Nancy Peacock's Blog, page 5

A Day Without Devices

On my walk this morning I found a nub of purple chalk a child had used to scribble on the pavement. I picked it up, an opportunity in my hand. What would I write? I thought hard about it, and then knelt on the walkway and wrote, “Love The World As Much As You Can.”

I know it is difficult to love the world, but the truth is, it has always been difficult, and it always will be, yet one thing I think we can all do in order to love the world a little more deeply is unplug more often.

Last week I stepped out of my house with no tablet or laptop or phone. I had in my backpack a book, some money, my journal and some pens and that was it besides my keys. I took myself out to lunch. It was unseasonably warm and I sat outside and had a salad and read. Then I walked to a coffee shop for a brew and some journaling. No one knew where I was. No one could get hold of me. I couldn’t check my messages or my Facebook status or my email. I had nothing with me but the very things I used to always have when I stepped out of my house – keys, money, book, notebook, pens.

What surprised me was how unbelievably naked and light I felt without any devices. I hadn’t fully realized the weight of all that contact and potential contact. The thing is, during those pre-device days I hadn’t felt naked and light, nor had I felt weighty. To be unavailable was a way of life. I wandered the world with nothing but reading and writing material. It’s how I grew up, and once grown I didn’t change. I often made a sandwich and grabbed a Thermos of tea and went into the woods alone. I wrote beside streams and lakes, and beneath trees on university campuses. I wrote in fast-food restaurants. I wrote on land I didn’t own and never would. I wrote in my car, which I did own. But somehow when devices came into my life, this changed.

I’m not the only writer who feels this. Creatives everywhere bemoan the lack of solitude, and the fact that even the solitude we do manage to carve out feels different now, not as solid, less contiguous with other kinds of solitude. What has become of the transition between writing and chopping an onion for this night’s dinner in the quiet of the kitchen? Sandwiched between the two now is checking my status, however I am defining that in the moment.

There was a time when my conscious self and my subconscious self worked pretty well in tandem. Granted one was always driving while the other navigated, or visa versa, but at least they were both in the same car. Now I have to work hard to get the quiet needed to hear my intuitive voice. I have to recognize that it is missing in a particular project, and I have to make myself step out into the world without devices. Sometimes I have to limit social media time severely before my intuition is willing to dance with me again.

Lately a picture of a remote cabin has been circulating on Facebook, with a question posed. “Would you be willing to spend a month here without internet access, without cell phone, and without contact with the outside world? You will be provided plenty of food, and when the month is over you will be handed $100,000.” Post after post I see of this picture and every one of us says, Yes. “Yes, I would do that.” “Yes, I could write with pen and paper. I could read.” “What’s the catch?” a friend asked.

We are all so hungry for the world it seems to me. And here’s the deal. The world is hungry for you too, and being in it, without a screen, is a necessary part of creative life, of developing intuition, of listening to quiet voices. Writing is not just about spelling and grammar and thinking things up.

 

The Market

People often ask me how to read the market. What should they do? What’s the next new trend? How did I know to write what I wrote when I wrote it?

Look at me, I want to say. Do I look like I know what the next new trend is? Hell, I don’t even know what the last trend was. Or the one before that, or before that, or before that, etc. At some point I stopped paying attention to trendy. I outgrew it. I didn’t care anymore what was hot. Partly this was a function of feeling like I could never keep up with trends (they change so fast), and partly it was a function of disagreeing with said hotness, and partly it was simply entering into a practice with my writing that had nothing to do with trends, or hotness, or even sales. Naturally, I hope for sales. Big ones. But that’s not what tells me to write what I write, and I don’t think it can be what tells you to write what you write either.

Trends change. Those editors in New York who you believe can make you or break you – let me tell you something – they don’t know what’s hot either. Something came along that was different, and someone took a chance on it, and it became hot. So then everyone started thinking everything even remotely like it was either hot or had already been done. This is not an arena you want to worry about. Let the trends duke each other out. Don’t worry about whether it’s been done or not, or if you can catch the tail end of a trend as it flaps around on a million editors’ computer screens.

