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.

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.

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?

Past and Present

Because one of the therapists I work with told me there’s a place in town that shreds crap for three dollars per cubic foot, I spent most of Tuesday cleaning out my office. I got rid of some of the boxes and clothes baskets on the floor and all of the kindling under my computer keyboard.

On Wednesday, I woke up with incredible lower back pain, which was mild when I was merely standing, sitting or walking, but excruciating the second I tried reaching, bending, or doing any of the things one does when shifting from one position to another—really an unfortunate set of limitations where the bowels and bladder are concerned. Dressing was a long slow process, and managing shoes and socks involved third party assistance.

I spent the day sitting in a plywood frame, knitting a sock, and finishing The Woman in White. I don’t usually take this long to finish a book, but this month has been a month of mood swings and distractions, so progress has been slow.

It was interesting to read a Victorian version of the sort of light reading I do now. Characters really haven’t changed much: the brave hero, the smart sidekick, the intriguing villain, the damsel in distress. Nowadays the smart sidekick would be the heroine and the damsel would be someone’s sister or dear but useless friend. I like the multivoice narrative and plan to use it sooner or later, and I was gratified to discover that such familiar motifs as evading the tail and the fruitless recourse to the authorities have been with us for over a hundred fifty years.

What was more surprising still was how much more modern the novel felt than the literary works of the era. This one talked about everyday things–like indoor plumbing, matches, the business of going out to work, the practical points of day-to-day etiquette—in ways that were far less ethereal than anything George Eliot or even the more commonplace Charles Dickens put together, and the characters themselves had a sense about them of being modern people that made them indistinguishable from their twenty-first century counterparts.

By Thursday I was well enough to help with the Thanksgiving Day preparations (i.e., slicing, chopping, kneading, tossing, and yes, dishwashing).

Today I’m almost sound of back. I’m reading something called The Labyrinth While working on the same sock. I’m hoping that tomorrow I’ll have finished the sock and feel well enough to write.

Art As Metaphor for Art

Today is a day of completions. The maestro finished replastering the house and painting the trim, and I finished my seamless slippers. Both events are worthy of record because

• both began weeks ago,
• both evolved over time,
• both required input from others,
• both lapsed into immobility and meditation,
• both concluded satisfactorily after a low point of frustration near the end.

The work on the house began in early October. It started with a simple replastering/repainting (both substances shooting out of a compressor hose at the same time). After a week or so of rest, my mom thought it would be a good time to fix the sagging overhang above the stoop, cover a brick wall with the same paint/plaster mixture as the rest of the house, frame an outdoor shrine, properly finish the eaves below the roofing, and whitewash the trim. The maestro did it all—between real construction jobs and mysterious absences.

As the house progressed, the sound of sawing, filing, scraping, brushing drifted down in short, unobtrusive puffs, and I worked on my swatches, read patterns, thought about drab Amanda, a teacher of what used to be called Home Economics. I imagined her knitting some slippers of her own in a glitzy rayon blend for Hernan’s design gallery. Yes, he is a designer of women’s clothing.

She would do exactly as I was doing: sit over the slippers, her needles idle, reviewing what she knows, brooding—very much the antithesis of Ursula, a short story character who went from poet to knitter during my last bout of revision. Ursula casts on, experiments, frogs, her mind elsewhere.

Amanda is constant, steady. That is her predominant characteristic. She perseveres with her work, perseveres with her secret love of Hernan, perseveres with her theories about her sister, perseveres with her job and her seething obedience at home, perseveres.

I haven’t quite figured out what Ursula’s thang is, what makes her give up her craft, what motivates her very strong, very negative reaction to another character: protectiveness, scorn, pity, satisfaction.

I’m at the low point of frustration with the short story. With Amanda, I’m at immobility and meditation, but I’ve got the maestro to draw inspiration from: plodding, intermittent, and unobtrusive. The slippers are a good symbol to take strength from too.

While Not Writing

The life of a writer is full of the tedious and ordinary. I liked that about the last Harry Potter book: the great hero of the wizzarding world spent at least half of the book sulking and cooling his heels in a succession of camp sites while he figured out what to do.

Most of my energy this week has been taken up by work. For the last two years, my employer has been reading parts of our contract literally and pretending other parts mean the opposite of what they say (i.e., the-whole-is-unrelated-to-the-sum-of-its-parts syndrome), so my coworkers and I have been banding together. Last night we met to plan strategy for a big meeting today. Before that, I just stewed and felt bitter, picking out elements of this situation for my novella, which is about an awful person with a more awful boss.

When I drafted it, I had a boss I didn’t like, so many of her attributes made their way into the manuscript. Since then, I’ve had other noisome employers, and over the years, more of my characters, like the boss’ secretary, who were nondescript in the original draft, absorbed their personalities as well.

Makes me question scholars who spend their careers tracking down the source of this character or that. In my own case, I steal details from people who embody a Type, recreate the characters or moments that help me understand how to represent something, or amalgamate people so I can vent all my puke and pus.

But I started by commenting on how ordinary life is between writing sessions, how easy it is to get sidetracked by going to work, planning the month’s expenses, and remembering that this weekend the toilet must be scrubbed. I’ve only thought about writing once or twice since my last post and only fleetingly while confessing to a couple of friends that I have a blog, and really, those giggly admissions aren’t actual thoughts about writing.

The first writerly thought I had came to me Tuesday morning. I’m forty-one and have matching skin, so moisturizer has been integrated into the hygiene routine. When I got out of the shower, I realized that the single remaining droplet would not meet my needs. I went to work sans dermal hydration, and as soon as my first appointment was out of the way, I hurried over to the nearest drugstore, replenished, and slathered myself flexible as soon as I got back in the van.

Not a woman to wear make up, I had my first moment of sisterhood with the millions of women who put on their faces on their way to work and touch up in staffrooms and on lunch breaks the world over. Until then, I had never imagined writing about anyone who would bother with that because I could never imagine her leaning over the makeup counter deciding on the shades. That is, I didn’t know where she’d be coming from, What she would be doing after the purchase, and whom she’d have in mind as she chose (herself or the people who would see her).

But suddenly, I was her, standing in front of the shelves of bottles, tubes, and jars, comparing labels, deciding that anti-redness is good, but anti-wrinkle, premature. I had a tiny twinge of sympathy for Gabriela, her cosmetics boxes, and her pleasure at seeing herself as even better than she is, and a smaller moment of annoyance with drab Amanda, whose plain, round face rises like a watery moon when she can be a sun.

The other writerly thought came at today’s meeting. One of my coworkers objected to an issue. He railed so theatrically that I thought, “If he were a character in a book, he would not be believable.” Funny how some fiction is more believable than fact and some fact less believable than fiction.

I did have one of those I’m-a-poet-and-I-can’t-help-it moments while I was listening to him. His railing took the form of long impassioned pleas, lots of emotional appeals and personal attacks. the whole thing went along the lines of “Here I am: just trying to do an honest day’s work in the best way I know how, when I find that my own friends are stabbing me in the back, even though I soldier on …, punctuated by the refrain, “But little did I know that there was an invisible hand.” At one point, when he seemed to be at a loss for words, I prompted flatly, “The invisible hand.”

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.