Having a bad day, MarshaQ?

(Hot and muggy here, storm's a brewing, so forgive the churlishness ahead.)

Without fail, a few hours after I finish my daily writing I get a physical reaction--a whoosh in the gut--that is coupled with a discernible mood letdown and then I think, "What I wrote today was crap."

This has been going on long enough--years--that I know to shake it off and resume peeling carrots or whatever it is that occupies me.

Often it is crap, of course, especially when I'm in the long slog of the first draft. But I know I'll be less bothered by that if I've allowed a fair amount of time to pass before I look again, and if I have also accomplished something in another venue, say the kitchen, where perhaps a pile of peeled and chopped carrots waits for the soup pot.

This mature and rational handling of the whoosh and the writing blues works best, however, when I write earlier in the day. These days I rarely write early in the day. Morning--even early afternoon--has never been a good writing time for me, but for many years that's when I wrote because that's when the kids were in school. The kids are far removed from school now (which sounds like they've been placed someplace for their or a school's safety), but I've acquired a couple of other jobs that require my attention (because people are paying for my attention) and so writing is item #3  on the get-the-job-done priority list. Therefore, the Whoosh and the blues often hit me late at night, when A. it's harder to resist looking at what I've written or B. I'm roused from sleep or near-sleep and so ensured a night of bad sleep.

Probably the writing cry I dislike the most is "I treat my writing like a job," a cry that is usually followed by a proud comment about dressing for the (uptown) office while being ready to go in the (home) office by 8 am. I let that cry haunt me for far too long, even as I knew it had nothing to do with my own professionalism. If I wanted a job where I punched a clock, then there are probably better professions than the one I've chosen/stumbled into/embraced.

Still, making writing an 8-4 endeavor would have one, enormous benefit: the whoosh and the blues would be easier to synchronize with a nice glass of wine. 

p.s.: this is a very nice article.

To Write Daily Or To Not Write Daily

I’ve been reading Writers On Writing, A collection of Essays by Writers. Two stand out for their contradiction.
Carolyn Chute, author of four novels, (her first, The Beans of Egypt Maine was a critical, yet controversial success) says:

“I am an unmarketable person. I can’t teach writing or make a living in any public way, as I get confused when interrupted or over-stimulated. So, my only income is from novels. I make about $2 an hour. This should explain the absence of dishwasher, clothes dryer, running hot water, electricity, health insurance and other such luxuries.

Writing is like meditation or going into an ESP trance, or prayer. Like dreaming. You are tapping into your unconsciousness. To be fully conscious and alert with life banging and popping and cuckooing all around you, you are not going to find your way to your subconscious, which is a place of complete submission. It takes me three days of complete boredom and no interruptions to calm myself enough to get to that place."

Walter Mosley, famous and acclaimed author of over thirty books, including, the Easy Rawlings mystery series, says:

“If you want to be a writer you have to write every single day. The consistencies, the monotony, the certainty, all vagaries and passions are covered by this daily recurrence. It doesn’t matter what time of day, and there’s no time limit on how long you have to write. Some days it might only be a few minutes, other days it might be a few hours. The important thing is that you breathe and dream your writing every single day or it will lose its life.

Nothing we create is art at first. It’s simply a collection of notions that may never be understood. Returning every day thickens the atmosphere. Images appear. Connections are made. But even these clearer notions will fade if you stay away more than a day.”

Mosley is a commercial and financial success with a plethora of novels behind him and in front of him. He is a good and admirable writer. Chute is not as well known, she lives quietly and poorly in the woods (with her also “unmarketable” husband) yet she is just as committed to her process and her personality. She is poor, but she is honest. She is a good and admirable writer.

Is it possible to be a writer who is a little of both? Can we write daily and also not-write daily? Is every writer a walking contradiction?

The writing state mind

Claire's entry spoke eloquently of the challenges we face as writers. Anne's boggled my mind with all of the things that I should be doing to forward my career, at the cost of...writing time, so I found it very redemptive that the comment from the publicist was to just write.

I have been writing a lot lately, because I remembered how to get into the writing mind, or the writing state of mind (I've always liked the spacial resonances of that term, the vastness).

There are certain things I can do to bring myself to that state: reading, staring out the window, meditating, walking, swimming, reciting poetry, listening to Mozart or Finzi or Piazolla etc., looking at art and photography.

More important, though is what I must not do, lest I be exiled (to batter and abuse the metaphor further) from the writing state. I must not:
Answer the phone
Check my e-mail
Look at houses on Realtor.com
Google anything
Purchase anything on Amazon
Listen to the news
Open mail
Wear headphones when I run or walk (and bring paper or a tape recorder with me instead)
Listen to the radio when I'm driving

Yes, one does have to return calls, check e-mail, write their blog entries, send manuscripts out and try to promote them eventually. But none of these things should crowd into the writing space and time, which is sacred. None should come first. To write is to both receive and give. Water can only be poured into an empty vessel.