The prevailing advice is to write what you know, but I think that should be changed to write what you know to be interesting – to you. Writing a novel is a long haul. If you’re not interested in vampires, please don’t torture yourself by writing about them. If you don’t read murder mysteries or enjoy young adult, don’t write these things. I knew to write what I wrote when I wrote it because it captivated me somehow. It was that simple, and shallow. Start there. Believe me, you will go deeper if you begin with your own heart.

Whatever you do, don’t start with the market. The market is a fickle master. The market buys and sells and doesn’t care a thing about morality, or integrity, or the soul. If you don’t believe this, just take a look back over history at all the things (and people) that have been sold because the market demanded it. The market doesn’t care about you or your art, and it never will. The market cares about money, cold hard cash, an economy that does not respect art, or even humanity. Trends come and go. They are so much flotsam and jetsam. Celebrities are made and discarded. I too might be made and discarded.

Maybe my next book will make it big. I sincerely hope so, just as I have sincerely hoped so for every one of my other books. If it does and I am suddenly thrust into the public eye, then I had better have a firm place to stand on. And if it does not make it big, and I remain a midlist writer, then I had better have a firm place to stand on. In both cases the firm place is the same. It’s honoring the work of writing, honoring the characters that blessed me (for better or worse) with their presence, it’s knowing that I did my best with the story, and that I never let anything as vague and insubstantial as the market get between me and the truth of that story. That’s the thing that will carry me through.

 

Letting the Work Breathe

As soon as the contract for Persimmon Wilson was signed I started work on another novel. I knew I had just a slim window of time before the revision edits for Persy arrived in my inbox, and that once that happened I’d have to shut down whatever it was I’d involved myself in, so I worked like a demon. I followed the tiny thread the character and story had provided me, took from their hands the box of soggy matches and candle stub and entered the woods. Bravely, I might add.

I’d worked the story to a pretty good place when the edits arrived. I was sure I could come back to it and pick up the trail. Three months later, after my work on Persy was done, I returned to the new novel, but the trail had grown over. I was tripping over a lot of vines. I stopped and began the book in a different way. Then I did this again. And maybe one more time; I’ve lost count how many stops and starts I’ve done.

While researching Persimmon Wilson I learned that the Comanche would double back on their own trail and then split apart and double back again in order to create confusion for anyone who might be tracking them. It seemed I had effectively done this for myself. I’d doubled back so many times I felt I no longer held the original thread, and that the characters had snatched my box of matches and candle stub away.

Were they thoroughly disgusted with me? Had they pulled out, gone in search of another, more dependable, more settled writer? I didn’t think so. I’d done some good work on this novel. I’d uncovered a sweet relationship between a father and his daughter. I’d created a setting. I felt love in what I’d written, deep love, but my characters and the story needed something that I wasn’t providing and couldn’t identify. So I stopped. I stopped everything. I decided to take a month off from writing this book. I decided to noodle and read and write in my journal without worrying about what I was or was not producing.

I can’t tell you whether or not this has opened the portal for my characters to fully step into their own being, but I can tell you that it was needed and that hammering away at the work, grinding it into dust, or banging at it as if it was a piece of iron in a vice, was not working. I knew it. My characters knew it. Some editors may not have known it. Some readers may not have known it. Some agents may not have known it. Some would, but more importantly I knew it. The energy wasn’t there. It’s not that I’d become a slave to the story, it’s that I was panicked. I was clingy and needy. My characters needed space to breathe and be themselves and I wasn’t giving it to them.

Writing is a combination of the mystical and also hard, serious work done with perseverance. It’s not always easy to know what is required at any given time, and there are plenty of writers out there who will pooh-pooh at the mysticism aspect of it all. That is their right, but mysticism is one of the things I need to keep going. I need something to speak to me other than my own head. As Van Morrison wrote in one of his songs, “If only my heart could do the thinking, and my mind begin to feel.” Sometimes it’s an act of love to step away from the work. Sometimes you just have to step into the abyss and trust there will be some sort of net to catch you when you fall. Sometimes it’s the net you’ve been weaving all along, and sometimes it’s a totally new net, woven by unseen hands. I have yet to know which net will catch me. I’m still falling through the air.

