The Writing Life

Something Happened on the Way to Camp NaNoWriMo

In early December, I had a post-NaNo Facebook conversation. I wrote this in passing:

 Honestly, I’m a little surprised more people didn’t win. Over 300,000 participants, and only about 41,000 winners.

I had hit my 50,000 with a day or two to spare. My 50,000 was “pure”—I hadn’t included any of the writing I did for Walking Ledges, nor for any of my games, nor any of my brainstorming. I certainly didn’t include the conference paper that ate my first weekend of writing. I was proud of myself and excited by the proto-novel that I would only later start calling Ghosts of the Old City.

In attempting to repeat the 50,000 word feat in April, I have a much better understanding of how those other 260,000 people came up short of the NaNo benchmark. In November, I was working…but not full time. I had an hour or two a few mornings each week to write. I had the energy to go to weekday write-ins and saw enough of my kids to spend my Saturdays away from them sans guilt.

April has been different. I’ve been teaching middle school five days a week. Getting up at 5:30 would be great for writing if I didn’t have to get myself ready and help make sure everybody’s ready to be out the door around seven. After a full day of work, cooking dinner is just…more work. Dishes still have to get done. Clicking through flash games starts to seem a lot easier than trying to muster more words. I spent a Saturday fixing my washing machine, and parts of others doing non-writing socializing.

In short, life happens.

Despite good intentions, I had not shaped an outline before April first. In November I’d hit the wordcount goal, but even then I wrote: “My 50,000 are from all over the probable novel, and do not come close to completing it.” I had scenes I liked without any idea how they went together. I was able to string together a convincing first six chapters from what I’d written. I had part of the final confrontation written. Everything that came between was soup. I had killed off a character; I tried different spots for his death. I decided against killing off that character because his death wouldn’t mean much unless I brought him further out of the background. I had a secondary bad guy that I removed because he was a distraction. Then I brought him back. You get the picture.

That was the first week. The second was the broken washing machine and health insurance shenanigans. It wasn’t until the third week that I began writing in earnest. That was when I discovered something: filling in gaps isn’t nearly as much fun as writing in the leaps and bounds that produce them. When I got stuck in November, I could just jump to a new scene. I could also write “scene seeds”—brief bits of prose (200 words or so) that suggested something cool was happening or about to happen. I was constantly making something out of nothing. I wasn’t worrying about architecture or how well my story would hold together. In fact, I didn’t really figure out what my central conflict was until a lunch break in mid-November, when I was already twelve or thirteen thousand words in.

Now that I actually have an architecture, getting stuck has most often meant skipping over to some other spot where I’m stuck. I think most of the passages are in their proper places, but all the existing material I had in the middle has required some rewriting. No, Emma wouldn’t ask that question because she was there the night before when Maedoc explained it to the chief inspector…wait—Bogul hasn’t attacked Zahra yet, she can’t be frightened…nobody knows that the Owls are actually…. You get the picture. There have been many things to fix, and I can’t just write what seems cool at the moment.

The story makes more sense now, but the re-writing runs counter to the NaNo ethos of “words first.” Even with Camp NaNo’s flexible goals, I still cringe at the way I’m falling behind my on my bar graph. I got much closer to par over the weekend (thanks in part to the write-in I threw together), although some of the words I’m counting aren’t entirely fresh. Fortunately, my real goal doesn’t depend on word counts. I started the month aiming for a top-to-bottom draft. To get there, I think I’ll need to come up with about 10,000 words in the next 60 or so hours. Doable.

Camp is smaller. There’s much less local activity (another thing that has retarded my bar graph’s progress). The month ends in the middle of the week, so there won’t be the all-nighting that rounded out many NaNoers’ November. I have my virtual cabin and the Austin NaNo Facebook group to lean on for support, though. I haven’t given up on “winning.” And even if I don’t hit my wordcount or complete every missing scene in Ghosts of the Old City, I’m still writing. I will have written.

What more could I ask?

Mood, Music

I don’t really understand why the question is so common, but writers are repeatedly asked what (if any) music they listen to while writing. It comes up in the #NaNoWriMo Twitter conversations. It comes up in blog posts (like this one yesterday from Austin local and WordPress/NaNo stalwart Jackie Dana), in author interviews, and almost any occasion a writer fields questions.

