Structure Discovered
The structure of a creative work is discovered, not imposed. Consider the architect’s mantra, “Form follows function.” A skyscraper exists because of land limitations, population density, and the nature of business relations; its inherent qualities (its purpose, its limitations) distinguish it from a bungalow or a Carnegie library. Likewise each piece of prose has a unique being—a focus, an exploration, a heartbeat. We don’t know when we start if our subject has sharp corners or curves, if it’s solid or fluid, if it needs many compartments or just one. We discover the container that will hold our material as we discover the material. How distressing! Particularly when writers set out on longer projects, they want—even need—a structure to help them get going. But nothing is more deadly to creativity than a strict plan. An outline, a story-board or any scheme will only serve a creative writer so long as he…
Playing with Revision
The more I revise and the more I help new writers learn to revise, the more I’m convinced that good revision, like any good writing, is essentially play. Robin Marantz Henig’s recent article in the New York Times , “Taking Play Seriously,” looks at recent scientific studies that ask, What is play’s role in the evolution of species? Of course there are many theories, but here is one from Patrick Bateson, a biologist at Cambridge University: “Play is the best way to reach certain goals. Through play, an individual avoids…the lure of ‘false endpoints.’ Players are having so much fun that they keep noodling away at a problem and might well arrive at something better than the first, good-enough solution.” First drafts are first, good-enough solutions. We adults are particularly prone to false endpoints because we like results and we like efficiency. With writing,…
Revision Guides
We can only hold so much information in our heads. Thank goodness for paper and pen! I am an inveterate list-maker, and offer the revision guide as a helpful tool for collecting thoughts and steering revision. The revision guide is a catch-all, holding our vision for the next draft and a list of changes that will help bring this vision about. The guide steers rather than dictates our rewriting. Here are suggestions for what the guide might contain: 1. A simple sentence articulating the heartbeat. 2. Important themes and questions. You can refer to this list while rewriting. Do you stay faithful to your themes and central questions throughout? Do they change and grow? For example, here are some revision notes between the second and third drafts of my novel. Hannah is my main character; two time frames (one in Minnesota, the other in New Mexico) intertwine. • Hannah: “I…
Others’ Eyes
The fastest way to see our writing with fresh eyes is to look through the eyes of a reader. Established authors might profess that they don’t reveal their work to anyone until it’s done, or complain about writing workshops producing works created by consensus. But writers who are still learning the craft need exposure to the dirty inner workings of writing; they need to see others struggling with their same questions, and they need to learn from others’ mistakes and successes. It’s possible to receive nourishing, instructive feedback on a manuscript-in-progress. Here are some thoughts on giving and receiving feedback that will benefit your work: 1. Be careful not to share your work prematurely. Have you allowed yourself plenty of time in that cloud of safety and unknowing? Only solicit feedback when you’re genuinely curious about developing your piece. If you’re looking for someone to endorse your creative process—to say…
Better the Devil You Know: An Exercise
In a minute you’ll read a writing exercise you’ll hate. Your hackles will rise and a bitter taste will fill your mouth. Every bone in your body will resist it. Here’s my challenge: Do it anyway. A first draft is a beautiful thing. Drafts are well worth growing attached to; they have raw energy, bursts of bright prose, moments of surprise and delight, and a ton of effort poured into their pages. A draft bears witness to our creativity: First there was nothing, and now there’s something. How thrilling! First drafts done well, however, are also flawed. The language is too loose, we’ve explored only one of a dozen approaches to our subject, we haven’t yet landed on what the piece is really about. Anne Lamott advises us to write a shitty first draft, but most of us have no other option. The tragedy is that most writers stop here,…
Process & Product
I’m a tender-hearted gardener. When last year’s cherry tomatoes reseed themselves, I don’t have the heart to pull them out. And so I end up with an abundance of late-ripening cherry tomatoes. What to do? Make tomato sauce. But cherry tomatoes are a hassle to peal, even after blanching, so I choose the lazy route, slice them with skins on and throw them in the pot. The resulting tomato sauce is tasty, but a bit watery and swimming with skins. The process by which we create something helps shape the final product. Our exuberance, laziness, playfulness, discipline, patience, bull-headedness, kindness, skill, and all the other qualities we bring to the writing process play a part in the text we finally create. Just as my choice to give the cherry tomatoes room in the garden rather than planting good saucing Romas contributes to the quality of my spaghetti sauce, each choice…
Revisiting the “So what?” Question
“So what?” Insidious, persistent, biting, the simple question is a brain-bug infecting every writer I’ve ever met. It gnaws at our confidence. It stops our pen mid-stroke. It’s a plague infecting whole classrooms—whole cultures, even, undermining the generative instinct because it assumes a vacuous answer. There’s no justification for creative work, it seems. And it’s the most important question a writer should ask. Only the crassest teacher scrawls “So what?” in the margins of a student’s work. Any mentor with half a heart knows that red ink seeps right through the paper and leaves an indelible mark on the writer’s sense of self. Now that I have twenty years of teaching creative writing under my belt, I know my primary job—if I care about the quality of literature emerging in the world; if I care about the well-being of the humans emerging from my instruction—revolves around the “So what?” question. …
Inevitable “I” Part 2
In Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, she writes: The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in the void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom—or rather the movement toward it—that counts. The world—the context within which the author’s life plays out—must show up in our story as well, and this inclusion requires memoirists to “move toward wisdom”, or, as I would put it, draw connections between one’s private life and the human experience. The connections are both inherent in the lived experience as well as created in the writing experience. Gornick goes on to say: A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will…
Inevitable “I”
If we show up in our stories as a character, our memoirs are stronger. Why? A reader entering a story needs shoes to walk around in and a pair of lenses to see through. We are embodied creatures. Even in the two-dimensional world of language, we need bodies or, at the very least, personality. Every reader of creative nonfiction is aware of the author lurking behind the story and brings to reading the expectation that the author will appear, either as character or narrator. Graham Swift wrote this about his fiction: “I favor the first person. One reason I do so is that I do not want simply to tell, out of the blue, a story. I want to show the pressure and need for its telling—I am as interested in the narrator as in the narrative. I want to explore the urgency of the relation between the two.” Swift’s…