 

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Nine times a month I teach classes devoted only to writing from prompts. The prompts can range anywhere from a line of poetry, to a picture, to an object, to writing a story that places an object within a picture, to a suggestion. I have been creating prompts and combining them for a dozen years now and the possibilities are endless.

At the start I tell students to write nonstop without editing, to not worry about spelling, punctuation or grammar, to not worry about staying on topic, and to let the writing go where it wants to go rather than trying to control it. I set a timer for 15 minutes, or 25 minutes, or 10 minutes and off we go. After we write we read (this is never required of anyone), and comment, and here, too, there are rules. We say what we liked about a piece, we use the power of recall to recite back particular lines or vivid imagery. If we notice something unique we point it out. We never try to edit or fix or meddle in something written under the gun like this.

Often times when I describe this class to someone who hasn’t experienced the process they ask, “What’s the point?”

Other times someone will come to one of these groups for a year and then ask, “What do I do with all this stuff?”

I’ve also experienced people, after reading and receiving comments dismiss what they have produced by saying, “It’s not real writing.”

But it is real writing.

We are all intelligent beings and intelligent beings have stories to share. I see three types of stories that we all carry inside: stories we know and have told a million times, stories we know and have never told anyone, and stories we don’t know. And that is the point of this work. To tell these stories, even the ones you’ve told a million times, on paper now.

Maybe by writing that million-times-told story in this pressure-cooker way you’ll gain a new insight. Maybe you’ll use a verb you’ve never used before. Or maybe, after writing it down, you won’t feel so compelled to repeat the story at the next Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe you’ll work something out, or feel more satisfied with the story now that it’s on paper and has been received by a group of fellow writers.

It is also the point to tell the story you’ve never told anyone, to cry while writing it down, to feel the sadness and the loss and the aliveness and the survival of your amazing, beautiful self. There is power in owning our stories, even the dark ones, even the ones that embarrass us, the ones that portray us in a less than flattering light. Even if we never read or share with another human being, there is power in writing these things down.

And then there are the stories we don’t know, the ones that land on our pages from out of nowhere. Where did that come from? That therapist? That tiger? That cave? That mountain? That war? That maiden? That plague? That spear? That cloud of locusts?

There is so much we know that we don’t know we know.

There is also the equality of the process, sitting in a room full of people writing from the same prompt, none of us knowing what we’re going to say or where we’re going with it, each of us vulnerable and human and willing and brave. It feels squirmy to write without stopping. It feels squirmy to read out loud, to release it, and write, and release it again. It feels squirmy to receive compliments, and to give them. It’s a shared vulnerability and a transformative process, and often times a collective genius arrives and holds the space. The act of writing with people from prompts and then reading out loud can help you get comfortable on the page, comfortable with your own mind, and comfortable with not always knowing what you’re doing, which is essential in the life of an artist.

As for what to do with all the pages generated by such a practice, I can’t answer that. I too have notebooks upon notebooks of scribbles. Some of my prompts have gone on to become something bigger, a chapter in a novel, or a short story, or an essay. Most have not. Some of what is left could be developed. Some of what is left is embarrassing. Some of what is left is illegible. Some is whiny and tight and bitchy and mean. Some is generous and insightful and touching. All are from my heart, and writing is how I know my heart.

That is all. This is the process. Feel the power in doing something without the big goal of publishing, or “being a writer,” or anything else. Lather, rinse, repeat. Write. Let it go. Write again.

I know someone who looks down on writing from prompts. He says he does not do it because he has his own ideas. This is fine, but there is writing that comes from your conscience and writing that comes from some place deeper. What I offer in a prompt is not an idea, but a portal, a doorway into the unknown. I wrote this blog post from a prompt. The prompt was “Lather, rinse, repeat.” Set a timer. Not one that ticks. Go for it.

