Stay of Execution

Big Paper Session, Part 1

A week ago, instead of doing yoga together, Neighbor came over and the two of us did big paper.  The topic was how I'm feeling -- this unfamiliar combination of overwhelm, tenderness, longing, and vulnerability that I've been playing defense against, or submitting to, or swimming in these past few weeks. 

What emerged on the big paper was three main topics.  One is writing -- I'm feeling stuck, like I'm not making progress, and ashamed and mad at myself about that.  I need structure and feedback.  I need a coach or an editor, deadlines and assignments.  I need milestones, and I need to get myself more confident about the business part of writing.  I think I know a fair amount about the craft of writing, and I have a sense of how to do various kinds of projects, and how to learn and get better.  But the business end, the querying and the pitching, I shrink away from.  And without it I have nobody else who cares what I've written or when, and without a sense that what I am doing matters to anyone, or to the world, I feel pretty drifty and aimless and depressed and unproductive.  It's a lousy feeling.  But there are some pretty clear avenues to explore to shake it up and transform it.  It doesn't feel hopeless.  Just hard. 

More Things I Try Not To Write About

There are some things that I won't blog about on principle.  I break these rules from time to time, for sure, but some things just seem like losing propositions to write about.  That's not because I think these are bad topics or because they're not part of my life, but because I think devoting space to them would make for a bad blog.  It's really out of respect for you and your time that I keep my mouth shut, although in a couple of areas it's out of respect for myself and my privacy. 

Some of these topics:

1) The lousy weather, or being sick.  These bum everyone out.  My take on them isn't new, or unique.  Nothing to be learned here. 
2) My insecurities about my body.  What's less interesting than a woman with body image issues?  Not much. 
3) Television programs.  I watch very few, and even when I'm interested and absorbed by them, I have no reason to believe anything I have to say about them is unique. 
4) My love life.  Alas, it's always in flux, and I've got too many doubts and fears about it to make it feel safe to talk about it on the Internet.  Remind me that reaching out long distance is often a risky enterprise.  Sigh. 
5) Money.  I went from earning more than enough to earning a little less than enough, and so money's on my mind a lot.  The anxiety I have about it is tedious and private.  I'll figure it out.  No need to talk about it.
6) House and home projects: the garbage disposal, the bathroom, the yard, the endless to-do list of owning a home.  I don't think I have much interesting to add here.
7) Politics.  There are too many other, smarter voices clamoring for attention.  Doesn't mean I don't care. 
8) Memes or quizzes of various sorts.  I'm as narcissistic as anyone, but even I can't imagine that anyone wonders which animal I am, or which deadly sin I am, or which classic rock song I am, or whatever the metaphorical personality quiz of the day is. 

Trepidation

Today I am meeting with my writing teacher.  I am thinking about whether to be honest with her, whether I am that brave.  Actually it's not whether I am that brave, because I've discovered it's not very hard for me to speak honestly.  It's whether I am willing to make her uncomfortable, whether that would be the right thing to do. 

What I want to say is, I have never had more difficulty communicating with someone I respect as I have with you.  It seems like I make you uncomfortable, which isn't my intention but which I don't know how to fix.  I feel like you don't like me, like there's this distaste that you are covering up with a forced polite laugh.  That makes me feel really strange.  Usually I can find my way around initial awkwardness, I can turn on the charm, laugh and be self-deprecating, but that doesn't work with you.  You don't seem to like my directness.  You make me feel like I'm not the right type of person, like I don't have the right kind of sensibilities.  I don't think that's true.  I feel like a blundering clumsy oaf around you, and that's an unusual sensation for me.  I feel like the way I speak isn't valued by you.  You are so British.  I am so American.  I'm a bull, you're a china shop. 

Truth is Stranger

• I realized I was falling in love with my next door neighbor when I swerved to avoid hitting a toad and lost control of my car and ended up in a ditch, and ran to his house for comfort, my heart beating wildly and the adrenalin still pulsing in my veins.

