horribly awful those learning curves sound. Squeaks and squawks and barely-there, full-of-air notes that are always out of tune. I don't think she expected that either. After all, when she learned piano, the problem was getting the fingers in the right places, but even if you didn't, the notes themselves were still pretty. It bothers her, this screeching that comes from her instrument which she can't seem to control.

Strangely, though, it doesn't bother me. It's the sounds of learning, and every time she plays, I hear her getting better. Less squeaks, less air, more music. I don't hear the horrible; I hear the lessening of the horrible.

She is too much like me, though. She wants to be good at something right away, and if she isn't, she wants to move on to something she IS good at. She doesn't have to be perfect right away, but she needs to see that she's good, that there is immediate hope of being good. I have to keep reminding her that there are some things in life worth working at, even if she isn't good at it right away.

As I was listening to her practice this weekend, I realized how true this is of me, too. This semester I took time off working full-time on my novel and shifted most of my attention to writing short stories. It wasn't an easy decision. I talked a long time about it with my advisor, with my past advisors, with friends and fellow students. I agonized over it. Maybe more than I should have. Because I knew, I'm not particularly good at short stories. I think if you could put sound to my words, they would sound like those early squawks of the oboe.

I've been reading a lot of short stories lately: books by Benjamin Percy, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Andrea Barrett. I love many of those stories, but I don't always get them. They move around too much, aren't always very linear, don't always seem to have fully developed plots, or any plot at all. They sometimes start in one place and end somewhere entirely different and I don't know how they got there, and how the end relates to the beginning. They are sometimes slices in time in which nothing happens. I love them - the words, the rhythms, the characters. I can sense a brilliance about them. But I don't get them. I can't dissect them and figure out what makes them good the way I can about a novel. I just know they are brilliant. And I know, if I wrote something like that, it wouldn't be.

Working on something I'm not good at is hard. Not just in the sense of writing and rewriting, but emotionally. Who wants to spend hours and hours during the day doing something they're failing at? Not my daughter. And not me.

So I have to remind myself every day of what I try to impress into her: some things are worth working on. Some things are worth enduring long bouts of awful to get to the fantastically good. Sometimes the work is not just about becoming better at your art, but becoming a better person. And with hard work and lots of practice, the horrid parts lessen, and the beauty increases.

Ten (only semi-) Interesting Things

Patti passed this on to me, and since Patti's been hanging around this blog for YEARS, I figured I owed it to her to not let it die on my watch.

(I will say, because I always have to add some sort of parenthetical comment, that the misspelling, even as purposed as it presumably is, bothers me. Putting a grammatically incorrect badge on my blog?? Oh the horror!)

Okay - on the the requirements. I'm suppose to list ten interesting things about myself. Seriously?? Ten?? Who came up with this idea? And if you are so Kreativ, you should have chosen a more Kreativ number, like say 11. Or seven. A prime number. Something not as cliche and even as ten. That is SO not Kreativ.

Okay, here we go.

1. All the canned goods in my pantry are facing perfectly evenly face out, labels aligned. My boxes also are all faced a certain way. It feels very "Sleeping with the Enemy" but if I don't keep them that way, I feel all itchy. I also straighten the towels so they are even.

2. I like the smell of skunks.

3. I am stupidly awkward about talking about my writing. If people ask about my published book, I blush, I mumble, I manage to say something wishy-washy about it and then switch the subject. I suspect I will never be good at marketing myself.

4. I am obsessive. About most things. Except cleaning the house. For instance, when I began reading Raymond Carver's short story collection, I had to find out everything I could about him. I spent two entire days online reading his biographies, his interviews, his poetry, people's blogs about him, his famous quotes, his tombstone.

5. If I read historical fiction, I end up reading more research about the time period than there are pages in the actual book. Possibly this goes along with #4.

6. When I write an update on Facebook, I sometimes think, "If I die, this will be the last thing I post here, and for years it will hang around as a reminder to people that this is what I was doing or thinking, and this is what they will remember about me." Sometimes I change what I wrote because of that.

7. One of my very most favorite things to do is to watch my son play percussion in band. When I was a kid, I got the feeling that all of the adults were just there because they had to be there. But I really want to be there. I would not rather be anywhere else. And I am totally and utterly amazed at him.

8. I can run 8 miles in an hour on an elliptical but can't run one mile on a treadmill without stopping and gasping for breath. This baffles me.

