A Fork on the Page

Strangeness. Have you ever been writing a story you know you're making progress on and keep getting nagged with solid ideas for another story? Sometimes this happens to me when I'm stuck in the primary story or I'm scared (perhaps not even admitting the fear to myself) where to go next, so it's easier to pursue another (underdeveloped) story where everything is still in the infatuation stage of perfection. That make sense to me.

This doesn't.

At present I'm working through a fun, extended scene of a first date where romantic magic & mischief intertwine -- and I'm being cascaded with whole swaths of dialogue & character insights & interesting settings from a (probable) short story. It's maddening, because it keeps drawing me away from my primary. It's also maddening because -- forgive my self-confidence here -- a lot of these distractions are pretty solid and some of it's quite good.

I have too many distractions from writing as it is. Getting distracted by my own imagination is unbearable!

Beautiful Sentences: Haunting Power

Ran into some unexpectedly powerful sentences (and literary criticism – or is it evaluation?) while listening to a bio of Nobel-Prize winner Pearl Buck.

Buck grew up as a Presbyterian missionary’s kid in China before the Boxer Rebellion, & devoured Dickens especially, reading his entire ouevre every year for a decade:

“As a prospective writer herself, she responded avidly to the haunting power of an imagination that accesses horrors lurking deep beyond the reach of the conscious mind through symbolic imagery and drama, gluing the narrative together on the surface with the bland sentimentality that soothes and reassures readers. The split between dream-like purity and contaminated reality … would become a crucial part of the implicit bargain she too would make later with her American public.”

-Hilary Spurling, Pearl Buck in China

There’s also a lovely sentence describing the effects of famine:
“Gaunt pregnant women gnawed from within” that grabbed me by its accuracy and its horror.

Christmas Choices: Writing Books

If you're writing fiction, then put these titles by Charles Baxter on your Christmas list, as they're invaluably insightful:

• The Art of Subtext
• Burning Down the House

Both are available at Graywolf Press, which has an impressive library of creative writing choices.

Suggestions I've made in the past include:

• Writing Resources 101

Writing Tips: New Yorker's Book Bench

The New Yorker, that bastion of the short story, always interviews the writer who wrote that week’s story in their Book Bench column. Whether or not you’ve heard of the writer, or like their story, they often have great insights into the writing process. For instance, Ben Marcus shared these gems:

On Setting

I first used Ohio as a setting because I hadn’t been there and knew almost nothing about it. It seemed like a perfectly plausible place to live, and it kept me from relying too much on autobiographical details, which would, I was sure, lure me into terrible spasms of sentimentality. I felt that I needed to avoid this at all costs, so I leaned on places totally removed from my experience. I prefer using personal experience that is emotional—feelings I’ve had, feelings I’m afraid of having—rather than experience that is specific to geography. Denver gets this treatment, too. “Write what you don’t yet know” is maybe the motto. I think the vacuum I sense around a place I haven’t been, like Cleveland (I guess I’ve been in the airport), is helpful to me, absolving me from being a tour guide, letting me focus on the story itself.

On Using Real Life

I’ve noticed how flashbacks (childhood causes, memories, back story, etc.) can take the sting out of a story, trading drama for information, mystery for facts.

Character Tension

The reader, by having access to Paul’s thoughts, the little crimes of his mind, has much more information than Paul’s parents and sister. But these characters, in turn, have information about Paul’s past that the reader doesn’t have. Maybe a tension becomes possible because of this, everybody knowing something different, no one on the same footing?

Be sure to bookmark Book Bench for regular visits. There’s always something interesting going on.

Characterization: Radical Uncertainty

The Guardian (of the UK) has consistently been the best literary spot on the web for the devoted reader for about 10 years now. Apparently, they're also sponsoring Master Classes on writing fiction.