Money, Spaciousness, Deadlines and Bathtubs

For a long time before I had a writing life, I dreamed of one. I dreamed of living by the ocean in a little cottage, taking long walks, reading, eating good food, relaxing, breathing deeply. Or else I dreamed of living in a little cottage along a river, or along the shores of a big misty lake. Sometimes I lived in a houseboat. Sometimes there was a garden. Sometimes woods. Sometimes soup and sometimes pasta. What I never dreamed of was actual writing. I didn’t bother to imagine an office, or a studio, or even a desk with a window to look out of.

I finally realized that I would never achieve my dream of a writing life without the writing, so I made myself buckle down and get serious. I gave myself a year to write the first draft of a novel. I told myself to show up at my desk for an hour every morning. I reasoned that the morning would be the best time for me to write as I was just too tired for anything creative after a day of work, which at that time was cleaning houses. I also reasoned that once I got my hour of writing out of the way, it’d be done and I need not think about it the rest of the day.

I obviously had a lot of resistance to writing, so I went a step further and made up a schedule. I gave myself days off. I took weekends, and I allowed myself five “sick days” during the year, days in which I could just ignore writing if I wanted. I also decided that I’d complete one chapter per month. After the month was up, I had to move on to the next chapter whether or not I was satisfied with the work I’d done. I kept track of all this with a chart on my wall.

I was fortunate to know the story I wanted to write. I’d already developed it as a short story, and I’d been futzing with it as a novel for about ten years. All that procrastination was not wasted time. I knew enough about my characters and the story to not be thrown blindly into a cave of my own making. I could always see the light, and I fell in love with writing, but the love did not last.

My next book was written under contract. I sold an idea and received an advance for work I had not yet done. I deposited my check, quit my housecleaning gig, and settled down to live the writer’s life. This turned out to be one of the worst writing experiences I’ve ever had.

I lived alone at the time in a remote cabin, just like in my daydreams of the writing life. It was a beautiful place, with a pond I could swim in, and woods I could walk through and I didn’t have to go to work anywhere else. But the pressure of the deadline made the exploration of my novel and characters nearly impossible. What should have felt spacious and creative instead felt constricting and stifling. I fell out of love with writing, and I swore I’d never go under contract again.

People assume that going under contract is the way to have the spaciousness needed for writing, but money does not equal spaciousness. I wrote every one of my books, either the entire book, or in the case of the second novel, a portion of the book, while holding down a job. In fact, once the money from my advance for this book ran out and I found employment again, the writing began to go better.

I’ve now published three books (soon to be four) and written six (two remain unpublished). I always took breaks between my projects, but the breaks I took were filled with angst and anger. Too often I felt like my writing career was going nowhere. I felt bitter and unnoticed. What was the fucking point, I wondered. And so I’d quit.

It didn’t help that some people I knew in the industry told me I needed to write a book every eighteen months, something I knew I could not do in the way I needed to go about it. I needed spaciousness and the subconscious, and instead of deciding to simply give myself what I needed, I decided I wasn’t a real writer. The books I’d written and gotten published, well, what a fluke. I was never going to write again. Instead I was going to spend my time taking long walks, reading, eating good food, relaxing, and breathing deeply. These were the very things I’d imagined doing when I imagined being a writer, and now that I wasn’t writing, or worrying about writing, I’d have time for them.

And then something would happen. A character would stroll into my mind, and it would be a character I couldn’t turn down. I’d have to write his story. I wanted to write his story. Steven King says that writing a novel is like rowing a bathtub from Boston to Great Britain. It’s a wonder anyone attempts it and that so many actually make it across. Relaxed and open after having had some time to just be, inspired by a new character, I’d get back in my bathtub and start the trip from Boston to Great Britain (or its equivalent) again.