Generally, I’m in the “sometimes listen to music before writing, but rarely while writing” camp. I spent most of my adult life studying music, and even the wallpaper Baroque and early classical performances that so many people use as writing or study music can distract me. (Or just annoy me. There’s a reason I specialized in 20th-century avant-garde music.) There are exceptions, though. When working on a scene from Ghosts of the Old City that I’ve since discarded, I put on György Ligeti’s Atmospheres. It’s dissonant atonal stuff, heavy on strings and built around texture. It was the right music for the scene in question.

And that’s my cue to pivot. I’ve spent the first part of Camp NaNoWriMo cleaning up my outline. (I’ve historically been a pantser, but the middle chunk of Ghosts was a horrible soup until I set aside the time to give it structure.) I was surprised to find myself mentally scoring the scenes to help pin down their content. My thoughts about the scenes’ moods were more musical than verbal.

I started grad school as a composer. I started as a composer because I dug music. And largely, I dug non-pop music because of film scores. I spent a lot of my undergraduate years composing pieces with explicit or implicit narratives. I also spent a lot of time thinking about music and text and how they worked differently for telling stories.

The upshot of this is that my ideas of textual structure are thoroughly tangled with my ideas of musical structure. When I think about pacing, I imagine a conductor’s gestures. I think about conflict in terms of crescendoes and cadences and shifts in orchestration. Back when I composed long pieces, I’d get one or two pieces of 11″x17″ paper and sketch out the shape of the piece. Sometimes I’d do that with a carefully-measured timeline across the top of the pages, others I’d just be roughing it out—“trumpet solo here,” “percussion cacophony,” “pianissimo strings…”. I’d draw shapes and small pictures on the page. I don’t do that with my stories, but my longhand outlines sometimes get close as visualization exercises.

Music plays out in time. In a live performance, at least, you can’t flip back to check if the theme you’re hearing now is related to the one you heard two minutes in. (You can do it with recordings, but unless you’re a music student, I think it’s pretty rare.) It’s the composer’s and performer’s job to make those connections clear, to hold the listener’s attention. You get one shot at structure, start to finish. You can use inherited forms, many of which are based on returning material and/or harmonic progressions, or you can make your own structure. Either way, the structure is experienced linearly.

Books don’t have that limitation. You can read them by flipping around. You can read the end first. You can go back and remind yourself what happened in the first chapter. Despite that difference in the medium, structure in fiction works an awful lot like musical structure. Even if you break up your plot, reveal it in out of sequence bits and pieces, it has to be compelling as it unfolds for the reader. You have to bring them with you through the story. The crescendoes have to get them excited. If you change keys for the bridge, you’d better have a good reason (and probably ought to consider bringing some of the bridge material back to prove its relevance).

A novel isn’t a symphony. The concepts and themes to balance are different. The techniques are different. For me, though, it seems more and more like the principles are the same. Whether you’re writing a story or a string quartet, you’re giving shape to chaos. You’re making the inchoate intelligible. Words or notes, you’re paving a path for your audience.

Long story short, there’s a lot of music involved with my writing even when my speakers aren’t making a sound.

NaNoWriMo, Camp Style

November was National Novel Writing Month. I was a bit skeptical going in, as I wrote before the month began. I also “won” NaNo—I got my 50,000 words despite presenting at a conference and missing the first weekend. I met some fun people in the Austin area. As the month wound to a close, we were abuzz with the desire to start writing groups and workshop the manuscripts we’d piled up (some more neatly than others). It faded relatively quickly amidst the clamor of the holidays and what passes for winter here in Texas.

Earlier this month, the Austin NaNo Facebook group slowly rumbled back to life. Nanowrimo.org also sponsors “Camp NaNoWriMo,” a more open-ended pair of virtual camps in April and June. (This is exactly what I needed back when my Novembers were full of academics, incidentally.) A good chunk of the Austinite NaNo crowd was signing up. Some of us are still working on our NaNo projects: editing, adding the missing bits, or otherwise trying to turn our word piles into entities with literary architecture.

I signed up. I want to finish.

When I committed to the “proper” NaNoWriMo, post-relocation life was still unsettled. It had been about three months since the move. My partner was only just starting a new job. I was still applying for writing jobs willy-nilly and substitute teaching on occasion, but with my partner working, I went back to being the stay-at-home parent. (Substitute teaching did not pay enough to justify paying for daycare for our pre-K daughter.) That’s changed somewhat. My sister-in-law watches the kids after school when I’m working…and I’m working a steady 40 hours each week at my long-term substitute gig for most of April. This weekend I even had to take some time to do grading and a dash of course prep. I will have considerably less energy and rather less time to throw at my novel than I did in November.

