Nancy Peacock's Blog, page 4

Writers and Editors

Editors work with energy. Writers also work with energy. But the energy is different. For a writer it’s deeper, it’s more personal, it’s intimate. This is not to say that what editors do is unimportant, only that writers have relationships to their work that no on else can have.

Who else spends years with a particular book? Who else has studied every word, not just for meaning, but also for rhythm and sound? Who else is possessed for years by this fictional world and its characters? Who else knows the narrative flow so deeply, and understands the purpose of particular characters in a the main character’s story line? Who else has woken in the middle of the night to scribble a dream down, a dream seemingly delivered from nowhere that solves a particular thorny problem? Who is the first to cry when a character dies?

An editor looks at a book from a different place, a more distant place. It’s not a bad thing to have someone involved who does not share the level of intimacy with a work that the writer does. It can be helpful. It can make the book better. It can send the writer back to research to find out things she did not know she needed to know, to deepen certain passages, to clear up anything that’s vague.

It can also be painful, and wrong sometimes. Editors can feel that a book needs things the author does not feel it needs. They can sometimes go overboard with their suggestions. They can sometimes suggest the book go in a direction that feels completely wrong to the author.

So how do you know the difference? How do you know what to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to?

I hold that because of the intimacy of writing a novel and working for years with a character, the writer will be able to feel the difference. If she’s not developed that intimacy, if she’s not worked deeply, then she’s apt to be swayed in any direction. A novel that has deep roots, roots planted and nurtured by the author, knows what kind of tree it is. A novel that lacks these roots is tumbleweed and can be blown down the road with a puff of wind. It is your right to take care of your work. You are its steward and you should take that responsibility very seriously.

Figuring it Out

Besides writing novels, I also weave tapestries on a small lap loom and am learning to play the harp. I feel fortunate to have several different creative endeavors and I try to do a little of each every day. I’m not retired or a lady of leisure so only a minimal amount of time can be given to these pursuits.

I usually write for at least an hour (never more than two). I play (I’m not sure it should be called that yet) the harp for several ten minute sessions. And I weave in the evenings while I’m watching TV.

In every one of these mediums I have to figure things out. It doesn’t matter that I’ve woven tapestries before. The new tapestry has new shapes in it, and I have to figure out the best way to make them. It doesn’t matter that I know Joy to the World on the harp, the new song has a different arrangement of notes in it and I have to train my fingers to them and figure out the best placement of my hands. It doesn’t matter that I’ve written novels before, the new novel has different characters and a different setting, a different plot and different tensions, and I have to figure out how best to make it all fit together.

Today as I was weaving a mermaid I set the loom down and stepped back from it and realized that I needed to change my design. I needed to un-weave some of what I’d done and do it differently. This didn’t upset me. There’s no reason it should. It’s just a part of the process, something I needed to do to make it right. As I began to take the yarn over and under the warp so that it removed part of the image rather than built it, I thought about figuring things out as I go. I believe it is one of the greatest gifts of a creative life. If I can figure this project out, then I can figure the next one out too. And I know I can figure this one out because I figured the last one out.

This crosses over disciplines too. Because I have to figure out weaving I know that I also have to figure out writing. And because I have to figure out writing I know I also have to figure out playing the harp.

Playing the harp has been the most difficult for me, the most embarrassing even though I play for no one, and am the only one witnessing my clunky awkwardness. Nothing musical comes out. It’s not how I imagined it at all. When I first felt this, I put the harp down and didn’t mess with it for months. I felt ashamed that I had spent money for it and ashamed that I’d ever thought I could play music. Then, after awhile, I just decided I’d practice the crap out of one song, nothing more, and I’m getting better. I’m not great. I’m not even adequate. But there is definite improvement. And best of all, it’s not like I imagined it. It’s actually better. I feel myself developing a relationship to this instrument. My harp and I are friends now. My harp accepts my limitations. So does my loom. So does my writing. I just had to keep showing up for all of these things in order for them, and me, to accept this.

