The Usefulness of Camaraderie

*****

I read a great interview with Joel Willans this morning on Every Day Fiction. I’d read Joel’s story, “One Bright Moment” in May and it was exceptional. The story was sympathetic, without being overly sentimental. The characters seemed accessible and real. The language was visual and resonant.

So I read the interview with high hopes. And I got one of the most useful author interviews I’ve read in a long time. So often, such interviews are discouraging for writers looking for ways to break through the paper ceiling. It’s hard, reading how someone got where they are by a random lucky break, or how they make millions writing two measly hours every morning. Joel’s interview made me believe there was hope for my writing aspirations. Here are a few things that encouraged me:

First, Joel is a regular guy with some useful things to share. Sure, as a writer he’s a few rungs ahead of me on the ladder. But he isn’t a giant. He’s just a guy who’s figured a few things out, but still thinks he has a lot to learn. He’s publishing frequently and he’s done well in several contests. I can relate to where he is, where he’s been and where he hopes to go.

Second, Joel reminded me of something I hadn’t done in years, namely timed writing. He insisted it was helpful to him since he does better writing under pressure. I’m the same way, so I was glad to rediscover it. I tend to use the same routine when I write, but while routine is important to my writing, sometimes it needs shaking up. I have two projects I’d like to try timed writing on—the ever-elusive beginning to “The Great Divide” and a new micro still in the sprouting seed stage.

I think what got me thinking most, though, was seeing, yet again, how useful it is to be in contact with other writers. There are so many ways we influence one another, through our work, through our camaraderie, through our feedback, through our encouragement. Even through things like online interviews. Whenever and however I spend time with another writer, I find something useful to take on my journey.

If you haven’t read this interview yet, here’s a link. There’s a lot more to be mined than the tiny nuggets I mentioned.

Tangled Destinies

*****

I didn’t sleep well last night. A front moved through, triggering wave after wave of thunderstorms. Nothing overly threatening, but loud enough to keep me awake. And as so often happens when I can’t sleep, my thoughts turned to writing.

For whatever reason, I started thinking about my legacy of bad writing. I’ve been on this topic a lot lately, for some reason I can’t quite pin down. But last night, I found myself going back further than ever, to stories I’d written 20 or more years ago.

One story in particular came to mind. It was a dreadful piece I’d written for Redbook’s annual short fiction contest, a trite bit of crap titled “Tangled Destinies.” Lord, I’d had high hopes for that thing, in spite of the fact that I was entering one of the toughest contests out there, tantamount to climbing the Mount Everest of literature.

Not only was this a literary marathon, it was a test of technical endurance. This was back in the days of the electric typewriter, and I was about as good a typist as a writer, so I had to retype each page over and over, agonizing over creating a perfect copy. I can’t tell you how many sheets of paper I discarded, how many cuss words I uttered over my suddenly uncoordinated, clublike fingers. I must have worn out a whole ribbon on 19 lousy pages.

The premise of “Tangled Destinies” was simple. It was a romance set in Colonial America, just before the revolution. My protagonist, Miranda, is a spy named Rebel who ends up deceiving and falling in love with the Nicholas, a cousin she’s been engaged to since her birth. There’s enough romance, misdirects and adventure to choke on--a regular cavalcade of unbridled sauciness, clandestine meetings, and cascades of riotous auburn curls. There’s also quite a bit of spirited flouncing and flirtatious, snappy repartee. Ambitious miss that I was, I even included a prologue and an epilogue, because God knows every 19 page story needs those anchors weighing down the storyline. I remember sending it off with hope singing in my heart. It was a masterpiece and I was damn sure I’d win.

Obviously, I didn’t win. And the heartbreak of losing almost discouraged me from writing again. I’d been convinced I was so naturally gifted as a writer, I was sure to be a Nobel prize winner by age 21.

Last night, all these years later, with the sound of rumbling thunder and flashes of lightning silvering the walls of my bedroom, I found myself wondering: what if I’d given up back then? The thought was sobering. It would have been so easy to give up, to tell myself I didn’t have what it takes, to avoid the heartbreak that inevitably comes when we writers put our work out there for evaluation.

Needless to say, I’m glad I didn’t. As bad as “Tangled Destinies” was, it represented a landmark on my journey as a writer. It was the first piece I ever submitted, so I learned something about the process. Most importantly, I learned about disappointment and how to bounce back from it. I still have a long way to go, but I’m a lot better writer now, with much tougher skin and a better attitude about working my way up the ladder. It’s been hard work, but it’s been worth it. And most encouraging, if I’m this much better now in my 40’s, imagine how good I’ll be in my 50’s and 60’s. There’s something innately encouraging in finally grasping that I’m a work in progress, not an aging old hack who missed her window.

