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.  

Random Acts of Writing

Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness.  -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

In graduate school, I found myself one evening in a workshop on writing for the theater.  We were to produce at least a scene, or, better yet, a short play, by the end of the evening.  The instructor (whose name I have forgotten) led us through a series of exercises to generate ideas, images, characters, and then set us to writing, with one provision:   every once in a while during the time set for quiet writing, she would speak - a phrase, a description of a sound, a character, an event - and we were to find a way to work whatever random thing she said into our scene.

I was writing a scene about a young woman trying to deal with the suicide of a friend, when the instructor spoke the word “parking.”   This spurred a memory of vaulting parking meters on hot summer nights with my best friend in high school.  We lived in a small town, and there wasn’t much to do, so we would run up and down main street, vaulting meter after meter until we were exhausted and laughing.  The scene I wrote that night sat in my stack of papers for some time, until, eventually, I took it out, re-read it, and wrote a poem based on it.  Eventually, the scene itself found its way into the novel I was writing (a requirement of the Creative Writing program I was in) which, later, became my first published novel.  (Two Mothers Speak,  Winston-Derek Press, 1996).  

In graduate school, I was of the opinion that I would become a writer of poetry or short stories, not novels.  I had no urge to write a novel, and worked for hours on my poetry, gaining praise from my advisers.  I went to the play-writing workshop not because I planned to be a playwright, but because I needed another seminar, needed inspiration, and it was the only workshop offered that night for writers - a random occurrence, a random chance.

Since then, in the teaching of writing, I have often used that instructor’s strategy in writing sessions - take the random, include it in whatever it is you’re writing, see what happens.  One student in a creative writing class came up with the perfect idiosyncrasy for a character she was writing - he compared everything to $700.  I.e.:   “That man is as ugly as $700”  or  “It’s colder than $700 in here!.”  Others found metaphors for freedom or love, hunger or loneliness, empathy or rage.  

I have learned to trust the random.  Watch, listen, be open, and pay attention to what happens within when you do.  At one of my favorite writing spots months ago, a song I hadn’t heard in years  - Spirit In the Sky -  came on the jukebox (yes, they still have those) and was the catalyst for identifying the central love in my character’s life.  Once, when completely stuck writing a scene with three people standing on a dark street corner talking, a walk by a fruit stand gave me the descriptor I needed for the night air they sensed:   it smelled cantaloupe-sweet, and the rest of the scene followed.

Chaos theory proposes (among other things) that patterns that appear random actually have a pattern, a design, a purpose.  As a writer, at those moments when the plan - the carefully designed outline or storyboard or sketch - fails us, if we turn from that information to the random, we may just find the very pattern our story needs.  

Writing a Novel As a 1941 Ford

When I was eleven years old, my mother piled my little sister and I in the back seat of her ancient 1942 Ford sedan, she and my 18-year old sister Colleen got in the front seat, and we set off on a 200 mile road trip. Colleen was headed to college, and Mom couldn't afford the bus fare to send her.  It was a miserable trip - winding mountain roads kicked up hot geysers of gritty dust, and the sun beat down on the thick metal roof.  We arrived at the small Catholic college in Helena, Montana a sorry sight - sweating, dusty, and road weary.  Unloading Colleen's boxes and suitcases added to the the sweat and general grumpiness, and it was far past dinner time at the college cafeteria when we were finished. Eating dinner out wasn't a possibility, and the snacks we'd packed for the road were long gone.  After hugging Mom good-bye, Colleen retired to her new room hungry, and Mom, my little sister and I piled back in the car for the long trip back.  I remember Mom commenting that the car didn't sound quite right, and thought aloud (she didn't really think we were listening) that she'd check with the gas station attendant when she gassed up.  The only gas station left open at that hour was at the fringes of town, and a single greasy and over-worked mechanic was in attendance.

Mom got out of the car to talk to him, and I hung out the back window, gulping in the rapidly cooling evening air.  He listened tiredly to what Mom said of the car's behavior and opened the hood, prodding here, poking there.   He lay down on his back and scooted under the bottom of the car, banging metal on metal, muttering.  He emerged from under the car minutes later, shaking his head.  Continuously wiping his hands on the grimy rag that he held, he looked askance at my mother.  "Where do you think you're going in this car?"

Mom turned.  She'd been gazing off toward the high mountains we needed to cross.  "Kalispell."
His jaw nearly dropped.  "Kalispell?!?  Kalispell! ....lady, that's two hundred miles from here."

Mom nodded.  "I know."

