I’ve been thinking seriously about fiction again.  I have this novel that’s been kicking around my head for five years (since the Summer before I left for grad school).  The idea for my first novel had been around for at least that long (one of the characters I’d actually had in my head since I was 17) before I actually wrote it.  And I always want to say, it really doesn’t take that long to write fiction. But, maybe it does.

Studying theology, freedom is something I’ve thought a lot about. The strange thing about it is that even if you believe in free will (as I do), you have to recognize that you are only free in a limited sense.  As one of my professors put it to me when I was working on my Master’s thesis, “you cannot be a frog.”  What he meant is that even though I make real choices and determine my future in a real sense, I do not have the freedom to snap my fingers and be a frog.  I choose from a limited number of possibilities and the choices of others have an effect on the possibilities open to me.

Fiction is different.  Truly, you start with nothing.  And, in a sense, with everything.  You can snap your fingers and be a frog.  That kind of freedom is overwhelming and it takes a while–maybe even years–to sort out.

You have to define the limits of your story, but you also have to keep in mind that you can change anything at any time.  This story I’m working on right now, for instance.  I’ve had the idea for years to tell it from four different perspectives (because there are four main characters).  It was a daunting prospect and it was simply not working.  I don’t know two of the characters well enough to write from their perspectives.  I have a strong sense of them, but they don’t have enough to do, and as I realize now, it’s not really their story.  But, I was so stuck thinking the story had to be told this way that it came as a revelation last week when I realized that the story should really be told from the perspectives of only two characters.  It shouldn’t have taken me years to realize that, but it did.

Fiction seems to happen on its own time, but it is really similar to what David Gray says about songwriting.  You cannot control the creativity, but the more you show up to do the work, the more you’ll have these moments of inspiration where something that wasn’t clear becomes clear.

In writing fiction, you get stuck thinking that the way you decided things should be is the only way they can be.  But, then you realize that you’re really not stuck at all.  Maybe that plot hole you’ve been trying to avoid with such caution is actually the thing you should be running straight toward as fast as you can.  Maybe the way things are are not the way they have to stay.  The slightest shift in perspective can change everything.

Of the infinite possibilities open to us in fiction and the millions open to us in life, maybe it doesn’t make sense that we grasp at only a few and hold onto them long after we should have let go.  But, maybe it doesn’t matter how long it takes.  Maybe it doesn’t matter how long we avoid the plot holes.  As long as we keep showing up.  As long as our perspectives eventually shift and we start running straight toward the things that scare us most.

My dad is incredibly supportive of everything I do.  He tells me constantly how cool he thinks it is that I’m in grad school.  He was so excited that I was spending NYE in San Francisco.  And every time we talk on the phone, he asks me if I’m working on the new novel.

The answer is no.  I’ve barely even thought about it in the last six months.  When Fall semester started, I cut myself some slack and said I wouldn’t even worry about writing fiction while working so much and studying.  I don’t regret that, but I miss fiction so much.  Even when I’m not writing, I love the way it plays in my mind.  I love pulling together stories and imagining futures for people who feel real to me.

Even writing bad fiction requires an incredible amount of discipline.   And it competes for my time and attention with the far easier blogging and journaling.  It’s exhausting to find enough words to cover them all.

But, fiction is a part of every future I can imagine for myself.  In a sense, I consider it my life’s work, even if I am never published.  I read the journals of Joyce Carol Oates (this has become a Summer ritual) and I see how someone dedicates her life to writing.  I want that for myself.

I don’t feel like making any grand declarations today.  I’m just reminding myself of the things I want to do with my life.  Writing another novel and many more after that is on the list.

Sometimes when I think about the fact that almost 60 people have my novel, it becomes hard for me to breathe.  When people tell me they’re reading it, I have no idea what to say, because it’s so cool to think that people are reading my writing, but it also makes me incredibly uncomfortable.  It’s just that I quite like people thinking I’m smart and talented and I have no perspective on the novel, but I think it’s pretty bad.  And I told myself I wasn’t going to say that again, because I hate to give disclaimers, but it is how I feel and not just an effort to save face.

With the way I talk about it, I know the obvious question is, “Why did you ask people to read it?”  The real reason was that I was ready to take a risk, but the reason I will ascribe to it now is that I’m ready to get over needing people to think I’m perfect.  I think it’s pretty cool that I wrote a novel, even if it sucks, and I want to do it again, so anything I can do to lower the stupidly high bar in my head is worth it if it makes writing any less intimidating.

Knowing my fiction is out there also motivates me to keep writing, because I think, “I can do better than that.”  Which brings me to the new novel, which I haven’t been making as much progress on as the Creativity Challenge really demands.  I’ve been taking more notes than actually writing scenes.  I’ve had some trouble figuring out the main character, because for a while she was too much like me and then she became me on crack mixed with Daria Morgendorffer. Now she’s back to being pretty normal instead of an anti-social, unfeeling crazy person.

I was having a hard time finding my way into the story, even though I do already have quite a bit written.  I’m still lacking plot points.  But then yesterday, I just started writing conversations between characters, apart from any scenes they might be attached to, and it felt so nice just to be writing even if I’m not sure exactly where I’m going.  Plus, it’s fun to put things you’ve been thinking about into the mouths of characters.

It’s kind of strange writing about people in grad school, because sometimes I feel this pressure to represent it in a certain way.  Not really out of any personal stake I have in what people think of it, but just because I live it and should know.  In truth I do know a lot about grad school and it’s not all exactly as you would think (though I’ve been here too long to really know what people think anymore and it probably takes a grad school ego to think other people even care that much), but I don’t like to write in that way where one person represents this group of people and another this group of people, so we get a perfect mix and balance.  Seems quite dull.

