The Intrinsic Writer

Posted on May 17, 2012 by

Deep River Dream, Robin Urton

Intrinsic writing is about writing for your own, self-motivated reasons, such as the satisfaction of accomplishing a goal you’ve set for yourself, or discovering something about yourself.

Intrinsic meaning occurs during an autotelic activity, one we direct and have a sense of control over. You become an intrinsic writer when you write because you feel like it; or more importantly, because you feel happier and more engaged with life when you’re writing.

Alternatively, extrinsic writing is about writing for an externally-motivated reason (a deadline, a publisher, need for approval, to win against an opponent as part of a competition). This creates an exotelic situation, which comes with a potential problem: since we are all raised within an agonistic worldview, one’s exotelic reason for writing too often involves some form of competition.

This might never be a literal competition. Instead, this could be the sense that anonymous others are achieving when you’re not. To the extent that you are motivated and feel good about yourself, responding to an externally-motivated stimulus has little or no negative connotation.

Blooming Meditation, Robin Urton

Ideally, of course, competitive situations are supposed to be pleasurable and bring out our best.  However, when it comes to writing, an activity complicated by individual psychology, emotional states, and perceptions of reality, there can be a negative component to being raised in a strongly competitive culture.

Because competition is not necessarily a positive energy, there’s a potential chasm lying between autotelic and exotelic writing. There are specific times when writing goes badly or feels forced. I believe at least some of these moments are caused by external, socially-reinforced stressors on the writer.

There are certain expectations imposed on those who come to the writing situation. For the writer to succeed, she must overcome hurdles that do not necessarily exist for those who fulfill the ‘social contract‘ of what a writer is expected to be, based on what we’ve been told to believe—our legacy of writing myths.

A Dreamer’s Odyssey, Robin Urton

‘Successful’ writers, I think we can agree, have all, to a great extent, accepted the unspoken social contract that says that writing is, like any other commercially-viable activity, competitive in nature. In addition to money, fame and glory, there is something for the successful writer to “win,” and it’s called cultural capital—not an insignificant possession, since it grants you access to power in ways that should be discussed more often than they are.

Cultural capital is a form of social cachet or status granted to the person who attains intellectually significant achievements. That these achievements are defined by a group in power with cultural values that shift and change over time is a detail that goes largely undiscussed, since instead we focus on the writer’s attainment, rather than the elitism of the cultural milieu in which she attains whatever status is granted to her.

Meditation Dream, Robin Urton

But what happens for the writer whose self-motivation is provisional, who depends largely upon someone else’s approval if she is to continue writing without feeling discouraged? To continue being interested in the challenge of writing, she’s going to have to add to the complexity of her own writing experience by adding new skills. Ideally, complexity should be balanced by a difficulty factor that includes attainable goals.

By using the word ‘attainable,’ of course, I have complicated the situation, since many goals you might want to achieve seem utterly unrealistic if you believe the myths about writing and writers we have inherited through the centuries, so let’s look at some of those myths.

Writing is an activity unlike any other for one specific reason: writers are imbued with magical ability because society puts high value on the ability to communicate in ways that affect our emotions. This is true, I believe, because we don’t understand ourselves very well, and we’d like to think that writers and other artists have a mystical understanding of humanity’s inner dimensions, combined with an ability to explain ourselves to ourselves.

Then society decides that ‘good’ writers (usually writers who can explain the human condition via poetry or lyrical prose) are so special, so magical, so inspirational, that the writer is placed on a pedestal of heroic proportion. During this process of ‘deification’, the writer becomes A Great Author, and society loses any sense of proportion in terms of valuing the person as an average human being.

Brave New World, Robin Urton

The danger of being externally-motivated in an environment where writers are pitted against one another, and are encouraged to live up to a mythic status available only to an anointed few, seems clear. Only the intrinsic writer will succeed in having a meaningful reason to write when up against such strong beliefs about what makes writing and the writer important and valued.

As long as we continue to perpetuate the elitism that surrounds the act of writing, we risk alienating potential writers who lose faith in themselves when they come up against hurdles that have nothing to do with ability, talent, or skill, and everything to do with perception, belief, and mythology about writing and writers.

