It’s About Time

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

This post continues discussion of the five components to a writing practice, as proposed by Jane Anne Staw in her excellent talk at UC Berkeley Extension’s Summer Fiction Intensive.

How many of us say that we’ll write our novel, story, memoir, exposé, whatever, as soon as we have the time?  I wish I had a bag of peanuts for every time I’ve sat on a plane next to someone who, after asking the inevitable “What do you do?”, said to me, “Oh, I’d write, too, if I had the time.”

As if all it takes is time.  Clear the schedule, brew the coffee (or pour the single-malt, depending on your fantasy of the writer’s life), rent your garret, and type away. If only.

Some years ago, over egg-salad sandwiches, an uncle asked me, “So do you sit down to write when you’re in the mood, or what?”

Hell no.  If I waited for the right mood, I’d never write.  Writing is like brushing my teeth, I told him.  I have to do it even when I don’t feel like it.  Sure, there are those times (like this morning, come to think of it, standing outside the sauna in the locker room after a swim) when I can’t wait to get home and write down some flair of brilliance (which never looks quite so brilliant after writing it down).  But most of the time, I write out of habit and discipline and because, if I miss more than a day, I feel like a failure, a wash-up, a wannabe.

So how to find the time?  Because no matter what else is going on in your life, there’s always something else to do.

In speaking to a group of (mostly) beginning writers at the Fiction Intensive, Jane Anne Staw offered up the suggestion – no, insistence – that what matters is showing up.  Yep, you’ll have to give up something else – maybe a favorite cable show, or frequent phone calls with your friend in Chicago, or an hour of sleep – but don’t be harsh on yourself.  Demanding, yes, but not harsh.  Find a time that works for you – and it doesn’t matter when it is – and stick to it.  Yes, every day – but not necessarily four hours a day.

I’ve known writers – this was in grad school – who, when they had a story due for workshop, pulled eight- or ten-hour stretches at the laptop.  I envied them their intensity.  But now, fifteen years later, it’s those of us who wrote every day, even for “only” two hours, who are still writing.  Habit and consistency matter.  So does the commitment such habit involves.  If you give to your writing, it will give to you.

Life happens. When my mother got cancer, when my father died, when I became engaged, I took a break from the novel I was writing, the stories I was revising, the nonfiction project I was drafting.  I had too much going on, too many phone calls to make, too much emotional energy invested in the grief or excitement swirling around and inside me.  This doesn’t mean I stopped writing altogether.  “Take notes,” my friend Michael Frank, a writer, said to me when my mother got diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer.  “Write it all down.”

I did.  In a computer file of non-proofread, single-spaced entries.  On Post-its.  In a spiral notebook I could take with me to the doctor’s office.  And when life settled back into life, I got back to the novel and the stories. (As for the Post-its and spiral notebook, they provided essential details when writing about the loss of my parents in my memoir, The Water Will Hold You.)

What have you found helpful in carving out time for your writing?  When have you needed to step away, and what’s kept you feeling like a “real writer” when you’ve had to?

 

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Only 27

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

I’m breaking my order here to post a piece not directly about writing, or teaching, or craft.  Next week, I’ll return with some of the helpful things I learned from the UC Berkeley Extension Summer Fiction Intensive, but this week, I’m taking a more personal tone.

It’s the first thing most people have said. She was so young. Amy Winehouse was so young.

I’ve had only a handful of conversations about Winehouse since her death last month– over dinner with movie group, at the hair salon – but they’ve followed a pattern. A brief bit about the cause of death – how could it not have been drug-related, even if toxicology tests showed no traces of illegal substances in her body?  Getting clean and sober isn’t without medical risk – and then onto her talent, her hair, her voice. At this, I’ve felt relief. Talk about the music and the look all you want, I think, but not the other.

So young.

Something rises in my chest at those words. Not surprise or sadness or anger but something more chaotic and layered and almost primal. Almost, because I wasn’t born with this sensation, but I’ve carried it, or some variation on it, most of my life. It existed in me long before I ever heard Amy Winehouse’s name, or her music. Yeah, I noted the coincidence in the name of Amy’s ex-husband, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

On a website titled AWO, A Tribute to Amy Winehouse, I read that Amy’s favorite song was Carole King’s “So Far Away” and that her family sat shiva. I think how my brother, at age five, begged our babysitter to play King’s Tapestry album over and over. Easy to read into these coincidences. I read Mitch Winehouse’s grief-struck words, and his statement that “Amy was about one thing and that was love.”

Oh?

