Not writing, not bad

It’s been an interesting few months. It’s not about the writing. It’s about something bigger. A few months back, my wife Gail was asked to sit on a panel discussion after a showing of the movie No Impact Man. She works for the Timberland Corporation and has been involved in trying to raise the awareness of “greener” practices. So, off we went to a nice little theater in Concord, NH. I have to admit that although I like spending time with Gail, I sort of wasn’t feeling too excited about having to sit through a film about “saving the planet.” I thought it would be self-righteous and preachy and worst of all, boring. Of course, this was all a preconception, based on nothing. And what did I need to know about living greener? Wasn’t I already trying to do my part? I threw my cans in the recycling bucket, right? I rode my bike to work. And… and… what? Isn’t that enough? So, anyway, back to the movie and panel.

The film was nothing like what I imagined–funny, intelligent, disturbing. The subjects of the film, the writer Colin Beavan and his family, tried their best to live for a year without impacting the environment. It was an insane experiment and not something that Beavan suggested as a “model” for living green. The word extreme is used too much these days (Extreme Basmati!!) but this experiment was extreme in all the best connotations of the word. I highly recommend both the film, and the book of the same man.

After the film, Gail took part in a panel discussion with three other green-minded folks, one of whom was Joshua Trought, the executive director of D Acres–an organic farm and educational homestead (http://www.dacres.org/), who talked a bit about eating locally and seasonally. One of the panelists was from Stoneyfield Farms, a large yogurt company that buys its milk locally. Gail talked a bit about what Timberland was doing in their day to day business, but also talked about the things we were doing around the house. I was surprised to hear that we were doing so much (mostly through her prompting, I might add): composting nearly all our vegetable refuse; eliminating all paper cups (no more coffee’s from Starbucks, et al); no canned sodas or juices; all paper recycled, including packaging; riding bikes to work and to the store; trying to be vigilant about turning off lights and unplugging appliances that sucked electricity even when off (do all of our appliances really need digital clocks on them?); keeping the heat low; using the dryer only when absolutely necessary (we hardly ever dry our pants and shirts and underwear); combining errands so that we can get everything done on one car trip; walking to friends houses; getting rid of the snow blower because shoveling snow is damn good exercise and doesn’t pollute; trying to eat less packaged food and less processed food (indeed, there are pretty much whole aisles of the supermarket that I don’t need to venture down much these days)–but listing the things isn’t what is important. Doing these things didn’t take make my (our) life any harder. In fact, I think it’s made things easier. By riding to work (it’s not a super long ride, 11.5 miles each way, and now in NH, during winter, I can’t keep it up) I lowered my cholesterol levels and lost weight. We’ve reduced our non-recylced garbage to a couple of bags a week. We use less gasoline. We return nutrients to the soil. We use less water. We eat healthier. We spend more time together.

What’s shaking me up now is the fact that if I can do some of those simple things and improve my life, then why not do more? It’s not subtraction, it’s addition. By changing the way I live, my life gets better. So, that’s the seismic shift. I’m not writing, not really, but it’s not bad. Is writing another novel for the express audience of me going to leave the world a better place? Or is my time better spent thinking of a way that I might conceivably leave my daughter a nicer planet than the one she’s in right now?

Tonight, I watched Food, Inc. A devastating look at the gross and unpalatable “corporate” food industry. It is a sickening and important film. Next up, buying local. Stay tuned.

Rejection

So many rejections. Lord. They wear on a writer. They come in droves, in dribbles, in waves, washing over me. It’s not my kind of story. It’s a tough market. You have lovely language, but no plot. I’m taking on very little literary fiction now. It’s too ambitious. It’s not ambitious enough. I can’t “identify” with any of the characters. There’s too much story. Too many characters. Not enough story. Not enough character.

And worse than the rejection are the agents who never, ever, ever respond to email queries, even when they say they are accepting just such things. We only respond the queries we are interested in, they write. That’s so much crap. How much time does it take to shoot off a quick rejection form email? Seconds? I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that agents are so swamped that they can’t reject people instead of just leaving things hanging in the air. It is, to me, the epitome of unprofessionalism. So, I teach writing. What if I decided to only respond the essays that I was interested in and I never ever told the other students anything concerning their grades? Isn’t it the same thing? Less than a decade ago, if you enclosed a SASE with your query letter, they’d at least send it back with a rejection slip. No mess, no fuss, simple, clear cut. A little cold, usually, because it was a form letter, but way better than not responding at all. Now, since paper copies are becoming less common, suddenly the ability to take that time has vanished? Pffffttttt.