They've got a bunch of short, tantalizing articles on "Creating Suspense," "POV," and this on "Characterization" that I quite liked:

“At its simplest, its barest, characterisation is about a writer's grasp of what a human being is. When we set out to write, we do not do so out of a sense of certainty but out of a kind of radical uncertainty. We do not set out saying: "The world is like this." But asking: "How is the world?" In creating characters we are posing to ourselves large, honest questions about our nature and the nature of those about us. Our answers are the characters themselves, those talking spirits we conjure up by a kind of organised dreaming.”

Insight: "A Way of Talking"

I always go out of my way to read arts criticism (from the usual suspects: The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, anything by Joseph Epstein, Christopher Hitchens, & James Wood) because often the insights expressed, no matter the art form, are startling adaptable to my writing.

So in the same issue of the New Yorker (August 1, 2011) where music critic Alex Ross penned the envy-inducing phrase "sonic decor" in regards to the composer Bruckner, David Denby had this great comparison between some classics and today that seemed especially true:

“In the remarriage classics (The Awful Truth, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday), the former partners have a way of talking and being with each other that they don’t have – and couldn’t possibly have – with anyone else. That sophisticated metaphor for sexual compatibility made for uniquely satisfying romantic comedy. But Crazy, Stupid, Love holds to the boring modern convention that good people are inarticulate, and Cal and Emily mainly stumble around trying to fill the silence.”

Someday, you're likely to see a couple I write getting back together, foreshadowed by a magnetic language only they can speak.

Words to Live By: Creating Your Future

"Goals are the way we time travel into the future that we want. You can drift, or set goals and get to where you want to be." -Kennon Sheldon, professor of psychological sciences, University of Missouri-Columbia.

So what type of future do you want to live in every day?

If it's writing related, then it will include writing daily, creating an adequate support group for your efforts (local or via the internet), sources of inspiration, moving out of your comfort zone to attend local author visits and writing conferences, reading author interviews for tips, and finding internet sources for regular feedings.

Your Writing: Give It a Chance to Exist

If there isn't a reader, the text doesn't exist: that's the premise of reader-response criticism. It's fun to think of all the books in the world that don't exist because I haven't read them, starting with most of the books on the list "100 Greatest Non-Fiction Titles." (Thanks, Kent!)

But what about your text? Is what you've written being given existence by others? There are several stages at which existence can be thwarted.

For those of us who have trouble transmitting the text from our brains to the page, a group of other committed writers may help. You know they're going to ask you about your project; it becomes easier to work on it than it is to dodge the questions. It also helps to know that you have an immediate audience. Granted, your text at this point is still in the embryonic stage, but it does exist because what you've written has been read by other eyes.

Others of us abort our text at the publication stage. You've written something, your writers' group has helped nurture it, but you haven't delivered. Publication can be scary. You have to accept that the editors might hate your child and throw it back at you. You have to give your baby a chance to live.

If there isn't a reader, the text doesn't exist. How are you giving your writing a chance to exist in the world?

Photo Credit: My amazingly intelligent niece at four months

Appendix A: Justifying the Grotesque

In her essay "The Fiction Writer and His Country," Flannery O'Connor writes this:

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume it does not, then you have to mke your vision apparent by shock--to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures.

• Do you think O'Connor's is an effective means of communicating truth?
• Is there a chance for the Christian writer to become addicted to the "distortions" and no longer feel repulsed by them?

Just food for thought, folks!

Plot & Structure . . . and Movies?

Yesterday I completed James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure, a marvelous “how-to” book for those wanting accessible, appliable points to their fiction. I’m sure I wouldn’t have reaped so bountiful a harvest without being several thousand words into a long writing project. The book’s allowed me to immediately apply his points, make corrections to my underlying story structure, deepen my characters and their challenges, as well as think through muddy areas of subplot. Plus, at key points, he differentiates between commercial and literary choices while always insisting both can be used, so that’s helpful.

Bell also does a great job of using many concrete examples with each point, so that they’re easily grasped. However, he also falls prey to the same tendency most writing “how-to” books get mired in today.

Writing Books or . . ?