Take Heart, Creators

I imagine that we all have a lot spinning in our hearts right now. It’s an election year here in the United States, and a contentious one and the energy is painful and distracting and punishing. Political views aside, how does one create in such an environment? To create is to open oneself, to offer something to the world. The world might not notice a book until it reaches the shelves of booksellers, but the writer notices the world. It’s our job to notice the world. It’s our job to be open, to delve into emotions and emotional subjects. It’s also our job to protect ourselves.

These days I am finding this combination more and more difficult. The hate, the venom, the violence, the frayed nerves are like downed electrical wires after a storm. How can one feel safe enough to make the offering of art in an unsafe world?

I don’t really know the answer to this, except that as a story teller I find myself taking refuge in the story itself, in the world I am building and occupying. To write a novel will always be more intense than reading one. It will always offer a world to step into different from the one the author lives in. It may be only different in time, but there is some comfort in that. We got through that era, didn’t we? A story has a beginning, a middle and an end. There’s comfort in that too. A story is making structure out of chaos. It’s finding the narrative thread and following it. It’s ignoring the tributaries that don’t matter right now, that haven’t yet reached out their tentacles to snag your feet as you journey. Creating a story is both an act of will power, and giving over to the power of something larger than yourself, larger even than the life you’re living now.

Please take heart creators. We need your art now more than ever.

Make ’em Care

I watched Lonesome Dove this weekend, half on Saturday and half on Sunday. I needed something epic and grand and filled with great scenery, strong emotions, and memorable characters. I needed something like this because, frankly, all I wanted to do was sit on the couch and not create, not read, not work with words in any way. I’d just completed an intense three-weeks meeting a deadline for copy edits. The original deadline had granted me five weeks. The new deadline gave me two. I begged for a third, and am glad I did.

Copy editing is important work. Here’s the final chance to make sure grammar is correct, typos eliminated, and any funky time, historical, language glitches are corrected. It’s checking and double checking and triple checking, and knowing that mistakes are still possible. For three weeks this was my life. I am not a deadline driven person. I am more of a turtle than a hare. To me backing away from work is as important as doing it. I like to take a walk, make a pot of soup, vacuum the rug, futz in the garden. These activities might seem like I am avoiding my writing, but I assure you they are not. They are the way I take care of myself, and return to the work fresh. These physical activities are the way to new insights. But I couldn’t work this way under the shrunken deadline. I simply had to plow through, and plow through again, and plow through some more. I turned the copy edits in on Thursday, taught a class that night and the next morning, and told myself there were only three things I wanted to do over the weekend: Take walks, go to church, and watch Lonesome Dove. I wanted nothing to do with writing for this brief recovery time.

But a writer is never very far away from writing. We’re always thinking about it. One of the things I think about when watching a movie made from a book is how did the book translate into such a story. How did it go from marks on a page to something so visual as a movie? Where did it come from inside Larry McMurtry and how did he take his vision and make it translate on the page? As a novelist I’ve been asked these same sorts of questions. Where did the story come from? Where do you get your ideas? My answers are, “I don’t know” and “I don’t know.” I’m not sure McMurtry would know either, but that would not keep me from asking the question.

What struck me most as I watched the movie though, was how much I cared about these characters, how invested I became in them, and how quickly. I cried when each of three main characters died. I cried over one character’s inability to express what was in his heart. I cried at the end when that character visited the town of Lonesome Dove again. The fact is, I became invested in these characters almost immediately, in the movie and in the book. And while I don’t always know exactly how that happens, I do know it’s necessary, and I do know that it requires a memorable character.

I’ve not been having an easy time with my own writing lately. I’ve been plying and prying at a story line for over a year now and not making much headway. As I watched Lonesome Dove I had the thought that writing fiction is a people business, but not a customer service business. The people are the characters. If I can just access the people in my stories then the stories will flow. It’s as simple, and as complicated, as that. The thought gives me comfort though. It helps me scale down out of the big thoughts of theme and publication and a whole book. It helps me remember that the way into a character is through scene, and that I am simply trying to get to know someone. Writing a scene is entering his or her world, and getting to know them. It’s a slow process. I’ve been trying to speed it up. I’ve tried that before and it fails every time.

 

The Trouble With Words

Words are clumsy. They will tie your tongue. They will embarrass you in front of the cute girl in school. Words will tie your shoelaces together. Words are the mean boys in gym class who pants you.

