I was stuck in the middle of a revision. Yes, when I recognize that something is missing—that I had I glided over some weird canyon in the conversation between two characters—I drop a helpful “ADD” into the text to point out my omission. “Helpful.” If I could, I would paste a gif of someone yelling “Clean up on aisle 5!” into the text. This happens frequently. The excitement of a first draft leads to mysterious elisions and weird gaps in logic and consistency that reveal themselves during revision.
Upon reflection, I knew I needed a story at this juncture of the novel. One of my main characters needed to respond with a story—not one from his life (he can remember nothing of his past)—but from the ocean of stories that shine like distant stars in his mind. Wow, mixed metaphor. And so, I spent a few hours digging through folk and fairy tales that somehow suited the novel’s moment, and, finding nothing, I decided to wake up the next day and head back to work to wrestle with this problem.
On the way to work, I happened to be listening to Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes (I am leading a discussion about the book in August and wanted to polish my thoughts) and this passage played:
In recounting the tale of his famous breakthrough to his colleagues, [Leo] Kanner compared himself to the legendary Persian prince Serendip, who “went for a stroll one day, with no particular quest in mind, and unexpectedly came upon a hoard of treasures,” as he put it.
Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes, 141
And that’s how I made a mad dash back through the copy of the Shanameh that sits near my desk, a quick detour through the 1,001 Nights, then a couple of other sources, and added something meaningful to the conversation between my two characters.
I am not above noting the happy irony of serendipity. In fact, I suggest that a writer—at any and every stage of writing—court serendipity with unmatched fervor. Perhaps your mind is constantly percolating with ideas already. Perhaps you feel that you need a kind of absolute quiet to access some hidden cave of treasures accessible only with the gentle murmur of some magic words. Perhaps you fear that you have forgotten the magic words. Or, perhaps serendipity will provide if you open yourself to the possibility.
The end of Lent means that I can eat sweets again. Even though I am years removed from my Catholic upbringing, and I don’t recall my parents ever guiding us through some chosen fast during the six-week run-up to Easter (although we did not eat meat on Fridays, enjoying fish sticks and cheese pizza during that time), I try to give up something I enjoy during Lent. My practice is partly an exercise in self-control but also, and perhaps mainly, an extended ritual. I wonder how many rituals I practice.
I used to work for a Unitarian Universalist congregation, and they treated rituals like a kind of smorgasbord (one of these, one of those, absolutely none of those), depending on the season. While I understand being open to possibilities (I often quote Dickinson: “I dwell in possibility, a fairer house than prose”), that kind of openness can too easily lead to egoism: my belief reflects what I think and feel and want. When egoism is brandished without the perpetual interrogation of the self (What do I want? Why do I want it? And: what are the consequences of my desire?), it tends to become a rather sloppy exercise. We may fall back on Whitman’s handy “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself” (If he can do it, why can’t I?) but without putting in the hard work of loving the contradictory multitudes of the kosmos.
Belief is more like weather. You know that it is there and part of an intricate system, but the weather does not care if you have a picnic scheduled for Saturday afternoon. In fact, the weather does not care; it simply is. Sailing taught me that hard lesson. We would huddle around the satellite radio for the computer-generated voice that told us what was likely to be around us in the nights and days ahead, but short of sailing out of the way of a microburst—sometimes reversing course for hours—we plunged through. Stormy sea, or sun-drenched calm with the motor running to push us out of windless placidity, forward was our only way.
Much of life, the universe, and everything is like that: out of our control and uncaring. Either that casts you into an existential crisis (as it should), or you declare, “Fuck it (choose your exclamation)! I’ll do whatever I want,” or you put on clothes that suit the moment and struggle on. I’m a fan of the struggle. Many of my rituals—you might think of them as routines—engage the struggle. My 5-6 day-a-week workouts are arduous enough to get my heart rate above 170 bpm. My Sundays in the museums set a benchmark for my writing—the art beckons: Beauty and brilliance are possible. Attain this! Even my mornings, jump-starting my brain with some puzzle before driving 30-40 minutes accompanied by music that sets the course for the work day ahead, are parts of my daily ritual.
What is the difference between a ritual and a routine? Perhaps intention. My brain switches to full-on during ritual. I recognize that some who meditate (and meditate as a ritual) do so to quiet their minds. I recall sitting in Quaker Meeting, having left the world at the Meeting House doors, and waiting for that still, strong voice to rekindle my spirit. Some days, it did; many days, it did not. Many days the world clattered too noisily. Many more days, my mind was dropping plates and banging a wooden spoon against a dented pot. I can understand the wisdom in trying to quiet the mind of its desires.
Perhaps I use ritual to find music in the cacophony of life. The external and internal noise blend together to create something like order in the chaos. I write “something like” because part of my writing ritual is to transcribe something that doesn’t simply seem real but mimics the real in all its disorder.