• My best friend and I got identical rips in our pants at the same instant when we were clambering over a cyclone fence to her dad's house.

• I know people with the following nicknames: Pumpkinhead, The Cheese, Drizzle, Harpo, Wibber, Mighty Mo, 517, 4, Dr. Groovy, Panthro, Beaner, Curbside, Fang, Nimbus, Nutmeat, Scupper, Papa Queso, and Bugger. 

• I have a neighbor whose first name I don't know but who tells me about his glass eye almost every time I see him.

• The dilapidated old cannery behind Liberty Tool in Liberty is an amazing architectural experiment inside.  The sculptor who lives there bought a new silver Audi A6 wagon and painted it a dull black with housepaint so he could drive it in the winter without worrying about the finish being damaged by the salty, dirty roads.

• The way [___] found out her husband was cheating on her was when she contracted a venereal disease.

• Sometimes regattas on Mystic Lake have to be postponed because someone has committed suicide by driving their car into the lake, and you have to wait for the police to pull the car out. 

• In a convenience store line this weekend a man with some kind of intellectual disability said, "Excuse me, but you are very pretty."  I thanked him and asked what town I was in, and he gave me a detailed geography and history of the region, stammering a little to get out each word. 

• [__ ] was abducted at gunpoint and taken down a river in Belize and raped, and she escaped by running through the jungle, and nobody believed that she had something in her foot until a thorn she'd stepped on worked its way to the surface a year later.

• When we were stopped at a service station in Georgia, filling up the F150, a woman gestured at the Hobie 33 on the trailer behind us and asked, "Is that one of them helicopter-boat-planes?" 

There are so many absurd details and terrible stories I can think of, far-fetched situations or interactions that don't play out the way you think they will or should.  I am thinking of dozens more small moments, secret shames or odd details I am privy to from my own life and the lives of people I intersect with.  People are so surprising.  Life is tragic and awful and sweet and whimsical, and we push along in the face of absurdity, worrying about mundane things.  I've been thinking about details lately, and what's realistic and what sounds true and what sounds like a cliche.  I've been thinking about this quote from Willa Cather, too:
....there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.... (via Tom Guariello)

All Requests: What Have You Learned About Your Own Writing?

This is the last of the lingering batch of requests, unless I'm forgetting some that came by email.  I'm sure if I have you will remind me.  Wowsers.  It took me almost a month to complete.  Sorry about that. 

Misspixie wanted me to reflect on my writing style, and what I've learned about it since blogging.  I've been thinking about my writing style a lot lately, as I've been having my words edited and commented on by a bunch of people offline.  I still don't feel like I know very much about what my writing style is, really.  That's a problem, I think.  I lack confidence in my own voice.  That's not exactly true.  Leave it to a post about writing to make me unable to verbalize what I mean. 

Short Story Update

I'm writing a short story.  I'm a little behind where I should be, but this one isn't turning out as hard to write as the last one.  The last one was about two middle-aged drinking buddies at a sports bar who know one another only from watching college basketball together. One of them loses his job -- the other is fearful he'll be asked for a loan.  But instead he's asked to help the first guy move a rug, and he agrees, relieved.  They leave the bar and drive to the first guy's mother's place on the beach.  It's surreal and uncomfortable, because the two don't know one another all that well, and they're both a little drunk, and it gets weirder when the first guy puts on a wetsuit and runs across the street to catch a couple of waves on his surfboard.  It needs some work. 

This one is about a family in Vermont.  For a high school project the daughter installs a webcam in their henhouse back in spring of 2001, and it becomes inexplicably popular.  People at work like to watch the chickens moving around.  The family gets emails from all over the world, they sell ads on the site.  The New York Times does a travel section on their region and mentions the hencam.  After 9/11 a number of New Yorkers decide to relocate to their town, citing "the hencam" and a rosy ideal of country life as their reasons.  The husband becomes obsessed with the hencam and with maximizing "the brand," and even as their family life gets more and more strained and starts to fall apart, he is pushing to depict them on the website as an idyllic farm family. 

