Writing's slow. When I was in grad school, one of my professors - and this is a full-fledged novelist, mind you - told my class that, if he pumps out 2 pages of text in one day, then it's a good day. A little daunting when you're looking at a final product somewhere in the 250-500 page range. We're talking a year just to get a rough draft together. And that's assuming that you're writing every day. And that's assuming that every day is a good day. (Every day most certainly will not be a good day.) And then there are all those revisions. Reams and reams of revisions. It's slow.
I've been having bad days for the past couple of weeks. It's been slow. I blame my job. Specifically, I blame a student with whom I've been "working" at my job. I say "working" because what I really mean is "getting yelled at, insulted, and threatened by for doing nothing more than trying my very hardest to help her in what are increasingly complicated and frustrating situations." I've come to dislike this woman, as I'm sure she has come to dislike me, and it's made me have to struggle for the first time in my life to not yell very loud and scathing words at a person with whom I'm conversing. But what's worse is that this has affected my writing.
I was on a hot streak for a while. Getting back into the novel, churning through rewrites, pumping out the pages and digging back into the material. I'd gotten through 45-odd pages as of the beginning of last week. And now I'm at 52. That's a marked decrease in production, for those keeping score at home. What happened was this woman. I remember distinctly, last week: I was muddling through the last half-hour of the business day, waiting for the clock to wind down to 5 so I could shut my office door and open my laptop for a couple hours, when the phone rang. Half an hour later, I was ready to kick a hole through a tree, and my mind was buzzing with fury and self-doubt. I was racked with guilt and righteous indignation. I haven't been able to dispel these emotions. They've continued to invade my thoughts whenever I've had a quiet moment to think. They've even invaded my dreams in strange ways. This woman really pushed my buttons. I think she has a Koz user's manual somewhere. It's too bad she's been using it for evil.
There are artists who can use these strong, chaotic emotions and create great things from them in the moment. There are some artists who need these emotions, who can use them like a paintbrush or a keyboard. And I say, bully for them, but it's not for me. I need peace, quiet, pleasant calmitude if I'm going to produce anything. But it stretches farther than that. I've had this conversation with my mother before: "Do you produce better work in bleak times or happy times?" "Happy times," we both say, and we scratch our heads at the genius of Van Gogh. "It's just so much easier to work when you're happy," we say. "It just feels so much more rewarding."
As I write this, it leads me to think of duende, and to wonder about its place in my writing. Because I think that soul, that duende, does have a place in art in general, and even in my writing. I've experienced it before, an outpouring of deep and almost frighteningly powerful emotion. And I know that it's vital in every respect of the word. So what does it mean that I crave peace and quiet? Am I too immature and inexperienced to be attempting the things I'm attempting? Am I unable to properly or effectively sublimate emotion into art? Am I not up to the task of being an artist?
I don't know for sure, but I think it's something a little different. There are moments when we all become trapped by emotion. It ensnares us and we become helpless. It infantalizes us, sands us down to the unvarnished id. And that's just life, it's just one of those things. Id happens. And like so many other aspects of life, it's what you do with it next that's important.
Like a lot of the rest of the world, I've been watching the Olympics over the last couple weeks. (Interstice - I LOVE the summer Olympics, and not only because it's the one time every quadrennium that I get to see rowing on TV.) I think they can provide an interesting and illustrative example in this case. Picture a gymnast about to do a routine, picture the pressure of having a gold medal on the line, in front of your parents, in front of your teammates, in front of the whole damn world. Add to that the memory of a hard fall taken on that very routine just a few days earlier in qualification or an hour earlier in practice. Picture the swarm of those emotions, and picture the gymnast taking a deep breath, inhaling those negative feelings, tasting them, and then releasing them, letting them go, pushing them away with her breath and stepping slowly up onto the stage.