I understand why her father would say that, and how it would be true for him. I get his need to say how Amy’s family and friends and fans “were everything” to her. But I can’t help think of a sentence I read weeks ago, in an article called “Farther Away” (The New Yorker, April 18, 2011). In it, Jonathan Franzen writes of traveling to a remote island, in a kind of Robinson Crusoe re-creation, and of the suicide of his good friend David Foster Wallace. Franzen describes Wallace’s intelligence and unhappiness and brilliance and corrosive addiction, without idealizing him. And then, at the end of one paragraph I read at least five times, he writes this: “Even after he got clean, … he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.”

Those words made me shudder – not visibly but in that same deep spot that quivers when people say “so young.” I felt a shock, yes, and then an immense clarity. Not easy words to write – or read – but honest ones. Not something we can feel in the early days of grief, perhaps, but something we come to accept over time, almost against our will.

Six weeks ago, an email landed in my In-Box from someone named Mark whose last name I didn’t recognize. The subject line was one word, Blake. I had logged on late at night, and answered several teaching-related messages. I deleted spam and other clutter, and then, with an intake of breath, I clicked on my brother’s name.

The writer got straight to the point, telling me he went to high school with my brother and was friends with him. He and Blake smoked a lot of pot together, and Blake made a huge influence, good and bad, on him. “I guess I was attracted to and impressed and influenced by his rebelliousness and generally extreme behavior,” this man wrote; “I had never experienced anything like it and found it perversely intriguing, as did others.” He wrote that he’d been haunted by Blake’s death and when he came across an article I wrote in 2008, he decided to write.

I’ve gotten several such emails over the years, from people who knew my brother and then read – or heard about – my book, my articles.  These people have all written of my brother’s charisma, intelligence, dynamism, etc. I write “etc” because hagiography wears thin. Mark’s email came closer to the truth. “Generally extreme” and “perversely intriguing” capture the shading any realistic portrait needs, the balance to what one woman, also in email, called “your brother’s total radness.”

At the time of my brother’s death, two weeks before he turned (yep) twenty-seven, I loved him more than I had ever loved anyone. In the days following, I walked the paths and fields near my apartment and thought of his gentleness and humor, our bond as children, our reconciliation during his short-lived recovery. I might have said that he was “all about love,” and in the things I would have cited as evidence, I would have been right.

I have no way of knowing in my bones and muscle tissue how it feels to battle DTs. I’ve only seen it from the outside, albeit up close. But I do know how it feels to look at the fact that, in the words a therapist once said to me, someone you love desperately and deeply loves his drug more than he loves you. Or life.

I wrote Mark back. Thank you for writing. And then, I loved my brother very much. I could feel the pull of more sentences, of addressing my brother’s pain in high school, his crying out for help, our parents’ enabling and blindness and my own distance, away at college and pretending all was OK. I could feel a thick braided rope, as strong and elemental as an umbilical cord, pulling me back to a place where my brother defined my world. Where the loss of him made me wonder how I could continue to live.

I let the rope slacken.  (I can never, of course, drop it completely.) I backspaced over a few characters. I loved my brother very much, and always will. I left it at that, adding my hope for Mark’s own recovery. I hit Send, closed the laptop, and went into the other room, to life.

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Voices in Our Heads

Posted on August 19, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

This week’s post follows up on last week’s discussion of Jane Anne Staw’s talk on the five components of a writing practice, given at the Fiction Writing Intensive this past July at UC Berkeley Extension.  Last week, I wrote about her tips on creating a safe place – both external and internal – for writing.  Today, we’ll look at the next component:  No Uninvited Guests.

Some years ago, in grad school, as a T.A. preparing to teach my first class, I went a little nuts.  I spent months reading every book I could find on craft, scouring anthologies for the best short stories to illustrate Setting or Point of View, even reading lesson plans out loud to myself to time how long each activity would take.  (A futile exercise, I soon learned, as what I’d allotted twenty minutes for took about three, and vice-versa.)

The books on craft discouraged me.  Yes, the writers offered good information and made many important statements about what fiction needed to do.  They were full of examples.  But I put them down feeling burdened — or discouraged. John Gardner’s exercises, especially, in Art of Fiction, did little to boost my confidence as a writer or instructor.

And then I found Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott.  She’d been writing fiction for years – excellent fiction – and was just on the cusp of becoming a household name. I almost cried with relief when I read Bird by Bird.  Here was the first book I’d found to demystify the writing process, to talk about the gremlins of insecurity, the internal critics, the pitfalls.  Here was someone who could address writer’s block (and overinflated fantasies of success) with humor.  I felt restored – and hopeful.  Maybe I couldn’t yet describe a barn as seen by the eyes of a murderer (do not mention the crime!), but I could fantasize about banishing my judgmental relatives to the inside of an upside-down water glass.