That’s really why I’m doing it—because I don’t have the time. I want a draft. Correction: I want a finished manuscript. I can’t have that without a draft. I can’t complete a draft without doing the writing. NaNo’s a good incentive for that: I take lizard-brain pleasure in watching a bar graph (or in this case, a bullseye graphic) improve. I also get something out of the mild competitiveness of the wordcount race. These nudges will, I hope, be enough to help me cram writing back into my day.

Oh, there’s writing in my day. Blog posts. Still a bit of online game writing (though I’ve dialed that back). I’ve been pecking at my novel intermittently. What has been lacking is sustained pressure. I wrote last week that I’m afraid of quitting my novel, that it would be easy to leave it where it’s at. That’s true. The fear of quitting is also a much more familiar one: the fear of failure. I’m okay with being a “failed” academic, mostly because I happily slap those quotes on it. Being a failed novelist wouldn’t come with the scare quotes. I am in this for serious.

 Not everybody who does NaNo is. I think that’s where many of the anti-NaNoWriMo posts miss the point. Many people do this for fun, and only for fun. They do it because they like hanging out with other writers, virtually or physically. They do it because they enjoy the process. If they crash and burn in November, it’s no skin off their nose. If they write 70,000 words that nobody else will ever read, that’s okay with them. We do NaNo because we love to write.

This seems to be even truer of Camp NaNoWriMo. Its format is open-ended, allowing users to set their targets and describe their projects any way they want. In my virtual cabin, I’ve got two people who are enthusiastically writing fanfic (Harry Potter and Dr. Who, if you’re keeping track). Some people are writing histories. Others are writing poetry. Camp NaNo is an excuse to revisit November’s camaraderie for a while, to borrow a bit of its structure and manic energy without being swamped by it. Or it’s a chance to dip a toe in those waters before diving in in the autumn. The key is this: we bring in the goals we want.

To my fellow campers and fellow writers: best of luck achieving them.

Quitting Not Quitting

“Winners never quit and quitters never win.” —Vince Lombardi

This gentleman has little nice to say about quitters.

This gentleman had nothing nice to say about quitters.

A caveat: What follows is a messier intersection of thoughts on writing and thoughts on postac than I usually feature here. Since making a tacit commitment to be more upfront with my thoughts on #postac a few weeks ago, my posts have generally stuck with writing or postac. This one is both. It might be a miraculous chocolate plus peanut butter moment. It might just be as opaque as the title.

Technically, I didn’t quit. Sometimes I remind myself of that as a bit of self-boosterism: I finished my damn doctorate. I earned that title. Sometimes it’s self-castigation: why didn’t I just quit when I finished my coursework and school stopped being fun? I’d be several years farther down the road to whatever “what’s next” I’m currently fumbling toward. But I didn’t quit. I finished.

I’ve been a quitter twice. In high school, I quit the track team for a few weeks my junior year of high school. Abruptly. I was freaking out about my solo for district solo and ensemble and generally being an overstressed, depressed teenager. (I went back before the season was done after profuse apologies to the coaches.) The second time was a similar whirlpool of overcommitment and depression, and came my freshman year of college. After a ridiculously easy fall semester, spring semester turned out to be, well, college. I was still trying to treat it like high school, where I’d done everything. By February, I had simply run out of time and energy. I quit the school weekly and scaled back my participation in several of the organizations I was part of. That time, I didn’t go back. I had been doing too much. Quitting was the right call.

Even a year out from my decision, I’m not sure whether my departure from the Academy counts as quitting. In some ways, it feels like I just never properly started. I spent one year seriously pursuing the job market. When the time came to fish or cut bait with the secondary market in the spring, I cut bait. That doesn’t negate the adjunct jobs I had while ABD, but the decision to leave is still one I’ll only ever be 95% sure about. Maybe the secondary market would have been the kind of stepping stone it’s marketed as…but that’s a skinny maybe.

I’m pretty sure imaginary Vince Lombardi would call it quitting. It was my dream or a close facsimile thereof, and I stopped chasing it. I stopped chasing it because I woke up, but quitting for a good reason is still quitting.

Quitting has been on my mind because I’m a little terrified of doing it again. I have two thirds of a novel written. I’m a few pieces of plot from being able to write the rest of it. This is an easy place to quit, a point where rationalizations come quickly. I hit a similar point with my dissertation. I hit it with just about every academic paper I ever wrote: “I know how it goes. I could finish it if I want to.”

