Beth Deitchman's Blog, page 3
November 1, 2013
The First Draft Blues
As of today I’m declaring myself about half way done with writing the first draft of Margaret Dashwood and the Enchanted Atlas: Regency Magic Book Two. I’ve made this declaration based on word count rather than plot because I have only a vague idea of the story at this point. A few things have started coming into focus: I sort of know how it will end, I know who the good guy is and who the bad, and I’ve got some cool spells worked out. Plus there’s the enchanted atlas, which is slowly revealing its secrets. Otherwise, everyday when I sit down to write, I’m winging it, coaxing the story out from wherever it’s hidden in my mind, figuring out what the hell I’m writing.
But for a few weeks now, I have had the sinking feeling that my story is a great steaming pile of poo. Probably because it is. How could it be anything else? It’s a first draft! Yet as often as I have started new projects, I cannot seem to get beyond my desire for everything to come out perfectly formed from the moment I sit down at the computer until the moment I type “The end.” You know, like that scene in Shakespeare in Love when Shakespeare sat writing Romeo and Juliet in a fury of productive genius, inspired by his love for Viola de Lesseps. If only it were that easy, right?
It’s funny that I should torture myself with such ludicrous expectations. Before I left my fabulous acting career for my glamorous life of Pilates instruction and writing, I taught writing (and a few literature courses) at UC Davis. With unbridled enthusiasm I used to encourage my students to write really crappy first drafts so that they could get the damn things done and then begin to revise them. Met with their blank, sometimes fearful, stares–I don’t think they had ever been given permission to do really crappy work and they didn’t know how to react–I would repeat myself. “Seriously, guys, just get it written. You can fix it later. That’s what the revision workshops are for,” I would say, doing my best to reassure them. “Tell your editor brain to take a few days off and just write!”
And yet, like a hypocrite, every day when I sit down to write, I find myself sinking into that self-judgy pit of despair that comes with allowing my editor mind to weasel her way into the drafting process. So, I’ve decided to bring in a little help. Since I know that I am not alone in suffering these first draft blues, I’ve turned to other writers, compiling a list of quotations about first drafts that I find reassuring. I hope you do, too.
“The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.” Anne Lamott
This is one of many helpful and reassuring nuggets from Bird by Bird. I read it a few weeks ago because of this Margaret Dashwood anxiety.
“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build sandcastles.” Shannon Hale
I found this one on Twitter in another writer’s pictures. And I like it a lot.
“There is no great writing. Only great rewriting.” Justice Brandeis
My husband reminded me of this one the other day, which I thought was nice of him. He’s very comforting.
“Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist. It’s perfect in its existence. The only way it could be imperfect would be to NOT exist.” Jane Smiley
What more reassurance could I need?
Except maybe this one:
“The first draft of anything is shit.” Ernest Hemingway
Right to the point.
If anyone else has a favorite quotation about shitty first drafts, I’d love to hear it!
October 1, 2013
And Genius Scratches its Ass
http://bethdeitchman.com/?p=446
And Genius Scratches Its Ass
About a week ago I let myself get distracted from writing with a “quick look” at Facebook. Half an hour later I was watching Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creativity and the creative genius. It is very much worth a watch, so if you want to take a moment to do that before you finish reading this post, I’ll totally understand. If you don’t want to, I’ll get to the most salient point as quickly and with as much eloquence as I can. Gilbert begins by talking about the crippling fear faced by artists when they sit down to work on a new project, especially in the wake of success (in Gilbert’s case it was with Eat, Pray, Love, a mind-boggling success that took her by surprise). This fear can understandably inhibit the creative process and has been known to drive artists mad–or at least to drink and do drugs. In order to combat this fear, Gilbert began looking for ways to understand the creative impulse, what we sometimes call genius, and she raises the marvelous possibility that genius is not something that comes from within but is something external to the artist, something that can be invited into the room to give the artist a little help, like, as she says, Dobby the house elf. There’s more to this TED talk, so you really should watch the video when you get a chance.
After the video ended, I finally pulled myself away from the Facebook and went back to work, inspired and relieved. I did a little experiment and extended an invitation to Dobby the House Genius to join me. Ralphie, my dog, was curled up on one end of the couch, but there was ample room for Dobby on the other. And damned if the writing didn’t go just a little bit smoother. The slog was a little less sloggier. I didn’t feel tortured at all, which got me to thinking about something that I’ve been thinking about for some time: a mixture of images and ideas that are best described as the portrait of the artist as a tortured soul, so burdened by the weight of his genius that he goes mad.
When I was younger–in my teens and twenties especially–this portrait fascinated me. There’s just something so special, I thought, about that artist so driven to do his or her work, so driven by his or her genius, that they can be held apart, distinguished, as somehow better than other mortals. Somehow less mortal. It’s a seductive image, especially for an adolescent, because, among other things, it gives permission for a lot of very bad behavior. “I’m an artist. I commune with the divine. I don’t have to live by bourgeois rules.” Who doesn’t want to have permission to say something like that? From the other side of forty, however, I can see quite clearly how that is not a very healthy idea, how, no matter the distinction it brings, genius is not a burden I wish to bear.
