Back In the Saddle

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

My husband has a friend who falls in love every week.  Ed meets women at parties or around town, talks (or not) with them, and falls.  Sometimes hard, sometimes not so hard – but either way, regardless of what transpires, he’s a goner.  Until the woman lets him know she’s not interested, until a dud first date, until the relationship sours.  And then he’s out the next weekend, falling all over again.

This resiliency in romanticism amazes my husband and me.  Ed gets back on the horse, but my husband and I, when disappointed in love, went off and nursed our wounds for, oh, a decade or so.  I first heard about Ed, in fact, when my husband and I were still speaking in code, testing the thickness of the ice, speaking in slanted comments and abstractions that hid the risky specificity of “I’m falling for you.”   Or, in my case, “All I want to do is kiss you.”

I’m thinking about this because I recently started revising my novel (again).  Two years ago, I sent it to my agent.  (Actually, I dropped it off in person, conveniently having flown to New York for a friend’s surprise 50th birthday.)  I wanted her, of course, to pick up my 304 pages and not pee or eat until she’d finished reading.  But – as I kept reminding myself, week after week, as I heard nothing – my novel wasn’t the center of her universe or even the only manuscript on her desk.  I waited a month, checked in.

Polite, noncommittal reply.  Another month.  The same.  It wasn’t lost on me that our communication had been downgraded to one-sentence emails sent from her Blackberry as (I imagined) she zipped uptown to lunch with a fabulous editor about to make an offer on someone else’s manuscript.  Once, she’d lavished me with “Brava”s at my book proposal’s garnering interest from a hard-to-please editor at an esteemed publishing house.  Once, she’d bought me lunch.

“I haven’t forgotten you,” she wrote sometime in late July.  And “I want to read it when I have time to give it the read it deserves.”  I didn’t bother her in August.  (We all know what happens in New York publishing in August.)  Then, finally, after a week of her being at the US Open every time I phoned, she emailed.

Three sentences telling me the novel “didn’t quite work.”  That it was “too quiet.”  That “the market’s really tough right now for fiction.”  That she was sorry.

Heck, Gilead was quiet.  Didn’t “quite work” how?  I knew the market was tough – but an agent is an advocate, right?  She didn’t need to sell something she didn’t believe in it; no, I didn’t expect that.   But I did expect some details, some editorial guidance, some level of investment, some suggestion on moving forward.  This read like a kiss-off.

I talked to two published writer friends.  I talked to my therapist.  I made a bulleted list of talking points.  I called, she took my call, we talked.  She gave details – hers and those of the three outside readers she’d sent the novel to.  We agreed, for this novel, to part ways.  Many writers, she said, have one agent for nonfiction and another for fiction, and while I didn’t like the sound of that, I did see her point.  I’d gone with her because I liked her no-nonsense manner, her good reputation among editors I talked to, her track record with books like the memoir I was then shopping around.  But I could leave her now, with dignity intact, telling myself and any future agent I approached, that she didn’t do my type of fiction.

Dignity?  Several friends pointed out that mine hadn’t been compromised.  But here’s where we get back to Ed.  Ed doesn’t think about dignity when he professes love after hearing a folk singer at the local coffee house – and he doesn’t need to.  His hasn’t been compromised.  He may be ardent, and overly eager, but he’s not abject.  He doesn’t let rejection ruin his optimism, his eagerness.

My agent and her readers made valid points. I knew that I could improve the novel, tighten and dramatize key elements, and look for new representation, sending out the best first fifty pages I could come up with.  What I didn’t know was that doing so would take so long.  What I didn’t realize, until recently, was how stung I’d been, how fully I’d retreated.

So, as I revise, as I look for agents to contact, I think of Ed.  And I think also of the man I love, the man I am married to, the man I wouldn’t know at all if we hadn’t each taken a deep breath and broken through the code.

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How do you keep writing when you don’t have time?

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

When I started this blog, last spring, while taking Meghan Ward’s Social Media Madness for Writers class at the Grotto – which I highly recommend to any Bay Area writer mystified by the demands and protocol of social media – I vowed to keep to it regularly.  Habit, discipline, building a readership – all that good stuff relies on consistency.  OK to take a break for a vacation or such, Meghan advised, just let your readers know.