Of course, rejection itself is nothing new. All writers face it. All writers deal with it differently. I don’t take it personally, but after a while, it just flattens the desire to write.

It seems as if my third novel manuscript, The Improbable Colony, is destined to be yet another “practice” novel for me. I just can’t find the right person to represent it and I’m tired of looking. I’m sort of tired of thinking about writing, actually, but I’ve felt that way before and it will most likely pass. I’ve written three novels and two collections of short stories since I was thirty, and most of those manuscripts will remain hidden away. So much time at the keyboard.

What am I doing?

A special thanks to the agent Sally Wofford-Girand, who although she didn’t click with my manuscript, at least wrote back to me in person and actually seemed to have read the book and put some effort into her response. I find that sort of attention to be rare in the industry. She seems like a stand up person.

I told myself that if I couldn’t sell Improbable Colony, I’d give up writing novels and just write some short stories. I may rescind that vow. Or not. I wish I was better at writing plots.

100th Meridian

My friend Jon Travis died last night. I don’t think he’d mind me just blurting it out like that. He wasn’t one to stand much on ceremony. He wasn’t fancy, although he had good taste. We weren’t lifetime friends, but it sure felt like it. I met him through a friend. She brought him to the Music Hall, my old theater, in 1993. He wanted a job and I didn’t have a job to offer. But he kept hanging around. Sometimes he would come even though I couldn’t pay him. Sometimes, I’d have him on a show crew and he’d bust his ass with the rest of us trying to put on a show for small money. Finally, he became my stage manager. It just happened. One day I looked up and he was there at the stage manager’s stand and it was like he was supposed to be there, or like he’d always been there and I just never noticed. We’d had good stage managers before Jon, but Jon brought something special to the job. He didn’t buy trays of cold cuts for performer food; he made fresh sushi and gourmet salads. He didn’t run cheap coffee through our old machine; he brought in a cappuccino machine and handed out frothy espresso drinks. He was grouchy and difficult sometimes too and just when you’d think he was going to flip over something, he’d bust out a killer Ethel Merman impersonation as he was climbing the stairs to the flyfloor to heft sandbags and lead weights to balance out the lights and scenery on the pipes. When Gail and I got married on the Music Hall stage, he stage managed the wedding. He cared about that building. For several years, the place couldn’t have run without him. He needed us, but we needed him more. Or maybe I needed him. He wasn’t afraid to be the “bad” cop when I was the “good” cop for shows. In fact, I think he sort of liked it. Now that he’s gone, I feel as if I still need him.

Other things: I was in his wedding party where him and his wife Cathy asked me to read “Oh, The Places You’ll Go” by Doctor Suess as part of the ceremony. He loved pub rock, especially the Reducers. Jello Biafra once spent the night on his apartment floor. He’d seen hundreds of shows, bands that most people never heard of but who Jon loved. We went to see the Tragically Hip together at least a dozen times. Man, did that guy love the Tragically Hip. I think that was my one big gift to him, turning him on to that band. We played the Hip so often that most normal people would have gone insane. Once, early in our friendship, as we drove back from a late night load out of a Nutcracker in some high school hours away, we listened to the Hip cd “Day for Night” over and over, very loudly. We sang and sang and sang to that album. We analyzed the songs. We somehow connected over that band. Another time, the Hip came to our theater. We were giddy. When the Hip were doing their soundcheck, Jon went into the dressing rooms and took a shower. Later, when we met Canadian Tragically Hip fans at other concerts, Jon loved telling them that he once sang in the shower along with Hip as they soundchecked. It was the little things, really.

Of course, Jon’s gift to me was his warm and true friendship. He was easily annoyed by much, but he never seemed annoyed with or by me. He was always glad to see me and I him. I hadn’t seen him too much over the last few years, but that is normal, I suspect. We both were married and had full lives. We’d been talking quite regularly recently, thanks to facebook. He was a tremendous artist. Here is a link to his art:

http://www.hygienic.org/profile/JonLTravis

As I worried about my writing, Jon would tell me just to write something. He practiced what he preached in his own art. Just make something.

When I worried about my teaching, somehow convinced that what I did wasn’t important, he said: “That’s the difference between what you do now as opposed to what you did at the Music Hall. There, it was instant gratification. You got the audience reaction and you knew the show was good and your performance was validated. But teaching, you never really know. You just have to trust that you are getting through to someone.”