I try not to say this part out loud too much, but as a writer, the whole idea of silencing the mind is antithetical to my craft. I always listen for a voice that is sometimes still and strong, sometimes bumptious, sometimes shrill, sometimes serious, sometimes frivolous, sometimes the voice of two women discussing the responsibilities of sovereignty, sometimes the voice of a horse who charges into the abyss, sometimes the voice of a man contemplating the relationship between light and gravity, and sometimes something like my voice. Ritual helps me set aside voices and noises that make claims on my precious attention. More often than not, those noises are not discordant but precisely organized like steps in a march, and they would regiment my music out of me—even if that music is a march, or a waltz, or some mad scramble on some impossible dance floor, or just the call of birds at dawn.
Ritual does not preclude thought (or my self) so much as it helps me tune out everything that stridently insists: “not your thought, not your self.” Ritual is an exercise of will against everything outside the demands of my work—so that I can listen freely to all the voices; so that I can be distracted into flights of fancy; so that I can (and will) think more deeply, reflect more keenly, and write.
“But, isn’t that just egoism? Aren’t you just doing what you want? And weren’t you just complaining about that?” you ask. And yes, if writing were just a routine, something I did by rote, or just to accumulate something else (appreciation, remuneration), then I would agree. But ritual is also sacred, part of a trumpet call from the unknown, wherever and everywhere that is. To borrow from Kafka: “Ich weiß es nicht,” sagte ich, “nur weg von hier, nur weg von hier. Immerfort weg von hier, nur so kann ich mein Ziel erreichen.” Ritual opens the door back into the unknown world.
I started writing poetry in the 10th grade, stopped, then started writing fiction in my final year of college. I got into a writing workshop on the strength of a story about a mine disaster based on fact (there were/are/will be mine collapses) and was inspired by the immediacy and detail of a scene in Conrad’s Lord Jim (a boiler explodes). After college, I tried to write a mystery/thriller novel with Monet’s Haystack paintings as its centerpiece. It didn’t get far. Then I started another about a pair of young men who masqueraded as even younger men so they could be freshmen again and restart the process. No. Then, another about a young man with no memory who happened to be an all-star pitcher. This one also died a quick and quiet death, but the idea of someone without a memory persisted, and 40 years later (after several odd turns) became the spine of the novel I finished.
I will leave out the other fits and starts and hazard to mention that I attended a Ph.D. program in Creative Writing for six years and have published a few stories and poems. My writing life has centered more on frustrating periods of silence than flourishing runs of production. I have written other things along the way—articles, curricula, and this blog—but the impetus (novel, novel, novel) that started me writing was not fully engaged until I set aside other obligations. I am no longer the manager of an Italian dive restaurant in Philadelphia. I am no longer a director of religious education or the principal of a small boys’ school. I am no longer a full-time teacher. I continue to teach part-time but spend the better part of my workday in a well-lit corner of the library chasing pages.
When I was younger, I thought I had plenty of time to figure out my writing and that I would somehow perfect the creative process to get properly tuned into the muse. Many of my teachers focused on quality, brandishing red pens, and working as gatekeepers, and I ate that up. Only one teacher wrote an encouraging “Keep Writing!” at the bottom of every story I delivered to workshop, no matter what other positive or adverse comments he made. Maybe my teachers took for granted that the most significant driver of creativity is not perfection in all its glory but a desire to spend hours every day at the task. And—and this is the hard pill to swallow—the world is not just set against providing anyone with the hours required to do the work; it will also sponge up and divert the emotional and intellectual attention that writing requires.
I acknowledge that some writers get by on an hour borrowed here and there, getting in a solid jag on their off days. Some. I had one—and only one—teacher who advised against attempting to balance writing with a full-time teaching job. He suggested that driving a soda delivery truck would be a better option. And he taught. He recognized how easy it was to get wrapped up in the briar patch of teaching. Even when it is a bed of roses. However, writers, novel writers at least (okay, this particular novel writer; I really can’t speak for anyone else), revel in the unceasing details of life. Even driving a truck full of soda bottles can provide grist for the attention mill. Writing is more about limiting the scope of one’s vision, on not-seeing. One either ignores everything that doesn’t advance the progress of the current project, or the attention-seeking device in the writer’s mind will fly with a preternatural attentiveness to every corner of the room, out the window, and down the street to a vast and varied countryside. Again, yes, some novels venture into the encyclopedic (including some novels I love), but once you lash yourself to the mast of a story, you must learn to pass through the siren songs of everything—anything—else.
As previous posts note, I value distraction. I welcome something (anything?) that nudges ajar the closed doors of perception and lets in the light of inspiration. Except. The distractions I choose are just that: my choice. The inexorable enforced distractions that modern life promulgates, especially those that are delightful, noble, or profitable, will not contribute to the necessary accumulation of pages that a novel requires. Virginia Woolf recommended a room and three guineas as the basis for a creative life; something like that still holds.
In the end, I have become significantly less concerned about the origin arrival of the next idea and whether it is good than with securing time, place, and inspirational distractions. The mind will generate ideas as surely as it produces dreams night after night without prodding or worry. Back to work!
I’m sure it’s happened to you. Someone has told you the right way to do something. It could be something as simple as folding towels and then hanging them up on a towel rack in your bathroom, folding a t-shirt and putting it in a drawer, or wrapping a birthday present. Maybe you offer such advice, although it’s not really advice. It’s a dictum: THE RIGHT WAY. I wonder where people get these ideas, and I suppose, as often as not, they come from parents who explained how to wash a fork or how to tie shoelaces. Someone once watched as I tied my laces and corrected me. “That’s not the right way.”
