On Length
I’ve been surprised by how many beginning writers have a strange notion that whatever they’re writing—say, a chapter or short memoir or essay—must be certain length—say, twenty pages—and get tied in knots when their writing doesn’t conform. Ironically, everyone’s assumptions about the proper length for a piece are different. Where do these ideas come from? And why? I suspect these assumptions have their origins in twelve-plus years of schooling, during which every bit of writing comes with page expectations. Our five-paragraph themes had to be three pages long. Our college essays had to present our response to certain texts within twelve pages. When I taught creative writing at a seminary a few years ago, I was amazed at how many times my students asked me how long their assignments had to be. “As long as they need to be,” I answered repeatedly. In the freewheeling world of creative adulthood, guidelines…
Authorship
Here’s an observation to chew on: A few times in my career as a writing instructor, I’ve coached retired therapists in writing their memoirs. These are people who have worked with their personal stories over decades; they’ve had extensive experience in therapy and have continued to explore their stories through supervision groups and continuing education. And yet, when they sit down to pen their life experiences, they’re shocked. They remember details that have never before emerged. They pair memories in surprising ways, revealing new perspectives on events. They discover recurring themes that bring unity to their story they never knew existed. This phenomenon is not unique to therapists. Many authors who have done extensive therapy or told their stories multiple times in twelve-step groups make the same observation: writing an experience down changes us in different ways than telling it aloud. Why? Here’s my theory. When keep our stories to…
The Overwhelm Factor
Most prose writers at some point get overwhelmed by the scope of their material. Except for those deliberately writing short, stand-alone pieces, writers usually face projects whose scope or subject matter is larger than most human beings can fathom. The memories are too complex, the emotions too fearsome, the pages too many, the themes too interconnected, the motivations too secret. The majority of writers who seek me out as a coach do so because they’re overwhelmed. They want me to fix it. I have two seemingly opposite responses to the overwhelm factor. First, don’t we want our work to be bigger than us? The best writing addresses universal truths; it digs down to the essence of human nature; it asks questions that have been with us since the beginning of time. Literature always connects the personal to the universal, the telling detail to the broadest abstraction. The fact that we’re…
Transformation & Writing
During my first years of serious writing, I labored under the conceit that I was writing a book. The thought was bracing; it motivated me to climb out of bed at 5:30 so I’d have a half-hour of solitary creativity before I had to face a classroom of seventh graders. Only as I entered my third and fourth years on the project, having given up public school teaching and discovered that my memoir was not an adventure story about biking through Wales but rather an uncomfortably revealing story about reconciling bisexuality with my Christian upbringing; only as I revised the book a dozen times did I begin to understand what was really happening. The book was writing me. The primary creation was the self I became because of the writing—a self humbled by the truth of my story and yet less afraid to own this truth; a self no longer…
Tie-backs and Through-lines: Writing as Weaving
I grew up a mile from Philipsburg Manor, a restored colonial farm and mill in the Hudson Valley. The summer between seventh and eighth grades, I volunteered there as an apprentice to the weaver. I got to wear a bonnet and bodice, milk the cow, card and spin wool, and I learned to weave. The loom filled an entire room; the beater was the size of a roof beam. I slipped the shuttle back and forth, watching the home-spun wool unravel and gradually fill the warp with color. I pulled the great beam forward and beat each pass-through into place. As I continue to work on my novel this summer, I’ve been thinking about that apprenticeship. The initial drafting of my story was very much like carding. When you card wool, you use these crude paddles with metal teeth to brush out all the seeds and tangles that sheep accumulate. …
Removing What’s Not Story
I’ve just cut fifty pages from a polished, 400-page draft—that’s one-eighth of what I’d considered a completed book. What was in those pages? A few scenes that slowed down the plot, a lot of unnecessary dialogue, whole paragraphs of exposition, and hundreds of extraneous words extracted from too-long sentences. Everything I cut was not my story. As it’s very possible there are remnants of not-story remaining, I still have some final combing to do. And I’ve no doubt my agent and eventual editor will cut even more. I began working on this novel in 2005, and I am humbled by how much of the volume of what I’ve written has not been my story. Perhaps other writers are more efficient and economical; perhaps others have the capacity to anticipate the essence of an emergent story, or focus their work during the initial drafting, or otherwise find shortcuts that don’t shortchange…
Sifting
My daughter, who is almost a year-and-a-half, has discovered the joys of sifting sand. She shovels it into the colander and watches, fascinated, as it streams through, leaving behind the pebbles which she promptly puts in her mouth. After completing a draft, a writer’s task is to construct a new colander, a tool strong enough to strain out what is no longer needed and leave behind the essence of the story. The challenge in revision is to set aside our attachments to text. We’ve written scenes, characters, expository passages that we assume, by virtue of our effort, must belong. In the last draft of my novel, I included almost twenty pages of conflict around an insurance salesman; these pages were climactic, I thought, and illustrated the hardships all health care workers endure within our insurance-governed medical system. But when I looked closely at my heartbeat, newly articulated, I was forced…
Spoken/Unspoken/Unspeakable
Mark Doty, in a class on writing memoir, said that three forces are at play in any personal narrative: the spoken, the unspoken, and the unspeakable. The dynamic between these triune forces is what gives a story life. As I understand it, the spoken force consists of the words on the page—that is, the story as we’ve consciously told it. The unspoken force is made up of those emotions and ideas that lurk just beneath the surface of the story; we must “read between the lines” to find what is unspoken. The author is conscious of this material, but for whatever reason has chosen not to name it. The “unspoken” is always accessible to the reader who is willing to work. In the “unspeakable” realm we find all that material for which we don’t have language. Sometimes material is unspeakable because no language exists to describe it. The natural world…
What’s at Stake?
Whenever I begin to work with a writer on his or her project, I always ask two questions. The first is “Why are you writing this?” The answers I get are often similar—“Because I learned things from my experience I want to share with others”; “Because it’s good therapy”; “Because the world needs to hear this story;” “Because I feel compelled.” With any one piece of writing there exist a dozen motivations for writing, and I want to hear the surface explanation—the story the writer tells him- or herself when facing the blank page. But this first response, while honest and important, is never deep enough to sustain someone through the long effort of writing. Nor is it particularly helpful. As a writing coach, I look for the reasons behind the stated reason, the emerging inner story, because that’s where passion and fear and drive reside. I look for motivation…
Generating in Revision
Carol Bly wrote that the essential question we must ask during what she calls “the long middle stage” of writing is, “What more do I have to say about this topic?” Certainly this is a good question to ask early on, when we’ve completed a draft and are unsure where to go next. Usually we’re inclined to begin tweaking the words on the page as we head into revision, but I’d like to suggest instead that the first stages of revision more often than not involve generation. First, it’s good to generate journal entries. Why am I writing this? What’s in it (in the writing process and in the subject matter, NOT in the outcome) for me? How do I feel about my draft? What are my places of discomfort? What am I attached to and why? What might this draft be asking of me? What might it want to…