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.

Writing for Fun

Speaking of writing advice that I’ve found on line – and this is old advice that I’ve given and been given a thousand times, but that has been lost to me for quite a while – writing should be fun.

I know I admire the living hell out of Flaubert’s struggling on his chaise lounge for days at a time, wrestling with a single sentence. I envy his migraines as he scratched out and replaced a single word a dozen times with synonyms and antonyms and, I don’t know, hieroglyphs I imagine.

I have sustained for months at a time with tuna fish and coffee, and thought myself more the artist for it, and maybe I was, but my writing has always been its best when I have enjoyed it. When I’ve surprised myself, taken on something new, or taken on something old in a new way. When I’ve learned from what I’m doing.

So last week, I rewrote a book called What I Know About Boys by Louis Redmond, published in 1952. Each page of text was mirrored by a black-and-white picture of a boy or some boys. Sometimes I rewrote the entire passage. Sometimes I changed a particular phrase. Sometimes I changed just a word. Sometimes I was sarcastic, sometimes parodic, sometimes sentimental, sometimes sincere – and every combination of those things.

I had in mind, initially, that the copyright of the book must, by now, be expired, and I would be able to reprint the book in my own fine way, but, apparently I don’t understand copyright laws, and it might be another half century before this gem hits bookshelves (e-bookshelves or the other kind).

But, still and seriously, that’s not the point. I enjoyed the writing – in process and product.

Practice

Writing, I've found, in practice, is not so terribly different from sports.

What an awful feeling, I remember from my high school days, to step onto a basketball court after a two-day break. Even at seventeen, I remember, the creaky joints, the stiff back, throwing the ball up and having it hit the bottom of the rim . . . bounce back and hit me in the nose. A quick cross-over dribble off my foot -- did my feet grow in the past two days? Am I ever going to be able to pass the ball to a teammate again? Should I just get a bag of potato chips and lock myself in a different part of the world where nobody will ever call upon me to run all the way from one key to the other key in a single day?

Holy hell.

But then I'd make a couple jumpshots, do a few king drills, pass the ball off a particular cinder block and catch it in stride en route for a lay up.

Writing turns out to be much the same thing, even as I sit down for the first time in two days, or four months, and clobber the keyboard with mash-potato hands and fingers of cream corn. I feel awful. I want to walk home and play ping pong, but I think over the next five hours, I'll be able to catch some kind of stride, make a useful paragraph or, at least, a strong sentence or a phrase that will become a pleasant refrain.

The Writer Who Came in from the Cold; Or Went out to the Cold; I Don't Know Which Yet

I'm taking a quick break from my "Brief History" thread for several reasons. The main reason is that I finished The Day of the Jackal today, and, to be honest, I allowed reading that to cut into part of my writing time.

I haven't read a spy novel since the spring of 2001 when I was finishing my undergrad. I took a course PolySci 197, I think, in which we read five spy novels -- it was very much like a lit course, but also like a history course. The professor was awesome and could range back and forth between narrative theory and Cold War politics in ways that seemed easy and natural. When I tried to do it, I usually ended up sounding like Billy Madison talking about The Little Dog Who Lost His Way (I need a fact checker for that title).

I loved the course, but I never got terribly into reading the spy novels -- I saw them as genre novels, formulaic novels: beneath literary writing in all ways (except they could potentially earn an author an income and sometimes got made into movies). I have been trained to think of junk fiction as somehow lesser than "real" literary fiction, but I've grown to see them more simply as two separate things, and I no longer privilege one over the other.

I should note that all with Gorky Park and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, we also read Going after Cacciato and Our Man in Havana, such that the often arbitrary nature of the distinctions between forms showed its unkempt head from time to time.

Sooooooooooooooooooo what?

Yeah, well, right, I'm writing a spy novel these days. Actually, I'm collaborating on a spy novel with a poet friend. I've never tried my hand at a spy novel before, but it's going quite well, I think. It stems from conversations I've had with my poet friend that always ended at closer to two or three in the morning with us saying to each other, "We should write a spy novel." And slapping high fives, but then sleeping it off and not writing a spy novel. The point is:

I'm writing again. It feels good. One thing I had to do to start writing again, since losing the novel deal, was to move on and try something else. I've tried, over the past four months, to get back into "I'll Tell the Mill" to give it another draft, but I haven't been strong enough yet. Soon, I think, with some more practice, I'll be ready to enter back into that world. For now, though. I'm writing a spy novel.

Wish me luck.

Beginning a Sustained, Consistent Writing

I was comparing writing woes with Jaswinder lately -- that we never seem to have enough time to just sit down and write, that we don't seem to get enough recognition, that recognition never seems to be as fulfilling as simply sitting down to write, but still a little recognition would be nice.

This came up during this past quarter while I was teaching a creative writing (fiction introduction) course. The main project for the course was to keep a journal. The idea behind the journal was to perform a sustained, consistent writing. Writers, I believe, should sit down everyday and crank out words, not hellbent on creating a new and equally beautiful Sometimes a Great Notion, but to exercise, much the same as a professional athlete would her body, one's unconscious.

Days after Jaswinder and I spoke about our writing woes, I opened some moving boxes my parents had dropped brought to me recently. I found my college journals, notebooks, and binders for English classes, biology and earth science, Calculus140, Polysci 197, Theatre 203, et al., as well as my personal journals, my drunken notebooks, binders full of laminated papertowels, cigarette packs torn into queer crucifixes and stapled to three-hole-punched cardboard.

It was at that moment that I realized the one thing that I was doing constantly, the thing I backed off during my MFA and the thing I abandoned altogether as a Ph.D. candidate . . . I realized that whatever else I was doing in my life, I was always, also, already writing. I wrote about the subjects for the classes, fictionalized physics, wrote off topic, created worlds in which I was the biology teacher and Dr. M_______ was madly in love with me. I wrote three-line plays and three-page haikus. I started and abandoned novels. I wrote awful things about myself and generous things about exgirlfriends.

At some point, that all fell away. I blame myself, certainly, and at some point, it seemed counterintuitive to begin journaling again. I was a master of fine arts. I was a Ph.D. candidate. I was an adult with children and a mortgage. I had more excuses than I had time to list them.

But I was convinced that I had to start over. I know it was the write decision. So I started running my pen across some pages. Lousy things happened. I wrote about the couch I was sitting on. I wrote about how tall my kids were and how lonely a person might get on a desert island. I wrote about waking up and realizing everything was all a dream. I wrote dreams. I wrote more about the couch, some about the television, a touch about the future of humanity. All boring stuff. All awfully written. All terribly embarrassing. I loved every word.