This post has now reached the point where I must admit to feeling like an idiot sometimes when I’m writing about writing.  It’s like I feel stupid for taking it all so seriously, but the reason I feel stupid is because I have a problem taking myself seriously.  I don’t know what it is, because it doesn’t feel pretentious or silly.  I guess it feels self-important, but what doesn’t?  I guess that was also part of the challenge for me: learn to talk seriously about what you do with other people who do things.  Sideline sitting and preparing but never starting are easier, but maybe risks aren’t that scary even if they sometimes make breathing difficult.

Today is the first day of July and the first day of the Creativity Challenge.  I challenged other bloggers and myself to be creative this month, whatever that might mean for us each as individuals, and now it’s time to make that happen.  The second half of the challenge is that you have to blog about it, you have to share your process.

So, here’s where I am right now: frustrated.  I feel pulled in so many different directions that I’m having a hard time focusing.  I’m realizing just how accustomed I’ve become to running around all the time instead of concentrating on anything.  It’s probably time to admit to myself that this whole internet thing has had an effect on my life. It’s almost entirely positive, except I notice now that I’m anxious if I’m not trying to do at least four things at once and I don’t have the patience to even just sit and read or write anymore.

I think some of it is nostalgia for that time in my life when I had almost endless hours to sit on my bed and read.  Now I’m an adult and I have to be at work all day, every day.  On top of which, life has simply changed since that time.  I didn’t have the opportunity then to talk to people all over the world whenever I wanted.  I’ve gone back and forth in my head about whether this difference  is necessarily bad or really just me changing and the world changing, compounded by the pressing responsibilities of being an adult.

My conclusion is that it’s all of those things, but no matter, I can still recapture some of what I had before instead of simply mourning its loss.  I picked up the collected journals of Joyce Carol Oates again yesterday.  I read through it last Summer and it inspired me then.  It’s pretty clear that JCO spends most of her time sitting and reading or writing.  Ever since I studied the student movement of the 1960s when I was an undergrad, I’ve romanticized life as a student and as a professor in the sixties, seventies, and even eighties.  Study without all the distractions and conveniences and stuff.  I remember a professor of mine saying she arrived at college with just a suitcase and a typewriter.   I’m not trading in my laptop or iPhone anytime soon, but reading JCO reminds me of how much I want to write through my life and how important it is that I let myself have that time, instead of filling every moment with noise and distractions.

The creative challenge I’m taking on for the month of July is to finish the first part, the first four chapters, of the novel I’m working on.  I actually already have the first chapter and half of the second written, but they need to be rewritten, because the main character has changed too much.  I’m a horrible rewriter.  I edit heavily as I write, but once things are down on paper and I’ve walked away, I have a hard time making significant changes.  I think I’ll just have to start from scratch and pull in whatever elements I like and remember from the original.

This novel is still lacking a bit in story, but I really like the characters and they feel fully-formed in my mind.  I think the hardest part about novels is that you need so much for people to do.  Large story arcs are easy, but what do people do and talk about every day in the meantime?  The first novel ended up with this feeling of everything but the kitchen sink for me, and this one seems simpler even though I’m trying to write with four narrators.  I guess it just doesn’t have as much baggage as the first. That’s a relief.

I’m adding to this challenge a commitment to prioritize sitting still and writing while I listen to music or reading while I sit in bed.  I really desire that kind of peace and I think my writing needs that as much as I do.

If you’re interested in participating in the Creativity Challenge, it’s not too late.  Check this post out for more information.  Your challenge does not have to resemble mine at all–you set your own challenge and parameters.  Check this page for a list of the people participating.

The same Summer I started this blog, I also wrote a novel.  There are elements to the novel that date as far back as ten years ago when I was only 16.  I was 18 when I created the main character.  I was 21 when the basic premise for the novel came about.  I was 23 when I started the novel.  I was 24 when I finished.  I’m 26 now and I want you to read it.

This is a really big deal to me.  I’ve been writing fiction for just about ever, but only in the last five years or so have I started taking it seriously.  I want to be a novelist.  But, I have kept most of my writing hidden away.  To me, it’s personal and hard to share with others.  But, sharing is really the thing I want to do most.

I have serious insecurities about writing fiction, because it is hard.  It is really, really hard.  And, novels are long.  They are really, really long.  It’s true what Ira Glass says that there will be a long time when your taste far outshines your ability, which makes it hard to be confident in your writing.  But, it’s also true what all writers say that the only way to become a better writer is to write, which means you have to allow yourself to suck.

I would really like to write this with confidence.  I would really like to think of myself as an artist.  Maybe I’m getting there, but it’s pretty obvious that I need a push.  I need to stop waiting for perfection if I’m going to make this dream happen.  I need to allow myself to suck  and I need to throw my words and stories out into the world, even if it’s incredibly embarrassing sometimes.

I’m trying not to get too disclaimery, but the truth is that I have zero perspective on this novel.  I’ve been rereading it because I’ve barely looked at it over the last year, and if I’m being honest, I cringe all the way through.  Sometimes it feels very immature, sometimes strangely dark, and sometimes just bad.  The thing that strikes me most about it is just how unironic it is.  It’s completely earnest, which means that it often fails, but at least it tries to do something.

I originally thought of asking a few of you to read my novel and give me notes, so that I could further revise it, but I’ve decided against that.  This novel has been too long in the making.  It is for me an uncomfortable mix of ten years worth of experiences and it’s time for me to let it go.  This story means a lot to me, but it’s not an open book anymore.  I’m working on a new novel and that’s where I want to put my attention.

I am incredibly nervous and incredibly excited to have you read my novel, especially given how much I’ve talked about it in the last two years.  You all have been really supportive of my writing and it’s given me the confidence at least to share what I’ve kept to myself for all these years.

