The Writer's Journal: A HOT MESS

Decades of my journals

      My journals are a mess - and they should be.  Decades of journals in notebooks bound and ring-bound, loose-leaf and cloth-covered.  The pages are a mess, writing going sideways and in a circle, in different colors, interrupted with pictures and arrows and notes and even the occasional grocery list.

     And not just the pages are a mess.  In any given volume, entries may begin in 1997 and then break off, taking up again on the very next page in 2004.  It isn't that I didn't write in my journals for those seven years - it's that suddenly, that particular volume didn't feel right to me, and I'd either switch to one of the others that still had empty pages, or start up a new one.  Some volumes have entries from more than nine different years.  I switched because the heft of the book didn't feel right - it didn't feel right when I ran my hand over the cover, or the paper wasn't smooth enough or rough enough for how I was feeling at that time.  Or just because I wanted a change.

Handwriting changes!

      As a consequence, they are, as the kids used to say, a hot mess.  As humans, we do seem to have a need to organize things, and over the years, I've tried.  A few times, I sat down thinking I'd catalog what years were in which volumes.  Gave that up after two or three tries.  Once I thought the way was to type up each year in a separate computer file - that lasted even less time.  To try to find anything specific, or even the entries from a certain year, is, well, one very big task.  And still I continue to change from journal to journal as the mood strikes me.  Even my handwriting has changed over the years, sometimes from journal to journal.  I can't predict what I may find (or be able to read) when I pick up any individual volume. And that is just as it should be.

 These journals should not be a model of organization or chronology or anything measurable or quantifiable.  Peter Elbow once said that writing was a process of making a mess and then
cleaning it up.  The "mess" is the wonderful pile of ideas, brainstorms, anecdotes, sketches, and dreams that suddenly fall together to make a story.   The "cleaning it up" is the construction of that story from the mess of thoughts that led you there.

     

But we humans do have a tendency to want order.  This past week, I've been working on a piece about grief.  In doing that, I couldn't help but think of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's 5 stages of grief, and looked those up.  Reading about them, it struck me that there were similarities to the stages of the writing process put forward by many theorists, and also to the stages of cognitive development I studied so hard as I was preparing to become a teacher.  And all of those have one more thing in common with the "stages" of the writing process:  they aren't true.  They don't really work that way.  In her later years, Ross regretted ever having formulated the stages, because counselors were trying to force people into the model.  "I'm so much more than those five stages," she said in her last years.  "And so are you."   Piaget admitted not all learners go through the stages of his model, and not all go through them in order.   The stages of the writing process work best when, as suggested by philosopher/educator Paulo Freire, they are taken to be "recursive," to loop through and repeat different "stages" as needed by the individual.

     Life is messy, learning is messy, writing is messy.  In the beauty of that mess, as we trust it and immerse in it, as we feel it and touch it and let us carry it where it will, there's growth, and learning, and healing.  One of the graduate school workshops I remember well from the cohort who all worked with my adviser, was the challenge, as we wrote under her guidance in workshop, to incorporate random elements she tossed at us - to learn to trust the random.   So I pick up a journal from time to time, turn to a page, and think what those words are saying to the me of now.  And I start a new journal (or switch) whenever I damn well please.

ON MAKING CONNECTIONS, LOSING SLEEP, AND THE OCCASIONAL INCONVENIENCE OF THE MUSE

It was a wake-up-at-3-a.m.-and-get-that-thought-on-paper-before-you-lose-it kind of morning.   I’ve had many of  these as a writer.  Just a few short years ago, when I was working on an early draft of The Hapless Life of Samuel Joseph, my life changed.   My then-sixteen year old granddaughter, troubled and not doing well at home, moved in with me, as did a dear friend of mine in need of a temporary place to stay.   I was living in a small apartment, and we were, all three of us and our respective beds, crammed into one tiny bedroom.  My granddaughter -being a teenager - slept through my late-night bouts of creativity, but I would often hear my friend chuckle from her bed as I’d mutter “damn!” and shoot out of bed to run to my desk, pounding out the pages that were shouting in my brain, then stumble back to bed, pull up the covers, and close my eyes, only to have the insistent story dragging me from bed short minutes later to write some more as I muttered soft curses under my breath.  The house-mate chuckled, and I beat out page after page on my old typewriter, and slept a whole lot less than I might have liked.   A month or so later, we found a much larger house to rent where each of us could have our own room, and lived there for a year or so, but I would still wander out to the deck in early mornings to find my house-mate grinning and commenting on the sound of the typewriter having lulled her to sleep the night before.  

