I am a writer. I can’t help it. Don’t judge.

Revision day.

Today is the day I get down to business. Today is the day I make all adjustments and revisions to my manuscript before sending it off to my faculty mentor.

Revisions = arts and crafts. Those things on the floor are orphaned scenes.

This is a task I’ve been putting off, because it horrifies me. The first draft of this novel is not finished. Revising feels like going backwards. I don’t particularly want to read what I wrote in the first chapters. I hate having to put scenes in order when not all the scenes are written yet. I really hate the idea of making cuts to the manuscript this early in the game.
But since this is for a structured academic program, that’s what I’m going to have to do. And let’s face it: my mentor is probably going to want to read a draft with as few misspellings and typos as possible, so I have no choice but to make the manuscript presentable now.

The good thing is this: By the end of the day, I’ll have a very good idea about the shape of the story I’m trying to tell, and all of my scenes will be, roughly, in order.

So let’s do this thing – no Facebook, no Twitter, no email until I am done revising. I may have my husband unplug our router.

Clean manuscript or bust.

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Things that are distracting me today.

Yesterday, I came home from brunch with a friend, printed out all 119 pages of my novel in progress, read and line-edited the whole thing, and prepared for the revisions scheduled to take place this afternoon. I researched magazines and fellowships, identified pieces to send out and cleaned my office. I made myself a to-do list for today. Not bad, huh? I figured I was on a roll.

I was wrong.

Below are just a few of the things that have distracted me from work this morning:

• My job.

• The fact that Boyfriend the stray cat has been on my porch for 45 minutes.

• The impending blizzard.

• The fact that Boyfriend the cat is sitting on my welcome mat while a blizzard impends.

• Facebook.

• Polite correspondence.

• Polite correspondence via Facebook.

• The fact that Boyfriend the cat will surely have to come indoors if he’s on my porch when the blizzard hits.

• Worries about the syllabus that will take me a half hour to complete.

• Clearly, if I keep Boyfriend the cat on the doorstep for another several hours, we’ll have no choice but to add him to this household.

• This blog.

• A mental inventory of groceries, so that we can eat during the impending blizzard.

• The sad fact that Boyfriend the cat is no longer on the porch.

 

It might be time for me to lock myself in my office, pull down the shades and turn off the Internet.

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Thoughts about poetry

On my first day of my grad school residency, about two weeks ago, one of my colleagues flagged me down.

“Why,” he asked, “do you write novels?”

This is a good question, and something I hadn’t really thought about.

Our grad school program is divided into three sections, or genres: Fiction, Non-fiction and Poetry. I think that sometimes we tend to get hung up on these labels. At our cores, we are all writers, and many of us – even if we don’t officially study cross-genre within our program – do write in other genres. You have only to attend a student reading to see fiction writers reading essays and non-fiction people reading poetry. I have yet to see a poet read fiction, but it’s sure to happen. We are all creative writers, and it would be silly to expect us to stick to one form.

So when my friend asked why I was writing fiction, and the novel in particular, I had to take a minute. My response was this: I write novels because I enjoy reading them, and because that’s what I read, I believe that the novel is the highest form the written word can take.

After a week and a half, I’m not quite satisfied with that answer.

My first love was poetry. I remember writing a poem at the age of seven. My mother tells me I was writing poetry earlier. I bought books of poetry in the fourth grade. I played with rhyme and meter all through high school and college. I’m a card-carrying member of the I-wrote-moody-poetry-in-high-school club. I was also a poetry slam groupie in high school. I fell deeply and indecently in love with Taylor Mali. (I got over that.) I wrote a collection of angsty poems in college. My first creative publication, in the now-defunct Citizen Culture Magazine, was a poem. I framed it. It hangs above my desk. Then, somehow, poetry took a backseat to fiction.

I don’t know why. I wrote fiction and poetry at the same time through high school in college. Like a kid who starts out left-handed, learns to use his right hand, becomes ambidextrous as a teenager and then grows into a right-handed adult, I switched to fiction. No reason. It just happened.

Except now, after the last residency, I’m considering a return to poetry. I took two poetry seminars, and went to a poetry graduate reading and it strikes me that I’m missing out on something I enjoy. I have no idea what the vocabulary of poetry is – I couldn’t identify a sonnet, for example. And I’m intimidated by the distilled emotion presented in poetry. I think I will have a go at it anyhow. I’m not planning to forsake fiction. It is possible that the novel is, for me, the highest form the written word can take. But that doesn’t mean that I have to neglect poetry.

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The MFA frenzy.

I’ve been back for a few days from my grad school residency on Enders Island, and I’m ready to blog again.

The gardens at Enders when it’s not extremely cold.

