Finding Your Character in a Cup of Coffee

Last term, I had a student in my composition class ask me, “how do you write objectively, without passion?”   My immediate response was, “I’m not interested in writing without passion.” I’m not interested in much of anything without passion, and I don’t understand the passionless life.  I don’t want to understand it.  I want to sink myself in my characters, in the world they live in, feel their emotions, know them so well that their stories write themselves.  I want complete immersion in their minds, their lives, their tales.

Now, my student’s question, of course, was a legitimate one.  She, and her classmates, are stuck in an academic world where passion is not just frowned upon, but actively discouraged.   It was not always thus.  Throughout history, the best teachers have been the ones who find a way to encourage passion in their students, who light their imaginative and creative fires, who get their minds burning. But that is no longer the goal of education in this country, more’s the pity.  The slam-poet (and teacher) Taylor Mali said it well in his spoken-word poem, Totally like whatever.   

“Have we just gotten to the point where we’re the most aggressively inarticulate generation to come along, since, you know, a long time ago?” I show this YouTube video to my writing classes, along with his hysterical “The Impotence of Proofreading.”  Students laugh.  And then they talk.  

 They are hungry.  Hungry for someone who listens to their passion,  for an audience for their passion, for other minds as passionate as their own.  

It is that hunger we should pursue in our writing.  We should fill our pages with the stories that burn out of us, that defy efforts to construct them, that will themselves onto the page.  And those of us who teach should reject anything less from our students.   We should be writing stories and essays and poems that are hungry for listeners, for readers, for an audience, because they speak the truth.  

That means making the stories real in fundamental ways - making them honest about the nature of human beings.  And that means that characters are everything.  “The character-driven story” is a buzz-word in publishing right now - writers are encouraged to construct characters that are interesting or quirky or unusual or exceptional.  Not often enough are we encouraged to write characters who are real.   I’m not talking about non-fiction, here.  I’m talking about characters who are so naturally representative of flawed, messy, screwed-up humanity that you can’t help but know them as you read.

How this happens is simple:    work, and attention.  Work,  day and night, page after page, to know the characters - have back-stories about them, interviews with them, and write their entire life history.  Know who they went to school with, where their first kiss happened, when they left home, how many lies they’ve told and why.  Even if none of this makes it into the story you’re writing.  If the best way to learn language is immersion (and it is) then you have to make your character the language that you speak;  you have to immerse yourself in that person day after day, every day, until they walk into the kitchen with you in the morning and pour a cup of coffee.  

This can take months.  You’ll have false starts.  You’ll write whole pages of back-story out of desperation that you invent from whole cloth and later crumple or tear up or flat-out burn them because you know they were desperation writing, and not real.  But, in the end, that morning the character is in your kitchen, you start to listen, and you begin their story.  In that moment, they have your attention - you can look at everything you’ve written about them to that point and know what is true and what goes in the fireplace.  

A friend asked me recently how I could manage to write novels without going insane.  He said it was impossible for him, that when he made the attempt, the characters and the world he was writing became too real, that he got lost in it.  For a moment, I was jealous of him - to just have that world, those people, become real and be able to instantly sink into it.  Then I told him how desperately I seek that moment when it all becomes the world, the real world, for me, when the characters walk and talk and take over the story and I know them like I know my mother.  Then I asked him what made him think that I was not, already, insane, when clearly I am.  

I’ll take this form of insanity, and rejoice in it.  Because that morning that I stand in my kitchen with a steaming cup and my character is there with me,  I’m living a life of wonder, a life of truth, and maybe someday, a student of mine will stand in her kitchen with that feeling, and be grateful that I told her I wasn’t interested in writing without passion, that I led her to a life where she found it, just as I am grateful for all of those teachers of mine - Willie Parsons, Nicola Morris, Pat Waddington-Koontz, and Mr. Chapman from high school Composition - who led me to that moment.  

Of Iranian Women, Drone Pilots Who Kill, and Writing for the Market

It was a difficult day on campus today.  After my writing class, an Iranian woman spent nearly fifteen minutes talking with me about the things that happen to women in her country.  When she was done, I felt like I was gasping for breath.  Imagine how she must feel.

Immediately after that, I found myself in a conversation with a former student who had just come from a sociology class, in which they watched a Frontline documentary about Air Force pilots who leave their suburban homes in the morning, go to their base, and sit in an air-conditioned room all day at a console, where they pilot remote drones that, half the globe away, drop bombs in battle zones - real bombs that kill real people, and then they go home and have dinner with their kids and help with the homework. This student was upset, in tears, about the reactions of her classmates, who saw this as a good thing - keeping our pilots out of danger.  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but if you kill someone, it SHOULD hurt you.”  

