ReScrap

I'm revising Scrap. I'm going to start sending it back out. What an awful prospect.

Revising is an exaggeration. I'm editing it as per my editor's (from Pugilist) suggestion.

I started this edit shortly after I got the comments from her in July -- or, at least, I read them through, and opened up my computer -- then the press shut down; we all know this.

I had a look at them in September and again in October, twice in November, and I vowed not to leave the house in December until the draft was complete -- that didn't work at all. But now I've completed the draft and I'm sending it out.

Sending out damaged goods.

When I sent out the ms. in 2009 and 2010, I felt fucking fantastic about the work. I was dumbstruck each time a press declined, each time I did not win a contest. Unbelievable . . . who wouldn't want to publish this work?

Today, I'm dubious. I've lost confidence. I've never faced this crisis as a writer before. As a high school athlete, sure. As an engineering major, of course. As a lover, bet your ass. As a grad student, every day for five-and-a-half years. As a writer, rejection always saddened me, but made me want to write more, and, more to the point, to write better.

But there's something about losing a book after eight months of feeling pretty sure I had a book that has really wrecked me psychically.

I doubt myself. I doubt my work.

But I'm sending it out. I guess a really good way to get over this for-shit feeling would be to get a book published. So, of course, that's floating around in the front of my mind -- it was good enough already for what looked to be a really great press, it will happen again -- as long as rumor hasn't gotten around London yet that Scrap isn't virtuous.

Bad place for a Downton Abbey reference? I suppose so. Even as my metaphors gather in strength, my allusions huddle in the basement of some other master's servants. Crud, it sounded good, but it doesn't mean anything.

Hell.

I'm sending it out, and would like for it to get published, but would like, also, to be rid of it. Even in early August, I had 80,000 words of an historical novel written. 80,000 words which were, in fact, the basis of my post-doctoral fellowship application. I tried to enter into that text after the bad news from Pugilist, but it was futile. Not just the novel, but the pursuit, the writing. I had my most serious doubts of walking away from creative writing entirely. I'm pretty good at teaching lit classes, and I love comp. Who needs to bother with writing fiction, impossible, after all, as it is?

But I'm healing. I've spent this past week revising and preparing submissions. I'm ready to jump back into my Pithole with my pen blazing. I don't have a timeline, but I am going to reread what I have, dive into my research, and finish this book.

I'll keep us all updated on my progress.

Why Writing Is Impossible: A Quiet Diatribe Concerning the Craft Delivered in the Form of an Innocuous Series of Blog Posts

It's hard to learn to write again for all the reasons I've mentioned -- fear, shame, humiliation -- but the emotional difficulties also help to bring into clear relief the technical difficulties. I've been thinking about some of them, some of the reasons writing is so impossible. This is not the first reason or the most important; it's just the first reason I wrote down.

Consider the paragraph, for instance. Francine Prose writes a twenty-two page lyrical, informative, passionate, impassioned, telling, showing, fun, descriptive discussion of the paragraph in her book Reading Like a Writer. In the chapter, title "Paragraphs" (Oh! I love this book), we learn or relearn everything we've ever known about paragraphs but never thought to ask. The writing is a delight. The passages are a delight.

I'm rereading the chapter right now, thinking about how I will begin a conversation about paragraphs with my creative writing class this afternoon, thinking about how I break my own paragraphs, thinking about my favorite paragraph writers (Rick Bass, Richard Ford, Johnathan Kozol, bell hooks) -- yes, I'm just dorky enough to have favorite paragraph writers -- thinking about what makes their paragraphs great.

Prose delivers great advice from great writers, all guided, of course, by her own love of paragraphs, specifically, of writing at large. At certain points, as with the previous two chapters "Words" and "Sentences," we realize that the key to any good paragraph (or word or sentence) is magic. Or, as I like to call it, God. Or, as I like to call it so that atheists and religious folks don't get offended and agnostics don't have something new to ponder, society speaking through us. Or the muse or the Aeolian Harp. Or great writers of the past. I was right at first: all good writing moves are magic.

And then Prose inserts a passage from Strunk and White's The Elements of Style -- certainly, every creative writer's favorite grammar book, despite its many flaws. The passage ends, "Moderation and a sense of order should be the main consideration in paragraphing." Thank you, Strunk and White, for creating this tiny book of writerly advice. It has served me, it has served my students, it has served us all in more ways than we'll ever know.