There’s a tendency in today’s writing books to reference movies as examples instead of … you know, books, the art form you’re supposed to be wanting to learn how to write. Bell only references movies as examples 40-45% of the time, but I’ve read others that seem to go higher than 60%. (And I’m not trying to single this book out as the primary culprit. It is published by Writer’s Digest, so we’re assuming MFA’s won’t be picking it up anytime soon.) Still, it’s part of a larger, pungent trend.

At no point does Bell reference Tolstoy, Flaubert, Henry James, or Faulkner. There is 1 Hemingway, 1 Dostoyevsky, 1 Cervantes, Mehlville, and perhaps a few Dickens. There are lots of Stephen King and Dean Koontz and Catcher in the Rye illustrations. There are also innumerable Casablanca, Godfather, High Noon and any number of other movies great and small.

To use a strained analogy, if you were reading a book on composing symphonic music, and the author kept referring you to TV theme songs and movie scores by John Williams, without once mentioning Beethoven, Bach, or Mozart, wouldn’t you find that . . . unsettling? Might you think it was time to find another book? Yet that mindset is de rigueur for most writing how-to books.

Are Writers Stupid?

Is this another sign of the dumbing down of our society—that most readers of these books wouldn’t know examples from the classics? (If you don’t understand why the historic writing greats are considered great, even if you disagree, how can you hope to make your mark?) Or is there an assumption that most writers don’t want to read? Or are “how-to” writers just lazy?

What’s also handily overlooked with these points is that novel-writing is almost completely a single person’s passion transformed into art, while films are entirely collaborative. Screenplays are almost entirely dialogue in 3 acts that rarely eclipse 120 pages. They are often rewritten during shooting by the writer, director, actors and any number of others. Yes, movies examples can certainly work as story examples, but I can never flush genius-crank Alan Moore’s evaluation out of my mind either; he says movies might be only the 7^th most vibrant art form ever created. (So are we infatuated with 4-color inferiority?)

No Confidence in the Written Word?

I’m not saying film is not an art form or even unworthy of comparison at points. I am insisting of all the art forms, writing has the most examples since it is the oldest extant art form. So why are film examples even necessary in these types of books?

Richard Russo on Writing

Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo (Empire Falls) visited St. Louis on Friday, June 4, 2010 at the St. Louis County Library Headquarters. Since he’s been published since 1986, and has had numerous novels turned into films (three starring Paul Newman), he’s also had the opportunity to write screenplays of his own work.

Due to the size of its market, St. Louis rarely makes anyone’s hardcover tour list, but catches top-flight authors on their paperback tours. Thus, Russo said he imagined most of the 200ish in attendance had probably read his latest title, so he chose a short selection from Old Cape Magic, because “most readers prefer Q&A.” This title, he said, was “about how hard it is to shut your parents up after they’re dead.” It was quite funny.

He said a lot worth sharing, so I will pass it on.

Writing

• His writing routine: he writes 2-3 pages daily. He spends a couple morning hours writing in longhand; in the afternoon he types and revises what he wrote in the morning.

• He writes novels and reviews and essays in longhand because he likes the feel of pen on paper. “It’s part of my process.” He writes screenplays on the computer because it is a “new habit.” Background noise is also essential, since he started serious writing when his daughters were young and noisy.

• His most valuable writing mentor told him, if you write 2-3 pages a day, every day, “at the end of a year you won’t have a novel, but you’ll have something the size of a novel.” This is a slight twist on the familiar adage that seems truer.

• Of all his novels, Straight Man was the easiest to write.

• On how he discovered he was a comic novelist: “The most difficult thing you learn as a writer is who you are going to be. Not who I am. Who I become when I sit down to write.”

• Comedy allows you to lead readers to dark places. (As in his own Bridge of Sighs.)

• “Generally books are over when the (central) conflict is resolved.” It has more to do with resolution than plot. Straight Man is about a guy eho must pass a stone—a kidney stone and otherwise. Once the stone is passed, the story is over.

