Control Ain't Just a Janet Jackson Song

The Girl Scout story got workshopped yesterday. It was a confusing, difficult workshop. There was no consensus; everyone had something different to say about what they wanted it to do and be. Usually when that happens, it means the story needs pitching, not rewriting, but I'm certain that is not the case here. So I don't really know where to go with it, aside from just trusting in what I wrote, which is an extremely arrogant thing to do. I think I'll submit it a few places and then look at it again in six months or thereabouts.

The most worrisome comment was from the professor, who told me that I needed to "let go of intent" to give my work "a more organic feel". This is more or less the same thing that my workshop professor from last semester told me. She gave me feedback that has haunted me insanely since I got it: that my control over the writing was too tight, that the story was constructed too meticulously and that I needed to let go and write with more freedom. I have no idea what this means or how to improve it (particularly with the story I workshopped that led to this feedback, which required strong control, dammit), but hearing an echo of it in another professor, who has no idea what the prior one said, makes me want to wail and rend my garments.

Organic?...

(She also said the Girl Scout story was "nearly flawless" in its surface aspects. Which is a nice adjective, one I'm happy to take away with me.)

Aside from that, something else happened since last we spoke. Over the weekend, I had a fit that is seemingly becoming a part of my ritual for beginning a big project. I drew you a highly professional diagram for this process.

So this weekend I kicked and screamed and yelled and whined about the wikibook, because no fooling, you guys, I am genuinely scared out of my skull about writing this thing. But I can't keep pretending that I can put it off until next year, or next century. I have to begin. So I had the tantrum, and now I can buckle down.

I have no idea how this project is going to go. Not a clue. Generally it takes me something like a quarter of a year to write a novel (which, please, writers who are reading: don't use that as an example for your own work or a way to shame me about the shoddiness of my effort), but the nature of this book means I could be working on it for much longer. Years, maybe. I hope I won't be, but I'm not eliminating it as a possibility.

Matt advised me to set a deadline for review on it. That is, he said I should work for a certain number of months and then make a mandatory stop to reevaluate the project, see if I should keep going or stop or set other deadlines or what. I thought this was fucking amazing advice, and I plan to implement it.

I don't know how to organize my work on it around my other responsibilities, which have changed dramatically since the last time I worked on a novel. But I hope to get going before the end of October. Now that I've punched pillows and moaned sufficiently, work can really start.

It's work that needs tight control, so I guess my professor's feedback is well-timed. Either that or I'm not ready to write this book at all and it's going to be a big disaster. I guess, in the coming months, we'll see.

Sing, O Muse

During the wonderful 24 hours that I spent in San Francisco, Kathleen and I talked a lot about writing and a bit about writing our passions.* Knowing that I really love opera, she asked me why I didn't write a story about that, or at least a story that integrated it. I said I didn't even really like talking about opera to my acquaintances, because I have met almost no one in my generation who's interested in opera (aside from actual opera singers, I know a couple of those for reasons too long to go into), and it's an interest that people generally roll their eyes about as weird and snooty and difficult to enjoy. Or at least this is how I see it. Kathleen told me that this did not matter, and encouraged me to write about what I loved, because that's how writers do great work.

*I know I didn't reproduce this set of interactions correctly, so I apologize to Kathleen for my shitty memory. Instead of being confusing and losing my point, I just filled in the blanks with fiction that makes the anecdote cohere.

I was reminded of some unexpected feedback I got on my old SF novella The Apocalypse Experiment. I included a scene wherein Maria, one of the main characters, talks about why she learned to knit. The novella takes place about 150 years from now and knitting has fallen even further out of common knowledge than now, and it's a world where there's no place for handmade crafts. It's partially for this reason, Maria explains, and partially for the exact same reasons that I learned to knit (which she also explains), that she took the time to learn.

I thought this scene was lame and awkward and I was ashamed of it as a seemingly obvious explanation of my own feelings about knitting. I left it in anyway because I felt it communicated something important about Maria and also about the world she lived in. Somebody told me, upon reading it, that he thought this was one of the best scenes in the novella. It was warm and affectionate, he said, and made Maria and her emotions come to life.

