Your Brain on Writing

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I’ve been reading (devouring) Fire Up Your Writing Brain, by Susan Reynolds (click on the title to go to her blog). Late in the book, Reynolds quotes Margaret Atwood on why a writer should read her own work aloud, a long-time practice of my own.

Black marks on a page are like a musical score, they don’t come to life until they are being played. A score for violin is not actualized until somebody takes up a violin and plays the music. That’s when it turns back from paper and ink into music. Pages are like a magic freezing mechanism whereby you take a voice and you put it into a score on the page — it’s a score for voice, it always is — and it becomes actualized again when somebody reads it and turns it back into a voice. –Margaret Atwood

Photo by Steve Johnson from Pexels

Reading aloud is a great tool for self-editing, but I think this quote speaks, even more, to the alchemy of the writer-to-reader link.

I am trying to remember when I was first given the advice to read my work aloud. My poetry professor at the University of Washington, Nelson Bentley, used to tell us to, but I think it came before, in my very first literature class at Edmonds Community College. Pat Nerison had assigned a paper on the poems we had been reading, and she recommended that we read them aloud before we began writing. “I have roommates!” I protested. “Go in the bathroom and turn the water faucet on,” she said. “They won’t hear you.”

Station Eleven, revisited

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When Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, Station Eleven, first came out in hardback, I resisted it. I picked it up a few times, reading the opening (I loved the opening), but — oh, gee, it was another dystopian novel, and did I really want to read or watch one more story about the end of life as we know it? I mean, after The Road, I was kinda done. 

So I mentally counted up the number of books on my TBR (to-be-read) list, already waiting at home, and I left Station Eleven on the bookstore shelf.

When it was released in paperback, I went through this process again. The prominent display of it on CD at my local library, however, caught me at a weak moment. I grabbed it.

I loved Station Eleven.

I listened to it (at least, large parts of it, more than once) and then I bought a copy and read it again. I thought then that it was a debut novel, and it is such a rarity for a debut novel to hook me not only with the first 50 pages — “audacious, darkly glittering” pages — but to keep me hooked all the way through to the last page. No fifth act problems here (quite an accomplishment, considering that it begins with a staging of King Lear).

It turns out that Station Eleven is not Mandel’s first novel. But never mind. The structure is magical. It’s ambitious and startlingly collaged, hammered together like a shack out of civilization’s leftover scraps, and yet it completely and totally works.

We move from the story of Arthur Leander (it’s his enactment of King Lear that gets us rolling), then follow a man slipping outside the theater into a snow storm, and a flu epidemic; we pick up the story 20 years later with a child actress now grown; we move back to Arthur’s first marriage and the creation of an amazing graphic story that will survive civilization’s collapse. And so on. It’s all intricately woven together. Mandel moves so deftly between time periods, and from one character to another, that I simply had to tell you about it.

And to add to this vignette, my family spent the last few days in our own post-apocalyptic bubble that sort of brought some things home for me.

We thought having a tree fall in our back yard last week — and miss all the outbuildings (hitting only the fence) — was enormously lucky. But the storm brought other, less immediately visible problems. On Saturday, our main sewer line backed up. On Sunday, we lost power. So by Monday morning (the morning of my birthday, mind you), we had been living for 36 hours without toilets or washing machines or drains of any kind, and for 18 hours in the dark, without heat. Power was restored late Monday afternoon, but we learned that the sewer problem was not going to be simple. I couldn’t help thinking of the ordeals of the characters in Station Eleven (and so many other such novels and movies and TV shows), how I in fact have sort of romanticized their stories, wishing (at times) for simpler, pre-Internet (and pre-fully wired offspring) times.

Gradually, it dawned on me that this is the world the characters I’m writing about — both in Puritan America and circa World War I — inhabit. Oh! (Insights abound.) No flush toilets!

Of course, in my real life, I could still drive to Caffe Ladro and order my usual almond milk double latte. I could come to the library and check my gmail. I could get a very lucky cell-phone call from a friend offering us the use of her house while she is away. (Birthday dinner saved!)

And, a little money down the road, we will get access to our plumbing again.

Interesting, isn’t it, what we take for granted until we don’t have it. As Garrison Keillor says: “Nothing bad ever happens to writers; it’s all just material.”

Please, please read this book!

In the Company of Writers

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b85fd-stack2bof2bbooksI have had the privilege over the past few weeks of hanging out with some very cool writers. Joannie Stangeland for one, Katie Tynan (of It’s About Time) for another. Last week I was one of the featured readers for Rose Alley Press‘s 20th Anniversary reading series, and I want to take a moment to recommend this local press, owned and operated by David D. Horowitz, and its books (particularly as it is getting to be that gift-giving time of year).

The novelist Jane Hamilton tells a story about getting caught reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch in a school hallway while waiting for a child. The other mother who spied her said something that Jane translated to “How Quaint.” With an edge of outrage in her voice, she added, “as if I were tatting lace!”

I thought of that story because I read Middlemarch, the first time, while taking a class with Professor William Dunlop, whose poetry book, Caruso for the Children and Other Poems, is a Rose Alley Press book.

One reason to go to readings is to connect with like-minded people who read the same sort of books that I do. That you do. Don’t you?

 

 

Time

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Why is it that — even without the teaching career — even without the three little girls who were underfoot for so many years and now are nearly grown — I STILL feel overwhelmed and as though I don’t have enough time to write?

Because Louise DeSalvo told me to, I have been reading The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months. In this book, which is largely for manager-types and salespeople, Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington explain that time is finite:

“It’s important to realize the simple truth that you can’t do it all; otherwise you will continue to labor under the false belief that you will eventually catch up, and finally get to the important stuff. You will continue to use all of your time on the urgent day-to-day activity and postpone the strategic that is required to create breakthrough and, ultimately, the life you desire.” (138)

You wouldn’t think that this would be such a big idea. I’ve encountered it before, and in contexts more relevant to my writing life. But it caught me at a vulnerable moment. And then these sentences, a few paragraphs down the page:

“Reaching a breakthrough isn’t about being incremental. Breakthrough requires a profound change in the way that you work…”

You have no doubt heard before much of what Moran and Lennington say. But their idea of ditching annual goals for 12-week goals strikes me as brilliant. You can still have annual goals, but you have to go through the process of breaking them down into doable 12-week chunks. Instead of writing down for 2015, “Lose 20 pounds, Declutter house; Finish two new books” — which sounds an awful lot like a wish list, rather than goals — thinking in 12-week chunks of time has made me get more concrete in all of my thinking.

If I want to lose 20 pounds this year (ultimate goal: to be radically healthy into my 90s!), how much will I have to lose over the next 12 weeks? And what actions will I have to take this week in order to be on track with my 12-week goals?

To finish my novel rewrite before I take my Florida vacation (which was about 7 weeks out when I started reading The 12 Week Year), what actions will I need to take? This week? Today?

To send the requested 8-10 poems to the journal that requested them by the end of May, what actions do I absolutely have to take this morning, now?

I started by printing up a 12-week calendar that fits on a single, 8×10 page — a planning practice from my teaching days. I had SO much to write into it, that I then made the calendar days bigger and put it on two pages of six weeks each. I divided up the work, leaving myself leeway (I know myself too well to think I won’t need leeway), and planning for Sundays off from writing.

Today, one poem, polished and put in the file to submit. (Tomorrow, another.)

I’ll let you know what happens.