• Most novels pose a question, “It’s a question the writer poses for himself.” For instance (from one of his novels), what happens when you’re 60 and you can’t work and you can’t not work?”

Reading and Writing

• On MFA programs: The most valuable aspect was he didn’t have to explain himself to anyone else (because they were writing also). He learned from peers doing the same thing more than from his professors and felt like ‘my writing apprenticeship was cut in half due to the MFA.’ His caveat: of course authors were writing for hundreds of years before MFAs were created, so an MFA isn’t absolutely necessary.

• When he was one of the 3 Hemingway Prize judges (for first novels), he had to read 65 books in four months.

• When discussing his characters (most often in Straight Man), he said of his real friends and acquaintances, “Everyone recognizes everyone else, but no one recognizes themselves.” Usually the person who comes up to him and says, “X character is so-and-so isn’t he?” is actually the character he most based it on.

• An audience member said, “I love your stories, but I love your characters even more.” Russo said thanks, adding, “I even love the characters I don’t like.” If you’re going to spend 5-6 years on a book, you don’t want to be bored. He doesn’t set tasks for characters, but listens to them because “what’s on their minds is what’s on my mind.”

• He neglects social media—"I don’t object. I think my life is cluttered enough.” Technology can isolate us, but avoiding it can isolate us as well.

Finding an Agent

He’s had the same agent since he was discovered via a short story in a small circulation magazine, so he admitted the advice mightn’t be completely fresh:

• You can’t send a full novel to numerous agents (simultaneous submission) because none will read it. However, send the first 50 pages to numerous agents. Keep a log book so when the first agent replies, you date the communication and send the entire “solicited manuscript” (& will become your agent if they want the novel). If/when a 2nd agent expresses interest, date their communication and contact the first that you have other interest if they decide to pass.

Novel as Screenplay

• Novels can adopt any structure, all screenplays (barring the rare exception) are 120 pages built on a 3 act structure. The first act is 25 pages, the last act is 20 pages and the 2nd act is 75 pages.

• Writing screenplays has forced him to think of structure earlier in his novels.

• Paul Newman loved writers.

• Russo found it “wonderful that talented actors found things in my lines that I didn’t know was there.”

• A friend told him: “Writing screenplays is hot sex. Writing novels is marriage.”

• He says he now purposely writes scenes in his novels that can’t be filmed.

Visions, Revisions & Curious George

Lest any of you Wordians fear I'm writing out of turn, Kent said I may post between Tuesday and Thursday when it's not my week. And I think those rights extend to other members as well...

Two items of note in our continued consideration of faith and writing:

Anna Blanch, a doctoral candidate at St. Andrews, informs us that Corpus Christi College at Oxford is hosting Visions and Revisions: Putting God in Literature, a conference on how the divine is represented by writers. Sounds interesting. Oxford, anyone? If you have a paper to propose, you'll have to hurry. The conference isn't until November 6th, but the deadline is May 31.

An article in First Things explores the role of art in desperate times through the lives of the creators of your favorite childhood books: Curious George! Did you know George escaped the Nazi regime? I didn't either.

Appendix A: An American in Athens

At the risk of appearing an utter egoist, I'm posting a link to a travelogue I wrote that was published by an online literary journal, The Literary Bohemian. "An American in Athens" just happens to involve an economic exchange and is in no way a commentary on the current crisis of the country in which it takes place. (My authorial intent speaking up here, in case you lit critics are tempted to take too many interpretive liberties in your close reading!)

Escape or Journey? A Post on Writer's Wanderlust

Hello fellow Wordsmiths,
How goes the writing? Echoing Lee Ann's question, what are you writing these days, or is it a secret? I've heard conflicting advice on whether our energies as writers are better spent discussing our work with other writers or putting our proverbial pens to paper. What do you think?

