The Twelve Smartest Things Ever Said About Writing

The Twelve Smartest Things Ever Said About Writing


The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.
_____Gloria Steinem

I am going to write because I cannot help it.
______Charlotte Bronte


Publishing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But writing is.
_____Anne Lamott

Pleasure is not always at the time.
______James Salter

The only advice I have to give a young novelist is to fuck a really good agent.
_______John Cheever.

Nothing is as important as a likeable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.
_____Ethan Canin

The protagonist cannot be a perfect person. If he were, he could not improve and he must come out at the end of the play a more admirable human being than he went in.
____Maxwell Anderson

You must be aware that the reader is at least as bright as you are.
_____William Maxwell


The story is always about the person who is telling it.
_____Jack Heffron


The subconscious mind seeks truth. It wants truth so badly that it will cease to speak to anyone who wants something else more than he wants truth.
___Anne Sexton


The work will show you how to do it.
____T-shirt


Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody’s fault. You chose it.

____Bill Barich

The Chapter Cometh

Okay, now this is freaky but true. I was down at the beach over the weekend and while I sat under my beach umbrella looking out at the gorgeous ocean I was also performing three writerly tasks:

1. Proofreading the galleys for Love in Mid Air, which were mostly fine.

2. Rereading the second draft of the second book, which I plan to send to my agent and my editor sometime this week. A little traumatic because while there are certain parts of the book I really like there are some definite chunks missing, especially this one part about 2/3 of the way through where I know I've always needed a scene. Not just a scene. A strong scene showing a strong internal shift.

3. Reading this absolutely infuritating book that I found in the back bedroom of my mom's condo. It's about writing so I can only assume that I bought it at one point during the 34 years she has owned this condo and left it there but I don't recall ever reading this book. Of course, come to think of it, I might not recall reading this book since this is the kind of book that gives you a stroke. It's all about how it's easy to get an agent and a publisher and just so long as you take care of your work and create the best manuscript you can that it will certain find itself a home. So Pollyanna-ish, so unreal and unhelpful, that I can't believe a published writer would say this to hopefuls. A pox upon her!

Anyway, I get home yesterday afternoon with a buttload of work to do because this is a very full week and I'm still missing this scene. So as I'm drifting off to sleep last night I summon the ghost of my dead father and any other random general benevolent spirits from the other side and say "Send me the scene."

And I woke up with it. Pretty much the whole bloody thing. The only thing I didn't have was a good last line, but hell, the rest of it was exactly what I needed and it might be the strongest scene in the book. I scrambled out of bed and came straight to the computer at 6 this morning and began furiously typing notes...just a brain dump and then I stood up and went into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and then, for some reason, I said "Amen."

So I rushed back to the computer and wrote "For some reason I said 'Amen'" Which is the perfect last line for the scene.

I've got to start praying more often. And I am NOT kidding.

Oy

This has been a rough week. Not only did I get this bizarre attack (dutifully described in the "ouch" entry) on a scene from the second novel, but I have also been getting a lot of feedback on the first novel as well. The finished one. The whole thing is making me feel horribly exposed.

It started like this. My publisher sent me four sets of galleys to have when I visit workshops and conferences this summer, in case I meet someone artsy who might want to blurb the book. (Well...no one wants to blurb the book. Maybe I should say someone I can persuade to blurb it.) Since it was two weeks before the Queens session I decided this was a good chance to give some friends and family members a preview. They'll have to read it at some point and I suspected it would be upsetting for some of them. I figured this way we'd have ten months for them to read it, digest it, and get used to it before the book actually came out in print. So I start sending these four sets of galley copies around.

Some people were fine. A couple of friends/family members were very supportive and complimentary. A couple were lukewarm. A few struggled, clearly bogging down in attempts to figure out who the people in the book were based on, what was true and what was fiction, etc. A couple of people were hostile in a passive-aggressive way, either opting not to read it or claiming they couldn't finish it, based on the fact it was "chick lit." I found this last response the most insulting. ...I think when men use the term "chick lit" they almost always mean it in the most dismissive way possible. Some people offered suggestions for revisions as if they didn't realize that the book has been sold and this is the version that's actually coming out in print. In short it was pretty much what writing has taught me to expect, i.e., you can't predict how people are going to react to material. Some people who you consider to be experienced readers respond in a very simplistic way, people who you think might get upset are fine, people who you never thought about reacting in a thousand years get completely ripped out of the saddle.

But the aggregate of so much feedback over the course of ten days has laid me low and made me remember why I have a policy of not showing work in process to anyone who isn't a writer. Last night I went over and watching the Dancing With the Stars finale with my writing buddy Ed and his wife, my dancing buddy Schelley. He said that she is his first reader and Dawn says Steve is her first reader, but I can't imagine using a spouse as a first reader. I'm glad it works for them but I find this mystifying and wonder if I'm doing something wrong....if I show work to non-writers it seems that have trouble seeing it as a) a story and not either a confession or some secret message to them and b) my story and not theirs. I dread the moment people who know me read my work, dread the discussions which inevitably follow....so why do I have so much trouble doing what other writers seem to do easily?

Maybe it's just a matter of the material I work with, which tends to be about suburban life in Charlotte and thus easy for people to read me or themselves into. Maybe it's the fact I seem to know a lot of blocked creatives and they can't resist hijacking any story in progress and trying to turn it into the story they'd like to write. Maybe I present things in a defensive way, unconsciously looking for trouble and ergo I find it.

