When you have to write

I read an article recently, written by an insufferable writer. I've never actually read any of the fiction she's written, but I can tell, just by reading this little essay, that what she writes has to be insufferable. I won't name her; I don't want to be sued, or harassed by any of her fans that happen across my obscure blog. I'm sure there are some who think she's just the top of the trees, the best writer since Dickens or Voltaire or Homer.

Why did I find it insufferable? It's because she takes herself far more seriously than she takes her writinng. And how can I tell this?

She'll only write with a black fountain pen of a certain luxury brand, and will only write with a certain brand of black ink, and said that once she had to make do with blue-black ink, and felt as though she was slumming. She will only write certain things in certain notebooks that she bought in this little hidden shop in Venice, or from a book stall in Madrid, or Milan or St. Tropez or Dublin or Zurich. She will write notes for her novel in one book; sentences in another, single words in another. She has a handmade book of handmade paper with a hand-dyed suede cover that she found in a gallery, and reserves that for single sentences that she constructs, sentences of such surpassing beauty that they must never set metrical foot in anything as plebian as a mass-produced book she found in a little shop in Majorca, which, though lovely and expensive and rare and oh so European, is just too low-class for her sentences of surpassing beauty. She only puts one sentence of supassing beauty on each hand-made page, so that it will not have to rub elbows with any other sentence, even others of surpassing beauty.

In one notebook she writes in English; in another, of similar design but a different color cover, she writes the same sentence in French. In another she writes her daily thoughts on Proust. But never, never would she soil her fingers with a Bic or a Papermate or even a really decent pen like a refillable rollerball available at the corner bookstore. And never would she soil her deathless prose by forcing its ink to mingle withsuch common and vulgar material as Mead college-lined filler paper. Heaven forfend!

I think this lady is not a real writer. See, when you're a real writer, when the urge to write hits, you HAVE to WRITE, and it doesn't matter with what, or on what. You have to get it out, get it down before that brilliant flash of words is gone. They may turn out later to not be so brilliant, but at that moment when the Muse is shouting at you, hitting you over the head with a bag of words, it is the most brilliant combination of letters since the invention of the alphabet.

I have a pen I prefer, a kind of beat-up Sheaffer Javelin fine point fountain pen, loaded with blue-black ink. It's a dark steel-blue, but the paint is rubbed and scratched off in places, so the brass shows through. There is no paper I especially prefer, though I go through spells - narrow-ruled glue-top pads, blank copy paper, spiral notebooks, the aforementioned Mead loose-leaf filler paper, maybe even legal pads, in a pinch. But when the muse hits, if my comfortable, companionable pen and paper are not within reach, I will write anyway. Somehow, I will get the words down.

I will write with a Bic Stic ballpoint, medium point, red ink, on the back of a paper placemat in a diner. I will write with the tiny pad-and-pen set I keep in my purse for emergency grocery lists, directions, recipes and other assorted notes. I will write with a  #4 pencil on the unused address-book pages of my dayplanner.

A couple of years ago I was out to dinner in the Birdseye Diner in Castleton, in the midst of a perfect maelstrom of noise, because it was Graduation Weekend at the local college, and everyone and his brother (and sister, and uncles and aunts and neighbors and cousins) were in that diner. The voices alone were deafening, and then there was the overhead music, the crash and clatter of dishes, the noise of traffic on the street... but my Muse out-shouted the noise, and I HAD to WRITE. No notebook - no room for one on the table anyway. No paper placemat... but I had my checkbook. I tore out two or three deposit slips, and dug my emergency backup pen out of my purse (a gel pen that skipped a lot) , and in the midst of deafening noise and distraction, I wrote. And it was good stuff, and made it into the manuscipt.

I once went on a writing jag, and filled a little 6x9 spiral notebook, writing on the right-hand pages. But when I got to the end of the notebook, I still had a lot to write. I was in the woods, having lunch in the lacy shade of early-spring trees, and did not feel like abandoning my lunch and my muse, driving into town, and buying more paper, so I simply started in on the blank backs of the used pages, wrting "backwards", sort of. I wrote on the back of the last page, flipped that page back, continue on the back of the next-to-last page, flipped that one back, and so on.