Those months were, for me, the height of the creative process in the writing of Samuel Joseph.   His life and the story he had to tell unfolded in my brain insistently, as though I were but recording the story as he narrated it, trying desperately to get it all out before he lost the connection with me.   Pages piled up in my writing room (another reason we chose the house we found - rooms for each of us, and a writing room for me), stacks growing exponentially.  Three thousand, four thousand, sometimes as many as six thousand words in a day.  It was a wave of energy, a wave of clarity, and I rode it all the way from the first scene to the last, feeling the story unfold, knowing when I needed to stop what I was doing, rush to the typewriter (or the page, as I wrote a great deal of that first draft in long-hand).  And I often did not get much sleep.  

I had not gotten to that point easily - for months I’d been trying to find Sam’s character, feeling the basics of the story, having strong images of scenes and characters, with no idea how they connected, but understanding they had a story to tell that meant something to me.  I knew it had to do with the tragedy of a very talented young person with the wrong mentor, I knew that some of the things I tried to write were not  right, as I stumbled around, trying to find the presence that was haunting the corners of my brain.

This is the same process I have gone through lately with the story I am currently telling - the story of a family once torn apart by secrets, now finding their way back to each other.  For this story, the characters have been clear to me from the very beginning, but how their individual stories connect had not been, until, after much stumbling, I began to see those connections in the pieces of their lives.   Which led to today’s late-night scribbling, and lack of sleep.  

I was in a show last night, performing on a local stage with more than a dozen other actors, and coming home with that post-performance high that caused me to putter about for a couple of hours before I lay down.   Once asleep, though, that rest did not last - at three in the morning comes the muse - with yet another connection in the woven fabric of these characters lives - an essential one between parent and child, a clear and simple explanation of who they were and who they have become, and I had to  get out of bed and get it down.  Once done, the energy of that release, that creation, once again left me too wired to sleep.

Some time back, a friend and I (the same woman who was, just last night, my scene partner in performance), joked that someone needed to start a training school for the muse, as she tended to misbehave and come at the most inconvenient times.  We even joked that we would write a play about a training school for the errant muse, modeled after those schools that train misbehaving dogs.  Interestingly, it is often the owners of the dogs who are really trained in such a school, to understand how to work with their dog’s essential nature in a way where they can live together.   I think such a thing is also true of the training of the muse - we must actually train ourselves - to be open, to listen, to understand when the voice of the muse is the true, essential voice of the story and must be written, and when it is okay to mutter “oh, go away” and go back to sleep.

Learning such a thing is not easy, and none of us are ever perfect at it.  Like writing itself, it is a process.  I have had moments when I’ve muttered ‘go away’ at my muse, and returned to sleep (or to work, or to feeding the cats, or whatever I happened to be doing at the time), only to jolt upright later and realize that there had been a light in my brain, a window opening onto the brightness of the story, and I’d slammed down the shutters.  The key, I believe, as it is for so many things in life, is to listen.  

And perhaps learn to be good at naps.  

"Street Cred" And The Writer

I like to think that I have (or could, if I wanted to claim it), some “street cred” as a writer.  Before I turned down the self-publishing path a couple of years ago, I had published four books ‘traditionally’ – three nonfiction and one novel – about two dozen articles and essays (four of them in juried publications), and a handful (dozen or so) poems and stories. All in ‘traditional’  mediums.  I’d edited six published collections, and  contributed to more newsletters and editorial columns than I can hope to remember.  It’s not being J.K. Rowling, but  it all counts as “cred”, right? The truth is, in today's publishing culture, it doesn’t count for beans. In the publishing industry, only one thing counts - the ability for the publisher to make money.