Please read my novel.  Novels are long so that alone is more than enough.  You can let me know what you think of it or not.  You can even just let it sit on your desktop unread. Don’t feel guilty, because I’ll never know the difference.  Maybe just try to get through the first chapter, though, so you can say something that makes me think you read it.

The novel is called Careful Where You Stand.  It’s titled after this song, but this song is more important to the story and to me.  It’s about 90,000 words.  You can read more about it here.

If you would like to read the novel, please leave a comment
here or email me at writetoreach@gmail.com
and I will send you a pdf.

The start of every new month is filled with anxiety and hope for me.  The anxiety is that time is passing too quickly and there’s too much to do and I have no way of slowing it all down.  The hope is that I have a fresh start to make it all happen.

That’s what happened to me on June 1st.

After a weekend spent with my parents eating and drinking and soaking up the sun, I was thinking, “Do you know what this Summer needs more of?  Everything!”  I was even planning the post I would write about it.

When I came down off of my vacation high, I realized that I’d had it exactly backwards.  This Summer does not need more of everything.  I’m driving myself crazy over here just thinking about all the stuff I should be doing now that I kind of have some time.

I really don’t have much time and trying to do everything is just leaving me stressed and confused.

I don’t have a one track mind, so no matter what, the other things in my life will not go anywhere, but instead of trying to journal, blog, read, work, run, jump, and soak up the sun more, I will just focus on writing the new novel.  It’s what I want to do.  I won’t have time to do it later.  And focusing on one thing and actually getting somewhere will make me much happier than speed intervals of all the other things pulling at me.

I’m already one week in and it was a great decision.

I like making plans, but I always have to add a qualifier to that statement.  I don’t like planning events or even what I’ll be doing next weekend.  I like plotting out of my life and making plans for achieving goals.  The more charts and graphs required, the better.

This is all quite obvious if you get a hold of my laptop.  There’s document after document labeled things like 5 Year Plan, Writing Goals, Blogging Goals, and Weight Loss Goals.  Each credit card I’m paying off has its own color-coded chart showing how much to pay each month.  Really, one of the most exciting things about working to get out of debt is all the charts it requires me to spend too much time making and revising.

Making plans has always been empowering for me.  Deep in my bones I have that American attitude that you can change anything about your life that you don’t like.  The first step is to make a plan!  This is the fun part for me.  I guess I just find the prospect of change exciting.  Sometimes it’s the only way to feel like you’re not stuck in place.

It takes a lot more than making a plan to ever actually change and I have certainly experienced my fair share of failure.  Perhaps even more than my fair share, because I’ve never been afraid to dream of living differently.

For a while my plans were so tinged with failure that I stopped creating them.  Evidence that it’s not just about the pretty charts.  In fact, what strikes me as so odd right now is that I’m actually succeeding at both of my two major goals: get out of debt and lose weight.

That’s changed the feeling of plan making for me, because it’s always been driven my present failure and hope for something different.  It’s how I take control–or at least feel like I’m taking control–of my life.

But, I have that feeling again.  It’s related to writing and specifically fiction.  I feel right now that I don’t know what to do next.  I mean, I can say what I should do and I have already written out a list in that document titled Writing Goals, but here I have time on my hands and I don’t know what to do with it.  My instinct: a bigger and better plan.

More than a plan is required, though.   If there’s a disconnect between me and bullet list of goals, then I’m never going to succeed.  There is no plan for getting your head in the right place, except that you keep after it.  It would be easy for me to continue avoiding writing fiction.  I can just think about doing it and write about doing it, but never get into the hard work of actually creating, even when it’s painful.

I try to take the attitude toward writing fiction that you have to show up to the (metaphorical) office every day and sometimes you’ll get down three pages of writing you’ll promptly throw away the next day and sometimes you’ll be struck by brilliance, but you won’t get anywhere if you don’t at least show up.

That will be my plan and once I have some momentum, I’ll figure out a way to color code it.

One of my college professors told us that she always assumes the lives of her students are at least a million times more complex that what she sees in the classroom.  That seems to me a fair way to judge anyone you come into contact with.  So, I don’t mean to make anyone’s interests or motivations or circumstances sound simpler than they are.  But, sometimes in relation to the other students in my program, I feel guilty that my mind is divided by other strong interests and is not adequately focused on theology and philosophy.

I feel this more in the Summer than at any other time.  I love what I study, but the free time I have now is the best opportunity I have to work on the other things that engage me.  And not that my fellow students do not have varied interests.  For grad students, we’re a fairly grounded and well-rounded group.  But, in the hierarchy of things that interest me, there are at least two battling for the top spot.

I’m not spending the Summer in a reading group battling Kant.  And when I’m not busy with school during the semester, I am not doing extra reading just to flesh out my knowledge.  I know this all sounds perfectly reasonable, but grad school is not that reasonable.  It’s highly competitive and if you like what you study enough to go for a PhD, then you should want to pursue it to its ends.  Instead, I’m distracted.

Sometimes when I talk to my classmates, I feel like I’m not sufficiently intellectually curious.  I do my work to get it done an then I spend the rest of my time doing other things.  That’s not really the life of an academic, at least not a successful one.  Really, I shouldn’t have time to blog as much as I do or work as much as I do.  And I shouldn’t constantly be frustrated that there isn’t enough time to pursue my other interests; I should be frustrated that there isn’t enough time to pursue my main interest in theology.

The other interests I keep alluding to are all variations on a theme: writing.  Blogging, journaling, writing fiction, reading fiction, and even reading critical work on fiction.  I was an English major before I was a Religion major, and my whole academic life leading up to the point where I took my first theology class and was struck by lightening like Luther was geared toward English.  Since Elementary School, it had been my thing, and then theology usurped it after only one class.  But, that old interest didn’t go anywhere.