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What To Do About Serious Writer’s Block?

Posted on April 19, 2012 by

When writer's block becomes writer's BLANK

Writer’s block can seem very serious when you’re experiencing it, but it’s nothing compared to writing apprehension, which is a fear of writing so profound it often leads to resistance to the act of writing itself.

With that fear comes a great deal of crippling self-doubt.

How can you tell when your block is serious, and could possibly be a sign that you’re actually afraid to write? What can you do about the truly serious block? These are questions that virtually all writers contend with at some point.

A block becomes truly serious when the writer senses, but doesn’t understand, that he’s actually experiencing apprehension—he’s afraid to write. He is actively resisting writing—but why?

There are a few basic reasons why people actively resist writing, but they primarily come down to safety—losing it or having it. Counterintuitively, being successful at writing might not lead one to a feeling or sense of safety; instead, ‘successful’ writers often feel very vulnerable.

The common thinking about writer’s block (which, from my perspective, is a relatively simple problem that can be solved) is that you’re putting off writing; you’re procrastinating. For many people stuck at this point of the writing experience, writer’s block feels like writer’s blank.

Water images and metaphors make sense for writers

Ideas don’t come, and your response is a feeling of frustration. It’s as though you were once a full cup that has now run dry. Water, container, and fullness/emptiness metaphors make a lot of sense for writers. Many of the descriptions you might use at this point are of a “well gone dry,” being “tapped out,” or having a feeling of emptiness, as though you were once full of thoughts, ideas, creativity.

Nonetheless, this experience of writer’s blank is not particularly painful. It’s annoying, it’s frustrating; you might have negative thoughts about writing, and yourself—your ability to write—but you’re not actively preventing yourself from writing. You’re not afraid to write, you’re just not writing, yet. You will.

Deeper problems begin when writer’s blank is transformed into something much more serious. It begins with self-doubt and loss of confidence, but the real problem with self-doubt is that its roots go much deeper than a “mere” lack of ideas. This affective difference is what makes writing apprehension so much more complicated and profound than ‘mere’ writer’s block.

To be a writer searching for ideas is a normal state of affairs. To be a writer who can’t or won’t let herself write, however, is indicative of something much more profound.

Procrastination is usually linked to laziness, and if you’re experiencing a “lazy” writer’s block, it might be because you aren’t terribly motivated, but it can also be because you’re overwhelmed by earlier efforts that have exhausted you.

The one way in particular in which this type of block becomes a real problem is when we inject blame and judgementalism into our response to the writing situation. Societies with a strong work ethic often veer into overwork, believing that if you’re not working, you must be wasting your life. Those of us raised with this message tend to be very hard on ourselves. If we’re not working, we feel very guilty.

Since I work with seriously blocked clients who want to write, but can’t let themselves, I learned to differentiate between a block, which feels bad, often for long periods of time, but is surmountable; and writing resistance or apprehension, which has deeper root causes and requires more assistance to overcome.

True resistance or apprehension has certain characteristics that indicate the writer is emotionally troubled about more issues than just his or her ability or inability to write.

For a writer to experience a writer’s block, she has to be writing, and something has to stop that flow. Loss of confidence due to rejection, or fear of external judgement are two common reasons for many blocks.

The thing about experiencing a block, though, is that it is usually temporary, even if ‘temporary’ lasts some years. A block can be overcome with time. Your core self is not affected. You might feel insecure during the period you experience the block, but you do not doubt yourself and immerse yourself in self-criticism. You don’t have anything to say, or you can’t finish a piece you started; or you’ve gotten a rejection letter and can’t see the point of writing again, until that ‘magic’ day when you pick up your thought, or your pen, or you begin jotting down notes for a new article.

In other words, the block was temporary because your core self was not wounded; your ego might have been damaged or shocked, but you recovered, and now you’re writing again.

In contrast, a relatively short-term block can turn into writing apprehension and then resistance if writing becomes associated with negative emotions. Apprehension might prevent you from becoming a writer in the first place, however. This is why apprehension and resistance are much more serious than a block, even one that lasts for years, because apprehension stems from something crucial to your core being: your self-expression.