He believed the same thing about art. I have a painting of his over my desk of a still of Robert Mitchum from “Night of the Hunter”. Here is the original still:

Here is Jon’s painting:

I think I’ll have more to write about this, but tonight I was just feeling his loss. Now that I am typing the images and memories are blurring together. The last time I saw Jon was about four months ago. We went to see the Tragically Hip together in Boston. He became fast friends with a bunch of drunk Canadians. We had to stand the whole time and Jon was tired, but it didn’t stop him from putting his whole body into the music. Perhaps the Hip song that comes to mind for me most right now is titled: 100th Meridian. Towards the end of the song, the singer sing/chants these lines: If I die of vanity/Promise me/Promise me/if they bury me/Some place, I don’t want to be/You’ll dig me up/And transport me/Unceremoniously/Away from/The swollen city-breeze/Garbage-bag trees/Whispers of disease/And acts of enormity/And lower me/Slowly, exactly and properly/ Get Ry Cooder/ To sing my eulogy/ At the hundredth meridian/ Where the great plains begin.

Jon, along with the rest of the Hip crazed crowd would go crazy just about the time the Ry Cooder line pops up… all of us bouncing up and down to the song. It’s a good memory of the man–passionate, a bit crazy, artistic, loving, grouchy, friendly, real. Wherever Jon is, I know he’d want Ry Cooder to sing his eulogy. And I love him for that. And all the other things. I miss him.

Been gearing up to write. That’s all I know. I’ve been not writing and now that my house renovations are almost done, the words must come back. Last week, I taught a Robert Olen Butler story entitled “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot” and have been fascinated with Butler ever since. I’m reading his book From Where You Dream. It is basically a series of transcribed lectures he gave to a writing class, I don’t remember at which school. It is fascinating how he describes the writing moment. He says that if you think about writing in a rational, idea-driven fashion, the work will fall short of any artistic goals. Art, he says, is not born of ideas. I’ve been telling my students a version of this for a long time. I tell them not to think when they write, as counter-intuitive as that may feel. I tell them that writing is much more like dreaming than thinking, that the “self” that pays bills and buys food and mows the lawn and prepares taxes is not the same self that can dip into E.M. Forster’s creative state–a place from which a writer will uncover things normally beyond his reach. I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking I had ideas for stories. Especially when I was just beginning–I was always having ideas. Now, I’ve been writing consistently for thirteen years (I really only started writing at thirty) I rarely have ideas. All my early stories were ideas before art. My first novel (horrible, horrible book) was full of ideas and despite occasional bursts of good language, was a failure. My second novel broke the pattern a bit. I wrote two hundred pages on an idea. Then, when I got to page two hundred, I realized that I was going about it all wrong. I cut everything and started over, with no idea where I was going. I still believe in that book. I think I reached a core of honest yearning for my characters. I no longer mourn the fact that it never found a home. I am happy that I wrote it and that it is painful and joyful and concise in its uncovering of grief. My newest manuscript (anyone who has read this blog as seen my writing concerning the work) had no idea at all. It started with water. That was all. I feel that the work was as pure a piece of imagination as I could create. I did not think my way through the book. There are large parts of the book that I barely remember writing. It came in a trance, I suppose, a creative state in which my artistic self surprised my rational, everyday self. I have no clue if anyone will ever publish the book. That’s okay too. I’d love to see it in the world, but if it stays with me, my art, my private adventure, I am satisfied with the outcome. I’m gearing up to write. I do not have an idea. I have an image. That is all. My goal is to figure a way to write toward that image. Nothing more.

Time Away and Gearing Up

Keeping a blog is harder than I ever expected. My life off the screen has been hectic. We’ve been renovating the last two rooms of our old farmhouse in preparation for my father-in-law to join us. The rooms were once the ugliest rooms in our house. And considering the state of the house when we bought it, that’s saying something. Now, the rooms are two of the most beautiful. With the rooms nearly done, I hope to bring myself back to speed in this small descriptive account of my writing life. I suspect we will still be inordinately busy, but I hope to devote my newly freed up “building/renovating” time to my writing life. I haven’t written anything since I finished the manuscript of The Improbable Colony at the end of May. I’ve been sending the book on the rounds with agents that I think might be a good fit, but have had no success interesting anyone as of yet. Still, the best medicine for the apathetic response to one’s writing is to simply get back to doing more writing. So this is an attempt to kickstart that process. Anyone else trying to sell a book with little success?