My parents never offered such advice. After my mother taught me the wrong way to tie my shoes, I became a free-range kid—long before there were such things as free-range kids. My brothers and I roamed through our exurban neighborhood, sent on our way for hours every day with only a momentary return for a PB&J at lunch. When I was eleven, I read the instructions on a box of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee pizza and made pizza dough from scratch on Saturday afternoons. I asked for and received a pizza tin for a birthday. My father set out the chess pieces, and after explaining how the pieces could move, I was on my own. Did I find a book in the school library that offered suggestions? Yes, I did, and then, eventually, beat my father. I learned to tie a bowline knot in Boy Scouts (the rabbit runs around the tree method), and my father didn’t care how I tied it when we sailed on the ocean together, so long as I could do it when the ship was bucking over chop.
I can’t tell you how many things I learned on my own, occasionally seeking guidance. While I took swim lessons, first in the pool of a local family, then at a Red Cross class at a nearby pond, later when I wanted to ascend from the junior varsity to varsity team at my very competitive high school, I turned to Doc Counsilman’s Science of Swimming to work on my breaststroke. My first car was a Volkswagen Beetle, and I owned a copy of John Muir’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive and used it to guide me through replacing the clutch; it was more complicated than I imagined. Replacing the McPherson struts was beyond my ken, mainly because I didn’t own something to compress the springs in the suspension. Even with expert advice, I knew when to turn to a professional.
I learned to cook by deciphering recipe instructions in my mother’s worn copy of The Joy of Cooking—the only cookbook she suffered to own. I watched cooking shows on PBS when I was a teenager, and in my early twenties read James Beard’s Theory and Practice of Good Cooking for fun. When I worked there as a waiter at La Fourchette in Wayne, I asked the head chef how to make a beurre blanc, which I needed to know to make scallops stuffed with pesto in a beurre blanc. I asked about the pesto, too; there was no internet. I learned about pastries from the pastry chef. For one Bastille Day dinner, I replicated his white chocolate mousse recipe, straining raspberry coulis through a well-cleaned lint screen from the dryer in my apartment’s basement. Not the right way, but one of many possible ways.
My early school teachers remain a blur. I remember one who told me my world map looked messy—my crayon blue oceans were too streaky. But there was Mr. Hecht, who asked me to join the math club, and Mrs. Vandergriff, who had us do a lesson in prejudice by segregating the blue-eyed blond students to a single table. We weren’t allowed to use our hall’s water fountains or restrooms. My seventh grade history teacher (Mr. Moore) taught us how to take notes, and I can still organize any lecture into a fairly plastic but organized outline. I made deeper connections with my teachers in high school, in no small part because we ate three meals a day with them; I attended a boarding school. But besides dates and processes (which I loved), I don’t recall learning how-tos. Ryck Walbridge did not walk us through how to work an autoclave; we had one, but how it worked was a lesson beyond us all. Buzz Gardner read Catcher in the Rye from start to finish aloud in class. Neither Dick Broad, Buzz Gardner, Arthur Jackson, nor Alexander Revell taught me how to read more effectively—or “Read Like a Professor,” as Thomas Foster advises. I came to reading on my own.
I was not an early reader. Sure, my mother dropped us off at the Paoli Library while she shopped. My brother and I wandered through the small dark corners, pulling books from shelves, settling on Dr. Seuss’s preposterous rhymes and Richard Scarry’s encyclopedic illustrations. We had few books at home: a multi-volume photographic history of World War II, another multi-volume medical dictionary acquired volume by volume by shopping at the Acme grocery store, and a few Reader’s Digest compilations of abridged novels. I must be misremembering a little because, at some point, the shelves in my 11-year-old bedroom began accumulating books, among them E.B. White’s Stuart Little and the anthology Rod Serling’s Triple W: Witches, Warlocks, and Werewolves, and a hard cover dictionary. In seventh grade, I met a boy who was reading Alistair MacLean’s Where Eagles Dare,and when he was finished, he loaned it to me. Thus began a reading bender that has not ended. I tore through those adventure novels, some early Michael Crichton, all of Vonnegut in paperback (Player Piano through Slaughterhouse Five).
Somewhere in that jungle of pleasure reading, I started to pull books apart. While reading MacLean’s The Way to Dusty Death, finding the title phrase buried in a description deep in the novel delighted me. I was 11 or 12 and began to dig through books looking for interconnected words as if the repetitions would unlock the book. I read books like puzzles. Of course, I never considered that MacLean alluded to Macbeth (I had, at the time, neither read nor watched a play by Shakespeare). Later, my magpie mind would make that connection and a thousand more.
I guess my point is that no one said, “Brian, look for repetitions” as a method for unpacking a novel (or, for that matter, the world). I learned to read, moving from Dick and Jane to The Story of Ferdinand the Bull to “Who Am I This Time?” to Leviathan to The Waves without anyone saying, “This is the right way to read.” Did I stumble along the way? Yes. Even in graduate school, one of my professors marveled at my compendious collection of interlinked parts of Donald Barthleme’s The Dead Father but suggested that I hadn’t stumbled on a reason for that compendium. “This lacks a thesis,” she wrote—as if connection wasn’t the thesis. Sometimes I think that what I believe to be so obvious that it beggars definition. It’s not. I have to be painfully clear.