My chest literally ached when I left the campus.  I drove home in a daze.  

What was I to say to either of these women?  How could I even presume that anything I do could help them?

And then I realized that I - that we, those of us who teach - already have.  Education should be, MUST be, was designed to be, a place for the thoughts that are hard to speak, the ideas that are not welcome, the voice that demands to be heard even when it hurts.  This is what education should be, a place to give voice to those thoughts, and an environment that encourages thinking about the meaning, about finding ways to change that which most around us embrace, but which may not be good for us.

This is what the Iranian woman wants - to change those things that cause her fellow countrywomen to suffer.  It is what my former student wants - a way to change thinking that she believes is dangerous to us all - is contrary to who we say we are.   It is what education should be, and, more and more, what it struggles to be.  

For decades, the model of education that has trickled down to us (those of us on the front lines) from our states and from the federal government has been influenced by the need for well trained workers in a variety of industries - those with pull and influence on the politicians.  We have been struggling to fit the curriculum into a model not designed to create learning in the minds of our citizens, but to train them.  

We should not be training minds, we should be liberating them.  It is why those of us who find ways to really teach know and understand in our hearts that we are subversives, and must stay subversive if our goal is learning and not training.  

What, you may ask, does this have to do with writing?  In the current market, everything.  We believe, (because we are told), that the best way to become a writer is to write for the market.  No one suggests, in supporting that notion, that the market may, in fact, be promoting writing, stories, and literature, that serve only to make us more compliant, to teach us nothing, to validate mediocrity.  

I saw a saying recently that went, “it is better to write for yourself, and not have a market, than it is to write for the market, and not have a self.”  

If you can’t see the parallel, find a teacher who will teach you.

Making The Words Come

I knew a woman once who could only write in one chair.  It was an old wood-framed armchair, with worn out pads on back and seat, and she kept it on her patio, where it was, from time to time, exposed to weather.  The arms were broad, and she balanced a yellow pad there to write her first drafts (later putting them, as we all do now, on her computer).  Ursula LeGuin (one of my heroes) once remarked that her favorite writing ritual was doing the dishes - it allowed her to think, uninterrupted, and in a kind of housework-zen-state, about her characters and her stories, as no one was going to risk interrupting her and, as a consequence, risk being asked to help with the dishes.  One of my favorite musicians gets up every morning and does an hour of yoga before he begins to practice - says he can’t really play until he clears his mind with his yoga practice.  Steinbeck put a one-sentence statement of his goal for a story on the wall in front of his writing desk. George Orwell wrote lying in bed, and Ernest Hemingway always wrote standing up.

Rituals have been on my mind, lately, as a theater company I produce is doing a showcase night of readings and scenes about rites and rituals in our lives, and it has got me thinking about my own.  Mine change, but they’re still ritualistic.  Except for, possibly, wandering about the house, by turns staring out the window and staring into the open refrigerator (as I’m thinking through a scene or character), my rituals don’t stay the same from story to story, but I do seem to always have one.   

While working on my first published novel, I would go for long drives, turning intentionally down roads I didn’t know, looking not necessarily to get lost, but to not know where I was.  It’s said that Dickens did the same in old London on long walks - trying to get lost.  Psychological studies indicate that being lost creates a state of mind that can induce creativity, though I doubt Dickens knew that - he just knew that, when he was lost, the words came.  

And that is the essence we should look for in any writing ritual - that the words come.  If what you’re doing isn’t making that happen, change it, until the words do come.  I have sat in a (particular) booth at a local bar, listened to one song over and over, worn a particular hat while writing, eaten the same food for dinner (Spanish rice) night after night, and rose at 2 a.m. day after day to write for three hours before returning to bed.  Sometimes it’s just writing at the same time every day - other times it’s waiting for my cat to come sit on the writing table.  

In teaching writing, I ask students to think of the times they did their best writing, and think what environment they were in at the time, and try to duplicate that when they write.   That works for many.  Others, like myself, have to find a new ritual for each project, and that can be difficult.  The key is to pay attention - whatever it is you’re doing when the words come, try continuing that thing.  But, also, listen to the words that come.  You want to induce that state that brings words that make your heart sing with the next words, and the next.  Don’t choose a ritual just because you got some words down - find that thing, that elusive, magical thing, that makes you create.

There are certain things that have worked for many that you might try - long walks (or drives), listening to instrumental music (most recommend Mozart - I recommend his Concerto No 20 in D Minor),  recite a favorite poem, or literally invite the muse (many recommend Homer’s Invocation of the Muse).   But, above all, when the words do begin to come, pay attention.  Trust the ritual that works for you.