I dug out “Tangled Destinies” this morning, all 19 yellowed pages held together with a rusted paperclip. One of the benefits of being a paper packrat and rather accomplished filer is that I have such things at my fingertips. It was every bit as dreadful as I remember, but still, I think there was hope for that young writer with the big dreams. I've recreated it in electronic form for my personal archives and submit it here for your amusement. Get a tissue. Empty your bladder. And get ready for the parade of jaunty adverbs, hysterical historical errors and glaring plot inconsistencies.

Oh, and one additional disclaimer: absolutely no meticulous research went into the creation of this literary masterpiece. My source was only what I remembered from a high school history class, where I spent more time writing notes to my girlfriends than listening to my teacher. I don’t even remember who he was, so that should tell you something.

On Courage

*****

A month or two ago, I dragged out an old photo album from a 1991 trip to Vail. I was beginning Nick’s story and I wanted to remember exactly what Colorado looked like, the color of the mountains in October, the clarity of the sky, the exact shade of a hot spring new friend, Baxter, had brought us to.

I found much more. Pictures of my younger, faster-running self. Captions written in her stranger’s voice. The look in my eyes and the voice bothered me most. It was like seeing a stranger in my body.

I read them over and over, heard the sarcasm, the immaturity, the brittle, affected cynicism. Who was this creature, teetering over disillusionment, but still clinging to notions of romance? By that Vail trip, I’d thrown myself at life hard enough to cause a few serious fractures. I was toxic back then and this album proved it. I wanted to throw the evidence in the garbage.

As writers, we face this kind of thing all the time. Our early work, our early selves as writers, are so rustically unskilled, sophomoric and boastfully posturing that it can be hard to face them in retrospect. Around the time of the Vail trip, I remember being thrilled with myself because I’d finished writing a dreadful category romance, tantalizingly titled Legacy of Deceit. It’s an eye-roller, not because it’s a romance, but because my heroine was such a tantrum throwing little snot and because my writing was painfully bad. I couldn’t balance the basic elements of narration without tripping; it was like watching Frankenstein’s monster lurch haltingly along.

I run into this now with recent projects. I expect I’ll run into it down the line with the drivel I’m grinding out now. Somewhere on the Road to Me is considerably better than Legacy was, but the initial draft needs such substantial revision, I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. And my first short story published, “Beautiful,” makes apologies leap unbidden to my tongue. It’s embarrassing. (I swear, I’m a lot better now.)

So what do we do? Hold our writing close on our hard drives until we reach the lofty pinnacle of skillfulness? That’s like waiting for the polar ice caps to melt—they say it will happen, but who the hell knows exactly when? And that kind of insularity is counter-productive. Our writing should be read so we can glean useful feedback, which in turn leads to further growth.

But that takes guts.

I had an email from a friend yesterday. Let’s call him Bob. He was kicking himself over a blog entry he’d posted. Riddled with errors, Bob claimed. He said he never should have posted it. I wondered what the hell he was talking about. I’d read his blog and gushed over it in my comments. I really felt I’d learned something valuable. I couldn’t believe it was actually crap.

Well, I did what any good friend does: I told him he was full of shit (in a nice way) and that I really liked the post. I mentioned this concept of being embarrassed by our own past work. Email back: Bob wasn’t buying it.

I’ll spare you the ins and outs of our e-dialogue. But I’d like to leave you with this: for all its isolation, writing is a public act. We put ourselves out there when we share what we write. And once it’s out there, we can’t take it back. Just like we can’t take back the words we speak, we can’t erase our published writing. And published writing is worse, because it lives on as written, unlike spoken words which can fade in our memories. It takes a tremendous act of courage to put any piece of writing out there for another human being to read. Courage to face whatever criticism we may be given. Courage to face who we are in this moment in time, knowing we may look back and cringe.

At times, each of us doubts our nerve.

The great writer EB White captured this idea best, so I leave the last word to him:

A writer’s courage can easily fail him . . . I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.

Way Out Water Towers!

*****

My daughter is obsessed with water towers. There’s a big one at the top of the hill on our regular walking route. Ever since The Miss discovered it, she’s been fascinated by every water tower we encounter. Plain ones. Fancy ones. Doesn’t matter. On our recent camping trip, she pointed out every water tower between home and Two Rivers, Wisconsin. And there are a lot more than you’d imagine. We’ve become so accustomed to looking for water towers that I find myself calling out, “Water tower!” when she isn’t even in the car. (I recently took a photo of the water tower in Arena because Julia wasn’t there to see it with me.) So it seemed natural to suggest we go to the library and check out some books on water towers. She jumped around the kitchen, yelling “Wat-oo tow-oos! Wat-oo tow-oos!” arms flapping like a baby condor. She was excited; I was excited for coming up with an idea that made her so unabashedly ecstatic. I could hardly drive there fast enough.

Then we hit a bump in the road. Who’d have thunk it, but water tower books are a rare breed.

