Why Writing Fiction is Like Having the Flu

Let see, where were we ?

Actually, after a much needed internet vacation followed by a week of the hella-flu, I haven’t the slightest.

Oh yeah: I was documenting my thoughts re: progress in the craft of fiction.

What I’ve learned this week:

Fiction writing is sort of like having the flu. You can make a lot of plans, but then life or the process laughs in your face, probably knocks you down, kicks sand in your face and says, sorry sweet heart, we do this my way.

You can fight it, but it won’t get you very far.

I keep arriving at the same thing over and over. The essential pain of writing good, deeply textured, organically, non-linear prose ( or poetry) is that it requires a beastly amount of patience, time, unused ideas, repetition, drafts, work, and so on. This is not some great new discovery.

My biggest leap of faith in fiction writing is trusting the story to tell itself…. More specifically, letting go of my originating ideas. I haven’t gotten much work done lately, but the story I am working on, keeps revealing itself in new facets… telling me what it is really about. It is certainly not about my first given synopsis. It is frustrating… and fascinating process to me.

It’s also a lot like having the flu. I want to move ahead, but I know there is no point before I am ready. It only causes relapse.  Both the flu and my story’s time line has little regard for my impatience.

It seems to me, I am just still here, learning to be patient. Nothing new here, folks. Same old, same old.

It’s possible I will need a new blog angle if I ever hope to say something new. Heh.

Much love,

Zen and the Art of the Hot Mess

Sometimes this business of writing is a lot like Whack-A-Mole. And I am not talking little moles you expect to tunnel through the lawn from time to time. I’m not talking mere word choice or punctuation quandaries. I’m not even talking about plot points or characterization. I am talking about the secret bone-crushing things no one can teach you until you feel your own bones giving way. Okay, that was melodramatic. I’m afraid I woke up that way.

It’s true though. They say you can’t teach or be taught writing. This isn’t entirely accurate, but I’m going to say it accounts for the acknowledgement of natural talent. Natural talent is the element that makes something sing, that takes your breath away… but on it’s own, it’s worthless. This is where what can be taught comes in. Craft. Craft is what gives scaffolding to natural talent. In my years at school, and in the stacks of books I have read on the subject, these are the two elements teachers lectured about. The further I get in my trying, I find they missed a huge colony of moles. Whack whack whack.

The battle of your own psychology. I guess such a thing is self-evident in most endeavors. Just because something makes obvious sense, does not mean I don’t have to find my own, long, round about way of discovering it for myself. I wish it did, but I am not that put together. So here I am, discovering the third element of writing, is in fact, the writer herself. And baby, that field is full of moles.

There I am coming to terms with time and mortality and the essential pain that good writing takes more time than I have allowed patience for. Whack. And up pops the next grubby mole. This would be the Hot Mess Mole. Just as one has to be patient with the process, one has to be tolerant of the mess. Another paradox. You can’t develop an inspired, well crafted story with out exercising a few bad ideas, a ream of bad lines, sloppy styling, the wrong order, the wrong point of view… And you have to have the vision to see through it all. Trust that it will come together. Peace with the fact that it might not.

Up pops the time mole ( Whack!) I don’t have time to get it wrong. I don’t have the patience or bravery to see myself flounder. ( Whack whack!) The truth of course is, not allowing the hot mess is a hot mess all its own. It’s called Never Finishing A Story You Can Be Truly Happy With.

It’s a big, effing, ugly mole, that one.

Whack!

The Tao of Crocodiles

Time is something I wrestle with; I am not obsessing over my mortality. I’m acutely aware of it. My first father died at an age younger than I am now. I’ve had friends who were there, and in a blink, were gone. I’m old enough now; this happens. But I am not running on about a falling sky. There is a secondary motion that rises from the fact we are going to die. It’s reinforced in consumerism. In technology.  It skews our expectations. We want hamburgers and answers in 30 seconds, then we want more.  We are in a rush to fill our lives with fast things. We forget how to wait. It’s a paradox.

I feel this in my writing all of the time. I want to have it figured out. I want the polished story. I want the provocative poem. When I am frustrated–When stories make my brain hurt– I worry it is because I think in a process more akin to poetry. I feel like I am running out of time to get it right. This stress is manufactured, irrelevant and certainly isn’t helping the art of it all.