The Story of a Saw

I’ve been absent from this blog for some time now. When I started the blog, I didn’t think writing a bit each week would be so hard. But as it turns out, I find the process difficult because it takes me away from exactly what I’m supposed to be blogging about. Namely: my life as a fiction writer. I started the blog as a way to “report” to the New Hampshire community after being awarded the New Hampshire Individual Artist Fellowship, and figured I come every week and update my massive readership on the novel I’ve been working on and which helped me secure the fellowship. A little jot here, another there, voila, I’m an official blogger. The problem is, I ran out of things to say about writing fiction that didn’t somehow detract from my ability to write fiction. During the semester, my writing life is pretty diminished. Between work, grading, home renovations, family, and the daily life of chores, when I sat down to write, I needed to focus on my manuscript. Hearing about that slog gets boring pretty quick. It goes like this: I worked on my book again today. I spent several hours fixing my crappy sentences and then had to overhaul an entire page for continuity problems. Then, I realized I’d accidently called the same character by two names. The work was tough, but in the end, I made the story stronger. It wasn’t exactly fun, it was rewarding in a strange sort of way. Reading that type of description of the writing life would be less than enlightening. Now that school is over, I hope to say more, report more, and shed more light on why I do what I do. But first, this:

 

My Miller's Falls reciprocating saw, broken beyond repair.

Yes, that is a reciprocating saw, more commonly referred to as a “saw’s all,” which is like calling all petroleum jelly “vaseline.” And yes that saw is flat out busted. In many ways, this saw has been a bigger part of my life than writing. It’s sad to say, but true, especially over the last few years as we’ve renovated our old farmhouse. Last week, I was busy cutting out some old, rotted supports from the last unrenovated section of the house and the saw got stuck somehow in a beam that didn’t look as though it ought to be that tough. A reciprocating saw works like a regular handsaw, back and forth rather than spinning like a skill saw, except that it is driven by a powerful mini-motor. The saw got stuck, as it has hundreds of times, and I applied pressure and the blade jammed more and the saw wrenched around in my hands something fierce. The next thing I knew, I was holding the back end of the saw, live wires exposed, and the body of the saw was still lodged firmly in the house. It seems that our home was fighting back. I unplugged the saw and pried the metal casing away from the source of its trouble. The blade had got so hot that it fuzed with a piece of wood and was quite hard to dislodge. 

So what? It’s just a saw right? Who cares? Isn’t this a blog about writing? Not today. Today, it is a story, or perhaps an obituary. I bought that saw in 1993 from Peavey Hardware, in Portsmouth New Hampshire–a hardware store for two hundred years. They had all sorts of hidden alcoves and whole floors of storage. They were small town, personal. They wrote all receipts by hand. They had a shelf next to the cash register they kept stocked with tools pulled from some deep dark corner. I was working at the Music Hall in Portsmouth back then (I still called myself a writer, but I never wrote anything) and we were putting a new roof vent on the stagehouse. The guy with the “saw’s all” didn’t show up and we needed one. I wasn’t making much money then, but I decided to bite the bullet and go to Peaveys, where I bought this saw. Miller’s Falls was a good brand, but they’d been out of business for years. I paid $149.00 for the saw and it very quickly became my favorite tool. I sound a bit sentimental about it, true enough, but why not? It was good quality, American made, reliable, bought from a store that no longer exists (and a type of store that no longer exists, either) and served me well. I used that saw like no other tool. I certainly got my money’s worth. 

About five years ago, we bought this old wreck of a farmhouse and set to work fixing it. Not a day went by that I didn’t use that saw for something. So, when I felt it come apart in my hands, it was like losing an old friend. So, that’s what this writer does when he’s not writing. He’s sawing stuff. That’s the real life of this writer. I used to have this glamorous idea of the writer’s life. I’d have a great desk. I’d sit there with a cup of coffee and marvel at how wonderful my writing life was and how easy the words flowed and how rewarding my work was and how important. The truth of the matter is far more mundane and much more real than that fantasy. I’m a father, a husband, a teacher. I struggle with making writing a centerpiece of my life, but I keep trying. It’s taken me years longer to find my writing self than I ever would have thought. I’ll be forty three this summer and have yet to publish anything beyond some short stories. I’ve written nothing, absolutely nothing as powerful as I believe I will, and yet I keep trying.

