Writing For Yourself

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As many of you have probably heard already, the great children's book writer Maurice Sendak died today.  While not entirely unexpected (he was 83 and had been in poor health for quite a while), his death saddened me a lot.  Outside Over There was one of my favorite books as a kid -- it was creepy and full of adventure and I could identify with the story, as it was about the love-hate relationships of older siblings and their younger counterparts (I am a big sister myself).



When I read about Sendak's death this afternoon, I immediately thought of his recent interview on Fresh Air, which you can find here.  It's a really sad, touching interview, and I remember getting teary-eyed the first time I listened to it, so if you are an emotional listener, just be ready.  In the interview, Sendak talked about being old, about being aware of his closeness to death, of the fact that soon he would die.  And in talking about that, he said something that I found really interesting.  He said that he wrote only for himself now, that he wrote only things that interested him, that he'd always wanted to write, and nothing much else.

"I'm writing a poem right now about a nose.," Sendak said.  "I've always wanted to write a poem about a nose. But it's a ludicrous subject. That's why, when I was younger, I was afraid of [writing] something that didn't make a lot of sense. But now I'm not. I have nothing to worry about. It doesn't matter."

What a gift it must have been, to be able to look at his work that way.  To only write because he felt like writing, to write it and not to care if anybody ever read it or liked it (though they probably would want to do both, I'm sure).  It's a thing that I struggle with every time I start to write something new, and I continue to struggle with it the entire time I'm writing.  Because I can never get rid of that imaginary audience in my head, that cruel, nitpicky class of readers jeering my every word choice.  I've struggled with it since I decided I wanted writing to be my career, because the reader is a necessary part of writing professionally.

The imaginary readers stole my creativity and left a dummy in its place.

It's not the same as it was when I was a kid.  I wrote constantly, without filter, and I think that part of the reason I could do that was because I had not ever considered the fact that if anyone read my stories, they would judge them.  They would judge the merits of the story, the believability of the characters, the words I used and the way I used them.  I didn't fear improper punctuation or cliched phrases, because I didn't care about my readers. So it was easy to sit down and just write what I wanted to write.
As soon as I made the decision to pursue publication, everything about the way I wrote changed.  There was a new pressure there, a new guilt that came with time spent doing other things.  There was a new panic when I thought of a new story, this voice in the back of my head that squeaked, "But will anybody like it???"  Writing became something hard, something stressful, something that had to be done.  And I think now that a lot of the reason for that stress was the imagined reader.

They hate his work.

It's become worse since I finished my novel and sent it into the publishing fray.  Rejection after rejection comes back to me with reason after reason for that dreaded phrase, "No thanks."  So when I try to write something new, I'm automatically thinking, How can I make this sellable?  How can I make them want to take it on?

This is terrible thinking, people.  As artists, we are not supposed to worry about what kind of a reception our work is going to get, especially not before we're even finished with it.  And while it is important, if you're going to be making a (supposed) living off of your work, to create something that can communicate with people, your work will be dead before it hits the water if you get too concerned with what people are going to think about it from the very beginning.

I want to get back to a place where writing is just something I do because I want to do it.  I want to be like the little girl I once was, sitting in the corner with a pencil and a notebook scribbling away, because the story in my head was too good to stay there.  I want to kill off that dissatisfied audience in my head, turn them out of the place and send them to some other person's stories.  I want to write a poem about a nose, dammit, and I don't want to care who likes it.

He's naked cuz he feels like it.

 

 

 

 

*NOTE: I am in the process of moving blog to Wordpress.  I plan to have phased this site out by the end of May, so if you want to continue subscribing to Rachel Writes A Book, mosey on over here and subscribe.  Thanks!* 

The Years of Busting Ass

A few months back, I was feeling pretty rotten.  I was frustrated with the lack of interest in my novel, worried that I had chosen the wrong path when I decided to focus on being a writer, and starting to wonder if I had what I takes to be successful in the publishing industry.  I spent three years of my life working on something that perhaps no one would ever read, and I was spending a lot of time asking myself what the point of all that hard work had been.

Invest in a duster so at least your book appears to be getting some interest.

Then I heard a story on "To The Best of Our Knowledge" (which is an excellent radio show/podcast from Wisconsin Public Radio), and it put all my frustrations into perspective.  The story was an interview with psychologist Carl Dweck, who had recently published a book called "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success."  You can listen to the story itself here, if you're interested.

Image of the book in question, folks.

The gist of Dweck's argument is that people respond to failure in two different ways:  some people fall apart when they fail and some people learn from their failures.  To the people who fall apart, success and failure are measures of worth: failure means they are not intelligent, not talented, and that they never will be.  They avoid challenges for the fear of being proven to be unworthy (or incapable) of success.   But the people who learn from their failures seem to look at them as obstacles they have overcome, as lessons they have learned.  These people seem to thrive, almost, on failure, to become energized by it.  They understand that abilities, talents, and intelligence are not attributes a person is born with, but attributes that develop over time and with practice.  Talent is less like the bones in your arm, which are more or less always going to be the same (nutrition aside) and more like the muscles, which get bigger and stronger the more they are used.

