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.

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.

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?

When I consider How My Light Is Spent (Some more)

Ah, the post partal effluvia has receded. I read my Miltonian sonnet last night, and it has ceased to be the quintessential Miltonian sonnet, the one he would have written if his sensibilities were mine.

Fortunately, I still like it. I revised, of course, more editing than real revision, and I haven’t changed my mind about sending it out soon.

Most of the changes involved adding more periods. The poem was basically two long sentences, and while grammatical and perfectly clear, they made the whole thing overly dense. I broke it up, not easy when meter and rhyme need to be taken into account. The effect is to make the tone more anxious, angrier. That wasn’t quite what I was going for, but I think it works, so I’ll probably leave it alone.

The most significant changes, the ones that were real revisions, happened in the last line. It sounded very cryptic to me sans post partal effluvia, so I spent over an hour writing and rewriting it. Now its sense is clearer, but I’m not sure that it will have any meaning to the general reader.

What does that mean?

I made the mistake of Googling the sonnet. The blog entries I read discuss it in very conventional terms: the speaker wonders if he will be judged by God for not exercising his gifts to the fullest, then realizes (1) that God, the giver of all gifts, doesn’t need humans to do His work for Him and (2) that standing and waiting is work enough. Of course, the bloggers emphasize the tragedy of blindness, which is what prompts the speaker’s musings in the first place.

For the general reader, a sighted reader, that tragedy is one of the assumptions of the poem. For the speaker, blindness is a fact, and it’s a hardship, but its tragedy is that it may be a possible obstacle to salvation. My own reading of the situation, not the poem, is that what impedes the speaker from exercising his gifts is not his blindness, but the small mindedness of others, who, in not recognizing that he can be an instrument of God as well as they, fail to exercise the gift/responsibility of loving their neighbors as themselves. Saying all of this in a few short lines is hard. It’s even harder when the reader is unwilling to rethink the nature of the tragedy and his or her roll in it.

Another thing I noticed about my response to Milton’s sonnet is that one of the images (the bony whore) that was key during the writing seems to be unimportant now. It isn’t altogether irrelevant. It suggests by analogy. But what I’ll have to decide is whether that analogy or another will work best.

I should reread other poems now that I’m sitting in the arid glare of reality.

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.

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent (continued)

My Miltonian sonnet has a title now, and excerpt from the original. At the moment, I think it’s hot stuff, but right now I have no judgment.

I’m bathing in the post partal effluvia of my own brilliance. Not arrogance: the cherished delusion that evaporates all too quickly. Why is it that whatever we write is perfect for about a month and only that all too fleeting month? After that, public bathroom graffiti is a goal to strive for. Alas, alack.

I read the sonnet again two days ago. I did a little tinkering, substituting words that don’t conjure images with those that do (harried whore to bony whore) and snipping a few function words (mostly articles) to help the images roll into one another. I spent a while on the last line, which sounded about as meaningful as the cryptic writing on the stall.

When I reread the poem just now, I’d forgotten about the last line. The changes seem to work though the image is different from what I had been going for. For my original idea to make sense, the reader would have to know what a talent is (a unit of measure in money) in order to get a really bad pun that isn’t particularly clever even at the most superficial level. The line as it actually reads, however, draws on the image of the houses like tombs and does something more complex.

Were I not floating in my own effluvia, I could never admit that poems really do write themselves. It’s a matter of getting the tool at the word processor to let them.

Catching a Spark

Avoidance seems to work for me. Last night, I thought the weekend would be about Ursula and her knitting, but today that seemed too hard to think through, so I pulled up a poem that was almost done last time we met.

Again, who picked out the brilliance to leave all the crap?

I wrote it the semester I took a class on form. The only real rule on this one is seven syllables to the line. As with the sonnet, I noticed a lot of flab (irrelevant detail, needless repetition, pacing issues). I was going for a feeling of frantic chaos that encircles a core of overwhelming isolation.

Emotionally, the poem is successful, but on a literal level the action is hard to follow. The language is vague; the images develop the mood, not the actual situation; and the lack of substance weakens the impact of the close.

The second I stopped reading, I started to revise. First it was fairly superficial stuff, cutting flabby words to fuse lines, but quickly I discovered I was adding detail, filling out the story of the poem, giving it the life of setting and of character motivation. The biggest thing is that I rediscovered it’s about the significance of losing a poem that wrote itself. I remember starting with that idea, but somewhere along the way, I lost it.

The changes go into the major overhaul category: whole stanzas will disappear to be replaced by others, and new characters and a new sense of what is missing will be added.

What does work well in the version of the poem as it stands is the use of nonflab related repetition. A few of the images and lines come up two or three times, evoking some of the circular unease of a villanelle. I’ll try to keep that aspect of the poem. I’m excited.

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.

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.

And I’m a Knitter Too

We may as well get the unpleasantness out of the way once and for all. I’m a knitter, and knitting is part of my writing process, so knitting will appear here from time to time.

First, I’m usually listening to audio books while I’m knitting, so I’m thinking about how a piece of writing is put together while I’m also thinking about how a piece of knitting is constructed. If I don’t have anything to listen to, I plan my next piece of writing or work out the kinks in a current project.

Second, knitting has taught me to think differently about how to accomplish a goal. When I knit, I think about what it is I want to achieve. Then I think about all of the little tricks and techniques that can theoretically help me do that. Most of the time, I’m dead wrong, but every once in a while I pull it off. In the knitting realm, two no-hole sock patterns are my major accomplishment, It was also the project that helped me realize I can do the same with writing and other things. My most recent application of the principle has been in the sonnet: I’m giving myself the task of figuring out what I want the ending to do.

Third, since most of what I know about knitting comes from the web, I’ve learned to research and enjoy it. Now I actually stop in the middle of a piece of writing to look things up or—stunner of all stunners—to read a book or two on the subject. With the Shakespearean sonnet, I looked up information about root systems. Almost none of it made it into the poem, but I did move some details around to be consistent with reality. A newer poem started entirely as research, and turning facts to poetry has been quite the task.

SO I’ll post patterns from time to time, and if I can talk someone into taking pictures for me, I’ll post them too.