That’s one of Lamott’s suggestions, when the voices of the internal critic – whether it’s your mother, your grumpy uncle Ed, your second-grade teacher who called you on the carpet for spelling errors, or your own special amalgamation of all three – get in the way.  Zap them down to the size of the Borrowers and trap them under a glass.  Imagine them screaming and beating their little fists against the glass, but don’t let them out.

I recalled that water glass while listening to Jane Anne talk about uninvited guests.  In your writing space – whether you have an office or a corner of the dining room table – you get to decide who comes in.  True, people don’t always obey orders.  Spouses and children will interrupt, friends will phone you (“I knew you’d be at home”), the cat will stride back and forth across the keyboard.  But you have a say.  You can close the door and hang a Do Not Disturb sign on the knob.  You can (and must) turn off the phone (or the little bell that signals a new arrival in the In-Box).  Unless you do this 24/7, your family and friends will accept it.  They might not always like it, but they’ll learn to take you seriously.  (The cat, on the other hand,…)

The tougher uninvited guests are the ones who dwell in our own minds.  You can’t write that!  No one cares!  It’s a cliché.  This has all been said before, by better writers… Etc.  Those won’t knock or announce themselves.  They’ll just barge in.  We know these voices well, and we know how quickly they step on the most eager little sprout of an phrase.

Here’s what Jane Anne said that I found especially helpful:  “Dialogue with your critic.”

I know.  I groaned, too.  It sounds awful.  (And, the critic asks, Isn’t dialogue a noun?)  But, like the counter-intuitive advice a therapist once gave me to accept my anxiety,  it works.  The voices (like the anxiety) don’t go away, but we learn how to live — how to write — with (and despite) them.  Jane Anne had us take out a sheet of paper and draw a vertical line down the middle.  She gave us a writing prompt – light from the window – and told us to follow the prompt on the left-hand side of the paper, and write down every little thing the critic said on the right side.  This is dumb, I’m too tired to write, etc.

I’ve encouraged students to write it all down, but I’d never thought of the two-column approach.  It creates a back-and-forth, a dividing line.  You can talk back, perhaps not with cruelty – the critic will always best you there – but with negotiation and even (gulp) compassion.  Hey, I know you’re worried I’m going to make a fool of both of us, but hear me out.  Or:  I know you’ve got things to say, just give me ten minutes and then I’ll come back to you.  You’ll get time to edit later.

Try it.  And if you find the right-hand column is still holding forth loud and clear, and drowning out all the good ideas, go find a water glass.

 

 

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A Safe Place

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

A few  weeks ago, at the Fiction Writing Intensive offered by UC Berkeley Extension, writer Jane Anne Staw spoke of the five components of a writing practice. The first thing you need, she said, is a place.  A real, physical location where you feel the most relaxed, the least anxious.  She asked the students where they wrote.

A home office.

A chair in the kitchen, as the morning light moves across the table.

At night, after dinner, when the house is quiet.

A parked car.

“Good.”  Jane Anne nodded.  “Whatever works for you.  It’s important not to judge.”

I thought of my office, its paper-strewn surfaces, its piles of magazines and books.  I keep envisioning a quiet weekend of catching up on old issues of Poets & Writers and stories ripped out of old New Yorkers.  The piles keep growing.

When I moved into my flat, I was thrilled with the fact that I had an office. For years, I had written on a desk in the corner of the living room.  When people came over, I threw a festively-colored blanket over the computer and the piles.  Now I had an office all to itself, and no need for the bright woven blanket.  No need to cover the piles.

Or was there?

When I’d moved in, I’d taken pleasure in placing the desk – a long slab, a door without a hole for the knob – on top of file cabinets.  I bought and assembled Ikea shelves on which I arranged my books alphabetically by author, fiction here, memoir there, poetry and writing and travel over there.  I angled the linen arm chair against the bay window, where the dappled light would fall on my arm in the afternoon as I sat there reading.

It was perfect as a writing room, the kind of safe space Jane Anne talked about.  I had all the physical components in place.  I wrote there.  And I paid bills, graded papers, spoke on the phone.

Soon, my safe haven of an office felt more, well, office-like.  I started carrying my laptop to the dining room, to write at one end of the dining room table where I didn’t have to see the Rolodex or the curled-up roll of stamps or the piles of bills.  I wrote the final draft of my memoir, The Water Will Hold You, at that dining room table, in fact, surrounded by unpacked boxes.

And that’s where Jane Anne’s second component comes in.  Yes, we need a physical space, but what creates safety is often internal.  Close your eyes, she said during her talk three weeks ago.  Breathe from your belly. 

