On Deadline

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

I’m on deadline.

I’ve written that before, many times,  for the most part about a self-imposed deadline. Even this blog, which I try to keep posting to every-other-Friday, is a voluntary act.  As much as I hope that some of you enjoy reading what I write here, I’m under no delusions that anyone waits with baited breath to read these words.  Still, I do it, just as I sit down at the keyboard every weekday morning for a minimum of four hours to work on a novel that no one, as yet, clamors to publish.

We need our discipline, our structure, and where we can’t find it, we make it.

But this deadline is real, externally imposed, printed onto a contract signed by yours truly and an editor.  I’ve promised to deliver a personal essay—800 words on a certain topic by a certain date.  April 8, to be precise, which seemed reasonable when I signed.

It still does, I remind myself. I know how to deliver on time.  I’ve done it with many personal essays (about swimming, about my father’s pancakes, about a stray glance with a handsome stranger on the street, about my brother’s addiction), and I’ve done it with two books.  And even if the time when I regular wrote and sold personal essays seems like another era—around the turn of the last century, to be precise, before every publication had a website so I can’t give you links here though I can point to a few on my website—the process feels familiar.

It’s what I describe to my students every term, not as the gold standard of the only way to write a piece, but as what works for me and might work for them.  Worth a try.  Open a file and pour out all your thoughts.  Write in circles.  Repeat.  Talk to yourself.  Ask questions.  Make typos.  Expand, explain, defend, undermine.  And, when you feel you’ve said all you want to say on the page (or screen) on this particular topic—when, in other words, you are only repeating yourself—stop.  Print it out, typos and all.  Read though, highlighting what seems essential, slashing out where you go off-track, noting repetition.  Then, in my experience, you’ll find the “nut,” the point you want to make.  And once you’ve found that, you’re there.  The rest is clean-up.

So that’s where I began on this particular assigned topic. Except that I felt rusty.  The process felt weird.  The tone sounded stilted.  The supposedly uninterrupted gushing of the “messy first draft” process now jerked like the VW bug in which I’d learned to drive a stick-shift.  I’d been working on my novel for so many months, an entirely different writing process with an entirely different narrative voice.  Yes, I’d written new scenes but I was revising, fine-tuning, not generating raw material.  I was writing in the point of views of several fictional characters.  And, now, for this essay, I needed to write as myself, in my essayist voice, but she (I) sounded pedantic, or tedious, or whiny.  She kept wandering off.  I kept wandering off. I would type a sentence or two—ten or twelve if I was on a roll—then I’d get up for a glass of water.  Check email, make some coffee, Google the spelling of a word that probably wouldn’t even make it into the final draft, type five or six more sentences.

It’s OK, I reminded myself. Keep going.  But I felt frustrated, stuck.  What was going on?  Had I lost my touch at the form? Was my idea too half-baked?  800 words, I reminded myself.  Like a blog post.  But it wasn’t a blog post.  It was an essay for a national magazine, an essay I was getting paid for.

Hm.  Was that the problem?  Not getting paid, but that I hadn’t gotten paid in so long that I’d forgotten how it felt?  Oh, I’d made money here and there on a reprint or a short piece but nothing big enough to justify a schedule C.  Embarrassing to admit, yes.  These days, anyone can start a blog and call herself a writer.  Nothing wrong with that.  I’m always encouraging, even mandating, that my students call themselves writers regardless of publication.  So what’s the problem?  I came out of the gate as a freelance writer with beginner’s luck.  I published a lot of pieces, and then I wrote a book and got depressed and took care of my dying mother and wrote another book and got depressed again and took care of my dying father… and, well, life happens, right?  During those years, editors moved on, connections weakened, confidence rose and fell.

I’m thrilled to be back in the game, in this 800-word way.  I hope that this piece, when it is handed in and if it meets with editorial approval, leads to more personal essays and a feature article or two.  I’ll let you all know.  But in the meantime, hold a good thought, please.  I have no double I’ll finish it—I just want it to be good.

