Writer’s Crash

I stepped into my closet tonight and my brain just locked up. It said, “No.” I clicked on my fiction blog and again, “No.” But I can’t quite bring myself to listen so here I am. But I realized that I’ve been writing every night for at least fifteen nights–some of those nights creating art as well (not instead of but also)–and it has been great. I’ve walked through my days gleeful at the thought of what I put down on the page (words and color) but now I feel as if my creative brain has wrenched free from me and jumped off a cliff.

And the rest of me is on my stomach looking over the side at the splat–and it is a mess. There are the two birthdays forgotten, the baby shower, the thank you note, the father’s day, the graded papers, and the syllabi (I’m so late with that I think my boss may have forgotten too). All of it soaked right into the birthday party scene I wrote, the long lost son reunion scene, the funeral scene, the new boyfriend scene, and the blog entries.

This blog might be in part what it means to be Catholic (lapsed, disavowed, or whatever)–I now have a place to confess. So writerly dramatic! But those who will insist on making their lives from their imagination will create drama somewhere…

I think I need some kind of writer detox. Or perhaps a better phrase would be that I need a writer replenishment. And it’s got to be more than sleep, because in my sleep I’ve started dreaming my novel. The other day I took a nap and I really believed I was in bed for a few minutes thinking about a name for a new character. It took me a while to realize I’d been asleep for an hour. Sound asleep dreaming of thinking! See, and now I have to write about it too.

Of course, I could avoid all writing and art for a week. Well, a few days. Okay, one day. But that idea is rather painful. Of course, feeling the crash is no fun either. This must be why so many writers drink, drug, and sleep around. Pity I don’t do any of them.

Writer’s Rant

When someone tells me they want to write a novel, but…well, my kind, supportive side wants to hand them a book on writing, to clap and cheer them on, and to believe them. Yes! Go! You can! And then my evil side just wants to roll my eyes and say, “Then sit your butt in the chair and do it.” Honestly, if you want to write, you must stop waiting for the magic moment and for your loved ones to pat you on the head and say they believe in you, and you must give up some tv or something else you think you can’t live without and put your ass in the chair.

Now plenty of people really love words on the page and they have stories in their head and they should be encouraged. But there are those annoying souls who want to have written a book, and they believe that they’ll just sit down and a masterpiece will flow forth, it will be published, and they will be polishing their interview skills for NPR or morning television. Of course, these are the same people who, when I tell them about NaNoWriMo, ask, do you get paid for that? And when I say no, they say, but you get published, right? Happy side says, cut these people some slack. Evil side says, draw blood–my printer is low on ink. Or at least beat them senseless with my manuscript.

If it’s hard for me, god knows my evil side wants it to be hard for everybody else…

The Red Shoes

I stay up too late, drink too much coffee, avoid grading papers, put off housework and phone calls, and who knows what else just to sit and write or draw, and while I don’t necessarily think there is anything wrong with that (would it be so terrible die in a messy apartment, tired and caffinated and a pile of manuscripts and art scattered on the floor?), it does drive me mad that even when I decide to sleep or get some paid-for work done, I can’t turn off that part of my brain that spins from idea to idea and knows, just knows, that this moment, THIS MOMENT, is THE moment I can create something great.

And now that I have my closet to work in, I think I may never stop, as if I’ve put on the writer’s version of the red shoes and my hands are going to be moving across some kind of paper until they are bloody stumps and a handsome woodsman has to cut them off. Okay, maybe it isn’t that bad, but if my other life, my earn-a-living, parent-in-a-non-mommy-dearest-sort-of-way, eat, and sleep life, didn’t force me to, I’d be drowning in marked up papers.

I’m exhausted and yawning and thinking–surely there is more thing I can make before sleep…

A Closet of One’s Own!

Who would’ve thought I could be grateful for broken appliances? The washing machine and dryer broke, and instead of reparing or replacing them, we put them out on the street. This means, of course, that I will be quarter obsessed to feed the machines of the shared apartment complex laundry room, but it also means I have an office! (dancing here)

We’ve cleaned out the space, wiped away the spilled detergent, mopped up the floor, put down the rug, pinned up the art (created and pinned by my incredible child), hung a picture over the washer hookups, and–ta-da!–a space of my own with a door and everything. Will the art and writing be better? Ha. But it will be left out in a space unshared.