But when I was a freshman at UCONN, I reveled in that image. Early in my first semester, I took some time one afternoon to craft a sign to hang on my dorm room door whenever I was writing a paper. First I wrote (in as elaborate a script as I could manage–we didn’t have computers in our rooms back then) “Abandon hope all ye who enter.” Then I poured coffee over the sign and hung it to dry. Later I charred the edges with my friend Paula’s cigarette lighter. I was very pleased with my sign, not just because I had made it myself but also because it was an awesome prop in my ongoing performance of being a Writer. The purpose, of course, was to let everyone on my floor know that I was WRITING and that things could get crazy because that’s what happens when someone is WRITING. I embraced this role because I thought that’s how an artistic person should act, and I was nothing if not an artistic person. I cringe now to think about it, and I realize that I had very indulgent friends, especially my roommate Kim, who happily studied downstairs in the cafeteria so I could write in our room. No one laughed to my face about my pretension. They just kind of took it in stride.
Of course, behind the door with my awesome sign, I was doing the work. I didn’t just sit at my desk, pulling out my hair. Fueled by coffee and chocolate, I wrote draft after draft of my papers, crossing out lines, cutting bits and pasting them–or taping them–to other bits, and then when it was ready, typing the whole thing to be turned in. Without really understanding it, I was actually doing my duty as a writer. For, as Gilbert makes clear, that is the artist’s only job: showing up and doing the work–sitting down to write and writing, no matter how awful or wonderful the words, bringing paint brush to canvas, warming up the body to dance, running lines before a rehearsal or performance, whatever the work, it is the artist’s job just to do it. Genius belongs elsewhere, to Dobby, or to whatever one chooses to envision. And that is a remarkably freeing idea for a type-A-must-get-it-right-and-be-perfect person like me.
It was freeing for Elizabeth Gilbert, too. While she was deep in a draft of the book after Eat, Pray, Love (or maybe it was that one, I can’t remember), she looked up from her work one day and addressed a corner in her office, saying something like, “I showed up. I’m here doing the work. So if this sucks it isn’t my fault.” That moment helped her turn a corner and actually finish the book. Whether her genius showed up or not didn’t really matter after that.
The one problem I have with Gilbert’s notion of genius is that she connects it to the divine. To me that connection undermines the whole pressure-relieving notion of genius as separate. I don’t want to worry about a deity occupying any corner of my house. How am I to keep from taking myself too seriously if I believe that God has taken some time out of His busy day to make sure that my writing doesn’t suck? Isn’t that the point of removing the burden of genius from myself–so that I can get on with my work and not be so tortured? Besides, I’m not a big believer in gods.
As a reaction against this invocation of the divine, I’ve been refining my vision of the genius that I welcome to my office every day, searching for something a little earthier, a little baser. So now I imagine a combination of Dobby the house elf and Tom Hulce from the movie Amadeus: it’s helpful like Dobby, but also crude and irreverent like Hulce’s Mozart. When I sit down to write, I invite this Dobby Mozart to join me. While I’m slogging away, my genius is sitting on the couch with Ralphie. Looking out the window, maybe, or watching me or just, I don’t know, geniusing. If, as I am going about my work, I start to take myself too seriously, my genius looks at me and pointedly scratches its ass.
August 21, 2013
Writing Mary
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"Steal It and Make It Your Own" or Why Reading Good Writing Matters
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July 5, 2013
Killing the Sylph
When I was fourteen years old, my ballet teacher pulled me aside after class one day and told me that I needed to lose some weight. I was about the same height I am now, five foot three, and I weighed around one hundred and ten pounds. While I was not ballerina thin, I certainly was not fat. I had a nice body, actually, a budding woman’s body, strong, with beautiful curves. But Ms. Allenby told me she wanted to consider me for bigger parts in the small company with which I danced, and that to do so, she needed me to be thinner. I don’t remember that “request” bothering me. I didn’t go home and cry; I didn’t feel humiliated or defeated. I was daunted by the woman’s body developing without my control, and I think I wanted–on some level, perhaps not consciously–to stop it. I didn’t really like my breasts or my round butt and curvy hips. I was mortified by my first period. I didn’t like maturing, so the part of the story that comes next makes perfect sense.
I went on a diet–counting calories, cutting out sweets, and planning my meals very carefully. The “request” came toward the end of the summer between eighth grade and my freshman year in high school. By the time school started, I had lost around ten pounds. It was exhilarating at first. Anorexia always is. By mid-fall I had lost almost twenty pounds. Ms. Allenby seemed pleased, and that pleased me. I got to dance some great parts–fun variations in the Nutcracker and Juliet in the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene choreographed by John Cranko. My budding breasts nearly disappeared and my period stopped; my development was arrested and I was relieved. I had a ballerina’s body–not that this picture shows it very well, but it’s the only one I can find.