What form or genre of writing have you done, moved away from, and come back to?  What hurdles have you faced in doing a new (or not-so-new) kind of writing?

 

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Only Connect

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

I’m in a scattershot mood this morning, so today’s post will be rather scattershot.

First, I’d like to give a shout-out to three colleagues with recently published books:

I’ve mentioned all three on Facebook, and Monica guest-blogged here a few months ago, but I must mention them again here.  If I can bring even one new reader to any of these books, which deserve many, I’ll be thrilled.

**

About a month ago, my cell phone died.  I had an old model, a decidedly-not-smart least-expensive model on the Verizon shelves.  I used it as a phone – how quaint! – and took a certain Luddite pride in flipping open its clam-shell shape. No iPhone 5 for me!  I didn’t text, and the only photos I took happened when, fumbling for the phone in my purse, I  mistakenly pressed the camera button.

Last month, the phone broke – literally, in two pieces, on the floor.  Uh-oh.  Does Verizon even make a clam shell model anymore?  Had the time come to jump on the smart phone bullet train, to join the 21st century?  Would I create yet a monster checking email at stoplights and walking down the street hunched over my own texting thumbs?

Reader, I capitulated.  I got an iPhone 4 for only $39.  Yeah, it’s fun.  Yeah, I’m one of those people checking Facebook on the bus, although not for long.  Staring at a small screen on a moving bus makes me as queasy as sitting in the backseat of the Ford Torino on the twisty road to Stinson Beach once did.

As predicted, I check my email more often, just to see what’s there, you know—to delete the spam and make sure no fires need putting out.  Yesterday, a new name sat in my inbox.  The subject line gave the title of my book.  I clicked the message open.  A woman I’d met briefly had written to say that she’d just finished reading my book.

Seeing those words in her email, and typing them again here, thrills me anew, even though my book’s been out in the world for six years.  Someone read my book!  Isn’t that all we ever want as writers, when you get right down to it?  Bestsellerdom, front-page New York Times reviews, movie options, translations into languages we’ve never heard of—all fabulous, I imagine, but what really matters?  Reaching readers.

She’d had to find the book—not too hard, true.  But still! She made the effort!  She had several nice things to say, about how my book touched her—but what stunned me came at the end of her note.  Keep writing, she wrote.  Keep living.

My book, in part, describes depression.  Major debilitating depression, the kind that made me hide my kitchen knives (I knew I’d remember where I’d hidden them; I just couldn’t bear seeing them any more for the thoughts they prompted in me) and spend hours curled on the bathroom floor.  I emerged from that place ten years ago and, while I’ve had dips since, I’ve never plummeted into anything as bad as that fourteen-month-long hell again.  Thank God.  And, yes, I mean it literally.

But with those two simple words, Keep living, I feel the enormity of what her email told me.  Not just its acknowledgment of the toll of depression and loss and addiction but its tone of connection, of intimacy.  A near-stranger was moved by my words, enough to share with me some of her own story.  Wow.  I’d been battling a late-afternoon energy slump.  I had been debating whether I really wanted to go to the gym or whether I should just hole up in a coffee shop and eat something loaded with sugar.  Reading those words on my smart-phone screen didn’t just prod me to make the healthy choice (groan) or remind me of why I write; they reminded me of why I made the choice to, yes, keep living.

**

My new class started this week.  I’ve taught this course for twelve years.  I could do the first night blindfolded.  And yet, as I entered the classroom I felt that tingle of what my former therapist used to call “good anxiety.”  Twenty faces stared at me.  Would I meet their expectations?  Would I – could I – help them become better writers?