I once chided myself for imagining a writer’s life without writing, but now I think there is something to that original vision. I think the downtime is necessary. I think I need it. I think that yes, I want to be a writer, but this sometimes involves not writing, and I need to not judge myself so harshly. I am a writer. No one is going to take that identity away from me. I write. Even when I am not writing for public consumption, I am writing. I am journaling. I am blogging. I am writing to prompts with groups of writers. Just because I’m not navigating a bathtub in the high seas does not mean I am not still the captain of that fine vessel.

What are you working on now?

What are you working on now?

There is no escaping this question once you are a published author, but the answer is complicated. For me anyway, which is one reason I don’t like to talk about works in progress. In fact I make it a policy not to discuss works in progress with anyone besides my writers’ group. Even my husband doesn’t know what I am up to, which means I live in two worlds. The day to day earthly world that we all occupy, and a second world, often as real to me as that one, but secret.

Secret because the storyline still feels fragile and wobbly. Secret because half the time I don’t even know the storyline. Secret because there’s a process involved in which I am just stabbing at fish and hoping something sticks to the end of my spear. You might think it would be beneficial to talk about the little bits of information I have, the “ideas” I am trying to explore. Maybe someone could help me brainstorm a plot. Or maybe they have a grandmother who grew up during the era I am working on, a grandmother that likes to talk. Or maybe someone will have a plot idea I haven’t thought of. By keeping my mouth shut do I run the risk of missing out on something crucial and helpful and timely?

Not really, because what I am seeking is internal, not external. I am seeking the intimacy with a character. I want the character to speak to me, to tell me the story, to guide me, and this is why I don’t want to throw ideas at this person, mine or anyone else’s. The story exists without me. I’m the new kid. The author. I’m being vetted. I need to shut up and listen and this is not always easy, or pretty, and it’s nothing like what I imagine the general public imagines a writer’s life to be.

That’s not to say that my process is the only process. I know some writers who have “plot parties” in which they get together and brainstorm one another’s work. They outline. They know where they are at any given time while writing. There’s a part of me that envies the hell out of these writers. It would be so much more comfortable, I think, to have a plan.

But for me writing a novel is a guided exploration. I don’t know where I’m going, but someone does. Too often I have no idea what country I’ve landed in, or if I’ll be snatched out of it, or if my guide will talk at all. Some characters just hand you a candle (it’s not even that long) and a box of wet matches and push you into the forest. You uncover the trail by writing. It sucks when they are like this, but it doesn’t mean the story isn’t worth telling. It just means that frustration and self-doubt are high, and the question, “What are you working on now?” holds a magnifying mirror up to me and now I can see just how ugly writing is. Just how much I am failing at it. I know I’m supposed to say something cheerful and wise and confident while giving just a hint of what I am working on now, but I can’t. I’m a deer in the headlights whenever I am asked this question. I feel like the whole process will collapse under the pressure of this question, which I know, logically, practically, sincerely is never meant to be pressure, and is always asked out of interest and support. But, let’s face it. I’m a writer. Of fiction. I have a great imagination. Except in the game of chess, I can always propel myself into the future with imagined scenarios.

In the case of fielding this question, here is someone standing before me. He or she has read my books and loved them. That alone is a miracle, but it’s even better than that. He or she has recommended my books to friends, maybe even reviewed them. He or she can’t wait to devour the next story. That’s intoxicating stuff, right? Something every writer dreams of and continues to dream of. I don’t want to disappoint this person. More than anything, I hold this person dear and don’t want to disappoint.

But here’s where I start the propelling action. There might even be more than one such person. Imagine two or three people wanting to read my work. I dream of this, and it’s happened. I dream of big success too. What if my last book was a best seller?  What if millions of people are waiting to read the next one and might ask me about it as I gallump through my life, buying potatoes and whatnot? What if everyone wants to know what I am working on next?

I will tell you now, that whatever I am working on, chances are it is in a wobbly and goofy stage. Let me say that, and don’t argue with me. I am not being modest. I am not being self-effasive. I am not putting myself down. I am being honest. What I am working on now is like a newborn kitten with its eyes still closed. I am its mother. My instinct is to keep moving the litter so those big scary people can’t find my baby. My baby’s not ready yet for the big wide world. It’s tiny and mewling and we need to be quiet together.

