Writing With Blinders On

One of best things that happened to me as a writer was having to commute an hour and half to a new job. At first it seemed more like a curse than a writing boon. How would I write now that I had to be on a train with all those distractions? The way I did it was that I learned to do it. Admittedly, the first week of commuting was more about survival than anything else, writing included. One evening in particular I recall coming home at seven-thirty after having been up since quarter of five and thinking that life as I had known it was over. In a way it was.

By the second and third week, there was a kind of rhythm in getting up early, getting coffee at the Whistle Stop café, downing it before the 6:20 arrived and getting settled in the cramped seat at the back of the row on the left so that only really cheeky individuals had the nerve to ask if they could sit down. I began writing every day I took the train, morning and evening. I learned to block out the noise, which isn't so much on a morning train whose destination is New York. It isn't all that much most evenings either, once you get used to it as white noise, something to be ignored so that you can write with better concentration and more intensity. I kept up the habit and found that the time flew by as fast as the scenery, and several times almost missed my stop. After ten months, I had the first draft of a novel. The time had flown, and I arrived at work in the mornings and home in the evenings feeling more energized than drained on most days, and when I was tired, it was more out of a sense of accomplishment than exhaustion.

It took a while to get into the rhythm and the habit of writing with blinders on, of blocking out whatever else was going on. That's not to say that the conductor with the plastic chicken and the other conductor whom we were all certain led a double life somewhere we didn't want to know about weren't distractions, but they were momentary, welcome distractions, good for a laugh or side observation, a small break before returning to the work. With the habit and discipline of the day (and the night), I learned to write a thousand words in a sitting, usually an hour, since the other half was getting to and from the stations. It wasn't easy, at first, to write with blinders on, but it was good discipline, helpful for writing around the house and its myriad distractions, or Starbucks on the rare times out for coffee.

When Inspiration Isn't

The day is closed and gray. Rain splatters the earth, and the branches of the scarecrow trees scratch the sky. There's nothing in this day that hasn't been seen before, nothing that hasn't been felt before, nothing new under the sun. Futility infuses all effort. Writing without apparent inspiration is, well, work. There's the business of writing, the promoting of it. There's the art of writing, the windswept moments when you're swept away. Then there is the sheer labor of it that happens on days like this, days as closed to inspiration as a changed lock. Yet it's the work of the writer to labor, if not by the sweat of the outward brow, then by internal effort, which seems infinitely harder, the continual giving birth. If you know nothing of this and writing seems easy, wait. The days of apparent futility will come, days that separate writers from dabblers and make writers who they are. Like the caterpillar struggling to break the chrysalis, this is how butterflies are formed, how glory is put into the thing and into the work, and inspiration comes by doing.

Whatever Is Lovely: On Contemplation

It could be that moment, fleeting, in morning when winter clouds enfold the sunrise, or the sound of turtle doves flushed warm from the underbrush. It could be the bark of squirrels at play, the signal cry of Canada geese in chevron flight somewhere that seems always north of here—those moments of loveliness, which, if not captured in thought, are swallowed the day or the night, moments when stars shine stubborn even above city lights, or of the silence of the house when all wireless things momentarily rest, the smoke of city stacks from a train window, these moments of loveliness that invite contemplation and refill the soul. The scenes of life are moments to feed off in memory, moments whose vitality dissipates as soon as they become words. Still, the moments offer themselves as refreshment, not always to write about, but to write from, a momentary replenishment of the well from which the writing water comes.

The Romance of the Written Word

Never being sure exactly what will happen when I sit down to write can be scary, but it's exciting, too, and an encouragement that the romance isn't completely gone from this business, art and calling of writing. That blank page, whether it's on paper or the computer screen, is a perpetual fresh start, a chance to reinvent "story" over and over again, that mystery of creating, like a baby being born each time, filled with its own unique life yet taking after someone else, or maybe more than one person. What will this day, this writing exercise, bring? What will the novel I'm working on become? At what point will it take its own path and lead me, instead of the other way around? In a kind of "writing to learn" way, that's the give and take, the yin and yang of writing, where it's as much about the writer being shaped by the words as the words being shaped by the writer.