I often feel, three-quarters of the way through the first night of a new class, scattershot.  I’m following a lesson plan, I’m staying on point, but the air in the stuffy room and the heat of twenty bodies makes me feel flushed, flustered.  My skin shines and itches.  I made my hands a lot, I drop the chalk, I smudge eraser dust on my dark pants.  I’m used to all that, but it never feels calming.  Nor should it, I suppose.  There’s too much adrenaline in the room, too much  anticipation—my own and theirs, upon hearing that I will expect them to read aloud and share their writing and write every day.

I work alone every day, for up to four or five hours.  I futz over sentences and phrasing.  Thinking on my feet in front of a room of strangers, even with my hair askew, has no room for revision.  What you see is what you get.

I feel less scattered, now that I’ve written this.  If I had more time, I could revise and fine-tune, home in on that main idea, the way I tell my students to do.  But I think I’ll leave this post as it is.  Jumping all over the place, okay.  But underneath that, something else:  connection.  That’s what, after all, keeps us living.

 

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What I Did For Love

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

for blog

A scary number of years ago, I worked on a literary magazine in New York City.  Turnstile was a labor of love, a nonprofit corporation with a volunteer staff.  Nine of us, seven of whom worked together for the same book publishing company during our weekdays, met on Tuesday evenings and weekends to hammer out the details of editorial vision, selection process, type faces and lamination, 501 (c) 3 status, and who’d take care of bookstore and library sales.  We were lucky and idealistic and focused.  We put out nine issues in six years, obtained grants, and published work by excellent writers, many of whom had never been published, a few of whom went on to become well known.  I pick up an issue now, and I feel pride and a kind of longing for those days of pizza and cheap beer and galley proofs, of arriving at our rented mailbox (“Suite 2348”) every week to pry out the manila envelopes of story submissions, 99 percent of which we sent right back.  I pick up the issues now with pleasure and amazement. We published good work.

Over the years, people moved on.  New jobs.  Marriages.  Divorce.  Babies.  Grad school.  We got tired of staying up late to key in manuscripts and impatient with the new editors who joined merely to eat cheap pizza; sure, they brought along a six-pack, but it seemed the extent of their contribution.  Turnstile came to end.  Happily, before the quality diminished.

Recently, one of us posted to Facebook that our inaugural issue, Winter 1988, with the startling black-and-white cover photo (especially nice in that glossy film lam), went on sale for $240 (original price $6.50).   Several of us chimed in jokes.  Who knew?  All those back issues a nest egg!

When I first moved to New York, my first landlady told me that “everyone here has a day job, and then they have what they really do.”  The waitress who writes.  The waiter who acts.  The legal proofreader who sings jazz or opera.  The of-counsel attorney who spends weekends studying koine Greek.  The printing salesman-cum-woodworker.  Etc.  Seven of us, for six years, put out a magazine.  No, every day was not joyous in 1988, nor was every issue put out in a haze of constant camaraderie.  But we did it.

That makes me happy.

Fast forward to 2013.  February 20, to be exact – just the other evening.  A corner bar in downtown Hayward, site of a lively release party for Arroyo Literary Review.  Standing room only, with fresh-faced editors and eager grad students.  Five of us read, and it was a wonderful evening.  I thought of Turnstile, and in a way that I hope doesn’t sound patronizing (though I can’t help but notice that I am now old enough to be the mother of the Arroyo editors), I felt a torch had been passed.

The folks at Arroyo are doing things right – T-shirts and gift bags, launch parties and funding from matching grants.  And what really made the evening, and the issue:  the writers sharing the pages, some of whom got on stage to read.  Okay, yes, I was there – but so were others, and that’s what matters.  I was wowed by Lucy Lang Day’s observations on Fra Angelico and miniskirts (not together), by Daniel Langton’s moving poem on aging and the green of trees, by Michael Larkin’s skillful move from the humor of purchasing condoms to a parent’s fierce love, by Ethel Rohan’s piercingly sharp short fiction.

That makes me happy, too.