Better start working on those brain muscles.

In some ways, this argument fits quite nicely with my Dorothy Parker apply-the-ass-to-the-chair philosophy; you will only ever get there if you work hard to get there.  But what happens if you work hard and you don't get there?  It feels sometimes like a hamster on a wheel -- the hamster might think it's going somewhere, but really it's just running in place.  Dweck argues that we need to look at our failures as a chance to learn something about what we're going for.  Why didn't it work?  What did we learn from the process?
We spend too much time focusing on where we want to end up (in my case, well-respected and widely-read novelist) and not enough time thinking about the process of getting there.  Even when we look at people we admire, we don't see the younger version of those people who stumbled along the way to their success.  We don't look at their struggles, their failures, and say, "Look how persistent they were!  Look how hard they worked!"  We say, "That person is a genius."  Or worse, "That person was destined for greatness."

Isn't brilliance fun?

Nobody is destined for greatness.  Some people get very, very lucky, but most people who wind up great bust their asses to get there.  Their work, their contributions to our society, aren't just some magical extension of their natural genius, but the result of years and years of passionate, bone-grinding, sweat-flooded hard work.  And sure, some people are naturally smarter and more talented than others.  But as a writing teacher I once had said, "If you give me a student with natural talent and a student who works hard and ask me which will be a best-seller, I'd bet on the hard worker every time."
The fact that so many people envision their heroes as geniuses who burst, fully developed from the skulls of gods, makes me really value writers who talk about their failures.  I love to hear stories about now-successful writers who struggled in their formative years, not because I'm a glutton for pain (my love of horror films notwithstanding), but because it makes me feel like the success that I want for myself is not so out of reach.  Stephen King famously wrote about his collection of rejection slips, thousands of them, from the time that he was a child until he published "Carrie."  And most writers have heard, at this point, about Kathryn Stockett's 60 rejections for "The Help."  The fact that these writers learned from their rejections, that they kept evolving and persisting even when everybody around them told them to give up is inspiring.

"I may have been born fully formed, but my brain wasn't."

I can look at my novel and say, yes, I hope it does better, but I can also learn from the things that I have done wrong.  I have lots of feedback from all those agents who rejected my work, and if I stop looking at those rejections as just letters that spell N-O, and start looking at them as tools for learning the business, I have already gained something.  And the years I spent tripping over words and trying to find the rhythm required for writing a novel taught me what kinds of things I need to do to motivate myself to write, what kind systematic approach I should take to writing a piece of work that long, and how to approach agents when I'm ready to publish -- those years were prime learning years!
In the end, who knows where my writing will end up?  But I can't know that until the end comes.  I have years and years and years to go, and right now the years ahead are for busting ass and learning how to get back up.  And that's okay by me.

On Writing: Truman Capote V. Jack Kerouac

Ah, November:  when fall changes to winter and families gather to glut themselves on buttery deliciousness.  November also happens to be National Novel Writing Month.  As I have in years past, I started a NaNoWriMo project and then couldn't figure out what the hizzle to write.  Okay, so I wanted to do a collection of short stories rather than a novel, because I figured I would have to have a less grand plan for them, but of course, a plan is still necessary for a short story.  And for twelve short stories, well, one must have twelve plans.

Which begs the question, how good are these NaNoWriMo novels, anyway?  This is not sour grapes, I still have hopes that I will finish my project on time.  The question comes from my knowledge that the work I am turning out right now is far from my best.  Then again, it is work.  I know that the point of NaNoWriMo is to get people to (say it with me folks!) apply the ass to the chair, to actually write that novel they keep telling everyone they're going to write that day.  And for my own part, yes, I am actually churning out some work, and getting some great ideas while I'm at it.  But in terms of quality?  It's not quite there.  Basically, what we see on my NaNoWriMo screen is stream-of-consciousness that may or may not make sense to a reader.

Type faster, pokey!

Which brings to mind Jack Kerouac.  Before you Kerouac fans get all defensive, I am not dissing the fella, nor am I saying that his writing was bad.  What I am saying is, he famously wrote On the Road in, like, ten minutes (actually, it was three weeks -- a shorter period of time than the month of November).  As the story goes, Old Jackie sat at his typewriter, fingers bouncing all over the keys, pounding words onto a 120-ft scroll of paper as his wife wiped the profuse sweat from his face.  On publication, he added paragraph breaks and margins, took out some sections and added others, but the point is after three weeks, homeboy had himself a novel.   And it turned out to be a major novel.

Looking smug, I daresay.