The fact is I feel shame when I can’t answer this question gracefully. I feel shame that I can’t just whip out a work in progress and show it around and receive pats on the back and encouragement. I feel that I am a disappointment to my readers, the literary world in general, booksellers, the word gods for refusing to answer this question. I feel that I have been given the great gift of publication and that I am blowing it by insisting on privacy. I feel like I need a psychiatrist’s couch right away, maybe even a prescription. The fact is, I feel a little wobbly.

Writing Fiction

Writing fiction is always about relationship, and the first relationship that must be established is between the author and the main character. There’s got to be a certain intimacy in order to proceed. I can’t just write. I don’t just make things up. I need to be guided and if I can’t get that guidance from the main character then I can’t write the story.

I don’t know what causes the initial spark, or why the story or character lands on my door step or my page. It’s mysterious to me, although I think it must have to do with my own interests. An author is interested in certain things, and those interests make the author open to learning more, and so a character shows up who can offer an author a deeper journey into those interests. A story sort of taps a writer, and at the point of being tapped a writer can only say one of two things. Either yes, or no.

Saying yes to a story is more interesting, but that’s not reason enough to say it. Sometimes no is an appropriate answer. Writing a novel is a very long haul – two or three years usually. It’s a marriage, not just a wedding. Maybe the subject tickles my interest but doesn’t seem like something I can sustain. Or maybe I feel ho-hum about the story. Or maybe I just don’t feel ready, in which case I can shelve the story and let it percolate in my subconscious. Or maybe I’m just afraid, in which case I may as well say yes, because in my experience a story won’t leave me alone if fear is the only thing keeping me from it.

Fear of writing a story is always fear of the future. Fear of publication, fear of rejection, fear of bad reviews, good reviews, no reviews, success, failure, fear of being criticized for writing the novel I wrote. Fear of the process.

For me, writing a story or reading a story is always about learning something new. It’s about pushing against what we know to learn what we don’t know. That’s what storytelling is about. That’s why storytellers in some cultures are highly regarded, perhaps even considered shamans. Storytelling is always about breaking down barriers, not about maintaining them.

A good storyteller can go beyond the limitations of self. That’s the point. That’s the magic. It always begins with that relationship between author and character. That’s who I write for, the character.

Naturally, I hope other people read my stories, and like them, but I don’t write for those people. I don’t write for them, or a marketplace, or what’s hot, or a professor, or an editor, or agent. I write for my characters.

Have I honored them? Did I tell their story? Were we in the journey together? Did I listen to their guidance?

If yes, then I’ve succeeded.

I Quit

I quit. I quit on average about three times a month. Sometimes I stay quit for months. Sometimes I stay quit for only hours. Sometimes I quit a particular project and sometimes I quit the whole gig.

The last time I quit was about two weeks ago. I was taking my morning walk and my mind drifted to how I feel differently about the current novel than I did about the last one when it was in progress. The narrative flow for the last one was like stepping into a rapid river. Once there, my job was to keep breathing. The new novel is an epistolary novel. It’s an interesting way to write. I can only deliver little tiny spyglass views of information to the reader each time I sit down, and I’m finding that there’s less opportunity to play with language. So I decided I missed narration too much and was going to abandon this project and start up with another character that intrigued me. I went to bed that night happy in this knowledge, and then I dreamed about the current characters. I dreamed about a pair of fringed gloves, and the young girl who is my protagonist trying to learn how to use a lariat, and I woke up and knew I had to continue with this book and I started again.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, this tendency I have to quit. There’s power in quitting. It’s like releasing a pressure valve. I need to quit now and then to remind myself, that writing is a choice, that I am not chained to a desk, a computer, a screen, an imaginary world, or a character. If I don’t remind myself of this I start to feel like writing owns me, and that’s not the relationship I want to have with it. The relationship I want to have, the one I insist on, is one of mutual respect.