Loss of control: Those who are afraid to write fear the various stages of loss of control. The first stage of loss of control comes when you are forced, against your will, to produce a piece of writing you’re not interested in or do not feel ready to write.

This happens most often for the writer when she’s in school, and when a writer is under a deadline. Facing someone else’s expectations under these circumstances brings up a host of emotional responses, not limited to the obvious (anything from fear of judgement, to fear of losing control over one’s writing).

Another stage of fear of losing control occurs when one’s writing is taken out of your hands. This happens to students, but it also happens to any writer who puts his writing in the hands of someone else: a reader, an editor, the public.

The final stage of loss of control comes for many writers who hand their writing over to others, and have no say over what is done with the writing. This on its own can be enough of a deterrent to many writers that it prevents them from wanting to be put in a situation where we’ll have to make this compromise with our vision or our creativity.

Fear of outcome: It requires a fair amount of courage to write, largely because unless you write exclusively for yourself, every time you send off a piece of writing, particularly writing you have not distanced yourself from emotionally, you have no idea what will happen, or how the writing will be received.

Fear of outcome means that you now have to wait in the ambivalent silence of doubt. This silence can lead to an intense amount of self-doubt, in which every decision you’ve ever made is up for analysis. It takes a strong soul to withstand silence. In fact, being emotionally beaten up by harsh criticism is easier for most people to withstand than having to listen to the sounds of silence.

Fear of finishing: Writers frequently speak of ‘grieving’ the loss of their writing process when they come to the end of a project. Now what? The fear of the blank page becomes a fear of the blank life. Many professional writers have more than one project going at once to avoid ever having to deal with the nothingness of the blank life they dread facing.

Fear of failure: Not everyone bounces back from rejection letters and critique sessions. Some people are devastated by responses that lead them to question their writing—and themselves.

Writing becomes, for most people, a measure not of their intellectual ability (an arguably cognitive skill we can distance ourselves from emotionally) but instead a measure of ourselves—the deepest parts of ourselves we can’t articulate very well, not without some help of the compassionate kind (this doesn’t have to be from a therapist, although sometimes, that’s what the resistant writer really needs).

When we’re afraid of expressing these deeper parts of ourselves for fear of ridicule and humiliation, apprehension can overwhelm any desire we have to express our feelings. Feelings are difficult enough; expressing them to the outside world requires tremendous courage. Why would you want to do that when you’re scared and feel vulnerable?

The answer is, you won’t. You’ll do everything you can to avoid sitting down to your writing. In the process, you negate yourself and your deep need to express yourself.

Fear of success: Let’s say you very much want to get the writing done. You want to be published. You know you’re writing will be out in front of the judging, commenting world. Suddenly, this becomes the world you can’t control, with responses that feel overwhelming.

Fear of success means you won’t want to deal with the world if and when you do get published. Success, at least as it is defined by the rest of the world, is very scary for many people, much scarier than failure. The ‘logic’ of fearing success is that we tell ourselves, at least I won’t have to deal with the demands of success. I’m safe. I can stay as I am.

The key to serious writer’s block, then, lies in the feeling of a lack of safety. Because our society imbues so much emotional and psychological weight to writing, and further imbues the writer with so much social capital, we are right to be cautious before we set out on this path. Conquering these fears is a process, one that might have to be dealt with at every step along the way.

Please click here to contact me at The Collaborative Writer if you would like more information

If you are coping with any of these fears, and still want to write, I hope you will feel comfortable enough to contact me. We can discuss options. The last thing I want is for you to feel alone with these fears. I started The Collaborative Writer because too many writers have dealt with these fears on their own, and I think the time has come to create a new way of thinking and feeling about writing and writers.

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Why It’s Important To Take Your Reader Into Account

Posted on March 26, 2012 by

As you compose, consider your reader's needs too

Eventually, if you want to develop as a writer, you must share your work with someone.

Ideally, this should be someone independently interested in your topic or your genre, who already reads the type of writing you’re working on. Audience awareness implies taking your reader’s perspective into account, but at first, you might not have any idea who your actual reader is likely to be.

