More writers on writing

Miss Brenda, yanked from the Kore Press site.

Last year, I read Dorothea Brand’s Becoming a Writer, a book that approaches some of the sticky underlying issues of why it’s tough for people to establish a writing life, and proposes an eminently sensible method for approaching one’s work.

This weekend past, I stumbled on another book on writing published in the 1930s, Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write: A Book About Art, Independence, and Spirit. While Brand’s book is largely about developing the dual minds of a writer (the subconscious flow mode and the analytical/critical mode), Ueland’s is about the right of anyone to tell a story, cultivating the right motivations for doing so, and accessing what she calls one’s personal truth.

I don’t identify with Ueland’s spiritual values (though she is refreshing neutral in how she frames them), but her basic premises – that everyone has a right to write, has an original perspective from which to do so and should write for intrinsic happiness vs. external reasons – are not only reassuring, but kind of inspiring as well. I’m so in the habit of viewing my writing as a grand slog or a masochistic impulse, that I tend to overlook the parts of it that are genuinely satisfying. Sometimes that means that something’s come together neatly, or I realize that I have sincere affection for a character, or sometimes it’s just the pleasure of putting together words or phrases that capture whatever effect I’m going for.

The positivity of Ueland’s approach is rubbing off on me, at a much-needed juncture. I’ve been dreading the novel revision for so long, but it’s not so bad. I’m telling myself that the ordering and moving things around and testing the foundations of a possible new structure are perhaps even more exciting than the early generative phases.  And I’m believing myself.

What is it about these women of the 30s? Brand and Ueland were so practical and accessible, so focused on the root issues of establishing a writing life (versus the painful overthinking of the post-MFA era), and they each have distinct, vivid voices. Reading Brand is like having a conversation with a trusted, no-nonsense aunt. Ueland is charmingly digressive, her pages littered with footnotes and parentheticals.

I often find myself dismissing my work as stuff no one is interested in reading (not untrue), but this sensation must have been worse for women of the 1930s, marginalized as they often were by their dicked counterparts. Perhaps it’s this phenomenon that led them to write for themselves and their own fulfillment and satisfaction. And really, is there any better motive? I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be lovely to make a living from novel writing, but I do believe that as a primary motivation, it’s unlikely to generate much in the way of art (coughNicholasSparkscough).

Back from hiatus

By Dianna Molzan; follow link for source.

I was going to write something here about moving and home improvement projects, but that is some grim, boring shit, the likes of which I hope will soon recede in my memory to a faint acrid haze (at least the moving part). But I have nothing of note to share: I learned the same lesson I always learn (and forget), that blind optimism doesn’t actually make hard work go any faster or easier.

Instead, I’m finally getting around to quoting Jerry Saltz on writing, from the introduction to Seeing Out Loud, Village Voice Art Columns Fall 1998-Winter 2003.

For me, writing always seems to take everything I have; sometimes it’s hell. Generally, I don’t know what I’m going to write until I write it. However, in the same way that art tells you things you didn’t know you need to know until you know them, writing is a way of finding out what you think. Of course, often when you start figuring out what these thoughts are, they’re not always the ones you hoped you’d have. You might dislike something you thought you’d like. Or vice versa. I often find myself writing about art that embarrasses me, is unknown or unresolved. About reviews like these, a colleague warned, “Critics make their names by writing unequivocally on well-known artists.” Maybe, but just doing that reduces you to what artist-critic Douglas Blau calls “a validator of the inevitable.” Reactions are complex, and critics should try to plumb this complexity and be willing to fail in public, sometimes flamboyantly, just as artists are. Reviews that are all positive or negative, only neutral or descriptive or so obscure or academic you can’t figure out what they’re saying, sell everyone short.

