Category: Blog

Slow Growth

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Agents often seem to admonish writers to be patient.

It’s one of their core themes of advice to aspiring writers and, I feel sure, to the authors they’ve signed to work with. The industry moves slowly, they say. Give them time to work.

This advice is, naturally, also self-serving. It’s a nice way of saying “don’t bug me.” Fair enough. Agents and editors juggle a lot of balls and reading takes time.

What they don’t think about, it seems to me, is that we’ve already exercised tremendous patience.

If slow and steady wins the race, then the writers are trailing over the finish line well after the tortoise is in the club bar celebrating. Writing is an incremental craft. It’s like building stalagmites with the water of your soul. You flood the page with words and hope a few stick. Day by day, you watch the wordcount gradually increase. Then you see something formed wrong and you knock off a chunk, and let the words accrete again.

Once your pillar of salts has grown large enough and seems done, you polish and carve. It feels like you’re using your fingernails to do it.

Then, after all of those hours alone with your creation, you package it up and send it out into the world, to find out if anyone else thinks it’s neat enough to pay you for it.

And they tell you to learn patience.

All you can do in the end, really, is not bug them.

Flower Arranging Fail

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This is kind of a “fat guy in a little coat” joke of a bouquet.

(See the clip from Tommy Boy, if you don’t know what I mean.)

But I love how daffodils look in this blue vase. How was I to know the blooms at the new house would be way too short for my favorite daffy vase? I suppose I could have predicted it, since the length of the flower stem from a bulb plant is directly proportional to the amount of time it’s been frozen. Thus in Laramie we had “leggy” tulips; in Santa Fe, the daffys are short.

These are, however, the first daffodils of the season and thus to be celebrated.

And, yes, I’ll go dig out another vase for them. The color contrast won’t be as good, but they won’t look quite so swallowed up. One has to trade off, now and again, to get the best possible result.

Writers often debate balancing dialogue with narrative, the advantages and disadvantages of first person vs. third. Everyone wants to find the magic formula. Over time, one discovers that there’s no such thing. There are no rules, only general guidelines. And even those guidelines can lead you astray.

Unpublished writers tend to be much harsher critics as contest judges than published ones are. They’re much more likely to cite a raft of “thou shalt nots” and rank a manuscript low if commit the sin of transgression. Published writers more often focus on the story itself, and whether it works. They’re more likely to understand that you’re really going for the yellow and blue contrast. They might point out the vase is too large, but if the whole thing is pretty, who cares?

Sometimes, it makes the joke.

Flourishing

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It’s amazing the results you can get, when you give something what it needs.

The trick is, figuring out what that is.

This little Madagascar Palm is our Exhibit A for flourishing in our new environment. The picture on the left is one I took this morning and the one on the right was from last summer. Yes, I did repot it into a much bigger planter (which was free with Bunny Bucks from Jackalope – woo hoo! love this town!), but the palm demanded repotting within a few weeks of our moving here, it was growing so large, so fast.

I should also mention that the picture on the right is pretty much how that palm looked for something like 15 years. I kid you not. In the early years of our relationship, when we had practically no money, David and I would take road trips for spring break. We’d head to the desert Southwest to get as warm as possible as quickly as possible. Often we’d end up somewhere in Nevada where the casinos provided very cheap lodging. (Harrah’s in Laughlin for $19 per night – ah, sweet nostalgia.)

We would also buy cactus.

It sounds funny now. I don’t know why we liked to buy cactus. Except that they were unusual plants that we didn’t see in Laramie. And they were inexpensive and fun. We bought quite a few over the years and most died. The Madagascar Palm hung on, but now I suspect it was kind of in stasis. The palm version of cryogenic freezing, in hopes of being awakened in a better future.

Several people made interesting comments on my last post, about changing the physicality of writing when you get stuck.