All this talk of writing conferences has me revisiting my notes from the two Nimrod conferences I've attended at the University of Tulsa. In 2008, the theme was "Making Tracks," and I thought it might be interesting to consider writing as means of travel. How do you think this is an accurate metaphor? Or where does it fall short? Do you write with a destination in mind or as an exploration of the territory?

And in answer to Lee Ann's question, I thought I'd share a bit of wandering I did for a creative writing prompt a while back, no further qualifiers:

Entering the office, she felt at once overcome by the generic gray surroundings and comforted by the knowledge that she had a place in the world, a place to do something worthwhile, even though it wasn't what she wanted to be doing.

She was stuck, five days a week, eight hours a day, at a computer, trying to block the stream of office gossip that flowed continuously around her. Intent on doing a good job, fingers flying over the keyboard, she was dreaming up another life, a life that included adventure and exploration in distant places.

She liked to imagine how far she could get from the office in those eight hours.

On foot, she figured twenty five miles. It might be a stretch, but she knew she could walk four miles an hour, but could she keep that pace for eight hours? She'd never tried. She could be back on the farm tonight, walking in the river bottom land as the sun set.

Or, if she took the car, she could be almost to the ranch in Texas, out in the hill country in time for supper. Would Grandma have made soup? She could taste the warmth of cream and onions, celery and potatoes, punctuated with black pepper as the air conditioner in the office kicked back on. The taste of the soup still in her memory, she shivered as frigid air poured down on her from the vent above her desk.

If she were to drive to the airport instead of making her commute to work, she would fly across the whole western US and be in California or Oregon. She would go back in time, and it would still be early there. Early enough to take a long walk and have tea before supper. Then they'd all go down to the beach and remove their shoes, even though it would be too cold to walk barefoot. She could feel the sand between her toes.

It was then she realized she had kicked of her Vaneli heels and was digging her toes into the gray carpet under her desk.

Where does your writer's wanderlust take you? What happens when you return? Are you able to appreciate your present surroundings more fully for having explored other places, real or your in imagination?

What would you write the folks the back home about what you have seen, heard, or experienced in your travels? All the room you have is on the back of a postcard. What would you write?


Image: Road in the Ozarks

A Picture is Worth (Almost) a Thousand Words

Whether my topic is relevant as inspiration for regular writing tasks, I will let others decide. I haven’t had a lot of such tasks recently, posts for Word being about the only writing assignments currently on my desk. And the problem with getting these written hasn’t been a lack of inspiration! Rather, my problem as a writer would appear to be over-stimulation and lack of focus.

Life in a Kaleidoscope

If you’re like me, you might notice how life often feels like living in a kaleidoscope with constantly shifting patterns and colors and people and stories coloring our days. As a writer, while fascinated by these compositions, I tend to grow dizzy at times, and I need to pull back from them. I need to be able to capture life in individual frames.

Snapshots

I hope it’s not a hash of metaphors to liken this capture to taking snapshots. When we pull out our cameras to take a real photo, aren’t we trying to capture a moment, an impression, and image? Later we come back to these for inspiration, to relive a time to which there is no return. In a sense, we are assembling, in each picture we take, the present as it slips into the past. It’s like that in writing, too. There is no way to write down every significant detail of life as it whizzes by like the country side seen from the window of a speeding train. But we can snap verbal “photos” of what we see and hear and smell and taste and feel throughout our days. And I can store these, as my creative writing instructor said, in my writer’s warehouse for inclusion in some later project.

Focusing the Fiction Mind

In their discussion of reading as a tool for writers, Hallie and Whit Burnett in their Fiction Writer’s Handbook, offer this: “It is by reading that we learn first to focus the fiction mind, framing incidents and characters and places into the particular shape of imagery and economy that makes a short story, a play, or a book. A photographer has his own way of shutting off what he does not wish to see, moving his camera through many angles until he finds the one that suits him best—but this is after he has learned the limits of his medium.”

