I haven’t read Vonnegut since college, and his “rule” about semicolons is crap, but his comments about writing and art making in this blog post are just wonderful.
Process
Whatever Works
Are you a “plotter” or a “pantser”? For many writers this is a far hotter topic than liberals versus conservatives, dogs versus cats, or Macs versus PCs. Plotters work it all out in advance. Pantsers — you’re way ahead of me here — fly by the seat of their pants.
The other day I learned about “swoopers” and “bashers.” Swoopers dive in and write write write till they run out of steam. Bashers knock each sentence into shape before they move on to the next. Their first drafts are polished and almost ready to go.
Some how-to guides emphasize planning. If you fly by the seat of your pants, they warn, it’ll take a lot longer. You may never finish at all.
If you’re writing to a deadline, whether imposed from without — say there’s a contract involved — or within — say you’re participating in NaNoWriMo and trying to write a novel this month, time is of the essence and “longer” is a liability.
I’m not writing to a deadline, beyond producing a few new pages for each week’s meeting of my writers’ group, but there’s no question in my mind: planning has its uses. Last spring my novel-in-progress (working title: The Squatters’ Speakeasy) ran out of steam. It was all sprawl and no trail. I pushed it to one side and went to work on Wolfie, the current project. Eventually I diagnosed the Squatters problem as a “surfeit of subplots.” There wasn’t a main plot in sight.
Some planning is clearly called for.
At the same time — Wolfie started as one of those multitudinous subplots. It appeared when I was flying by the seat of my pants. It’s taken on a life of its own.
Planning has its uses. So does flying by the seat of your pants. So do swooping and bashing. Whatever works — and when it stops working, try something else.
As usual, Ursula K. Le Guin got there long before me. Her Steering the Craft (Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1998) is my favorite how-to book. Sometimes I open to a page at random, as if I were casting the I Ching or laying out tarot cards. The other day I was flipping through looking for advice on plot. This is what I found:
“Somebody asked Willie Nelson where he got his songs, and he said, ‘The air’s full of melodies, you just reach
out. . . .’ The world’s full of stories, you just reach out.
“I say this in an attempt to unhook people from the idea that they have to make an elaborate plan of a tight plot before they’re allowed to write a story. If that’s the way you like to write, write that way, of course. But if it isn’t, if you aren’t a planner or a plotter, don’t worry. The world’s full of stories. . . . All you need may be a character or two, or a conversation, or a situation, or a place, and you’ll find the story there. You think about it, you work it out at least partly before you start writing, so that you know in a general way where you’re going, but the rest works itself out in the telling.”
About her “steering the craft” image, which organizes the book (and which I love), she adds: “The story boat is a magic one. It knows its course. The job of the person at the helm is to help it find its own way to wherever it’s going.”
In Wolfie the other day, my main character, Shannon, was sailing along on course. She knew where she was heading. Then two things happen, boom, boom, one right after the other. The first shakes her certainty; the second tells her she’s heading in the wrong direction. She’s got to do something, but she doesn’t know what.
I generally depend on my characters to tell me what’s what. I was no help — but I’m at the helm and lingering in irons in the middle of the bay is not an option.
So I picked out a pen that hadn’t seen much use lately and filled it with red ink. (For days I’d been cruising in more somber colors — gray, brown, black cherry. Red woke me up.) With a sheaf of my new blank paper in my lap, I slipped into Shannon’s head and we wrote, and wrote, and wrote. Now she knows what she’s going to do, and I’ve got a pretty good idea. We’re back on course.
Red ink collage
In Praise of Readers
If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?
I think it did. I also suspect that when we repeat the question, we’re not just talking about trees. Trees don’t care if they make a sound. They’re going to fall, and rustle, and crack, whether we hear them or not.
For me, writing is part of a conversation. I do want people to hear the rustling and cracking of my words, and more than that: I want to hear what they have to say in response. I’ve had three one-act plays produced, and I love giving readings. Nothing beats the thrill of seeing and hearing people respond to my words.
It’s a rare audience that will sit still for a book-length work, but I’m lucky: I’ve experienced what has to be the next-best thing. Last Wednesday and the Wednesday before, I got to sit down and talk with a group of women all of whom had read my novel, The Mud of the Place, and were interested in what I was writing about, the lives of year-round residents in a seasonal resort.
Minnesota Women’s Press publishes a bimonthly newsletter that’s all about books, writers, and readers.
These women, who came from all around the U.S. and Canada too, were participants in Books Afoot, also known as Reading on the Road, a program of the Minnesota Women’s Press. As organizer Mollie Hoben described it in an email, “The basic idea is that reading and travel make a rewarding combination. We pick a destination, learn about women writers from that place (which always involves exciting discoveries), select books to read beforehand, then travel there with interested reader-travelers for exploration and book discussion. Participants come from all over the country.”