When I've finished notebooks, I've written on the paper subject dividers. I've written on the cardboard at the back of a glue-top pad. I've written on untidy sheaves of cut-up and torn-up scrap paper. 

When I had read the article by that insufferable writer, I wrote a letter to Mary and told her about it, and received, by return of mail, a letter she had written in part on the inside of the envelope in which I'd sent the letter to her. She'd sat in her car outside the post office, torn the envelope open to lie sort of flat, and had written to me on it with a dull pencil stub she'd found in the glove compartment. And no, that wasn't an intentional comeback to the insufferable writer; the Muse had hit her, then and there, and she HAD to WRITE.

That's the way it is. Yes, it's nice to have the luxury to have a good pen and good paper, but if you HAVE to WRITE, you will use a pencil stub on a torn-up envelope. You'll write on the back of a grocery recipt, or the back - or front - of a grocery list. You'll write on a piece of cardboard with a crayon. You'll write on a piece of scrap lumber with a Sharpie marker. You'll write on a piece of tree bark with a burned match if you have to. But if you hold back... if you refuse to write unless you have that special pen, or that special paper... if what you write with is more important to you that what you write down... then you aren't a writer. You are a dilettante. It's like an artist saying that the brush and canvas are more important than the image that is created on them, a sculptor saying that the stone and chisel are more important than the statue the chisel and the hand and the heart and the eye combine to create. 

Just write.

I Must Emerge from the Mist

Last week my sister Mary won a book in a raffle. It's a self-published book by an as-yet unknown author, who is hoping to catch on in the current craze for teenaged paranormal romance. It is doubtful that this author ever wrote before, and even if she did, no one ever gave her any guidance, and instruction even in the basics of grammar and mechanics. The prose is choppy, stilted and forced, stuffed to bursting with adjectives and adverbs, and sprinkled lavishly with misplaced punctuation. The spelling is bad, and the author's grasp of homonyms is shaky at best. There is nothing subtle in any of the story; every motion, every word spoken, is accompanied by some descriptive word or phrase.

It is bad - just BAD. We took turns reading selected passages aloud around the table and roaring with laughter, sometimes unable to finish reading a single sentence without cackling. Dad read a few lines and screwed his face up as if he had just taken a mouthful of sour milk.

On Monday, Mary called me and told me that she had learned that this writer, who doesn't know "to" from "too", has landed a publishing deal, and is doing to have her work, such as it is, distributed through Barnes & Noble.

This new almost caused me physical pain. How can this be? How can this nearly unlettered amateur find herself on the verge of nationwide distribution? How can any publisher read even one paragraph and not know that it is poisonous drek? Is it because it has brooding, lusty teenaged vampires, demons, ghosts and other half-baked things in it? Is it because the female lead, who of course sleeps with the brooding, lusty teenaged vampire before the book is half over, is in a perpetual state of danger, and must be rescued?

It seems very unfair, besides just being stupid, that such terrible writing should be accepted as marketable, when mine languishes. I cannot complain too loudly, because one this that unlettered author has done that I have not is, she went ahead and got her writing out there. She published that book (and several others in a series, I understand, to my aesthetic anguish) herself, and promoted it, and got it into people's hands... even if it ended up causing great hilarity around the table. My writing languishes becuase it's all still in file drawers and on CDs and in binders on my shelves, and almost no one outside the family has read any of it.

That has to change, and I have to be the one to cause the change, because no one will take pity on me. Though I know my writing is good, that and a buck will buy me a cup of coffee. I know it's good; I have to show others it's good.

So which one do I send out first into the wild, cold, unforgiving world? Come to Dust? Jag? Miller? The Rathin series? How do I tackle the alien-to-me world of self-promotion and marketing? I really dislike Facebook, but that's the way the world works now. Do I go to the Shires Press in Manchester and print it myself with the Espresso Book Machine? Do I e-publish, and if so, how? Do I blog, tweet, or what? I am totally at sea.... and wish I could find someone into whose capable hands I could dump all this promotional jibberjabber, and just sit back and write, and leave the dirty work to someone who will do it for free...because even if I do get published, again, that and a buck will buy me a cup of coffee. I can't afford to pay someone to do my marketing for me, so once again, I have to do it myself.

