The sky so
steely, cold, unrelenting,
looms above
Finishing a draft; or, why writing is like spelunking
I finished the draft of my work in progress today…the word “finish” used advisedly (there are various bits that need fixing, now that I’ve gotten to the end and know how things work out). Still, even knowing that there’s significant work to be done before I can hand it to my first-line readers, typing “End” feels so, so good.
This particular project has taken a LONG time in the drafting stage. This is in part because I have been working on it during breaks between other things (two major revisions of another work of fiction, the start-to-finish writing and subsequent revision of a non-fiction book) – it has never once in its lifetime been my only project. It’s also taken a while because, well, sometimes life goes that way.
But I think the biggest reason it has taken me so long to get to the page where I type “END” is my so-called process. I am what Brandon Sanderson has (very generously) called a “Discovery writer.” Some people use the term “pantser” but “by the seat of one’s pants” doesn’t really describe what writing is like for me – it makes it sound kind of like riding bareback on a half-broke horse that’s running off into the sunset.
There are days when writing is like that for me, I suppose, but usually it’s more like spelunking. I start with an idea of where I want to go, and there is definitely a world that confines me. Sometimes I take wrong turns; sometimes I get stuck in narrow passages; sometimes I run out of light and can’t see where I’m going.
Sometimes I stumble into a cavern and look up, and see something like this:
(Looking up and suddenly finding cave art is how many of the famous works of Paleolithic art were identified, BTW. I’m not going to get into my cave-art-discovery-stories geekery right now…maybe another post sometime. This particular image is from Chauvet Cave, which has a particularly cool discovery story. )
To get back to this particular draft, I spent a lot of time at the beginning trying to follow other people’s writing advice, thinking that maybe outlines or story cycles or something would speed me up. But it didn’t. I’m not sorry I tried all those techniques – it’s always interesting to try something new – but in the end, I wound up writing as I always do, groping through the dark with a small lantern, trusting that if I keep on going, I will find the story.
My first-ever public reading
I have a piece in the 3rd annual SCBWI-NM Enchantment show this month. This is not the first time I’ve participated in the Enchantment show, but it is the first time I was able to make it to the opening reception/reading (it took place last Saturday, on July 9).
The Enchantment show is a fun concept: participating illustrators come up with a piece inspired by a theme (this year’s was “Warm and Fuzzy). Participating authors are assigned one of these illustrations at random, and have to come up with a single-page written piece to accompany the illustration. I am really not a short-form writer, so I began doing this because I thought it would be good practice.
I was right, it turns out: it is good practice, and it’s taken my writing down paths I never would have anticipated. (Poetry???) In addition, the pressure of the “show” aspect (these pieces are hung in the Los Griegos library for all to see) means that I work harder on these pieces than I ever would for a writing exercise meant only for me, which is also good.
And this year, I read my piece at the reception – a brand-new experience and one again, good practice. I like reading aloud (I read my writing aloud while I’m writing it, anyway), I’m a practiced public speaker (even if not about my fiction writing), and this was a small and friendly crowd. I therefore didn’t expect to be nervous. Foolish of me! Reading in front of the illustrator (this year I got a terrific illustration from the fabulous Lois Bradley, an accomplished author-illustrator) made my knees shake as they had in my very early days of giving talks.
Despite my nerves, though, I had fun. Lois spoke a bit about her illustration, I said a few words about mine (titled “The Prickle Runs Amok”), and then read – and then it was over, and I could relax and enjoy the other readings.
Thank you for the wonderful inspiration, Lois – it was an honor to write to your illustration!
The Enchantment show hangs from July 1 – 31 at the Los Griegos branch of the Albuquerque Public Library. If you are in the Albuquerque area, I highly recommend stopping by before it closes!
Listening
I have been listening to Performance Today this morning, featuring Andre Watts and Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto. When asked about his relationship with his teacher Leon Fleisher, Watts said that the most important thing Fleisher taught him was to listen – to listen to everything.
It reminded me when I took a class in drawing, many years ago. The class’ first rule was to really look, to see.