That “if” works better as the German “wenn,” which has a bit of “if” and a bit of “whenever.” I could finish whenever I wanted to, you know, if I wanted to, and if I had the time. It would be automatic. With academic papers, I resented having to actually write out the remaining parts once I had figured out the line of the argument and structure of the paper. With my dissertation, I felt like most of the work had been done and the only reason there was still stuff left to do was that I’d picked a project that was too big. In both cases, the problem is that the exciting bit is done. What’s left is mostly work. I’d have the feeling that I had proven to myself that I could do what I set out to do and the rest was just window dressing. Window dressing is trivial. Something you take care of “whenever.” If you want to. Like washing the last few dishes.

And this “whenever” is where I am at with my novel, only I have not been able to make the time lately. Part of that is the stickiness of the last two plot bits. More relates to a string of work and family obligations. I’m working five days a week. With responsibility for lesson plans and assessments, I use my planning/conference period for…work. There was a wedding. There was the Baha’i month of fasting. The “whenever” has seemed much more like “if.”

Combine that with the pseudo-accomplishment of being “mostly” done, and quitting starts to look easy. A novel isn’t like an academic paper, either. I don’t get to just hand it off and stop thinking about it. It will need the unflinching eye of an editor. It will need revision. It will need, eventually, publishing and promotion. No matter how mostly done I am, that is still work, and work fraught with chances for rejection. I like my draft a lot. There are problems with it, some of which I recognize. There will be others that I don’t and will happily fix. There will be still others, though, that are in the troublesome category of things-I-think-are-cool-and-how-could-you-possibly-call-that-a-problem.

When I hit this point with my dissertation, I had already turned the corner from “make it awesome” to “get the committee to sign.” (That was a kind of quitting in itself, but I haven’t met many PhDs who haven’t made that capitulation at some point late in the dissertating process.) I also had a quirk of scheduling that gave me the two months before my defense “off,” which allowed me to focus on loose ends.

My hope is that I don’t get similar time off this go-round. There’s no substitute teaching work in the summer, but I expect to have at least a medium-term plan in operation by then. I’d rather have income than open-ended time to write. (Never mind that I’d rather have income from writing, and never mind that the summer will involve full time parenting if I’m not working.) What I am working on instead is carving out the time around my other obligations, trying to push Ghosts of the Old City toward completion.

Quitting would be easy. If nothing else, though, graduate school proved that I’m bad at quitting…or maybe just bad at easy.

Larry Brooks: Story Engineering

“You’re too cocky.”

Cocky? I said, “Cocky?”

“Yeah. You have all these theories, and that’s fine, and you’re probably right more than you’re wrong. But once you’ve answered something, you stop looking.”

“I don’t understand.”

He sighed. “All right, you know how we say you have to keep developing as an artist? …If you’re going to be a theorist as well, you have to keep developing that way, too. You can’t be content with easy answers any more than you can be content with paintings that are easy to do. Does that make sense?”

I said, “I guess so. But, shit, man. Where am I wrong?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I’m not trying to be a theorist. Besides, I agree with all your theories.”

—Steven Brust, The Sun, The Moon, and the Stars

That’s a long quote, but it’s as close as I can get to a thumbnail of my review of Larry Brooks’ Story Engineering. The man is sold on his theories, which makes him occasionally insufferable no matter how much sympathy I have for his titular concept. Story Engineering is a good place to start if you’re a writer lost in the process of building your cool ideas (whether concepts, characters, or scenes) into a complete novel. Once you get past the bluster, Brooks’ advice is surprisingly practical.

The bluster, though…ye gods. Unless you’re a glutton for punishment, skip the first three chapters. They are 40% extended analogies meant to sell you on the necessity of story engineering. The rest is mostly beating up on Brooks’ favorite target: the strawman pantser. (If you’re not familiar with the term, writers often separate themselves into two camps: plotters and pantsers. The plotters plan every detail of their stories before they begin writing. The pantsers just sit down and write whatever comes.) Brooks repeatedly rails against an imaginary, stereotypical pantser who refuses to outline, refuses to plan, refuses to think beyond the current location of their cursor. This straw man has an ingrained resistance to anything that might make their story “mechanical,” especially any idea that story structures and elements might build on recognizable formulae.