I’ve written and posted quite a lot recently as I’ve mused over what it means to be a writer, to seek after the truth of our lives, and to speak it through fiction.  All very wonderful and noble, you may think, but what good is it if you can’t get those words to readers?  In the dominant cultural mind, the mainstream publishing industry is the way to do that, and American publishing is a hard industry to break into.  The odds, as they say, are against you.

Publishers turn down brilliant works because the author is too old for them to “sell,” - yes, this happened: I read it in a recent op-ed piece written by an editor at a large publishing house, explaining why she sometimes turns down very good books - she turned down a book she adored because the author was 54. Or they turn them down because the author doesn’t already have an active online platform, or because it's been too long since her/his last publication, or because the editor thinks the writing is too complex for American readers. That last one startled me, but I’ve actually seen the rejection slip, and that’s what it says - the plot is too complex for American readers. The market is publishing for the masses, and the market has a pretty low opinion of the masses.  

Self-publishing has had an unfortunate reputation for decades, and, often, deservedly so - a lot of what is called “vanity publishing” (the author pays a publisher to print their works) is frankly abysmal, as is a good deal of what is now published in the form of e-books, which authors can publish for free on a variety of platforms.  But there are also some profoundly beautiful works out there as well in that medium.  It is a free market, which is what attracts me to it.  A thirty-something, recent-lit-grad, New-York-publishing-house editor will not decide the merit of your works, but readers will.  

Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Ben Franklin, John Stuart Mill, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, and William Blake - these are just a few of the luminaries in history who have self-published their work.  Some (Whitman as a perfect example) were vilified by some for the work they published, others gaining acclaim and respect in their own time.  Unconcerned about the opinions of "the publishing industry," they turned their concern more to sharing their work with the world.  And how much poorer would the literary world be if they had not done so.  They didn’t care about “street cred,” or the opinion of the powers that were in the then-publishing industry - they simply cared - about what they were writing, about sharing it with those who might read.  

That, honestly, is the true tradition of self-publishing.  Be a storyteller, put your stories in front of readers. For decades, publishing has been (much like academia) a “gate-keeper” industry.  Those with some sort of credentials (degrees or pedigrees) decide who gets in and who doesn’t, and this shapes the reading of the consuming public, because it shapes what is available to read.  And that is what is changing with the availability of free self-publishing platforms.  Writers have an opportunity, here, to raise the bar.

Let’s set aside (for the moment) debates over large companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble and what they have done to small publishing houses, bookstores, and independent publishers.  That’s an important debate, but not what I’m talking about here.  What we have in the shifts currently going on in the publishing industry is a chance to change things.  If, as many claim, the American public has been “dumbed down,” it is at least in part (and I believe a large part) due to what they’ve been offered:   education shaped by politicians and not educators, media shaped by profit interest and not public service, books marketed more on the celebrity status of the author and not on challenging or enlightening content.  In a truly free market, (which I believe free publishing offers us the opportunity to create), all of that can change.  

Not that I (or most writers) sit down to my  writing table every morning with revolutionary intent in mind. Many of the things that I write, I write just for fun.  This blog, for instance – a wonderful musing release in the middle of days of struggle, and many of the stories I’ve produced recently are fancies, flights taken in moments of “what if?”  But, even there, I find the themes that haunt most of my writing (and that haunt my thoughts):    the abuse of power  never being  justified, the tragedy of youthful talent in the hands of the wrong mentor,  the twisted co-opting of what used to be a dynamic working-class culture in this country, the terrible loneliness of being the sole voice to stand for something.  I return to these themes over and over, and if I write words that help one person with a difficult decision, or bring memories back, or help them see the lives of others more clearly, that is enough.  More than enough.  So, the audiences that flock to big box book stores or to Amazon may find my books, or they may not.  But if just one of the right people does, I am ok with that.  And I know that this conclusion is the polar opposite of the (dare I use the word) philosophy of the publishing industry.  And I know I don’t need them.  I don’t need their “cred,” their respect.  I just need my own.