Writing, like music and drawing, sharpens my senses. Look, listen, touch: such small things, all a part of everyday life, and yet magic when given full attention.
When books don’t work
The wonderful flurry of reading I experienced in May has trickled off. For the last week or so, I’ve been in a reading lull.
It’s not that I’ve been too busy with other things. Nor am I waiting on the next books on the list to come in at the library, or anything like that. And though I have been writing again (finally! hooray!), it’s not that I can’t read because I don’t want to lose the fictional world I’m writing in. (Though I am beginning to get to this place…)
No, it’s merely that I’m in a reading funk, the literary equivalent of a bad mood. I haven’t been able to get in to any of the books I’ve tried these past days, and so I’ve wound up casting them aside. In some cases, it’s been the book’s fault. But most of my reading problems recently have, I think, been just me.
What to do when this happens? In the past I’ve occasionally been able to snap myself out of it by re-reading a favorite. Re-reading hasn’t worked this time, though – I wind up casting even my favorites aside.
So I’ve been reading cookbooks. Here are a few that I’ve enjoyed while in this lull:
- This is Camino
- Tacos: recipes and provocations
- NOPI: the cookbook
- Zahav: a world of Israeli cooking
- The Beetlebung Farm Cookbook
Of course it’s too hot to cook these days…maybe that’s why this is working for me right now. I can simply read and fantasize!
The “marketability” trap
For me, the power of fiction (and a lot of non-fiction too) is that it tells a universal truth through the particular – through an individual, or collection of individuals.
Marketing, on the other hand, seems most often to be about generalizations – guessing what most people (be they a category of people, or people in general) will like. I’ve had a problem, personally, with generalizations about people for – well, for as long as I remember. They make me feel like the last kid chosen for the team; they make me feel like I don’t belong.
I’ve known this about myself for a long time. Usually I try not to worry about generalizations and instead just get on with my life. But the business of publishing has to think about marketing. And I, in my search to publish, got hoodwinked into thinking about “marketability” as part of my writing, about “what readers like.” I was told thinking about the industry would make me a better writer, and I bought it.
I was wrong. This kind of thinking killed my ability to write for a while there. It also killed my ability to read. And worst of all, it made me feel like an alien in my own life. Every time I read, a voice in my head would be asking, over and over, “Is this publishable? Why?” Every time I wrote, I felt alone in a sea of faceless generalizations. And more and more that feeling spilled into my everyday life.
So I stopped. I stopped reading industry news; I stopped worrying about being published. And it took a while, but I’m recovering. I can read, and write, again. I may never publish. That’s ok with me.
Not every piece of advice out there works for everyone.
Winter poem
Earth hard as concrete
beneath my feet and the wind
is unrelenting
Poetry
I’ve long loved poetry, but – despite the usual embarrassing teenage attempts – I’ve never much written it. I guess that unfortunate teenage poetry stayed with me; I didn’t want to revisit what I’d written then, and it didn’t really occur to me that (of course) what I would write now would be different.
This changed in 2015. I can’t remember where the idea came from, but in mid-March I embarked on a plan to write a poem a day for thirty days. It was funny timing: my poem-a-day month included the first part of April, National Poetry Month, which I didn’t know when I began; and I discovered, too, that there were others doing poem-a-day.
I learned a few things in doing poem-a-day. First, the only way (for me) to do this was to give up any attachment to the poems being any good. A lot of the poems I wrote in this period were as bad as those I wrote as a teenager.
But I also discovered that – like drawing – writing poetry made me really look at the world around me; it drew me to actively observe rather than passively receive.
And I found, too, that words and rhythm came more easily with practice. I started by writing haiku, because it is short and I knew how. The more I wrote, the more my language naturally came out in 5/7/5. When I decided to try other formats, towards the end of my month, the consciousness of rhythm transferred easily to those as well.
I didn’t stick with poem-a-day after my 30 days were up, but I did keep writing poetry. Mostly it’s still not very good. But the practice of writing it has given me so many gifts, I cannot give it up.
Failure or Feedback?