Over the past few years, I’ve been working on this manuscript and feel that I’m coming to an endpoint. It is good, I think. And yet the thing that mattered the most to me on this day was putting a picture of a saw on a webpage. It’s one of those concrete details that I tell my students they need so desperately in their fiction, a link to a character’s life. My broken Miller’s Falls reciprocating saw says more about me than most of my other possessions. I’m going to secure the saw in it’s original metal box and hang it near my desk next to my dear friend Jon Travis’s awesome painting of Robert Mitchum. Mitchum and Miller, inspiring this writer, drawing him back to the written work.

Oh, the process…

It has been a long time since I’ve posted here. I began my blog with the best of intentions. I would write every Friday as a report to the New Hampshire community on my State Council Fellowship. I would write about my creative process. I just realized that it has been over a month since I returned to this site. What in the world could be keeping me away so long? It hasn’t been because I’ve not wanted to write, but that my writing energies have been directed toward the manuscript of my novel, and not the “process” of finding reporting on my writing life. Process is a funny word with writers. We all have a process. When people go to see writers read, they ask, “What is your writing process?” When we talk to students about writing, we say that it is, “process” oriented. When we sit down to write, we work with drafts, and when we are struggling, we say it is part of the “process.” But there is no way to adequately define the process. When I say that my writing is process oriented, I think that is just code for “I don’t really know how I get from one place to another. I don’t really know how one draft is built on the bones of the last draft. I don’t really know how I suddenly have three hundred and thirty pages of a messy, first draft of a novel.”

Process. How’d I get from point A to point B? Process. How am I going to clean up the messy manuscript I’ve been working on for nearly four years? Process. 

In my last post, I described how I came to set my characters onto their raft in the middle of the a flooded world. My apocalyptic event. My Great Flood. Two people. Adam and Eve. Well, that’s the chapter that I’ve been working on for the last week. Part One. In fact, the main reason for my delayed blogging routine is directly related to the work I’ve been putting into the novel. After writing the last quarter of the manuscript long hand, I translated my writing to the computer and printed out the pages. It was a nice moment to see the pages stack up in the printer, but only a moment. After I saw the paper sitting there, warm from the printer cartridges, it hit me how much work was ahead of me. I’m not one for believing my first drafts are any good. For some people, maybe. For me, the first draft is far, far from finished. Like many writers, I’ve felt the draw of the energetic nascent draft. There is a power to the new creation, but not a lasting power. Plus, I think my eyes lie to my brain. They tell me sentences are sparkling, images clear and orderly, characters believable and fully developed, even when those things are far from the truth. Revision, the process, is all about slowing down. I’m forty-two now, and I think I might be finally getting that lesson burned into my consciousness. 

So I printed out the manuscript and read through the pages. Will it hold together? I don’t know. I have to trust the process. I always tell my students to risk something when they are writing. What should we risk? they often ask. Risk is taken on a per-writer basis, I answer. There is no one way to risk. Some writers might write something embarrassing about their families. Or themselves. They might write something honest that they promised a dying loved one they would never write. They might write mean, or gentle. They might write toward God, or away. They might decide to risk point of view, tell a story from across the gender or age divide. Or they might drop a reader down a rabbit hole and trust that the reader will follow. My manuscript is of the “rabbit hole” variety. I hope readers will follow. So, what about part one,  the part I’ve been working on?

I couldn’t believe how horrible it was. No, seriously. I teach writing, after all. I should be able to tell a story with some degree of proficiency. In the first part, thirty six pages, give or take, I stumbled across every writing problem I’ve ever struggled with my entire life. This is process. I’d like to think I’d grow into a more able, organic form of story telling, but I have not grown. If this work ever sees it through to the light of day, it will be because of work, plain and simple. Process. In the first thirty six pages, I used the word “was” one hundred sixty four times. I used the word “up” fifty eight times. I actually wrote this sentence: “He looked up at the sky.” This, to me, seems like writing 101. I saw the phrase “up at the sky” and laughed. What other direction would a person look to see the sky? There’s only one way, jack, and it’s up. These are the sorts of sentences I have to work against. Process. Now, I’d like to believe that part one of my manuscript is smoother. In fact, it’s pretty concise, shorn of any excess. I cut away all those sentences that sounded good for the sake of sounding good. I got rid of needless chatter and noise. I now only use the word “was” nine times. I refined what I thought was already refined. How did I do all this? Work. Work. Work. Avoided blogging. Stayed up way too late. Got up way too early. That’s why I’ve been away from this little web-thingy. I’ll try to do better. But I can’t make any promises. I’ve refined the first part of the book now. The shortest part. I only have three, maybe four more sections to go. Next time, I’ll be writing about part two. My two character from part one will be long gone. I’ll be about two hundred generations into the story, nearly two thousand years distant. How am I going to get there? Process…

