Writing News
July 25, 2013–Just a couple of news items. If you’re a poet and have not yet heard about it, here’s a link to the Poetry Society of New York’s Poetry Festival, happening this weekend. Second item: Terrible Minds on doin’ it wrong. If you’ve had a frustrating writing week, maybe these insensitive words of advice will get you to lighten up.
Writing Advice: First Drafts, Part 1
Other writers may challenge me on this–many consider revision, for instance, to be the hardest part of writing–but in my experience, the greatest obstacle to finishing a book-length writing project is nailing down a decent first draft. By “decent,” I don’t necessarily mean “polished,” but complete, in the sense of having a beginning, middle and end, and representing at least the boundaries, if not the living fullness, of the world you are trying to build.
I had the opportunity in the last year or so to connect with five published authors on the process, and will present their insight in a series of five blog posts.
Before Words: Underneath Arcadia, with Lauren Groff
You begin without writing. Your simmering, creative primordial soup sublimates into the elements of story. Your muse offers sparks, whiffs, even dazzling displays, but she rarely speaks in sentences—that’s your job. In this non-writing stage, you assemble the raw materials for alchemically transforming inspiration into story.
“I’ll carry around a detail or an idea with me for years,” says Lauren Groff, “and one day that idea will interact with something that I read, and explode into a different story.”
Arcadia, Lauren’s second novel, started where motherhood, a move to a new town, and a deluge of grim media events unsettled Lauren’s life. News of escalating war in the Middle East and the U.S. peak oil phenomenon, even the release of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, seemed to foretell apocalypse. It made for a “dark place in my life, and it took me four years to write my way out of that place.”
Pre-writing, Lauren simply sought to escape her emotional downward spiral. “I researched happiness, and people who tried really hard to be happy,” she says. “People who go outside of the mainstream and try to create a better world.
“I visited a number of former intentional communities… I did a lot of talking, and a lot of walking around… I talked to as many people as I possibly could, without a notebook, without a recording device…
“Writing a novel is exercising the imagination, and exercising sympathy.”
Lauren’s longing for community and her real-life efforts to start over set the stage for Arcadia. Observing her own son and her own second pregnancy, she began musing about a fictional child, a depressed mother. “I wanted to write as close as possible to the heart,” she says. “I would never say that writing a novel is therapy. But there are elements of struggle in the book.”
The non-writing aspect of writing infuses your day-to-day perspective. “Things will come to you… Those moments, in your sleep, in the shower, pushing the grocery cart, those are the moments that give you what you need… When you start noticing, everything calls for your attention. When you open up that part in your body, or in your mind, where you’re asking for the world to tell you what you need for this story, it will tell you… deeply, repetitively. There will be words you’ve never seen before that will come at you… three or four times in a day.”
Your creative self is opening a new conversation with the world, forming a unique library of image, emotion, and language—the vocabulary of your story. When you have taken in enough to begin seeing interesting patterns on the wind, you take up your pen.
**And for a little extra mojo**:
Stephen King says that story is a found thing, like a fossil. The germ for his novel Misery came during a catnap on an airplane. J.K. Rowling famously claims that Harry Potter “strolled” into her head, “fully formed.”
While you can’t idly wait for inspiration, accept that the initial work of any book-length piece takes place off the page: an irresistible image, a scribbled phrase, a spate of intense research. Many authors carry ideas in their heads, little black books, or hard drives, long before beginning to write.
Max Ellendale always keeps a little black “idea” book in her pocket. When an idea seems ready, it “gets its own notebook.”
Emmy Laybourne hardly writes at all during what she calls the “conception stage.” “I walk a lot, I think about it and let it grow. Inside myself, I start to feel another being that has its own heart, its own volition, its own little world. At some point, the book begins. The focus becomes, well, you’d better sit down and write it! Because the words will stop.”
Joanna Clapps Herman describes her new, barely-conscious ideas as “the strangest creatures. I love how inchoate they are. First there is a flitting of images, bits of language. At some point there are a few sessions of intense writing, where I begin to get very excited with what I am trying to say. A flood of language, ideas, images… I just ride that flood, try to keep up with it and not talk back to it.”
“What seems to work for me,” agrees James King, “is to, first of all, spend a lot of time thinking about the story and the characters. Then, I pretty much jump in with a first chapter to see how it ‘feels.’”
Over weeks or months, related images appear in your jottings. Word-patterns emerge. You decide to commit to the work. You finally begin your first draft.
Coming Next Time: Part 2, Wordsmithing By Any Means Necessary, with James King
References:
Except where otherwise noted, all quoted material from James King (Bill Warrington’s Last Chance, New York: Viking, 2010), Emmy Laybourne (Monument 14: Sky on Fire, New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2013), Max Ellendale (Glyph, Breathless Press, 2012), and Joanna Clapps Herman (The Anarchist Bastard: Growing Up Italian in America, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011) is from personal interviews and emails with the author, March-June, 2012.
Except where noted, all quoted material from Lauren Groff (Arcadia, New York: Voice, 2012) is from the author’s transcript of Ms. Groff’s seminar at the New York Writer’s Institute, State University of New York at Albany, March 27, 2012. “Lauren Groff on Writing and Arcadia”
Subtropics: The Literary Magazine from the University of Florida, “Interview with Lauren Groff,” www.english.ufl.edu/subtropics/Groff_interview.html, quoted in “Lauren Groff on Writing and Arcadia.”
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, (New York: Pocket Books, 2002)
Scholastic, “J.K. Rowling Interview”