Yes, yes. There are pretty ones too. You will never date them. You’ll forget the pretty word’s name. You’ll think to yourself, that perfect word, the one with three syllables, what was its name again?

Words will seduce you and leave you. Words will lift your wallet out of your pocket. Words will step out of a dark alley and slice. You never saw it coming.

Words will hack your computer and steal your identity. When you call to report the crime you won’t know how to spell steal. Is it s-t-e-a-l or the other one? You won’t be able to remember the word identity. That’s just the way words are. Where are they when you need them? Slipping and sliding around some corner of your brain, only to wake you up at night and chant to you, “You should have said this. You should have said that. You are so stupid.” That’s words for you.

Words are your worst enemy masquerading as your best friend. They don’t care about you. How could they? These little marks on a page that come spooling out of your pen. At least with handwriting they have some admirable curves and turns and fancy shapes. On a computer they come marching across the screen like some stiff-stepping imperialist army. They even finish themselves, so that day lily becomes daylight? And pheromones becomes phone? And if you try to write sonnet they say sofa.

They always think they know better than you. Words are bossy. They own you. You need them more than they need you, and they know it, and they act like it. As soon as they meet you they’re planning a paternity suit, or a divorce settlement, or opening an account with an alimony check you don’t remember writing.

Whatever you get paid to work with them, it will not be enough for a long, long time, if ever. But we know that and we keep coming back. We are words’ whores and they are our pimps. They bail us out of jail and put us back on the street again.

Holding Space for Yourself

In teaching, one of the things I try to do is hold space. In my private prompts classes, we close our eyes and take some deep breaths and get quiet, letting the workweek fall away, the effort that went into getting the kids off the school, the traffic we drove through to reach our destination, all the little niggling energy that we carry with us to the next place. My studio, where I teach my private classes, has, overtime, taken on a lot of creative energy from my work there, and the work of others. The space supports our creative endeavors, and the work of holding space is made easier by this concentrated energy. But the energy in my public classes is also concentrated, and held collectively.

The class I teach regularly, for free and open to the public is called Prompt Writing. I teach it in a book store, and here I have a different ritual for opening the space. I ask each person to say their name, and give one or two sentences about their writing practice, and in this way we settle into each other.

I then introduce myself and tell the class what we’re going to do, I give the prompt and we write. There are rules for responding to others’ writing when it’s read out loud, and they are rules I believe in, so I try to enforce them gently, but firmly, and consistently. I do not waver from these rules.

The rules are meant to create a safe space for writers. It’s important. This is what is meant by holding space. Holding space is holding safe space, and there are lots of different ways to do it, and lots of different ways to not do it, or to undo it.

Competition is anti-safe-space holding. Overly critical thinking and analyses also. Hierarchy. Self-promotion. Comparison. Trying to fix something for someone, be it their writing or their life. Sometimes asking digging, probing questions can make a person feel challenged and defended instead of heard.

Recently I have been thinking about how powerful this is, and how I might try the same techniques for myself. In other words, when I am feeling low and anxious, perhaps I could recognize that I need something that’s not being provided and try to provide it. I might try to hold space for myself.

I don’t think it would be any different than holding space for others. The first step would be to get quiet, and the second step would be to create a safe environment for myself. One without competition, without over-thinking, without hierarchy, without self-promotion, without comparison, without trying to fix it, without digging at myself. In fact, when I need to hold space for myself, it’s always because I have let these things in. It’s natural that they should creep in. We live in a world of low thoughts. The trick is to see it, and to say no to it, and to open the space for yourself again.

 

 

 

Proof of Seriousness?

For years I wrote while holding down some sort of job that had nothing to do with writing. The jobs were not glamorous. House cleaning, bartending, carpentry, costumer, clerk in a grocery store, cocktail waitress, house cleaner again, and again, and again. While working these jobs, I occasionally carved out time and finances for a conference. I always got something out of the conferences I attended. I always picked up some new clue to the craft of writing, or some new way of looking at what I did. I made friends and enjoyed being around other writers. But attending conferences can be an expensive proposition, time wise and money wise, and I wasn’t able to do it often.

