Does it matter?
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Exercise for the Older Writer
It seems that the older I get, the more integral exercise is to my writing practice. The way they are interwoven has changed with the passing decades, as has the type of physical activity that appeals to me. I no longer exercise to change my appearance (not that this ever was a huge motivation, but I think all young people have some measure of physical vanity). I think more about staying healthy and maintaining the strength and flexibility that allow me to do other things I enjoy, like sitting comfortably while I write, exploring new places, and having adventures. First and foremost, however, I like to do things that are fun. So I’m not going to give you a litany of all the reasons you should exercise to prevent heart disease or stave off Alzheimer’s. I’m going to talk about the ways being active have made me a better writer, in ways that I couldn’t appreciate when I was a newbie.
Once upon a time, I was an active kid. I didn’t think about exercise per se, I thought about playing. I ran through sprinklers, I rode my bike and attempted to roller-skate, I played outdoor games with my friends, but best of all, I acted out the stories I made up, either with my friends or by myself. I think this was my first and foundational experience of how glorious, how unexpected and consuming and enriching story-telling might be. As kids, we threw ourselves into one adventure after another. Granted, much of it was derivative, a sort of live-action fanfic. What we could do physically—climb trees, build snow forts, crawl under bushes, sneak around buildings—we did, and the rest we mimed as best we could. Stories were experienced not just with words, but with our whole bodies.
As readers, haven’t we had the experience of feeling our heart rate accelerate and our muscles tense during a particularly suspenseful scene? Our visceral reactions mirror the action of the story, helping to link us to the characters and their plight. So many times, I’ve read a passage that skillfully depicts some action and thought, I know what that feels like. I’m in that character’s shoes, or riding boots, or skin-diving flippers, or crampons, or toe shoes.
Speaking now as a writer, it’s one thing to do my research and get the details of an activity right. It’s another thing to have actually done it and to know what it feels like from the inside of my body, those kinesthetic and proprioceptive details that will draw the reader even further inside the scene. Joints flex, muscles strain under heavy weight, weight shifts, teeth slam together, ligaments stretch as they are strained, injuries swell and stiffen. We know the different qualities of pain, for instance: a burn does not feel like a broken blood vessel or a sprain or an abrasion or a puncture or the lactic-acid ache of exhaustion or the throb of a migraine.
It’s unrealistic, not to mention foolhardy and actually impossible, to attempt to experience every action we give our characters to do. As much as I would like to, I will in all likelihood never go into space, and I’m not willing to go bungee-jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. But the more things I have experienced, the more likely I’ll be able to find an analogy to what I want to describe. Look at it this way: human bodies bend only so many ways, intact ones, that is. My hip and knee will flex deeply whether I’m rock climbing or using a stirrup to mount a tall horse or clambering up a set of stairs created by alien giants. I have a sense of how I have to shift my weight over the top foot, or take a hop off my standing leg. I also know that my knees don’t feel exactly the same when they’re bent that far, and I’ve got a hitch in one hip at the extreme range of motion.
As I’ve gotten older, two truths have emerged. One, I don’t have to do it all. I don’t have the time, and I’ve come to terms with the fact that there are some things I am never going to be able to accomplish: become a professional opera singer or an Olympic gymnast, for example. Two, I don’t have to do it all, but it will make my writing as well as my life richer if I keep learning, keep stretching, keep challenging myself physically in appropriate ways. Those ways have changed. When I was a child and then a young adult, I had many more possibilities and far fewer physical limits than I have now. My body requires more care to remain strong and flexible, but my imagination requires even more. It needs not only intellectual stimulation, but new and renewed ways of interacting with the physical world through my body.
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Listening
Whenever I hear of a friend or relative—or a stranger, I’m not picky!—in distress, I want to jump in and fix their lives. It’s so much easier dealing with someone else’s problems than my own. Besides, I am at times the world’s authority on everything (things and times being variable). So I do my best to keep my mouth shut.
I’m long since realized what a disservice I do to those I care about by butting in with unasked-for advice. It doesn’t matter whether my perspective is correct and my facts accurate, or that what I suggest would work a whole lot better than what they’re doing. What matters is that these are my facts and my solutions, and I have usurped the resourcefulness of the other person and denied them the dignity of finding their own way through a problem.
Not only that, and more importantly, I haven’t listened. By filling my mind with problem-solving instead of attending to experience and emotion, I’ve cheated myself out of a priceless opportunity to glimpse life through someone else’s eyes. I’ve also deprived them of perhaps the most precious gift a friend can offer, a compassionate and undemanding ear.
Some time ago, a writer friend who was going through a difficult divorce told me that her therapist had been amazed at her ability to understand and empathize with her spouse’s point of view. She was puzzled by this response. As writers, we cultivate our creative imagination, the insight that gives us a window into characters very unlike ourselves. While I’m not suggesting that things told to us in confidence should be fodder for the creative grist mills, I do believe that careful listening, deep listening, can make us better writers as well as better friends.