I honestly don't know. I just know this has been a tough week. Dawn and I have been talking a lot and it's got me thinking that feedback comes in three forms. There are the people you don't know at all - the anonymous readers who buy or don't buy the book, the critics, the reviewers, the people who rate your book on Amazon. There are the people you know slightly - the people in the community who take offense for reasons you never could have seen coming, the friends of friends who want to be writers and who thrust their manuscripts into your hands, the people you read for at workshops or conferences. And then there is that inner circle of friends and family, the twenty or so people whose reaction could have a huge impact on your life. That's the circle where you think you'd find your most support but it's where I seem to find a strange mixture of support and trouble.

At least it's almost past me. Three people have the galleys in hand right now. After I get it back from them, I'm not going to hand it out any more. I guess I'm glad I did it, and I'm definitely glad it's over.

Ouch

I am a little stunned right now. I sent a working scene to a friend, a scene from the second book...Granted, it's a violent scene and violent in a sexual way and this a double risk....but it's pivotal to the story I've imagined and I've just talked to him and he hates it. He hates it in a way that I couldn't even respond to. I just caught this torrent of words and now...I don't know what to think. This is the midpoint scene. Other scenes either lead up to it or devolve out of it. The thing is, I like the scene....or at least I think I do. I'm rattled right now. I haven't had anyone jump me like that in years. So now I have this scene that's pivotal in a book I'm going to show David and show Karen in a matter of weeks and someone whose judgement I trust has just eviserated it.

The scene is risky but I think I like it. Until about an hour ago I was sure I liked it and if you ask me an hour from now I might it again. But right now I am rattled to the core and wondering if he has really hit on something that's to be extremely upsetting to lots of people (he kept using the word "repugnant") in a way that makes the whole book unreadable or throws it into the category of pulp fiction....or is he just having a personal reaction to what is, on some levels, a rape scene?

What do you do with feedback like this? Or is it even feedback? I'm shaken.

I'm gonna call it "serendipity"

Yesterday I heard that the workshop I was suppose to teach at Tinker Mountain was cancelled due to low enrollment. It wasn't a total surprise - Fred, my friend and the director - had been making noises about how hard it was to get students this year for some time and in fact the most recent issue of Poets and Writers talked about conferences and workshops being cancelled across the country. And then the same day I hear from UCROSS - the colony in Wyoming and the last of the four I applied to this year - that I didn't get in.

Not that any of this is particularly great news but it didn't throw me. In some ways it's easier to plan the summer now, knowing more about what is and isn't going to happen. And it occurred to me that I had scooped out this nice full week for Tinker Mountain and this might be the perfect slot of time to visit New York. I've needed to go for months - touch base with my agent David and my editor Karen about the novel and talk to Laura, my editor at Fodor's for the Disney book, as well as see my buddies Alison and Jason and Jan.

And the funny thing is I started calling and emailing everybody and it all fell together. Everyone's in town. Everyone can meet me. So I have a great trip to NYC planned, and also now a built in time clock, a date by which I need to have finished the present version and have it mailed to David and Karen. It's a lot to do in the next few weeks, but the bottom line is, I feel great.

Change to Questions from Mike

Oops. The first question to the following post somehow got cut out. This is an interview with my friend and fellow writer, Mike.


His first question was:

Mike: "If you had an author superpower, what would it be?"

Questions from Mike

Kim: Cool question, but I actually already have one....invisibility. When I was a kid I wanted to be invisible. It was the Cold War era and I was always pretending I was a spy. Constantly hiding behind the couch to eavesdrop on the adults, that sort of thing. It turned out to be excellent training for growing up to be a writer and I still love to sit somewhere in public and pretend to be reading while actually I'm spying on people and/or recording their conversations. It gives me the chance to be, for at least a few minutes, invisible.
If I could choose a writing superpower I didn't already have, I'd become Sequencing Girl, able to know exactly where each scene belongs in a novel. Because now I spend so much time in cut and paste frenzies - moving stuff all over the place, trying to get every line, scene, and flashback into the right sequence.

Mike: Do you have any superstitious rituals? I met with this editor lady who says she always writes better in her lucky pajamas....

Kim: I'd love to have a pair of lucky pajamas. I don't have any particular rituals, although I do write better in the mornings so I structure my day to take advantage of that fact. And if I get stuck, I switch venues and write in public. Most of my first draft writing is done in coffeehouses and cafes or on planes. Planes, come to think of it, focus me especially well. Maybe because part of me feels like I'm getting ready to die.

Mike: Who do you model your writing after?

Kim: No one. When I was in school I did like Melville, Fitzgerald, and Joseph Conrad especially well, which may be where I got my penchant for first person POV. But I would say that my style is my own.
Last week I was talking to a writing buddy who said an editor once gave her a spectacular line edit, which is interesting because I can't stand to be line-edited. I think it breaks voice. I'd much rather an editor tell me to change the plot or a character...I'm like "Sure, I'll kill off Litttle Susie, just don't ask me to cut the word 'very' from that last sentence."

Mike: Is there a book out there that Love in Mid Air would remind people of?

Kim: I was very impressed with Tom Perrotta's Little Children and I think my book is thematically similar. My story is nowhere near as dark as his.

Mike: What do you enjoy doing when you're not writing?

Kim: As followers of my blog know, I dance. American Smooth - the foxtrot, tango, and waltz. I'm obsessed with it. It scratches the same creative itch that writing does, but it also has a performance aspect to it, which I love.

Mike: What would you be doing if you weren't writing these books?

Kim: Talking about writing these books. I always knew I had to be a writer. There was no Plan B.

Mike: Will Love in Mid Air be part of a series?

Kim: Yes. It's like Elvis Costello says in "Everyday I Write the Book"....I own the film rights and am working on the sequel.