Oh, I shall be delirious for days. (more dancing)

What a Writer Owes

First, I just want to note that this is not inspired by the Sopranos ending. I never watched the show and have no opinion about the conclusion. This is inspired by a lively and interesting conversation I had this evening with a writer friend. That said, I am struggling with the question of what kind of ending does a writer owe her reader? I don’t mean happy or sad. I mean what makes and ending work? What makes it satisfying. Some readers demand happy endings and many movies have been changed accordingly. In the book Cujo, the boy dies. I heard that in the movie, he lives. Movies changes book endings all the time.

But writers change book endings too. Charles Dickens did it in Great Expectations. I love that novel, and I don’t believe the nicer ending where Pip gets the girl. She has to break his heart because that’s who she is. But people want her to change. Was Dickens wrong to change the ending of his own book?

Should writers be “allowed” to jerk you around. You think the story is about this, but..ah-ha!..it is about something else entirely! I’m all for surprise endings. And I don’t think tragic endings are more authentic than happy ones. But I can’t say I’m a fan of getting to the end of a story only to have the writer prove how clever she is by proving what a sap I am. I’m a gullible reader. I believe in the stories I pick up. I don’t want to be a fool for doing so. I don’t want to be an unwilling participant in someone else experiment.

Some recent stories I’ve bought into (spoiler alert)…The novel The Brief History of the Dead had an open ending–does she die or not? Not sure. Did this ambiguity bother me? No. Another novel The Seas. The ending may me wonder, so is she crazy or not? I don’t know. Did this bother me? Yes. Maybe because in the Dead, the character being alive or not didn’t change my belief in the idea of the book. But in the second novel, not knowing if she is crazy or not means I don’t know if anything in the story is real or not. It’s like that episode of Dallas–it was all a dream! How irritating was that?

Perhaps this leads to the question of how invested a reader should be in a story. Some books work; some don’t. What one reader finds disappointing or vexing, another finds enlightening and rewarding. There doesn’t need to be a solution to that–stories should be a as varied as the people who read them.

But a writer should remember that a reader has to spend hard-earned money to buy a book and take time out of his life to read the book, and jerking that person around seems like poor sportmanship at the very least. And a writer should remember that some people read books to escape their lives, to find solace, to find answers. Sure, plenty read to be amused and impressed and those are vaild reasons. I guess it has to do with the reader I used to be, long ago, as a teen when I read to escape the lunacy of life. I didn’t care about reading happy stories. Plenty of miserable stories appealed to my melodramatice self, but I did care about believing in the fictional world I was in. If I was made to feel fooled, made to feel like my emotions were used to show off someone else’s cleverness, it was bitter.

I suppose this conversation was, in part, about meta-fiction, which in basic terms for me isn’t about story-telling, but about art-making. I probably don’t know what I’m talking about, but I guess I want to be an old-fashioned writer. Let me tell you a story–no tricks, no slight of hand…

Well, all writers need to write what they must–there is no promise for how the reader will take any of it.

Writers Don’t Make the Best Friends

Plenty of parent-writers out there talk about the struggle of balancing parenthood and writing, and much of what they have to say is true. But it’s my friendships I neglect. My child is here in my house demanding attention. My friends are far away and too busy themselves to point out that I haven’t called or sent the birthday card or remembered the important event or whatever it is. What does it mean to spend more time with imaginary people than real ones?

The Writing Crush

That’s what good writing feels like–that delicious crush calling and wanting to see you, that rush to tell your friends about what your object of desire said or did, that lovely oh-he-kissed-me moment. Silly to admit to, I suppose, but when I believe (rightly or wrongly–just like rightly or wrongly choosing the guy) that my characters live and that I love what I’ve put on the page, I walk around like I did when my first college crush called me–that incredibly stupid dance I did, shouting, “He called!” over and over. I love my characters, even the jerks and the nightmares. Or rather, I love that they make me feel something strong enough to do that stupid dance not because they called, but because they showed up on the page.

Of course, sometimes my characters break my heart and dump me..but they can be persuaded to come back and ultimately I can make them do what I want. And how I treat them is another story.

Plot in Real Time

Before lakebelle I could pull back and set a scene, explain what was going on in a character’s head, find the mood. Writing in first person all the time and having only their musings to spin a plot wears me out. The characters, well-drawn or not, possess immediate lives and I find myself thinking about in real time–meaning I’m not pondering a plot line and what I might make them do next, but I wonder what they are doing right now. And without a “the end” page in sight where am I taking them. Or where are they taking me?