With impeccable timing, since I was writing about this topic anyway, just this morning Author Magazine shared the story of a writer who ignored her audience, and learned to change her perspective:

“Before Laura Munson published her breakout bestselling memoir, This is Not the Story You Think it Is, she wrote for herself.

With novel after novel getting rejected, who else was there for her to write for?

Now that her work has found an audience, now that readers are telling her how much her books have meant to them, she cannot help but “Consider the Reader.”

Strangely, it is this understanding—that her words will in fact impact others—that helped grant her the authority she needs to speak most honestly for herself.

Now, your ideal reader is not one who exists to critique your writing, looking specifically for flaws, nor is she there to tell you that it’s ‘great,’ without giving you useful feedback. A negative belief many beginning writers have is that if they dare show their work to someone, it will (or should) be critiqued—meaning: picked apart and changed.

Your best reader will be someone who likes your subject matter and already reads the type of writing you’re producing, and can give you a well-thought-out response. S/he is not interested in ego games, but sincerely wants to read a good piece of writing, and is willing to help you find the words to communicate what you’re trying to convey.

There are two basic types of writing situations: one in which you write for yourself exclusively, and one in which you intend for someone else to read what you’ve written. An important step in your development as a writer is when you become aware of what your reader is likely to think or feel in response to your writing.

While most of the guidance or advice you receive focuses on what’s going on inside of you and your approach to the writing itself (in terms of developing skills or talents), becoming aware of your audience requires that you pull your attention away from the act of writing, instead focusing on the effect your writing has on others.

n his truly excellent writer’s guide The Daily Writer: 366 Meditations to Cultivate a Productive and Meaningful Writing Life, English professor Fred White reminds writers to “envision individuals reading and responding to your work” rather than having them be a “vague abstraction.” He says that “how you envision your readers can influence the way you write” (188).

Envisioning your reader has a positive and a negative implication, though; if you are too concerned with what your reader thinks, you run the risk of compromising your own vision and style. If you are oblivious to your potential reader, though, you risk losing your reader through ignorance (being unaware of your reader’s potential hot-button issues, let’s say) or arrogance (thinking it won’t matter what you say or how you say it, you’re going to write whatever you feel like writing).

Once you make the decision to write with the eventual goal of sharing your writing, your focus should change from paying attention only to your feelings about your writing. At some point, perhaps during a rewrite of a draft, you will begin to wonder: What will someone else think of what I’m saying?

Remember letter writing? Writing a letter forced you to keep your reader firmly in mind; an excellent habit for writers to employ, no matter the genre.

A realistic audience for your writing could be one or more of any of the following:

  • One trusted reader (preferably not a family member or someone you’re so close to they won’t be able to give honest, effective feedback)
  • A writing group or other writing organization (online or in your area)
  • Potentially, when you feel ready, an agent

It’s easiest to define your audience when you’re writing within a genre, and if you are committed to getting published, you should already be reading or have read a great deal of the genre you hope to become published in. Until you define your audience, however, you will have trouble imagining what they’d want to read or the most effective ways to communicate with them.

No matter what you write, there are rules and conventions attached to the type of writing that you will be required to follow, and knowing those rules ahead of time will save you a lot of rewriting later on. Key to audience awareness is research into who already reads what you’re interested in writing about; where does this type of writing get published; does this type of writing have an established audience (is there a market for the writing you’re interested in doing)?

If you’re used to writing for yourself (an audience of one) it can be difficult making the shift to thinking about your audience’s needs. The first thing I know any audience will require from you is coherent writing, correctly spelled and edited for error, so let’s take that as a given, that Rule #1 of writing for others is to make your writing easy to read and easy to understand.

The rest of the rules do not follow quite so easily in any kind of order, however, and this is where I’d like you to brainstorm ideas.

Imagine your perfect reader, and try to see her or him as clearly as possible. For example, the perfect reader for the historical mystery I’m writing is fairly well-educated, older (over 40, perhaps), interested in history, specifically Ancient Athens, and already reads historical fiction (preferably murder mysteries).