Given that Brooks’ Story Engineering is more or less a formula for producing a novel, one can see how his straw man pantser might not buy in. Brooks would immediately retort that Story Engineering is more about principles than formulae, and he’d be right. That doesn’t stop him from tearing down this straw pantser at every turn.

I get it, though. This book grew out of presentations he’s given and work he’s done with consulting clients. When you’re in a room full of people, you have to punch up your rhetoric. (This is why, incidentally, many academic papers fall flat in a conference setting. Their authors don’t adjust their language for spoken delivery.) When you’re trying to help somebody who refuses to see the flaws in their work, you push and plead and coax and hope they will give. That, I think, is what pushes Brooks to oversell his argument so often. He goes so far as to declare that anybody who successfully sells a story is doing things his way, even if they don’t realize it.

So…what is Brooks’ way? In Story Engineering, Brooks outlines six core competencies. Two of these we usually chalk up to talent, though they’re also a product of long practice: scene execution and writing voice. The other four (the ones he starts with) are concept, character, theme, and story structure. He’s at his best in these sections, approaching writing as a craft rather than as his series of pre- and proscriptions about planning. There is nothing revolutionary in his concepts. Brooks explains them clearly (between bouts of pantser-baiting) and, even better, provides series of questions to help writers develop their own ideas.

Story structure gets the most attention. Although, again, there’s nothing revolutionary here, Brooks draws on lessons from screenwriting and studies of bestsellers (particularly The DaVinci Code) to lucidly explain the foundational elements and shape of a plot. If you’re familiar with Campbell’s Hero’s Journey or similar explanations of story archetypes, there is nothing here to shock you. Brooks, though, approaches the form from a practical standpoint. He doesn’t just tell you which moment comes when, but offers suggestions on how to write those moments. Brooks’ pragmatism is refreshing.

If your collection of writing books is heavy on the “just sit down and write your way forward,” Story Engineering may be a useful counterbalance. If you’ve already immersed yourself in explanations of story structure and are a habitual planner, there might not be as much here for you. As a writer closer to the pantser end of the spectrum, I found much to use in Story Engineering…when I wasn’t grimacing at Brooks’ extended metaphors and posturing.

Larry Brooks’  Storyfix.com offers regular advice about writing and publishing novels. (It is also the virtual storefront for his writing consultancy.) Story Engineering (ISBN 978-1582979984) is available in print and digital editions from Amazon.

Tools of the Trade

Alas that we don’t have the means to pull stories directly from our head onto a published page (web or otherwise). We are stuck with some combination of time, tools, and work to get our creations to the world. Here are a few of the ones I’m working with these days.

Pen/cil and Paper

I do almost all of my writing at the keyboard (and mostly in Scrivener). I do a lot of my planning and problem solving longhand, though. Pencil and paper free us from word-processing’s tyranny of left-to-right and top-to-bottom. It’s easy to scrawl arrows and asides and orient the text however you please. You can leave space and go back to it without relying on keys or clicks.

Vitally, it also takes you several steps away from the kind of distractions that can be endemic to working on a computer. You can’t flip a legal pad over to Facebook “just for a second.” Pencils don’t come with solitaire or e-mail or flash games. For me, pencil and paper has the added advantage that I can take it to work to use in planning periods or lunch breaks. (Several of the schools I sub in are places One Doesn’t Take Valuables.)

Don’t underestimate pen and paper as a way to get around writer’s block, either. Sometimes changing medium cracks things loose. There are sections of most everything I’ve written in the last ten years that I drafted longhand.

I have some nice Moleskine notebooks, but I also like plain yellow legal pads (the legal size). I have a soft spot for fountain pens, and use them whenever I haven’t run them out of ink.

Scrivener
I remember a time before Scrivener, but I try not to think about it too much. I did my master’s thesis in a mess of MSWord documents. It was long enough ago that the vast majority of my sources were hard copy. (That I was writing about the relatively obscure Harry Partch and using mostly archival material  contributed to that.)

I adopted Scrivener late in the first year of my doctoral program. It became my go-to writing platform almost immediately. On the academic side, Scrivener made it easy to organize my materials for a class. I could keep all my articles in there, all of my writing assignments, as well as  my notes and brainstorming. I could look at .pdfs without having to hop over to Adobe Reader. Even better, I could split screen the .pdf and my notes on it, or my brainstorming and my draft. I could go full-screen when I needed to.