But "Moderation and a sense of order" . . . ? What the hell are those? This passage marks the closest I've ever come to feeling like Ralphie in A Christmas Story after he waits patiently for weeks and finally receives his Little Orphan Annie decoder ring and deciphers the secret message "DON'T FORGET TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE." "Moderation and a sense of order" . . . ?

I feel like I should apologize to my creative writers in class today for sharing this drivel. "Strunk and White," I'll tell them, "aren't always like this. They're really good guys when you get them alone." Writing, all writing, but specifically creative writing, more specifically fiction, should be human, right?, should be flawed and well-intentioned and beautiful, and, above all, compelling. Paragraphs should be tiny novels or winding narrations with, yes, of course, topical sentences, even though none of us knows what those are, really. And, yes, they should vary in length and intensity. And, yes, like any element of craft -- from dialogue to setting to gesture to title -- they should do more than one thing. Paragraphs should be voice driven as determined by the narrator. Their look, size, density should be dictated by the story, rather than the other way around. How they look when set beside other paragraphs is key -- e.g. a short paragraph in between several long ones can be striking and lovely and carry as much weight as the big ones. Paragraphs, like stanzas, must focus us intensely on a single moment, must control the pacing of a story, must describe huge sweeping changes in time and space -- the paragraph must be able to navigate the present moment as well as guide a reader into the future or past. And because of all the demands on paragraphs, a writer absolutely must have an overarching sense of order -- not necessarily as an impetus for the story, but it must be present as the drafts develop narration. Order, for sure, and a writer must balance lyricism with scientific presentation, the past with the future, long paragraphs with short paragraphs -- a writer must moderate her passions and flare with the rules of language and a knowledge of literary history. In short, the two key elements of a paragraph are moderation and a sense of order.

I hope that clears this up for everybody, and, again, give Strunk and White a chance. They mean well, even when they're making sweeping generalizations about what you need to be a writer.

Francine Prose says all this much better than I, and I have learned more than I can ever convey from her book, but perhaps the most important writerly tidbit I can take away from her book: "Though once again, as with sentences, merely thinking about 'the paragraph' puts us ahead of the game, just as being conscious of the sentence as an entity worthy of our attention represents a major step in the right direction." Some ancient Greek wrote, though he was probably not the first to think or say, "To know that we know what we know and that we do not know what we do not know -- that is true knowledge."

See what I mean?

Smoke and mirrors, slight of hand, misdirection: all within a grounding sense of reality. Magic.

Unsolicited Advice from Jackson Connor to Jackson Connor

Interviewer: Leslie McGrath. Interviewee: Sabina Murray. From The Writer's Chronicle February 2012:

McGrath: Your first novel, Slow Burn, was published when you were twenty-one. How did that come to pass? Are the [sic] any similarities between being a young author and a child star?

Murray: Well, I didn't become a drug addict or a prostitute, but I'm not exactly Liz Taylor. When you publish that early, your peers are not rooting for you. That's one thing. And there are two treacherous holes one can fall into: first, there's the flash-in-the-pan, where you buy everyone drinks until the money dries up (let's say two weeks) and never publish again, and, second, there's the stuck-in-a-hole, where, although your first book was published when you were twenty years old, your subject matter and writing style remain remarkably unchanged deep into middle age. Or there's me, where your book is sent out, reviewed in a few places, you get your picture in Vanity Fair, but are still selling balloons on the sidewalk in order to make ends meet. Then ten years later, when your next book comes out, you find yourself telling people over the rims of pints that it's actually your second book. And this gets met with a "Really?" so frequently that you wonder if you're not making it up.
     I was a young college senior, I graduated at twenty, and the book was my senior thesis. I had the shocking good luck to have Valerie martin as my teacher and she sent the book on to her agent, who sold it. Nothing has ever been quite so easy since. What might have been an auspicious beginning turned out to be character building. But a I said before, no drugs and no prostitution, so I count myself rather blessed.

In On Writing, Stephen King discusses his early writing career, beginning, I believe, in his case, in the womb. After college, he taught writing, and he wrote like hell, and he published a couple things here and there, then he sold a manuscript for $200,000, and, well, you know the rest of the story. Or if you don't, this is it: he still writes like hell and publishes the hell out of his writing, and, if the story I made up is true, paid more than $200,000 for dinner with friends one time.

