Out of the Forest

In many early fables, the troubled or desperate youth wanders or flees into the forest. The forest is usually a dark place, mysterious, threatening -- often magical, or deemed magical for lack of understanding. The forest is haunted, not often by mindless specters, hellbent on giving one the willies, but usually by a primordial knowledge of the past, or the deeply frustrating notion that the youth is not living up to her potential. When she emerges from the forest, she is changed. Though she might look around at the world and see it differently, the real, knowable difference is her application of what she learned in the forest. She is now magic, because she now understands what was so recently beyond comprehension.

Our contemporary versions of those stories has a fella falling into a uranium pit. Or getting infected with gene-altering chemicals. And rising out of that experience with some new knowledge, be it wisdom or some sort of physical know-how.

At any rate, I guess I'm hoping that I arise at this moment as some sort of writing Spiderman . . .

But, first, let me tell you about my forest. I applied for this post-doctoral fellowship, which I currently inhabit, about a year ago with the promise to speculate about research-based creative writing. I'd been working on a novel about the early days of the oil industry for over a year -- I'd even had a short historical story about Ida Tarbell published in a literary magazine.

I was awarded the fellowship about a week after receiving news that my novel deal had fallen through, and, well, best-laid plans go to shit. Still, while it's taken some time to recover, I have had research on my mind, and I have had Petrolia on my mind. As a result, I spent two weeks in March back in Western Pennsylvania, wandering through the libraries in Oil City and Franklin, digging through old manuscripts, scrolling through reams of microfilm.

In the meantime, I have been still hung up on some of the ideas from my most recent post -- from holy moly over a month ago -- about landscape and fiction. I found the lesson in a book about oil, but went on to read Place and Space: The Perspective of Experience by Yi-Fu Tuan. What a book! It really got my literary spidey-senses tingling.

The rub: I have split my attention over the past month between a contemplation of landscape in fiction and the practice of research. Over the next couple of weeks, this blog is going to be a place where I can explore those ideas a bit, see if I've learned anything. In the meantime, I'll continue working daily on Pithole, which should inform both the narrative of landscape and of research, while informing both things.

There's No Good Way to Say This . . .

So I'm thinking about writing a book, which would share the title of this post, about the art of the query letter. The book would rise from my absolute inability to craft such a letter. Can it really be as hard as I'm making it? Shouldn't I just be able to reproduce my novel in one or two beautifully crafted sentences? Am I over thinking this whole mess?

I don't know. And I don't know if I want to be good at writing a query letter.

The book would be based also on watching my spouse go through the process of writing a query letter. I watched her spend a painstaking eight months crafting a beautiful literary page-turning novel about 1950s burlesque in New Orleans. Each day, she would read me her thousand words, and each night I would go to sleep wondering what might happen next. As she wrote the last few pages of the novel, I felt that familiar feeling -- as though I were saying goodbye to a good friend, knowing that it would be some time before I might see her again -- that I feel at the end of a great book.

I say familiar, but I mean the closing pages of Moby Dick, Nobody's Fool, The Things They Carried, The Sound and the Fury, maybe twenty or thirty other books whose voice I know I'll miss, even as I'm enjoying each ending. Like I say, I watched her research, live, and write this book for eight months, then I watched her research, design, and craft a query letter for the next two months. I've seen and listened to twenty or more drafts of her cover letter, and I think she's nailed it now. From her hook, to her synopsis, to her closing salutation, she's written a compelling, exciting argument about why someone should publish her book. I think she'll earn an agent very soon, certainly, I think, a book deal.

My spouse is way smarter than me, I think we've all come to terms with that.

In the meantime, I've been trying to write my own query. Here's what I have for a hook so far: "Stuff happens in a steel mill and somebody probably dies." It's awful. It's an awful thing to write. I believe in the book. I believe in the writing. But how in the hell do I write about the book? No, I think anybody who followed the epic whining of "The History of My First Failed Novel . . ." should know I have no problem writing about the book. More to the point, how do I write concisely about it?

Three more famous stories:

When Rimaud's mother asked him what a poem was about, he replied, "I have said what I have wanted to say, literally and in every other way."

Flannery O'Connor said of her short stories, "If I could have written them any shorter, I would have."

Jeanette Winterson, apparently likes to say, "It's about what it's about."

I'm paraphrasing off the top of my head, not quoting: I just want to be clear.

Anyway, I'm including those quotes for two reasons. First off, because I love them; they speak so deeply to the creative process and many of the things that I believe about art, that I celebrate them in papers and at cocktail parties and around campfires, often to very serious head nodding. Secondly, because I love them and use them as a constant excuse to not push myself harder to do the necessary writerly things that might not be as pleasurable as writing literature.

Ouch. It hurts to admit that.

But it's true. I don't wanna write a query letter. I don't wanna read the submission guidelines. I don't wanna buy a manila envelope to mail a manuscript to 10000ish zip code where, I'm almost certain, my manuscripts are insulating some of the tallest buildings in the city.

The only things I ever want to do, as far as writing is concerned, are read and write. But that's never enough. I think this might be a true story for a bunch of us out there in the world. For instance, by a show of hands, how many folks out there, like me, somehow expect an agent to happen across a manuscript and give you a call? (I'm typing with just the one hand right now, by the way.) Or it might be something else -- shouldn't a particular press be seeking out your very own work this minute, because you'd be a perfect fit for them?

Meanwhile, in my writing classes, one practice I insist my students engage is honesty -- not with the world, though I find that important to, but with themselves. Find the places you're being lazy, I tell them, and acknowledge that laziness. Often those lazinesses are easy to see. Some writers use a half dozen semicolons to build a monster sentence that goes nowhere, because they don't know how to advance their plot, their argument, their assertion. Others attempt to fit all 64 common prepositions into a single paragraph, because they've written something off topic and can't figure out how to get back to their text.

You can't lie to yourself and be a good writer.

No, scratch that again, one can be completely misguided in how one reads the world -- that might be how one creates such a compelling narrator.

But you can't lie to yourself about your writing and be a good writer. I'm working on a chapter right now in my epic oil narrative history clusterfuck, and in this chapter, I know, I absolutely know that the perspective is off. I've chosen, in fact, the completely wrong character to narrate this chapter. I've known that intuitively for a long time, but just last week, I admitted it. I said it out loud: "This chapter belongs to a different character." So after months of working and reworking a particular 5,000 words, I have to let it all go, redream it, see it from another angle.

That I'd been employing the wrong narrator all this time was hard to accept, though I knew it to be the truth. But, if I had recognized it earlier, I could have saved myself many headaches, countless frustrating hours, a full ream of paper . . . I might have completed the book manuscript by now, had I been honest with myself sooner.

So, okay, here I go: while what I want to be doing this afternoon is researching oil and writing awesome epic asskicking adventures about the early days of the industry, I'm going to sit down with Scrap and try to write two or three good sentences about it.

Such work is not glorious, not artful, but, if I must be truthful, necessary work.

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.