And my Scrivener folder for my dissertation…it’s about a gigabyte all by itself. It includes drafts of chapters, notes on articles, notes from books, notes from the very few meetings I had with my advisor, brainstorming files sorted by month (and year), a few pieces of me cursing myself into action… It was great. Scrivener, I mean. Not my dissertation (which was merely pretty good). It works just as well for long-form fiction and screenwriting projects.

That ability to manage many separate chunks of text and research is Scrivener’s major strength. You can tag files with things like character names or locations, link documents, and easily create hierarchies. It’s also worth noting that Scrivener will export in a variety of ebook formats as well as paperback-sized .pdfs. Importantly, though, Scrivener is not a document layout program. To do detailed formatting on a project, you’ll have to haul your text over to a different platform. Even so, Scrivener is my favorite piece of software. At one point, I stayed with Macintosh simply because a PC version of Scrivener didn’t exist. (It does now.)

Literature and Latte offers a free trial version of Scrivener.

Aeon Timeline
I’ve only just started using Aeon, and haven’t figured out how thoroughly I’ll integrate it. It’s an interesting tool, albeit a specialized one. Aeon is timeline software. It does timelines and only timelines. That sells the software short, though, because you can use Aeon to produce timelines with incredible depth.

At the macro level, Aeon allows the creation of custom calendars, especially useful for sci-fi and fantasy writers. You can establish multiple ages (comparable to our B.C./C.E.). You can determine the number of months in a year, days in a month, and hours in a day. If you need a world to have 27 hour days in months that alternate between 93 days and 11 days, you can do that. You can even incorporate leap years. Once you have a calendar built (or pick the default real world calendar) you can start building your history. Aeon’s timelines make great references if your work involves dynasties and lineages and Stuff that Necessitates Appendices.

At the micro level, Aeon’s timelines are pretty swell, too. One of the samples they provide with the software is a timeline of Murder on the Orient Express. It tracks all of the characters, their alibis, their conversations, and what they were actually doing. You can plot events to the minute. For me, this is particularly useful in keeping track of what my antagonists (who are often “off camera”) are up to. Although we’re fond of moving characters at the speed of plot, Aeon helps make sure we keep it in the realm of plausibility and aren’t putting characters in two spots simultaneously.

Aeon allows you to organize events by “arc” and by character, as well as noting which characters are participants or observers in a given event. I haven’t gotten the hang of it yet, but Aeon can synchronize with Scrivener (the Mac version), creating events for each of your documents. I tend to include multiple scenes in each chapter, so that’s not quite as useful for me, but it could be handy for folks who organize their Scrivener projects by the scene.

Scribblecode offers a free trial version of Aeon Timeline. The developer maintains an active and responsive forum, too.

Shoes
Being stuck is no fun. For me, one of the best ways to get unstuck is to take a walk. It does not have to be long. It does not have to be fast. Changing scenery helps. When I am deep into a project and the logistics permit it, I like to work for a block of time (usually 25 or 40 minutes), then take a ten-minute walk. Taking a walk can be an opportunity to work problems out in your head without the pressure of putting words on the page or screen. It’s not literally shaking things loose, but sometimes it has felt that way for me. It’s not always about figuring things out, though. Sometimes a walk clears your head so you can come back to the work with a fresh perspective…or just renewed enthusiasm. If outside isn’t an option, getting up and stretching is a worthy substitute.

Another useful benefit of movement breaks? They’re much less likely than “browser breaks” to pull you away from your work longer than you planned.

So, readers, what about you? What are your favorite tools? Anybody out there using typewriters? Favorite pens or notebooks?

The Blank Page

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
—Arthur O’Shaughnessy, “Ode”

This morning was rough. One of my responsibilities as pater familias is to pull everybody out of bed in the morning. (I could never have imagined this as a kid. I was terrible at getting out of bed until I left home.) Nobody wanted to be awake this morning. Or get dressed. Or get out the door to the bus. While I was trying to coax my kids towards readiness for the school bus, I was also making their lunches and trading text messages with my sister-in-law. She watches the kids when I work, but couldn’t today because her son is sick. I had to cancel a job while shoving toast at my son and suppressing a wince at how tight my daughter’s shoes have gotten. By 7:15 I was grumbling about how bad the day was.

