the ends and the Means

I’m back to the syllabic poem. It’s two pages long. The last time I worked on it, I revised the first fourth or maybe third. When I reread it tonight, I noticed the changes helped a lot.

With more of a reason for the mood of the poem, the middle section (of the villanelle-like repetitions) feels necessary, the obvious outcome of what comes before. On initial reading, I thought I’d leave it alone, but as I went through it line by line, I decided it can do more and should to make the significance of the lost poem resonate. Once I add to that middle section, I should be able to cut most of the final fourth.

I have to be careful about the way I write, pushing myself past the desire to quit, but not so hard that I don’t want to return. So far, I’ve managed to make myself write for at least an hour at a time.

The old habit, the one I’m trying to avoid, is to write myself into a panic attack, obsessing over word choice, punctuation, syntax, decisions about what comes next. I’ve written so little over the last six years because I’ve wanted to think and feel differently as I write.

My first step was patience. Relying on the muse, I’ve written a story, revised three others, drafted a couple of poems, and revised half a dozen. I’ve put no real pressure on myself to publish or even declare a piece to be done, though once or twice a year, I’ve sent out a stack of envelopes to wait for the rejections.

After that, I started writing regularly. I tried for a, but the medium that’s worked best for me is the discussion list: hitting the send button is about as final as a thing gets. If I put myself in the roll of explainer, I can create opportunities for myself to produce thorough messages about things and send them off, learning to become clearer and less self-conscious at the same time.

I’ve learned so much about writing and about trusting myself from the lists. They’ve helped me do what I’m trying now: keeping the blog and writing several times a week.

It isn’t easy. As I stumble over an image or decision, a physical pressure moves slowly up my arms, settling on my shoulders, and wrapping over the center of my chest, lightly, but definitely, like the subtlest of threats. At those times, I make decisions, and I ignore, drawing on the hours of fast and careful writing I’ve learned to do. After all, one of the many things I’ve learned from sitting in on hundreds of hours of other people’s therapy for a living is that the memory of a positive experience can encourage other positive experiences. Other lessons are less profound, like positive self-talk should not include words like “asshole” and “dumb fuck,” but the minor lessons have their uses too.

One of the current topics of my knitting list is the difference between process knitters and project knitters. The latter decide on a specific item, gather their materials, research or experiment with new techniques, and get to work. The former experiment or research new techniques, gather materials, find interesting projects, start them, get side tracked, return, frog or continue as the spirit guides. The point for one group is to meet a goal; for the other, it’s simply to knit.

I’m very much a process knitter. I’ve got three or four projects going at one time, hate them all during the endless middle third, and complete them only by popping a juicy book into the player days or hours before they have to be done.

I realized, as I was thinking about my knitting, that I’m not a very goal oriented writer either. Well, yes, the Nobel is the fantasy, and having a book in print in order to get a nice secure job is also a concern, but if writing were a real goal, I’d have to invest a lot more time and emotional energy into (a) writing, (b) submitting, and (c) keeping up with the field. I’ve always been afraid of approaching writing in those terms because of the severity of the writing anxiety that plagued me throughout my entire education, but I’m thinking now that, if writing became a series of practical steps and reasonable goals, it might also become less terrifying. This may be how I need to reframe the process for myself in order to make writing a profession, not a hobby.

The Blog Does Its Work: WDG Complete

I think I finished my Shakespearean sonnet—again. Tonight I read it without planning to, and I liked it.

Yes, the blog is doing its work: I pulled up the file only because I was feeling guilty about not having posted anything manuscript related this week.

Like last time, I picked at a word or two, knowing exactly which ones and why and knowing exactly what their substitutes or additions would be. This time, I wasn’t bothered by the movement from unusual to ordinary because the imagery at the start (unusual) evokes a lulling mood that shatters in the last few lines (ordinary). The final couplet is still not the embodiment of originality, but it’s one of those old truths that unsettles us every time we are reminded of it, so like anyone who’s ever written about seizing the day, I can live with the heard-before.

By my third rereading, I was thinking the details that were necessary for the turn to work were “clever devices,” not integral parts of the poem. I was tempted to tinker, but I’ve decided to trust they are fine, and I’ve decided to send the poem out next week in my first mass mailing since March.

Getting to Know the Book

The working title is Fat Girl. Yeah, I know, it’s awful and politically incorrect. At the time I started, I needed a title that would help me keep track of the book’s controlling idea. When I was a student taking first- and third-year comp, I wrote papers called “Abortion” and “Sex Education: Why It’s So Important” for the same reason. Now that I read and write a lot more than I did then (and now that I’ve read ten years worth of student essays as stunning [and that really is the word] as my own), I know that the title and the controlling idea are two separate entities and that getting the former to express the latter takes a great deal of thought and experience. I also know that titles can be changed, so I’ll leave mine alone for now and deal with it later.

The plot is simple:

Amanda, the plain and plump, and Hernan have grown up together. She’s madly in love with him, but she knows he’s got a crush on her beautiful but disdainful sister Gabriela.

Those really are the only characters in the novel. A few other people (their parents, Gabriela’s boyfriend, some of the people who work with them) wander through the text from time to time, but they’re not well developed, serving as window dressing, as one of my professors would say.

The setting is a spacious house in an upscale neighborhood and an equally upscale boutique. Having just skimmed the first chapter, I think I’ll tone the upscale down. Most likely, I was going through my Danielle-Steel-diamond-cage phase.

The point of view is first person singular: Amanda. I remember that at one time it was third person, but I think I may have gone through the text and changed that twice.

The first paragraph is this. I’m not sure that I like it:

I stood on the landing above the great room surrounded by potted plants and cooking smells, looking myself over in the mirror beside the fanlight, and wondering if the dress I’d tried on in Hernan’s shop would really help. Hernan had said it would, and they always did. But scanning the homely face and the plump body in the oversized T-shirt with baggy jeans, I reminded myself that Illusions could only do so much.

The third paragraph may be a better start:

I shook my hips in the landing mirror, remembering the feel of the dress: the gauzy fabric, the dark background, the discrete white bouquet print. It had taken at least twenty pounds off me, and if I kept my back straight and my chin up, it actually gave me breasts, a waist, and hips.

Or deciding now may be premature.