ACTING Like A Writer

Sometimes I wish writers had the equivalent of rehearsals, like we do in theater.  Cast in a play, you meet your fellow cast members, you do a "table-read" (everyone just sits around a table and reads through the script), you have scene rehearsals, then run a whole act, then run all the acts together, then have dress rehearsals.  In the process, you have time to get "off-book," to memorize your lines and be ready to rehearse without your script in hand.  You ease into the final product a step at a time - lights and sound effects added near the very end, first rehearsing without any set, then set and props and costumes added a bit at a time until the picture is complete.  You have a director who tells you how to imagine the character, the scene, who guides you.  You have crew members who take care of props and lights and sound.  You have fellow cast members, who, in playing out their characters, give you meat for your own.

It is terrifying, and exhilarating.  You can feel the story, the performance, coming together around you and the rest of the cast.  It's very social.    From the first day, you have to work to connect not only to your own character, but to the other characters and the actors who play them.  Sometimes it's easy.  Sometimes not. Actors get together after rehearsals and in cast parties, and meet ahead of rehearsals to run lines together or just to vent.

As a writer, there's a lot of that I could go for.  As many have said, writing is a solitary task - one person, one keyboard, one pen and paper.  From first draft to typing the last page, it's just you.  You can take your writing to a writing group, or get first readers (for my last book, I had nine) - but when the feedback comes, it's just you deciding what stays and what doesn't.  No director is going to call "cut!" and tell you how it should be.  No others are going to act out the characters for you to give you a new perspective.

I've often said that being involved in theater has been good for my writing - as an actor, learning to embody a character has given me a fresh perspective on how to create a character on the page, and I think my characters have improved as a result.  Being a producer (and occasionally an Assistant Director) has given me a sense of the scope of story construction that, though I'd studied it before, I don't think I fully appreciated until I'd ushered in a few productions.  It's also been incredibly humbling - watching the skill and intelligence with which so many actors approach their roles, how artfully they work with and bring out the best in less skilled members of the cast - how dedicated they are, going onstage with high fevers, broken toes, family crises, and heartbreak.

I know that the writing process has many parallels to "rehearsal" - the drafts, the editing, the revisions - but it is, in contrast to theater, anti-social - the writer, as one member of a critique group once said, "is God on that page."   And being God can be lonely.

I wish sometimes, at the keyboard, for a director to guide the mood of the scene, a scene partner to bring her/his energy to the scene so that my characters can feed off it, be guided by it.  I wish for an after-rehearsal gathering to vent, a cast party to celebrate the creativity.   But I know that, as a writer, that's not how it can be.   The truth of any particular story I write is in my head, and only I am responsible for bringing it out.  The difference between the creative act in theater and in writing is this:   in the theater, you are responsible to be with  the rest of the cast, to be present to them, aware, work with them.  As a writer, you are responsible to the story.   The actors works to be able to 'read' his fellow cast members, the writer must work to be loyal to that seed that sparked the story within her.   The actors act, the writers write.  They rehearse, we re-draft. They perform, we publish.   And then we all wait for reviews.

A Note of Thanks on Saying Good-Bye

4 of the original 5 - (l to r):  Rosalind, Connie, me,
and Jeanne.  Missing (and forever missed), Erica 

     This week, I left my writing group.  I had been out of the group since a month ago when I began my sabbatical.  This week, though, I told them I wouldn’t be coming back for the foreseeable future. It was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve made in a very long time.

This group of women have been a foundation in my life for the better part of a decade – the longest I’ve ever stayed with any writing group.  In that time, we have become a community – we have been friends and colleagues and confidantes.  Together we have faced the loss of one of our dearest members to cancer.  We've seen each other through health crises, family crises, and loss of confidence.  We have shared and worked and laughed together.

We have core members who have been with the group from the beginning, and we have welcomed  new members and lost them to other demands in life.  Together we have read our writings, critiqued, rejoiced in successes and shared failures and disappointments.  These women are good people and good friends.  The thought of not sitting with them twice a month to sip tea, laugh, share, and then get down to the business of work-shopping our writings – that thought fills me with sadness.