“Well, I believe there’s no failure, there’s just feedback. . And if you’re a growth mindset person then you take the feedback, and you learn from it and you get better. It doesn’t mean you tell everybody about what you’re learning and tell everybody that you failed at your game. I don’t think you have to do that, but privately and internally in this locker room we have a group that looks at ourselves in the mirror and if it’s not working, they’re honest, I’m honest – we change it and correct and we’re not naïve.”
Portland Timbers coach Caleb Porter, after winning the MLS Cup (http://www.timbers.com/post/2015/12/06/quotes-notes-columbus-crew-sc-1-portland-timbers-2-2015-mls-cup)
The Path Ahead
#amwriting – maybe even, #amalmostfinished!
Welcoming the unexpected
My writing has slowed in weeks past. I knew it would come: the school year has begun again, and finding time has thus become more of a challenge. But I have been writing – I’m in the final third now, and for the first time I (think) I know what actually happens at the climax.
I’m not a true pantser – I outline, I have some sense of the story before I start writing – but I never know the story in full before the end of the first draft. In the case of this particular work, I always knew how things ended (or will end, since I’m not there yet), but I wasn’t sure of the events that made that ending possible. Now I think I do know all the major events – at least, the major events in the action plot. This feels good, and like significant progress.
But I still don’t know the events of what Cheryl Klein would call the emotional plot. Today, for instance, one of my characters threw a total emotional wrench in my MC’s plans (and mine too).
It was unexpected. It will require revisiting a lot of what happened earlier in the book when I revise. There are many downsides to this having happened.
But – honestly? – it’s also kinda awesome. I love this feeling of being surprised, when I write as much as when I read.
Q&A with Scott Hawkins, author of The Library at Mount Char
Last week I posted about reading (and enjoying) The Library at Mount Char. Author Scott Hawkins was kind enough to answer a few questions for me, providing (among other things) some thoughts on fantasy libraries, a recipe I can’t wait to try, and advice for librarians engaged in power struggles at work. Thanks for the great answers, Scott!
******
I’ve seen The Library at Mount Char described as urban fantasy, as horror, and as speculative fiction. How do you think of it, and why?
I think of it as fantasy, but ‘speculative fiction’ works too. I was a little surprised to see that some people think of it as ‘horror.’ I mean, that’s fine, think of it however you want, I just wasn’t expecting it. I knew that there were horror elements, of course, but I miscalculated the degree to which some people found them disturbing. I thought I had the horror dial turned up to maybe 5 or 6 out of 10, but based on the reactions it seems like it was more a 7 or 8.
Continue reading “Q&A with Scott Hawkins, author of The Library at Mount Char”
“Play” – the 2015 Enchantment show
Earlier this summer, I wrote a piece for the New Mexico SCBWI’s 2nd annual “Enchantment” show – a collaborative project between writers and illustrators. I love the Enchantment concept – illustrators create an image inspired by the show theme, which is then assigned to a writer, who writes a (no more than 1-page) piece in response (this article describes last year’s show).
The 2015 theme was “Play.” I received my assigned illustration in May; after much wrestling, what came to the surface for me was a poem. I haven’t written poetry as anything other than a writing exercise for twenty years, so this was a little frightening. But the challenge of writing it, of polishing and revising to make it the best it could be, was exactly what I needed. It allowed me to get back into writing.
Here is my finished piece (gulp):
Along the Red Clay Road
Along the red clay road we go.
We gallop forward, we do not slow –
Our arms enlaced, with matching stride –
Our song, it will not be denied!
With a hey and a ho and a hey-nonny-no….
The sun is our companion, though
it is not constant; night does always follow
day. But through the dark we do abide
Along the red clay road.
Hey and a ho and a hey-nonny-no!
We’re crossing to the other side –
We’ll leave behind the tears we’ve cried –
They were so long ago
Before the red clay road.
The Enchantment show hangs from July 1 – 31 at the Los Griegos branch of the Albuquerque Public Library. If you are in the Albuquerque area, I highly recommend stopping by before it closes!