Are you neglecting your blog?

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I have been sadly neglecting my blog, but working on other projects — one of which is a picture book for the family about my parents’ lives. Another of which has been reading poetry each morning (and writing one-bad-poem of my own). When I came across this poem by Ted Kooser, I thought of this picture from the family archives.

The Great-Grandparents

As small children, we were taken to meet them.
They had recently arrived from another world
and stood dumbfounded in the busy depot
of the present, their useless belongings in piles:
old tools, old words, old recipes, secrets.
They searched our faces and grasped our hands
as if we could lead them back, but we drew them
forward into the future, feeling them tremble,
their shirt cuffs yellow, smoky old woodstoves
smoldering somewhere under their clothes.

-Ted Kooser (from Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems; Copper Canyon Press, 2018)

How to Begin

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I have a couple of friends who tell me that they are thinking of putting together a book. I’m thinking of putting together a class (fall?) for how to put together a book. None of us seems to be making much progress toward our intended goals.

How to begin a book is how you begin anything. You begin.

When I walk, I am often a bit pressed for time. I’m negotiating with myself as I set out, thinking that maybe just five minutes today…well, okay, maybe fifteen minutes. I set the timer on my phone for 7 1/2 minutes, knowing that if I turn around when it chimes, I’ll get my fifteen.

From one of my recent walks — I think this is elderberry in bloom, but I need to check.

But at the end of 7 1/2 minutes, I think, I could do 7 1/2 minutes more. Often, I do about 30 minutes in and 30 minutes back — it must have to do with that thing we learned in fifth grade about bodies in motion (they tend to stay in motion).

Writing is like that, too. But how is writing a book like that?

My best advice for the beginning of a book is to find a move, make a movement, that will actually look like building a book. For me the very early steps are these:

  1. choose a notebook (I have a ton of these, to be repurposed, though sometimes I splurge and buy a new one)
  2. create a title page — even if you know it’s a “working title” and not something you’ll keep (remember, you’re just getting yourself into motion)
  3. write a dedication (my mystery novel is dedicated to my friends and it is in memory of my mother, who read nothing but mystery novels)
  4. choose an epigraph or two (mine is from Agatha Christie; without looking it up, I think it goes — “I do think you should be more careful in how you choose your friends.”)

From there, you can begin sticking pages in, even if they aren’t in order. From now on, whenever you can find fifteen minutes to work (whether daily or weekly), you’ll know where your pages are. When you aren’t inspired to write, you can still work at scribbling in margins, moving pages around, or listing ideas for bits you want to write.

I could add something about getting your work “off-line” and onto actual pages — there’s some brain science to back up how important it is — but I’m working at the library in the middle of a walk, and now I need to go home to dinner.

Do let me know how your book is coming along! (And I’ll let you know if I make progress on creating the class.)

What Are You Writing?

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A friend, a former student from my college teaching days, has been revisiting her goal of writing her memoir and she’s been sending me pieces of it.

I have loved her story, and her writing, from the time I first met her, and I love it still. But when she said she was back at work on the memoir — despite working more than full-time in a stressful, human-services job, despite all the usual drama with marriage and barely grown-up children — I expected to see the same old pieces, pulled up from the archives, re-read and maybe fluffed up a little, like pillows on a guest bed. I didn’t expect that I was inviting a deluge of new and (sometimes) shockingly revealing chapters in her life story.

She always prefaces the pieces with “editing welcome,” or “you know I’m crap at punctuation.” But my feeling right now is that the sentences, the commas, her chronic it’s / its confusion (!) do not matter at all. DO. NOT. MATTER. What matters is that she stays open to the flood of these memories, experiences, and insights into her own life. What matters is that she keeps writing them down. If, by being willing to read them, I can encourage that flood, then I’m happy to. I’m privileged to be her witness.

Meanwhile, I’m working on the last act of my mystery novel (it is — gasp — actually drafted now, actually typed up, and not just a rough outline) and I am trying to imagine sharing it with my beta readers.

It feels as though I have to be hugely brave to do this. It makes me quake. I go back over the sentences and try to make them better. I add commas and take commas out.

I hesitate. I fret. I get all tied-up in knots.

How is it that my friend can send her memoir pieces to me with such trust that I will handle them gently, that I won’t judge them, that I’ll point out what I love about them and ask for more?

Which is exactly what my beta readers have done, by the way. So where does this fear come from? What is it that makes me start questioning every little thing (should the protagonist’s dog not be an English bulldog but some other breed? what if I took her daughter out of the story completely? am I getting away with all the backstory? is there going to be a romantic element, or do I let that go? sure, it’s okay, but what else could happen??????)

Hmm. The truth is that if I hadn’t given the first 2/3 of this story to my readers, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have drafted the last third. I was bogged down. I was doubting whether anyone would ever read it, or why they would, and I was feeling kind of like there was no point to finishing it. Having readers was what made me plow through. I’ve had the final chapters drafted for a few days now. I’ve reread and marked them up and typed in the new changes, and I think — for now — I’ve taken them as far as I can.

And I know this from my other projects and from working with scads of students over the past 30 years:

It’s never perfect.

It’s never perfect, just as we’re never perfect, but it will get better. That’s all part of the writing process.  Once you’ve drafted it, you’ll be able to revise it. You will make it better.

And if having a reader helps with the process, then it isn’t too early to share it. If it helps with the process, it helps with the process.

This morning, I’m channeling my memoir-writing friend. I’m printing out my pages (again) and I’m picturing smiling hugely and saying thank you and handing them over.

Reading Emily Dickinson

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I was browsing through Poetry Daily and clicked on a link to this article, by Sandra Lim, and found this image:

Having just spent February writing peace postcard poems and sending them out daily (yes, that is a thing), having spent a good deal of my adult life obsessing about Emily Dickinson, I felt as though Sandra was speaking directly to me.

“Make it new,” Ezra Pound said. But that’s what the best poetry always does.

Lim’s article includes (in the yellow box) a writing prompt. So excuse me while I go scribble (some more).