But, in the end, that friendship was not enough reason to stay with a writing group.  I was finding a need for more and more solitude in my work, and needed to transition to a different phase in my writing.  Over the years, I have received more from these women than I can possibly ever thank them for.   The closest I can ever come to adequate thanks  is to be as true to the development of my work as I can, and, for now, for the time being, that means working alone. 

So, day after day, I’ll sit at my table and work to be the best writer I can, and though the work may be solitary, I will never feel alone.  
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For Rosalind Trotter, Jeanne Bishop, Connie Newman, Carol Massahos, and Morgan Songi.  And, as always, for Erica.  

On Breaking Your Heart and Falls From Grace

“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace.
It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, 
you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then
 — and only then — it is handed to you.” 
 - Annie Dillard

I like the notion of "unmerited grace."   It seems to me that this is what grace should be - something not necessarily earned, but granted nonetheless.  I'm not a terribly religious person (read:  haven't been inside a church in decades), but definitely think a sense of spirituality is essential for writers, and also a sense of grace:  both the ability to grant it and to be grateful when it's received.   The past few weeks have really led me to appreciate Dillard's quote.  

They've been filled with  broken appliances, clogged plumbing, storms, storm clean-up, repairs and surprise visits and hacked bank accounts and bills and broken teeth and emergency dental visits and all the things of life that tend to happen in clumps – that’s been December, the first three weeks of my 'sabbatical.'   And yet, there've been mornings like this morning, where, after days of mulling over some work that I knew needed done on a manuscript, the words just came - handed to me like grace.  And, also true to Dillard's words, feeling perfectly unmerited - it had been a whiny sort of week - poor me faced with all this crap when what I'd wanted was just some time to write. 

I haven't been good.  I haven't kept up the good habits that I know a serious writer should.  I've watched movies, cleaned cat boxes, done unnecessary grocery shopping, straightened out drawers and cupboards, wrote letters, read books, and played stupid games on my pad computer - all at times I could have been writing.

But in some ways I was writing.  Writing, as many have said, is not just words on paper.  It is all the things we do to find the voice inside - the right voice, the true voice, for the story we want to tell.   That may mean going for long drives or long walks, or, like Ursula LeGuin, doing dishes.  Or burying yourself in others' writing hoping for the truth, or digging in your garden until your arms hurt, or building a fence or fixing your car or doing anything that lets you work and work and work, turn off your thoughts so that the right voice can surface. It is breaking your heart to find the right words, rejecting the wrong ones that want to come so easily, too easily.  It is breaking your brain by searching for the right words, the right story, the real truth.  

I'm not saying all the movies watched or games played were valid process work for my writing.  Most were just pure stupid laziness and cowardice - too tired and afraid to face that heartbreaking search.  But some of it was a type of zen zoning-out, letting my real self prepare for that breaking of the heart that had to come before grace. And plenty of hard work was done this week, too.  

That happens regularly for a writer, this fall from grace, and then the search to get it back - or it should happen regularly.  This morning, I wrote three pages of heartbreaking words from one of my characters - a painful wicked truth that, in the first many drafts of the manuscript, I'd edged around but never faced.  Her voice had been in the back of my head all of these days, whispering, urging me, and this morning, she handed it to me - grace unmerited.   

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NOTE:  As a report from my sabbatical, I should note that I have decided that it needs to continue through January, and possibly February as well.   

  

On Not Being A Poet (Report from the sabbatical: week two)

I’m not a poet.  I’ve been saying that most of my life, though I wrote my first poem when I was ten (a haiku, though I didn’t know at the time that’s what it was – my older sister, who had just started college, thought I had copied it from a book). Just a few weeks later, I wrote a nearly perfect quatrain (though, again, I didn’t know…).   But I’m not a poet. 