I won’t bore you with everything I went through, from dealing with a really disappointed little kid to trying to find another source for a water tower book. Let’s just say my efforts were both exhaustive and exhausting. Finally, it occurred to me, after all hope seemed extinguished. Why not write one myself?

Now, let me clarify something before I go a single step further: I have no desire to write for children. Sorry. My work can’t stand up to an audience that sharp. But I can write for the most important kid in my life. I’d written a book for her earlier this year—Little Girl in the Woods, a board book about my sweetie’s passion for camping. So I figured slapping this puppy together this should be a snap, right?

Not necessarily. I’ve learned a few interesting things thus far and thought I’d share them here.

1) MAKING TECHNICAL STUFF EASY ENOUGH FOR KIDS IS A BITCH. Yep, kids are smart little stinkers, but sentence length and vocabulary are an issue. Plus, kids have a limited set of experiences you can refer to in analogies. How to explain hydrostatic pressure to a little kid? Hell, I don’t get it myself! The best thing I can liken it to that she (and I) might understand is the feeling you get when you have to pee. Classy, I know. But I’m at a loss here.

2) YOU CAN BE LAZY AND LARCENOUS WHEN YOU’RE WRITING FOR YOUR OWN KID. I’m talking about pesky little legal landmines like cross-checking information, listing source credits, and obtaining publishing rights to photos. As far as I’m concerned, an initial search on Wikipedia and a cross check with howstuffworks.com is verification enough for me. But I doubt a publisher would think so. And what about all those photos I helped myself to on various websites? Let’s face it, getting rights to all that stuff would be a bear. Not to mention prohibitively expensive.

3) THERE’S NO SLAPPING TOGETHER ANY KIND OF PROJECT FOR CHILDREN. I spent two hours on the introduction yesterday. Yep, two hours to write 93 words. And that’s after the three hours I spent researching and outlining the day before. Had I operated that slowly in college, I’d still be sitting in College Comp. The discouraging part is I still have many sections to write and I haven’t even begun to think about page design. The way this thing is going, I figure she’ll either have lost interest in the entire topic or graduated high school by the time I’m halfway though.

4) I MUST BE INSANE. I add this as the only logical conclusion, considering I’m moving forward on this in spite of the aforementioned points. And I won’t even get into the lack-of-time rant again. My only defense is I love my kid. I guess that’s reason enough.

So Way Out Water Towers moves forward, God help me. It won’t be at a store near you, so don’t look for it. And don’t look for anything else I write, either. I’ll be so busy inventing non-bodily function analogies for hydrostatic pressure that I doubt I’ll have time to work on anything else.

To Submit or Not to Submit

*****

I’ve been encountering an uncomfortable phenomenon lately. It’s called Why the Hell Did I Submit That (WTHDIST) Syndrome. Basically, WTHDIST is a condition where I pray for a rejection on a submitted story because I’ve figured out that it actually sucks.

I experienced WTHDIST just this morning. I’d been waiting on a response from my story, “The Game,” from Espresso Fiction for a few months. And this morning, the response arrived. I can’t describe for you the feeling of dread I had as I looked at the innocent Thank you for your submission to Espresso Fiction subject line. Usually, this is because I love a story and don’t want to see it rejected. But with “The Game,” it was a definite case of WTHDIST. Frankly, “The Game” is a damned stupid story. I’d be embarrassed to see it get published.

I filed away my rejection on Duotrope Digest’s handy-dandy Response Tracker, but a feeling of dread still hung on me. I wandered over to my remaining list of pending responses. And there, in all it’s hideousness, it was: a 118 day pending response entry for a little ditty titled “Nighttime Daddy.” I’d submitted the story to LitBits in a fit of pique after the story didn’t make the cut in a Writer’s Digest’s Your Story contest. 118 days later, this thing was haunting me like the lamb kebabs from my favorite Afghan restaurant. I found myself praying: please don’t let this thing get accepted. Or wishing it was lost in cyberspace.

The whole thing got me thinking: how do we decide what to submit and what not to submit? I’d like to think I can tell good from bad. But, usually, until I get a rejection, I often believe with naive earnestness that even my homeliest, gap-toothed, drooling babies are exquisite and graceful swans. Clearly, my internal editor has a bad wire.

But I think the real problem comes earlier in the process, long before I seek out a market, write my cover letter and send my darlings on their way. Bad stories are born of bad ideas. And bad ideas should be nipped before they sprout. I should dump duds early rather than waste time finishing and editing it. Then I could spend my time on the good stuff.

Easier said than done. Maybe it’s a matter of experience. Or of refining my literary palate. I wish I knew. Time is precious. I don’t want to waste it. And I don’t want to live with any WTHDIST’s haunting me by, somehow, making it into print.