So, please:  Read literary magazines.  Buy them.  Support them.  Submit to them.  A complete list for writers can be found at newpages.com.  Stalk your local newsstand (if you  have one), bookstore, garage sale.  Subscribe.  Chime in here to tell us about your favorites.

And find that thing, if you haven’t already, that you “really” do.

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Two short, midweek notes

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

#1:  The new issue of Arroyo Literary Review (spring 2013) is out, containing my story “The Ruins” and other fine work.

#2:  Website problems all fixed now.  Thanks for standing by.

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Get A Job

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

I’ve worked as a stained-glass artist, a translator, a marine biologist, and an archeologist.

Or, rather, my characters have.  One of the most direct ways into inhabiting character and discovering details that lift a story beyond “mere” narrative has always been, for me, what that character does with her day.  How she makes a living, and what kind of a living it is.

Growing up, I felt little parental pressure about what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Oh, my dad used to tease me about becoming a dentist, so I could support him and my mother in their old age.  And my mother would mistily say, “Whatever you want to do,” while dropping not-so-subtle hints about becoming a wife in Greenwich, Connecticut—about as far-fetched and appealing to me as Dad’s suggestions of dentistry.

As a kid, I liked to make lists and fill out questionnaires.  The little boxes and the order they implied calmed me.  Lists would grow into fantasized roll calls of the classrooms I’d oversee as a teacher.  I always enjoyed imagining my pretend students’ names, however, more than I entertained lesson plans.

In high school, I romanticized marine biology.  Spending all that time at the beach!  Wearing Irish-knit sweaters, of course, and accompanied by a big shaggy dog and a handsome shaggy man.  I liked Mendel and his peas, the neat logic of big “B” and little “b” explaining my blue eyes and my brother’s brown—but I wasn’t quite cut out for the scientific method, with its patience and testing.  I liked gathering a few details, observing, and ta-da:  conclusion!

Lawyer?  Yes, that was suggested but never seriously considered.  My dad worked in law, after all, and not until many years later did I come to see how skillfully our dinner-table conversations had prepared me for the critical thinking of an attorney.  At the time, though, the profession felt dry and out-of-reach, not at all appealing.

Graduating with a BA in English and French in the early 1980s meant answering, almost every time I turned around, “What will you do with that?”  Law school or a PhD were the two options—that, and writing copy for pharmaceutical labels, as the representative who came to Career Day for English Majors announced not very convincingly.  I went into publishing, where I worked as an editor and wrote stories on the side.  Stories about layout designers and beekeepers.

Despite those childhood lists and roll calls, I had not pursued teaching in any serious way until grad school, when I was given a class to teach.  In that first Intro to Fiction class, I talked about the importance of occupation in character development.  A story may or may not center on a character’s job, but it helps to know what it is.  Gas station attendants will look at the world differently from how beauticians or computer scientists do.  The job you give to your character can yield all kind of details—important for verisimilitude, yes, and so rich in terms of image and metaphor.

Careful!

Heavy-handedness lies in wait, just around the corner.  My novel features a photographer, and I try to avoid what a writer colleague calls “the cooked-up feeling that professions often have in novels.”  Too many references to light and shadow, development and framing, and my character’s job feels inorganic, authorial, pretentious.  My device rather than his sensibility.  The two are linked, of course:  Christopher could never be a lab technician or a phone-sales rep, and neither could I. And yet.

I’ve been lucky, to choose the work I do and to enjoy it.  I’d like to think that those jobs that I would (or could) never do aren’t off limits for my characters.  Why shouldn’t a hedge-fund manager or a pimp or a Wal-Mart cashier or a Formula-One driver populate an as-yet-unwritten story?  Taking on a job on the page outside my own experience seems—like fiction itself—a way into empathy for and engagement with the world around us.  Maybe, Dad, I’ll even become a dentist.

What occupations have felt most natural to their characters, in your own work or the fiction you’ve read?  What comes first for you, the character or the occupation?

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