I have read that a writer's website needs things like a "press page" and testimonials and credits and lists of published works and awards and contests the writer has won.... but I don't have any of that. I think my one publishing credit (outside of our 9th-rate lit mag in college) is a short, sentimental story I had published in a local paper in 1986. I haven't published anything, though I have written thousands and thousands of pages, in the form of several drafts of several novels.

I don't know where to start...

Tension!

I started to read two novels the other day. One is a murder mystery, the other a somewhat self-conscious and pretentious story of a group women going on a road trip and finding their purposes. I am halfway through with the former and probably won't finish the latter, as it was too contrived for my taste.

One is written in third-person, the other in first-person. One drew me in from the beginning with the originality of the premise and the voice of the protagonist, while, the other put me off with its overwrought narrative and banality of the protagonist's voice. One thing both of these novels have in common, however, is the tense in which they were written: the present tense.

This seems to be a big thing these days. I almost never used to run into a novel written in the present tense, and now it seems as though every third book has this construction. "Amelia looks in the mirror one last time before opening the door, and straightens her lapels, though they are level and neat.'I am stalling,' she mutters to herself, and, taking her nerve firmly in hand, she grasps the polished brass handle and flings the door open. " "I walk slowly around the car, examining the path the water is making in the sand at my feet. The rain falls faster now, the drops crackling on the hood of my raincoat, and so I don't hear the footsteps approaching."

I do not like the present tense; it feels awkward and unnatural for me to both read and to write. I don't know why, because it is a perfectly valid tense to use, but it feels more like reportage than storytelling to me (I know, they're both a kind of storytelling), but the present tense lends the narrative a kind of arrogance. To my ear, anyway. To some writers, it must feel quite natural, but I don't think I could maintain it for long, and would soon fall back into the comfortable pace of past tense.

This seems a little odd, even to me, because of course, life rolls along in the present tense. I could write a paragraph about the last 10 minutes, thus:

I put on the kettle to boil, wincing at the screech of the aluminum over the stove grates, and wait for the water to heat while the computer slowly wakes up. It is an elderly computer, and like some elderly people, it drops off to sleep at unpredictable moments and is hard to rouse once it has slipped into a doze. I look outside at the iron-gray sky, heavy with the unusual October snow that is due to start falling this evening. My cell phone chimes; it is a text from a friend in Marin County, telling me how it is 79 degrees there, and he is hard at work on a roofing job. The kettle begins to sing just as the computer decides it is awake enough to let me log onto my neglected blog, so instead of opening the "new post" page, I get up and pour the tea. Hot water gurgles over the tea bag, and the fragrance of Constant Comment rises on the steam.

I can write like that, but it feels awkward to me. I think it might be because it is NOT all happening in the present; as soon as it has happened, it is in the past, so it is more natural to say, "the kettle began to sing just as the computer woke up...I got up and poured my tea."

I guess the intent is to carry the reader along with the action, to make it more immediate, to lend the sense that the story is still happening, that the characters really don't know what will happen, and perhaps even the author is along for the ride as well. Perhaps that enhances the sense of urgency and mystery. I can see how it can be perceived that way, but for me it diminishes the suspension of disbelief, and makes the narrative read more like stage directions than a relaxed flow of storytelling.

Cheryl flicks the ash from her cigarette and sighs. Tomas is now fifteen minutes late. "I'll give him another ten minutes," she thinks, when his rattling pickup truck pulls up and he hurries across the grass to the bench where she is waiting. "I'm sorry," he says, "but Jerome had me run an errand and it took longer than I thought it would-" Cheryl shakes her head and waves the cigarette. "Forget it," she says.

