Why I Write

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Our Pabu, who does not bite.

I often get my ideas for blog posts from conversations with friends. Last night my daughter Annie and I visited my good friend who is going to California next week and needs a dog sitter. As things turned out, the adorable mutt bit the heck out of my hand (I tried to be a good farm-girl and act like it was nothing), with the result that he is going to a kennel for the week.

What does this have to do with writing?

I’ve known this young man (the dog, I mean) for four years, since he was an even more adorable puppy. His owners dote on him, but they work and he is at home alone for long hours. He has never had any training. He bites. He acts like he’s warmed up to you and then he grabs your hand and sinks his teeth in and won’t let go!

And what does this have to do with writing?

My friend happens to be the woman to whom I passed along my copy of Writing Down Your Soul by Janet Conner. Here’s a list of questions that Conner suggests exploring (page 148):

  • I think there’s a pattern in my life, and I don’t want to perpetuate it. What is the pattern? Why does it keep appearing?
  • When did it start? How has it evolved?
  • In what ways am I passing it on to the people around me?
  • Why do I want to break it–or why not? What price am I willing to pay?
  • What needs to happen for me to end this pattern?

After I cleaned up my hand and found the anti-biotic ointment, the three of us (the dog was in his crate) reflected on what has to happen next. Well, a professional kennel where the dog can stay next week, safely. My friend speculated on what she will do after that. Annie cried. I hope training will be explored, but if you know your dog bites, can you just keep doing what you’re doing? Our lovely dog has introduced us to a trainer who has rescued at least two impossible dogs and turned them into model citizens. So maybe training can help. Maybe dog training is a reflective activity akin to journal writing. All I know is that it’s easy to go on–for years–perpetuating a pattern and feeling stuck and helpless. Helpless and hopeless. But writing in my journal, and rereading and taking my reflections deeper, is a way of recognizing those patterns and…one hopes…beginning to change them.

It occurs to me that when I’m stuck it’s often because I’m blaming another person or circumstances. It can’t be helped! It’s his fault! There’s nothing I can do!

But there is always something we can do. Finding out what that is, waking up to the possibility of it, becoming willing to see it differently, that’s what reflective journal writing does for me.

What price am I willing to pay to change? Will it be a lesser or greater price than what staying the same will exact?

Synchronicity…and Joy

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“Like many societies, the novel is a hybrid construction pretending to be an organic miracle. From its beginnings, fiction has had borderless relations with nonfictional sources, has found ways to incorporate and exploit journalism, biography, historical texts, correspondence, advertisements, and images. But, since fiction is an invention masquerading as a truth, the riot of intertextuality is often craftily smoothed into a simulacrum of orderly governance: these different materials, the novelist seems to say, possess an equivalent fictionality, and just naturally belong together like this–trust me. Some of the pleasure of reading novels, perhaps especially modernist and postmodernist ones, has to do with our simultaneous apprehension of invention and its concealment, raw construction and high finish. We enjoy watching the novelist play the game of truthtelling.” James Wood, The New Yorker (June 23, 2014)

A lot of three-dollar words there (sorry), but a rather splendid idea, and one I had been thinking about all day, even before coming home and finding that a new issue of The New Yorker had arrived.

My new writing project is a novel set in 1926. Its point-of-origin is a family story, an anecdote really, about my great uncle and his courtship of a married woman. I know NOTHING about this, mind you, only the anecdote, that’s how my family tells stories, one line. But that’s been enough to entice me into creating an entire fictional world around a couple in a small town between the world wars.  My main character is the woman, and I’ve made her husband (the current one) her second husband. Her first, the love of her life (or so she thought) and the father of her two children, died in the Great War.

While getting my initial 30,000 words scribbled and typed (now at 23,000…and another notebook still to be transcribed) one of the issues I’ve wrestled with is HOW to bring the Great War more into focus. Yesterday, I found a book of oral histories, The Last of the Doughboys, by Richard Rubin, which is basically an answer to prayer. Interestingly enough, the timeline I had developed for my married woman and her first husband exactly fits with the history of the 91st Infantry Division, which started out from Camp Lewis near Tacoma, Washington.  Synchronicity. Or a big old miracle. Anyway, that was my moment of joy yesterday, sitting in a book store with a grin on my face, lapping up the pages.

That, and meeting a dog trainer last night who totally “gets” our dog.

 

Advice to Writers – You’re A Boxer

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You’re a boxer. Your job is to get punched in the face and keep swinging. It’s easy for anybody to say, “I wrote five scripts. None of them sold. I gave it my best shot. I’m moving back to Chicago.” You can’t do that. If you want a career in Hollywood, you can’t fail. You can quit, which most people do when they don’t achieve success as quickly as they’d like, but you can’t fail. There are as many opportunities as you can create for yourself. You can write a script a day, every day, for your whole life, if you’re that motivated.

ADAM RIFKIN (Quote reblogged from AdviceToWriters – Advice to Writers – You’re A Boxer.)

stubborn little me, at three

This quote touched a nerve for me. Many years ago I wanted a child and had pretty much exhausted all attempts to have one the usual way. Then infertility treatment failed. At least, what we could afford to pursue failed. My husband is older than I am and we weren’t eligible for adoption agencies. Then I learned about private adoption. Then our first adoption failed, at the hospital. Devastating.

But this is what I realized: I couldn’t fail. I was not willing to give up being a mother. “Not in this lifetime maybe,” a friend counseled me. I got mad. Bullshit, I thought. In this lifetime! We put our hearts out there again, and our oldest daughters, twins, appeared. Six years later, their sister showed up.

My daughters may drive me crazy (some days), but I never regret being their mom.

That’s how I’m going to pursue this writing gig, this new, full-time writing gig. I can’t fail.  “There are as many opportunities as you can create for yourself.”

Hopeless and Helpless

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image from www.exchangewire.com

I have now written a little more than 4000 words into my new novel. I’m still floundering around, checking out the territory and the voice and the point of view, exploring the characters. The main character, a woman stuck in an unhappy marriage, hasn’t admitted to herself  that she’s unhappy, that she’s more unhappy that she can stand. She’s telling herself that this is just life and she can’t expect more.

I’ve been thinking about how my process — how the writer’s process early in the drafting stage — is a little like a character’s process early in a novel. We’re hopeless and helpless. Even if we’ve planned ahead, even if we know the ending, early in the process we can’t really be sure that it’s working, that it will work and be worth all the work we are willing to put into it. All the steps of the hero’s journey or whatever other template we’re using is all out in front of us and, like the hero, we haven’t really gotten started yet.

I’ve been thinking about how life can be like this. In a novel, the character has about 20 pages, maybe 50, to be stuck in this phase, the hopeless and helpless phase, after which they have to shake themselves off and get started on their quest…or whatever it is they have ahead of them. In life, however, we get stuck (not just writers). We spend months feeling hopeless and helpless. Or years. Decades. We’d like to change our lives, but, geez, it’s just not possible.  We think it’s just not possible.

If your life were a novel, your readers would sigh and close the book. They would go looking for a different book.  You should do them a favor and and give them a different book. Get up, shake yourself off.  Get started on your quest.