My writing and my characters have to know that I have other things going on, that I need breaks, I need the real world, I need to read sometimes, or watch TV, or cook. Mostly my writing and characters need to know that I am an expendable commodity. I do have limits. I do have needs. I do have things that are at least as important, and sometimes more important, than the book I’m working on.

In return for that, I try to respect my characters and their stories. I don’t “play god.” I don’t make things up. I listen and am lead intuitively into the places I need to go in order to pull this one off.

Some characters are quieter than others. Persy, of the previous book, wasn’t quiet or illusive. He wasn’t loud, but he was strong and sure of himself, and that made me sure of his voice and the story. The characters in the epistolary novel have been like shadows from lace. I wasn’t really sure if they were there. It wasn’t until I quit, that they really asserted themselves through that dream, and then in the work.

No matter what the relationship, one thing that keeps it healthy is the knowledge that it will end. It’s knowing that it’s ephemeral that gives it such sacredness. This is true for writing too. Even if I don’t quit the process of writing a particular story, the relationship with my characters will be over at some point. When I finish a book I can feel them leaving. I feel the point of departure. No one ever prepared me for the sorrow I feel at the completion of a project. No one could. But I expect it now. I know it’s going to be sad. And if I feel, in the midst of writing, that it’s just not working out, or worth it, I quit. Sometimes I return, and sometimes I don’t.

Why Are You Reading This Blog?

Hello. You again. At the risk of breaking all the rules of blogdom, I have to ask, why are you here? What do you hope to gain? Is there some grain of wisdom you seek that has not shown itself in your life? What do you desire more than anything? What do you wish to do with your breath? What do you wish to exhale?

If it is art, I can tell you that you better get to it. You will read perhaps, or maybe you already have, loads of advice on how to spend your time. Someone will tell you that being a working artist is 80% administrative and 20% actual making of art. This might actually be true. But anything that comes with an equation is a box you’re being told you must step into. “If you want to be an artist here is the artist box. Step right in.”

Don’t.

I have my own equation. Well, it’s not an equation. More of a theory. An artist’s job is to love the world. Loving the world means taking it in. Getting outside and sitting on a rock. Walking in the woods on a rainy day just to feel the trees’ interest in you. Going out to a cafe and sitting there with your tenth free refill, jittery and nerved by the caffeine, “doing nothing,” but all the while listening to the people around you, eavesdropping not just on the their words but on the patterns of their language, their gestures, taking note of clothes, and hats, and hands and shoes. Oh my god – especially hands and shoes. These are like portals to character. I recently read a description of a woman on a bus in Miami (where else?) who wore all pink, and had pink hair, and on her feet wore a pair of sandals with a goldfish floating in formaldehyde in each clear Lucite heel.

You might find that on the Internet, but you’d have to know what you’re looking for. And this is my point, you don’t know what you’re looking for. There is no search engine that will turn up the odd little surprise that life can give you, that tiny something needed for your story.

One night, many years ago, I took my dog for a walk after my night shift at a grocery store deli. We didn’t go far. I was tired and just wanted to get out of my grimy curry-smeared clothes and into my pajamas and bed, but I had a dog, and dogs have needs, and so I found myself taking that walk. At home, on my desk was the second draft of my first novel. I was having a hell of a time naming the commune in that novel. I had a list of names. Lazy Love Ranch. Chicken House. Butterfly Abode. I plugged in one after another and hated them all. It made sense for me to hate them. They didn’t arrive inside the story for any reason. It was as though there was someone outside of the story thinking things up, and there was. It was me. Fiction is a sleight of hand, and I was failing at it.

And then that night, on that walk, it came to me. Two Moons, named after the way, in the extreme curve of the road I lived on, the full moon switched sides, going from being over my right shoulder to over my left. I had noticed this plenty of times on full moon nights driving home from my grocery store shift, but as a solution to the dilemma of naming the commune, it hadn’t occurred to me. Maybe it was because I was driving. Maybe even twenty-five miles an hour is too fast for me to really feel the world speaking. Maybe not. All I know is that I went home, sleepily wrote down Two Moons on a scrap of paper, left it on my desk and went to bed. The next day the commune was named, and a new scene was born, one that is integral to the story, that weaves in naturally. I consider this moment a gift from the universe.