What It Feels Like To Write Fiction

It feels awful. 

I come here almost every day and write on this weblog.  In two and a half years -- approximately 900 days -- I've written almost 2200 posts.  I don't know if I write 1000 words a day on here but I wouldn't be surprised if I do.  If I don't, I could.  And don't forget the supersecret blog I have that I write on almost daily, too.  I have a lot to say.  I wake up and this is what I want to sit down and do.  It's the end of the day and I want to take off my boots and read my mail but instead I'm sitting down here.  I want to tell you things.  I want to tell you about the full moon I saw on my drive home.  It was covered by a very thin layer of icy clouds and so it glowed like a halo and there was a remarkable rainbow circle around it, and then another halo and another rainbow rim.  It was like some kind of funky glowing moon frisbee, with the real moon glowing bright and small in the center.  I see these things and I want to catch them, and tell you about them.  It's something I just love about being in this world.  I love the sights, the smells, the thoughts.  And I love sharing them with you.

With you.  Sometimes "you" just means me.  I'm trying to remember something, or to give myself a pointer to come back to later, and I don't particularly care whether anybody else is interested.  Sometimes it's a generic you, it's the world.  Sometimes it's a particular you, someone I am thinking about.  Sometimes it's a particular you I know isn't reading, and sometimes it's a particular you I know is.  Sometimes it's a particular you I know only because you read -- someone I've come to "know" through your comments or your emails.  Knowing you're out there, and you're curious, and you'd like to hear about the moon I saw or will chime in with your own thoughts about low energy light bulbs or whatever it is, that's really nice for me.  I like sharing my world with you.  I come back almost every day with new things I want to tell you.  I can't imagine that impulse going away.

And I never have writer's block.  Why would I?  I'm just telling you what I saw, how I felt, what I thought, what I wondered, what it smelled like, what it made me remember.  There are no rules.  There's no way to do it wrong.  Of course there is, and of course I have rules.  And of course I feel good when I think I've said something well, or given you just the glimpse I want, or conveyed a particular mood.  But there's no pressure here, for any one post to perform a particular function, to drive home a certain objective.  I just write, and tell you what I want to tell you. 

But fiction.  Oh, fiction is different.

Why Are You Posting So Much?

Because I am trying not to write this damn short story.  Ugh.  Did I say I liked writing?  Did I say I was a writer?  This is supposed to be fun?  This is what I chose, for myself?  Like, the destiny I can't avoid?  Who am I kidding?  Why don't I have anything to say?  Why are all of my sentences so bad?  Why are all the things that occur to me such leaden, bad, nonstarter ideas?  Hasn't everything good already been written, by people much smarter and more tuned into the world?  I could be sitting in an office with a view of the ocean, getting paid lots of money to sort out complicated legal problems, and talking by speakerphone with a sensible and capable secretary who would know where to find that letter I think I might need to reread, and even if I didn't know what I was doing I would know how to figure out what I was doing.  This?  I don't know what I'm doing.  I don't know how to figure out what I'm doing.  Bleh.  I know I need to write and at some impossible time I'll figure out what's happening and I'll disappear into it.  I remember, vaguely, that that happens.  I know something will shut off and take over.  But what if it doesn't, and there are just these dumb sentences and bad ideas and nothing else?  Then what??   

UPDATE: I think I have made progress.  I know what's going to happen, I think, and to whom.  And I know the story is going to leave the reader with a vague, sad, but strangely beautiful ache and longing that you can't exactly articulate, except by describing the exact image of the end of the story.  Glad I decided on that.  The rest should be easy. 