There’s a slew of interesting ideas contained in this paragraph. The first to grab me is one I’ve observed again and again when I try to compose a response to a fellow writer about the story. I may have a gut reaction of some kind, but until I sit down and start writing about it, I don’t really know what exactly I think about something. For me, writing = thinking. I have had kneejerk negative reactions to stories that, once I begin to write about, I come to understand after a fashion, and lose my distaste in the process.

Another idea: it’s hard to write unequivocally. I discovered this early on in my MFA program, when I foundthat the leaders of my craft classes basically expected me to take an interpretive position on a story and articulate it with authority. For a while, I was led to believe that this was a somehow morally superior position from which to approach a given work and I tried to become more definitive in my opinions. It’s not that I’m indecisive, but I am often awash in ambiguity. I no longer think that’s a bad thing.

Finally, that last sentence…last year, I was in a class where we read a bunch of nominees for the Essay Prize. Among them was something from I think Artforum, a review of a show by Dianna Molzan. The (then-anonymous) nominator was completely enamored of the form, a dialogue between two people, one seasoned, and one young. The nominator believed this essay represented a fresh and delightful, “insouciant” way to write about art. Reader, it was intolerable. The seasoned interlocutor spoke in what I think was supposed to be humorously over-the-top arty jargon. The younger was bored/indifferent. This was not an essay about the show it purported to review. It was a stuffy in-joke, maybe funny only to its author and its nominator. Which is fine – universality is a shitty metric for quality.

But perhaps everyone concerned needs to read Politics and the English Language.

Post-MFA writing

The literal results of my 3 years in the MFA program: lots of recycling.

Immediately after I completed the MFA program here – literally, within the first few weeks – I churned out a new story. Then I started dicking around. I wrote another scurrilous fast-draft novel. I kicked around other story ideas (only one of which I drafted).

This was all by way of putting off the revision of my real novel. When I realized that I was procrastinating, I forced myself into action. But instead of actually revising the novel, I hit upon this idea of fast-drafting a bunch of new content. After several weeks, I realized that this was a grand delusion: while the process had the distinct tang of productivity, it was in fact exactly the wrong thing to be doing. I already know the story. I just need to make it work better, aka revise it.

Le sigh. I have a fairly regimented approach to writing, so a month and counting of lost productivity (due to renovating and moving) is turning me into a brittle, anxious person. The novel feels like a cartoon anvil, suspended over my head by a fraying rope. It wants me to write it. I want to write it. There’s a palpable urgency about the enterprise. So when I lose another evening, not packing, but nursing a headache on the couch, streaming Parks & Rec and playing Angry Birds on my phone, self-loathing is the natural response.

I’m sure I’ve quoted this David Foster Wallace essay here before.

The best metaphor I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, where he describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (dragging itself across the floors of restaurants where the writer’s trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebro-spinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention.

…

And so you love the damaged infant and pity it and care for it; but you also hate it – hate it – because it’s deformed, repellent, because something grotesque has happened to it in the parturition from head to page; hate it because its deformity is your deformity (since if you were a better fiction writer your infant would of course look like one of those babies in catalog ads for infant wear, perfect and pink and cerebro-spinally continent) and its every hideous incontinent breath is a devastating indictment of you, on all levels…and so you want it dead, even as you dote on it and wipe it and dandle it and sometimes even apply CPR when it seems like its own grotesqueness has blocked its breath and it might die altogether.

This is the kind of urgency I’m talking about. And yet, I am neglecting this sad misshapen sack, when I know full well that if I turn my attention to it thoroughly enough, I can shape it into something you’d at least mistake for a proper infant if you were squinting, or just glanced at it in passing.

Two weeks past our move deadline, knowing that we must be out of our old house this weekend, I sit around strategizing how I can shoehorn writing (even the long-hand journally scribblings I sometimes complete in the mornings) into the tasks at hand, which include making sure we have a functioning toilet in the new house before we move.

I’m at once confuzzeled and conflicted about prioritization.  