And here’s the thing I want to really get across to you. The universe is in favor of you doing your art, but the universe speaks in tongues. It’s a language you have to decipher, and you don’t decipher it by thinking. You decipher it by experiencing it.

So, at the risk of losing you as a reader, I have to ask what are you doing here? Are you looking for something not likely to be on a blog? Are you killing time? Avoiding your art?

Or perhaps you are avoiding the discomfort of admitting that you don’t know how to go about your art? If so, then lean in and let me whisper this secret to you: None of us know how to go about it. We just go about it, that is all. After enough time of going about it, we learn to trust that a certain unveiling will happen as we continue to go about it.

So go about it. If you do not read my blog for three month, six months, a year because you are in the beautiful throes of going about your art, then I will be so happy. I will look forward to when you return, all wild, with leaves and grass in your hair, your cheeks rosy and bright, your voice singing an unknown but well-known song, your discoveries and journey reflected in those beautiful feral eyes of yours.

 

Thick Skin vs. Self Knowledge

I am often asked about the ethics of memoir. Specifically, is it ethical to write about another person? Can I be sued? Should I use real names?

My answers are, respectively: Yes and no, maybe, and definitely not.

There. Now that that’s cleared up, I’d like to talk about ethics in teaching. I have some hard and sure rules in my private classes.

1) We always use the word narrator when referring to the character in the piece (even if the piece is memoir). 2) We don’t give out life advice or devolve our work together into a therapy session (not that therapy’s not valuable – but a writing workshop is not the place for it) and 3) Confidentiality. We don’t talk about what is said or shared in workshop. What happens in class, stays in class.

My goal with all three of these rules is to provide a place of safety for the writers and for me, a place where boundaries are known and predictable, dependable and consistent. These rules have worked out for me, and I believe they work out for my students as well.

I hear a lot about thick skin, how writers need it because we will experience so much rejection in our lives, and it’s true that we will experience rejection, and loads of it. But there are qualities besides thick skin (and a grasp of grammar) that are needed to become a writer, and one of those qualities is empathy. A writer needs a heart that is tender enough to imagine what a particular situation might feel like for another person. This is true for both fiction and memoir. It’s this tender heart that helps us write stories in the first place.

What I really want writers to develop is self knowledge, and a deep knowledge of the work. If a writer develops that intimate relationship with a work, then she might get pissed off at some of the comments or treatment of her work in a workshop, but this anger will only be fuel for the boat she’s in. She’ll rail against the experience or comments for awhile, then process them as a whole, take what she can use and discard the rest. The thick skin older, more experienced writers talk about isn’t really a thick skin at all. It’s just an ability to process things more quickly. It’s efficiency. It’s using what we know to move forward and not get tripped up for too long. It’s the ability to filter comments and avoid empowering someone else regarding your work.

I’ve found in my own journey that there are plenty of people ready to define me, ready to dispense free advice about how I ought to go about this writing thing. At different points in my life, everything I’ve been doing has been judged as the wrong way to go about it. Beware the people with labels, pre-adhesived and ready to slap on. These people can be teachers, other writers, reviewers, editors, agents, total strangers, people who want to write and never have, someone who took a class from someone else some time ago, someone who knows a famous writer, etc. etc. Some of these folks can be out and out mean, or wolves in sheep’s clothing, or completely unaware of what they are doing. When it comes to writing there are many “experts.”

The only antidote is deep work. Know yourself and your characters and your story, and no one will be able to throw you off your game for very long. This doesn’t mean you never take a critique into consideration, and it doesn’t mean you don’t hurt when someone is especially mean spirited. It does mean that you have a clear vision of what is right and what is wrong for you, and when you do get thrown off your game, you return to a centered place. The longer you write, the more you will gain knowledge of yourself. This alone makes it worthwhile.