Shut the front door, was my reaction, but I thanked him politely and continued to despair about finding any kind of a market for a 23,000-word science fiction novella with dubious science and a very unhappy ending. This was also one of the first bits of evidence in an ever-growing pile that says I really don't know what parts of my writing are good and effective and which parts aren't.

ANYWAY, I had this idea a while back for a SF short story that mostly concerned the human voice and a significant change in its configuration. It occurred to me after the San Fran trip that I could integrate opera into my concept for this story, and that it would be richer with my [paltry] knowledge of and [significant] passion for the form. I drew up a concept and a general arc and sat down last night with my new Moleskine to draft it.

I don't know how many words I wrote, because I wasn't working on a computer, and I'm not finished so I haven't transcribed it yet. But I've set down several pages (on that narrow Moleskine rule - I counted: 45 lines per page) so far. It is mostly rude clay, with a lot of very inadequate work, but as I'm writing through it I'm learning more about the story and the MC and what I want to say, so I think in the end I'll be able to shape it and clear away the rubbish and have an actual elephant story. The opera addition was a good idea, adding a center to the story, and I will be glad to be able to write about this thing I love. Thanks, Kathleen.

Objectively, it's odd to me that longhand feels freer than typing into Word does. Because I type pretty quickly, it takes me a much much MUCH shorter time to draft things on the computer than it does to write them with pen and paper. Also, I am able to edit while drafting, often meaning that cringeworthy sentences are not recorded for all time, a big plus. Since I'm all obsessed with not wanting to write things over and over again, and with wanting to get it right with as few drafts as possible, you'd think that keyboarding would be the way I'd find greater creative freedom.

But no. It just isn't. Writing longhand is messier, in a good way, like a messy living room that indicates real human occupancy. It's easier for me to make notes that make sense to only me, and it feels realer, like I'm working instead of cheating on work. And I have the time to think before I set the next word down, think about how the sentence goes. (Er, sometimes.) And there's something about it that feels romantic. I don't know how else to express that, and it's foolish and has nothing to do with real writer-work, but I won't deny it.

Granted, there's been a real loosening in my work over the last six months in terms of how I feel about rewriting and tossing out the bilgewater. I don't howl and clutch the precious first draft anymore. That probably contributes to how longhand has become an advantage. Plus there's new fearlessness. And seriousness. And glee. All of these things together, not one of them less important than the others, have come to pass for me, and I know it means that I'm doing better work.

BECAUSE I AM THE FICTATOR. KNOW MY FICTIVE DOMINANCE.

In other news, I got a second specific story idea for this big scary project and took a couple of pages of notes on it. For various reasons I'm not really sure whether I should start it or not. The SF story has to finish up first, and after that I'll see whether I'd rather maybe go back to KUFC. It's nice to have a lot of irons in the fire, but my nature is to enjoy finishing things, so I also think of them as nagging loose ends. Oh, well.

Unpreserved

I killed a darling yesterday. I worked all day long (with a few breaks, of course), from about 10:00 to about 9:00, reworking the first third of the novel. As I went through the paper draft a few days ago, I drew brackets to mark spots where the writing was sound, but would probably have to be integrated elsewhere. I managed to preserve many of these spots, but discarded several others upon reflection. When I had to delete pieces like this from the electronic draft in order to make sense of what I was writing, I kept the physical page (otherwise I've put the prior-draft physical pages in the recycle bin to cut down on the clutter), so as to retain what I thought was good, ill-fitting work.

One page stuck around through the whole day's work, with a few sentences on it that I really didn't want to let go of. It was a darling. The Fictator mindset has helped me be more merciless with my darlings throughout my writing process in the last months, but this one just didn't want to go. I read it again and again, this little passage, and genuinely could not find a place for it in the sixty pages or so I edited today. So, finally, when I was setting aside the manuscript for the day and hitting play on Pride & Prejudice (I have a book to read before it's due on Friday, but I just couldn't look at any more words), I read it one last time, and then chucked it into the recycle bin. Goodbye, darling dear, I had to murder you.