Keena said she does as Marin suggested, and actually does move to paper and writing out longhand. Marin mentioned a writer who always writes longhand because it slows him down, causing him to be more careful. This is a diametrically opposite approach to the “fast draft” or “shitty first draft” method that many writers like to use today.

I suppose the point is that sometimes you have to mix it up. Try new things and see how they work.

You never know what might make you really flourish.

It’s Not Easy Deleting

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Yesterday I started off my writing day by deleting all but nine of the words I’d written the day before.

Now, this isn’t as bad as it sounds, since I’d only written 339 words the day before. Each one extracted like a bad tooth and laboriously typed. Over something like two hours. It just was not working.

There are two schools of thought on what this kind of wall means: either you’ve taken a wrong turn and the work is telling you by resisting or that you’re up against something really important and you have to punch through to the other side.

There lies the conundrum.

How do you know how long to keep chipping at the wall, looking for that little glimpse of Shangri-La on the other side? At some point you’re no longer making progress, you’re just banging your head against a brick wall and the only thing chipping is your skull.

Eventually I gave up at my pitiful 339 words. After all, I do have a day job. I looked at it the next morning and couldn’t bear to try to make that scene work any more. Made my head hurt just to look at it. So I deleted everything up to the previous scene. Kalayna Price, who’s a supportive friend, as well as a terrific writer, said she hoped that the nine words I saved were at least really good ones. (I, of course, had to tweet my ignominious beginning.) It’s a nice thought, but I don’t know — they must have been incidental edits to the previous scene.

This is a bit of a cheat, to delete before I officially start for the day. I figure my wordcount on a daily and weekly basis. (Have I ever mentioned I love spreadsheets?) At the start of my writing day, I put in the current wordcount of my manuscript. Then, as I write, I can watch the wordcount go up until I reach my target. This is why drafting can be more rewarding than editing — I hate negative wordcounts. So I deleted before I began, so I wouldn’t have to overcome the negative 330 to make my daily goal. It’ll show up in the weekly goal, but there it is.

Marin, who has a knitting blog that’s actually about knitting today, because she made this super-cool alligator sweater, responded that knitters call what I’d done “frogging.” Why? Because you rip-it, rip-it, rip-it.

Those knitters are a wild and crazy crowd, I tell you.

But I love this analogy, the physicality of it. I don’t knit, but I do quilt. I know that moment when you look at the thing in your hands and you realize that it’s gone wrong. You made a mistake a ways back and the only way to get to it is to rip out everything from that point forward. At least in writing, thanks to the blessings of word processing, you can cut the scene and stick it in a little folder, just in case.

(And, every once in a while, you get to raid the outtakes and pop them back into the document, which makes the wordcount zoom up in a tremendously gratifying way. Okay – it’s not an exciting lifestyle.)

When a thing is physical, when you can look at the rows of loops and stitches, you can see where the error is. With a novel that arguably exists only in your head, it’s harder to discern where the mistake lies. Or even that it really is a mistake.

At some point, you just have to go with your gut.

And hit the frogging with as much grace as you can muster.

Flyover

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LaTessa commented on my Spring Snow post that she’d recently flown over New Mexico — on her way from Memphis to Vegas.

(Of course, her main point was that she couldn’t figure out what all the white stuff on the ground was, but we won’t go there. The woman is stressed and suffers from various delusions. We all just look the other way.)

But I think a lot of people fly over northern New Mexico. The contrails at sunset are spectacular. This is a bit like noting that increased pollution makes sunsets more dramatic, and that a nuclear blast would REALLY liven up the skies. It makes for a happier life to just enjoy the pretty. Whether the condensation trails from airplanes have a serious impact on global climate change is just one more thing I can’t think about. I’m already scrutinizing all of my plastics to see if the (frequently illegible) number on the bottom makes it recyclable or not.

It makes sense, though that there are so many planes flying over our piece of the world — we are on a direct route to Las Vegas and most of southern California, as well as Mexico to all points northerly. There’s a phrase, even – “the flyover states” – coined by the people who fly from, say, New York City to Los Angeles. Oh yes, it’s a a term of contempt, lumping together all the people who don’t live in the major, urban coastal cities and who therefore develop unsophisticated ideas.