Focusing the Poetic Mind

Although the Burnetts speak of focusing the fiction mind, the technique they suggest also applies to the poetic mind. Reading good poetry that abounds in sensuous imagery is like viewing exhibits of well-composed photos. In turning to the poets, we can see the world through the poignant lenses of the Romantics, the Moderns, the Imagists. We return to our own experiences with re-sensitized vision to perceive the wonder around us, and like William Blake, “see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.”

Focusing the Spiritual Mind

Undoubtedly, the most significant aspect of writing for a Christian is maintaining spiritual focus, which we must do by continuously ingesting the Word. As my pastor has said, reading the Bible is thinking God’s thoughts after Him. Reading the Word is somewhat like perusing an extensive photo album of God’s family. We can see what faith and other virtues look like, not in abstraction, but in stories, snapshots and portraits, of living, breathing human beings like ourselves, especially in the person who was the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ.

Putting It All in Perspective

Ingesting the Word involves more than merely reading it, although reading is important. We need to write about the ways we experience the Word in our daily lives. Where does God’s grace interrupt the chaos and cacophony? How do we fit into God’s story? For me, the snapshot method of writing is a way to first perceive and then capture the grace-infused moments of my life. It is in this place and this time to which Jesus comes to teach us about Himself. He uses the familiar to reveal the mysteries of His kingdom: “Therefore, every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Matt. 13:52, ESV).

Get the picture?

Jesus wasn’t the only one to use the mundane to illustrate the profound. Every scribe trained in the kingdom of heaven pulls from the resources he has stored up. Look. Listen. Live. Read. Write. We’ll never be able to capture every aspect of life in infinite detail. The kaleidoscope will keep shifting. But we can give the world snapshots from our lives that have been illuminated by the grace and goodness of God.

Photo collage: Quote: Cesare Pavese, Quotable Cards. Painting: Edgar Degas' Mary Cassatt at the Louvre

Chapter One, In Which Rebecca Contemplates the Writer's Role

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe)…

But this is all sounding rather familiar, isn’t it? Charles Dickens, you say? Oh, right. It’s David Copperfield. And I am Rebecca Newton, twenty-something Apostolic, recently minted B.A. in English with a propensity for plagiarism and a host of other sins, including but not limited to, doubt, envy, and despair. I am also the most recent inductee of Word.

When Kent invited me to join the “merry wordsmiths” of this group, I felt hope spring up, as if I, being but a timid serf, had been summoned to join the band in Sherwood on a mission for their absent lord and king. I’ve lurked around the margins of Word for years—five perhaps?—seldom commenting on the posts by these writers but consistently challenged by their commitment to the Word of God and to their vocation. And while in more modern terms, we could call it “networking” I have been guilty of stalking these people because they fit my idea of good company, which as Jane Austen would say, is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation. I shan’t enumerate the times and locations off the blog when I have been guilty of such behavior...

Word is just the kind of writers’ colony I should wish to join, if such a thing exists in time and space. And though I must heartily concur with Kent’s point that we shouldn’t use lack of community as an excuse not to produce good writing, I must also posit that community is essential to developing good writers--writers who aim for the mark and consistently hit it. We need the accountability and the challenge of each other, but we also need the courage to develop our skills as marksmen on an individual basis. Can I call it one of the paradoxes that lies at the heart of a truth?

And it is the Truth we’re about, isn’t it? We’re gathered here at Word as Christians and as writers because of the Word who was made flesh and dwelt and suffered among us so that we might know the fullness of His life, even while He has gone away. We are gathered in the shadow of Calvary, in the light of the empty tomb, and beneath the flames of Pentecost. As witnesses of His continuing work in our lives, we seek a context for relating it. We experience community with fellow believers in Christ, the living Word. We hold that writing matters because language is somehow bound up in the very nature of God, and words spoken in love and truth invoke creative and restorative power in the lives of the hearers. Writing is, too, as Ron Hansen puts it, “a stay against confusion,” a tool of faith and a means of grace that enables us to grasp more fully who we are as people of the Word.

