Joe's Best Story

One of the predawn regulars at the 24/7 coffeeshop I sometimes go to for my writing sessions is a software engineer named Steve who's trying to break into the young adult market. Like me he puts in a couple hours before heading into the office for his info tech job. When the barista — a young twentysomething named Joe — heard about Steve's ambitions, he told a heartrending story about how he and his (single) mom lived through a tough experience of his childhood. 

One bright hope was that he had been a precocious, talented kid who wrote stories and had dreams of becoming a novelist like John Grisham or Stephen King. Both he and his mom got pretty excited when they heard a new neighbor down the street was a publisher. Encouraged to show this man a copy of his best story, Joe gave him his only copy of it, something he'd typed out on his mom's old typewriter. He was just a kid at the time. Later when they followed up with the publisher, the man admitted to losing the entire manuscript. The only copy of Joe's best story. 

I sat in the next booth avidly eavesdropping, imagining the child's terrible dismay at hearing this, guessing that, given a rare chance to grab hold of his future, neither he nor his mother thought to make copies of it.

Then Joe went on to describe his story to Steve, with a startling command of the details, and it was a great concept, filled with imaginative ideas and interesting characters. The problem was, he persisted in seeing it as the "lost manuscript" that ended his future as a writer. He never wrote any more after that.

I wanted to tear pages out of my own notebook and tell Joe, "Here. Write it down. Write it down now. Begin with what you have." (Next week I probably will. I might be accused of being a buttinsky but it's terrible to see young people let go of their dreams, still half-baked). 

If you're going to write, you'll receive plenty of rejections from literary agents, but after a while they feel like the occasional fly that buzzes into a bake shop — your bake shop. You see them, you dislike being rejected, but they can't keep you from making your cakes and pies.

Pictured above is the work of Chinese printmaker Su Xin Ping. It's a personal reminder that most of our restrictions and confinements in life are self-imposed. Like shadows, they can be scary, but like shadows that fall over our faces, they only have the power we give them because in truth they're insubstantial. The bottom line? Most barriers are artificial.

You can do whatever you choose in life. You even get to choose what will stop you.

A broken heart?

Unless a hero's written to be heavily conflicted, most actors will tell you they love to play villains.

Villains are the most fun and the hardest to write. Without them, there would be no conflict — no conflict, no story. They're so multi-dimensional: they can be evil in so many different ways, and each one comes to his wrongdoing from wide-ranging experiences. I read somewhere that inside each villain is a broken heart that's refused to mend (Rose's rich, embittered boyfriend from "Titanic"). 

Aside from wondering what made the villain, you have to design the scale of his evil. Is he a Dr. Crippen? Is she a child abuser? A villain's context showcases the magnitude of the evil: in a story about wartime genocides, can an abusive mother be written as more or less horrific? Put her in a coming-of-age story, set in peace time, and she can be drawn as a relentless monster. Within the Holocaust of "Schindler's List," Ralph Fiennes' Auschwitz commandant still stands out as exceptionally evil.

How does the villain's choice of behaviors compress and torment the life of your lead character? This is where the fun begins. One could say Kathy Bates' oinking loon in "Misery" just wants to be loved, to collaborate in a creative process. The problem is she'll drug and maim you to keep you home. Hannibal Lecter's mere presence signals the possibility of evil on an epic scale in the world, yet he befriends and mentors FBI agent Clarice Starling.

How will your villain be vanquished? Can your villain be defeated? Is your villain even human? (Maybe it's an incurable disease). Is it a complete obliteration, a vindication of good in the world, or a gray area of moral ambiguity? In the movie "Gone Baby Gone," Morgan Freeman's character insists, "Everyone looks out his own window," and audiences left the theater debating both sides of the moral coin. Maybe it just matters that the hero lived, because it's too exhausting to find every reason, to attribute wrongdoing to personality disorders, Agent Orange, addiction to drugs or pornography, and sociopathy. After a while, they all sound like "Twinkie defenses," such as the one used by Dan White after he snuck back into San Francisco's city hall and gunned down Mayor Muscone and Harvey White. Real human beings are complex, so what they feel as they look out their own windows can be tangled and murky, even if their actions are not. Sometimes the more we learn, the fewer answers we have. 