Lack of resolution

It's demoralizing to wear ratty clothes day in and day out. I ripped a hole in the crotch of these pants yesterday...good riddance.

I’ve never been one for resolutions: too often they are like diets, overly ambitious and ultimately unsustainable. I vote for permanent, incremental change every time.

In lieu of proper resolutions, Seth and I have been assigning ourselves a word to thematically encompass our hopes for what the coming year will entail. For instance, “progress”– but virtually any broad word would do, because it’s easy, retrospectively, to point to events that resonate with that word. We are always looking for patterns. The whole horoscope industry seems to be predicated upon just this sort of system – throw words or phrases or characteristics out there and people will self-identify the points of resonance. (I hasten here to point out that this does not stop me from reading my own daily horoscope.)

Now that I have raised the specter of horoscopes, I’m also bound to point out that we are coming up on the Year of the Dragon. Yes! Seth and I are both dragons. So this is our year, right? Right?

Progress. We have not yet moved into the new house, but the clock is ticking for us to be out of the old. It’s not lack of will, it’s the vast amount of work that we’re trying to complete. On New Year’s Eve, I insisted that we take a break and go have a nice dinner, which we did. But I did not completely enjoy it. It felt a bit like fiddling while Rome burned, only, you know, with an in-tact conscience.

Le sigh. It is not my intention for the blog to become a bitching ground related to the move and the renovation and all the other stuff. (Though for the sake of bitching, please allow me to declare, whole-heartedly, my loathing for Lumber Liquidators. I loathe them not because they offer bad product or bad service, but for completely irrational reasons. This duo of hippie sales guys, with their stupid facial hair and useless advice…gah. And now it seems I may have to go visit them again for a countertop! I’ve made kind of a bitch of myself over there. They must despise me.)

In any case, I anticipate that this will be a slapdash kind of place for the next couple months. Once I have a kitchen and two functioning bathrooms, things will be much better.

It’s kind of absurd how much I’m looking forward to going back to the office tomorrow.

Lone Wolf

Click for source

I toyed with the idea of posting a wish list here. The reason was not to guide people looking for gifts to give me, as that is at once presumptuous and unnecessary: this is stuff I’m likely to get myself. It seemed to me, in part, that to do so would be kind of like curating random cool things I’ve found recently, the performance of a kind of shopping public service. But yuck. Also, I am uncomfortable with my instinctive materialism and try to battle it at every turn.

Besides, when I made the list, I realized that the thing I am most excited about this year is Christmas tamales. My mom is getting a dozen, and I am bringing a dozen home from Tucson Tamale Company. It’s going to be an epic meal, with family – along with my mom’s holiday breakfast rolls, the best part of the whole weekend.

That said, one of the items on my list is the pictured fingerless knuckle tattoo gloves. I prefer “Lone Wolf,” and make no mistake, they shall be mine. It’s been unusually cold in Tucson this month, a distressing state of affairs for thin-blooded whiners such as myself. I am the kind of person who keeps her office thermostat at 80 degrees and still has to put on a jacket, shivering, when the afternoon light shifts away from my windows. In the fall, when the weather here turns and the highs are in the mid-90s, I bust out the fleece blankets and bundle up. This sounds like exaggeration, but I assure you, it is not. It’s in the 40s or 50s now, and I’m in Sherpa boots and have a fleece blanket draped over my head  and my hands. I really need those fingerless gloves, I’m telling you, and I’ll need them even more when my new writing nook is functional.

Renovation fugue

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Every major home improvement project I’ve ever worked on has a despair phase. Last week, I hit the despair period in the new house renovation: things I needed to order took twice as long to deliver as expected. Projects such as paint and wallpaper stripping took on a distinctly Sisyphean air. I sliced a finger with a razor blade. Everything smelled bad, from the wet carpet in the bathroom (YES, carpet in the bathroom) to the floral fabric softener I was using to strip wallpaper, which, Pavlov-style, is now linked to vile misery in my psyche.

