Sunday, April 25, 2010

I'm Finding This Hard to Believe

It is a draft. It requires a rest and a thorough reading by yours truly for glitches, grammar boo-boos, and glaring plot holes.

It might suck. It might be, as Anne Lamott so aptly puts it, a truly shitty first draft. But two years and four months after writing the first tentative scene, I did it.

The novel is finished.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSORS

The food isn’t real,
we made it all up
But there is something that nothing keeps quiet,
a yammering that wants to crowd everything out.
And I keep watching the TV
and letting the words and words and words
--those words, we made them all up--
remind me that I must be
hungry, I must be,
and I listen to the words
until they feel like something real.

And I have wanted to be beautiful
and I have wanted to be regular
and I have wanted to be hairless
and I have walked in shoes that made me cry,
and I have looked down to find
every part of my actual body lacking,
even when it walked without the shoes and smelled
like a living thing, and went into the street
to look at the moon at some dark time
when I should have been asleep,
when the rules say sleep, the clock.

Even when I laugh because we made it all up,
I go back to bed wondering if my neighbor saw me,
thinking I am not beautiful now because I am not young.

If I take ten steps back
and say we made it all up
and I don’t want this now,
I want to catch water and wear warm rags
and watch the moon at some dark time,
quiet, all of you, quiet now,
they will say she is missing something,
it’s God,
her marbles.

There is a thing to choose here. When I do
all the words and words and words will fall out of my mind
and the people who like me funny will like me silent
and the people who like me smooth will like me shriveled
and my warm rags and my hair, gray and coarse as a horse’s tail
and I will be happy with a bowl of beans
and lettuce that grew next to the house
And the house can just fall apart
because I will die no matter what.

But I go to work and do things
to keep the wheels turning,
teaching people to read
so they can be informed voters
and tell “Good Night Moon” to their children,
and know which pill to swallow,
and finally find Shakespeare and Socrates,
and words and words and words,
even these words, and I made them all up.

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

A "Who's On First" for Writers

There seem to be four kinds of writers.

1. There are successful, seriously talented writers. Everyone secretly envies or hates them. They don't really care, they just write.

2. There are successful, mediocre writers who either believe they are part of the first group or pretend not to care because writing affords them a satisfying life.

3. There are aspiring writers who will never be part of the first group, probably won't be part of the second group and if they were part of the second group they would definitely think they were part of the first group.

4. There are aspiring writers who would rather die than be part of the second group and feel as though they WILL die if they can't be part of the first group.

It's a hell of a bug, this writing thing. If you aren't willing to go a little nuts in the effort, consider dentistry.

Thursday, January 07, 2010

Journal of the Novel

August 8, 2009

In what feels like a delicate and precarious place with the work. I have written up through some climactic stuff and now am at a moment that has felt so huge and important since the very beginning. And I am finding it very difficult to go there. I wrote one sentence hours ago and have been stalling ever since. People who love to read but don’t write would never believe how hard this is, how intimidating to make it up as you go along, page after page, after page. It feels like a walk out onto the high board. It never seemed all that high when you were looking up from the water, but from up there, it felt like the top of the world, not fun but terribly risky.

Today I read through some pages that I had not looked at for a long time, and did have that strange experience of hardly recognizing it as my own writing. That’s a crazy feeling. But often a happy one. Reading something I wrote myself and enjoying it as I would if it was written by someone else, is a good feeling. Also have wrestling with the plot (so what else is new?). I actually opened the MS in another doc and started trying to do something different, trying to excise the character of Sh_, and it was just hell. I think I need to keep her, but it still feels like the characters have far too many moments of being yanked hither and thither simply in service to my outline. It is such a house of cards, though, to imagine deconstructing parts. Scary.

Still wrestling with language. I decided that I will continue to use Mandarin translation for the few words I need. I will then vet those with J_—god bless J_, I am so grateful to have her on board to help. When the draft is basically complete, I will look into getting old Xiang (Hunanese) translation help—although I’ll probably have to pay for that. I also have to make a final decision on the name issue, but I’m not going to do that until I feel the story is basically finished. It is just too tedious to figure out right now, with the other writing bearing down on me.

Plot and character are so inextricable. Elizabeth Bowen once wrote:

“Action is the simplification (for story purposes) of complexity. For each one act, there are an x number of rejected alternatives. It is the palpable presence of the alternatives that gives action interest. Therefore, in each of the characters, while he or she is acting, the play and pull of alternatives must be felt. It is in being seen to be capable of alternatives that the character becomes, for the reader, valid.”

And I have found this statement of hers amazingly true:

“The novelist’s perceptions of his characters take place in the course of the actual writing of the novel. To an extent, the novelist is in the same position as his reader. But his perceptions should be always just in advance.”

This is so apt! Over and over I have found that I absolutely, positively cannot PLAN what will be the next thing a character does—the actions of my people stay in the unknown until I begin to excavate them by the physical act of typing the words onto the page. I find this a great mystery and the heart of the creative act. It is what I love and hate about this work. When it is happening and I am watching it happen, I am delighted and feel something akin to creative bliss. When I am at a sticky point it feels like trudging through a bog on a moonless night, no map in hand, no one to shine a light and call “Hey, over here!”

People, people, people

Tonight, I’m feeling pretty fed up. I know there are Nelson Mandelas and Desmond Tutus out there. There is a Dalai Lama and a Tich Nhat Hanh. There was a Mother Teresa. But man, those folks are few and far between, and they have to work inordinately hard to hold back the dark side.

A perusal of various forums in the cyberworld seems to point to a dearth of intelligence, a lack of empathy, an inability allow for ideas other than those one espouses. Civility, courtesy, and simple human kindness seem to be disappearing from the planet. American citizens use the most heinous racist language to talk about the President of the United States, his wife, his young daughters. Fortune and fame are lavished on the nastiest and most vicious social pundits.

It is as if our vast population has turned into a pack of dogs, overbred, overpopulated, reflexively biting our own kind. Our differences terrify us. We can’t share. We can’t allow. We want to overtalk, overpower. We use whatever influence we have to create the world in our own image. We hate each other. We kill each other.

Be kind.
(photo credit)