Perhaps that's why we pay big bucks to see movies about the walking undead — zombies, vampires, robots run amok — because post-9/11, it's more comforting to believe in absolute evil incapable of human thought, thus easier to demonize our political adversaries as somehow less human, and to dehumanize strangers with code ("illegal alien").

My days as a writer — as a human being — became more textured when I tried to understand the stupid, disagreeable, wrongheaded, unpleasant people of my life without just demonizing them. The reader doesn't have to like your villain's reasons, but the better those reasons are understood, the more compelling your villain will be.

We now return to our regularly scheduled bloodletting

There are ways to overcome writer's block, but I'd never learned them because it was new to me. Although my case was brief and mild, it was alarming. Here are some methods that worked.

Don't get hung up on perfection. It's an unattainable outcome anyway, especially with  first drafts, so I just kept writing — on other things, in other ways. I started a second blog (this one) and focused on generating content for both blogs. I noted "breaking news" developments for my other book projects, and kept up with my journal, and when ideas for scene fixes emerged, I jotted those down (so my manuscript wasn't completely abandoned).

Change writing routines (temporarily). My best work session's always been 5 to 7 AM at the computer, but on weekdays I started dragging my notebooks to a coffee shop that opens before dawn — and I wrote some scenes, longhand. It also helped, somehow, to change the music I listened to: my characters age 20-25 years, so if the scene I was working on was set in the 1950s, I'd listen to chart-toppers from that era.

Understand where you are. In reviewing my current manuscript, it became clear — no wonder I felt blocked: the death of my friend coincided with one of the toughest scenes in the story (the lead character experiences a traumatic event). While the magnitude is very different, it reminded me of those weeks in September 2001 when daily life had to continue but all one could think about was what had happened on 9/11. 

So I tried tackling other scenes, ones that were less emotionally freighted.

It also helps to realize different goals: in drafting my last book, I set a goal for 1,200 words/day, but this current story is harder to write. I've set a higher bar, so now I'm aiming for 500-800 words/day. As Hemingway said, "Write hard and clear about what hurts," and this one hurts a lot.

Stay active and creative in other ways. My "day job" involves a lot of design and marketing thought, so I was able to feel productive in this regard. Other writers I know maintain hobbies that require creative effort — making collages, sewing, gardening, composing music. Creativity is an interdisciplinary act, so everything helps. Longer walks meant more endorphins too.

Read, read, read. Generally I keep one fiction and one non-fiction book on my bedside table, the latter being a research source for another story project. But given the block, I just submitted to reading novels as an escape from my own thoughts, and it helped to look at authors I'd never tried before. I learned that sometimes, to come out of writer's block, you just have to give yourself permission to not write, and not worry about not writing.

Write in shorter bursts. I spent one excruciating Saturday writing for 15-20 minutes, then reading a new novel for an hour. Then I'd write for another 15-20, and read for another hour. By day's end, I still got writing done (800 words, 2 hours' worth) but in my self-flagellation it never occurred to me I'd stumbled across a good tactic. I'd written it off as indication of my faltering work ethic. Not so. If a two-hour writing stint feels daunting, don't sweat it. Just get it done in shorter segments.

The bottom line: Never quit. Don't give up. I knew that, of course, but nothing like a few rough days to remind you it remains absolutely true. You gain nothing by quitting. Accepting these remedies also gave me space to grieve for my lost friend, and that has helped most of all, because he of all people wouldn't have wanted me to give it up.

Blocked out

... So here was the problem: 

As a writer, I've seldom experienced writer's block. Never, in fact. I've had bouts where a scene was problematic and I'd brood over it for days, sulking over long walks or scribbling "what if's," like trying different keys to see if one of them will turn the lock. I've felt cringes when that little inner voice said, "Something about this scene is just not right," and there would be more long sulky walks and impatiently doodled questions ("What's wrong with this scene? Why doesn't it feel right?"). Sometimes I'd write them on Post-it notes and stick them to my bathroom mirror ("What does Jeb Creel really want?"), because I didn't want to lose sight of the problem. I would "bird-dog" it and solve it.