The shaking of his head grew more vigorous.  "Naw.  Huh-uh.  Lady, the only place you should be driving this thing is to the dump.  There's nothing I can do for it."

I hung out the back window, listening.  The mechanic kept on shaking his head gazing under the hood of the car, as though amazed by what he saw there.  Mom looked off towards the mountains, over at me, and back at the mechanic.  She drew a deep, solid breath.  "Well."

The mechanic looked up at her, met her eyes.  "Sorry, lady."

Mom smiled.   "Well," she said again, "If I can start out for the dump, I can start out for Kalispell."

This time his jaw did drop.  "Lady, you're crazy.  You'll never make it, you just can't - not in this thing."

Mom climbed into the car, closed the door.  "Thanks for trying to help."  And drove away.

Hours later, deep into the high mountain night, the old grey Ford pulled up in front of our little house in Kalispell.  I woke to the sound of  Mom's delighted laughter.  She turned off the car, and turned to wake my sister and I.  That car never started again, and, when repeated attempts to repair it failed, Mom laughed again when she arranged to have it towed to the dump.  "I guess that mechanic was right, after all."

When I think of the things have have shaped who and what I am, it is this kind of thing that dominates my mind - the determination, the power of will, the sheer faith with which my mother, my father, and my larger family met life, and met its challenges.  No task was insurmountable, no challenge unbeatable.  You just started out, and you kept going till you got there.

I think this attitude, this inspiration has helped me as a writer.  In my early days, I wrote essays, short stories, and volumes of poetry, never even considering anything longer.  Until I was in graduate school, and was required to write a book-length, publishable manuscript as part of the curriculum.  Two Mothers Speak was published less than two years after I received my degree, and, since, I have completed and published eight other books, both fiction and non-fiction, had five of them published "traditionally," and the others self-published.

Writing a book is  daunting.  It takes years of focus and work - research, writing, checking, proofing, editing, cutting, and starting over.  And like that old Ford, when you reach the end, it is gone, done for good. The notion of ending up with hundreds of pages, all on one topic, can seem overwhelming.  But, if we can write words on page one, we, like my mother in that long-ago Ford, can start out.  

Zen In the Art of Writing (with a nod to, and great love for, Ray Bradbury)

Some years ago, I joined a Zen Buddhist sangha.  It happened pretty much serendipitously, as so many things in my life seem to.  A friend dropped by one afternoon with a book on Zen that she handed to me.  “I just had a feeling,” she said, “that you should read this.”  A few days later, stepping off the elevator at work, I found myself face to face with a small woman with a shaved head wearing black Zen robes.  A Buddhist monk, she had just returned from training in Japan and was applying to teach writing at the school where I taught at the time.  I asked her to be my teacher.  Over the next months, as the local sangha formed, we met and sat zazen in the warehouse behind a local art gallery, on concrete floors, with the wide warehouse doors to the loading dock pushed open to let air into the sweltering space.  We sat in circles on the floor while Eido Frances taught us meditation techniques, and, after each sitting, talked with us about Zen.  

All these years later, that sangha is thriving, and I live in a different town.  When I met Eido, I was not (am not) a religious person, or at least never would have described myself as such.   That is probably true of many ex-Catholics.  Not into religion, but still seeking.  Zen was the perfect place for me - a philosophy of living, plain and straightforward.  Eido once referred to Zen as “the Quakers of Buddhism.”  I met with that sangha at least once a month for a couple of years, and sat alone at home many times.   My (late) husband told me at the time that he had never seen me so focused, so serene.  

The community where I live now has a couple of sanghas, but I have never joined, though I have visited.  None of them give me the feeling of that first, plain, straightforward group, sitting on concrete floors, listening quietly to Eido in the stuffy warehouse air.  Since then, especially during the times when Zen has become (however temporarily) “trendy,” I’ve seen others I know become “into” Zen.  I’ve watched them buy hand-crafted zafus (the cushions you sit on when you sit meditation), and fill their homes with bronze statues of Buddha, rugs and hangings of natural fibers, low tables of polished woods.  Something about this always bothered me, seemed anti-Zen to me:  spending money on expensive trappings to “capture” Zen.   To me, the central part of Zen was ‘acceptance.’   Accept what is in your life, work with it.  

I’ve had Zen on my mind more and more, lately, with the current writing class I am teaching at my school.   I had wanted to use Ray Bradbury’s “Zen in the Art of Writing” as the text for that class, but the staff couldn’t find it to order.  That is a shame.  There are a quite literally millions of books on writing on the market, but precious few that have the spirit of Bradbury’s work.  Jump in, Bradbury tells us, explode with passion.  