This is what I told Nicky, my grad school advisor, at the beginning of my program.  I'm not a poet, I said, and I turned in volumes of poetry to her as I went through the program.  The second reader for my Masters Program,  a respected and award-winning poet, praised  my work.  And I told him I was not a poet.   I thought of my poetry as a route to something else – as preliminary work to prepare to write prose, a form of brainstorming. Generative work, not the work.  Editors who read my short stories, and later my novels, called my writing ‘lyrical,’ and, yes, ‘poetic.’  The language of the poetry, the  rhythm of the words, drove me to write prose and tell stories.  But I was not, I am not, a poet.

I know poets – quite a few of them – some relatively famous, some still striving for more than the random publication in literary magazines.  They work hard at their craft – they study the forms, they pour over the words on the page, carefully crafting each line, choosing each word.  I’ve done that with individual poems, but it is process, not product.  So I say. 

In studying with Nicky in the MFA program, I read (along with many other works on a long and challenging reading list) many poets who inspired me – Maya Angelou, Raymond Carver, Judy Grahn,  Kay Ryan, Pablo Neruda, Alice Walker, Judith Barrington, Judy Grahn.   I took lines that inspired me and pasted them on the wall above my desk, finally settling on  Muriel Rukeyser’s line  “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?  The world would split open.”   I told Nicky in conference that this was what I was trying to do – split the world open with the truth.   My work then focused on the lives of women, their stories, and individual stories often began with lines of poetry scribbled in the night, page after page, until, finally, I was writing the prose story of Agnes or Theo or Rochelle or Lena, and gaining nods and encouragement from Nicky.  My final thesis was titled “The World Split Open,” and was approved as it stood by both Nicky and my second reader Mark Doty, advancing me to graduation, and also to the struggle to keep up this work on my own.

Now, years and much Life later, that struggle continues, and, as it should, my thinking has changed.  As part of my digging in during this sabbatical, I am re-reading authors who’ve inspired me – this week,  Annie Dillard’s  An American Childhood and  Margaret Atwood’s stunning Cat’s Eye, and also a collection of works by Raymond Carver, including the breathtaking story Cathedral. And I am realizing that they are all telling the same story (read Dillard and Atwood in a row, back to back, and you will come to the same conclusion).  I think Rukeyser was right, but her thinking not expansive enough – I think what is true is this:  what would happen if anyone  told the (full) truth about their life?  The world would split open.

That is not to say that I have stopped being a feminist (though I have never liked that word, and find Alice Walker’s substitute  “womanist” too awkward, and “humanist” too laden with problematic connotations).  I haven’t stopped.  I have simply found my thinking shifting, opening.  Opening is good.  I do believe that much in our social system is biased against women, people of color, and other “minority” (though hardly a minority in mathematical terms)  groups.  But I also believe that this  systematic bias damages everyone – including those privileged by it, though often the very privilege blinds them to the damage they’ve suffered.   That is the essential nature of ‘the tragic flaw,’ and is a fundamental tragedy of our modern world.  It is the reason any story that tells the full truth of a life would split the world open – the razor sharp truth of the flaw that prevents us from seeing the damage done, and causes us to continue to pursue and desire a life of further damage would cleave the world in two.  

This is also, I think, the difference between art and craft that I have so struggled to (and failed to) define for my writing group and others I've had that discussion with.  Both art and craft are necessary.  We hone our craft because we love the work - we take care with words and polish sentences and change paragraphs. We honor our the work. 

 In pursuing the art of the writer's work, we seek to split the world open, to speak the truth.  

   

My last two characters have been men – damaged, searching, and deeply flawed while still fully and beautifully human.  One of the members of my writing group, in reading a chapter from one of those pieces and commenting on it, said to me, “you write better male lead characters than your female ones.”  I’ve thought about this often in the intervening months – is that because, as the poetry of their lives unfolds on the page, I can see the tragedy of male flaws more clearly than I can my own as a woman?  Or is it because the female reader cannot see the tragedy of the flaws in my female characters?  I’ll explore that more.  In the meantime, as the stories unfold in my mind and on paper, I sit every morning with sheets of paper and scribble stacks of first-draft poetry, most of it doomed to stay first draft forever, some of it to be polished, some more to lead to pages of prose as lives unfold there, and I seek to speak the truth about those lives.  But I am not a poet.