Now it’s Summer and I’m not on the third floor of the library, walking through the theology section. I’m on the seventh floor browsing the fiction and the collections of essays.  I’m pulled there and when I look through the books, I think, what if I’d gone this direction instead? I don’t regret having chose theology.  It feels more important to me (to my person and to the world) than the study of English (sorry, Tom, if you’re reading this), but it still engaging me on such a deep level that I cannot let it just rest inside of me.  That’s mostly what I’ve done for the last four years.   I misjudged even my own passion for it.

My frustration is that there’s not enough time to pursue English and yet it distracts me from putting my full attention on Theology.  I can’t be the person I want to be in either, so I get nowhere in my fiction and I’m not the religion scholar I want to be.  And it’s not just about school; I think my full academic life will be full of this tension.  I don’t know how I’ll work it out or if I ever will.  Sometimes I wonder if after so many years in grad school, I will end up a writer instead.  Assuming I can pay my student loans, that doesn’t seem so bad, but I don’t know if that would satisfying my interest in theology.

I know that there could hardly be a better problem to have.  The frustration is real, but it is fueled by the passion I have for all of my interests.

I’m allergic to cheese.  Not the tasty stuff you eat.  That’s my lifeblood.  I’m talking about fictional cheese, like cringe-worthy dialogue and surprise happy endings that bring out my inner cynic.  You know, when it all gets overwhelmingly sappy and you have to either laugh or cower in secondhand embarrassment.

Subtlety is a real art, a fine line that exists between saying nothing or going too far.  The deceptive thing about subtlety is that it necessarily looks easy, but it is really hard to convey, especially in writing.  Everything that happens has to be described, so that even an understated head turn announces itself.

Often I read through my fiction with a finger on the backspace key, ready to delete anything that even approaches the cheese line.  When I’m successful, what’s left is subtle but meaningful character interactions in language that’s not all, HEY! LOOK AT ME!!!  When I’m not successful, what’s left is horribly boring and lifeless.

Because cheese isn’t all bad.  It can be fun or moving and not cringe worthy. Sometimes, cynic be damned, my face lights up when she’s missing him and she turns a corner to find him standing there.  And he tells her how much he loves her.  And she gives him a Dawson’s Creek-style mouth-full-of-big-words response that’s more of a speech than a “hey, I love you too.”  Sure, if you break it down and read it in a mocking voice, you can go on about how people don’t really speak that way and how did he know he’d find her there? and eww, love.

Cheese: it does have a place.  It’s pretty hard to write interesting fiction in a monotone-like style where nothing too dramatic ever happens.  Even real life often lacks subtlety and fiction is not real life.  So, cheese, I’m learning to embrace you or eat you or whatever makes sense in the context of this metaphor.

I wrote this on March 21st:

Just feeling so crazy excited about life and so capable of making necessary changes.  Was feeling optimistic when I got off work and then I thought to myself that by the end of the week, with two scary presentations, I would not be feeling optimistic.  Then I thought, how fucking depressing and defeating.  I will conquer still!

I’ve been thinking for a while that if I’m going to take writing seriously, then I need to change the way I think.  There are a million things that could stop me from writing, a complete lack of time chief among them, but what’s really stopping me from making progress is that I’m not sure if I’m good enough.

Recent experiences related to my success in school brought me to a new level of clarity.  Don’t let me tell you any differently: I love studying theology.  I love school. I love succeeding at school.  I love debate. I love, even, talking in front of people and sharing what I know.  But, all of my insecurities about whether I’m smart enough or have anything unique to offer replace my excitement with dread.  I find myself thinking that just getting through it will be good enough.

There are a couple of problems with this.  First, I’m capable of a lot more than just getting by and the facts, if you examine them from outside of my head, speak to that.  I do really well in school.  Second, things that could be thrilling to me are instead dread-filled.  And, third, thinking you’re not good enough is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  You procrastinate, because you don’t want to face your own potential failure.  You don’t try as hard as you can, because you always want the excuse that you could have done better.

I don’t want to make this all seem more serious than it is.  I am confident at the same time that I am doubtful of my abilities.  Sometimes I even think ridiculously arrogant things that I would never say out loud.  Maybe that’s what makes this all so complicated.  The more success I have, the more weirdly perfectionistic and fearful of failure I become.

With fiction, it’s different.  There’s this same pressure as in academia to be something special, but my abilities are largely untested.  I’ve been writing fiction since I was 16, but I’ve only written a tiny portion of what I could have, and almost no one has read any of it.  Fiction is hard and most people suck at it for a really long time.  Getting published is also really hard.  Really really hard.  And you’re never going to make any money at it unless your J.K. Rowling or Steven King or Stephenie Meyer or John Grisham.  The odds are stacked against me.

But, if I’m going to keep marching down these difficult roads–one to a PhD and the other to published novel–then I’m going to have to stop expecting failure.  I’m going to have to start counting on success.  I’ll be disappointed sometimes, but I need to stop trying to protect myself from disappointment by always expecting the worst.  I’ll be okay and in the meantime I’m only hurting myself.

What does it mean if you wanted to do it, but never did?  Or even had the talent to do it, but never did?  It means nothing.  Potential isn’t anything to brag about.  I’d rather run head first into my limits.  At least then I will know where they are and I’ll have created something in the process.