While On the Road was a bestseller that some said revitalized the world of literature in the 1950's, others were considerably less pleased with the work, and wholly unimpressed with the method of writing.  I am thinking of Truman Capote here, that catty scribe, who, upon hearing about Kerouac's three-week writing binge, famously said "That isn't writing.  That's typing."  (A little disclaimer here, folks: everywhere I looked to get the exact quote, it was different.  While nobody disputes that Capote did say this -- it just sounds like the sort of thing he'd say, doesn't it? -- everybody who quotes him seems to be paraphrasing.)

Oh, you spiteful kitty, you.

What Capote seemed to be getting at with that little jibe was this: Anyone with a little time and a decent idea (and a wife who will change your shirt for you as you type) can write a book in three weeks.  That doesn't make it good.  A writer takes time and consideration when putting word to paper, puts thought and care into the words they choose.

It's hard to imagine that the NaNo people are super concerned with the quality of their participants' writing so much as they are concerned with the fact of the writing.  That is, they are trying to encourage people, all people, to think about words, to think about expressing themselves in words, to imagine a world of their own and assign it a reality on paper.  And in that sense, they are saying to the whole world the same thing that Truman Capote said to Jack Kerouac: Anyone can do it if they sit down and try.

How good it is, then, is not the point.  And that's what I tell myself this month.

"Write Drunk, Edit Sober": Ernest Hemingway's Writing Philosophy

Ernest Hemingway was famous for two things: writing and drinking.  So perhaps it's no surprise that his writing philosophy combines the two great constants in his life.  It's definitely no surprise to anyone who's ever read any of his books, except maybe The Old Man and the Sea.  Maybe.

Typing with one hand, holding a drink with the other.

While I the first book of his that I ever read was that very book, the first time I read and loved him was A Farewell to Arms.  Perhaps I felt a sort of kindredness with the protagonist in the story because we were both expatriates.   I was living in France at the time, in Dijon, and there was a rumor that the great writer had studied French in the same program that I was in.  While I hadn't really enjoyed The Old Man and the Sea (I was barely out of high school the first time I read it, and I think that I was just too inexperienced to really understand the book at that point in my life), I decided to give Old Hem another shot.  He did, after all, love Paris, so he couldn't be all bad.  I bought A Farewell to Arms in the Gare de Lyon while I was waiting for a train (I sort of think I was headed toward Berlin, oddly enough, because I was on my own, but I really could have been going anywhere, I suppose).  After I put the book down, I had changed my mind about Ernie.

In the following years, my love affair with Hemingway deepened.  I've read most of his books while living in various European cities, and I think that a big part of my connection to Hemingway draws from the fact that he was writing about expatriate life at the same time as I was experiencing it.  He so perfectly captured the loneliness and the excitement and the pureness of friendships between expats.  The Sun Also Rises.  A Moveable Feast.  These books were my expat bibles.

People who have read my work are always shocked to hear that I have been influenced by Ernest Hemingway.  His tight, concise style seems in direct conflict with my own style, which tends toward the verbose, often waxing emotional and quasi-poetic.  I think that people just roll their eyes and say, "You're probably influenced by Shakespeare and Stephen King too."  And it's true, when I'm writing, I totally ignore Ernie's spare voice.  But when I'm editing?  He is the heavy bird-of-prey on my shoulder saying, "Cut it.  Throw it to me."

Which leads me nicely to my point.  Hemingway once (supposedly) said, "Write drunk.  Edit sober."  And while I have no doubt that he meant the statement (at least partly) literally, that's not how I read it.  Personally, I'm a horrible writer when I'm tipsy, and if I ever gave it a shot when I was flat out drunk, I'm pretty sure it would be a horrible, rambling mess.

But what I think that Hem was getting at was this: the time to censor yourself is not when you are writing.  When you are writing, you should let yourself go, put on the page (or the screen) whatever comes into your mind, whether it makes logical sense or not.  We're talking stream-of-consciousness, wild and crazy stuff.  As though you are the drunk dude at the bar at the end of the night, hugging everybody and telling them how nobody loves him like his mother and it's been three years since the last time he got laid and he really hates his job because his office smells terrible.  Nobody is really interested in what he has to say, but HE is interested.  It means something to him.  And when he wakes up the next afternoon, he will wonder what the hell he was talking about.  He will wish he hadn't said certain things.  He will edit.

See what I'm saying?  More importantly, see what Ernie's saying?  He's telling you to let yourself go when you put pen to paper.  Follow your imagination wherever it takes you.  Enjoy yourself.  Make stupid jokes.  Bring in characters who don't belong.  Make up indiscriminate love affairs and ill-conceived antics and senseless crimes.   Fall in love with every word you write.  Become drunk with the power of creating your own universe, being the god of that universe.  If you censor yourself from the very beginning, you'll never get anywhere.