I sat down this morning to let my readers know that this morning, I won’t be posting because I need to work on a revision due to my writers’ group in two hours.

I started blogging here, in part, because I needed to keep writing while planning my wedding.  I’m one of those people who tends to think she can clean out the closet, re-organize all the bookshelves, make soup, and still have time the read the Sunday New York Times – in one Sunday afternoon.  I like to make to-do lists, lists that suffer from overambitiousness.

So when the reality of wedding planning didn’t allow the kind of writing time I was used to – three to four hours, every morning – I fought the inevitable.  I can’t stop writing!  If I don’t write, I’m a failure!  Then, somewhere between lining up the caterer and ordering the invitations, I gave in.  I’d put my writing on hold when my mother got cancer and when my father died and I was the sole adult survivor, when I became seriously ill, when I bought and moved into a new place.  Sometimes life events get in the way, and why not make room for joy as well as sorrow and mortgage pre-approval?  This would be my wedding; I wanted to get it right. Some writers are able to keep to their writing schedules no matter what life throws their way – and they seem to be men, don’t they? men with wives or the book royalties to afford the kind of household help that facilitates writing all day? – and I’m not one of them.  I’ve made my peace with that.  I may not clock my four hours every day, but I do what I can – scribble notes with story ideas, make rambling entries in “Write It All Down,” a file so named after my friend Michael’s advice to me when Mom was diagnosed, post to this blog.

The wedding is over now; a new life has begun.  (The wedding was perfect, by the way.)  I feared the transition back into daily work.  I had left a few projects on the back burner, and I didn’t know which to pick up first.  I feared the empty screen.  Last week, I turned to one of the many piles on my desk – next weekend, I’ll go through them all, right? and get the Times read, too – and pulled out my notes from a few months ago.  I’d shown my writers’ group the first chapter of my novel, and they’d had many helpful things to say.

I began re-writing the chapter.  I have two versions of the re-write now, and I’m toggling between as to which works best.  But here’s the point:  I need to spend the next two hours in Rincon (the fictionalized town where the novel takes place) not in the blogsphere.

Does this mean the blog has run its course?  How disposable, after all, is a blog?  (Pretty disposable, I’d argue, and yet I keep at it.)  Has this one run its course, having served as a way to keep writing when I couldn’t Write? Here I sit, in my bathrobe, empty coffee cup at my side, typing out this explanation for why, this Friday, I won’t be posting.  And before I know it, that’s my post.

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Rising & Falling

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

I can’t get a certain floor out of my mind.  It’s tiled, worn, and – the best part, the part I can’t forget – undulating.  I’d attach a picture if I had one, but the entire time I stood on this floor, marveling at it and the gold mosaics around me, an officious guard with Nordic hair and a uniform one size too small kept calling out, in a harsh, beleaguered voice, “No photo!”  Many others disregarded him (as well as the prominent signs showing a camera with a slash through it), but I’ve always obeyed orders.  Just as well I don’t have a photo, really.

Thirty years ago, after my freshman year in college, I spent six weeks in Alaska, working in a fishing village on a shore of the Nushagak River.  I had my camera with me, and no prohibition kept me from capturing my co-workers in their flannel shirts and kitchen aprons, the silver surface of the river at dusk, the short airstrip on which I’d arrived, by two-seater plane, from Anchorage.  But, one night when I went for a walk, I didn’t have my camera.  In late June, in southern Alaska, the sun takes several hours to set, which means that around 11:30, as my companion and I rounded the bend back to camp, the sky still held plenty of blue as well as sunset pink.  Enough color to make pop the small white one-room building with U.S. POST OFFICE painted above the only door, the American flag fluttering from the pitched roof, and beyond, a perfect creamy disk, the full moon.

We stopped, breath in our throats.  I said something about my camera, back in my room.  “Here,” my companion said, and stood behind me to place his forearms on my shoulder so that his hands framed my face.  “Take a photo.”