Story of a Manuscript

Last week I began telling the story of the manuscript on which I’m working. I said that it all started with water. That’s sort of true, but it really begins even further back. In 1999 I took a poetry workshop with Mekeel McBride as one of my last classes as an M.A. candidate at the University of New Hampshire. As part of that class, we had to read books by contemporary poets and write “homage” poems in the style of, or inspired by the reading. It was a great learning tool; it allowed us to try out different forms and to reach outside our already somewhat ridged writing styles. The poet that had the greatest effect on me was Russell Edson. We read a collection of his work entitled The Tunnel and the experience of reading the poems certainly felt reminiscent of moving into a darkness. At first, I didn’t like his often bizarre, surrealist prose poems. I couldn’t tell what it was I was meant to see in his elliptical sentences stocked with gorillas, taxis that turned into walls of butterflies, and men who become stones. But I trusted the teacher; she wouldn’t have pointlessly assigned Edson.

The Tunnel

By the middle of the collection, I began to enjoy entering Edson-ville. His nightmarishly conceived little worlds grew increasingly soothing, and entry into his vast imagination proved a worthwhile exploration not only of the shape of words and sounds, but also of imagination and perception of our own culture and civilization. When it came time to write my homage, I was forced to look at ordinary things in new ways, to see the fantastic in the everyday. For me, it all came down to numbers. My poem (I am a serviceable poet at best, so I won’t be sharing the poem here) attempted to recreate a society that counted everything. In its first draft, it seemed a terrifying place to imagine—fascistically organized. But the more I wrote, the less terrifying it seemed. Indeed, the inhabitants of my poem took comfort in their counting and were only undone by the wind, which they could find no way to classify or codify. It became a dark utopia, one that I enjoyed pondering.

I enjoyed thinking about it so much that I wrote a short story entitled “17 Historical Documents” that chronicled this civilization in more detail. It was fun to write and to think about and for a long time I thought that would be the end of the story. I tried to interest a few literary reviews in the work, but never had any luck. The society of numerologists was conceptually fun. I think, however, that it was missing a key ingredient to make it a successful short story: context. I think people who read the story thought, “Well, that is a strange land…I wonder how they got that way.” I suppose I wondered how they got that way, too. At the time I was writing the story, I was writing my first novel, and that occupied most of my writing and revising life. After several years of work and rejection on that book (understandable rejection, mind you—the book just wasn’t that good), I returned to short stories, but my attention had been drawn back to realism and away from fantastical stories. “17 Historical Documents” languished.

I’ll fast forward a bit through my next bout of novel writing. I wrote Ghost Light as I worked on my MFA at Bennington College. I wrote a few stories there as well, but the novel took precedence. In December of 2004, the Asian Tsunami struck most of the countries that border the Indian Ocean. The destruction was horrific. I had two friends in Thailand at the time, and they were near some of the worst devastation. Perhaps because of the news coverage, or because the fate of my friends was uncertain, or because of my common bond to humanity and the sinking feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that evolves around natural disasters far away, I began thinking much of water. I didn’t think at the time: “I know, I’ll write a story about the Tsunami!” I never seem to know exactly what I’ll be writing about. The creative mystery isn’t something I normally dissect, but looking back on it now, it is easy to see that I began thinking in terms of a great, global flooding—a noveau forty days and nights—and apocalyptic destruction. At the same time, I was reading Walt Whitman, and it is nearly impossible to remain apocalyptic while reading Whitman. There’s a line in “Song of Myself” that reads: “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.” Whitman is talking about death there, but it really fits about every situation. So my thoughts of the apocalypse were tempered by the thought that nothing collapses. It wasn’t exactly optimistic, but it wasn’t sheer dread, either.