But I've never had writer's block. I've written all my life — poems, short stories, or little exercises where I mimicked another writer's voice, just to see how it felt. (Was my emerging "voice" more like Dashiell Hammett or Pearl S. Buck? Caleb Carr or Tama French?) I've written for business, and for this insane other career I'm aiming for: to be a successful middle-aged novelist — or die trying. (Most of my friends are planning their retirements and I'm hoping to break into a new industry, where — merely to survive — you learn to be cool about rejections, as matter-of-fact as a bastard at a family reunion). 

Then, a few days ago, a friend of 20 years died. 




And another problem presented itself: as a woman, I'm not an easy crier. I seldom go to pieces, "dissolving into tears," as it's sometimes written. I hold it in, and the grief seeps like rain falling on a laundry line — gently, by degrees, but drenching all the same. I don't cry because usually I write about it. 

And that's when it got scary, because suddenly I couldn't cry and I also couldn't write. Instead, I spent hours sitting still and silent, thinking about his death, the painful suffering of his last few days, and the recent deaths of other friends, about having dear old Jack put down last summer, about other types of death — not merely physical, but emotional and spiritual. 

It felt as if something inside me was being irretrievably borne away on a wide and private Sargasso Sea. A lot of my energy was going towards navigating giant waves of grief, yet I still believed in the story I was working on, and I'd started notebooks on three new book ideas that need research to help flesh out plot ideas. But as for writing a single line...? Nothing. Zip. Nada. Once a fluent activity, writing felt as much fun as having to compose a thank-you note to someone I didn't like, for a gift I never wanted.

That's when the real terror behind grief set in. Journalist and world peace advocate Norman Cousins once said, "Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live." And I thought, It could all end right here. Right now. I just walk away and give up on this thing, and nobody would blame me for doing it.

Wide, wide Sargasso Sea

Below is a post from Jordan Ghawi's blog. His sister Jessica was one of the Aurora victims (7/20/12).

Grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.

The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.

Happy Birthday, Madiba

Years ago I was browsing in an antique store when I saw a panoramic photo of a 1914 Michigan Klan rally — hundreds of people, as far as the eye could see, and every man, woman, and child was wearing hooded whites (probably 50-thread percale). It was a surreal and fascinating image, and I nearly bought it, but then decided — even as an oddity — I didn't want it hanging in my home.

Two interesting things are happening in the world right now.

Today is Nelson Mandela's birthday (b. 1918). I think about the character this man had, to bear years of imprisonment and hard labor, yet still come out advocating peace and reconciliation when most would be seething with bitter anger. And he took on apartheid, which is about the most repugnant form of systematized hatred and intolerance one can imagine, after Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

The other is that the KKK is holding a nationwide membership drive. From California to Louisiana and Georgia, the Klan is distributing fliers and "Kandy," touting "Save Our Land / Join the Klan," and asking if we're tired of black crime, black welfare, and "race mixing." To add "nuance" to their cause, Chris Barker, Imperial Wizard of the Loyal White Knights, elucidated that "It ain't about [blacks] any more with the Klan. It's about the immigrants who are flooding the U.S." (Oh, okay. Thanks for clearing that up...).

So...who joins a hate group? Does growing up in communities with little diversity actually foster hate? Does it come from a lack of education? From generations of economic hardship? According to Quancast, 200,000 to 400,000 people join groups like Stormfront each month; the numbers have been climbing ever since this nation elected its first black President. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that 100 murders over the past five years can be linked to Stormfront members.

And yet in his 7/12/14 New York Times op-ed, economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz found that conventional correlations about education and social class are no longer holding up. One interesting new dynamic is that educated under-thirtysomethings flock to hate groups in part because they don't like being marginalized by interracial dating. He also found that a garden-variety Klan member is a little better educated than the average (non-Klan) American.

