One Week Late

I wrote this last Saturday on my Note taker, but I wasn’t able to upload.

I’m debating whether to work on my novella next or go with the more reasonable plan of sticking to one manuscript until I finish it. Lately I’ve been feeling stressed. As I’ve mentioned here, I don’t like some of the things going on at work (especially the part about how we’re getting paid in installments, like that check for $90.00 I just got for September and the half wages I’m still waiting on for November). On top of that, I’m in the process of trying to find a new job, preferably one with benefits and some level of permanence, and because I haven’t found one yet, I’m going through that vulnerable feeling like a pathetic-loser-who’s-begging-to-be-loved-and-accepted phase. The gist is that I sometimes manage the stress better than others.

The last few days have been bad days on the stress management front, and my novella is about a character who … well, let’s just say stress management is not her forte. Part of the reason I’ve avoided working on it much is that I’ve had to do some research about the possible setting and about eating disorders, but mostly I’ve avoided it because I feel I need to go to a negative emotional space to get into my protagonist’s head.

I know there’s a debate about whether the best writing happens inside or outside the character’s skin, and I think that, based on my current revision work, my present opinion is that revision is best outside the skin, but I’m not so sure with this piece because it’s so long and because I’ve decided to change the direction of the action somewhat. I should probably just start reading to decide.

Puntitas reads _The Observations_ by J. Harris.

All About Drama

This morning I finished reading The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, a first novel about a father who gives his retarded daughter away while his wife is still unconscious from the delivery. I admired certain things about it, like the very real and very annoying tendency we all have to hear someone else’s truth and focus on ourselves. The novel’s characters all do that to a fault. One ordinarily self-contained person shares an honest thought or feeling, and the listener automatically says, “What about me? What about my drama?” I also thought The writer did a good job of capturing how we interpret other people’s actions in the framework of our own assumptions about them and about the way the world works. Someone says or does something with one intent. Other characters respond as if something else were meant.

But what was most compelling for me was the father. I was drawn by his motivation and fascinated by his guilt. I was so drawn to him, in fact, that I noticeably lost interest when I realized he would no longer be appearing, and when I became conscious of that loss of interest, I remembered a conversation I had with a friend of mine about how books with happy endings are less satisfying somehow than books that end sadly. I think that’s because happy endings are so much harder to write, happiness so often sounding like platitude, not reality.

For me, this book fell into platitude because I don’t believe that a mother who’s been mourning the death of her perfect daughter for twenty-five years simply accepts the retarded replacement, without wondering what she did wrong or why she was being punished or whichever of the lines from that script that the parents of children with disabilities act out before they learn to love the versions of themselves they never expected to give birth to. I especially don’t believe it from this set of characters—all self-absorbed in the extreme.

The book also gave me the opportunity to reflect on my own writing. The novel has too many little dramatic arcs and small unnecessary complications. For example, the father goes out of town to give a talk. He’s supposed to be gone over night, but instead, he disappears for three days. The family is in a panic and calls the police. When he does come home, he brings an unexpected guest. Later that afternoon, there’s an argument, and the eighteen-year-old son runs away from home, necessitating another call to the police, and the next day, the mother is frantic because she still has the guest in her home, an important business account to maintain, news of her sister’s cancer diagnosis to contend with, an extra marital affair to break off, and her son’s continued absence to worry over. That moment would have been as dramatic (or more) if complicating factors had been trimmed down to one or two problems. The marriage was going badly, so things would have been tense enough if the father had called to say he’d be staying away an extra day or two, then stayed away longer. His coming home with the guest, a character who’s presence doesn’t seem all that necessary to me, is complicating enough. The argument would have happened more or less as it did. And the son (instead of running away, stealing a neighbor’s car, and getting busted for shoplifting) could have just disappeared for a few hours and come home pissed or drunk and made more or less the same scene he had at central booking. The mother could have been just as frantic at the office the next day, stewing over the guest in her home and over the affair she’s breaking off, an important moment in her character’s development. My guess is that this excess of drama comes from an inexperienced writer’s fear that one problem is not serious enough to make the reader understand why a character does one thing or why the action takes a specific turn.

