Urk.
Author: laurie | Date: December 21, 2009 | Please Comment!I spent most of the weekend writing chapter one of the New! Improved! Funny! Memoir! Totally cracked myself up. Enjoyed it thoroughly. Told some great stories and poked fun at myself all the way through. Sent it to my critiquers, feeling mostly good about it.
And here’s why they are such good readers.
They told me I reveal too much too soon, and need to figure out how to only tell what is necessary, to reveal in such a way to allow for suspense and discovery. Also that I need to find a way to blend the funny with the serious. I can’t do all trauma, but I can’t do all funny, either, apparently. Even David Sedaris has the dark side in his stuff. Oy. I totally see their point, but I have no idea how to blend the two voices into something beautiful and moving and lyrical (AND funny.) Homegirl Tanya gave me the best advice, which I knew full well, but it always helps to be reminded: read dozens of other memoirs and mine them for tricks on how to make my own work. She provided a nice list so I can get started. I see a trip to the library in my near future. With a wheelbarrow.
The problem I’m having with this whole scenario is that I am psychotically impatient to get this thing done. It’s making me completely crazy that I don’t have a book to sell right now (and I’m the last of my writing posse to do so, which doesn’t help.) I desperately want this book to be written and to be working on a proposal. I can’t bear the amount of time it’s going to take to do it right (although I’m fully aware I have no choice — it’s going to take as long as it takes.) The other side of the coin is that I am ON FIRE to write right now, but I really need to be spending as many hours reading as I can before I’m going to really have an idea of how to write this thing. But reading doesn’t feel like real work to me. I know in my head that it is, that the writing can’t happen without the reading but…urrrggghh. I want to write.
It’s a quandary to be sure. Perhaps I will put reading on my calendar like I do with writing deadlines. A certain number of memoirs by a certain date, checking off my list of titles as I go. Yes, that might make it feel more like legitimate work. And I will keep a compendium of things I learn from each one.
This has already been such a wrenching process. I feel like I have whiplash from the number of times I’ve changed my mind about what I’m doing. I can only hope the second book is easier.
11:28 am on December 21st, 2009
WRITE! If you’re on fire, just WRITE! That’s the NaNo lesson; don’t wrestle your editor trying to make the pieces all fit into some beautiful architecture. Write it down, write it now! There’s plenty of time to edit later but when the muse is prodding you, go with the flow!
12:22 pm on December 21st, 2009
Look, as someone who has the gift of writing large of amounts of text quickly when she puts her mind to it, I so feel you on this. It’s very tempting to speed through, race to the end, use your manic writing powers to get to that point where you’re rich, famous, and published, as fast as your little fingers can type.
But I can also talk to you about the other side of this – and that is that you have to, HAVE to learn patience and never rush this stuff. Because when you have just finished writing something, and it’s sitting there all new and pretty and still steaming from the oven – you’ve got absolutely no perspective on it whatsoever. Zero. It’s like your newborn baby who, when she’s first placed in your arms, she looks like a god damned golden glowing seraphim and smells as sweet as fresh bread, but actually? Her head is all misshapen and pointy from the trip down the canal, she’s covered with that white smudgy stuff, her nose is squished, her eyes are swollen… she barely looks human and she smells like afterbirth and shit. Later on, after your baby has had a bath or two, lost her pointy head and grown all plump and cute and not covered in that vernix stuff, you’ll look at pictures of your newborn and go, “Wow, yow, that baby was a little bit hideous!” but in the glow of the moment? She was the most beautiful thing in the world.
Works the same with writing. You’re all excited, you think it’s the best, most funny thing you’ve ever written (in fact, it might be the funniest thing ANYONE has ever written, right?) but if you put it away and come back to it in a month or two, you’ll be able to see the pointy head.
I have learned this the hard way with my screenwriting. (My screenwriting partner is an impatient dame as well. We tend to egg each other on in this regard). Rushing stuff out there never amounts to anything good, and might very well be downright disastrous.
My advice? Stop showing your work. Take that fire you’ve got lit and charge through your first draft. I don’t know your process – but either let it all flow, or edit as you go, or do what you do, but every time you finish another chapter – put it aside, forget about it, and just start work on the next one. Things will become clear as you move along. Themes will emerge, cracks that need to be fixed will show up, your voice will gel, your pov will solidify. And, if you do this right, you will probably end up rewriting, to the point where the first draft should practically just be thrown out at the beginning, because it’s going to be invisible – it’s only going to be, like, the basement of your book. The foundation that you can’t even see anymore once the whole house is built, painted, and roofed.
Write. Write. Write. Finish a chapter and throw it over your shoulder and move right into the next one. Don’t talk too much about it. Don’t write too much about your process. Just keep writing. (and reading. But only read the works that really speak to you, so your influences are the proper ones). And then, after you’ve written that first draft, give it one good read, pat it on it’s little head, and hide it for at least a month. Then come back and read it again and your most immediate problems will be clear. Then do your first rewrite. And THEN send it out for notes. And then listen to the people that ring that little bell inside of you – who point out the things in the manuscript that you KNEW were flaws (but were hoping nobody else would notice so that you could be lazy and not have to fix them). And then rewrite it again. And then again. And wring notes out of everyone you can think of. And push it and clean it up and cut it down mercilessly and get it so polished that it’s perfect. And then, and only then, can you can start shopping it out to agents.
But you must allow the time for it to happen. You must allow yourself the time to get perspective. And you can’t get bogged down with every new chapter by handing it out and taking notes and then rethinking the whole project. And you really, really can’t rush. I mean, yes, you can write as fast you like right now. You SHOULD do that. But then you have to schedule in the down time. The time that has to pass so you can see just how ugly your baby really is. Otherwise you’ll end up like a crazy new mom, showing off your kid’s pointy little head and crossed eyes and drooly little mouth and asking, “Isn’t she the most BEAUTIFUL baby in the world?
If you haven’t read Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, I would recommend it. Also Stephen King’s book on writing is pretty amazingly good.
12:36 pm on December 21st, 2009
Hang in there, honey! You can still write while you research and prepare–just get down whatever comes to you; you can always go back and revise later. If it feels good to type, then type for pete’s sake! Don’t let us tell you what to do when you feel the urge. You’re doing so well so far. No one said it would be easy…
6:36 pm on December 22nd, 2009
Don’t worry about how long it will take. Just work frenetically until it’s done (well, that’s MY way, but it seems to work!). The research part can be a fun break after a few hours of writing, too, so you don’t need to feel that all the reading needs to be a big, onerous project.
Ditto Tanya–get it down, then revise like hell. It’s hard for us poetry types to look at the work that way, I think, because we’re thinking so much about shape and form as we work. Prose is sort of a different situation, but the wild writing and studious revision are sort of the gift and curse of the form.
9:33 pm on December 22nd, 2009
Laurie,
Just write it and worry about the rest later, when you’re no longer worried about worrying about all that other stuff (the stuff about fame and fortune).
I did not mention this during our recent poetry workshop, but I supported myself as a visual artist by spending some thirty years as a book editor (Random House, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill) and as a managing editor of two university presses (Stanford, Washington) before embarking on my current path, and I still consult with writers of all kinds. The best advice I could offer has already been given by Maia, above. It’s the same thing I’ve said to countless writers (especially the part about NOT talking about it and NOT showing it UNLESS talking and showing are indispensable elements of your process). So all I will add here is a suggestion to reread Nathanael West (especially “Miss Lonelyhearts”) and Jane Bowles (especially “Two Serious Ladies”). It’s fiction, but it weaves the serious with the humorous to produce something dark and deliciously quirky.
Good luck!
X.P.