It's the same thing with writing, really. You need to be centered somewhere - or I need to be centered somewhere - if you're going to be in the right mindset to write anything coherent. But that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is when, from that centered place of calm, you choose to dive back into the chaos, when you choose to do battle with your duende. From that centered place, you look out and see the dark angel with his rusty wings and flaming sword and you step forward and throw open your arms and throw back your head and wait for him to strike. The interesting part is that it often is not until you have the choice to face those emotions, and you make the choice to face those emotions, that it becomes possible to turn them into an expression of truth.
There's an old Arthurian legend about a woman named Dame Ragnelle. The moral of the story rings true for men as well as women. We just want the right to choose our own fates rather than have them enacted upon us. Without that choice, that power, we can become trapped and buried - devoured. But with that power, with that choice, we're capable of making the basest horror sing with beauty.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Well...here I am
So where am I now? Well, now I'm in chapter 3. I wrote a bit today (and yesterday) about...well, about the things that happen in chapter 3. I suppose I shouldn't bother talking too much about the plot. I suppose I should talk about the writing itself.
The writing lately has been going well. Which is something of a new experience. Or, if not a new experience, an experience that has a flavor I'd forgotten. This isn't to say that it was easy today. It's never really easy (unless you're the kind of crazy person who writes novels in a weekend) - especially when you start off with a full day of work beforehand. But what it was was enjoyable.
There are days when the writing makes me hate. There are days when writing is the worst thing in the world. Unfortunately, there tend to be a lot of these days, and I'd been living in a string of these days for quite some time until recently. But recently, something changed.
I mentioned this book the other day, and I mentioned it because it did a lot to alter my mood. The experience of reading the book inspired me to delve deeper into the experience of writing. I'd like to tell you why, but I'd rather that you read the book. But I'll tell you why anyway. Why is because I like to feel important. And if there is any lesson imparted by that book it's that stories are important, perhaps to the utmost. Sometimes there's nothing quite so invigorating as a sense of purpose.
But there's another reason as well, and it has to do with something that used to frighten the writerly side of me: parallels. As I was reading the many examples of myths and legends in the book, I kept noticing parallels with what I'm trying and hoping to do with my story. Like I said, this used to scare me. The goal I used to strive for with my writing was one of novelty, freshness - I wanted to be something that no one else ever was and write things that no other writer had. When I saw parallels to the work I was doing, I grew frustrated at both my lack of novelty and the fact that someone else did it first.
Those desires and fears have...changed. They're still there, to be sure, but they're also coupled to the desire to express some kind of human truth (<-- this is the kind of thing that, when you say it, most people will roll their eyes at you - feel free to roll away, but it's true). And where I saw a lack of originality in the parallels I saw in the past, I now see a sign that I'm on the right track. Because if something's worth saying twice, then it's probably worth listening to.
Also, plagiarism's fun.
The writing lately has been going well. Which is something of a new experience. Or, if not a new experience, an experience that has a flavor I'd forgotten. This isn't to say that it was easy today. It's never really easy (unless you're the kind of crazy person who writes novels in a weekend) - especially when you start off with a full day of work beforehand. But what it was was enjoyable.
There are days when the writing makes me hate. There are days when writing is the worst thing in the world. Unfortunately, there tend to be a lot of these days, and I'd been living in a string of these days for quite some time until recently. But recently, something changed.
I mentioned this book the other day, and I mentioned it because it did a lot to alter my mood. The experience of reading the book inspired me to delve deeper into the experience of writing. I'd like to tell you why, but I'd rather that you read the book. But I'll tell you why anyway. Why is because I like to feel important. And if there is any lesson imparted by that book it's that stories are important, perhaps to the utmost. Sometimes there's nothing quite so invigorating as a sense of purpose.
But there's another reason as well, and it has to do with something that used to frighten the writerly side of me: parallels. As I was reading the many examples of myths and legends in the book, I kept noticing parallels with what I'm trying and hoping to do with my story. Like I said, this used to scare me. The goal I used to strive for with my writing was one of novelty, freshness - I wanted to be something that no one else ever was and write things that no other writer had. When I saw parallels to the work I was doing, I grew frustrated at both my lack of novelty and the fact that someone else did it first.