I had a big moment yesterday. The first of it was that I read an awesome story by Shawn Vestal in  Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy Volume 3  called “ The First Several Hundred Years Following My Death”  The second part of it was I read a number of blurbs in the back of The Best American Short Stories 2005. Nearly all of the authors reference their stories taking multiple YEARS to write.  We are not talking novels. We are talking 7-15 page stories. Different drafts and incarnations, concealments and revelations.  

It’s not the first time I have realized this, but because I am remedial in certain ways of the Universe, it had the makings of an epiphany all over again…  life actually happens outside of our perception of it.  We can rush as much as we want, our sights set on the outcome, but beautiful, meaningful things have their own version of time.  Learning them has yet another version of time.

It frustrates me. I live with two feet in a high speed world, sometimes.  And yet it inspires me. What a beautiful way to live, I think to myself. What patience and discovery and mindfulness of the small journeys.  But it’s an emotional battle. I want to have arrived. I want whatever emotional payoffs I see in the end ( which may or may not even be there).  And yes, I know 1000 aphorisms for enjoying the journey not the destination, and I agree with them. But humans are funny critters. For better or worse, I am human. As I try to really embrace this truth… The one where I  may or may not reach a destination, where I could be run down by a moose or a bus or a Zamboni next Tuesday, leaving what I perceive to be my life, undone… where I embrace the journey of art whether or not it will love me back… this risk…this being human–

I do my best to consider the saltwater crocodile. They’re funny looking. They have these stubby little legs and meaty bodies. They can barely swim at all. Did you know they can cross entire seas? Do you know how?

They don’t swim at all. They surf. They don’t ask how they can get through the sea; they just ride it. They wait until the tide is just right to fill their bellies with fish as they travel. Saltwater crocodiles are boss.  They get where they are going, using what they have, and I am pretty sure they never ask the sea, “ Are we there yet?”

Much love,

A Year In the Life of Empty- J.E. Glaze

I’ve wanted to review J.E. Glaze’s debut book of poetry, A Year In the Life of Empty for awhile now. Two things have slowed me from doing so. The first thing is, I don’t necessarily adhere to the traditional review form well. The second is J.E. Glaze is a good friend of mine. When friends review friends on the internet, does anyone actually believe them?

I will tell you this. In the adult world, where I am stripped of my crayons and Ho-Hos to engage in lunch room trading, poetry is often my map. If your words move me in such a way I know I would trade a Ho-Ho for what ever sorry lunch your mom packed you, I am destined to love you. In the jaded adult world, it’s one thing I am reasonably sure of. Poetry betrays people enough for me to trust it as a measure of their person.

The thing that strikes me about this collection is not the grit. Though it is not lacking in the pain or loneliness this human life conjures–What shines for me in these words is how despite this–the most tender bits of hope and humor remain in tact. J. Writes of the Plains. In “Humus II” he begins:

There’s one thing about the

Plains and that is Alone

It’s what they are and

It’s what you are if

you’re in them, of them.

There is such a human truth of our aloneness at times, it is so well captured here, and yet the entire collection reads to me like a prayer or a conversation with the Universe. Prayers populated with barbed wire, bruises, night. Entire landscapes of coral berries and hack berries and horses and the humans too.  The humans who will say“ Life is nothing. Life is made to slip out of your jeans and float away, naked, in love with the universe.”  ( P. 47)

There is such an honest beauty to this living. There is no airbrushing or false bravado. There is flinching sometimes. There is ache. There is wonder. There is the little spark of gratitude that begins to warm because no matter how hard the living is sometimes, it is full of life.

I’d give the dude my Ho-Hos for no tradesies, even. If either of us still ate that kind of crap.

You can find the book here: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2847222

You can find the poet on wordpress here:http://jeglaze.wordpress.com/

Much love,

The Disease of Poetry

I wanted to do something respectable today, I mean besides floss and brush and work my day job and care for my family. I wanted, perhaps, to finish a short story I have been working on. I want to train my brain in these processes. I yearn for it. The one million-trillion elements which complete fiction into works of art. I have the elements, just never all at once. Mastering them all at once has become my holy grail, my whale, my dragon.

A few weeks ago Sherman Alexie tweeted this: Poetry and mathematics are siblings; Fiction and poetry are distant cousins.

Despite my perceived ineptitude in mathematics, this has stuck in my thoughts.

But so has the simple understanding that poetry is clearly a mental illness and I am afflicted.