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When Is It Enough?
One of the challenges in growing older is having to adjust the amount of food I eat. Like many women, I’ve battled with my weight for my entire adult life, and have kept it mostly under control with careful food selection and regular exercise. I had reached an understanding with my appetite, a truce of sorts, and maintained a fair degree of equilibrium. Then menopause hit, and a decade later, it is finally penetrating my brain that I cannot eat as much as I used to without gaining weight (which, now for health reasons rather than vanity, is not desirable). In other words, I no longer know how much is enough.
I fought this realization for years. I clung to the illusion of being able to navigate three meals a day, whether at home or in a convention hotel restaurant, without having to think too much. Now I have gotten as far as making my peace with re-defining “enough food,” although I don’t always know what that new amount is.
It strikes me that there is a parallel process in learning to write. When we begin, we have no idea how much is enough—enough description, enough dialog, enough scenes, enough blows in the blow-by-blow sequences. What’s too little? What’s too much? It takes experience and critical reflection to judge. My own version was that I’d either write stories that were so minimalist, the most important story elements verged on becoming non-existent, or else I’d belabor every detail, no matter how trivial.
I’d think that because I had worked hard to craft a single sentence (or even a phrase), it would necessarily carry a similar weight with the reader. Surely, those few words would convey the full impact of all that travail. Surely, the reader would fill in all the carefully-understated gaps, would realize every nuance and spot every subtlety. While I still believe in giving the reader credit for being intelligent, I’ve come to understand that the material has to be on the page to begin with. Even perceptive, literate readers aren’t telepathic. We have to give them a clue here and there, more here than there if it’s something important.
I also fe
ll prey to the widespread beginner’s error that the amount of text on the page (and hence, the time it takes to read it) ought to correspond to the speed of the action itself. Fast action’s a short scene, right? The truth is that the more dramatic a scene is, the more “weight” of detail it can support. An essential element in suspense is “playing the scene out.” Overdone brevity undercuts the build-up of tension and deprives the reader of that very experience she expects from the story.
At the same time, I’d excessively elaborate details without reference to their importance. (Actually, the word “excessively” points out that even crucial details can be overstated.) Some of my tools-in-crime were exaggeration, inappropriate diction, and repetition. I described every object, every character, every bit of action, with multiple adjectives, and I couldn’t use a simple verb like, “said” or “ran” or “was.” I twisted sentences into excruciating shapes in my efforts to avoid the verb “to be.” I thought the more syllables an adverb had, the more it added to the color of the sentence.
What, isn’t the “purple” in “purple prose” a strong color-word and a good thing? And my goodness, I can’t risk the reader not getting this point! So I’d better highlight it every time it comes up, just in case they missed it the first time.
In my early years, I focused on cutting out the redundancies and overwritten prose. I learned to “flesh out” my scenes, to draw out moments of drama, to slow down the action, and to give the reader time to savor whatever is going on. As I’ve gotten more skillful, I’ve learned to do it more with fewer words. I’ve found different ways of “playing things out,” of creating resonances instead of inflicting repetitions on the reader. I strive to evoke rather than delineate. I try to make every story element serve multiple purposes (for instance, advancing the plot and revealing character and adding backstory, or setting the scene and heightening tension and suggesting the larger world).
What is enough has, like the food on my plate, gotten smaller. What is too much, on the other hand, requires never-ending vigilance.
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Nourishing Yourself
Surviving as a Writer (Or Artist . . . or Musician)
There’s no dearth of articles on strategies for financial survival. The Internet abounds in them, some excellent, but many more that seem to be unfounded blatherings. At a time when publishing is changing faster than news can spread, a person can say just about anything and be right some of the time. This isn’t one of those. This is about surviving psychologically.
The two sorts of survival are connected. Struggling financially, being unable to support yourself with your writing (insert as appropriate: art, dance, music, etc.) is frustrating and discouraging. I think it’s even more so when reaching that readership, that group of people who love your work and for whom your work has enduring value, is part and parcel of the rewards of being a writer. I also think that each one of us forges our own way through the thorn-forest of publishing/getting paid/writing/dreaming. Here are a few things that work for me. They might be helpful to you, too.
If the only thing I loved about writing was getting paid for it, I’d probably give up and go back into health care. If I either hated or was indifferent to the writing itself, it simply wouldn’t be worth the hassle. At least, helping sick people get better comes with warm fuzzy feelings and a regular paycheck. I’m fortunate in that writing fiction isn’t the only thing I can do for that paycheck. Don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful to get paid. It just isn’t sufficient in itself for me.
What if I knew no one would ever read what I wrote? That’s stickier. I began writing, somewhere around 4th grade, without any intention of reaching an audience (well, beyond my parents, who enthused over every effort). As a teen, I sent a few stories out without any idea of what I was doing. By the time I started submitting seriously, I’d started about a gazillion novels and finished a few of them, as well as many more short pieces. All for what? For the pleasure in telling the story.