So, I want to tell you there is no right way; there is only your way.
But.
You will only find your way by working at it. You will need to test your method in several unrelated fields. “But I don’t like math,” you will complain. Or, or, or I don’t like “fill in the blank.” Look, even if you don’t like math, or Latin, or chemistry, you can’t say, “I don’t like trying.” You may be at a loss for knowing what you want to spend the rest of your life trying. The whole point of school is not to teach you some balance of everything. School is here to give you a reasonable amount of exposure to things you would not necessarily consider as avenues for something like success. And—and this will frustrate you—school teaches you that effort—genuine slog through the mud, sweat in the field, freeze on the mountainside effort—has lasting value. You may not remember the Krebs cycle or the quadratic formula, but you will remember the effort.
Let’s suppose you are that rarest of rare birds, “the natural.” What you are a natural at is not baking, auto repair, baseball, drawing, or writing. Naturals have the ability to expend genuinely unfathomable effort in some—usually one—direction over and over again without giving in to the fear of failure. They begin every day and try. The rest of us, the regulars, must learn how to try. “The right way” is just a shortcut—and when replacing a clutch, I’m happy to have that shortcut. Imagine winging a clutch. Good luck.
Even if there is a right way, there is no right way to try. That you have to figure out for yourself. Figure it out. Try. And you will find your way.
I finished a first draft of a novel in the fall of 2019–a smidge past 88,000 words, huzzah! huzzah! I almost immediately began working on the next one. While at this new work, I managed a copywriter-style edit over the next year that swelled the thing by another 5,000 words, but other than adding connective tissue, it hadn’t substantially changed. I kept at the next book but felt a nagging unfinished feeling about the previous one that hindered my progress. Other events conspired (as they often do). An annoying fallow period set in when the twinned butterflies of ideas and scenes clashed until book #2 relented and declared, “Finish the other one and get back to me when you’re ready.”
It took about 15 painful minutes to realize I had arrived at the wrong ending. Actually, 15 glorious, freeing, soaring minutes, but then came the less soaring, freeing, and glorious realization that the hard work of revision waited. “Why not just change the ending?” you might ask. Because no matter how messy a novel is, with its few hundred threads strewn across the living room floor—some leading to the kitchen, some to the garage, and some impossibly outside through the dryer vent (can we not talk about those that lead down the WC, please?)—the line from beginning to end is the single thread that holds the vivid, continuous dream together.
And so, revision. Fortunately, the events will remain (mostly) the same (that much I got right). Still, the permutations of characters and the thickets of motivations they brought with them to, say, a stone wall in Central Asia, changed. And so how characters walked, strode, strolled, marched, limped, ran, trudged, or galloped (one of the characters is a horse) to that wall also changed.
I know exactly why I ended the book as I had—a kind of brutally insistent wish fulfillment. And one of the nice things I realized is that the book had been fighting that resolution at its bones. So now it is throwing flowers at me as I realign characters (Oh, he said that–not her, and she said this instead—head smack—duh!), even though it demands new work and new consideration. I don’t know exactly how it all will come off, but it beckons with a willingness that is at once surprising and exacting. As I fall asleep, the book whispers, “You see this now, yes? So, do it.”
I will share a few of the changes as I proceed. I will try to explain why these changes occurred and what they mean in a general way. If this process only helped me with this one book and not in all the books to follow, what’s the point? We take the lessons as they come; I hope I’m not too obstinate to apply them. Others will surely follow.
There is no guarantee that these changes they will make it through to some “it’s out of my hands now” final draft. But I think much will.
I began the day in a foul mood. That’s not true. I shook the snooze on my phone enough times to drift back in and out of a dream I was having, gathered the cats’ feeding mice (they retrieve their food from a set of “mice” that I secret throughout my apartment twice a day), and poured a small cup of coffee. Traffic was inordinately painless. Then there was a line outside my first Sunday stop, a French bakery off Logan Circle in DC. People bundled in the late March chill. Flurries on the 27th? So be it.
Then the first blow, no almond croissants. Routine is terrible; I accept the necessity and know that I must make adjustments—perpetually. I arrive by ten to ensure my weekly extravagance of three almond croissants, which I portion out across the awful early days of the workweek. So be it. The friendly counter assistant offered almond croissants with chocolate, but I prefer not to mix my pleasures. “I’ll have three pistachio croissants.” There were, fortunately, plenty. “I’ll suffer,” I told her as the owner of the bakery looked on, noting my disappointment and smiling nonetheless.
And then the descent. As I left the shop, a young man burst through the open door and into the crowded shop. A wiry blonde fellow carrying a blue paperback textbook. Physics or economics—it hardly matters. He charged in without acknowledging his rudeness—one other person was waiting to exit. Unlike Ishmael, my first impulse was not to knock his hat off; he wore no hat. I wanted to deck him. “There’s more room out there,” slipped from my mouth, and then, “Dumb ass.”