Cheryl flicked the ash from her cigarette and sighed. Tomas was now fifteen minutes later. "I'll give him anther ten minutes," she thought, when his rattling pickup truck pulled up and he hurried across the grass to the bench where she was waiting. "I'm sorry," he said, "but Jerome had me run an errand and it took longer than I thought it would-" Cheryl shook her head and waved the cigarette. "Forget it," she said.

They say the same thing, of course; the same characters and action and mood. There's something about the present-tense version, though, that just feels uncomfortable to me. Even as I was writing it, I slipped into my accustomed past tense, and upon reading it over, found "flicked" instead of "flicks" and "said" instead of "says."

CHERYL

(waiting on park bench. flicks ash from cigarette. Looks at watch.)
I'll give him another ten minutes, but-

A RUSTY PICKUP TRUCK RATTLES TO A HALT AT THE CURB.
TOMAS
(jumps out of truck and hurries across the grass to where Cheryl waits on the bench. Breathless.)
I'm sorry, but Jerome had me run an errand and it took longer than I thought-

CHERYL
(shakes head, waves cigarette dismissively)
Forget it.

I'm sure the format is all wrong, but the present tense scene above reads very much like the screenplay sample. It just doesn't feel right to me.

I Am a Writer

I have not infrequently asked myself why I write. I have not ever made a penny off it, yet have spent hours writing, thinking about writing, agonizing over writing. I have a shelf groaning under the weight of binders full of manuscripts, and file drawers full of writing - from a single paragraph jotted on a scrap of paper to multiple revised copies of novels. I have stories that I keep only to show myself, to remind myself of how far I have come; these papers, I hope, are never seen by anyone else. Not that I have written anything grotesque - it's just bad writing.

None of this answers my question - why do I write? To be honest, I do not know. I just know that I have to write, because that's what I do. I am a writer.

What do I write? Fiction - novels. My muse feeds me stories that take hundreds of pages to tell; no short stories for me. I am within an inch of finishing a novel which at its simplest level is a mere ghost story, but which a friend of mine has called a "bildungsroman". I didn't set out to write literature, but it seems that I have.

There are two intertwined novels that deal with the supernatural and the eternal nature of love. I have written 3 low-tech fantasies (and have embryonic ideas for 2 more), devoid of dragons, orcs, mages, elves, dwarves and other stock fantasy characters. This series has people, some of whom are gifted with a talent of sorcery; the magic is understated but essential. These stories deal more with human nature than super-nature.

There is one story I am having trouble writing, because it is so grim and dark. It is a ghost story, but two of the main characters are two very evil and disturbed little girls. I will write the story, but find that I can never work on it for long because it is so dark.

I also write non-fiction essays about life in Vermont - the change of seasons, food, gardening, family - the day-to-day things, special occasions, silent icy winter nights, spring evenings chiming with peepers, muggy summer days, sharp autumn winds. These observations of the world around me work their way into everything I write.

-----

I think I'm a pretty good writer. I do. I'm not tooting my own horn. Anyone with a basic education and halfway-decent grasp of fundamental writing mechanics can put words on paper, but not everyone is critical of their own writing, and I am very critical. I believe that a love of language is essential to making a good writer - a curiosity and appreciation of the subtleties and vagaries of the language they use. As I am a monolingual American, then I must make do with English.

It's not a bad language with which to make do. I love this language. I love its history and evolution, and the way it adapts, and absorbs words. I also respect the language; I don't use vulgarity, but do not object to witty earthiness. I'm not a hidebound language purist, but you will never find me using "parent" as a verb, "impact" as a verb except in reference to wisdom teeth, or "normalcy" in any sense. These usages are ugly to my ear. God help me, I read a corporate memo the other day that used "vehicle" as a verb. I stopped reading when I got there, and didn't finish the memo.

Why do I write? I used to say I write because I am too shy to act. I have stories in me that want to be told. I write because I have to. I don't know if I have anything of any importance to say. I don't know if anyone will ever see what I write, if it will inspire anyone, if I will be remembered for the words I string together. I am sure there are writers with this in mind, but I know there are many like me for whom the impulse to write is undeniable, like an involuntary reflex. Writers are born, not made.