I first learned about Books Afoot a year and a half ago, when Mollie contacted me out of the blue. Three Books Afoot groups would be coming to Martha’s Vineyard in the fall, and my novel was one of the four “required reading” books. Would I be willing to meet with any or (ideally) all of the groups?
One of the 2013 Books Afoot groups, meeting in the outdoor café at a local bookstore
Would I?? This was a fantasy come true, and the reality surpassed my wildest expectations. (I blogged about it here.) I’d pretty much decided that writing a second novel was a waste of time. These women changed my mind.
This year we were joined by my writer friend Shirley Mayhew, whose wonderful Looking Back: My Long Life on Martha’s Vineyard came out early this summer — too late for the travelers to have read it before they got here, but plenty of them bought a copy to take home with them. Shirley moved here as a young bride in 1947; I arrived solo in 1985. Our books and our very different but overlapping experiences became gateways for the visitors to enter a place that many people know about but few actually know.
Last month I concluded a blog post, “Who Do You Write For?,” with this description of the kind of reader I’d like to be: “one who’s brave enough to venture into unfamiliar territory as long as she trusts her guide, and one who appreciates the effort that goes into the writing.”
When a book goes out into the world, does it make a sound? If it does, will I hear it through all the cacophonous competition? Having sat down and talked with dozens of such adventurous readers, I know you’re out there. I’m writing for you.
The 2014 Books Afoot women each picked a postcard from wherever they were from and wrote a favorite book recommendation or two on the back. Here are a few of them.
Who Do You Write For?
I’ve been struggling with this one. “Who do you write for?” keeps getting tangled up with “who’s your audience?” They’re related, but they’re not the same. Who are you writing for before you have an audience out there? Let’s leave the out there audience aside for now. We’ll come back to it soon, I promise.
Aside: Yes, I do know that purists will insist on “Whom do you write for?” or “For whom do you write?” At the moment I’m not writing primarily for purists. Be warned.
So the other morning, while procrastinating warming up, I went over to Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog and found “When Words Stop” by Beth Taylor. Beth Taylor was writing for me, whether she knew it or not, so I had to write back:
Been there . . . For me writing is a conversation. If no one’s listening and (maybe more important) if no one’s speaking back and otherwise responding, the words dry up. Any actor can tell you that monologues are hard to pull off. One-person shows are even harder. In a one-person show, the actor is rarely talking just to her- or himself. Sometimes she’s talking to the audience, or a particular person in the audience. Other times she’s addressing a character that only she can see at first, but in doing so she makes that character visible to the audience. Writers can do that — we’re often doing it without knowing it.
When I write, I write alone — but there’s always someone there.
Aha. That’s who I’m writing for: someone that only I can see but that I’m in continual conversation with when I write. That someone has evolved over the years. She wasn’t always there.
At first I wrote to keep from cracking up. I also wrote to turn myself on — remember the “desert fantasies“? This was back in the day when writing on paper was the only option. Most of the paper I wrote on got burned in my parents’ fireplace or, later, ripped to shreds and put out with the trash. This was a big clue that I wasn’t writing for anyone else. I destroyed most of what I wrote because I was afraid someone else would find it and think I was crazy.
The time came — and it came pretty quickly — when writing for myself wasn’t enough. I wanted people to read at least some of what I wrote. I thought it was worth reading. In college I reviewed books and the occasional concert. I wrote regular op-ed columns, mostly political commentary. Most of my published writing since then has consisted of reviews and commentary, with significant forays into poetry, journalism, theater, and, most recently, fiction.
But that doesn’t explain why I sometimes hesitate over a phrase and think: No, that’s not right or That’s going too far. Or why I make choices that I know bloody well aren’t commercial: they limit my publication options, which weren’t all that great to start with. Who do I write for?
Turns out that the choices I make are clues to the identity of this mysterious entity, the reader who makes writing worthwhile.
I’m writing for the person who’s willing to read about and even identify with characters who aren’t like them in some ways.
I’m writing for the person who’s willing to be momentarily perplexed or even pissed off but doesn’t want to be hoodwinked for no reason.
I’m writing for the person who once in a while will be struck by a turn of phrase and think, That’s exactly right. Who might even toy with possible alternatives and finally conclude, Yeah, you made the right choice.
All of which, come to think of it, describes the sort of reader I’d like to be, and try to be: one who’s brave enough to venture into unfamiliar territory as long as she trusts her guide, and one who appreciates the effort that goes into the writing.
Let’s see where the road goes, huh?
Stop Whining. It’s Another Day. Don’t Waste it. Back to Work.
Some timely advice from one of the best writer-bloggers I’ve come across.
Write Through It 