I had the best intentions to be a productive, upstanding citizen today. But the first thing I did, the first mistake is I read a poem. And though that poem was about fear and belief and  mortality and Omaha, I suddenly had to write about Pangaea and dinosaurs tearing meat from bone on our bellies and the true, true, nature of love and fear and need. You can see why this is an illness. This is how my brain is made. I can yield no order. I can just embrace a heap of words and blurs and marvel at how the meaning rises up from the spaces.

I am a disaster. And when I get like this ALL of MY thoughts COME through IN a PAttERN of ODD EMPHAsis, Like a ROwBOAT uPon the Waves. And then I read what I have written up until now, and deem it mostly crap. Even the ones that were published by other people. But in a few hours, I will change my mind and change my mind again.

I am starting to believe there is no cure for this, despite my best intentions.

The only thing I can learn to do is promote inbreeding between the mathematics, the poetry and the fiction.

Which reminds me of an article I read about blue people today on Yahoo.

See, this is what I am saying. There is no cure for this. Not even death, I suspect.

The Cheap Nightie

Things Happen.

Things happen at Walmart. You’ll be strolling through and there will be a sale on nighties. You will thumb through, check the stitching on the cheap lace edges, inevitably as you put the pale blue one in your cart, your five-year old daughter will loudly exclaim that Daddy said not to buy any clothes this trip. People look. You shrug. You’re pretty sure he won’t mind the exception. You briefly consider you are teaching your daughter to not mind the wishes of those we love. You briefly consider this is a bad, bad, mother thing to do. You briefly reconsider, that while your life is easier when she listens to you, you are really not sure you want a daughter who will grow up to do everything she is told despite contradictions in her inner compass. You don’t, of course, want her to commit atrocities. Or be a litter bug. Or be unkind. But you secretly hope she will be, in fact, a little bit bad ass.

As bad ass as you can get buying a sad, cheap nightie, made somewhere in deplorable conditions, where women don’t have the luxury of hoping their daughters will let their inner compass be their beacon. After you think on this awhile, you really start to wonder if your inner compass isn’t a bit askew. It’s a slippery thread, this nightie unravels down to.

Perhaps you wanted to feel lovely. For $7.99,  a bit of lace can do that for awhile. Perhaps you are angry because another woman questioned your right to be discontented with something, or worse, questioned your right to change. Your inner compass acts out sometimes. Perhaps it was simply because you were there, having come from a birthday party at a bowling alley, where your daughter lost her first tooth. It is not that her hair is a porcupine of winter static, or that her face is smudged still with chocolate or that the unsettling hole in her smile seems a bit ill. It is because it is only the beginning. Those tiny pearled baby teeth will tumble one by one. New teeth will grow.

In the check out line, you notice the middle-aged man who is scanning your delicates and canned goods, alike. It is the writer in you. You intuit this is not his career of choice. In better times, he was perhaps an insurance agent. He has that insurance agent look to him. He has a harried ache to his smile. He forgets to ask you if you found everything you were looking for. Maybe he knows it’s impossible to find what you were looking for at Walmart. You wonder if he thinks about your cheap nightie on your chubby form as you approach middle age. We make do with what gets us by. He gets to the Rosemary Rx bubble bath, you put in your cart long before the nightie. Your daughter reaches for it with grubby hands. Bubble Bath! she cheers. Mommy’s! you say, too quickly. The man checking out your long list of items which fill your life, laughs. It is such a genuine warm laugh, you laugh too. How sad this life is, we are thinking. How we muddle through, each moment checked on the conveyer belt. Oh, our sweet rebellions.

How beautiful it is.

How beautiful it is.

Hello, I Love You, Won’t You Tell Me Your Name

Having become more serious in my desire to become a published writer, I am plagued by a sense that I ought to establish some sort of respectable online presence. It’s what writers do, I think. This is to say, an online presence where I minimize the risk of alienating anyone with evident perversions and/or convolutions in my personal sense of humor,  opinions on political, social, spiritual, literary, musical and personal matters, the status of pizza as a vegetable, the giant roiling seas of electric voices in the wilderness, life on other planets, my hazy relationship with punctuation that no English degree can cure,  those god-awful boots with open toes, my disdain for stupidity, including my own, perhaps also my Pollyanna-tastic wonder in regards to the universe. Quite frankly, it scares people. To maintain a respectable online presence it is most advisable for me to sit  quietly with my hands folded in my lap and my ankles crossed, smiling weakly, perhaps contemplating my desire for a cup of tea.

Consequently, there is nothing left to say.
Actually, the only promise I can make is that such a thing will never happen.

It’s a pleasure to meet you; thanks for stopping by.

Much love,

Leah