The children of an American crucible

My next book project is a "triptych" of novellas: sandwiched between one based in Nigeria and the other in Japanese-occupied Nanking is the story of a Freedom Summer volunteer. And no, it's not about the three missing Civil Rights workers, but researching that pivotal American summer made me a student again.

It was 50  years ago today that their bodies were finally discovered in a rural dam after a 44-day search. Barely out of adolescence, they're iconic in American history, their story told and retold by better storytellers than me. But as with all icons, sometimes we sit before the canonized versions and miss who they had been as human beings. And their humanity affords us so much insight, even a half-century after their deaths on June 21, 1964. 

Andrew Goodman (b. 11/23/43) grew up in New York, the son of affluent and progressive professionals. Intelligent and unassuming, he attended the Walden School and Queens College: hearing Allard Lowenstein describe Mississippi as "the most totalitarian state in the nation" sparked Goodman's application to the Mississippi Summer Project. He knew the risks and dangers; each volunteer had been thoroughly trained and forewarned. "I'm scared, but I'm going," he told a friend. He arrived in Mississippi the day of his death, enthused and ready to work, knowing he'd lived a sheltered and privileged life, hoping to learn from the summer ahead. Check out the foundation in his name: www.andrewgoodman.org

James Chaney (b. 5/30/43) was finding his way in life that summer. He'd been disqualified from the army (asthma), tried apprenticing as a plasterer, then volunteered his services at the Meridian CORE offices, where he was quickly befriended by Mickey and Rita Schwerner. His value was that as a native Mississippian, he could go places white CORE volunteers could not. Although quiet and shy in public, his family described him as a cut-up at home. On the day he left, he promised his little brother Ben he'd take him for a ride as soon as  he got back. His daughter, whom he would never meet, was born during the 44-day search. www.jecf.org

Michael "Mickey" Schwerner (b. 11/6/39) was the "old man" of the group, a New Yorker who'd studied rural sociology at Cornell and felt an "emotional need" to work in the South for a more integrated society. Nicknamed "Goatee" by suspicious Mississippi locals, by June '64 he was the most despised and conspicuous Civil Rights worker in the state, and the Klan's leader, Sam Bowers, had ordered his death. Schwerner was married, described as "full of life and ideas," and believed all people were essentially good. He had a dog named Gandhi, loved sports, poker, WC Fields, and rock'n'roll.

His widow Rita remarried, became a lawyer, and is now a grandmother. In an interview she said, "I think anything that broadens one's understanding of the issues that people struggle with, the life decisions that people have to make, helps in your understanding as a lawyer. Nothing in your life happens in a vacuum."

Things that impede creativity: 1. Self-congratulation

I spent most of the morning developing a synopsis for my next book project and wasn't quite sure what to post here, but then a friend just told me about a Facebook status where a woman gloated over the extravaganza planned for her birthday, something sure to run into the tens of thousands of dollars. 

I've also seen shrill Facebook posts re: new cars, new boats, and new home theater units. ("Envy us! We are the lucky ones! Don't you admire us?!")

So here it is: If you're lucky enough to immerse yourself in a continuous stream of high-end material goods, more power to you. I'm happy for you. What you choose to do is nobody else's business, and I hope you can keep padding your life with rampant consumerism (if that's what's important to you). 

All I suggest is that you don't confuse your financial good fortune with presumptions that you're of better vision, character, or work ethic than anyone else on the planet. (I spent most of my time, money, and effort on giving my kid the best education I could afford — that didn't keep me in new cars or large-screen TVs, but it's an unquantifiable "commodity" that promises huge ROI). 

Stephen King keeps a pretty simple work schedule: write all morning, return calls and email at midday, read all afternoon. What's fascinating about King isn't just how massively successful he's been, but how prolific he is despite that success. Some of the more compelling millionaires I've ever met are social entrepeneurs or fulltime philanthropists who don't just throw money at a cause but get to know its inner workings so they can create more durable fixes. I admire the example set by the late Dr. and Mrs. Brumley, who used their insights and good fortune in life to establish the Whitefoord project in Atlanta, which has benefited thousands of schoolchildren.

Creativity takes courage (Henri Matisse). Creativity requires calculated risk-taking, self-examination, and the "letting go of certainties" (Gail Sheehy). You have to be willing to accept a bit of discomfort. The paradox of regarding your possessions as achievements is that over time you numb out — you forget what the journey towards real achievement feels like....If you prefer to be defined by material goods, and to believe it's the beginning, middle, and end of your inner reserves, then you're going to miss out on a lot, not just as a creative but as a human being.

Currently there are plenty of industrious Americans working in jobs they can't stand, hoping to keep kids in college and elderly parents in assisted-living, hoping to make it to retirement, hoping just to survive. Plenty of Millennials are still struggling to find their first jobs, or trying to kickstart careers in unpaid internships. This nation's still recovering from the worst recession to hit our homes since the Great Depression. 

If you've got good stuff, be grateful, not gleeful, and maybe read up on philanthropic opportunities (give a thousand children their very first b'day party instead of blowing it all on yourself). Anyone can suffer a reversal of fortune, and until all of us are doing better, none of us are really doing better — so learn a new level of grace. It'll fuel your creative endeavors too. #getoveryourself

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.