In his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace warned against such flares of anger. He suggests “that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.” I get it. That young man might have had some life-saving advice to give to the people he was meeting at the bakery. Or he may have been on the spectrum and not in control of his social cues. I have many more moments when I can find the deeper solidarity of human experience, but I am keenly aware of my disdain for what? the failure of something like social grace.
The next twenty minutes of my morning descended in a spiral of disgust and disdain. Bad drivers multiplied like fleas and ticks on a lost dog. The sensor in my car alerted me that the air pressure in a reasonably new tire was low. The news and Joe Biden’s slip of passion—too much like my own. The world.
Except there are always bad drivers and people who back up without looking on crowded sidewalks or couples who stand conversing in entryways as if no one else wants to enter or exit. There are also kind shop owners, docents who recognize you and wave at you over the heads of a crowd, women who pet dogs, and dog owners who say, “Yes, she loves people.” Part of my Sunday ritual casts me pointedly and intentionally into the sea of museum-goers. The way people gaze at art—their comments and commiserations—delight me. We are at a concert, dancing and singing along with the masters of the world.
No wonder I write surrounded by all this—and all of them.
So, why such hypos today?
I just killed one of the characters in my novel. Yes, of course, someone else in the book killed him; I didn’t do it. But I did it. I knew I would do it and try as I may—and did—to distract myself from this inevitable passing, it had to happen. And today’s writing would carry me into the aftermath of that realization. I would have to begin the slow work of grief with the characters who remain. Writing has consequences, and no number of almond, or pistachio, croissants will salve the emotions that the work stirs. Yes, other characters have died in other works, but this was the first time a central character died because of another character’s cruelty. He will haunt the rest of the novel and haunt the characters who loved him.
I used to tell students in my college classes that they could miss a week of classes and needed to provide no excuses. “You’re adults,” I told them, “Life happens.” I also said, “Do not invent excuses. Do not claim sickness or death that did not happen—no, ‘I had to attend my great aunt’s funeral.’ Words have consequences. They are magic and can change the world.” I still believe this.
So today, on a perfectly ordinary day in a perfectly ordinary world, my brain hunkered down in advance of the pages that waited. Huzzah for belated self-awareness. I haven’t broken anything yet. Lesson: writing will shape your world, even if you aren’t aware of the shaping, even if it doesn’t change the rest of the world. Get to work at your own risk. Risk it all.
As a coda, there is a painting by Gilbert Stuart—he of the famous portrait of Washington—of a skater (called, The Skater). The man is utterly self-possessed. Unflappable. And yet, he is inscribing perfect circles on the ice. He has a nice hat. I don’t want to knock it off. I see him and think, “abstemious” (Either that or he just came from a long ocean voyage). Just as Prospero advised Miranda and Ferdinand, “Be more abstemious.” Advice well given. Back to work.
So, I posted my workout on Facebook, and one of my friends replied, “sounds like a good swimming workout to me!” Another responded, “Or something rather naughty.” A few weeks later, the woman I was married to threw a log onto whatever fire we were in the middle of and said she was ashamed by what I had posted. Her response did not rise to the level of high dudgeon: “How could you!” Instead, “You’re an embarrassing idiot.” Later in life, one of my blog posts earned a chilly, “Why are you sharing your emotions? It’s just like Taylor Swift.” I should be so lucky to have Taylor Swift’s “readership.” I lay myself bare here—joys and struggles—to let my tiny audience know that they are not alone. I have been in the hole, and I found a way out.
Some of this I learned from other writers. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote that effective speakers (and writers should think of themselves as speakers) needed to be aware of their own character, the demands of the audience, and, finally, the logic or quality of their arguments. I will not investigate or interrogate your character, and, honestly, character seems less and less an issue these days. Or, just as troublesome, the only issue. I have read excellent work by writers of execrable demeanor, and awful work written by saints. I don’t need my favorite writers to join me for dinner or win my vote in the next election. One hopes for excellence on the page, in public, and in private, but it doesn’t always work that way. Writers, like readers, are human.
As far as the quality of your work, if you have read any of what I have written before, you know that I believe the more you write, the more likely you are to improve. Grit out an hour, two, or six a day and fill the buckets. Murky water will become clear, and with a bit of luck and a ton of persistence, it will transform into decent ale, wine, or smoky whiskey. Are there savants who miraculously produce exceptional work as if their quills were wetted in holy ink? Maybe. While I am sure that lightning strikes, most writers have written gobs before their first miraculous effort arrives on the page. Dickens, Twain, and Marquez wrote for newspapers under deadlines. Virginia Woolf kept dense journals.