My novel, the literary one, and my novella are retellings of one another. The novella came first. When I wrote it, I didn’t think I’d write anything else, so I felt the need to cram it with every important scene I could think of and to fill it with drama and complications so as to compel the reader. When I wrote the novel, I discovered that some of the scenes in the novella actually belong in the longer work and that the two stories are too similar. At one point, I thought of them as being the same story only one when the protagonist is having a good day and the other when she’s having a bad day. Lately, I’ve discovered that they’re actually two different stories, but I’ll need to do a lot of work on the novella to draw that story out.

Puntitas reads _The Memory Keeper’s Daughter_ by K. Edwards.

Resolutions–Sort of

So it’s January 2, the expected time for talking about new beginnings. The first two that come to mind for me are knitting related:

1. I will not add to my yarn stash until I have used most of it up.
2. I will spend less time reading knitting lists and blogs.

I think I spend too much money, time, and writing energy on my craft. That isn’t a bad thing. Knitting brings me lots of pleasure, helps me unwind from a job that is sometimes emotionally stressful, gives me a way of planning manuscripts and working through writing decisions, etc., and certainly, I owe knitting a great deal in that it’s taught me to work through some of my old fears and neuroses where writing is concerned, but I think I’m falling into the habit of using it to avoid. This morning, for example, I spent four hours reading and responding to email, most of it knitting related.

I do plan to continue with this blog. Though I haven’t been writing as much as I had hoped, I am writing most weeks, and I am thinking about how and what to write, something I hadn’t really done.

My goal, when I began this blog, was to have a manuscript completed by this week, and I don’t. I do feel the pressure of not having a book-length manuscript in the mail. I have several that are close, but close does not a publishing contract make, and close won’t get me a teaching position that will carry me through retirement. I’m also feeling annoyed with myself for not taking advantage of the writing opportunity I have now. I’ve got a flexible schedule, the luxury that someone else worries about most of the cooking and cleaning, and enough money to pay my bills for a few months , even though my employer is being a reeking anus about giving me my money in full and on time.

All of that said, I’m not going to sit here and regret that I haven’t written enough because doing so doesn’t help me write more and because, not having written with any kind of discipline for years, I had to start somewhere and I am very glad I started here. The next step is to increase the manuscript time and to decrease the time I spend on mailing lists. I won’t commit to a specific amount of time so as not to discourage myself when I don’t follow through. For now, this is specific enough for me.

Temporarily Out of Commission

I’m sitting in my bedroom with a humidifier, trying not to cough. Illness is such a humbling experience, stripping us of all the airs of grandeur we dress in daily. This morning I got out of bed, smelling of menses and urine from when the cough was so bad I voided. I went straight to the shower, unable to stand myself. After that, it was breakfast, a conversation with my mother, and more cold medicine. I think I’m back to the yearly thing, the one that requires antibiotics and a stronger than usual cough suppressant. My mother says it’s time for the doctor, but since I haven’t had this long enough to obviate the lecture about how colds and viruses need a week to work themselves out of the body, I disagree. I want my $100.00 and my two-hours wasted to result in a prescription, not a follow-up (i.e., no prescription, one condescending lecture, an appointment for another $100.00 and two more hours wasted). By this point in my life, I know my own body and my own ailments well enough to distinguish between a cold and something more serious.

I’m not sure why I’m bringing this up here, in a blog about writing, except that Adrienne Rich has a poem about how coming out of a fever is like a resurrection, how you feel like a survivor afterward, like you left someone else behind. I always think of that poem when I’m sick because she captures exactly what it is to be well again.

I think too that it’s hard to write about the way the mind betrays us when the body doesn’t respond to whatever power we think we have over it. My novella is about a person who is falling apart in mind, body, and spirit. While each collapse has its source, the collapse of the body exacerbates the other two. It affects her judgment and her responses to things. When I had a friend read an early draft, she could not understand why the protagonist couldn’t just do this or that more obvious and normal thing, so I realized that I hadn’t done a good job of reproducing that mindset.