In January of 2004, I went to Bennington for my bi-yearly MFA residency. It was a bitterly cold ten days in Vermont. Although the residencies weren’t really geared toward allowing any writing time, I forced myself to spend a bit of time with my work during the morning hours, before the day of lectures and workshops began. Not really wanting to work on my novel, I went into town and bought myself a nice blank notebook at the local bookstore in hopes that it would spark some new stories (new notebooks are such beacons of hope!). And then, with the thoughts of Whitman and the Tsunami and Noah and Floods and Beginnings and Endings floating in my head, I wrote. There, in my tiny little dorm room on the Bennington College campus, I set a man down on a raft. A pretty modest beginning for a novel I suspect, and not the first nor the last book that will start with a man on a raft. Then, as he was floating, he saw a woman floating in the distance. Endings. Beginnings. Man. Woman. Adam. Eve. Creation. All going onward and outward, refusing to collapse. Suddenly, without even meaning to, I’d begun a new novel. It would be nearly five years before I found my way to a finished manuscript.

How I got from floating people to my dark-utopian-number-obsessed society is another story, for another post. 

Writing Thoughts for the Week (using the popular Facebook “25” format):

1. Transcribing longhand to the computer is tougher than one might expect. 

2. I received five rejections in the last week, four on one day.

3. I don’t believe that all literary reviews treat all submissions the same.

4. Several of my rejections came mere days after sending out the story, which I find fishy.

5. Those who staff the literary reviews and journals have a tough job, admittedly.

6. In my fiction class this week, we discussed Raymond Carver’s beautiful short story, “A Small Good Thing.” My students had thoughtful reactions to the work. Next week, we are reading Joyce Carol Oates. If they thought Carver was dark, wait till they walk into the story-world of “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been.”

7. I’m have about thirty-five more pages of my longhand manuscript to transcribe before I can say I have a typed first draft of the novel on which I’ve been working.

8. There are four parts to the novel. The first three are fairly “clean”—they need work, but they are readable and have little by way of continuity issues.

9. Part four needs lots and lots of heavy lifting. It’s taken me so long to write this section, that the opening feels mightily disconnected from the closing. All part of the process.

10. Once I clean up the fourth part, attach it to the first three, I will have something workable.

11. Once all four parts are together, a new round of serious revisions will be in order. This novel depends of interlocking images and themes.

12. I’ll be reading the first eight pages of this manuscript next month at River Run Bookstore. For more information about the reading, please check the “News” section of my site.

13. I am now reading The Guermantes Way, volume three of Marcel Proust’s massive novel, In Search of Lost Time. Although it is tough reading—slow reading—reading that requires a lot of patience—I am drawn to it and have vowed to finish the novel. There is no other author that I can think of that can so fully explore the smallest moments, who can so imbue the insignificant with purpose. In fact, I don’t think there are any really insignificant moments in Proust, not so far.

14. I’ve struggled to write this week—though I have written much. I’ve been in transcription mode and it’s hard to convince myself that I am writing. But my story is growing, so I must be doing something right….

15. It is very difficult to let story rejections go. All I can do it send the stories out again. All I can do is present myself at the table and believe that my best writing is ahead of me, not behind me. I talk about this Walt Whitman quote all the time: “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.” He is talking about death, but it applies to nearly everything. Everything is extending forward, never backward. It is easy to forget how much effort the writing life requires. It is hard to remember that I must move forward, and that persistence is key.

16. Next week, my daughter turns ten. Tonight, we are going to the town father/daughter dance. I’ve been reading to her class, and next week I’ll begin doing writing exercises.

17. I’ve just found out that I won’t be teaching a fiction class this summer. They decided against offering the class. That is a paycheck that I will miss. But, on the other hand, I will have more time to write, to work on the house, to do silly summer things with Grace, to watch the Tour de France, to read, to take advantage of my non-tenure track position. I don’t have security, and little hope for advancement, but I do get crazy vacation months. I think I can have a polished version of my novel by the end of July.

18. Once, years ago, an agent believed in my first novel enough to take me on as a client. Although she couldn’t find a buyer (Thankfully! The novel is horrible…) and we parted ways, she is willing to look at the new book, once I have a polished draft.

19. My goal is to finish this book, get it to this agent, and see what happens. The novel is strange enough that I think someone might be interested.

20. I know what you are thinking: Clark, the first chapter of this novel is what won you the artist’s fellowship… what in the world is it about?

21. Well, I can’t really tell you…other than to say that it takes place over six thousand years and is concerned with humankind’s renaissance.

22. Is it science fiction?

23. I wouldn’t call it that…but I don’t mind the label. I think of it more as creation myth. Or fabulistic story-telling.