Anne Lammott in the chapter "False Starts" in Bird by Bird receives a letter from her editor beginning, "This is perhaps the hardest letter I've ever had to write" (86). Now, if she's anything like me, she's immediately thinking the letter is hard to write, because her editor doesn't know how to spell Pulitzer Prize. Come to find out, this book she'd been struggling with for two years just doesn't quite do it for the editor. So she struggles with it for another eight or nine months amid feelings of grief, fear, and humiliation. She fell in love with the book and this new draft and resubmitted it to her editor and flew out to talk to him about it. "But my editor said, 'I'm sorry.' I looked at him quizzically. 'I am so so sorry," he said. 'But it still doesn't work.'" That evening, as she describes it, sounds rough. But she immersed herself in the novel for a month, wrote, and wrote like hell, set a brand-new treatment off to her editor . . . "The book came out the following autumn and has been the most successful of my novels.

(I am not doing either of these authors justice. Lammott discusses this process in a lovely, hilarious, and brutal eight-page essay. The first 94 pages of King's memoir cover this epic and honest writer's early writing life.)

Norman Mailer high-fived himself when he got drafted and published The Naked and the Dead at age 25 -- I think it's his best work and one of the best war novels of all time.

Gertrude Stein got a famous rejection early in her career, suggesting, if I recall, that she learn the rules of our language before she attempt any further fictions in it.

Nick Flynn's dad failed at his attempts at the Great American novel, and this failure, in part, is at the heart of Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City -- which creates, for me, complicated notions of the contemporary American novel.

How old was Henry Miller when he published Tropic of Cancer?

Some craft books, some collections of essays, some anthologies of writerly advice, offer writers eight, ten, thirty-three, fifty, or a hundred and one varying perspectives on how to get into the writing world, how and when to write, how to publish, how to respond to publication, how to keep one's head up despite set backs, but not so far up that one might think oneself above oneself. In short, it's a clusterfuck of advice.

And it's all good. Every ounce of it: from Hunter S. Thompson's job applications to Natalie Goldberg's Writing down the Bones to They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein.

There is no template for the writerly life, I believe. In fact, when we've read these books by writers about how to write, my spouse and I have often reflected that these writers are not telling us how to write, so much as telling themselves; more to the point, they're telling us How I Wrote -- whether it's how I wrote this story or this novel or this sentence or my complete oeuvre, the only thing they're telling us is: this worked for me . . . good luck. There is no one way to advance in this field. There is no way to know when you've made it. There is no end game, except to write. The only thing to do, the only thing that's real for a writer, is to write. And if that means losing your first novel because Borders shuts down, sit down and write. And write like hell.

My Toolbox, How I'm Like Michael Jordan, Nothing Groundbreaking

Stephen King begins his chapter "Toolbox" with a long description of a moment from his childhood when his uncle carries a hundred pound toolbox from the workshop to the window where he's replacing a window screen. Quite an effort. He uses a screwdriver, replaces the screen. Job over. I almost said out loud, "Why the hell did he carry that great big thing all the way out there when all he needed was a screwdriver to replace some loopscrews?"

Then eight-year old Steven King: "I asked him why he'd lugged Fazza's toolbox all the way around the house, if all he'd needed was that one screwdriver.

"Yeah, but Stevie," he said, bending to grasp the handles, "I didn't know what else I might find to do once I got out here, did I? It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged."

I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you. (On Writing 106)

There's nothing more, really, I can add to that, especially considering the fact that King spends another 28 pages describing a writerly toolbox. What can I add?

Except to say that I am (re)building my own toolbox in my own way. I've talked about Burroway and Prose and here a touch about King, and there is no limit to how much these writers are helping me build it and fill it up.

But I'm not relying on fiction writers alone for help. I'm also teaching a junior-level composition class, using Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing." A book that sings the praises of, provides examples of, and teaches students to use . . . templates. Hazah! But I don't mean to be sarcastic. Nor do I mean to belabor an introduction of the book.

Consider the opening paragraph of the introduction "Entering the Conversation":

Think about an activity that you do particularly well: cooking, playing the piano, shooting a basketball, even something as basic as driving a car. If you reflect on this activity, you'll realize that once you mastered it you no longer had to give much conscious thought to the various moves that go into doing it. Performing this activity, in other words, depends on your having learned a series of complicated moves--moves that may seem mysterious or difficult to those who haven't yet learned them. (1)

This notion -- that writing is a complicated set of simple procedures -- is something that I could not acknowledge over the past few months. I have, rather, been trying to sit down and finish a novel about the early days of the oil industry. In the midst of my desperation resulting from Scrap, each time I sat down, I became overwhelmed by the 80,000 words staring at me and the notion that there might be 20,000-40,000 more that I needed to get down before I could even begin a revision, and then, and then, and then, oh my hell. It's little wonder the words fell to pieces when I looked at them. The language became shrouded in mystery, because all those moves had ceased to exist.