So, I was more than a little alarmed when I heard some advice being dispensed to young writers to attend lots of conferences and list these when submitting a piece for publication or to an agent as proof of seriousness about writing. Attending conferences is a wonderful thing to do, but it proves nothing except that you have somehow found the time and resources to attend a conference.

I suppose we’ve got to face the fact that agents and publishers are bombarded with manuscripts from writers of every ilk, every day. They are most likely searching for some simple way to winnow the pile. Who can blame them? Just as editors will dismiss a manuscript for a misspelled word, agents and publishers may well look at a fat list of conferences and veiw it as proof of seriousness compared to the resume of a person who, for whatever reasons (money, time, children, illness in the family) has not been able to attend conferences. This is a sad thing. Work done outside of the publishing world and the academic world can only enrich a piece of writing.

I once taught a workshop in a private high-school, in which a student spoke of spending his summer writing his novel and gaining money that way, or working at McDonald’s and gaining money that way. Never mind that he most likely would not have sold that novel, and never mind that the writing of a novel would have been good for him. I advised him to work at McDonald’s. “You need the experience,” I told him.

It’s understandable that listing one’s scrappy jobs (I left out milker on a dairy farm, assistant drum maker, and telephone surveyer) is no way to endear yourself to a publisher or agent, and yet, I value my scrappy jobs as experiences that have helped me a great deal with my writing, with getting a scene right, or stepping into the mind of a character. I also value these experiences as helping to make me a kinder person, because I know what it is to stand on my feet eight hours a day. I know how small-minded some bosses can be. I know what it’s like to get kicked by a cow and smacked with its shit-encrusted tail. And I wanted the young student writer in the private high school to know a little more about these things too. It’s not a bad thing to understand that people who do blue-collar work are no less intelligent than people who don’t.

The student was good-natured about it. He said he hadn’t thought about needing experience. I applaud him for that, but I don’t know which he chose to do, or if he did either. I still stand by the advice, though. We all need to know something about the world before we can write about it. We need to know about people other than the folks we are thrown with at birth. To me, this reaching out to the world that surrounds us, the non-writing world, is proof of curiosity and an open mind, and both are needed for writing, and both are proof of seriousness.

Living in Fear

I have been living in fear. I am afraid of my public life. I am afraid of what it might mean to be known for what I do and recognized. I am afraid of what it might mean to not be known for what I do and not recognized. As I age, I am afraid of being called on to take care of my husband in ways I don’t know how, and I’m afraid he may be the one taking care of me, and that I don’t know how to surrender to that either.

Combine this with fantasies of simpler times, fantasies in which life is easy and manageable and I know what to do. Sometimes I pass a house and I think, would life in that house be easier? Maybe there would be a dishwasher, more counter space, a spice rack that makes sense. Maybe it would have a better place to write. Maybe I wouldn’t be afraid in that house, or that one, or that one.

And then the other morning, after praying over my constricting heart, while lying in bed in half sleep I suddenly felt myself to be a giant. It wasn’t unpleasant. The fact is it was kind of nice. I was the same as I am now, only very, very large. I felt the weight of my huge head on the pillow. I felt the curl of my body on the mattress, big and solid and strong.

I’m a giant, I thought. This is interesting. I like it. I like feeling this big and strong. I knew if I stood up I would tower. I knew I could not be knocked down. I knew I wasn’t just “okay” – that reassuring little back-pat of a word – “You’ll be ‘okay.'” Instead of okay, I was strong and solid and firm and without a doubt I was a giant. I would not wobble.

And then I started shrinking again. Not terribly. I never got smaller than I am now. But I was normal and I wanted to be a giant again. So the giant feeling came back, and then left again, and came back, and left, and by the time I got up I understood something I hadn’t understood before. I understood that I’d built a big life for myself – one that includes a lover, and a home, and soup, and writing books, and teaching, and friends, and being known and recognized sometimes, and unknown and unrecognized other times, and a church, and a river, and herons, and otters, and beavers, and energy work, and over one thousand Facebook friends, and that in many, many ways I’d built this big-ass life and yet I was shrinking from it. I was scared to occupy it.