It doesn’t help that there are a lot of people in those states with poorly reasoned ideas. Not that there aren’t a few in those coastal, urban centers, too.

It’s easy to fly over and forget what the experience on the ground is like. We forget that other people’s lives aren’t exactly like our own. We might know it, in our heads, but our hearts forget. We get caught up in the tumult of our own lives, the daily concerns, sorting the plastic recyclables, admire the sunset and hope the contrails aren’t really such a bad thing.

Every once in a while, we notice that someone else has snow.

Emerging Writers

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I saw yesterday that my alma mater is holding a special event celebrating emerging writers in the creative writing MFA program.

This is likely code for “these are three people who’ll be graduating in May and trying to hack it in the real world, so let’s give ’em a bit of a boost.”

The thing is — and I know I read and watch way too much sci fi, so this could be just me — the term “emerging writer” always sounds vaguely insectile to me. Kind like pod-people covered in weird mucus-stuff. I know I’m likely meant to envision the beautiful butterfly, but I tend to fret about the cocoon itself. If a writer “emerges,” where were they before that?

Sealed in muck, wrapped in a protective package?

Maybe they have a point.

The word “emerge” comes from the root mergere, which meant to dip, sink or dive. So “emerge” originally meant (according to the Oxford English Dictionary, my bible in all things etymological, if not entomological) “to rise by virtue of buoyancy from or out of a liquid.”

See? There we are, right back in the mucus, the nutrient bath. I suppose there could be something to the metaphor. Many writers talk about the act of writing being like swimming. Annie Dillard said that it’s like diving underwater and not knowing where your head will pop up. But that idea implies that the diving and emerging is a regular event, part of a writer’s daily life. In that scenario, a writer would emerge by virtue of some unspecified form of buoyancy, only to deliberately dive again.

Which makes sense to me.

It’s one of the great truths of being a writer that you are never there. You never get to dry your wing membranes and fly off to giddily pollinate flowers. Which is probably a good thing, since a butterfly’s life is cruelly brief.

Only by diving back down again, can we find the buoyancy to emerge, over and over.

Ides and Flowers

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The Ides of March at least produced the first blossom of Spring.

I know. I know. It’s one flower component of an an entire hyacinth. But, hey, the journey of 10,000 leagues begins with that single step, right?

Besides, I’m tickled to have actual flowers by mid-March.

It’s long been the tradition of my Irish-Catholic family to plant sweet-peas on St. Patrick’s Day. We soak them in buttermilk the night before. Living in Laramie for over twenty years disabused me of that notion. I used to try for Easter instead. Then I just gave up on a date and waited for the ground to thaw.

But it’s supposed to hit the 60s tomorrow. I think I’ll buy some seeds and buttermilk this evening, along with the eggs and Earl Grey on the list. Work is quiet, so I’ll take a little time to plant my seeds. I don’t know how well sweet peas will do here, but it’s worth the experiment to find out.

I’m a believer in planting seeds. In the incremental approach. I’m not the first gardener to note that planting seeds is an act of supreme faith, in the universe, in the rhythm of nature. I’m not the first writer to go about putting down words little by little. Sometimes you have no idea what exactly is coming next in the story, but you take the seeds that fall into your hand and lay them into the fertile soil with love and precision.

By the end, you hope you’ll have something beautiful.

Spring Snow

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We left the palm trees and hot sunshine of Tucson and came home to a wet Spring snowstorm.

We didn’t hit snow until north of Albuquerque, but then it hit us with a vengeance, making us crawl home. Someone in Santa Fe tweeted that it had been tea on the patio sunny, then a rainstorm, then all the snow. The forecasters had said snow after midnight, but this hit well before sunset.

Springtime in the Rockies!

