Borrowed Tales

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“True artists are possessed… they are messianic egomaniacs. They believe that what they do is unspeakably important; it is only that conviction that makes the writer himself important…So Beethoven does draft after draft of his works, scrutinizing, altering, improvising them long after anyone commonly sane would have stopped, delighted… Only the absolute conviction that with patience enough he can find his way through or around any obstacle — only the certainty solid as life that he can sooner or later discover the right technique — can get the true artist through the endless hours of fiddling, reconceiving, throwing out in disgust… If he does the work well, the ego that made it possible does not show in the work… He builds whatever world he is able to build, then evaporates into thin air, leaving what he’s built to get by on its own.” -John Gardner, as cited by Charles Johnson in his 2006 preface to The Sunlight Dialogues (1972; rpr. 2006, New Directions Books, NY, NY)
In what other profession does one have a goal to be possessed? I love this work.
woodard
The other night, despite a headache I had been fighting all day, I went to Open Books in Wallingford to hear my old friend Deborah Woodard read from her new book of poems, Borrowed Tales. I was glad that I did. Deborah gave an inspired performance. The poems are amazing, I saw some old friends, and I was able to deliver two copies of my new book, Sparrow. (One of which was purchased by the evening’s end.) It’s all good.When I have a poetry reading (or two) set up, let alone a book launch, I will let you know.

Conflict, Revisited…

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books4I had a really interesting experience the other day in class, and I’ve been debating with myself as to whether or not to share it here. Given our current national debate about guns and violence, it feels like one of those hot topics that I tend to veer away from. You know how it is, in fiction conflict is EVERYTHING, but in life, I have lots of company in the avoidance category.

So I have this assignment that my young students just love. Even the older ones tend to like it. It begins as a setting exercise. I tell the students to take out their notebooks and do a “here and now” (as Priscilla Long calls it), jotting down everything they observe about our classroom. Sometimes, when I remember, I have a candy bar for the student who comes up with the longest list.

The next step is to write a scene using ONLY what turned up in the setting exercise. That’s your stage set, I tell them. It’s all you have. No bombs or Uzi’s in your bookbags. In this scene, they have to kill someone. “Can we save someone,” a student asked me this time around. I liked that. “Yes.”

ericVampires sometimes turn up in the scene. More often, the flat-screen TVs fall off the walls. People are bludgeoned with Rockstar cans, choked with scarves, tossed out windows, stabbed with pens. Once, a student was stabbed by the clock hands. (The writer hadn’t put anything else vaguely weapon-like on stage.)

We read all of the scenes out loud (they get only 5 to 7 minutes to write it), and who knows why we all have such a good time. There must be some catharsis going on. We laugh. Everyone is better friends afterward.

The reason I’ve been wanting to tell you about it, is because this time around, for the first time ever, several students killed me. For the first time ever, I killed myself! 

In my morning writing time I’ve been carrying on a series of dialogues (David Morrell suggests this in The Successful Novelist) and one of the issues that keeps coming up for me is a need to get myself — or my ego, I guess — out of the way. I think, really, that I’ve just been given a clear signal that this is the right work for me to be doing. Who am I? Who is the real me? What does she need? If she had permission to act, to confront whatever conflict, what would she do? In truth, we can say we avoid conflict all we want, but it’s here all around us all the time, not just in our stories.

As I walked out of class, I felt lighter than I had in days.

Now is the only time you have…

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a&pI thought I’d circle back to telling you about how I got my doctoral dissertation written.

When Annie and Pearl were really tiny, four or five months old, we took them to Spokane to visit their grandmother. We had Thanksgiving dinner at my husband’s brother’s house. My sister-in-law was at that time a Dean at Whitworth College. She wanted to hear how I was managing graduate school alongside infant twins.

I was finished with coursework. “Wonderful,” Tammy told me. “So all you have to do is write the dissertation.”

I was teaching two classes that fall, and felt that I had plenty to do without writing. I cheerfully reported that I thought I’d wait until the babies were older to start writing. “When they’re old enough for preschool, or even Kindergarten. Then I’ll have lots of time. It will be easier!”

Tammy’s eyes grew wide and for a moment she simply listened to me babble on. When I stopped talking she said, “No, you will not have more time. It will be different, but it won’t be easier. If you’re ever going to write it, you need to write it now.”

It was not a smooth transition. It took me months to find my feet in the damn thing, and months more to establish a writing routine. I can credit my sister-in-law, however, and that Thanksgiving visit as the moment when I made the mental — and emotional — decision to get cracking.

The picture is of me with the girls on their first day of Kindergarten. My sister-in-law was right — it was different, and it wasn’t easier, but at least I didn’t have a dissertation to write. That was finished when they were two-and-a-half.

Permission Granted

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I was talking to a friend the other day, another writer, about our respective novels (yes, Beverly, you really DO have a novel underway!), and it made me reflect yet again on my work habits.

What was it at the retreat in New York that allowed me to write? I think it was the extent to which I felt as though I had permission to write. I still had my on-line classes, after all. And if my husband and daughters (and my mother) were 3000 miles away, I still had them to worry about. I still watched some television (on my laptop) in the evenings. I read about five novels. (Silly Bethany.) But I got up every morning, opened my manuscript, read, and — eventually — wrote. I spent hours and hours on the manuscript every day. In my journal I wrote about the manuscript. At night, I dreamed about it!

Now I’m getting deja vu’ — I think I’m guilty of having told you this before. But this is what I’m thinking this morning: Couldn’t I, now, though I’m at home (at the Mukilteo Public Library actually), give myself permission to write?

sisters3What can I do today to give myself permission to do the work that I want to do? What can you do?