But audience…
And here’s the second (the first was process) thing: when you write, you don’t write for yourself. Of course, you write for yourself, to answer some deep-seated god-only-knows-why-I’m-doing-this compunction, but the whole point is to tell. Your words seek another’s ear. Yes, yes, delight yourself and unburden yourself (or profoundly burden yourself) by what you do, but never forget that your words seek an audience. The reclusive Emily Dickinson wrote for God—at once the most daunting and forgiving audience. Joyce wrote the nearly impossible Finnegan’s Wake for a tiny audience—one that was brazen enough, curious enough, playful enough, and willing enough—but the effort was not solipsistic. His claim that if it took seventeen years to write, it should take seventeen years to read is as ponderous a gauntlet to throw down to the reader as any writer should manage. Easy messages (those that surprise but stay within narrower, almost expected bounds) get bigger audiences, but even Dubliners’ original print run was for only 1250 copies. It did better, but he fought hard for that initial print run. You will fight too.
So, write with an audience in mind, and know your audience. Your audience is not everyone (even if it could be anyone), and it is certainly not someone who willfully (and vindictively) misconstrues your meaning. Some people are beyond convincing It could be because of something their parent said, or where they were born, or the weather in Tasmania. If you chase that rabid white rabbit, you will get bitten. You have no control over how the reader feels when they read. With any luck, you will cheer those in need and charm those ready to be diverted and enchanted. Every reader carries baggage to your work, and not all of it will get in the way. Some readers are packed for whatever journey you take them on. Be ready for them. Seriously, they will expect your best work—meet their expectations.
Besides, writers come with our own freightload of luggage; it’s okay. The best you can do is enter into an unspoken contract with your readers to provide something clear and engaging (and in the broadest and most profound sense, entertaining) to read; they will enter into a similar contract to read as generously as they are able.
Not all readers will. Not all readers can. Some are just curmudgeons. Some will comment and criticize for their own delight. I once had a classmate add an illustration of eyes in flight to the margins of one of my fledgling efforts. He said he wanted to remind me that “eyes cannot fly around a room.” The eyes were artfully crafted but perhaps beside the point. Maybe you like that kind of attention. There is something enthralling about gobs of feedback, even down to the level of “Use curly, not straight quotation marks.” Or the other way around. A writer can become mesmerized by confirmation that readers have given their fullest attention even if the attention is toxic.
Let me remind you that some readers refuse to read anything out of their comfort zones, refusing to read a book about football, or only wanting to read books about football. They remind me of my daughter, who always wanted mac n’ cheese no matter where we ate. Some people don’t want a salad with goat cheese, a veggie burger, pasta primavera, or grilled fish. Some people turn their noses up at pecan pie. They aren’t wrong; they just aren’t right for you.
And there is a side to people we must admit. Let me share stories that will put this in sharper relief. On a zoom meeting with fellow faculty (weather kept us home), a number of us displayed our pets. One faculty member chimed in, “I can feel my allergies getting ready to kick in.” Delight, delight, delight, and fuck you. Or, while I sang the praises of hot and sour soup with duck from a Chinese restaurant, one person volunteers, “I don’t like spicy food.” It could have been “I don’t like duck.” Leaving a movie with friends, I shared that I was going home to enjoy a small glass of Lagavulin 16 year old Scotch. “If you like drinking a campfire,” one acquaintance replied. Witty, but really? Humans have a predilection for negativity, and on the other side, we drag negative comments behind us like a chain of money boxes. Oh, the humanity. This negative penchant can be fatal for writers struggling to break the shell between themselves and the world made of words—the world they can and should make.
You are going to need a thick skin. More importantly, you will need a clear vision of the star you hitched your wagon to (some readers will complain about what I just did).
In Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction, Seymour advises his brother Buddy about writing: “[Y]ou’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer… ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world [you] would most want to read… The next step is terrible, but so simple… You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself.” Remember what delighted you, what amazed you, what made you turn page after page, or read and reread over and over again. What book do you thrust at friends and strangers, exclaiming, “You’ve got to read this!”? Of course, some will complain that they cannot keep all the Aurelianos straight in One Hundred Years of Solitude—you don’t have to be friends with them anymore; it’s okay to make that judgment. I jest. No, I don’t. Yes, I do.
No, I don’t.
Yes, you are the writer, but you are also your first audience. Have you written something that delights, amazes, frightens, shocks, excites, encourages, and engages you? If you have, it stands a chance to do the same for someone else. You might wonder if anyone will publish—or buy—what you write? Keep this in mind: shelves (actual and virtual) are full of product (yes, product) with a range of quality. Write well and let the market settle its own problems.
Be ready. Your audience will want you to guide them, to tickle them, and torment (for the right reasons) them. They will adjust their schedules and expectations when you surprise them. Surprise them!Write for that audience, delight and amaze them. And disregard all others. I think I may have drifted too far into a warning about that other audience, so let me insist that some people will cheer you on—as you work and for your finished work. One of my teachers would always comment “Keep writing!” on my stories whether he liked what I wrote or not. He wouldn’t invite me into the weeds of precisely what he thought I should fix or revise, even if his overall comment was “No,” he still cheered, “Keep writing!”
And so, keep writing. Find your audience. Be more patient with yourself and them. They will come around. So will you.
I look at Hokusai’s screen that encompasses the twelve months and recall a writing task—a prose poem a day—that I imagined and attempted when I was in my early thirties. It was another opportunity to write; I had just finished Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen and felt inspired to follow his example. I wrote a bunch of prose poems centered around Philadelphia, and when I showed them to a teacher, he dismissed them as being too much alike—“in one voice,” he said.
