Sophfronia Scott's Blog: Sophfronia Scott, Author - Posts Tagged "sophfronia-scott"

I was walking around my yard in a bit of a daze. The day before I had finished the novel revision I’d been working on for months. Like the crazy woman I am, instead of resting I was trying to organize my thoughts for the next novel. But I felt like I didn’t know how to steady myself in the real world after being in my previous novel’s world almost nonstop for so long.

I decided to go for a walk in the woods at Fairfield Hills, a campus-like park near my home. As I headed for the hiking trail I saw a friend from my church—he’s my co-teacher, in fact, for the 8th and 9th grade Sunday school class I’m teaching this year at Trinity Episcopal. He was there to go jogging and he stopped to tease me, saying he almost didn’t recognize my face because I wasn’t smiling. I said, “This is my thinking face. This is a thinking walk.” Then I told him I’d just finished my novel.

“Oh!” he said. “Then you’ve just lost a lover.”

I totally didn’t expect such words from him: he’s a retired Marine, a guy who’s as button down, spit and polish as you can get. But there was an odd truth to what he said. It made me think of the monk and writer Thomas Merton—I’m in the process of reading all of his journals—and at one point, before he entered the monastery when he was a young man in New York City writing and teaching, he wrote that he was missing his novel. Of course those were the days when a writer only had one or two precious hard copies of a manuscript and once you sent it out it was gone until the publisher returned it. He said he missed his book; he wanted it back. He spoke of it like it was an old friend. I didn’t think of myself as attached to my book in this way but I began to wonder about it as I continued my walk.

Then a phone call on my cell—it was a new Vermont College of Fine Arts student, about to embark on his first residency in the MFA in writing program coming up in December. He wanted advice from me, a recent graduate, about how to get the most out of the program. I asked him about his aspirations, how he saw himself as a writer, what he wanted to write. He told me he’d written short pieces but wanted to develop the skill of writing longer work. He’d started novels but had never been able to finish them. He said he often lost interest in the story and wasn’t sure if it would be interesting to anyone else.

I spoke and I realized what I was saying to him was the answer to where we both were—he starting to write and me having completed a big project.

I said, “You’ve got to love what you’re writing.”

This is so true. A novel takes such a long time—months and years. How else can you stick with it unless you truly loved your story and loved your characters? Where is the fun and energy to keep you going if you don’t love what you’re writing? I know it’s tempting to want to follow publishing trends and write in whatever genre happens to be hot at the moment. But if you don’t love the work it will be a punishing exercise and the results will show it. The reader can tell. If there’s no affection a reader can put a book down and forget about it as easily as you might during the writing process. But if a reader can sense love it will feel as though they’ve stumbled on a secret, and he or she will feel closer to you and your work because of it. One of the best critiques I received on my novel manuscript—and believe me, it kept me going when the revision process got tough—came from a reader who said, “I can tell you love these characters.”

Interesting side note: This same reader also said, “I could feel your love of baseball.” I smiled at that because while I watch the World Series every year, I don’t have a particular love of baseball. However I have a dear friend who does, and I wrote the baseball parts of my book with him in mind thinking I wanted him to enjoy it whenever he read it. So I was channeling someone else’s love, but the love was still there.

That day I stood there in the woods with my phone to my ear watching the truth of what my church friend had said unfold before me. I thought I was walking around out there because I was trying to think through the start of my next book, but what I was really trying to figure out was this: how do I fall in love again? It almost seems impossible to do but I know it must be possible. I suppose I have to be patient with myself, and patient with my heart. I’m thinking now if I court the new novel gently, putting in the time I know it requires, the love will manifest. This is my hope.

What will you do to find the love in your next piece of writing?

Yours,

I tend to talk about Toni Morrison with a cautious blitheness. I mention how we share the same hometown, Lorain, Ohio, but even that’s a scary thing to do. Why would I want to invite comparisons to a Nobel and Pulitzer prizewinning author? Such a thought would send most writers under their desks, possibly holding a thick reference book over their heads, like we used to do for tornado drills in my old elementary school, as protection from the debris surely to fly around them. However when I saw the video of Ms. Morrison’s interview with Stephen Colbert, I realized it’s time for me to talk seriously about what binds me to this important author and how she taught me something about myself that makes me confident, not fearful, in my work.

When Colbert asked how Ms. Morrison wanted to be “pigeon-holed” if not as an African-American writer, she said she wanted to be known “as an American writer.” She went on to say, “There is no such thing as race. None. There’s just the human race. Racism is a construct, a social construct…” I agreed and knew what she meant from the fiber of my being. I too think of myself as simply “a writer” working from the imagination and experience of being a human who happens to be named Sophfronia Scott. I have always felt this way but up until about ten years ago I couldn’t “own” it because I didn’t understand it. I only knew from a very young age I didn’t see the world along racial lines and thought this was an awareness I somehow missed out on. When I was in high school I often heard whispers that I wasn’t “black enough” or that I didn’t “sound black.” This led me to wonder if I was lacking in a way I could never figure out how to fix.

But then I happened upon Hinton Als’s 2003 profile of Toni Morrison in The New Yorker. I discovered she and I, despite our age difference, have a lot more in common than I knew, and these similarities were most likely what had shaped my worldview. It began with the most basic of shared characteristics—our fathers both worked at U.S. Steel, and she and I both grew up hanging clothes to dry outside, doing it very badly at times, and coming to a realization early on that we would not have the same existence as our mothers and aunts.

“I developed a kind of individualism—apart from the family—that was very much involved in my own daydreaming, my own creativity, and my own reading. But primarily—and this has been true all my life—not really minding what other people said, just not minding.”

But the big thing she pointed out to me in this article was how our community in Lorain was so integrated. Morrison always lived, she said, “below or next to white people,” and the schools were integrated—stratification in Lorain was more economic than racial. The piece also noted the work at U.S. Steel attracted not only American blacks from the south (my father was from Mississippi) but also displaced Europeans: Poles, Greeks, and Italians. The city has a large Hispanic population as well. This made me think of my father’s Polish friends we used to visit and of Lorain’s annual International Day Festival. To me this was just the way I grew up—I didn’t know I was living an integrated existence, or even what it meant .

Then, to match our outer experience, it seems Morrison and I fed our minds a creative diet that turned out to be just as integrated. As a child, Morrison read virtually everything, from drawing-room comedies to Theodore Dreiser, from Jane Austen to Richard Wright. I had done the same, thoroughly steeping myself in the work of Bronte (Charlotte and Emily), Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Wright, Ellison, and, yes, Morrison. My influences cover the globe.

I realized I come by honestly my inclination to write from views and voices not my own. The characters in my fiction are white and black, gay and straight, of various religions and nationalities. I used to worry about being taken to task for this and that I wouldn't have the confidence to back up this tendency because I didn't understand it myself. But Morrison helped me to see this inclination is truly my own. I have been nurtured by my inner and outer environments to write this way and once I knew this I could write with confidence and without apology. And in all this writing I know I am seeking to tell one humanistic story and it is and will always be, I think, a love story. Morrison’s stories also seek such basic humanistic elements: love, mercy, forgiveness.

So if you ask me whether I aspire to be like Toni Morrison, I would say this: I don’t aspire to her lyricism or style, which are very much her own, but I do have this simple ambition—to tell a good story and tell it well. This aspect, I think, is where she and I both come from, the true hometown we share.