Writing on the fly

When I wrote my novella, I had only just begun to explore the kind of writing called a web log. It hadn’t occured to me that it would be the perfect place to catalogue and share the experiences of actually writing the thing. Now, I wish I had done that. Someday I’ll probably want to revise the thing, and it might help to look back on some notes. I do have some, on paper. They will have to do.

I have been following the ongoing work of one Diane Greco, whose name came up at lunch today, because she is keeping track of her writing process as she goes. She posts things like ” YAY! I just hit 30,000 words.” More to the point, she shares really useful lists of lessons learned, such as this one:

1. Keep notebooks. Use them to store the stuff that doesn’t seem to fit yet. When you fill one notebook, make an index to it and stick it on the cover. Use sticky notes, too.
2. Write lots in notebooks, but also keep working on p. 181 — especially if you feel stuck there and are tempted to skip to p. 200, or to another novel altogether.
3. Do the hard work. That’s how the book gets inside you.
4. Use primary sources for historical fiction: eyewitness accounts, memoirs, interviews.
5. But don’t get so wrapped up in the research that you forget to write.
6. It is not necessary to cover every little bit of historical detail, just the details that matter to the characters.
7. If you’re channeling your characters — dressing like them, talking like them, dreaming their dreams — then you’re cooking. It doesn’t mean it’s time to see the nice doctor with the cozy couch. Not yet, anyway.
8. Getting the scope right is the hardest part of novel writing. The beginning is the worst. You’re mapless for 80, 90, 100 pages. It’s like this every time. I’m through it now, but next time will be hard, too. Keep going.
9. Be open but pragmatic about advice. Try everything. Forget anything that doesn’t work. Including this list.

Another thing she pointed out a month or so is a New York Times article called “Blocked: Why Do Writers Stop Writing” (They can’t always think of what to put after that damn colon, thats why.) THe article frames, very succinctly, the issue of this so-called “writer’s block” in terms that help deconstruct it and help place it in the box of silly-business where I feel it belongs. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll admit that the ability to write is not always readily available, but, lets look at what The New Yorker has to say about it:

Writers have probably suffered over their work ever since they first started signing it, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that creative inhibition became an actual issue in literature, something people took into account when they talked about the art. That was partly because, around this time, the conception of the art changed. Before, writers regarded what they did as a rational, purposeful activity, which they controlled. By contrast, the early Romantics came to see poetry as something externally, and magically, conferred. In Shelley’s words, “A man cannot say, ‘I will compose poetry.’” Poetry was the product of “some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind,” which more or less blew the material into the poet, and he just had to wait for this to happen. In terms of getting up in the morning and sitting down to work, a crueller theory can hardly be imagined…

Is it really all about that “theory” that you can get up in the morning and sit down to work? What about what Virginia Woolf has to say, or for that matter, what Diane Greco has done with the daunting task of reconciling the demands of a modern lifestyle with the demands of an artistic one? (Diane has a charming toddler who demands things like “up with people!”)

My writing professor tells me: “Death will come knocking, and you can hand in a manuscript, or you can display a clean set of dishes, but in eather case, there are no extended deadlines then.” My professor is a smart-ass when you ask him for an extension, but he has a point.

The New Yorker goes on to relate an account of a life lived in a way that seems completely incompatible with the notion of Writer’s Block:

Trollope reported in his “Autobiography,” he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eight-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next. The writing session was followed, for a long stretch of time, by a day job with the postal service. Plus, he said, he always hunted at least twice a week. Under this regimen, he produced forty-nine novels in thirty-five years. Having prospered so well, he urged his method on all writers: “Let their work be to them as is his common work to the common laborer. No gigantic efforts will then be necessary. He need tie no wet towels round his brow, nor sit for thirty hours at his desk without moving,—as men have sat, or said that they have sat.”

I’ve tried this method myself, or something like it. I read The Artist’s Way and I did so at an impressionable enough age, and with an open enough mind. In spite of the new-agey, self-help approach, I learned the lessons in that book, and they have stuck on me like a warm homecooked meal. The first Lesson: “morning pages” THis is essentially Trollope’s method, but with a limit of ONLY three pages, and with an open-mindedness toward “taking a brain dump” as I like to call it. It is really is good to clean the old pipes out, and within two months or so I was a strong devotee to my three pages of writing every morning. I found that the experience of writing every day, even stream-0f-consciousness style, it got my hea dclear of all the rediculous wasted thoughts that occur throughout the day, and, with a clear head I was more prone to better thoughs and also less prone to those stupid thoughts that get in the way of writing: those worries, those to-do lists, the exuses and procrastinations. College got in the way of all that somehow. Rather, I should say, I let college get in the way, and I quit the habit of writing “morning pages”.

I’ve had my share of obnoxious girlfriends say “stop writing and do…” anything less important to me. Rather than admit, to me, or them, that an obnoxious girlfriend is actually less important (that would be rude, wouldn’t it?) than whatever I might have been writing at the moment. I stopped what I was doing and capitulated to the easy temptations of rock ‘n’ roll, etc. It wasn’t until I, too, had a room of my own, that the novella was even possible. Anyone I live with in the future is simply going to have to share me with my life, just as I am prepared to share them with their life, a sharing I take to be the mark of a mature relationship.

This is one of those new beginning times for me. I ahve finished my wonderful summer in Boston, working at Eastgate, and now I’m bound southward again, back to school for one more attempt at the college try. I think those kinds of beginning times become increacingly rare the more “settled down” one becomes. I’ll approach this beginning with all the best intentions of any new beginning, and I’ll commit to writing every day, and to straying from those silly romantic notions that might allow me to believe in “Writer’s Block” (Faith being the thing it is, I choose simply not to believe in it.) I have this groovy new weblog, and all my notebooks leftover from (uglier) times past, they are all filled up. I’ll start a new one for morning pages (rather than share my brain-droppings with this audience). I think that’s enough for now. I will let my professors supply me with whatever large-scale writing assignments I might have. For now, I’ll simply focus on living a writing life. That’s enough.