I’d love to write with no concern for whether I was producing anything good or not, but it’s impossible to subtract my ego out of the equation. Not as a means of self-delusion, but as a means of compensating for the defeatist attitude I call realistic,((This is a reference to a favorite quote of mine: “Doubt has replaced hopefulness—and men act out of defeatism that is labeled realistic” —Students for a Democratic Society.))   I’m going to assume that it is good.  Decent at least.  Nothing to be embarrassed about.  Will get there one day.  I’m going to kick this imposter complex to the curb and stick my neck out by writing as much as I can and sharing it with whoever is reading.

This is an excerpt from my novel Careful Where You Stand.  You can read more about the novel here and read another excerpt here.

She could hardly remember now how she used to fill the hours of her life.  To keep her mind busy felt like a constant struggle.

She tagged along with her parents as they ran their errands.  She wasn’t much for company.  It was hard to engage in small talk when they were always staring at her with those concerned looks on their faces.  It began when Ally died, but it’d become so much worse since her visit to the hospital.  Always they searched her face for signs.  When she was alone in her room too long, they’d come check on her.  When she said she was going for a walk, they insisted they could use the exercise too.

It was a new dynamic she was slowly getting used to.  She’d always been the happy child. She pushed the limits occasionally, but she never went too far.  They didn’t have to worry about her.  Now she was unpredictable. She was flirting with something serious, and they didn’t have confidence that she wouldn’t fall over the edge.

She knew how they felt.  Her mother was easy to read, and her dad had been forced to voice his concerns directly for fear that Haley was in real danger.  She tried to convince them that things were getting better, but they were watching all the time.  She couldn’t smile through it all, she couldn’t keep her eyes in focus through every dinner conversation, and she couldn’t always eat her food without first gagging.

Though they didn’t ask any specific questions about her sessions with Dr. Vine, she tried to offer them a clue or two after each one.  In passing, Haley would say, “We talked about that trip Ally and I took to Portland when she first got her license.  Remember that?” or “She said I should try harder to talk to the kids at school.”  They’d say something encouraging, and she would smile and agree.  Later when they walked by the living room and saw her staring into space rather than paying attention to the TV, they’d pause for a second in the hall, the look of concern returning, before walking away.

Her mother was most concerned that she continue to eat and shower regularly.  She’d been managing both fairly well.  It was easier if she ate regularly, but sometimes she’d forget and long hours would pass, the juices in her stomach swirling around, making her nauseated rather than hungry.  She liked to stand under the warm shower and think of nothing.  No one could catch her there.  Her mom only knocked on the door when more than a half hour had passed.  Then she’d wash her hair quickly, change into clean clothes, and appear downstairs for a snack before bed.

Maybe it was all a waste of time, since they didn’t believe her anyway.  But, Haley knew it was those subtle looks of fear and disappointment that kept her moving forward.  She’d like to climb in bed after school, but her mother couldn’t find her that way.  It was this self-delusion—the idea that she was really fooling people with her act—that helped her get up every morning and go to school every day.  She didn’t want to think of what would happen if she let the truth in.

Haley couldn’t even explain to herself how she could sit in class and talk and laugh with Ryan and Rick and the girl who sat in front of her, Angela.  Even then she wasn’t without her grief.  It sat in the pit of her stomach, weighing her down like lead.  She never forgot it.  It wasn’t like before when the realization of Ally’s death would leave her and then come crashing down upon her again, the pain renewed.  This was dull and heavy and constant.  But, it didn’t keep her from smiling or joking.  It just kept her from believing it would ever go away.

I’m haunted, but not by a ghost.¹  It’s a character in the novel I started last November for NaNoWriMo.  And by started last November, I actually mean I started thinking about it Summer 2006–that very thoughtful Summer between college graduation and the start of graduate school.

It doesn’t take four years to write a novel.  Though I’d been thinking about my first novel at least that long by the time I finally finished it, the writing itself only took a couple months.  One advantage to this slow and distracted approach is that the characters get to live inside your head for so long that they start to feel like real people you once knew.  Sometimes you find that weeks and months have passed since you last thought of them, but there’s always the opportunity to get reacquainted.  You might just find they’ve changed in your time apart.

This character’s name is August.²  He existed for years with simple motivations and an undeveloped personality.  He was the stupid guy who broke the girl’s heart and would later come to regret it.  The story wasn’t even about him.  It was about her.  And it was so simple that after that first Summer, I never intended to actually write it.

But, then, this Summer, I started to think about the story again.  Maybe it was my desire to write about grad students.  Maybe I was bankrupt of ideas and so forced to pick up stories I’d thought of years ago.  Maybe these characters have some kind of power over me.  Whatever reason, I started thinking of this story I’d abandoned and suddenly August became a real character and he changed the whole story.

The story became much more emotionally complex and the result was two characters yelling in my head, fighting with each other at a volume I could not ignore and didn’t want to, because it was so interesting to me.³  My experience writing fiction is that some scenes, some characters, some motivations come out of nowhere and the rest you piece together like a puzzle, trying different pieces to see what fits.  But, unlike a puzzle, the end product is not already determined.  It could be anything.

I’ve struggled a lot with how to tell this story and in developing plot points aside from the major emotional core.  When not knowing where to go next combined with business and a lack of self-discipline, I gave up on NaNoWriMo.  But, I didn’t give up on the story and I find myself thinking of it more and more.

Lately, August is in my head.  He has a broken heart, the poor guy.⁴  And he haunts my fiction-filled life.

1. Though I can’t tell you how much 13 year old me wished her dad would move into a scary old mansion, so that I could be haunted by a Devon Sawa-looking Casper, who would ask me, “Can I keep you?”
2. I intended for his name to be ridiculous.  It says more about his parents than him.  But, after you repeat a name for a couple years, you forget how weird it is.
3. I’ve written about 15 drafts of that fight, which is approximately 13 more than I normally write of anything.
4. I sound like a crazy person. I don’t walk down the street talking to these characters, I swear.