And then, when you've written the last word, get yourself a strong cup of coffee.  You're going to need it.  Now you've got to edit this mess.

Applying the Ass to the Chair: Dorothy Parker's Philosophy of Writing

Thinking up clever quips, no doubt.

I was initially drawn to Dorothy Parker because of a T-shirt.  I bought it in Charleston, SC on either my 18th or 19th birthday, and it was dark orange and said, in circus-poster font: "I'll try anything once; twice if I like it."  My friend Brooke, who almost always accompanied me on the road trip from Atlanta to Charleston, told me she thought that it was from a Dorothy Parker poem, and I immediately resolved to find out more about this woman.  It probably stands as a testament to my lack of motivation that I, to this day, can neither confirm nor deny that Parker ever did write that pithy T-shirt-destined line, but I have, indeed, read more by and about ole Dot, and I find her work a delight to read.

I think that my attraction to Parker stems from her tendency toward both melancholy and sarcasm -- sometimes at the same time!! I don't think that I can ever stress enough how much I love a smartass; someone who is funny and irreverent and observant, and I say in the most respectful way possible that Dorothy Parker was one of the greatest smartasses of all time.  I give you some small examples, so that you can understand my love:

"Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne."

"She was a great, hulking, stupidly dressed woman, with flapping cheeks and bee-stung eyes."

"But now I know the things I know,
And do the things I do;
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you!"

Like I said, I love her.  I could go on like this for pages and pages, but then y'all wouldn't go out and read her for yourselves and find your own little gems of acridness to fall in love with, and what's the fun in that?  There are a million things I could say about her -- she was a founder of the Algonquin Round Table (a bunch of writers who sat around in the Algonquin Hotel and got drunk and talked about politics and books and gossiped about writers and politicians they didn't like); wrote several collections of shorts stories and poetry and was a very early contributor to the New Yorker; lived in France for a time (like all great American writers did); was blacklisted in Hollywood during the McCarthy era; was famously a champion of progressive causes, not the least of which was the Civil Rights movement (she even bequeathed her estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. -- the estate was transferred to the NAACP upon his assassination and, in a long, twisted, and ironic chain of events, her ashes also ended up at the NAACP's headquarters).  Again, Dorothy Parker was a fascinating human being.  I can say, in all honesty, that I really, really, really wish I could have known her.

But what is most pertinent to me now (and to this blog, I suppose) is her philosophy on writing, which was all about hard work and perseverance (grim determination of the soul!).  I picture Parker at a desk, furiously scribbling, sweat pouring down her face, mental muscles rippling as though her brain was John Henry driving steel for the railroads.  Parker had no patience for the whimsical artist, the one who worked only when "inspired," the one who claimed that one cannot push art.  She once said, "The art of writing is the art of applying the ass to the chair," and I cannot agree with her more.
"...You writers don't know what struggle is," Parker once wrote in a short story.  The character that says it is an actress, old, alcoholic, washed up.  "To write.  To set one  word beautifully beside another word.  The privilege of it.  The blessed, blessed peace of it."  And those of us out there who are writers can see the joke she's making, though personally, I can't quite bring myself to laugh, knowing how the toil that goes into writing sometimes results in very little.  It's a common misconception that writers are just mediums, channeling ghostly voices of inspiration, words that come pouring like magic out of our  fingers to settle comfortably on paper.  But anyone who's ever tried to write something, and write it well, knows that this is the worst kind of fairy tale.  And trust me, Dot knew.

Good writing, like good dancing, looks easy.  Words flow from one to the next, each one in its place, creating a cohesive, meaningful, and aesthetically pleasing work of communication and (dare I say it?) art.  And writers, as a species, don't help with the perception that they are a rollicking, whimsical bunch; at least not the (in)famous ones.  A writer that I went to school with once called our class Alcoholics Synonymous.  But for every night we spent drinking and dancing and cavorting, we spent three alone in our various rooms, toiling over which word to put where.  I have personally spent hours fiddling with the same paragraph, rearranging it, flipping through dictionaries and thesauri (is that a word? am I crazy?) and literally tearing my hair out to get it just right.  And to be honest, if  I look at that same paragraph now, I could probably spend another hour or so tweaking it some more.   Parker said once said in an interview, "It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence—no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I change seven."

That's pretty much the gist of it.  It's not that inspiration doesn't count, or that it isn't real.  It does count!  It is real!  My own novel was inspired by a dream, which haunted me for days until I finally threw my hands up, shouted "Enough!" and scribbled down what turned out to be my first chapter.  But never again did I experience that kind of clarity, that kind of passion and certainty -- at least not with that project.  Everything that has happened with the novel since then, every blessed word of it, has come from hard (and sometimes forced) labor, and that's how it should be.  I worked my ass off.  I did it because that's what I had to do to get it right.  A good writer, as Parker once put it, works "damn hard and all the time."