Almost everyone knows about the many forms of lasting damage caused by anorexia and other eating disorders. I think for me the most pernicious result was how anorexia narrowed my definition of myself–encouraging me almost to erase myself. As a dancer, I equated my body with my whole being, and it reflected my value in a scary inverse proportion: the less I weighed, the more I was worth. The logic is mind-boggling: I’m worth more when I almost don’t exist at all. The book Competing with the Sylph: The Quest for the Perfect Dance Body sheds some light on this bizarre aspiration that I shared with so many young women. In my quest for near weightlessness, for a sylphlike body of air, I created an image of what my body should be. Forever. That was when I was fourteen. Thirty-one years later, I still struggle with this image of my body–from time to time I find myself at war with my own flesh.
A couple of things have happened recently to bring all of this mess back up. In September I started training to teach Pilates. Since then I’ve been working out a lot, and I’ve been a lot hungrier, which means I’m eating more–it’s really hard to do things like hang upside down in Pilates inversions if I’m not getting enough nutrition.
In January I turned forty-five, something I celebrated with a four day dessertapalooza, which paved the way to sequels in subsequent months. Then a few weeks ago I realized that I was tired of being afraid of food. I’m tired of worrying about how what I eat might kill me. Last summer I stopped eating gluten and dairy to control my asthma, which actually stays under control just fine as long as I take my Flonase. I got sick of being so restrictive, so I started eating things that had been off-limits–like croissants and ice cream. All of these things have led to some weight gain because my forty-five year old body does not metabolize food like it did when I was twenty-five (ah the joys of peri-menopause!). I have no idea how much weight I have gained as I have no scale, but I know that my body has changed. It has more flesh. A lot of this new flesh is muscle–my sister and I develop muscle very easily, probably because of our eastern European peasant genes. But some of it is not muscle. Some of it, in my recovering anorexic’s mind, is excess. Unnecessary flesh.
But my body–the ideal Platonic vision I created at fourteen–has no excess. I was driving home from Pilates the other day, and I realized that is why I am having trouble with the “extra” flesh on my stomach, thighs, and butt. I see that flesh as not part of my real body, the ballerina’s body aspiring for sylph-hood. There’s certainly no fat on that body. It is sleek, perfect. Anything else is not really me–it might be attached to me, but it is not me. The insanity of that notion struck me as I sat waiting for the light to change, thinking about how I didn’t like the way my thighs feel. In that moment, I wanted to cut off part of my body. Remove a chunk my flesh. Part of me. Jesus, that is fucked up.
I’m hardly unique in this horrifying desire. I hear my friends talk about their bodies in much the same way. They grab handfuls of flesh that they’ve identified as excess, the part that needs to be eliminated from their stomachs, thighs, butts, waists–everywhere that “excess” intrudes. One of my friends jokes (?) about “just getting it all sucked out.” Getting part of her body sucked out and thrown away as though it is trash. What makes a woman think that about her body? What makes anyone think such thoughts?
Of course I can’t answer that question for anyone else. But sitting in the car, wondering how to get rid of those bits of my body that don’t really belong to me, I figured it out for myself. And it pissed me off. When I stop and listen to the voice in my head telling me that there is too much flesh on my body, I hear the faint traces of a South African accent–it is an echo of my ballet teacher’s voice. I was sixteen years old and in the middle of rehearsal when she had me come over to where she sat. She reached out and grabbed the flesh of my inner thighs, saying, “If we could just get rid of this part….” So, yes, I understand the compulsion to just cut it off. I was eighteen years old and sitting in her office trying to explain why I didn’t want to dance anymore when Jean told me that I would be nothing but a fat, plain lady if I left ballet. I think some part of me has been trying to prove her wrong ever since. But the best way I can do that is to ignore the echo of her voice and to change the ideal image of my body to one that is strong and healthy, not frail and sylphlike.
In fact, that ideal body does not serve me well. When I am pared down, when there is no excess, I tend to be much sadder. I’m crankier and harder to be around. And I’m less healthy–my joints ache, my asthma flares up more readily, and I feel weaker. I’m tired and can’t concentrate, which makes most things harder to do.
That I can even see the difference now is progress. That I can also see my body with some measure of objectivity is also progress. Believe me, I know that there are lots of people who think I’m crazy, who must resent my complaints about my body because it is actually beautiful. More importantly, it is strong, well-muscled, and solid. Mine is a woman’s body, not that of some pre-pubescent teenager, all angles and limbs, or of a sylph, weightless and airy. In this body I have a lot of energy and much more focus for my teaching and my writing. My joints don’t hurt, and my asthma flares up far less often. This body, my body, made of flesh and bone and blood, serves me so well. Why would I want another?
June 19, 2013
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