If you had the luxury of having your perfect reader in front of you, what questions would you ask him or her? Make a list of things you want to know about your ideal reader. Interview your reader (in your imagination and then on paper) to discover what other books they’ve read? Where do they live? What do they do for a living? What are their hobbies?

Then turn the ‘conversation’ around, and think about the passages of your writing you’d most want your reader to see and comment on. Tell your reader very specifically (write this down!) what kind of help you’re looking for, what kind of comments you need from them; what kind of help you want with your grammar, or style, or vocabulary—whatever you have been thinking, write it all down.

These notes will be very important when you finally do have a reader, because it will help focus your mind, and it will help keep you and your reader away from useless, vacuous comments about how much they “liked” the action on page 15. All well and good, but we want your reader to be specific. What did they like? What didn’t work for them?

Most importantly, be sure to ask your reader, not what they liked, but what they understood or didn’t understand. The easiest mistake for any writer, experienced or not, to make, is to assume their reader understands what they’re trying to say. We think this, as writers, because we have no idea what our reader actually thinks until we ask them. This information is more important, and will ultimately make you a better writer, than asking if your writing is “any good,” or if the reader “liked it.” 

I may not like it when my reader says my writing can use a lot of work, but I will be grateful if he shows me what specifically is not working for him, since I trust my reader’s judgement. Every writer needs one serious reader whose judgement they respect.

A good reader is one who tells you what about your writing was effective, what worked, rather than discussing what they “liked.” Having someone tell you they liked or disliked your writing is too vague, and doesn’t help you grow as a writer. Having your reader show you precisely what worked or didn’t work is helpful. Without this feedback, your writing won’t improve. However, there is no excuse for any reader to criticize unfairly or harshly. It is never necessary, and it puts off many beginning writers.

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In Praise of Cosmetics

Posted on March 18, 2012 by

Reblogged from The Blue Plate Special:

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Edouard Manet, Portrait d'Irma Brunner (1880)

It seems I’m not the only person who believes that nature, left to her own devices, is a pernicious evil.

In the Musée D’Orsay, Paris’ temple to Impressionism, a period in art history where colors were often delightfully blurry, there is a section of the museum set aside for pastels—a painting form, according to…

Read more… 734 more words

I visited one of my other blogs today, to bid it adieu, and remembered this post, which has references to writing in it.
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Knowing You’re A Writer From An Early Age

Posted on March 16, 2012 by

The hurdle to consider one's self a writer occurs during the adolescent period, when we're forming our self-identity. Later in life, redefining our self-identity to include what is authentic to our spirit, or whole self, becomes paramount.

George Orwell‘s essay “Why I Write” offers interesting, and revealing, psychological background into his beliefs about himself as a writer.

As a young child, he believed he would grow up to become a writer; then, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four, he tried to “abandon this idea,” but knew that by doing so, he would be “outraging” his “true nature.”

What is the ‘true nature’ to which Orwell refers, and does his sense of what it is to be a writer have any bearing on you if you want to write? Can we not think of everyone, no matter their self-described ‘true nature,’ possessing the potential to become a writer?

I happen to think we can, but by believing this, I am like a salmon attempting to spawn upstream, because I am controverting the deeply-held societal myth that all writers are, of necessity, neurotic; that there is no way to write and, at the same time, live a simple, sane existence, since we are not accustomed to hearing stories about people who are stable who are also writers. To be a writer is to be at best ‘colorful’; at worst, suicidal.

Unfortunately, self-descriptions such as Orwell provides do nothing to dispel this cultural myth, and his fame and historical influence reinforces how ‘right’ he must be. His self-description of his formative years includes a glimpse into his family and social life; he considered himself “somewhat lonely,” with the lonely child’s habit of creating stories.

He felt “isolated and undervalued.” His self-description is laced with admissions of behavior amounting to neuroticism, in which his facility with language, combined with a “power of facing unpleasant facts,” granted him entrance to his own private world in which he could “get his own back” for his “failure in everyday life.”

To view all online chapters of Orwell's novel "1984," click on the picture.

When he says “[a]ll writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery,” unfortunately, Orwell feeds into negative stereotypes about writers, while at the same time sounding pretty interesting, because who doesn’t want to be thought of as mysterious?