The undulating floor has staying power, too – but unlike the Clark’s Point, Alaska, P.O., it has a significance I haven’t yet figured out. Actually, using the word “significance” in the context of the post office feels silly, pretentious.  The image was gorgeous, but I’m not interested in extrapolating from it any kind of meaning about the last frontier or the presence of a federal government in a village reached by two-seater plane or the spontaneous nature of seduction.

But the floor of San Marco Basilica in Venice?  Its tile floor rising and dipping in hillocks and valleys because of the movement of the water beneath?  That, I keep mulling over.  Not because of the sinking of the city, or the absurdity of building on a sandbar, or the hordes of tourists, or the gorgeous decorative loot brought back from the Fourth Crusade, or the tireless tidal persistence on stone and mosaic and pilings. I’m just plain in love with that floor, moving like something alive, a meniscus, a membrane, a scrim –

Students often ask where to get ideas for a story.  Real life?  A newspaper headline? A conversation overheard on the bus?  A dream?  Sure, any — all — of these, and more.  Whatever works.  My stories often start from an image – a door, elaborately carved; a girl in a party dress, running away from a swarm of bees; a cat sitting on the lawn, licking its paws; a pile of rusted car parts.  A floor, rising and falling.

I have no idea where, but I want to follow it.

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Airing the Laundry

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

I will be taking off the next three weeks.  My next post will appear Friday, October 21.

I’ve never worried about offending anyone while writing.  Maybe it’s all those years of uncensored diary entries about mad crushes and revenge fantasies and how my mother infuritated me – but getting the words down about real people always came easily.

The trick, of course, is when the time comes for those people to see those words.  Last month, Meghan Ward posted on her blog, Writerland, about the dangers of airing one’s  “family’s dirty laundry.”   Publishing words – however honest – about those we love is dicey business, it’s true, but don’t we own our stories, whoever else’s they intersect with?  Isn’t it our job as writers to do with them what we will, and our readers’ (and editors’) to squawk when we slide into revenge or bias or mean-spiritedness?

My memoir, The Water Will Hold You, tells the journey of a skeptic – me – into someone who prays regularly.  The book started as a way to write about an ineffable topic – prayer – and soon became a narrative.  After all, I needed to tell the story of how I came to pray, the factors and events that led me to even consider it as an option in the first place.  Certain people played roles in that narrative, and to do my book justice, I had to describe those roles with honesty and relevance.

I aired a lot of family laundry.  It helped that, by the time of the final rewrite, my parents and my brother had died. I’m not being flip. I could never have written the book I wrote otherwise – because the book is shaped by loss.  I did worry a little about what certain friends of my parents might think.  But this wasn’t a Mommie Dearest tell-all.  I portrayed my parents and brother as flawed, sure, but as human – just as I tried to portray myself.

The hardest decisions about “outing” people came not about immediate family, then, but  about two people, still living.  When Jenny Sanford published her memoir about her marriage to the former governor of South Carolina, who cheated on her while on a supposed hiking trip in the Appalachias,  “The book doesn’t make him look bad. It just quotes him.”

True, but still.  I agonized.  Memoir isn’t hagiography. But I’m a wimp when it comes to pissing people off — even when I never want to see those people again.  I changed the name of one, and when he found the published book and blogged about the dangers of dating a writer, he outed himself.  Fair enough.

The other person, I took more pains with.  I didn’t want to hurt or anger her – but I couldn’t gloss over certain choices she’d made, choices that had a direct impact on the events in the book. I had to tell her that I had written a book in which she played a role – but how to tell her?  One day, I took a deep breath and did it. I’d written “honestly about the past,” I said, hoping my euphemism would signal to her the reason she might want her name changed.  She didn’t.  “I’d love to read it, though,” she said.  “You will,” I said, “once it’s published.”  I didn’t let her see – or vet – a word before then.  The book uses her name.  She muttered something about libel, but has never said a word to me about it.

So it all ended okay.  But I remember the tenterhooks I was on, trying to decide how to handle the portrayal of these two people.  And even though my book has been out for four years, I’m still sucseptible to anxiety over upsetting someone, as I was reminded this summer when a cousin phoned whom I hadn’t spoken to in years.  He’d read the book and wanted to send me a note about his thoughts.  Uh-oh.  I waited three weeks before returning his call and giving him my address, fretting about the one brief comment made in the book about his parents’ marriage, a comment that only a close family member would recognize.  The note arrived.  I opened it nervously.  He wrote about being moved by the book, about wishing he’d thanked my father for how Dad had helped him.  I teared up.  Then, I read the next sentence: “I didn’t agree with all of your book, but it was interesting.”