What interferes with your writing space and time? What helps you?

Rereading

Betsy Bird’s 100 Best MG novels countdown has been mentioned here a couple of times. #1 revealed today.

While reading through the comments I noticed one person said the #1 book was one she rereads, adding, “I rarely reread any book.” Oddly, this was the third time in about as many days that I’ve run across such a comment about rereading.

I reread a lot. A LOT. This is a carryover no doubt from my youth when I spent more time rereading than reading new books. As a result, I was poorly read by the time I went to college. (Cathleen Schine has a lovely essay on her very similar youthful reading habits in the NY Times.)

Rereading is my best medicine for getting out of the writing doldrums. I may not finish an entire book, but I’ll reread enough to absorb the writing and once again fill up my head with language I love and admire. And sometimes I do finish the book and go on to another favorite by that author, immersing myself in his or her voice.

Story hardly matters when I reread. A return visit is all about “the how” of it. Marveling at an opening and the immediacy of mood, admiring the deft passing of time, savoring a word.
Of course I read new (to me) books, lots of them. I’m always thrilled to find a new book and writer I love; even so, it’s rereading that fuels the writing fire.

Currently Rereading: The Truth of the Matter, by Robb Forman Dew. Anyone else rereading something?

MQ

Got a Question? Ask the Inkpot!

Hello bloggers and blog readers!

Great suggestion to add an "ask the inkpot" component to the blog!

And so, with no further ado, if you have a question you'd like to submit to The Storyteller's Inkpot, please email it to: asktheinkpot@gmail.com.

(Bloggers, I'll be in touch with you to let you know the secret magic word that unlocks that account, so that you can check in to see what readers are asking).

Signing off,
Administrator

Check Off

I was amused to see and read in this week's Times Book Review a review of a book called The Checklist Manifesto, byAtul Gawande. Amused because only the day before I put such a checklist up on the wall by my writing chair.

This to-do list of mine is less detailed than an outline and more specific than an ideas list, and focuses on the scenes I know I need to write. Gawande apparently asserts that simple checklists can help avoid errors in the workplace. That's too much for this writer to hope for, at least with a first draft; still, I use and value them for making small the otherwise huge and daunting task of novel-writing. Each time I sit down to write, a quick glance at what's next on my "Need to do" scene checklist consoles me; the end is attainable.

Since Saturday I've already rearranged the order of scenes on my list, deleted some scenes (and characters) from the story, and added two more. The paper is now a mess of arrows and margin scribbles and thick lines crossing out ideas I once thought were inspired. And yes, there are some nice bold check marks (Done!) across several of the items.

Of course, the scenes are the fun and easy part of story writing; it's the connective tissue that makes the job hard. Still, I believe that a well-done scene should be easy to get into and out of, so the scene by scene approach, especially as I know where I'm headed, seems right for now.

MQ

Writing, Readings, and Kids

I'm glad folks like/are liking my do-it-every-day assignment. I've been writing unusually badly lately, and it's been weirdly delightful. But after I've fallen down the stairs every morning (so to speak) I take another hour or two to look at old poems that might need some work. And that goes really well. So does the painful and embarrassing stuff make the revising easier? If my studio is a junkyard, I seem not to be able to make that newly towed-in Volvo even turn over, but I can tune up a Chevy that's running rough.

On another matter: a couple of poet-friends and I gave a reading uptown. It went well enough, but the crowd was reserved. Turns out that a lot of them were college students who showed up for extra credit. Afterwards, one of the other poets (Charles Harper Webb) and I were working the crowd and when people said that they'd enjoyed themselves we asked why they didn't seem to be having a good time since we tend to read funny poems. "Well," one girl said, "It was a poetry reading. I thought it'd be all serious."

Little kids get read to all the time and some of that is poetry that makes them laugh. Goofy rhymes and ridiculous situations and all the rest of it. But after a certain point, most poetry does turn serious like milk, I guess, goes sour. (Look for the expiration date on your next quart of poesy.) And then, God help me, there's high school which is where Billy Collins says poetry goes to die.

High school. The droning teacher in a warm room. The knife-through-the-heart-of-any-poem question: "What was the poet trying to say?" A tough act to follow.

RK

Done

The other day I quit work on a novel. It feels complete, ready for another set of eyes. Almost every other time I've reached this point with a novel I ended up revising again, and I anticipate that will happen this time too. I'm not sure what makes me think the novel is at the right point to send along to a reader, maybe because when I revise it's similar to what Ron described below: wordsmithing with reverberation. And the reverberation was no longer happening, so the wordsmithing, I guess, was more accurately just dinking around. We'll see. What gauge do others use for deciding "This is it"?