I recently reread a book of essays by Joyce Carol Oates called The Faith of a Writer.  I first read it four years ago after picking it out of the bargain bin at a bookstore.  All I could remember about it from that first reading is that JCO went to school in a one room school house.

I love to read what writers have to say about writing and about their lives as writers.  I am instantly turned off by writers who can’t articulate what it is they spend their lives doing.  Yet, when they do open up, it’s often disappointing.  At least to a girl who has a bad habit of putting people on pedestals.  It’s not just that writers are often unstable and addicted, a stereotype that I think is becoming less true with every new generation, but even the most articulate and present among them can’t say the magic words to make writing easy. ¹  It doesn’t matter how much you know, there will always be anxiety as you stare at the screen or put your pen to paper and never a guarantee that anything worthwhile will come out.

Worse than the missing magic words are the broad statements that ring false.  Uncritical leaps from the personal to the universal about the only way to write and the role of The Writer in society.  Disparaging remarks about the reading public.

More than any broad philosophy I can pick up and run with, I pick up small pieces of insight, often the few encouraging words offered, and I add them to what I already know about writing, what I feel to be true.

So, here are a few quotes from Joyce Carol Oates, a writer I admire at least as much as any other.  As many qualifications as she makes to every statement about how prolific she is, the number of books and articles with her name and the name of her pseudonyms speak for themselves.  On top of which, she is a professor, which endears me to her even more, because while I dream of being a novelist, what I’m working toward is being a professor.  I want both.

“Write your heart out. Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject . . . Read widely, and without apology.  Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.”

I must admit that sometimes I get caught up in wanting to write what is clever and unique and artful and worthy of admiration.  I will go through what I’ve written and strip out everything cheesy and cliche until all that’s left is boring and emotionless.  What interests me about fiction is feelings and relationship dynamics.  And as much as I am impressed by Catch-22, I also love Boy Crazy Stacey.

“Your struggle with your buried self, or selves, yields your art; these emotions are the fuel that drives your writing and makes possible hours, days, weeks, months, and years of what will appear to others, at a distance, as “work.”  Without these ill-understood drives you might be a superficially happy person, and a more involved citizen of your community, but it isn’t likely that you will ever produce anything of substance.”

As much as it suits me, I’m not certain that all writers must be tortured and introspective, so I don’t know that this is the only way to produce anything of substance, but I think it is my way of producing substantial writing.  Who you are has everything to do with what you write.  You don’t have to pretend to be happy. You can be real and work out yourself in writing.

“Write for your own time, if not for your own generation exclusively.  You can’t write for “posterity”–it doesn’t exist.  You can’t write for a departed world.  You may be addressing, unconsciously, an audience that doesn’t exist; you may be trying to please someone who won’t be pleased, and who isn’t worth pleasing.”

We like to critique art for not standing up to the test of time, but if you take on the impossible task of trying to be everything to everyone in every time, you’re likely to write something very bland that’s not meaningful to anyone in any time.  If you want depth, then you have to write what you know.  What’s interesting about JCO is the specifically American, 20th century problems she addresses.

“The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.”

If it’s in your head, you have to write it.  Writing a novel is so hard, but you have to do it anyway.

“For what we can make of our own experiences, including even our ambivalent feelings about ourselves, is as legitimate a subject as any for fiction.”

You only have to look closely at the lives of a few famous writers to realize you don’t have to have yourself figured out in order to write about life.  Thank goodness writing about perfect people is not the thing to do.

“I have to tell is the writer’s first thought; the second is how do I tell it? From our reading, we discover how various the solutions to these problems are; how stamped with an individual’s personality.”

The how do I tell it I find so hard.  The scenes play in my head, the emotions are there too, but it just never goes down that smoothly.  And, also, maybe I can stop worrying about all of my characters seeming so autobiographical.  I can’t stand outside myself.

“Writers often have a very blurred conception of how their work is perceived by others, and what their work actually is.”

At the risk of sounding braggy and insecure, I’ll say that I have been praised for my writing for a long time and I have never understood why anyone likes it.  To me, it is tight, but otherwise nothing special.  I know that my style is simple and I like clear writing, but I usually cannot predict how people will react to my writing, my fiction least of all.  More like, my fiction not at all.

“The more we are hurt, the more we seek solace in the imagination. Ironically, conversely, the more imaginative work we create in solitude, and publish, the more likely we are to be hurt by critical and public reaction to it; and so, again, we retreat into the imagination–assuring that more hurt will ensue.”

This depresses me and comforts me at the same time.  When I get burned, I tend to retreat, but it fuels my imagination and motivates me to write.  It’s easier to write with big feelings.

1. I’m talking most about fiction, which is what I find most difficult.

God, writing fiction is hard.  I know I knew that already, but I have realized it all over again while working on NaNoWriMo.  It makes me never want to critique another piece of literature, because I am too much in awe of anyone who can sit down day after day and put words onto paper that make sense or are at least good enough that someone else is willing to sit down and read them.

It’s hard enough just to write.  It’s a struggle to get the story in your head into a series of sentences.  But then to read it over and realize how awful it is, is almost defeating.

I know it’s okay to suck.  I know that the more I write the better I’ll get, but it’s hard to see that way when you consider how much work is involved in writing a novel.  Don’t get me wrong, I will always choose my awfully written novels over the unrealized dream of some day writing one, but they come with a lot of frustration.  And a lot of bad dialogue.

I’m not giving up, of course.  That’s the last thing I want to do.  I just need to admit that it’s difficult for me to be so terrible at something I care so much about.  I need to stop expecting myself to spin gold and instead I need to trust Ira Glass when he says that if you work long enough at something, you will eventually start creating at a level on par with your taste.  In the meantime, maybe I should listen to “Gonna Fly Now” and pretend I’m Rocky, training for the big fight.