 

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Try, Try Again

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

Whatever works for you, I tell my students.  There’s no one way to write, no hard-and-fast rule that guarantees success, as much as we want one.  And yet, certain koan-like statements have made it onto my bulletin board or refrigerator.  My current favorite, from Samuel Beckett quoted by Colum McCann a year or so ago in the New York Times:  “Try. Fail.  Try again.  Fail better.”

In my writing classes at UC Berkeley Extension, I emphasize process, the messy trajectory of moving a piece from first draft to polished prose.  So, last July, when Jane Anne Staw mentioned “process” as the fifth component of her talk on the five components of a writing practice, given during the weeklong Fiction Intensive, I nodded and glanced around the room to see that my students were paying attention.  I’d been making the point all week in morning workshop, to a writer frustrated that he’d already revised his story twice and wasn’t that enough?, and to another who expected her readers to make connections not yet clear – or even present – in her chapter.

Jane Anne used the word “iteration,” suggesting that any draft worth its salt has four stages:  generating the raw material; mining the gold; shaping it; and then, editing for sentence rhythm.  And that doesn’t yield publishable story, or novel, or memoir – that just gets you through one draft.

I just started reading Proust, in the new Lydia Davis translation from Penguin.  I’m about twenty pages into Swann’s Way, and can see why one editor to whom Proust sent his manuscript wrote back:  “I don’t see why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before he goes to sleep.”  The sentences are long, their subjects often separated from their verbs by stacks of modifying clauses.  Reading one of them feels like climbing an elaborate staircase with many, many landings.  You think you’re at the top – but no, not yet!  Another flight remains!  I can only imagine the process Proust underwent, the iterations and drafts.  Apparently, he rarely left his cork-lined room on the boulevard Haussmann.  A typesetter’s nightmare, he crossed out sentences and pasted in new ones to his proofs, “not a single line out of twenty” remaining as originally written.

David Vann wrote a terrific novel called Caribou Island, with the gutsiest ending I can remember reading.  In a recent interview for The Millions, Vann says how he spend ten years writing his first book, Legend of a Suicide; publication took another twelve years.  That’s process.  In the interview, Vann eschews the idea of Post-its over the desk, or working from outlines.  To the question of trying to “attain some kind of perfection,” Vann replies “Fuck no!”

How would Proust have answered the question?  Does it matter?

We get mixed up, or I do, in applying any one writer’s technique as a formula.  Even the gentlest guideline about “process” can become codified.  Writing is a strange, intuitive, surprising mess, like life itself, and while we can break it down into iterations and drafts and pencil-and-paper and inputting-on-the-computer and index cards and Post-its, these things can throw up barricades too.

I spent one November in Virginia, at a writers’ and artists’ colony.  For my studio, I was given the Corncrib, a funny-shaped one-room ark of a building, set in the middle of a courtyard, with a leak over the single bed and windows high in the canted wall over my desk, through which I watched the light in the trees.  I’d brought colored pens and index cards with me that month, and a plan of gathering some 300 pages of legal-pad scribbling into a cohesive narrative.  I made charts, and pinned index cards in vertical columns and horizontal rows.  I used brown ink for one character, blue for another, green for a third, and so on, drawing lines of connection on ever-messier cards.

Did it help?  I don’t know.  Was it process?  Sure.  Is my novel published?  Nope.  I finished that draft, but found I still had another – and yet another – to make, before my characters were free.  And I’ve never again used that colored-pen technique, although I’ve kept the pens.

Those of us who like control can cleave too tightly to plans, can stifle our characters with preset notions of what they’re going to do.  And yet isn’t it helpful to jot down an idea of where you see Christopher going with that shovel?  Can’t narrative trajectory plotted on graph paper help give us a notion of where we need a little more tension, or a little less?

What’s worked for you?  Where have you failed better?

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