Using Anger (Passion) as Ballast

You would think the holidays wouldn’t be a time when people feel anger, but emotions can run high around this time of year. Despite a number of changes in the U.S., there is a lot of uncertainty, which means a lot of fear and, often, no small amount of anger. It could be over another rejection letter, or any of the other thousand frustrations that arise in a day. One safe place for anger, channeled correctly, is in writing. A writing colleague I recently spoke with said that one of the main ingredients lacking in writing these days, and an underlying reason for agent rejections (aside from an abysmal market), is the lack of passion. If we don't feel passionate about our work and if that passion isn't reflected there, how can we expect our readers to respond, to feel strongly about the book or the story? Think about the response elicited by Philip Roth's writing — not for the fainthearted, but it certainly strikes the soul, making the work unforgettable. Anger, emotion, passion can become a spark that ignites weak characters, a bland setting and flat dialogue. Of course, it's important to channel that passion in a productive way — but that's what editing is for. So use your anger and your passion, and fan your work into flame!

A Cricket in Her Hair

It's tempting to cut the things in a story that don't fit, a character's idiosyncrasy, an unusual setting detail, an unexpected plot twist. Of course, sometimes these things distract without any redeeming value—but sometimes, when handled well, they enhance and deepen the story. I noticed this recently while reading My Ántonia, by Willa Cather. Cather didn't shy away from describing the sunflowers that grew along a rural Nebraska roadway, even though they seem to belong more in someone's garden or California. But the unexpected sunflowers were like the Bohemian and other immigrant families that settled in the area in the nineteenth century, out of place and enigmatic. It was a good move, as was the description of Ántonia's rescuing a cricket from certain death by hiding it in her hair under a scarf. The visual is unusual, but for Ántonia the cricket was a reminder of home, specifically of an old woman in the town whom the children flocked to and called grandmother. By way of Cather's skilled description and expert weaving of Ántonia's choice to save the cricket by putting it in her hair, an oddity became a memory not only for Antonia but also for the reader, a warm moment in the otherwise bleak Nebraska landscape. Both the sunflower and the cricket showed the humanity of the German and Bohemian immigrants of the time and their strangeness among the original settlers, but also the immigrants' indispensable contribution, just by being there. So, I'm thinking that although not every weird detail in my writing should be kept just because I wrote it, I'm less likely to be afraid of the strangeness and instead try to figure out how it might advance the story.

Sometimes the best way to deal with fear is not just to face it, but to take it apart. It’s the same with writing.

This sums up my approach to one of my novels. Although three agents are still looking at it, the fact that I haven’t heard from them in a while doesn’t bode well. Plus, I’ve had a feeling that there’s more than one problem with story, and this was confirmed recently by someone knows. His suggestion – scrap it and start over, sort of.

Well, you know the feeling – what do I do now, I can’t go back and redo it all. So, I consulted someone else who said, essentially, why don’t you go back and read it again. If you like it, (in other words, if you can deal with what it would take to fix this thing), then give it a shot.

The fear is in taking that look – what horror will I find? It’s like coming up to an accident and thinking, “I can’t look at this.” Well, the hardest part is that first step. I sat down with the manuscript and didn’t read it all, per se. I recall it well enough because I just finished it. But I thought about it as if it weren’t my manuscript. The irony for editors is that you can see problems in other people’s stuff, but not always your own – much like life.

I saw the problems pointed out by the person who said it wouldn’t fly, and he’s right. But I also began taking those problems apart and thinking about ways to change the story so that the theme remains intact and the characterizations remain true, but the book is fashioned so that it could actually be marketable. This may sound like selling out – but think of it more as resetting a gemstone, or any stone that has some value that’s not being featured in the best possible way. The setting of the stone, and in this case I don’t mean the setting of the novel, although I’m altering that slightly, too, but the way in which that stone is featured in the ring makes a huge difference, as anyone with a slightly smaller diamond knows.

The upshot – don’t just face your writing fears, dismantle them. Ask yourself not only what’s wrong with the novel, but how it can be fixed. Either you’ll realize that although it will take work to make changes that an agent or publisher would ask you to make anyway, or you’ll realize that it’s best to start fresh with another story. The work is largely the same either way, but now you’ve faced one of your worst writing fears and survived. It makes facing subsequent fears much easier. Happy writing!

Upcoming Writing Workshop

For those interested in a library-sponsored writing workshop in Connecticut, I'll be doing the innovative "The Art of Editing in Writing" on December 6. The workshop is for fiction and non-fiction writers, and is based on the six "Rs" of editing — reading, revising, rewriting, restructuring, researching and re-reading. The workshop includes a critique session with Q&A. It's sponsored free by the Friends of the Library, so if you're interested, leave a response with an e-mail address, and I'll send more information.