The Spring storms are hard on the wildlife, too. A little bird, who had clearly gotten far too wet, pressed up on our threshold, savoring the warmth from our glass door. David captured it and we put it in a box last night to warm up. Now that the sun is warming and the snow shriveling before it, I set it loose to join its brethren at the seed-fest out front.

It looks rumpled enough that I can tell it from the others, but it should be okay.

Yesterday, before we hit the road, we stopped at Starbucks for breakfast. In Tucson there are these roving packs of bikers. The bicycle kind, not the motorcycle kind. They wear matching outfits, with the tight shorts, windbreakers and helmets. They zoom about the city in fleet groups and stop at Starbucks to sit in the sun and treat themselves.

There were several ladies of this ilk waiting for their lattes as we were, of that indistinguishable badly preserved 50s/well preserved 60s age. A very young girl also waited. She was maybe 18. I would have guessed younger, but she wore a short black satin skirt, a black satin top with big rhinestones and very high heels. Heading to a job at a nearby casino perhaps. Not your usual Sunday-morning garb. She looked gorgeous, with the long slim legs only teenage girls seem to have. Her pretty face smiled sweet and open.

The women glared at her and I saw her physically flinch and look away, some of her happiness dimmed. I wondered if she even understood what their problem was. She didn’t seem to notice the weathered columns of their thighs, pressed into wrinkles by the tight Lycra. I wanted to tell the ladies to stuff their nasty looks, to give the girl a break.

Let her enjoy her Spring, I wanted to say. There’s plenty of Winter to go around. We should celebrate the sunshine wherever we find it.

Sunshine, Beer and Palm Trees

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So, when I was feeling sad, the last couple of days, my stalwart friends suggested that it was okay for me to take a little time. Not to worry about wordcount. Hot baths, candles, wine and reading were suggested.

The fact that so many people took time to offer me ideas to soothe myself meant more than any steps I might take.

I mentioned that I was off to Tucson to see my mom. And for sunshine, beer and palm trees. So, here you are.

It’s amazing what some good conversation, fun meals and hanging out can do to improve your frame of mind.

Not to mention sunshine, beer and palm trees. My new mantra.

Frogs in My Driveway

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It’s been a funny weather year for everyone.

Certainly a wet one. It’s hard to say, after all the spectacular drought if all the snow and rain is unusual, or just not drought.

One of my Facebook friends, a distinguished Southern gentleman I work with, commented yesterday that they’ve had so much rain that he had frogs in his driveway. I said that sounded like a metaphor for something. He replied that he’d be proud for me to put it in my blog.

Someone else pointed out that it’s a toad, not a frog. He said he could live with that, too.

Yesterday ended up being a sad day. I wrote about Karol, as I really wanted to do, and then people replied. It was wonderful and gratifying, to see the various comments and read the emails. But it made each new contact freshened the grief. I suppose that’s good, the catharsis of it. At times, though, I felt like I was drowning.

I find deaths and funerals to elicit strange reactions from people. In the first place, people in general don’t know how to deal with grief. No one knows what to say to the ones grieving most. Largely because there’s nothing to say. And then there’s a level of competition, of who knew the person best, who loved her most, who’s the most affected.

For me, Karol was far from being a central part of my life. There was a time we were in almost daily contact, but that had long-since changed. And yet, her disappearance from the world feels pivotal to me. I’m sure my issues play in, my own mortality, facing the ways in which that very fun and fertile era is over.

That’s how it is for all of us. A death is rarely about the person who died; it becomes about the people left behind. After all, the person who died doesn’t care about any of it.

Not so far as we know, anyway.

Perhaps that’s why elegies always become autobiographies. People stand up at memorials and funerals to speak about the dead and almost always spend the whole time talking about themselves. They don’t intend it that way, but the thoughts always wend towards how that person made them feel.

Nothing wrong with that, really.

Rain is just rain. It falls without reason, without emotion. We are the ones who assign meaning to it.

We’re the ones who notice there are now frogs in the driveway.