Posts

Writing recess

A couple weeks ago, I sat across from one of my professors at a coffee shop. We were discussing my novel. I had just finished the first draft of it and I was obsessing over several minor plot points because I’d shown it to a couple of writers’ groups and gotten conflicting reactions.

My professor sat patiently as I allowed my OCD* to ride roughshod over my common sense and my ability to remain calm. After about 20 minutes of listening to my nonsense, she cut me off.

“Don’t workshop it anymore. Now is the wrong time to workshop it.”

I blinked. I belong to three writers’ groups, two of which meet monthly. I’m headed off to my final residency for the Fairfield University MFA program. All of these groups require substantial writing samples from me on a regular basis.

I need to feed those beasts. And I have just the fodder for them: a 273-page, mostly unread and largely un-workshopped novel. I mean, come on. What else do I have to hand to my writers’ groups? A sheaf of angsty college poetry written in Spanglish, complete with coffee stains and cigarette burns? Darkwing Duck fan fiction from 1992? Because that’s what’s left in the bottom of my filing cabinet.

"I am the terror that flaps in the night. I am the fanfic that lurks in your past."

I communicated this to my professor, leaving out the bit about Darkwing Duck.

“Don’t bring anything. Or you know, bring something else you’re working on. But don’t workshop your novel now.”

My professor told me to fuggedaboutit , literally. She said that I needed to protect and incubate the work. She told me not to look at it, or think about it, for at least two weeks.

“I know that might be hard for you to do, but you have to try,” she said, and looked almost apologetic.

She needn’t have. It wasn’t hard. Not even a little bit. My inner procrastinator seized onto that piece of advice, and by the time I skipped out of that coffee shop, I had already pushed all thoughts, worries, or concerns about my book to the very back of my brain. I walked out of there carefree. I had permission to forget about my novel. Great! My professor had let me out for recess!

There is a problem with this. The problem is that my professor’s advice had two parts. The first was to forget, and the second went like this:

“In two weeks, sit down and read the whole thing. Try to do it in one day. Read it with a legal pad in hand, as if you were reading something written by somebody else. Then you will begin to see what changes need to be made.”

Oh dear. It’s been two weeks. And I am having a hard time resurrecting my interest, enthusiasm or desire to look at my first draft. I can’t even write other things. I just got back from a writers’ retreat, at which I wrote at least 1,500 words of another two projects. All of it was crap. All the sentences were Subject-Verb-Noun, the level of the most basic Dick and Jane reader. (Jane writes novels. Jane drinks wine. Booze doesn’t help.) I lost my mojo, and I don’t know where to look for it.

Actually, that’s a lie. I do know where to look for it.

Because as soon as my prof told me to forget about the novel, I (as I stated earlier) pushed all of my worries and fears about that novel to the very back of my brain. I opened a mental closet door, chucked in all my concerns about the novel, then shut the door quickly before anything else could come tumbling out of that closet and walked away quickly. Now I’m loathe to return.

Not only have I enjoyed a stress-free couple of weeks, but I don’t want to go rooting around back there to find my enthusiasm for my novel.

Here’s an example of some of the other items I’ve housed in that part of my brain:

• Things I learned in high school pre-algebra

• Memories of the ignoble things that I’ve done to other people

• Everything I know about the phrase “mill rate”

Good lord. I’ve put my novel behind the Gee-I-hope-I-never-have-to-think-about-this-again door. Why? I have some theories.

It could be plain old fear of failure. (Ahh! What if I work very hard and fail?)

It might be fear of success. (Ahh! What if I publish it? Then people will hold me responsible for what I wrote!)

It could be something I like to think of as Queen Midas Syndrome. (If I touched it, it’s already gold. No need to touch it further.)

It could be my short attention span. (I should work on my novel… Ooh! Something shiny!)

It could be laziness. (I’d rather play Scrabble on Facebook.)

It could be that it’s summer. (School’s out!)

It could be any of those things. Or it could be something else. But while I was typing the above list, I realized something. None of the bullet points are valid excuses for not printing out my novel (an exercise that takes my printer an hour to complete) and reading it some time this week. I mean really. I’m too arrogant to fear failure, I love smugness too much to fear success, I’ve never been diagnosed with ADD (*or OCD, for that matter), and although I’m lazy and it is summer, neither of those things has ever kept me from doing things that I hate. That leaves Queen Midas syndrome, but who cares? It doesn’t matter why I’m making excuses for myself. It matters whether or not I pay attention to the excuses.

Well then. Recess is over. I’m printing it, and I’m reading it, just as my professor suggested. But I will ignore her advice about submitting something else to my writers’ groups. They’re getting chunks of novel this month. After all, I am lazy.

 

/9 Comments/by

Freedom!

I’m back! I was absent from this blog for a good month because I was finishing my thesis ( my novel) for my MFA in creative writing.