Before you all read this, I have to warn you: I have the MFA frenzy. It happens whenever I return from my creative writing MFA residency in Mystic, Conn. and it continues for about a month. During this time, I write like I’ve been taking uppers, talk incessantly about story arcs, character flaws,  scene vs summary, you get the idea. I apologize in advance.

For those who don’t know, let me explain where I’ve been. Enders Island, a religious retreat in Mystic, Conn.,  is the location for the Fairfield University Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing residency. (If you click on the link, I’m in the picture at the top of the page. You can just barely see my pink hat in the back row.) I’ve lived on Enders for 10 days every six months for the past two years. My cohort and I take all our classes there; we workshop our writing and take seminars and study with established authors. Every year when I come back home after my residency, someone always asks me if I’m sorry to leave the island.

My answer to that is no. It’s not easy to spend 10 days at a workshop with lots of other writers. Ask Chuck Palahniuk.

But, and this is a big but, I really need the residencies in order to be productive. And honestly, I’m not looking forward to graduating, because that means I’ll no longer have the creative kick in the pants that the residency provides.

Allow me to explain. In some ways, the MFA residency is run on the same principle as a boot camp. By the end of 10 days, I am physically ground down. I haven’t slept, I haven’t eaten that much, and I’ve been living in such close quarters with others that my personal space is all out of whack. I almost always leave the island with an ailment or a minor injury.  I  spend the final two days of every residency in a strange creative fog. I can’t pay attention to normal things, like conversation, or lunch, or tying my shoes, but a different part of my brain kicks in. I find myself thinking in poetry, and everything becomes a writing exercise. People become studies for character development. I start using active verbs, like “scrub” and “dive,” in small talk.  Nothing matters, by the end, except the work.

Once I get home and get some sleep, the writing begins, and does not stop for months. I’m not sure how I’m going to sustain that level of inspiration without the residency.

Another thing that’s amazing about the residency is that when I come home, I am always convinced that I will publish my novel. I’m utterly confident that my novel will be published, optioned, and translated, and that I will be able to eke out at least a modest living on my words. I write short fiction and poems and I send them out to literary magazines. They ignore me and reject me, and I don’t even care, because I am positive that someone will accept my work. It is bizarre. To hear me talk, when I come back from residency, you would think that I had already published a novel.

And, you know, I think that’s the way to be. Writing a novel (and getting it published) is my dream. If I were to allow myself to be discouraged by the cold hard facts of publishing, I wouldn’t even try to finish the manuscript. I certainly wouldn’t involve colleagues, professors, graduate programs and writing groups in a novel that I thought might fail. I wouldn’t want to disappoint the people I respect.  I wouldn’t want to waste their time. And at this point, I’ve involved at least 15 other people in my novel by asking them to workshop it, listen to it or talk with me about it.

So now there’s no room for failure. Especially now, because in the next few months I have to finish my novel in order to graduate.

 

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Not bad for my first full year of blogging.

I’m going to be honest: WordPress pretty much wrote this blog post for me. I’m currently at my grad school residency, a twice-a-year, 10-day program for creative writing on an island with limited Internet access, so I haven’t really been checking my blog. I didn’t count on blogging at all while here, but then WordPress emailed me this summary of my 2010 activity at The Garrett and I had to share, because I’m amazed at what people want to read.

Apparently, people want to read about my uterus. And to think, that was the post I almost didn’t share.

Bizarre, right? It has been weird to watch the hits come in this year. People search for the weirdest things. I get a lot of hits on the post I did about Harry Willson Watrous’s painting, The Drop Sinister. I get clusters of hits on that one,  and I suspect that those hits are the results of field trips to the Portland Museum of Art. It’s especially strange to be notified when someone I don’t know finds my site through a Google search for TC Boyle, or Denise Mina, and ends up reading one of the craft essays I wrote for this grad program.

I’m happy when people want to read anything I’ve written, however, so I’m grateful for all my hits in 2010. Thanks to all the readers; I will blog more in 2011.

Below is WordPress’s information about my blog.

Read more

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Great minds, average minds, small minds and robots.

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http://twitter.com/#!/AhmadBakhiet/statuses/7504393779810304

The quote in the above tweet* (which, according to Wikiquote, may not have been uttered by Eleanor Roosevelt) has been bothering me since I heard it 15 years ago. Because as much as I love a good discussion about ideas, I’ve also done my fair share of gossip and I spent my career as a journalist talking and writing about events and people.

Now that I’m actively studying fiction, I find that people and and events are, in many cases, far more important than ideas. Or at least, interesting characters and dynamic events provide a way of introducing an idea to a reader. Reading pages and pages of an author proselytizing about lofty ideas or ideals is the way to turn me off as a reader. But when an idea is lived out by a compelling character I’m much more willing to consider that idea.

Recently my husband and I had a conversation about this quote. Because I’m too lazy to recount the conversation in words, and because I just discovered Xtranormal, I will post it in video form.**

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JXHLHZTspo]

*I don’t actually know the Twitterer at the top of the page. His tweet came up when I Googled the quote, so I decided to include it.