Good Excuses

Writing is a good habit if it you make it one. Or you can make a lot of bad habits and good excuses. I used to blame other life-forms (spouses, children, or bacteria because I love to clean more than write) for my slim output, but now I can blame a non-life form. No, not a zombie, though it can effectively produce one, like me when I fall victim to the blue-screen syndrome, the drive-through-Windows consumption disorder, the I'm writing (posting, browsing, staring at the blinking cursor) but not WRITING bad habit. I am sated, soothed, and seduced by each click in the pale blue light of my laptop screen. Diets do not succeed. Avoidance does.

In the dark, walnuts fall when they will outside my window. My writing will happen as it happens too, but for now, not in the light of my laptop. It will happen as it once did. Hello again, pen and paper.

Ah, To Be A Pages Person.

Ron and Mary are discussing below how we structure our writing days.

When I first tried to write a book my husband challenged me to write five pages a day. Every time I wrote five pages, I’d get two Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups—the small kind, which I think have a more appealing chocolate-to-peanut-buttery-goo ratio. I wrote five pages pretty much every day. There’s nothing like a little motivation.

I found when I did this my mind was always working on the book in some level, thinking about what would come next. And then as I got toward the end of the book I’d write whole chapters in a day just to see what came next. I seemed to always be living half in the world of my book.

Then I had a baby and my writing time suddenly became conscribed by the hours we had child care, not to mention the piles of laundry and doctor’s appointments and desperately needed midday naps and entire days lost to things like little tyke getting sent home from school for getting handsy with the other toddlers. It's hard to fit in any page goal, what with all the time I have to spend procrastinating.

Right now, I am trying to begin a new book and can’t seem to find the voice. A day of stopping and starting led to little progress. But when I came home from picking up the tyke at school my cat had, helpfully, added eight pages of punctuation marks to the computer document. Do you think she likes Reece's?

From the trashed office of the pages person

I'm rolling up my sleeves, and firming up my chin. I'm ready to take this blogging seriously. I am just finishing revising my novel before I email it to my editor tomorrow. My office is completely trashed. The floor only shows by the door. The dogs like it this way (my two toy poodles, Rene and Jacques, who will show up in this blog from time to time), more places to sleep. My desk is covered with folders, papers, globes, stars, kleenex, and even some dirty dishes. This is unusual. I am not particularly a slob, but when I'm in those final stages of trying to get something out the door, writing under deadline, I tend to drop things when I'm done with them and they fall where they may.

But now that my mind is temporarily free of trying to figure out if any of this novel makes sense, I can focus on trying to write about writing. Ron asked when we write. I used to be a night person, seriously a night person. But I'm also a pages person. What I mean by that is that I try to write three pages a day when I'm working hard on something (obviously, this is different for poetry, or maybe not obviously). And if I can get those three pages done before nine o'clock in the morning, then I get to feel sanctified for the whole day. But I do not beat myself up if I don't get them done until ten o'clock at night. I do find that I don't sleep as well if I work that late. My mind doesn't want to calm down as easily as it used to. That's why I tend to hook rugs at night. A nice repetitive activity.

Good writing to all whenever you do it.

Night or Day?

I heard Lorrie Moore downtown at the L. A. Central Library. Among other things she talked about when she wrote. Like me, she was a morning writer and, unlike me, a big coffee drinker. (I drink only a little.) She was very funny about it, advising us to not waste coffee on friends since one builds up a tolerance.

It made me wonder when the rest of us write. I've always been a morning person, while I'm just about comatose in the p.m. And coffee does help in the a.m. My mind runs without much regard for the rest of me, anyhow, and half a cup of coffee with some soy milk is like rocket fuel.

This morning, though, I'm reading galleys for a book of poems called INDIGO, and I can't be so jet propelled. I need to read the lines out loud at this point and listen carefully. I'm past the spelling or grammar gaffes at this point. Coffee will just make me go too fast.

If I finish by noon, though, I'll have a little Cafe du Monde (a New Orleans blend so it has some chicory) and see if I want to write poetry. After that I'll go out, buy tomorrow's "Daily Racing Form" and take a nap!

RK

Writing vs. Having written

I asked a Hamline workshop once how many of them actually liked to write and most of them preferred having written: the pride in finishing, the appearance at a local book store, the feel of the book or magazine in one's hand.


Only a few preferred the quotidian: sitting down with two or three hours, a cup of coffee or tea, the favorite pen, the notebook with its inviting blank pages. I know painters who love the paint over the painting and potters who prefer clay to bowl. Even my mechanic likes the wrench and the spark plug more than the sound of the tuned engine. And once Buddy the cat has patiently stalked the bird beside the avocado tree, once it's dead he just stares at it.


Ron Koertge