9. I dance in my kitchen while I am cooking or doing dishes. I dance with my kids before they go to bed. I cannot, for the life of me, dance outside my home. It's like I completely freeze, I have no rhythm, and am totally self-conscious. In the words of Dudley from Wild Hogs, "The music moves me, but it moves me ugly."

10. I think about putting a surveillance camera over our kitchen table to tape our dinners. We eat as a family every night, and we do much more laughing than eating. The stories, the jokes, the songs.... I wish I could capture that, to play over and over when the kids are grown and gone. It is one of my favorite times of day. (and it helps that all of my kids love vegetables!)

So there you have it.

I'm supposed to pass this on, so here's a few of the many bloggers that I love.

Heidi the Hick
Holly Bowne
Laurel Garver
Cindy Wilson
Jessie Oliveros

Burning Questions

 

I'll admit that a small part of me liked Pacific's MFA program because the website promised bonfires on the beach. While I joke that this is the main reason I chose it, the fact that the program is ranked #4 in low-res programs in the U.S., has amazing faculty, is exactly the kind of curriculum and semester requirements I'd hoped for, and didn't require a foreign language proficiency to apply all ranked higher in practical reasons I chose it.

But the bonfire might have ranked highest on my emotional levels.

Really, is there anything more literarily romantic than a bonfire on a beach with a bunch of writers standing around talking shop? That just might be might idea of a tiny slice of heaven.

The funny thing is that it never once crossed my mind how ironic it is that a bunch of writers aspire to stand on a beach around a bonfire, considering the history of literature and how many books have been thrown in just such a bonfire. 

This was on my mind this morning, though, when I spent breakfast talking to my two middle-school-age kids about profanity in required reading at school. This weekend my son told me his reading group at school (8th grade) is getting ready to read The Book Thief, which happened to also be on my semester reading list. In anticipation, I moved it up on my to-read list and began last night. In the first 40 pages, there is a not-inconsequential amount of profanity.

My son's been choosing a lot of adult fiction to read on his own lately: Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Tim LaHaye to name a few. Grisham and LaHaye have been pretty safe, but Crichton he's had to sift through. On his own choice, he puts back the ones that have profanity, because he just doesn't want to read it. I admire him for that.

But now he's heading into a book required by his teacher that he doesn't have a choice in.

In our breakfast conversation, my daughter, who is currently in 6th grade, informed me that last year her class had to read a book with profanity in it as well. And they read much of it out loud. She said when one girl had to read a page to the class that had a word she wasn't allowed to say (by her parents or, according to the Code of Behavior, by the school), the teacher told her to go ahead and read it, because it was part of the curriculum. The teacher himself read much of it out loud, and my daughter said the class giggled because their teacher was "swearing" in class. She told me she never laughed because she didn't think it was funny.

Call me what you want - a prude, a fundamentalist, a head-in-the-sand parent - but this disturbs me. 

I've never used profanity. I didn't growing up, and I don't now. I don't wear that as some point of pride, anymore than I would be proud that I've never worn stilettos or eaten foie gras. I just haven't. It's a choice I've made for my life. I don't make it for yours; you are free to talk however you wish. And when my kids are adults, they can choose to talk however they wish. But while they are in our house, they are not allowed to use profanity - or scream, or hit one another, or throw things, or eat dessert without finishing their vegetable. The thing is, I've had to teach them not to scream or hit or throw, but I've never had to teach them not to swear. Because they know instinctively that, like screaming and hitting and throwing, words like that are meant to hurt or shock. 

My kids know it's out there. Sure, they hear it in the stores and on the street and even, sadly, at DisneyWorld. It's everywhere. It's true. I can't shield them from life. 

But I wonder why public school choose books with language in them that the kids aren't allowed to speak in the hallways. 

Don't get me wrong: I think a lot of these books are great books. The Book Thief is outstanding. I don't want to throw books onto the proverbial bonfire. I'm not saying kids shouldn't be allowed to read them. I'm just saying, shouldn't they have a choice? Shouldn't books in lower education be put to the same standard as the kids themselves? Should kids who are nine and ten be made to read books with language that would, if it were a movie, be rated PG-13?

So my son will read The Book Thief, and we will talk about it together, which is a good thing, and something I'm unable to do with every book my kids read. But that doesn't make the exposure go away. And while some might say that exposure is going to come anyway, that doesn't make it beneficial.