And finally I understand how small-minded that is. And finally I understand what a ride life is. And finally I understand that I need to make my spirit bigger. My giant dream showed me that. I need to live in my big life. I need to fully occupy it. I felt solid and strong as a giant, but the pillow was just as soft, the bed just as comforting.

Weaving a Blue Horse

This weekend I tried to weave an image of a horse on my small lap loom. It had been a long time since I’d tried to shape a horse with yarn across tightly stretched warp, and it wasn’t coming easily. I unwove my horse three times.

Unweaving is simply undoing what you’ve done. Instead of going over and under the warp threads to build, you go over and under to take down what’s there. It’s not unpleasant. It’s the same motion as weaving, but it can get frustrating if you have to do it too often and your image doesn’t progress. My horse kept on looking like a rabbit. I found the rabbit imagery interesting and thought I might try a leaping bunny at some point, but what I wanted was a horse. A blue horse.

Writing stories is also a complicated business, be they fiction or memoir. You need to keep a lot of plates spinning in the air, or to use a weaving metaphor, winding a lot of plot and character and setting and what-all-else threads into a story. Whatever you write can serve you later, or it can just sit there separate from everything else, and therefore glaringly wrong. Writing a story requires bringing a certain thread forward, bringing up a backstory for instance, or sometimes deliberately letting a warp thread show or a weft thread, sometimes deliberately hiding them.

One thing I’ve noticed in both writing and tapestry, and that I imagine might be true for every art form, is that there is a lot of forgiveness in the medium. You really can fix things that come out wrong. You can unweave, revise, rewrite, patch, splice in a new warp thread – nothing is really set in stone until you decide it’s done. But a lot of beginning artists don’t know this. They look at a finished tapestry or read a published book and feel awed by it. As well they should, but it’s important to realize that things rarely come out perfectly in the beginning. I could say that the miracle in making art is that sometimes things do come out perfectly the first time around, but I think there are actually three other miraculous gifts every artist is given, a sort of holy trinity of the creative process. The first miracle is that we get a second, third, fourth, fifth, and endless chances to make it right. The second miracle is that it will never look like our original vision, no matter what it is, and we should rejoice in this. And the third miracle (related to the second and the reason for rejoicing) is that often times “mistakes” end up being our guides, not guides telling us what not to do, but instead guides that show us what we did not know we could do.

That blue horse I was weaving? After unweaving it for the third time, I set my loom on the couch and went about my day. Each time I walked by I looked at it. I squinted my eyes. I took the long view. I related to it. And I studied the two weavings I’d done that had horses in them. I looked closely. How did I do that? I really couldn’t remember exactly, but that night, while watching TV I took my loom back into my lap and I wove a horse. He’s not perfect, but I’ve got some ideas on how to give him a nip and a tuck to make him prettier. The same is true for writing. Sometimes it’s just a nip and a tuck. Sometimes it’s a big overhaul. Sometimes, frankly you just lose juice for something and you cut it off the loom and warp up again and start over. Every time though, no matter how you feel about it, your art is guiding you.

 

On Becoming a Writer

Once I’d made my mind up to it, becoming a writer was fairly simple. I committed myself to it. I studied it. I read a lot of books. I attended a lot of readings. I attended as many workshops as I could, allowing myself to be guided, but not derailed by any of the comments. And I wrote.

The result was my first novel, Life Without Water. I had good luck with that novel. I worked with a great editor with whom I had rapport, as well as a wonderful publicist. I was supported by the house that published me, and I was fortunate. The novel was reviewed by the New York Times and chosen by the Times as an editor’s choice. Bantam purchased the paperback rights and brought it out with a new cover. I was very, very lucky to have had this as my first publishing experience.

My second book was purchased by the same house that had first published my first. I expected to be treated well. I wasn’t. Things had changed. The house was being sold, and the company that owned it had found a buyer, but before the deal was closed the company began nickle and diming, following through only to the point of publication (not actually keeping a book in stock to booksellers) the contracts with authors that they still held. Enter one of the most bitter eras of my writing career. My second novel came out around Christmas. It too was reviewed by the New York Times, as well as Southern Living. I started getting calls from friends telling me they could not find copies of my book. There had been a small print run, just enough to fulfill the contractual agreement of publishing it, and then no more. I have no idea in terms of numbers or money or sales or future contracts how badly this hurt me, but I do know how badly it hurt me in terms of trust and wanting to write again. I’d been betrayed. There is no other way to put it.