Then…then I got everybody out the door and some caffeine in my system and managed to wrangle my thinking around to “I get to write today. I have a blank page.” My days aren’t blank pages. Very few get that luxury. When I sit down to write, though, I get a blank page. I still think of them as pages even though I’ve done so much of my writing for so very long on a screen. It probably has something to do with composing, where I have always worked in hard copy first. It might also have something to do with poetry which, again, I just can’t manage to make without a pencil in my hand.

But the blank page. On the good days, it is freedom. It is, to borrow a recent pop culture example, the moment Elsa shakes herself free of Arandelle, singing and throwing ice everywhere. She’s flexing power she has had to hold in check for too long. She makes a world from her magic, a castle from thin, icy air:

Today hasn’t necessarily been a good day, but when I thought about the blank page waiting for me, that is the way my thoughts ran. Today (to steal a phrase from Steven Brust, who stole it from Gene Wolfe) I’m going to tell you something really cool. That’s the plan, anyway.

The O’Shaughnessy quoted above is careworn to the edge of being cliché. Clichés get that way, though, because they’re useful. They tell us something important, or true…or at least tell us what we want to hear. The “Ode” quotation is a tidy encapsulation of the Romantic image of the poet. In my interview with Cristian Mihai, I warned (twice!) about buying into such Romantic fantasies of the lone, supremely inspired artist, wandering through the wilderness with a pen in hand and mind feverish with art. I meant it. Whatever their stripe, artists need community at least as much as other people.

When we sit down with a blank page (or screen, or whatever), though, we are alone. That’s part of what makes it cool. We are alone with all this space to create, to conjure dreams. We might hope to concoct something that will connect with others, but that is part of the work, and we do our work with the blank page alone.

That’s why the blank page, on bad days, can be terrifying. We face it alone. It’s the “Here Be Dragons”  on an antique map, and we expect those dragons to devour us momentarily. You know, right after they finish picking their teeth with the bones of all our past, terrible work. On the bad days, we pick browsing the internet, doing housework, sleeping…anything that takes us from the blank page’s terra incognita back into familiar places.

We have to go out there, though. There are dragons to slay…or maybe befriend. I’m off to find mine. Best of luck with yours.

Success and the Persuasive Essay

I’ve been thinking about Rebecca Schuman’s recent Chronicle piece on teaching as a vocation, and her further rumination over at pan kisses kafka on the (temporary?) suspension of her pedagogy. I have also been trying to figure out what my life “should” look like as a PhD outside academia—what “success” might look like. I have also also been substitute teaching. Between bouts of riot control, today’s lesson was on the persuasive essay. The sixth graders had to read and break down two short articles on video games: one praising the potential virtues of video games, the other warning of their consequences. They had to suss out the author’s claim, then to note down the evidence the author used as support. They needed practice at both, but it’s the start of the unit and, like I said, riot control.

How do you convince somebody of something? We’re bombarded by competing notions of success in everything from car advertisements to religion to quote-images plastered all over social media. Especially in advertisements, success and happiness are elided by the smudge of money. When we get into more metaphysical notions of success, we lose some of that equation of success and happiness. We can even reverse the connection between success and happiness. (Think about the “inspirational” gym pictures that one friend of yours always puts up about pain and gain.)

All these success-mongers want to persuade us that their mode of success is the best. It’s the coolest. It’s the most ethical. It’s the one that will take you furthest in the world. Whatever. Digging down into the supporting evidence is too often a rabbit hole: claim follows claim follows claim. That’s rhetoric, but it can take ages to get down to evidence. My sixth-graders today were easy to catch with that hook, which was part of the point. Teaching people to really read means teaching them what kinds of evidence are important to which varieties of argument.

The persuasive power of success models is wholly contingent on what kinds of evidence we are willing to buy. Is success a new Lexus (something the TV told me everybody gets for Christmas), having a car younger than your kids, or living car-free in a place with viable public transport? Is success turning your every waking effort toward improving the world, volunteer tutoring on a Tuesday evening, or being a responsive partner in your relationship? Is it traveling first class? Is it traveling with all your worldly possessions in a single backpack? When we pick a model of success, we’re being persuaded not by the claim, but by the evidence. The claim comes afterward. It’s how we gather our favorite pieces of evidence together.*

When we write, our ideas about success are just a few of the many that creep onto the page. When we’re looking at our screen or our paper, we reflect in other ways on success. Is success making a reader feel something? Is it getting “enough” hits on your blog or sales of your self-published book? Is it making a living from your work? Is making Good Art enough by itself? Those are the questions I’ve been grappling with. They’re complicated, as they are for so many of us, by our competing roles in life. Where does success as a partner and father fit in? Who do I allow to persuade me?