Speaking of mindsets, I started the story I mentioned last time. I got 345 words down. I don’t really know where I’m going with it. Usually I’ve got a good idea. But I’ve decided I’m going to go ahead with it because I’m afraid of talking myself out of it the way I talked myself out of writing the poem with the ball, the swing, and the woman at the foot of the stairs. This story is about extraterrestrials, not at all my cup of tea, so developing the right mindset for the characters and in turn for the reader is important.

Now I’m going to stop. I’m rambling far too much. Between the humidifier and the last of the cough medicine with codeine, I’m having to work less hard at not-coughing, so I may be able to sit here and knit while listening to one of my famous audio books. The one I’ve got on the player now is not very good. It’s called The Lost Diary of Don Juan. Normally, I love retellings, hearing the story from another character’s point of view, etc., but this very obviously made-for-film novel has so little to do with the play that I suspect its writer hasn’t actually read the source of his narrative. The two clearest details in support of that fact are that the galanteador of the retelling is in love with a woman named Ana while the one in the source play is in love with a woman named INEZ and that the Don Luis, best friend of Don Juan and betrothed to Dona Ana (with whom Don Juan has a payback quicky before meeting the saintly Dona INEZ), of the play is no where to be found in the novel. I haven’t read the poem by Byron, so it’s possible that this novel is based on that. Anyway, aside from giving me an excuse to be pedantic, this book is helping me understand that I stop reading altogether when I lose interest in something. I still can’t bring myself to not finish a book, however crappy, so I suppose that finishing it slowly is better than not finishing it at all.

Starting a New One

I’m not sure what the matter is. This week and next are incredibly slow weeks workwise (three appointments in all), so I decided I would turn off my cell phone, my umbilicus to the world of interpreting appointments, and spend the time writing.

So far, I’ve spent the time sleeping, reading email, and researching useless and obscure trivia (like whether “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was once used to help children remember church teachings—an assertion, which Snopes.com tells me is false). Right now, I’m ready for more sleep. I should probably take Claritin or something for the discomfort in my sinuses and occasional drip. But I’m not motivated enough to do even that.

I was expecting to write today. I had an idea for a story last night. It came to me about a year ago after a conversation with my mother, but that mysterious spark that makes some ideas stories and others mere ideas hadn’t happened until I was doing my pointless Googling on urban legends.

Part of me wants to research more, to get the details right. Part of me noticed that there’s enough discrepancy in the details for me to have plenty of license. Part of me wants to put things off till I make a special trip to the locale, but this last is definitely a stalling technique.

Maybe I should stop doing this and do that instead. I can give myself a word goal, right? 500?

Finishing Again

Over the weekend, I read one of my finished stories. As usual, there were little things to touch up, mostly the odd wordy or awkward sentence. But over all, I was happy with it.

The story moves back and forth between present and past. The transitions are clear, and the flashbacks build on each other and on the action of the present effectively, drawing to a strong ending.

One of the concerns I’d always had was that the story sprang from a detail, a datura innoxia plant, but never referred to it. When I wrote and revised the story, I wasn’t able to work the datura in. It didn’t really matter, the story made its own kind of sense. But the plant hints at events that reveal something about one character, which affects others.

This weekend, I was finally able to work the datura in. The story will benefit from one additional reminder in an earlier scene. After that, I will be satisfied. I will probably not read it again once the new detail is added.

I’ve got another story in pretty much the same shape—all complete except for two telling details. I’ll try to work on that next. I’d like to send them out soon.

Speaking of sending out, I haven’t done any this fall. There’s no excuse, except writerly anxiety, and writerly anxiety doesn’t put books in print.

Struck by the Cold

Last weekend, I was knitting and listening to a formula romance, a Regency tale very similar to the sort of stuff I read as a teen, when I was struck by a description of the cold. The scene was the one where the heroine is forced by inclement weather to take refuge in a shelter with the hero, much steaminess ensuing. In this variation, a looming storm causes her to take a shortcut across thin ice (bringing in the damsel in distress motif), which breaks, providing him the perfect opportunity to save her (heroic action leading to indebtedness), take her into the hunting shack, strip her clothes off in front of a blazing fire, and … well, the rest can be surmised (passion aroused or rekindled through circumstances beyond control—though why that isn’t a form of psychological abuse is a subject for a novel I plan to write after I finish the manuscripts on my hard drive).