This is an edited version of a journal entry  I wrote this summer.

I’ve been thinking about my philosophy as a writer.  I’m reading a book of interviews of Margaret Atwood.  Writers always seem to be asked–even by other writers!– what the role of The Writer is in society and various other questions about The Writer. Writers always seem annoyed by these questions, but yet they always supply answers that though they may be under the guise of humility, instead come off as pretentious and self-important.  I can’t pretend not to be pretentious, but I have to say that while I think novels can be important to society, such lofty ideals do not motivate me to sit down and put my fingers to the keyboard every damn day.

I always thought, before I had the confidence to say it out loud, that symbolism was something only critics and teachers and students ever spoke of.  I can’t even imagine a writer sticking in symbolism with any intention.  Themes, maybe, but I think they more often come naturally.¹

What I think most when I read these interviews is that there is no The Writer.  Writers come in all forms and work in different ways.  I need to remind myself of that more than anyone.²  It’s not that there aren’t some techniques better than others or that nothing can be taught, but I don’t think we can ascribe one role to The Writer or think for a second that we all have the same motivations.

It’s always going to be a messy process, but I want to keep it as simple as possible.  Simple words, simple motivations, and mostly simple stories.  It’s always been the relationship dynamics that intrigue me the most.  Not crazy plots or unique characters or a precious worldview or clever dialogue, but the way people relate to each other.

I’ve been thinking, too, about the degree to which novels are autobiographical.  Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates will say they are not autobiographical and balk at those who make that assumption, even calling them unsophisticated readers.  That all sounds good, if not a little snobby³, but I can’t shake the feeling that all of my characters are at least partly autobiographical. I mean, all of their thoughts were at one point my thoughts, even if it’s just projection. Then Atwood said something that rang very true. She wrote about stepping into the shoes of another person.  That’s what it is.  I can’t abandon myself, but I can put myself in another’s shoes and write from there.

What I’m getting at is that any person who writes is The Writer, so even if we continue to assign general characteristics and motivations to such a person, we should know that the reality is far more complex than any stereotype.  And in figuring out our own philosophies and reasons for writing, we shouldn’t be limited to what other writers think writing is.

1. I am very possibly doing the thing I am supposedly arguing against in saying that I don’t think writers think as consciously about symbolism as scholars do, but I’m getting into my philosophy here and I can only say that I hope they don’t.
2. Some of them even come in the shape of Carrie Bradshaw.
3. In their defense, as women writers, they were getting people assuming that they were somehow incapable of distance from their characters.  They assumed that everything the women wrote about had actually happened to them.  For instance, Margaret Atwood wrote a character who was fat and she had a person ask her at a reading how she’d lost all the weight.

“When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat.  But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop.  Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.” –Joyce Carol Oates ¹

1. The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates 1973-1982, 277.

I’m still reading through Joyce Carol Oates’s journals.  The way she talks about being consumed by a story, about not wanting to do anything else but write, it’s hard not to feel inspired.  Writing is often that way for me too, but not always.   With novels especially, there is just so much time to find yourself distracted, unsure of where to go next, or even bored.¹

But there’s a part of the process that I always find overwhelmingly engaging.  It’s the kind of fun that makes me skip around my apartment with a smile.  For me that’s planning out stories.  It’s all the fun of writing fiction, but with far less pressure, because I’m just getting ideas down and it doesn’t matter so much whether they’re right or well written.    The ideas flood my brain even as I do dishes or search the library for missing books.

I think the most engaging part is that I’m discovering what happens to people I care about.  It’s like hearing really good gossip, but without any of the guilt.

It’s not exactly like playing God.  Some parts of stories are very deliberate, but a majority seem to come together like puzzle pieces of a puzzle I’m working on, but didn’t create.  As one character comes into greater focus, it changes the people they interact with. As one plot point settles itself in concrete, what happens before and after solidify too.

I’m reading this book of interviews with another one of my favorite authors, Margaret Atwood, and she describes how a collection of images come together or a voice emerges.  Then she says, “Starting a book is like jumping off a cliff.  You’re never ready, but you just feel that you have to start sooner or later.  So you start and you know that it’s probably going to be bad, but it doesn’t matter: you have to start anyway.”²

I’m not working on the novel I thought I was going to work on next.  That one started to seem too tedious and serious, so I picked up one I started in the Summer of 2006.  I liked the characters, but I never thought I’d do anything with this story because it seemed too simple and superficial.  Now that I’m looking at them again, I see depth I didn’t before.  They still need more to do, though, and I’m working on that now.  My experience writing fiction has taught me that those people who say you can just have good characters and no plots are big liars.  Characters have to have something to do and you have to have something to write.  But, it’s okay, because this is the fun part.

1. It’s exactly like being a grad student, actually.
2. Margaret Atwood: Conversations, 164.

Given the opportunity, I will go on and on about how you can’t wait for inspiration.  It’s one of the few things that gets me on a soap box.*  You might very well be struck down a few times in your life by a genius idea straight out of nowhere, but I doubt very much that those exceptions really make up a creative life.  You can’t wait for anything.  You have to just sit down and, in my case, write.

But, while you shouldn’t wait for inspiration, sometimes you can seek it out.

I’ve been scanning through the journals of Joyce Carol Oates.  I was up on the seventh floor of the library stacks the other day.  I like it up there, because it’s quiet, warm and cozy (nearly suffocating, actually), there’s a cool view of some construction they’re doing across the street, and it holds most of the library’s novels and critical essays on literature.  I like to walk through the stacks and pick up novels I’ve read and novels I’ve heard of but never read.  I don’t read them now.  I just look through them, trying to get a feel for how other people write fiction.  Call it research.