More importantly, how do I persuade myself of something? The latter is what I am working on these days: convincing myself that some direction or other is worth pursuing. I need to move from “convince” to “conviction.” We measure success in a hell of a lot of ways, but which ones are the most persuasive? Thoughts?

(*As a contrasting example, contemporary U.S. politics put the claims first and the evidence much, much later.)

Revisionary: Three Thoughts on Fixing What’s Broken

I’m not sure if it’s my favorite (favourite?) distinction between British English and American English, but I spent a good chunk of my first term at school in Wales being alternately charmed and confused by “review” and “revise.” Revising, there, is something you do to prepare for an exam. (At the end of the second year, my cohort and I concocted ornate revision schedules that we nearly managed to follow.) Review is used much more often in the context of “a formal review.” You know, the kind of thing you might revise for.

What’s important to either usage of either word is that they involve seeing again, looking intensely. When you look again, the goal is not to see the surface of the story (the writing you’ve already done), but the story underneath. See what the underlying principles are. See where the story has gotten away from its best self. Those are the spots you need to go back to, to make the story match the vision. (It’s just as true, incidentally, of nonfiction and academic writing, even if they don’t have “stories” in the same way.)

I posted about editing not too long ago. I described it as selection, keeping the best bits and weeding out the worst. Editing is also, though, a reaction. As writers or editors, when we go to edit a work, we are reacting to what’s on the page. Revising (in the American sense) is an active process, one in which we make the good better and the replace the bad. We push and pull and coax the story toward the vision we have for it.

That vision can change. We refine it when we share our writing with our favorite co-conspirators or hand it to an editor. When we look again, we might see things that were in our blind spots for the last go-round. Whatever changes, though, there are a few things that help (me) with the revision process:

1. Have a Plan

Even if you are an inveterate pantser when you write, having a plan makes revision smoother. Some fixes are simple enough to handle intuitively. Most, though, require a bit of forethought (which is not easy to do while you’re writing). What other parts of the story does a particular scene touch? More importantly, why are we changing what’s there? What do we have in our mind’s eye or ear that we’re pulling the story toward? How are you going to get there? Change in voice? Altering a character’s actions? If we’re replacing a bad section, how do we avoid making the new one bad? The more you have figured out about the problem before you go mucking around in your story’s guts, the more likely you are to have the right tools on hand. Plus, you’ll be less likely to leave a spanner in there that will necessitate more work later.

2. Keep Your Eyes Fresh

This is vital for editing, too, and one of the best reasons to have somebody who is not you look your work over. When I get into a story, it’s hard to hold on to the big picture and the small picture at the same time. It is also particularly hard to kill your darlings when they’re cozy at home. Work environments matter. Mess with them. If you’re sticking to soft copy, try opening your document in a different program. Print it to .pdf and read it without being able to change things. Personally, I love having hard copy to scribble on, even if it’s not always practical. Do what you can to disrupt the habits of your eyes. You’ll notice more—not just bad things, either.

3. Remember That it is Your Work
(in both senses of ‘work’)

The story you’re revising is yours. If it gets out into the world, it will have your name on it, no matter how awesome your editors or workshoppers were. If you’re self-publishing, you get to make the final decisions. Even if you’re not self-publishing, you don’t have to do everything your interlocutors suggest. I’ve mentioned before that I had an excellent advisor for my master’s thesis in music history. She taught me an enormous amount about making academic writing good writing. That didn’t stop us from disagreeing, though. I’d get drafts back marked to pieces in mechanical pencil. Some (many) of her suggestions or corrections were good ones. There were others that I didn’t agree with. I left them in the subsequent drafts. If they came back marked a second time, I’d think harder about changing things. That didn’t happen very often. It would have been a much worse document without my advisor’s input, but it was still my name on it.

Revising is also your work to do. Your editors point out problems. They might suggest fixes, but they won’t make them. As the writer, it’s your responsibility to fix what’s broken. Revision is work. It is often a grind that forces you to fight your own bad habits. Revision can be a painfully unfun slog. It’s just as much part of being a writer, though, as zooming through that ecstatic first draft or smiling at the fact you’ve changed nothing into something. When you get to the end and you’ve polished everything to gleaming? It’s worth it.

So go forth and work with fresh eyes. Know that I’ll be trying to do the same over here.