Back in the Saddle

I’ve just returned from a week’s vacation. I did not write nor did I try to write nor did I think about writing. I did get on a horse, I did complete a 6 mile hike in the red rocks of northern Arizona, I did drink a bit o’ wine.

Yesterday morning I was home again and busy with newspaper and coffee and delighted to see a NY Times magazine article by Sarah Lyall about the wonderful novelist Kate Atkinson. If you’ve not read it, please do so.

Here’s a quote from Atkinson that sent me free-falling out of vacation mode and back into the writing life:

“It’s the nearest we’ll ever get to playing God, to suddenly produce these fully formed creatures. It is a bit odd. Other aspects you work out more—you rework sentences, you rework imagery. But not characters. They’re not deciding their own fates, clearly, but once you have them, that unconscious process is at work.” 

I was at first at odds with Atkinson’s claim about not reworking characters, probably because I do rework characters—I have a lot of exercises I do with them—and any student who has worked with me has likely been ordered to do the same. But as I considered it more I thought, yeah—I’m not changing them so much as finding out more about the character who has sprung to life, sometimes unbidden. 

Then, according to Lyall, Atkinson “talked about her characters as a means to an end, as if they were pawns in a board game.” 

“Pawns in a board game” is not only a cliché, but one that suggests an emotional detachment I never feel when reading her novels; still, it’s a useful image for a writer, I think. We do manipulate. We  move things around. We play God.

Public Side of the Writing Life

I have been off the blog recently with my energy focused on the public side of the writing life. It's a crazy sometimes, isn't it? We go from writing in our pajamas until noon to talking about a book that we wrote many moons ago, while wearing lipstick. I am happy to have launched my new book Marching With Aunt Susan: Susan B. Anthony and the Fight for Women's Suffrage with two events in Spokane recently. Saturday I head for California to present at suffrage centennial events and libraries, and Naomi Kinsman Downing's Inklings program in Menlo Park. Hurray. Support from our fellow writers is so valuable. I wish I could be in Minneapolis to attend one of Anne Ursu's upcoming book readings for her new novel Breadcrumbs. Or to have attended Mary Rockcastle's novel launch last Friday night at Hamline. Congrats to you both.

We are never too old to appreciate friendly faces in the crowd. That's what makes a Hamline residency reading so special. The entire crowd knows the journey the writer has been on and has cheered every step. At my Spokane reading, one of my writing group buddies said afterwards, "As I heard you read, I remember all your revisions and the choices you made." Those writing friends know my book like those that work backstage on a play. New readers experience only the story that exists now on the page.

Marsha Qualey was here last weekend to present at our Spokane SCBWI conference with a wonderful presentation on character. What I especially loved is for that hour in the day we didn't focus on marketing or publication, other public sides of the writing life, but rather on the writing that begins and ends with story and character.

The public side of writing is so important. We have to get out in the world to share our work and learn how to do it better. But how I also love the return to the quiet life of putting words down on paper, an energy that comes from inside.

Polishing shoes and other tasks

Yesterday was one of those days between projects when it was hard to focus on any one thing. Definitely a “hummingbird brain” day. So I took to reading poetry, thinking that might help me to settle down.

And I found one of my favorites:

Those Winter Sundays

Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put on his clothes in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

There is much that I love about this poem, but one thing especially struck me yesterday—the heartbreaking detail of the father, alone, polishing his son’s shoes on Sunday morning.

It made me wonder about other fictional characters who reveal themselves by taking care in doing the simplest of acts.

And the other side of finding fictional characters-- inventing. Seems like it would be an interesting exercise for those times when nothing seems to be there: write about a character doing a simple, humble act, but an act that reveals heart and motive, something like washing dishes, changing the oil in the car, re-glazing a window, combing the tangles out of a child’s hair, or the young man in Liza Ketchum’s story who bakes bread.