I come back to that principle again and again, in many variations. I don’t see any point in slogging through a story that’s drudgery to write (and will therefore be boring to read). Scenes can be difficult or painful to write. They can challenge me in terms of skill or raw emotional honesty. So pleasure in the sense of ease is misleading. Perhaps a better way to express this is the sense that this is worth doing, and worth doing right. We know that kids love mastering new skills and learning new information. Tackling a difficult story element—a scene, a point of view, some technical aspect that presents a high-wire act—may be excruciating at the same time as it is exhilarating.
So I write in part for the satisfaction of telling a story and telling it well. I write stories I myself want to read. But there came a time in my development as a writer when I wanted to share those stories with other people. Herein lies the challenge: what role does the completion of communication play in how I feel about writing? Is it enough to run off copies (or send files) to my family and close friends? Once upon a time, there weren’t a lot of choices besides traditional publishers if I wanted to reach a wider audience. Publishers act as gatekeepers in the worst sense and as guarantors of editorial quality in the best. If I let my publisher (or editor, or agent) be the sole arbiter of my work, I may be enlisting an invaluable ally in both commercial success and in determining the worth of my work. But that’s a two-edged sword, as too many have found to their sorrow.
The question for those being published in traditional ways is, How do I remain true to my internal compass and stay receptive to that advice which is valuable to me? What happens when sales figures over which I have no control result in rejection (declining advances being yet another aspect of this). How do I find satisfaction in the work itself, regardless of what’s happening in New York or amazon.com?
If I go the self-publishing route, all too easy these days, must I sacrifice the mentor/teacher/gadfly role of a professional editor? How do I keep growing as a writer, keep learning new stuff and practicing what I know to make it seem effortless? How do I stay humble in my art? Or is that important to me? Maybe it’s pretentious or destructive to think in those terms. Or maybe it’s essential.
The real gift of all the venues offered by the Internet is that they allow me to separate publication anxiety from the joy of storytelling. If all I want is to get the words down, they can stay on my computer. If what I want is to throw them out and say, I had a whale of a good time writing this and I think you might enjoy reading it, for fun and for free, I can put it up on my website or other places on the ’net. If I believe the story has merit and for whatever reason does not suit traditional publishers, I can do what many (some say, far too many) have done and make it available for money. The point is that I no longer have to feel locked in to evaluating my work by the commercial marketing decisions of a corporate publisher.
Sure, I can put up drek. But I can also use that same freedom to keep my focus on writing the stories that are wonderful to me, to the best of my ability. That is what has kept me writing all these years, and that is the only thing I know that will for sure continue to do so.
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Defining Writing Success as Publishing
Some writers, and successful professional writers at that, began as daydreamers with no thought of becoming published. Whether they wrote fanfic or invented their own worlds, they went through a long period of writing just for themselves. I want to cry when I think of some of the wonderful writers who had to hide their work because of parental disapproval or employer requirements or other reasons. I think that’s one reason I’m so encouraging of people in those early stages . . . you never know where those early Mary/Gary Sue stories might lead.
Other people knew early on that they wanted to be published. I don’t know if there’s a correlation between this goal-setting and preference for working on invitation and under contract (versus “on spec,” where you don’t know if there’s a market for what you’re working on, y
ou just fly with it anyway). On the one hand, having such a goal can focus our efforts, perhaps boot us into serious critique groups, workshops, and classes earlier than we might if left to our own inclinations, because we’re going about learning to write in a professional manner. That’s a thought—being a professional writer even before we’ve sold anything, measured by how we go about learning to write.
The down side is that (until the Internet made self-publishing so easy) defining ourselves as writers by whether we are published relies on something beyond our control. Are we then setting ourselves up to feel like failures if the market does not cooperate with our timetable? Or does it serve us to have an objective measurement of the quality of our work so that we are held to higher standards, so we don’t have the option of saying we don’t care, what do editors know, they’re all against us . . . the usual whiny excuses. It’s a bit like weight lifting. The numbers don’t lie.
One form of “numbers” is the value the marketplace assigns to our work. In the past, it’s been the size of an advance, and to a lesser extent the prestige of the market. Add to that the sales figures, assuming we can decipher those amazingly baroque royalty statements. Self-publishing adds both positive and negative aspects. There’s no longer a gatekeeper editor/publisher to say, “This book is worth this much in sales.” We can prove them wrong . . . and know we’re doing it. We can have direct access to our own sales figures. So, quality aside, we can define success as so many copies actually sold (not what the publisher thinks will sell).
If the (or one) source of pleasure and satisfaction in writing is doing it well, does it do us a disservice to set our goals by copies sold? This assumes we aren’t one the edge of homelessness and financial considerations trump everything else, just looking at how we maximize the joy and sense of achievement from our work. If we take editorial feedback out of the equation, how do we measure our growth as writers? Professional reviews, growing fewer all the time? Reader reviews, which can be meaningless? Critique groups? Trusted beta readers? Book doctors?
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