Her talk took place right after lunch, never the best time for guided meditation.  I fell asleep.  But not before I heard her ask us to think of a place in our minds, a place we felt embraced and free, a place where we receive life and stimuli.  Writers are often alone, she reminded us, but we are connected to life, to something larger, when we write.  Where do you feel that?

I had a moment of panic.  My office did not come to mind.  The beach?  Such a cliché.  The bench in my back yard when I was growing up where I’d go to hide from everyone else?  Nyah, too freighted.  The more I tried to think of the one perfect spot, the heavier my lids felt.  And then it came to me:  an Adirondack chair under a crepe myrtle tree on a spot of grass in Sonoma County.  There, I felt – for the fifteen minutes or the hour during which I sat in the chair – such calm and focus and spaciousness, such a sense of possibility that, compared with my running-around city life, time seemed to slow.  That’s it, I thought!  Too often writing becomes a task, another item on a day planner of items.  Write.  Go the gym. Laundry.  Shop.  Pay bills.  Grade papers.  Plan class.  etc.

The best writing, the freest, comes when we can suspend – to whatever degree possible –the tasks and necessities that surround us.  I’m not advocating giving up on them.  Philip Roth can write seven days a week because Philip Roth has someone to do his laundry and errands and shopping.  Good for him.  The rest of us have households to maintain, jobs to hold down, relationships to nurture, and phone calls and emails to return. I’m often happy for the errands and the break they provide; it’s good to be out in the world.  When we’re out there.  The rest of the time, we need to find a way to still the obligations, to make them sit quietly and wait outside the door, like well-behaved cats.  (I know, it’s an oxymoron. That’s the point.)

I’ll say more in weeks to come about the other three components of Jane Anne’s advice.  In the meantime, find her book Unstuck: A Supportive and Practical Guide to Working Through Writer’s Block.  And go find your space.

 

 

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Posted on July 29, 2011 by Lindsey Crittenden

Two weeks ago, I heard Daniel Coshnear talk on “The Balanced Life.”  It was the final day of UC Berkeley Extension’s Fiction Writing Intensive, and we’d gathered four panelists to talk about Where to Go From Here:  Sustaining the Momentum.  The idea was to give the students – with varying degrees of writing experience – some practical and inspirational ideas for moving their work forward.

Mimi Albert, a writer and longtime UC Extension insructor, talked about online classes.   Heather Cameron gave an overview on publishing.  Deborah Lichtman covered the pros and cons of MFA programs.  And Dan talked about making a balanced life as a writer.  Somewhere in the process, he word “successful” slipped in there.

And that’s where it got interesting.

Every writer wants to know how to make it.  In 90 percent of the classes I’ve taught for more than ten years, the inevitable question comes up over the seltzer and hummus at our final class meeting:  How do you find an agent?

On the panel two weeks ago, Heather offered up the encouraging and true fact that every publisher is looking for good books.  The trick, of course, is what makes “good” and who decides?  The industry? the market?  The writer?

For years, self-publishing carried the stigma of “vanity press,” implying sloppy standards and poor product.  That’s largely changed, though self-publishing has other daunting considerations (marketing, promotion, etc.)  But many writers consider self-publishing for the wrong reasons.  Four or five rejections, and it’s all the industry’s fault.  There’s plenty to complain about in the industry, and there always has been, but your novel’s being rejected doesn’t necessarily mean anything more than the fact that your novel needs more work.

And that’s where Dan and Laurie Ann Doyle – the other workshop leader in the Fiction Intensive – come in.

The discussion had been tipped for more than twenty minutes toward the publishing end of the table when Laurie chimed in from the back of the room.  “Your goal as writers” – and here the room grew still, pens poised waiting to hear the trick – “is not to get published.  Your goal as writers is to make your story the best story it can be.”

Her point is essential.  Sure, publication is a goal – but not necessarily the goal.  (Anne Lamott says this better than I can, in Bird by Bird.) I knew a guy in grad school who studied The Atlantic and The New Yorker for their stories in the belief that if he wrote one with the right formula, those magazines would accept it.  He titled one work “Guns and Lovers.”  He imitated Hemingway.  Nothing wrong with aiming for the top, publication-wise, or stealing from a master, or alluding  to a famous modernist in a story title.  But to give the market what you think it wants does not strike me as the way to success as a writer.  As a byline, maybe. Which, come to think of it, I’ve never seen in that guy’s name…

I may be old-fashioned, or not savvy enough, or just plain lame – or preachy – but I prefer Dan’s definition.  Read it for yourself, from the online version of the Los Angeles Review (scroll down to find “The Balanced Life”).

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