In similar fashion, I have a hard time imagining Michael Jordon returning to basketball after five months away from the court and leaping from the foul line after his first dribble.

Now, though, I'm working again on those small simple steps. I'm reconsidering what I know about showing vs. telling. I'm thinking about character, setting, dialogue. I'm reading like a writer again. It's all part and parcel, though, right? I'm simply repeating myself with every entry, with everything I read. Oooh, did I mention the inspiration for Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird?  If you've read the book, you'll recall:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

So, yes, I am repeating myself. No these lessons are nothing new, really. Nothing groundbreaking in any given thought, but the repetition itself speaks to the practice at the heart of this regenerative process: the sustained, consistent effort.

Fiction, the Healing Process Continues

Part of the process of learning to write again is studying craft again. Or is it studying craft for the first time? I'm not sure how to qualify this, so I'll just tell the story. Because I'm teaching creative writing this quarter, and because I taught it last quarter, I've been reading books about writing fiction. The two text books for the class are Writing Fiction (7th ed) by Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey French and Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose. Both wonderful books from which I am learning more than I can express, more than I can teach, more than I'll ever know I'm learning.

But here's what I mean by "studying craft for the first time": I never read Burroway's book before. Nor had I read Prose's. I've never read Writing down the Bones, Bird by Bird, Stephen King's On Writing, The Art of Fiction by John Gardner . . . the list goes on. I read most of Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern as an undergrad, and I've done a great job of forgetting a large portion of that text (I, of course, mean that in a good way), and I read an occasional craft essay by Carlos Fuentes, Andrea Barret, Rick Bass, Lord Byron, but by and large my ideas about craft came to me through reading Moby Dick, Satanic Verses, Darconville's Cat. I learned to write, largely, the same way I learned to play soccer . . . except I learned to play soccer by watching it on television, but you get the point.

Which might be part of what I love about Reading Like a Writer . . . Prose suggests that we attempt to unlearn what we know about reading, and, in a sense, learn to love reading again, learn to savor it. I've never been a fan of speed reading, never been a fan of skimming, never been a fan of reading the first and last paragraphs of a short story or just the last act. I have never read a Cliff's Notes or a Sparknotes: I've always wanted to, I've just never found the time for it. I've always read, as far as I can remember, every word. It's a slow process, and I'm a slow reader. My students always think I'm kidding when I describe how many minutes per page a book takes me. (For instance, Writing Fiction is a five-minute per page kind of book. Infinite Jest for another instance took close to 6000 minutes to read.) Francine Prose celebrates this kind of reading . . . in fact, more intensely: she suggests reading classic texts in a language you barely know. Now that's slow, savory, something I hope to do . . . someday.

I have often wished I could read faster. But never while I'm immersed in a great book. I never once, while reading Sometimes a Great Notion thought, "I can't wait til I'm done with this monster."

As for Writing Fiction, Burroway has gathered a best-of writers talking about writing. She continually quotes Dorothy Allison, Flannery O'Connor, Anton Chekhov, and maybe a hundred other disparate and talented writers. And this is what I mean about "studying the craft again:" This text reinforces a lot of the ideas about writing that I've learned from my amazing cast of mentors, my shockingly talented groups of peers, and from my own autodidactic pursuit of craft lessons.

Burroway quotes Octavia Butler: "Forget Inspiration. habit is more dependable. habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice." The most important element of any writing life, I believe, is a sustained, consistent effort. I like talking to folks who say that they're always writing, no matter what they're doing, even if they're sitting around smoking a joint or bad-mouthing Republicans or playing golf. I think that's fantastic, and I think it's largely true (that writers are always writing), but if a writer doesn't get on her ass every day and slap some keys, she isn't going to produce anything -- she'll lead the paradoxical life of a writer not writing. Let me preface this (after the fact) by saying I'm definitely wrong about this. Some folks can smoke a can of opium, sit in a bathtub for an hour, and write "Kubla Khan" any day of the week. Some folks can write in their sleep or while they're driving or while they're watching the Superbowl. I can't. I think most folks can't. And, even if they can, I think we're all better served by the sustained, consistent effort, by persistence in practice, by sitting on our asses and cranking out words.