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show…”

Soli Deo Gloria.

*Publication of which, it must be noted, was delayed by an onslaught of technical difficulties, procrastination not being one of them

Writing to Music?

Most people go nuts about music. I don’t.

That makes it tough to be a Pentecostal sometimes, where 30 minute song services aren’t unusual. My beloved Mamaw was a “2-songs-and-done” Pentecostal, and I inherited her genes. It appears my son has as well. (We’re definitely an overlooked minority within the movement.) I’d much rather church service time were filled with a Scripture reading or sermonette than another congregational song, but that’ll never happen in my lifetime.

Not that I don’t enjoy music. I do. It’s just not the center of my life or my writing.

That said, if I find myself surfing the net or answering every email I’ve been avoiding for months instead of writing, I’ll often click on some jazz (John Coltrane, Charlie Parker) or a symphony (I like all the usual biggies) so that the music will push me into creativity. It often does. When I stop noticing it is when I’ve found my writing groove.

Music with lyrics is verboten however, unless I’ve immersed myself within the album for so long that the lyrics and music have merged in my mind. Otherwise, “the words” become an obstruction I can’t write through or around. (This doesn’t include the background tinkling at the book superstores I often write in, perhaps because they’re too distant or screened by the noise within the café.)

When I edit articles or lessons, I often go with my mood, be it loud and bangy or soft and soulful. If you examined my laptop’s Windows Media Player, you might be awed by its breadth and depth, but don’t be deceived. Along with my Christian selections, I reserve (free! from the local library!) almost everything in iTunes weekly Top 10 so I know what our youth group is listening to. Some I’ll listen to once and delete. Some I’ll listen to over and over. Either way, it’s an easy way to stay current.

The truth is, I don’t own an iPod. I don’t need a soundtrack to my life. I go nuts over writing and reading stories. Most people don’t.

I Know Why Writer's Drink

It isn't a much discussed phenomenon anymore, but it wasn't that long ago that great writers (Hemingway, Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, F. Scott) used to be assumed to be drunks. Of course, as this article makes clear, that was when great writers were the rock stars of their day. Now rock and hip-hop stars are drunks (or some equivalent) and we don't think anything of it. (Probably because of the quality of their output. Faulkner has a legitimate chance at being read in 500 years, but who besides the Beatles - and maybe U2 - has a chance at being any more than a footnote in 100?)


Still, it has crossed my mind more than once this year. I know why they drink. It's when you're facing a day when you're just not sure what's going to happen to your story, you're not sure where it's going to go, and--even when you feel that old creative mojo slithering just below the surface--the fear of a false start, of drilling a dry hole, of not maintaining the necessary energy to breakthrough--keeps you from doing some real writing.*

You need something to reduce the fear. To calm your nerves. To build your confidence. But also, it needs to let the creativity, that light sliding mass of almost reachable goodness, flow. Because there's no higher earthly high than a good day of writing.


So the substitute needs to accomplish multiple, often opposing, goals simultaneously without diminishing your writing skills and forward motion. From the evidence, I'm guessing alcohol does that. Me? Too often I make a thick frosty shake out of Breyer's all-natural ice cream. Sometimes music works. Sometimes surfing the net or triple-checking my emails works. Sometimes I check off items on my "To do" list to "clear my head." More often they're time-wasters. But ice cream--now there's a guaranteed good night no matter what happens on the screen.

For me, the fear rises most with fiction, but it might be a thesis for you. Or memoir. Or something else.

Frankly, prayer doesn't guarantee anything except my acknowledgement of the Father's gifts to me. Yet, I need to remember it more.

Yeah, I know why writer's drink.

* Notice the mixed metaphors in just trying to describe the experience.


Currently Reading: Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, edited by Rob Spillman. Just started it this weekend, but--Wow!--the essays have been fabulous, great fiction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adicihie and others. In the 1980s/early 1990s, it was India bursting at the fictional seams. In the aughts, it's Africa. This proves why.