I took the criticism to heart, added some comedic pieces, and stopped. I never felt an urge to get back into it. Or I always felt the urge to get back into it. Writing can be like that. Merwin wrote, “my words are the garment of what I shall never be/Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.” In a world that values completion, so many stray projects end up feeling unfilled. Here is the life you laid out clothes for last night, and nothing fits in the morning. When you get to work, you notice that everyone else is walking around in well-tailored suits. Your jacket has four arms as if made for a horse or a dog. We won’t talk about your pants.
I attended a graduate writing program that required a full slate of academic courses, which meant that I read Shakespeare and Bussy D’Amboise, Woolf and Dickens, Heidegger and Gallop, Baudelaire and Blake. And I taught. And, oh yes, I wrote. I read work by classmates and writers who my classmates and professors recommended. “You should read—.” There was also a fair amount of “You should write—.” Both “shoulds” implied something about what was good for me and what I would be good for—as if there was a menswear shop that had something in just my style. If only I could figure out my style. With so much swirling around me—and not just “so much” but so much that was exciting and excellent—it was easy to lose track of what I wanted. Other people claimed greater knowledge. Two of my classmates thought I should wear leather pants—that’s how they saw me. Another friend insisted that I put on sweats and play in the Sunday morning touch football game. Later, the same friend castigated me for having a hard time with the “O” word. Obey. Good luck. The only call I had to obey was write. And read. And teach.
Of course, I was disobedient—even to my own calling because I did not know where I wanted to go or what I wanted to write. In the garden of earthly delights, who could choose one pleasure? I was complimented that I could learn from anyone, and this is true. Whether a professor or poet, a work of fiction or philosophy, every teacher had something valuable to add to my world. Even my worst teachers, whose habit ranged into anger and vindictiveness, displayed some small nugget of positive enthusiasm, even if the display was unwitting. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake wrote, “Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.” I read that during my first semester of college in 1978. It’s a damnably enticing bit of advice. Who wouldn’t aspire to genius?
But crooked roads don’t conform, and like it or not, conformity is a more guaranteed path. Improve! Improve! In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert wrote that the secret to uncovering happiness is following in others’ footsteps. If you want to know whether or not somewhere or something will make you happy, ask someone who has been there and done that. Obey the wisdom of the crowd—even if the crowd is relatively small and odd, as crowds of writers and artists tend to be. Or choose the Blake way and talk to imaginary friends. In the world of writers, there are iconoclasts—many who have disappeared from view, but a few who still hold our attention.
But. I cautiously add this proviso. Most iconoclasts we acknowledge as geniuses found a reasonably straight path, even if they wrote about the value of the crooked way. They dug trenches that ran long and deep. Many dug at their own peril. Some—a fortunate few—found acknowledgment early in their endeavors. Others—an even smaller few—were favored by enough fortune and privilege to sally forth in strange directions without fear. Many suffered. If you choose the crooked path, prepare for the worst and delight when the better comes.
I have a hard time advising blinders, but unless you have turned distraction to your advantage, avoid it. Figure out your ditch and get digging. I have repeatedly sung the praises of distraction in this blog, but I am also keenly aware of the price I paid for following a crooked path. Maybe you can do both. Maybe work (a job!), a relationship (spouse, partner, kids), and years of peripatetic exploration will not prevent you from piling up words. If you have succeeded, I venture that your work, partner(s), and exploration support your writing. Writing requires support. Virginia Woolf was right when she proclaimed that she—and any woman—needed a room of her own (and three guineas) to mine the creative ore. This is true of either gender. Time, space, and money must be managed. Mr. Micawber put it this way: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” If a writer does not build time and space for writing into that calculation: misery.
So, you can’t do everything. But you can write, which, if done well, will connect you to more of the world and to the essential everything you require. If the path is crooked, don’t worry, and take in the view. You are laying up treasures where it counts.
The commonplace is a story about removing and re-inserting a comma, and I’ve seen it attributed to Flaubert, Wilde, and even Galway Kinnell. It’s a story that circulated in my creative writing program and served to reinforce a notion of meticulous effort. Every word, every punctuation mark, and even every margin mattered. Teachers handed back drafts of stories (I suspect the same for poems, but I was primarily a fiction writer) swathed in red. Students exchanged workshop drafts with equal editorial fervor. I recall a doodle in the margin explaining why “his eyes darted around the room” was wrong (the eyes had sprouted wings and flew).
In retrospect, how did we write anything?
Writing can be a solipsistic venture that verges on the masturbatory. This kills me because the whole point of writing is to write to someone else. We don’t tell stories to the wind—it may feel like that, but the goal is to engage and entertain. Art aspires to enrapture the reader’s heart and mind. I want to hear laughter or tearfall—for my reader to swoon into deep and long-lasting arousal. The worst critique is not “I don’t like it”; it’s “I’m bored.” Spending years with readers who explained exactly what it is they didn’t like did not help me. A simple exclamation of “Yes!” or yawning, “Nope” (politely put) would have helped. We all chase “Yes!” We should be unabashed and single-minded about that pursuit.