It felt damn near impossible to spend any amount of time writing anything but my novel, or any of the associated bits and bobs that go along with it, so I haven’t been on this blog at all, but I have been thinking of it. In the last month, I came up with a million ideas for posts while driving to work, riding in the car to and from holidays at my parents’ house, walking the dog, taking showers and folding laundry. I didn’t write many of these ideas down. Most of them slipped from my mind as soon as I came home, determined to jot them down in the various notebooks that clutter every surface in our house.  I do know that the posts ranged in theme from dreams to politics to an angry, Twitter-inspired rant about grammar. (I actually half wrote that last one, but it got canned after I made a glaring grammatical error on Facebook and was called out by a former editor.)

My blog is not the only thing that I’ve neglected in the last month, as I struggled to finish scenes, make character’s motivations more believable and put chapters in order. My house was filthy. My garden, which is a major source of food for us in the summer, was nearly overtaken by a violent weed uprising, and there were many seedling casualties. My students got about half as many emails from me as they usually do, (although they probably still thought that was too much.) Our pile of laundry toppled out of the closet and began to crawl across the bedroom floor, like a soldier involved in guerrilla warfare. My dog was allowed to forget basic commands like sit, heel and don’t eat that manuscript.  My friends called me and emailed me, but alas, only 20 percent of the calls and emails have been returned.

Professors told me it would be like this. I read quotes about the insanity of non-stop fiction writing. I heard firsthand from other students in my MFA program that the last push of putting together a thesis is just like going crazy.

They were right, and I’m finally able to stop raving, wipe the froth from my mouth, take a break and write a blog post or two.

I really did question my sanity this month. Not because of the novel writing process itself, per se, but because all I’ve wanted to do with my life, ever since I was a toddler, was write a novel. And it turns out that writing a novel, in its most intense form, is hell. What kind of little kid was I to have aspirations like this? Why did it take me so long to realize that my dream was so dumb? Is it too late to decide that I want to be something else?

Truth is, intense novel writing isn’t healthy. It’s like drinking red wine. In small doses, it can be good for you. My life has been dramatically improved by the Graham Greene method of writing 500 words a day. Five hundred words a day is  a nice round number. It’s healthy. It’s reasonable. You can write 500 words a day and live a normal, productive life.

But if you get a steady diet of novel-writing, if you do nothing but work on a novel for days on end, hoo boy, no one wants to be around you. That’s less like a glass of wine a day and more like wandering around with Thunderbird in a paper bag.  You never change out of your pajamas. You start walking around in a daze, not really interacting with the people who are actually in front of you, but always preoccupied with what some imaginary people are supposed to be doing. Then you get mad at the imaginary people for not doing the things that they are supposed to be doing. You stare at a blank screen and despair. You write a page and are elated. You realize the page of writing is terrible and it’s back down into the pit of despair again. You don’t so much sleep as pass out.

I’m glad that’s over. Or at least that it’s over for now, because I’m not actually done with my novel. My  thesis was done and sent out to my mentor and reader early this week, but the novel is still not quite finished. Which means that I’m sure I’ll disappear to work on it again. For now, I’m enjoying the real world, which is a crazy place, but not as insane as the world inside my head.

/5 Comments/by

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.

/12 Comments/by

A world-class event.

This won’t be a long post, nor will it be filled with my usual embarrassing personal revelations.  All I have to say here is that not only did the student reading last night go well, but I am in awe of my colleagues from the Fairfield University MFA program.

From the new student, who got up to read his work even though he’s never set foot on Enders, to the poet who riffed on Gertrude Stein like he was performing a guitar solo, to the memoirists who put their most private moments out there for us to see – you all rock. Hard.

Also rockstars? The students who didn’t read but showed up to support us, even though they have jobs, families and lives. And the student rep who organized the whole event, and who chose not to read, even though we would have welcomed a reading from her.

It’s really cool to be a part of this group of people.

Now, before this post gets cloying, I’m going to put an end to it. Just as  my colleague Steve Otfinoski put an end to some adorable sacrificial bunnies in his reading last night.

Update: This post is titled “A world class event” because that’s how we were described by the store manager during his in-store announcement. I thought I’d written that into this post but I must have edited it out. Whoops.

/7 Comments/by

Deep breaths.

This Wednesday brings the fall semester student reading for my MFA program. I’m one of the readers, which is very cool, because I’m going to be trotting out my new novel. Still it’s terrifying, because I never know how I’m going to react when I get to that podium.

As I was explaining to a fellow student over the weekend, it all depends on the space.

I once did a reading with such a loud rushing in my ears that I couldn’t even hear my own voice. I was so relieved to get away from the podium that I left a pile of important papers on it, and only remembered them hours later. But then again, I did a reading this summer and I was fine. Granted, I had a drink in me before I got up to read, but I don’t actually think I needed the drink. That reading was in a smallish crowded room. The first, terrifying reading? That was done from the pulpit of a church.

Wednesday’s reading is being held in a Borders. And while I’ve spent many hours happily shopping in that space, I don’t know how I’ll feel reading there. I guess we will see.

/7 Comments/by