I can't even express how useful the Fictator-hat has been in the course of all this. For the majority of my life I've been a reactionary, not wanting to let go of things that are past, whether old books, old pictures pulled out of magazines that used to be pasted on my wall, old knowledge and ways of life (it's why I learned how to can preserves), old slang. I value the past and its quirks and turns, and I believe we can always benefit from its existence, even if it's just learning something like the fact that teen-pop groups have been assembled by heartless record executives at least as far back as the sixties. At any rate, the same reactionary attitude always went for my writing - if it wasn't preserved exactly as it was first concocted, with changes only for grammar and awkwardness, its value was diminished.

Of course in writing this is foolishness. It's the way of editing to throw out reams of work and start all over, to tinker and alter until maybe what you have barely resembles what you started with. I had so much trouble with this until I began approaching my work as if it was mine, not something that had already been conjured up by the Muses in the Creativity Dimension and transmitted to me for transcription. Until I started thinking of myself as the Fictator, the person who has all the rights and powers to decide what will stay and what will go, I felt hampered and hostile about the editing process.

Now I'm much freer, and less afraid. Words are cheap, is the thing. A good paragraph is easy. There are a hundred ways I can write any given conversation. There's no guarantee that what I've thrown out won't end up being better than the newly-written stuff, but the old stuff doesn't have inherent value just because it was my first idea. This isn't the SATs; the first answer isn't always (likely) the right one. Besides, I save versions. Nothing is really lost.

If you cut my story, does it not bleed words?

I don't know anything about writing contests. I have been a finalist in two of them, but I really don't know what distinguishes contests from the usual query for publication/get rejected dance, except that there's payment involved. I'm talking about quality. What is it about these stories that makes them good enough to deserve a prize, rather than just the prize of publication?

I also don't know what kinds of writers win these contests, and what they do with the money and prestige that they win (if any). I don't know how many writers I'm going up against, whether a few dozen or a few thousand. I don't know if there's some kind of a scheme to winning them, or whether they matter more or less than regular-style publication. I just don't know that much about them.

But I've dived back into writing during the fullest swing of the fall contest season, and I'm damn well going to take advantage of it. Two nights ago I decided to enter a short story into a genre writer's contest at Writer's Digest. The short story in question was 4,800 words, and the word limit for the contest was 4,000. I am pretty happy with this story the way it is; it squeaks going around corners maybe once or twice, but I don't think it needs shortening, unless it's the Crisco kind of shortening. But I was sure it was a good idea to enter this story in this competition, so I put on my Fictator hat and I sat down to chop until I could chop no more.

It was a nightmare. It was two hours of work to lose those 800 words. I must've read through it seven or eight times, lopping a word here and a sentence there. When my progress was too slow, I held my breath and cut 400 words of really fine character development. I do not think this made for a better story, really I don't, but I had 800 words to lose and, in the end, I lost 804.

And I paid my $20 and entered the contest. Lord knows if the story even belongs in the horror category, or if it's up against stories by much more seasoned and worthwhile writers, or if the contest will decide to go belly-up and they'll keep my money (it's happened before), or - what is most likely - I won't win and won't know why.

Once I entered a contest where your entry fee paid for a copy of a book with all the winners published in it, and when I was sent the book (so many months after the contest ended that I'd mostly forgotten about it), that was my first notice that I hadn't won anything. When I read the stories, I didn't really understand what they had that my story didn't; sometimes I understand why I got rejected from a publication when I read a copy of the publication, and sometimes I don't, and this was one where I didn't.

So, that's that. Fictator success; contest entered. Everything is super.

I am exhausted this morning. For the third time I am the victim of temporary insanity leading me to agree to substitute for a sunrise yoga class, and I had to get up at 4:30 to make it there in time. And all night I woke up every hour because my brain was worried I would oversleep. And no one even came to the class. Fool me thrice, shame on me.

The Fictator is me.

You can’t read all the books in the world. It took me years and years and years to learn this, to actually absorb it to the point where it was useful knowledge. (For the longest time it was just a personal tragedy.) With this knowledge, I no longer feel the need to keep reading books I don’t like, or to read all the books in a series if I liked the first one okay, or whatever. I still haven’t read The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest because although I very much want to know what happens to Lisbeth, I was not crazy about the experience of reading the first book and liked the second even less. Plus it’s not in paperback yet.