I may not know the right way to teach Creative Writing, but I think we got it wrong. The focus on “getting it right” bores down to a molecular level that obscures the grander design. And, too often, it misses the need to simply find a better way to get into it, stay in it, and get back to it. “It,” of course, is writing. While Twain is correct: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ‘Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning”; I would argue that unless you learn to write every day, surrounded by bugs and in every sort of weather, lightning will not strike. The friction of the daily grind creates fiction; we live by sparks. The more you grind, the greater the spark—and the chance of producing good writing.
I had acquaintances (primarily students in Binghamton’s Medieval Studies program) who insisted that creative writing could not be taught, and since it couldn’t, shouldn’t be taught in graduate school. I disagree with both assessments; however, I take the point. Some people believe that raw artistic talents are strictly innate, like eye color or height. You can’t teach someone to have green eyes or to be 6’10”. Talent—creative ability— is more fungible. No fairy arrives crib-side to bless some and cast the rest into outer darkness. If she does, gifts are no guarantee of accomplishment. It’s not enough to trust that divine inspiration combined with considerable application of ass to chair will produce work.
To the question of should, I am amazed that those scholars familiar with the scholastic tradition did not appreciate the value of the joint venture. We gather together—even when we are introverts—because, as the monks patiently scribing out holy manuscripts understood, company helps. The world with its incessant demands is not favorable to writers. Lesson one for any writer is that time is the most precious commodity in their day. Money—always money—helps, but money does not put words on the page. And, if you have the drive to be a writer, that drive can be too easily misplaced and reapplied to almost any other worthwhile task. Lesson two for any writer is that drive matters more than talent. Surrounding oneself with people who understand these two immutable truths will help keep the writer on track. One reenters the world, understanding that in both well-meaning and insidious ways, the world will seek to redirect your time and drive is vital.
A note and an aside. Perhaps you like the idea of being a writer more than the actual writing. The world celebrates the idea too, and maybe that is what attracted you in the first place. I have bad news: the reality does not match the idea. Good news! If you are driven to write, the truth, the obstinate durable daily habit of writing, is unmatched. You will begin the day either not knowing or with only the vaguest sense of where you are headed and then discover the Northwest Passage. Or Zanzibar. Or Ur. Or Eden. Writing opens the world.
So, the first things I would start with are how to manage time and how to direct the drive. Writers need to learn that the grind is not their enemy (we live for the struggle!) and that their time is precious. And then I would ask, what is your lightning? What is your spark? And start them working in that direction. And then I would point them to the world that waits.
A quick note can save the day. You’re writing, and you start worrying, “Do I have the scene right?” You get bogged down, derailed, and despondent.
In the middle of a chapter, unsure of where it was headed, I inserted this line: “Out to dinner with [the usual crowd—check and add].” That not sat on the page (it didn’t sit long). The music changed, a few paragraphs later, I got up and walked to a different room, and then the note became two pages of unstructured dialogue (see at the end). Will it all stay? I don’t know. The Gatsby-driven exchange may come out.
What I do know, none of it was there when I wrote the note “the usual crowd—check and add.” I kept writing. Advice: If you can’t find what you are looking for, drop in a note to yourself, and move on.
First, writing begets writing. Write something—anything—but write. Put down sentence after sentence. The connections will come. But start. Write holding pattern sentences as a warm-up, the same way you begin a workout with 3-5 minutes of easy exercise before grinding into the “real” work. It’s all real—and all necessary.
Second, never forget that everything can (will) be revised and rewritten. First drafts are first drafts are first drafts. Write it (even if it is temporary, even if you think you have finished), and let it go. It could stick around until the end (maybe there is something Gatsby-esque that will hold that part of the exchange), but don’t get obsessed, attached, or disgusted. Keep going.
A note to yourself can save your day. Just keep writing.
“You have a job?” Valerie was incredulous. “Did Richard find it for you?”
“No!” I answered too forcibly. While they had been my entrée, with this crowd, I felt too much in their shadow.
“The tooth brushing didn’t work out?” Jason asked.
“He told me about that. You’re as scandal, Aletheia. No wonder you never found a real job.”
“She told Jason that she was doing porn—brushing her teeth naked for old men.”
“Or a boyfriend.”
“Better than brushing naked old men’s teeth.”
“No, seriously, how did you get the job?”
“An old man hooked me up.”
“Connections.”
“Gumections.”
“Get it?”
“I get it, Wolfsheim.”
“Ha!”
“She’s pregnant.”
“No! Valerie!”
“You’re having wine?”
“Just a glass. I gave up cigarettes.”
“You mean, I gave up cigarettes.”
“Well, I’m carrying the package. It’s the least you could do.”
“I’ll have another.”
“Do you have morning sickness?”
“I have nicotine withdrawal. The poor thing will grow up with a pre-baked craving.”
“An itch it can’t scratch.”
“Have you picked out a name?”
“Jason’s great grandmother was named ‘Esmeralda.’ We can call her ‘Esme.’”
“Is it a girl?”
“Who knows, we just found out.”
“Just?” Looks shot back and forth across the table.
“Well, not just.” Jason placed his hand on Valerie’s. “Just enough. It might be a boy, but Val’s convinced.”
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