Those desires and fears have...changed. They're still there, to be sure, but they're also coupled to the desire to express some kind of human truth (<-- this is the kind of thing that, when you say it, most people will roll their eyes at you - feel free to roll away, but it's true). And where I saw a lack of originality in the parallels I saw in the past, I now see a sign that I'm on the right track. Because if something's worth saying twice, then it's probably worth listening to.
Also, plagiarism's fun.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Get back, Joe!
So grad school brought back the book. There were approximately 7 grad schools applied to by me. If you imagine the worst hand you can be dealt in Texas hold-em' poker, then you should have an idea of how many of those grad schools accepted my application. Oddly enough, the only schools that accepted me were the ones to which I did submit an excerpt of my novel as part of my portfolio.
At any rate, I ended up at Sarah Lawrence, which was generally a good time, although there were a few hiccups along the way.
Most of my time at Sarah Lawrence was spent working on the novel. This is how that worked out. In the second semester, I got just about 90 pages deep. Of these 90 pages, approximately 23 remain in the current version. The third semester was probably the most productive. With the help of Mr. Ernesto Mestre-Reed, I had a very productive semester and eclipsed the halfway point of the story. And that's where things started to go downhill.
After that third semester, I ran into a problem, and that problem was this: I decided that it makes far more sense to rewrite 1/2 of a novel over and over and over and over and over and over and over (get the idea yet?) and over and over and over and over (sure you do) and over again, rather than just finishing a stupid full-length rough draft. So there. And that's what I did. And that's what I've been doing. For a long, long time.
I got some good stuff out of those re-re-re-re-re-re-writes, don't get me wrong. With no small amount of help from a World Champion Ultimate Frisbee player (that's David Hollander for those not in the know). But the fact of the matter is, the writing, once I left the comforting confines of grad school, made me want to smash my face into things with extreme abandon.
Listen, it's time to end this prelude. Here's the long story shortened: I started the novel, I put it on hold, I went back to it, I wrote a bunch of it, then I kept writing the same thing over and over until my soul was ready collapse in on itself and pull me down into the shadowy pit of Hades. But now I'm feeling better about it. Much better. Why? Mainly because of this book. I must say, it was inspirational.
Now, here we are. I'm back in the groove. I'm three chapters deep again, and from here on out, I'll try and talk about the day-to-day issues of writing. We'll see how it goes. But all that is for next week. For now, let's drink until our hearts stop:
At any rate, I ended up at Sarah Lawrence, which was generally a good time, although there were a few hiccups along the way.
Most of my time at Sarah Lawrence was spent working on the novel. This is how that worked out. In the second semester, I got just about 90 pages deep. Of these 90 pages, approximately 23 remain in the current version. The third semester was probably the most productive. With the help of Mr. Ernesto Mestre-Reed, I had a very productive semester and eclipsed the halfway point of the story. And that's where things started to go downhill.
After that third semester, I ran into a problem, and that problem was this: I decided that it makes far more sense to rewrite 1/2 of a novel over and over and over and over and over and over and over (get the idea yet?) and over and over and over and over (sure you do) and over again, rather than just finishing a stupid full-length rough draft. So there. And that's what I did. And that's what I've been doing. For a long, long time.
I got some good stuff out of those re-re-re-re-re-re-writes, don't get me wrong. With no small amount of help from a World Champion Ultimate Frisbee player (that's David Hollander for those not in the know). But the fact of the matter is, the writing, once I left the comforting confines of grad school, made me want to smash my face into things with extreme abandon.
Listen, it's time to end this prelude. Here's the long story shortened: I started the novel, I put it on hold, I went back to it, I wrote a bunch of it, then I kept writing the same thing over and over until my soul was ready collapse in on itself and pull me down into the shadowy pit of Hades. But now I'm feeling better about it. Much better. Why? Mainly because of this book. I must say, it was inspirational.
Now, here we are. I'm back in the groove. I'm three chapters deep again, and from here on out, I'll try and talk about the day-to-day issues of writing. We'll see how it goes. But all that is for next week. For now, let's drink until our hearts stop:
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