I’ve since written four more books, published one, and am now under contract for another. This is not because I have any great faith in my own ability. Nor is it because I have any great faith in the publishing industry. The truth is I find the struggle of being a writer far greater than the effort it took to become one.

When I was in the act of becoming, it was all about writing and pushing myself beyond my own inertia. I had no shame around it. Oddly enough, after publication, and particularly after the experience with my next book, I began to feel shame. I began to feel that I’d entered into a world I could not negotiate. With the publication of my second novel it became very clear to me that support could be jerked away at any minute. Success seemed random, playing a slot machine, and me with a cup full of dwindling quarters. I wondered if I wanted to continue. I wondered if I had what it took to have a public life. I wondered what I would be giving up and what I would be gaining. To tell you the truth, I still don’t know the answers to these questions. All I know is that I have both quit and not quit. I have both produced and not produced. I have written books I am proud of and books I am grateful never made it to the public eye.

“Why do you write?” is a common interview question, or one sometimes slung from the audience, particularly for a panel of writers. I listen as my colleagues answer – usually with something poetic, something profound, something funny. They seem like prophets to me, worthy of the mantle of writer. When it’s my turn to answer, I am like a deer caught in the headlights. Why do I do this?

It helps to remember why I wanted to become a writer in the first place. The answer may surprise you. I buckled down and became a writer because I had something to prove. Yes, it’s also because I was a reader. Yes, it’s also because I love stories. Yes, it’s because I admired writers. But there is the fact that I was motivated by I having something to prove.

I grew up believing I was stupid. I did poorly in school. I barely graduated high school. I did not attend college because I hated school, and assumed I’d do poorly there too. It was a time in my life that I did not need any more proof of my inabilities. I needed proof that I was okay, and I entered the working world and found it. It turned out I was quite good at work. I could remember things that made sense to remember, like that the Bandaids were on aisle four of the drug store I worked in, or later on, when I worked as carpenter how to put the saw blade on so that the teeth bite into the wood, and that to put it on backwards is very dangerous. When I started tending bar it was easy to remember the recipes for the drinks I mixed, and when I started cleaning houses, I remembered how to change the vacuum cleaner bags on six different models. I felt smarter in the working world than I ever did in school, but as every working class person comes to realize, knowing how to do your job does not prove you’re smart to the world at large. More importantly than the world at large was me. I still didn’t feel smart, so I set out to prove it and I set out to prove it via the only desk job I ever thought I might want – that of writer.

Being a writer does buy you a certain amount of clout. People respect writers. They look up to them. They think they’re smart. And that is sort of the problem, because every time you finish a work you have to dumb down again for the next one. You have to clean out everything you learned from writing the last book. Forget about it. It doesn’t apply here. You have to be stupid again and start over, which is harder to do now that everyone is looking at you as though you are smart.

Perhaps this is why I think fondly of the days when I was becoming a writer rather than being a writer. No one really thought of me as having anything special back then. I cleaned houses for a living. Being a member of the working class gives you a sort of invisibility cloak. People don’t want to talk to you. They don’t want your opinion. And best of all, they have conversations in front of you as though you are a tree. I see now that moving through the world without anyone expecting, or even hoping, for anything great from me was a great gift as I was in the act of becoming a writer.

Bob Dylan is an artist I greatly admire. His music, yes. His lyrics, absolutely. But also his fierce independence. I love to watch old clips, the way he handles the press, the fact that he never gets swept away into any sort of illusion. Dylan always defined himself, and never let anyone else define him. And he’s wise. One of my favorite Dylan quotes is this: “An artist must be careful to never think he has arrived somewhere, he must always be in a constant state of becoming.”

Why do I write? It can no longer be to prove I am smart. Or if I have proven it, I must prove it again. I must, once again, become a writer, and I think Dylan has explained to me why I am so much more comfortable in the state of becoming rather than being.