“...if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are

only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market …  that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.”   - Ray Bradbury, from Zen in the Art of Writing -

“A thing of fevers and enthusiasms…”  - would that teaching our students this was a goal of education in this century.  Would, in fact, that this was a goal of writers in this century, or, for that matter, of any of us as human beings. I have, quite recently, stopped going to writing workshops, lectures by published writers, and writing conferences.   I’d never gone to them often, but now I’ve stopped entirely.  I’ve found that, more and more, even the workshops on something seemingly so incorruptible as a poetry workshop have come to be more and more about the market - writing not what is your best work, not what is the quality of poetry that elevates us, but what will sell.  Forget zest, forget gusto, forget love - remember:  sell.  It is to focus on the image of what the market wants, not the truth of human expression.  

Please, let us do the opposite as writers:  let us forget the market, forget the editors and critics, forget what will sell, and follow Bradbury.  “You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations,” Bradbury tells us.  “You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.”    It may or may not sell, but, it is so much closer to a real life, to that life out of time and within love.  And, honestly, it is grand.

If You love "Having Written," Turn on Your Crap Detector

“I hate writing, but I love having written.”

                                             -Frank Norris (1915)

This quote is a hard one to be honest about.  Because if we (those of us who call ourselves writers) are honest about it, it doesn’t make us look very good.  Damned bad, in fact.   We are like those parents who take credit for all our kids accomplishments, while forgetting to pack their lunch.  Image without substance.    There are lots of writer's blogs out there that have explored the meaning of this quote - I read a lot of them when I was working up to this, jotting down ideas, researching the quote’s origins.  And, by the way, No, it was not Dorothy Parker who said it.  In fact, there’s no link at all to Parker and this quote.  Nor was it, (as some have claimed) Gloria Steinem.  Or Cornelia Otis Skinner.  Or the many others it’s been attributed to.  Most of them have quoted the line, but the first documented use was by novelist Frank Norris in a newspaper interview in 1915.

Frank Norris

People generally write about this quote as though it were all about process.  The writing is hard work, (I hate that), but the end product is satisfying (I love that).  But I think there is much more here.   I think this quote, which many have blurted, tongue-in-cheek, goes beyond the notion that the struggle is worth the product, that the hard work is worth the satisfaction.  There’s more here than the idea that commitment to gut-wrenching honesty in your work leads to relief when that is done. My thoughts on it’s relevance apply  to all forms of writing, all types of writers - from the commercial writer who writes for the market, working hard daily to churn out volumes of quick-and-easy formulaic reads, to the would-be ‘artist’ who labors for truth in every word.  

Four or five years ago, I went to a local theater to see a production of Steven Dietz’s play Fiction.  The play’s two main character’s are both writers, though one has produced only one book, and the other writes material even he considers unsatisfying.  The play has many layers about writers, relationships, and the lies we tell, but the moment that I am thinking of now comes as the husband in the pair sits at his desk talking about his work, and uses this quote in his speech.  There was light laughter in the audience when he said it, and two or three of us who laughed much louder.  I fairly barked out my  laughter at the line.  At intermission, the friend I was with asked me what I found so funny about it, and I felt pinned to the spot, mentally flailing for an answer.  

Why was it so much funnier to me than to others in the audience?  And why couldn’t I explain that?  

Because it’s hard to own up to unpleasant things about yourself.  A local reviewer called the characters in the play “un-charming” and “self-satisfied.”  And I identified with them.  It’s similar to having a belly-laugh at a sitcom about a dysfunctional family, because you see the ghosts of your own family there.  

What Michael (the husband in the play) seemed to me to be saying when he uttered this line was that he really hated writing, but he loved being a writer.   There are perks, after all - even if (like most of us) you are not famous and only have middling (or no) publications.  People envy your ability with words.  People admire your commitment.  They ask for advice, they respect you and what you do.  They romanticize (and so do you) the image of what it means to be a writer.  That can be a pleasant place to be, living in that imagery.

Perhaps, when faced with this, we all need Hemingway’s “shock proof crap detector” - (the only quality he said every good writer needed to have).   A writer needs to be perpetually on the alert for crap - especially her/his own.  Much has been made of getting rid of your ‘internal critic'- that voice inside telling you that your work sucks, and so do you.  Whole lessons have been structured about getting rid of that voice.  But we need to rid ourselves of the voice on the other end of the spectrum as well, the voice of self-satisfaction, the voice that romanticizes the work we do.  Because it’s work, not a self-promotion plan.  Laugh at ourselves when we go that route, then roll up our sleeves and, simply, work.