** I realize some of the dialogue doesn’t make sense. Sorry about that. Most of our conversations are like this.

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Trees, snow, and my belated list of thanks.

Oh, you crazy tannenbaum.

There’s nothing quite like the smell of a Christmas tree. Especially right after you’ve brought it into the house and right before your nose gets used to it and you cease to consciously smell it. The fresh-Christmas-tree scent is one of the few scents I wish I could get my nose to smell for the whole season, but I know that by tomorrow I will have to stick my face directly into the branches to smell the tree. In a week, I will be crushing needles to smell it.  I can’t be the only one who’s experienced this.  In fact this is probably why Yankee Candle is able to do such an appalling trade in balsam-scented candles.

Right now however, the tree is two days old, and smells just like a little piece of the forest in our newly cleaned living room. And the best kind of snow is falling outside: The kind that looks pretty, collects on the ground, but does not make the roads treacherous.

And because I’m grateful for all these things, I thought I’d write the blog I failed to write a few weeks ago. Inspired by a few other people’s Thanksgiving posts, I had meant to make a list of five little things for which I’m grateful. Not the big things (wonderful husband, awesome parents, brother and future sister-in-law, roof over my head and job that I love) but five little things that make me happy every day. Things that seem so good that they might be revoked by the government. Read more

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Writing at the library.

In a bid to get more work done, I’m moving my morning/early afternoon writing to the library. It’s not my ideal writing spot, but it works, because unlike my house, I don’t have to clean the library, answer the door, the phone or anything else.

I’ve picked the prettiest library in the area, the one with the fireplace and a limited collection. It brings back memories. My mother spent years working in a library and when I was a kid my brother and I used to take the school bus to the Oakville branch library, where she was employed. We did our homework there, did chores around the library and helped her and the two librarians close up. When it was warm, we could walk home.

Being at the library now is a strange flashback. I had forgotten about the “regulars” who collect at local libraries:  Mothers with their story-hour children, retirees, middle school kids who show up to hang out, and people who don’t have anywhere else to go. I remember them all and now I’m seeing them all again. Very little has changed. There are still the people who think of the librarians as their personal servants. There are still those who stand and gossip with the librarians. There are people who need to talk to the librarians because they simply don’t have anyone else to talk to. I know these people. I know all about these regulars –  as a child I hid behind the magazine racks and stared at them. I used to help my mother reshelve their books, and when I played too loudly in the library basement after my homework was done, my mother would shush me so that they they could read in peace.

It’s so strange that now I’m one of them.

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Writer’s block and the cat.

I haven’t written anything in the last week. Nothing. And it’s not like I haven’t tried. It’s just that everything I’ve tried to type has turned into an obituary for my cat, Copy, who was put to sleep last Tuesday evening. So – although I can understand how you all might not want to read a eulogy for my cat – I’m writing this now, in the hopes that once I’ve posted it, I can get back to work on my novel.

Writing without Copy might be extra difficult because she liked to spend time with me when I was writing. But probably it’s just been hard to write because I’ve been preoccupied with losing such a big part of my home life. I adopted Copy when I was just six months out of college. She was there through my first 10 years of real, honest-to-goodness adulthood: new jobs, new apartments, new boyfriends. Through shack-ups, break-ups, break-downs, break-ins – she was there for everything. Often, she was more of a roommate than a pet. She woke me up in the morning, hung out with me when I got dressed for work, met me at the door when I came home, sat on my lap when I wrote and always knew when I had a migraine.

It was a very satisfying friendship and I knew it couldn’t last forever, but it was a shock when the vet told me that Copy would have to be put to sleep.

Suffice to say, very little last week went as planned. We canceled our Thanksgiving trip to Texas because the cat – before we knew she would have to be put down – was too sick to stay in a kennel. And then there were several free days when I could have spent hours writing, but was unable to. Every blog post, every short story, every section of my novel I’ve tried to work on, has drifted toward the subject of cats in general and my cat specifically. So I decided to not write at all.

It’s nearly been a week now, and I have to start writing again. I’m hoping that this blog will get the ball rolling again. I think it might be working. I have an idea for a short story already, and there aren’t any cats in it.

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Big damn pet peeve: “But you’re a writer!”

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If you’re friends with someone who works in IT, or anyone who is really good with computers you’ve probably seen the “No, I will not fix your computer” tee shirt. I submit that there should be a similar tee shirt for writers. I don’t know how exactly I’d word it, but the gist would be the same.

I know what some of you are thinking: “You don’t know which words you’re going to put on your snarky tee-shirts for writers? But you’re a writer. You’re comfortable putting words together!”

This is a blog post about that. And by “that,” I mean the phrase “but you’re a writer.” Read more

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