Workshop

I'm in a fiction workshop this semester.  I like it and I don't.  What I like:

• The instructor is smart.  I like the way she structures class -- the sequence of topics, the examples she chooses, the exercises for particular lessons.  I like the readings she's chosen and the vocabulary she uses to talk about pieces.  I've learned a lot from the way she's setting things forth.  I came in not sure whether I would learn anything about the mechanics of writing.  I suppose that sounds terrible, but I think and talk about writing a lot on my own, and I think I'm pretty good at it.  I've taken fiction classes before.  I wanted to take this mainly for the deadlines, the assignments, and a group of smart readers.  A kick in the pants, kind of.  But the instructor and the way she thinks about writing, these things are proving useful to me.

• The other students are smart.  There are some good writers in the class.  That's fun. 

• We read short stories.  I've missed short stories.  Some old friends are there in the syllabus, and some new ones.  Fun.

• There are, of course, deadlines and assignments.  The kick in the pants.  This is good for me.

• It's fun and it feels fundamentally worthwhile to talk about writing with smart people.  Time flies. 

What I don't like about the class:

• The instructor's nervousness.  There is the usual amount of polite maneuvering in a workshop class -- you want people to participate, but people hang back because they're not sure what the rules or the vibe or the appropriate tone is, and because of a certain level of shyness about speaking up.  But this instructor is polite but dissatisfied.  She wants something different than what's emerging, but what she models is not straight talk -- it's sort of overly ginger.  It's a bad combination.  It makes the class nervous, and quieter.   For example, she'll ask something like, "What works in this piece" in our first bit of workshopping of student-written pieces and the class responds with good things.  Nobody mentions the things that don't work.  She didn't ask, and it's difficult, and she looks like she's a little uncomfortable talking about that.  And yet she clearly wants it.  We wait to see what her plan is for addressing the negative, but she doesn't offer a roadmap for it.  She asks if anyone would "respond" to someone who compliments something that (at least to my eyes) isn't working in the piece.  I think she wants someone to say what to me is obvious -- this part doesn't ring true.  But are we going to rip the piece apart?  She hasn't acknowledged that we're going to talk about the bad stuff, too, and we haven't on any of the other pieces.  I don't want to depart from the tone of encouragement and politeness that she's trying to set.  But the alternative is this strange, ginger, fakey-talk.  I don't think I can do it for another session.   But I don't want to be a dominant personality, a boor.

• The other students are undergraduates, which of course is fine, but there's a sort of undergraduate eagerness to please and self-consciousness that's tiring.  They're filling notebooks with notes during class.  I wonder what the notes say.  I jot a word or two in my journal or on the top of a handout. 

• I am not a fiction writer, or if I am one I'm a reluctant one.  I'm an essayist; I've always been, although I haven't always known there was a name for it.  I want to tell true stories.  You can do that with fiction, too, but I always scratch my head and think, yikes, I have to make something up?  What on earth will I say?  I coax my way out of rising panic by starting with something or someone from real life and imagining something out of it. 

Other Women

Marybeth was on the pill.  She was kind to you. 
Britt has a great body but she didn't like sex.  She got married to someone else almost immediately after you broke up.  She kept the cat. 
Meg has a PhD, in Latin or Greek or something.  She's older, and she knows how to dress.
Kerry was kind of walled off, emotionally.  She broke your heart, and when we finally broke up you gave me a letter that was addressed to her.   
Heather didn't want to talk about the relationship.  She would fidget instead, and not meet your eyes.
Angela is gorgeous and she never had any money.  Once she left a brand new guitar that you gave her in the back of her unlocked car and it got stolen.   She didn't like your house. 
Jody is creative, jealous, and prone to cleaning obsessively.  She read O Magazine, but didn't have other hobbies.  You fought like cats and dogs.   
Christine is a massage therapist with a pet snake. 

There are nameless girls, too.  The one who you followed to England.  The one who snuck into your dorm room that time.  The one you were married to, who ran marathons and attempted suicide.