Why do people choose to hate? I'm guessing it's from accepting modeled behavior — your parents hated Latinos, so you grow up with "permission" to hate, and maybe you expand that to include Asians and blacks and Jews, plus any hybrid thereof. The other possibility is that the work of self-definition, of self-awareness — the work of adult life — is so tough, the easier thing is to define one's self by deploring "the other." In other words: "This is what I am not."

There's also a fantasy-driven, self-glorifying component for lives made bleaker by lack of meaning and purpose. The work of real adult life is often dreary and hum-drum — loss of work/money, loss of love, loss of hope. This is exacerbated by our addiction to celebrity lifestyles, where concepts of "overnight success" and physical beauty are almost literally Photoshopped into perpetual highlight reels for gullible consumption. A rather pedestrian mind might wonder, "Why can't I have that? Why can't I be that?" or "How come he (who is of a different race) gets to have it, and I don't?" Eventually, someone else's years of hard work and paying dues starts to feel like grand larceny: they came into your home and stole your opportunities.

White supremacists derive drama and meaning for their lives by demonizing other groups as dangerously close to tearing apart "normal" or "moral" social order. It's lots more thrilling, perhaps, to dub yourself a Grand Dragon or Imperial Whozzats, and to work on training a paramilitary army in preparation for an imaginary dictator threatening to lead a racially teeming social Armageddon. Or to jump into a car for some adrenaline-pumping "night rides" and distribute fliers in racially mixed neighborhoods. That's lots more purposeful than going back to school, earning a degree, and maybe grooming one's self for more upward mobility.

Reports so far have said these neighborhoods aren't the least bit intimidated. Neighbors of all skin colors are gathering the KKK fliers and putting them where they belong — in trash cans. And here is the only Klan picture I'll have in my house: black ER doctors and nurses, working like crazy to save the life of a Klan member, shot at a KKK-led rally. This is the legacy of Nelson Mandela, and it's a thing worth loving.

Why bother?

I keep hearing about how writers need to create platforms so their readers can find them, understand them, love them yet more, and get advance notice of upcoming titles and book signings and speaking events.

Well, I'm not a published writer — not yet. I'm not even a self-published writer. But I wanted to start this blog because when you write, you think almost all the time about the business of writing. Storytelling; plotting. Characters, motives, action and reaction.... Imagined conversations run through your head. Your mind becomes a movie screen and you see your characters' scenes played out on that. I have so many questions as well.

The first question is one I think about each day when I wake up: Why bother? Why do this? Being a writer is filled with constant, solitary effort, and rejections, so many of the latter that you learn to make a friend of it. Second to parenting, it's the hardest thing I've ever attempted, yet millions strive to do this. Why?

Three sayings help propel my life these days.

The ordinary world is filled with extraordinary stories. I came up with this, corollary to the other one I love: "God created man because He loves stories." I want to write because each person you meet, no matter how obscure or ordinary, is a fountain of stories — about himself, his experiences, the people he knows. That's a big reason to love humanity, I think. (There are very few people I dislike and, when I do, the reasons are usually valid and profound).

Paraphrasing Hemingway: "Your job is not to tell what happened, but to make the reader feel it all happened to him." This is why it's hard work, why it's got to be "show, not tell," why it's about conflicts and compression and yearning. Our lives are filled with people reporting, "OK, here's what happened," but to make the reader feel "Oh my God, what would I do if this were me?!" sets a very high bar. And I like a challenge.

"Rise and shine, buttercup. This damn thing won't write itself." Well, that's the long and short of it. I have to persist and write every day, or else it'll get put off and sidetracked and dismissed, and nothing will get done. One scene per day, or one page each day, means over 360 scenes or 360 pages by the end of a year. My first book took me three years to complete; the second one, nearly a year; the third one, seven months. I'm trying to get this next one done within a season.

What about you? Why do you bother? What keeps you going?