Another hugely exciting experience I'm having in reading Writing Fiction is the writerly dialogue the work is opening up in my head. Burroway quotes John Gardner:

. . . the needless filtering of the image through some observing consciousness. The amateur writes: "Turning, she noticed two snakes fighting in among the rocks." Compare: "She turned. In among the rocks, two snakes were fighting . . ." Generally speaking--though no laws are absolute in fiction---vividness urges that almost every occurrence of such phrases as "she noticed" and "she saw" be suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing seen.

Is this what it all comes down to? The distinction between "she noticed two snakes fighting" and "two snakes were fighting" feels like the least of details, like noticing a dusty shelf in a condemned building (while I approve of the metaphor, when I'm completely healed, I'll create an analogy with a positive connotation, rather than suggesting that good writing is like a condemned building . . . though, when I say it that way, I like it all the more). I mean is it that big of an issue? I actually asked myself that question as though I were asking John Gardner himself. And, as if John Gardner were speaking through me*, I thought, "It is not only that big of an issue. It's the only issue. A good story, a good piece of fiction is consciousness -- we are accessing another's consciousness. We are seeing through another's eyes (we are, in fact, using all of her senses, which is why sensuous detail is so stinking important), and registering another's thoughts." I for one have never looked at two snakes fighting and thought, "I turn, only to notice two snakes fighting among the rocks." No, I have never thought that at all. I might say that, but I'll be damned if I'm going to narrate the action in my head, I think to myself as I continue typing and consider what I have learned today.

Also, I say I haven't read Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird or Stephen King's On Writing, but that's only half true. I started both books recently and both are helping me to rebuild my writing self. Thank you, fiction writers who have paved this road to recovery. I always imagined that I would read the books someday to help me improve my writing, to help me improve my teaching, to help me pass an exam or land a job, but I never would have guessed I'd be reading these texts as a way to help my psyche heal.




*Yep. I'm suggesting that I'm channeling, not only one of the best fiction writing books of all time, but also, a book I just acknowledged I've never read. It might make you feel better that earlier today on a different blog, I very clearly compared myself to Cool Hand Luke.

Reading Like a Writer

Okay, so, clearly, the last five months have been rough on this writer. I'm not ashamed to admit, I've had my first bout with "writer's block," whatever that is. Whatever that stems from. Down the road, certainly, when asked about writer's block, I have to imagine myself saying, "Yes, I had that once, it was caused by the loss of my first novel," and that might be true, or it might be a cop out, or, most likely, it will be like this: I doubted writing for a while, the way some folks doubt their religion, but I worked and I prayed and I read and I sat down and pounded the keyboard and pounded the keyboard . . . and here I am today.

Perhaps it will be part of my acceptance speech for the Pulitzer Prize . . .

Certainly, by then, I will have got over my need to use so many elipses.

At any rate, I am becoming a writer again. That is, in large part, what this blog is about. The recurring narrative, of course, is about loss, but the bigger idea, the one that will carry on after the sad-sac recounting of the early life and times of Scrap, is that I am learning how to write again.

And, and I have to stress this, it's not just happening for me. I am not just waking up in the morning feeling a little more like a writer each day. No doubt Michael Jordan never stepped back onto the court after a month or two of hardly touching a ball and leap from the foul line (did I just compare my writing to MJ's basketballing? Oh, my. I'm getting out of control). It isn't just happening. I'm reading; I'm writing; I'm seeking out my writerly spirituality (again, very similar, I imagine, to folks who follow other religious practices).

Will I please be more concrete and specific, please?

"Afraid of running out of books," Francine Prose writes in Reading Like a Writer, "I decided to slow myself down by reading Proust in French." I've been reading books about reading and writing is one thing I'm doing. I have no fear of running out of books, but I love Prose's notion here. I love that she gives herself permission to slow down her reading: clearly, she is not suggesting to read less or to read sloppily, lazily, half-assedly -- she is suggesting we look more closely at every word, to make connections, to love the work. Again, I'm thinking of sports: in all my time around sports, I have never heard a coach say, "Get your ass out there and shoot 10,000 foul shots as fast as you possibly can!" Rather, we ask an athlete to slow down, to perfect a particular motion, to focus on Feet Elbows Eyes Followthrough (FEEF? That doesn't sound right).

I taught this book in the fall and am teaching it again and am taking this advice to slow down. The easy thing for me, at this point, might be to skim through the text, focus on a few notions that I underlined, checked, starred or circled last quarter and summarize the rest. But I don't think that would be as good for my writing.

At the same time, I don't think I have it in me to write a 500 word blog post every time I find a sentence I like. Or do I . . . ?

No. I don't.