I don’t remember what detail struck me, but it was one or maybe two that put the cold on my skin and into my hands. Two things happened:

1. I marveled at the power of language. I was fine one minute, knitting cozily in a well heated house. A few sentences later, I was tucking my fingertips under my legs to warm them, noticing they weren’t cold only after I pressed them on my palms.

2. I got an idea for a poem. I spent the rest of the weekend surfing the web for information on hypothermia, exposure, and other topics connected to my idea. I haven’t written anything. In fact, the idea as inspiration (as physical lightness) is gone, but I’m interested enough in it to try writing anyway. I’m not sure of the point of view. I had one notion of that when the idea first came to me, but as I read, that changed, and now it’s going back to the original.

My plan for the weekend is to update my NOTE TAKER in order to write a draft. I have other things I need to do (get a writing sample sent off and get some manuscripts ready for the mail), so I may not get to the draft by Monday. I don’t normally write anywhere except at this computer, Pax, a sturdy desktop in my office at home), but since I want to start writing on Chulo, the NOTE TAKER, I’m going to experiment drafting this poem on it.

Old habits are hard to break. The transition from writing by hand to typing into a keyboard was not easy. I’m expecting the transition from qwerty to Perkins to be rough too.

In the Details

When is a piece of writing ever done? That’s the question I struggle with most. I think things are done. Then I read them again months or years later, and I realize they’re not. That more than anything keeps me from feeling like an accomplished writer.

Real writers know. Real writers read their work years later, say, “I would write that better now,” but feel satisfied that the poem or story was written well. I write, and when I read the piece again from a stranger’s distance, I think, “This is the work of an amateur.”

Most often, the devil for me is in the details. Without much trouble, I catch gaps in the logic or the plot, and I catch inconsistencies in images or characters,. Where I’m likely to find problems is in the nuance suggested by all the little details: the gesture a character makes at a key point in the dialog, the shape or size of an object on a table, the length and rhythm of a paragraph or line. Sometimes they contradict me. Sometimes they distract. Sometimes they do nothing. Sometimes they do too much. The frustration is that, when they’re working, I know God is in the details.

Last Sunday, I reread my two sonnets and another one of the poems I’ve been working on relatively recently. Over all, I like the sonnets. They’re clear, detailed, and easy to read. The endings, which had been my great concern, hit the right notes in both what they say and how they leave the reader feeling. On the Shakespearean sonnet, I unchanged most of what I’d changed the last time I worked on it. That realization was what ultimately decided me to call the poem finished.

When I read the Miltonian sonnet, I discovered it read much better than I expected. I spent most of my energy changing details in the octave to develop the image in the title. The bony whore seems more out of place than ever, but she was too helpful in the writing and is too precise about the nature of the wait for me to let go of her yet, so I may send the poem out a few times before I can get up the nerve to replace her with some other story.

The third poem is one I’ve never mentioned here. I like it for lots of different reasons. It was well received in workshop. It’s got a solid build. It’s a tribute to the power of art. It made me feel close to the friend who inspired it. I’ve sent it out a few times, but it hasn’t been picked up. Each time I read it, I notice some of the details “aren’t there yet,” a wonderful expression I heard to describe a lack of readiness to understand or articulate, and though more of the details are contributing to the wholeness of the poem now, many of them still are not. How long will I have to wait? How long?

Hitching a Tow

Yesterday the van lost power while we were out in the middle of nowhere. I take that back. We were out on a dead stretch of San Joaquin Valley farmland on Avenue 7, which more or less marks the boundary between Fresno and Madera Counties from Highway 99 to Root 33. My father kept the van going by sheer force of will over a small rise, but even his oaths and flatulence couldn’t push it past the Avenue 7-1/2 Exchange, a y-intersection six miles outside of Firebaugh, California. Now that’s an ag town as tiny and forgotten as the one I grew up in.