And I’ve never read The Red Tent, or The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, and I gave up halfway through my second Joyce Carol Oates book because you know what? I don’t cotton to her. I no longer feel the need to try and keep up with the frantic pace of books released in this country. It’s faddish, like everything else, and I was very surprised when I learned this, because books have always seemed permanent to me, more lasting, but it just isn’t so. The book everyone’s talking about will be forgotten in five years. I have never enjoyed an Oprah book. If a book crosses my path that looks good, I’ll read it, but I don’t have a To Be Read pile anymore because there are just too many books. Every book in the world would be in that pile if I was honest, so I’m not going to keep a pile, I’m just going to let books come into my life as they will.

I refuse to feel bad about this. Most of the time. But I'm in a writers' workshop right now, and a lot of folks are talking about books they've read and books they recommend, and I haven’t read a good many of them because I don’t keep up with contemporary lit this way. I feel ashamed. I’ve spent a lot of time re-reading Skeleton Crew, I am reminded. I could have used that time to be up on my market.

But you can’t read them all. You just can’t. And maybe if I was in a graduate program or didn’t have a day job I would have the time and inclination to feel bad about this, but aside from flashes of “haven’t I read anything?” when I read these comments from my co-workshoppers, I don’t.

(If you want to know how I learned this lesson, it was from Ha Jin’s Waiting, which, halfway through, was boring me so desperately that I gave up and read the end to find out what happened. It was a thoroughly disappointing ending. The critics loved that book, it won a National Book Award, and I haven’t the faintest idea why. When I returned it to the library I looked around and saw the skazillions of other books on the shelves, not all of which were likely to be as disappointing as this one had been. So after that experience, I was determined no longer to let the books boss me around. I can decide how I want my time to be spent, and no author/critic/talk show host will decide it for me.)

Over the weekend, this idea has mated with another idea in my head and they’ve produced an interesting notion about my own writing. I told my husband the other night that recently when I sit at my laptop, I have begun feeling not, as always, helpless before the grind of events, as my characters tell me what’s going to happen (or sit there and refuse to do anything), but more muhua-ha-ha-ha, more like the dictator of my own little empire, drunk with power over my little fictional people. Dance, puppets! You’ll do what I tell you to do! I am your creator! I am the WRITER!

It doesn’t mean I have an easier time cranking the words onto the page, but it does mean I am far more capable of thinking outside the box than I was. Just because I’ve never read a book where a character had X quality doesn’t mean I can’t create a character that does. Just because Y usually takes place in tandem with Z in many books I’ve read doesn’t mean I have to write the two together as well. I can do whatever I want. It’s all coming out of my own head.

This may seem obvious, but to me it wasn’t. I guess I believed that stories come from somewhere, some other dimension where they are fully formed by the fiction gods and transmitted here, and that they can’t really be written any way but the way they appear in my head (or Kevin Brockmeier’s head, or wherever). Having to invent plot for my Greenland novel when absolutely nothing was springing from my mind like Athena from Zeus has been an interesting lesson learned. I’m just…makin’ shit up. It can go this way, or maybe it can go another way; if I look back and see that it didn’t work, I can just write it over again a different way. It’s my book. I wrote it. I can change it to be whatever I want it to.

So. Fictator + Can’t read all of the innumerable books in the world = …I don’t have to be attached to anything I write. There are limitless metaphors out there, endless permutations of the two plots. No matter how fragile and spectacular a unit of writing seems to be, there is always a way to make it better (or to make it worse, for that matter). No sentence will be exactly like this sentence, true, but there are other sentences, other words, even made-up words and obsolete words. Maybe it won’t be perfect, but nothing ever is, and being attached to paragraphs I write will only hold me back from better paragraphs. Just like being intent on reading all six Dune books meant that I missed out on reading other books I might have liked better.

I feel about 80,000 times better, and far more energetic about writing in the future, after this epiphany.

And hey, if you thought this was interesting, you should read what I’ll have to say soon about how knitting test swatches is like rewriting. If you didn’t think this was interesting, go be your own fictator. It’s my blog.