It’s too early to say that we’ve turned a corner, but at least I started priming and painting things yesterday. Painting is cathartic. It’s visual proof of progress. Yesterday I started painting the kitchen cabinet interiors and decided that hell no, I would not go, until they were complete. In the bright light of morning, I saw that they need a second coat, but that’s nothing! Look. The interiors of these kitchen cabinets were a bright, streaky blood-red. Now they are white. It’s as if a minor miracle has occurred.

One thing we learned from the complete top-to-bottom renovation of our first house is that certain projects just require more precision and expertise than we have at our disposal. We can improvise solutions to just about anything, but that does not mean that we will be happy in the long run. Thus, a bowl-cutted fellow called Hans came over this morning to bid on a slew of things, from countertop installation to ventilating the over-the-range microwave we’re installing to installing new outlets and moving the gas line to accommodate the range. Also, apparently, the entire south wall cabinet needs to be rebuilt, because it’s jacked up.

On Tuesday, when we expect to get the bid, I anticipate a second round of despair. But these are investments that will be well worth it. We know our limits now.

My cats need to up their game

He’s doing excellent work

Demo queen

It looks a fright now, but will be fabulous soon. I took out the cabinetry in the foreground.

My writing productivity is shot, presumably just for the short term…we just closed on a new house Tuesday. Of course by “new,” I just mean new to us. It’s a 50s ranch in the neighborhood just north of ours, and it needs a metric ton of work. Which is why I am so completely zonked tonight.

Seth stayed at the old house this weekend working on a big project, while I sallied forth to begin demo on the main area we plan to update before moving in, the kitchen. I’d hoped to be farther along tonight, but stripping the cabinets is a real bitch. I’ve made middling progress on this, one of the most important steps. I blame the “safer” stripper I’m using, some kind of citrus product. At first it seemed to be doing OK, but it’s up against four or five coats of paint. There’s two whites, a cream, and, to my surprise, a dark green, which I presume to be the original color, as green is an accent in the original tile. Sorry original tile. I’m gonna kick your ass tomorrow. Did you see how I took down that kitchen WALL today? Yes. I am the demo queen, and no tile can stand against my will, even though it may inexplicably be adhered to the wall with ¾ inches of mortar.

Anyhoo. There’s so much that needs doing in this place. There’s another wall I want to take down, one we were pretty sure the owners added. An exploratory foray into what we thought was ductwork in this wall turned out to be a baffling space filled with improvised insulation including a dirty king-sized pillow. Many are the delights and mysteries of an old house. I may yet take down that wall on my own…it is in what we’ve been calling my writing nook, but may become a sort of joint-use office, because I am magnanimous that way. Also, it’s a good-sized room.

If my blogging drops off in the coming weeks, it will be because I am too tired to write, or because my hands have suffered too much collateral damage. Tonight they’re covered with little cuts and I have a strange blood-streaked thumbnail, a remembrance from the putty knife, which cut me loose unexpectedly as I was scraping paint off a cabinet. Depending on how things go, I may post some before/after type pictures here. Such is the state of the befores that we will automatically look like badasses, even if what we get finished is unimpressive. But it will be impressive! I know it.

Hectic

So the quality ‘round these parts has really taken a dive of late. Rather than go for long dry spells with no activity, I feel compelled to throw things up anyway, even when it is of dubious quality. I realize this strategy is probably not the best one, and yet, I doggedly continue.

Here are some things that are keeping me from the blog:

-          Massive backload of work projects

-          Creative lull vis a vis the novel

-          The purchase and impending massive renovation of a new house

-          The creeping malaise of the holiday season

-          Mercury in retrograde (I kid.)

Anyhoo. I shall endeavor, by Sunday, to post actually interesting content. Meantime, here is this lovely gem from Flight of the Conchords. The song from this episode was also hilarious, but I can’t remember what it was called, just that it involved self-identification as a kiwi.