I’m trying to remember if reading the following would have put me off writing when I was a teenager; on some level, it does sound almost oddly glamorous, with its tone of willful rebellion against that which we are raised to think of as boring ‘normal’ behavior. To a certain mindset, the implied romanticism of giving way to something outside your conscious control, a force larger than you, must have a subconscious appeal as we form our own writer’s identity:

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows, that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.

Orwell’s interest, from a very early age, was in description and detail. As he matured, he found his ‘voice’ through the process of becoming politicized. As he grew increasingly aware of the injustices of the world around him, he found an outlet for a skill or talent he possessed even in childhood: his desire to write with an attention to descriptive detail (a desire he described as a “compulsion from outside”).

It’s my belief that becoming a writer is a process of development. We aren’t born thinking of ourselves as writers; instead, we form an idea of who we are, and what our innate tendencies are, and only then respond to positive or negative reinforcement from the outside world.

To become a writer, we consciously and unconsciously compare ourselves to those who have come before us, so what we hear, read, and believe about writers influences our perception of ourselves as writers. Do we fit this mold or not? We use the experiences and words of those who came before us to shape our vision of ourselves, and the life we see ourselves living. But Orwell says that if we try to escape from these earliest influences altogether, we will kill the impulse to write.

He lists four basic impulses that underlie our motivation to become writers, and although Orwell’s focus is on writers of prose, I think this list is interesting (not that I agree with all of it) and might hold true no matter what kind of writing you do. At any rate, it’s good to ask yourself these questions so as to know your own motivations for wanting to write.

These motivations

exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living.

  1. Sheer egoism: It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one . . . There is the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.
  2. Aesthetic enthusiasm: Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement . . . desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.
  3. Historical impulse: Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
  4. Political purpose: Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction.

Finally, Orwell says that our nature is attained when we are ‘first adult,’ and that these impulses must ‘war  against one another,’ fluctuating from person to person and from time to time. Even if you’re writing fiction that isn’t particularly political, I think Orwell’s perspective on what creates our writing ‘nature’ continues to have relevance for writers today; perhaps even more relevance, since mainstream writing has taken on an inherently political tone, and more and more published work is non-fiction. Once again, Orwell was ahead of his time, it seems.

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Midnight in the garden of good and evil writing styles

Posted on March 6, 2012 by

My favorite genre is not true-crime, it is mystery—specifically historical mysteries. However, I read across all different genres, and I just finished Midnight In The Garden of Good and Evil last night.

I have found an online source, Goodreads, where I write all my reviews (mostly to myself, to help remind me which books I’ve read, since I read too many and time flies by too fast to remember what they are, let alone what I thought of them).

Ultimately, this could save money, since I have a terrible tendency to completely forget which books I’ve read, and then I buy them again, only to find as I’m reading them that the plot sounds awfully familiar….

Here’s my review, pasted in from Goodreads. It’s a pretty unhappy review, since I expected to love this book, and didn’t, and was therefore left rather disappointed.  Also, I have to say that this book was shortlisted for a Pulitzer, but the writing style didn’t seem extraordinary enough to warrant that kind of high praise. This leaves me wondering what are the criteria for Pulitzer-quality writing?

Berendt is a journalist who hasn’t mastered the art of translating reporter’s notes into flowing narrative fiction, an admittedly difficult skill, and one hard to live up to after Truman Capote created the genre of true-fictional-crime with his seminal In Cold Blood. I’ve discovered that, once again, my perceptions about what constitutes good writing, and what other people consider good writing, are very different; a fact I find rather dispiriting, actually.

Here’s my review. I’m not happy with it, largely because I’m not happy criticizing someone’s writing when they did a really excellent job, but you find it’s missing that crucial element you need, as a reader, to make it highly memorable:

The stiltedness of Berendt’s reportage-style detracts from the story he was trying to tell. I wish someone would do a rewrite and turn this into narrative fiction, because then it would have the potential to be absolutely fascinating, but the story, as it is, reads too much like a lengthy newspaper column.