When our vehicle was well and truly dead, we called the roadside assistance number on my sister’s auto insurance card, also with my name on it, and since the purpose of the drive was three-hours worth of work, I interpreted psych appointments from my cell phone between shorter exchanges with the road-side dispatchers who live in cities and don’t know how to transmit information like, “Standing out in a field next to a sign that says ‘Avenue 7-1/2 Exchange. Firebaugh 6 miles.’ … yes, we were heading westbound on Avenue 7 from Highway 99. … No, we’re nowhere near 99. We headed west. … Yes, it’s a field. … No, no fence: farmland. … right, no houses anywhere. … Yes, really, no houses. … Yeah, pretty empty out here.”

Of course, the tow truck arrived when I was working again, so I had to interrupt my rendition of “Any self-harming or assaultive behavior?” to deliver, “Ma, he’s asking if we want to ride with him or in the van.” Fortunately, my mother had the good sense to move herself, my father, and the tow truck driver up the road far enough for me to finish my phone call and observe HIPPA all at the same time.

The truck was huge. It had three foothold-like steps, each at least a foot apart, and two grab bars that were absolutely necessary for climbing up. The cabin ceiling was high, and the spaces between the seats were wide, except the one between the back of the driver’s seat and my knees (really my crotch since I had to sit with my knees splayed to be comfortable). Everything rumbled and rattled, and when the driver honked at lousy drivers or police officer friends, the bellow filled the cab and resonated in my chest. I was a little kid again, everything so big, loud, and exciting. Even the dull bong as the driver tapped his onboard computer’s touch screen with knuckles, elbows, and cell phone antenna gave me the same Wow! Neat! Sensation that children have, that I haven’t had since I was seven or eight and my parents would take us out to the local cherry orchard to pick one or two buckets of fruit.

I got so caught up in the shift in perspective that having to climb down those big grownup steps to hand over the insurance card and sign the slip felt like coming out of another person’s skin. I realized that one of the things that differentiates the adult point of view from the child’s is that ability children have of losing themselves in the sensory, without analysis, without agenda, without even the goal of escape. It’s a very different feeling from the desire to transcend or to saturate oneself. It’s so much more spontaneous than all of that.

Starting with the Image

I’ve had very little inspiration where writing is concerned. Too many other things are cluttering my head this week, most of them work related, something I’ll probably write about sooner or later. I did have one tiny tremor of an idea one morning, one of those thoughts that flits into the consciousness while I lay in bed waiting for the alarm clock to ring. Three images—a child’s ball suspended in the sky at sundown, the optical illusion of a foot next to a cloud, a woman standing at the foot of some stairs with her spine arched completely back, her hands on the lower steps—came to me, starting with the last and ending with the second. There was another image, a reaching or scooping hand. At first, I thought it was random. Then it helped me gather the other images together, developing the cloud image into a playground swing, the bar overhead and the chains that attach the seat.

Before the fingers enclosed the images into a beginning, the memories just floated around in my head, shuffling like snapshots into different orders, revealing more details, fading, growing again. Each reminded me of having wanted to center a poem around it, but until the hand caught each up and held it against its palm, nothing united them, gave them meaning.

In bed, out of nowhere, I started to feel the peculiar lightness and energy of a piece of writing clamoring to make it to the hard drive, that flaring of experience. If I teach a poetry class, I will probably tell my students that images are pictures or sensory experiences evoked or elaborated to explain what something means for the speaker or why it is important. But images are more mysterious. They’re the nut of a poem, the originating impulse, the supporting detail. They tell narratives in layers, In my case, each image told the same story, but it had something different to say about that story.

As I lay there, the images became more defined. The hand came clearly and fully into focus, and I understood immediately that it was the story all the other images were telling. Part of me knew that I’d need to hang on tight to whatever was developing because I’d have to get up in five minutes to get ready for an early appointment. Part of me wanted to tell the appointment to screw itself so I could let the images play out.

What made the images a moment, rather than the draft of a poem, was that the vast descending hand suddenly seemed cliché, and the narrative, one that I’ve written about before. I know that, as with the Shakespearean sonnet, some narratives are worth telling more than once, but all at once, this one didn’t seem worth retelling at all.

That realization turned all the airiness into flat, dense disappointment. I thought about the seeds of two other poems I’ve been carrying around. They’re images and general thoughts, but something—the right detail, perhaps?—is missing. I wish I knew what would make them bloom. Maybe I can use the ball, the swing, and the arching woman to figure it out.