24. Oooo… tell us more…

25. It all started with water….(to be continued next week). 

 

Weights Lifted, Weights Lowered

First,  a bit of business. I’ve been telling people that I’ve started a website as a way to report to the New Hampshire community on the Artist’s Fellowship I was awarded. I tell them that I’m doing my best to chronicle my writing life, the creative process, and to reveal a bit of the inner workings of a regular, fiction writing Joe in the midst of creating. That’s not the problem. The problem is that people then ask me if I’ve started a “blog.” And I reluctantly have to admit that yes, I have started a blog. Then I feel the need to quality that statement with a quick acknowledgement that the word “blog” is an ugly, flat, toad-like word (and I mean no disrespect to actual toads, whom I cherish with all my amphibian-loving heart). Yes, I say, I am blogging, but I hate the word and wish we could call them something else. There’s an old Simpson’s episode in which Lisa says, “A rose by any other name would swell as sweet…” and Bart says, “Not if you called ‘em stench-blossoms.” And that’s what the word blog is to me. A stench-blossom. How did we get locked into using such a utilitarian word to describe the sheer explosion of creativity that the World Wide InterWeb affords? Creative people who never knew they were creative are now online writing, posting photos, diving deeply into the creative state (you know, the state that E.M. Forster says will allow an artist to “draw up something normally beyond his reach.”) and all we can come up with is a condensation of Web-log? Well, I suppose I have to be the change I seek… so I pledge to do my best to usher in a new word for blogging. For now, I propose Zapping. Why? Because it’s snappy. It somehow relates to the speed of the InterWeb’s informative flow, so I’m going to go with it. To the right of the weekly post, you will see a new link section entitled Zaproll. There, I will link this blog…er… I mean Zap, to other Zappers out there. Will you help me Zap a more creative term into existence? And if you have a better suggestion, I’m open for discussion on the subject. 

Now, on with the regularly scheduled blog…I mean… Zap. This week was a strange week for me as a writer. I’m back to teaching, so my energies are spread thinner. It is easy to feel the surge of the creative state when one is on break from class, but harder to sustain when class plans beckon, and student papers loom. Still, I’m grateful for my job. Two weeks ago, I saw a crew of cold, presumably grumpy, workers on a roof in bitter cold weather, tearing off the old shingles, and applying new. They had to shovel the snow off the roof first. When I think of that job, and then ponder my job, I know I have nothing to complain about. It’s been so cold here that I’ve not even been working on the renovations of my house. Of course, last week, I spend a good deal of time fighting the ice dam on my roof, and then addressing the heat loss problem, but still, when I go to work, I am in a relatively warm office, and talk to good students with varying degrees of enthusiasm for the courses I teach. And then there were family concerns, service work, pets to take to the vet…blah, blah, blah. The daily life of chores shocks me out of the creative cosmos and into reality constantly. I’ve allowed it to take me away from writing for months at a time because when the important stuff of life calls, what chance does writing fiction have? What chance should it have? Indeed, in an economy like ours, at this point in time, why should I be practicing the craft of fiction in the first place? Again, these are thoughts that swallow many writers and drive them from the page. I don’t have the answers necessarily, but I do know that when I am reading a good, moving piece of fiction, I am enriched by the experience differently than I am by hard physical labor, or by teaching, or by viewing a painting, or listening to carefully crafted music. The work of the fiction writer does not provide easily quantifiable results. John Gardner once wrote, in his book, “On Becoming a Novelist” that writing is like a yoga, or practice, and that the benefits are mostly spiritual in nature (not monetary) and that for those truly called to the profession, those results are enough. And for me, the practice of fiction this week, was powerful. As I noted in another post, I’ve been completing a novel manuscript longhand. On Tuesday, early in the day, before I went to school, I came to the end of the story. I felt it in my fingers as I started writing that day, felt it in my palm, the way the pen nestled there. I knew that I was coming to the end, and that if I focused, if I was able to shut out the noise of my head telling me that what I was doing wouldn’t amount to much, that what I was doing wasn’t work, that what I was doing was a massive waste of time, that I could bring my story to a close within a few pages. And since I was at my table, since the pen was in my hand, and my daily life of chores was cast aside for just a few hours, the muse did visit, and I did find my way to the last sentence. Of course, this is only a first draft, and first drafts for me are miles away from final drafts, but I felt the weight of drafting lift—the sheer imaginative jolt of filling up blank pages—and the weight of revision descend. Since then, I’ve been translating my writing into the computer. All week, the work of fiction has sustained me even though life goes on around me and my responsibilities to my family and my friends and my job are unchanged. I make the time to be at the table, and the energy of the creative state makes time for me. The first draft is done. Now, it is time to begin.