There is, hopefully, an awful lot of life left for my kids to hear these words... to decide for themselves if they want to use them, to read them. Is it a crime to want them to have a few more years without them?

(And don't think I haven't missed the irony that The Book Thief contains a crucial scene of book burning in Nazi Germany... which brings us back around to the irony of the beginning photo... )

Submerged

 Letting myself off the hook for this blog and diving into my writing and reading with every ounce of my energy has been good for me this past two weeks.

I've read four books, finished several drafts of my essay for the semester (analyzing the way backstory can be used successfully to propel a plot rather than stall it out), and heavily revised a short story I wrote last May.

It's been emotionally and mentally exhausting though, which is something I didn't expect. By completely throwing myself in to my short story this past week - six to eight hours a day of it - I felt like I'd dived headfirst into a dark lake and lost sight and breath. I don't know if writing is like that for most writers, and when I write sporadically, juggling life along with it, I seem to bob at the surface more. But when I write, really, obsessively write, I get lost. My heart and head are somewhere else, and that place is usually not a pretty place.

When I left school two weeks ago, I'd lost a good part of my confidence in writing. I lost confidence in my ability to tell what I'd done well and what I hadn't. I'm not saying it's not okay to write stinky stuff. You should. We should all write stuff that's terrible once in a while - stretch out wings, try out new things, attempt something greater than our talents. The thing is... you have to know, when you've finished, that it stinks. And I couldn't.

One thing that's critical as a writer, at least if you want to get better, is to be able to see what you're doing wrong... and know how to fix it.

I can't say that over the last two weeks I've conquered that part. But one thing I've learned about me is that I write for a reason. I usually have something to say... a point to make, a lesson to learn. A theme. Something I want people to think about and mull over.  And that.... is no way to write a story.

A story has to be about the characters. It has to be their story, and not yours. Not even the story you want them to tell. It has to develop without a point to make, or some agenda. Not that, in the end, it can't have a point. But the writing towards that point is the death of a story. It feels heavy handed. It feels preachy. It feels like the characters are being corralled like cattle into a place they may not want to be, and along with them, the reader.

So I rewrote a story I'd written last spring, one which started as an idea rather than as a character with a problem. This time I focused on the character and not the idea.

I like the story I wrote, but I don't trust it. I don't know if it works, and  I don't trust myself to know if it's any good. Not yet.

But I figured out one thing I was doing wrong, and that's a start.

Back from Residency

I meant to write while I was in Oregon, but the hours got away from me, and the times I had to write I realized I couldn't put into words what I wanted to say.

I feel that way now. That there really aren't the words to explain what happened there.

I'm half-way through this program, but not nearly where I want to be. My writing lacks focus, lacks beautiful words and startling language. Lacks great ideas and simple significance. I make all the mistakes I know not to, and then can't even see that I've made them. I've read 48 books, but it never seems like enough.

The craft talks send my mind spinning. I can see all the possible ways to implement ideas into my writing, but then can't seem to actually do it, or at least not do it well.

I feel like I need to work harder. Work longer. Produce more work. Make that work better.

It's good, sometimes, to have that fire lit underneath you. To be surrounded with people better than you. One of my workshop leaders, Laura Hendrie, told us to to immerse ourselves in excellence. "Read good works so you know what good writing is. If you read things better than you are, you set the bar higher than where you are."

So that's where I am heading into my essay semester, the prelude to my thesis semester. I am, for the moment, putting my novel as my side project and concurrently working on new material. I am working with Pete Fromm this semester, and beyond thrilled about that. Before beginning this program, his novels were the first I read, and I fell in love with both the stories and the writing. I had the pleasure at residency to read more of his work, and it's the kind of writing you just want to sit inside and absorb. He has the reputation of being a tough advisor – not brutal, but honest and demanding – and I really want that at this point. I anticipate the next months being difficult, but in that growing, stretching, learning kind of way I'm craving.

In all the years I've been at this blog, I've never taken an official blog break, but over the past year my posts have definitely thinned. I wish I could be here more often, be at your blogs, emailing all of you dear friends and encouraging you. But for the next months, I will probably be tucking in, head down, trying to find my way to that place I want to be. I'll be thinking of you, and hoping you find your way there yourselves.