The Flood

*****

Things aren’t great here in Southeastern Wisconsin. We’ve been inundated with torrential rains. Our rivers are swollen beyond capacity and have overflowed their banks. In Racine, Waukesha, and South Milwaukee, cars float in the streets and people have been evacuated from their homes. West of us in Lake Delton (a popular tourist area), the lake swelled over its earthen dam to come home to the Wisconsin River. I saw the video and it scared the heck out of me, how fast our world can slip away. In moments, the lake drained and roads and homes (whole homes!) were suddenly, irrevocably lost.

Here at home, we’ve had our own weather disasters, but nothing on the same scale. We were away for the worst of the storms here, enjoying a quiet weekend camping on Lake Michigan. It poured the last night and morning of our trip. My daughter and I sat in the car while I watched my poor husband take down the sopping wet camper. Halfway home, I called our house and my friend Pam told me the sewer had backed up in our basement. My heart sank at the news. My husband had spent three years remodeling down there. The carpet, installed in January, was the capstone on a beautifully executed project. I still remember how proud and pleased he was as he showed off his handiwork at Easter. Now everything was saturated with yucky black sewer sludge. We rode home quiet, lost in our own sense of helplessness.

Since I got home, I’ve longed for the sense of normalcy, the routine that keeps my days sane. We live and die by routine around here. Husband to work, then breakfast. Walk, play/errand/library/park time, lunch, TV, read, then down for a nap. Most days, I’m ready for a nap myself by then, but I can’t bear to give up my precious Mommy time. The afternoons are when I write.

With all the chaos, we’re completely off-kilter. My husband stayed home from work to mop up the sludge. I’ve been wringing out the dripping camping gear. It needs to be done, but it’s created a hole in my life and it happened in it’s own kind of flood. A few changes led to a shift in the sense of balance. A camping trip, a husband home from work. Before I knew it, order was swept away.

For me, not writing creates its own flood. A day or two off and I start to get antsy. As the days slip away, a backlog of thoughts clogs my brain. Before long, I start to turn, sniping at my daughter, bitchily ragging at my husband. But mainly, I turn on myself. I’m a waste of space. I need to get my act together. How do I ever expect to make it if I don’t write? Pretty soon everything feels off, like my body chemistry’s out of whack or my planets have spun out of alignment. My sense of self and purpose crumbles and washes away. I lose myself, one facet at a time.

I’m on day six here. Last Thursday morning before we hooked up the camper, I did a little scribbling as ideas for a revised start to Nick’s story came. I meant to get to them while we were gone, but the days slid away over the bump in our routine. Then the mess at home consumed my energy. At this point, I just hope I can find my crumpled page of scribbles. I’m fidgety and nervous. My list is too long. Without the routine to structure and the writing to provide an outlet, I’m caught up in a weird kind of flood. The chaos without mirrors the chaos within. I need a dam and I need it damn quick.

Over-tweakers Anonymous

*****

I had something discouraging happen twice in the last week. Just when I thought I’d finished something, I reread and discovered I was far from done. One was the beginning to the Nick short story, “The Great Divide.” The other was a somewhat unimportant scene in Somewhere on The Road to Me. Both had been cooling for a week or so while I stepped away for a dose of perspective.

I can’t tell you how disheartened I was when I came back and saw my own drivel. In the case of “The Great Divide,” I’d been sure I was ready to submit. But really, I’d created a mess. I’d crafted paragraphs of weighty, poetic description, had fully developed themes before my story even started. I’d written one entire page of a guy looking at telephone lines while sitting in a hot spring. What the hell was I thinking? I’d clearly overwritten.

I don’t know about you, but I could tinker a sentence into complete oblivion. Tweak a little here, reword a bit there, maybe shorten, or re-punctuate, break it into two, jam two together with a conjunction or a comma splice, throw in another snazzy image. Maybe do all of the above until the revision bears no resemblance to the original. Unless you’re Hemingway and you write nothing but unalloyed gold, there’s always the option of mixing things up a bit. But with that possibility comes the chance of overwriting. Damn. I clung when I should have let go.

I think this is what’s killing me with Beth’s story. (okay, I know) I’m so doggedly determined to get every phrasing just right that I belabor even the shortest scenes. Why do I do that? I’m driving myself nuts. Not to mention I’m getting so damn sick of Beth, I’m starting to understand why her mother gets so pissed at her.

But the real shame is that I’m losing Beth’s freshness. Too many similes, too many artful phrasings. Too much writing when I should just shut up. My overly stylized sentences are taking attention away from the story and placing it smack dab on me. And this story isn’t about me. Or it shouldn’t be. I could kick myself for being a pompous ass.

So, once more back to the drawing board with another fine line I need to identify. And as usual, I have more questions than answers. How do I stop annoying my manuscripts with petty revisions? How do I take myself out of a process that’s so entirely personal? I want to just say no to annoying revision, but I’m addicted without a support group in sight.