I often walk to the section with all of Joyce Carol Oates’ novels, because she’s an idol of mine.  A Princeton professor who also produces novels, book reviews, and critical work at an amazing rate.  If you think Steven King is prolific–and he is–imagine doing all that and teaching at Princeton.  Next to all of her novels, I came across a volume of her journals.  It’s a huge volume and it only includes 10 years worth of her daily writing (1973-1982), edited down to a mere 500 pages.  It’s hard to imagine she ever stops writing.

Reading the words of someone who has spent her whole life writing inspires me to just write and not worry so much about whether I’m writing anything good, anything meaningful, anything artistic, anything I’ll ever be happy with, anything I’ll ever finish.   There’s no checking your ego at the door, but you can choose at least not to let all that other stuff stop you from doing whatever it is you do.

*This is a lie.

Remember a couple weeks ago when I gave myself a deadline for the revised, not-embarrassed-to-let-someone-else-read-it version of my novel? The deadline is July 1st. It’s the day I’m handing the novel off to my friend Lisa, who will be my first reader.  Not just the first reader of this novel, but the first reader of any of my fiction ever (aside from the excerpt I posted here), and I have been writing fiction since I was 16.  All this time people have said things to me about how they’re sure it’s good, but the truth is that no one knows, least of all me.

I do not think it’s impossible for a writer to have perspective on her own work, but any perspective I did have on my novel has recently slipped away.  What I mean is that I have no critical distance from my work and I can no longer tell what’s good and what’s not or what works and what doesn’t.  This happens to me all the time with papers for school, usually because I work so close to the deadline.  After writing for 8 hours, I can’t tell anymore if my arguments is genius or incredibly obvious, so I write until I’m out of time or energy and then I turn it in and hope for the best.  That doesn’t really work for a novel.  I mean, at some point I will have to say it’s good enough, but there’s so much more time for feedback and revision.

And, the truth is that though I could go on and on about its merits, I hate revising and I’m no good at it.  Normally I revise only for typos and small clarity issues.  Even with my Master’s thesis, my revisions were mostly adding whole new sections, not tearing apart the ones that were already written.  But, again, that doesn’t work for a novel.  I like a lot of what I have and I will never be one of those writers who rewrites everything, but there are parts of my novel that don’t work and they need to be changed.

I don’t know what it is about revising.  I know that most writers find such relief in having something down on the page.  The blank page makes them anxious, but once they have something down, then they can get to work polishing it.  I’m not like that.  I stare at my already written words and have no idea what to do, even though I know they need to be changed.  I guess it goes back to me being a big picture person.  In a novel, especially with dialogue, there are so many pieces that have to fit together and once you go messing them up, there’s so much work involved in making them flow again.  I hate it.

Once I can get enough perspecitve to see what’s not working and I gear myself up for digging into my already written words, the issue is that the problems in my novel remain problems because I don’t know how to solve them.  That’s something that’s really surprised me about writing a novel: I spend so much of my time feeling like Angela Lansbury in Murder She Wrote.  The biggest problems in my novel come in the last half where most of the major drama is over and it’s much more about recovery.  It’s easy in dramatic scenes to explain why people feel the way they do and why they react the way they do, but the far more subtle mood shifts and motivations that happen in day-to-day life are so much more difficult to write.

What I’m trying to say is that the writing is not going well.  And yet the deadline just gets closer!  I have very little time left and so much to revise.  I’ve always had a healthy respect for deadlines.  In fact, I’ve never missed one, never asked for an extension, and never taken an incomplete.  And, even though it would be really easy to do that now, because there are no real consequences for missing my self-inforced deadline, I don’t want to .  I know that some people would advise taking some time off, but that has never worked for me.  I never figure things out unless I’m in the thick of them and I never get anything written unless I sit in front of my computer and force myself to focus.

I look forward to a day very soon when I don’t have to rely on my own limited perspective–when I can hear what other people think of my work.  But, I realize now that even though I do fear harsh critique, what I’m looking for is not praise.  What I want most is for people to talk about my characters as if they are real and as if their lives are real too.  I want to engage in debate about whether one would really make the decisions she did or whether the other would really be so willing to put up with her.  I think that’s when I’ll finally get some of the clarity I crave.

It’s strange to think that I finally have some time to write, which is what I’ve wanted all year.  But, now that I’ve overcome that obstacle, I’ve run smack into several others.  It’s never as simple as just sitting down and writing, and yet there is no other way.  I can’t set aside the ego and anxiety and story problems, so I’ll drag them all along with me to the finish line.

I am a deadline kind of person.  It’s not that I like deadlines.  It’s just that I need them in order to get things done.

So, I set myself a deadline of July 1st.  On that day, I will have finished all of the major revisions on my novel and I will hand it over to Lisa to be my first reader. I’m hoping later on that some of you will consider reading it and giving me notes, but I’m going to just give it to Lisa for now.

The thought of anyone reading my novel makes me want to run far, far away, but Lisa has seen me jump up and down waving a glow stick at NSYNC concerts and march in the shape of a W while wearing a polyester band uniform, so I don’t have much pride left around her.

With this deadline in mind, I’ve already gotten a lot done.  It’s the second half of my novel that needs a lot of revision.  I’m reminded of what I learned when I was first writing it last summer: the big dramatic scenes are so much easier than the day-to-day stuff.  People not really doing anything, not reacting to much, but just going through the motions, is really hard to write.

In order to hold myself to it, I want to let this deadline be known.  By July 1st I will have completed a draft of my novel that I’m willing to let people (okay, one person) read.  Wish me luck.