Given Berendt’s background as a journalist, that isn’t surprising, but if he was able to turn as much of it into fiction as he must have, to reorder events and change character’s names to protect their innocence, (not that anyone sounds particularly innocent in Savannah, Georgia) then it ought to be possible to turn this into proper fiction.

Unfortunately, I was hoping for an unputdownable story of compelling characters and scenes, complete with a murder mystery and whodunit in a unique and unforgettable location, but what it felt like was following around behind Berendt as he took notes and tried to shape those notes into a coherent story.

So what is it that made this book so readable that it was a finalist for a Pulitzer? I get the impression that Berendt walked into a writer’s gold-mine the day he decided to get to know Savannah and its highly eccentric residents. He has an ability to recreate dialogue from some very interesting (and funny) people, and he had a ready-made plot evolve right in front of him as he got to know Jim Williams, accused of shooting his male lover/companion/sadist.

But there was so much more Berendt could have done with this wonderful material, that it leaves me disappointed. I have to say that the effect of this book was probably dissipated for me by the evil of watching the movie first. That’s one of those realities of modern living that corrupts the author’s abilities and vision, because it gives the reader the impression that the book and the movie are mirror images, when they clearly are not.

This is subject matter that obviously comes along only once in a lifetime, if you pursue it, as Berendt was wise enough to do. Yet in my imagination, much, much more could have been done with the material, and in my editor’s eye, if I’d had Berendt as a client, I would have tried to get him to write more elegant transitional statements. Too much writing today needs better editing, though, if you ask me. As part of the ‘true crime’ genre, this works, but it doesn’t dazzle, and it should.

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Why Authenticity Is More Important Than Ever

Posted on March 2, 2012 by

If you no longer feel quite this innocent and enthusiastic, don't worry

One of the rules we learn early on as writers is to use our ‘authentic’ voice when we write, but learning how to access that authentic voice is usually an elusive skill, not easily taught. It seems authenticity is like art: we know it when we see it.

When writing relies on tricks, gimmicks, gratuitous experimentation, or cleverness for its own sake, we feel manipulated, especially when it comes to replicating the voice of a child, I’ve noticed.

As a reader, I am particularly critical of reading books written from a child’s perspective, since children don’t have the vocabulary writers like to imbue them with. Also, children live very complicated lives, and can’t always make sense of what happens to them. I rarely feel as though I am reading a story authentically written from a child’s perspective. Children don’t seem to write a lot of stories for adult audiences, and the reason for that is key to what I’m trying to convey about finding one’s authentic voice.

Most advice about accessing your authentic voice tells you to rediscover your childlike sense of wonder. What happens, though, when guileless innocence is gone, and you are left feeling rather used up by life? Should you simply stop writing? Does this mean that you will never find your authentic voice? Maybe it means you are not meant to be a writer, because you can’t remember what it feels like to be a child, and, at least for the moment, the sense of wonder we associate with childhood floats away, a dimly-remembered colorful kite growing smaller and smaller on the breeze of all your yesterdays.

If, like me, locating your authentic self through a ‘childlike’ sense of wonder does not come easily, consider this: each day of your life, there has been at least one moment when you discovered something for the first time. It doesn’t matter how small—in retrospect—the moment might seem to you now. What matters is that you write about it from your own current, in-the-moment perspective. The ‘voice’ you write in has never seemed as important to me as the simple fact of the writing itself.

I'm more like mutton than spring lamb at this point in my life

Most people stop themselves from writing because they trip over things like ‘voice’ and ‘authenticity,’ instead of saying to themselves some version of “I just need to write this down for myself.” That need is more authentic, in the moment, than worrying about what someone else thinks, and at least you’d be writing!

We are held to an impossible standard when we’re told we must somehow recreate our childhood sense of wonder, in my opinion. I remember feeling more confuddled by childhood than in a perpetual state of joyful wonder, and maybe you did too. 

The underlying emotional reality of authenticity is the feeling you get when you discover something new.  In essence, an authentic awareness of your own personal reality requires two things: being conscious, awake and aware of how you feel, and acknowledging your feelings instead of ignoring them or pushing them down, or denying you feel what you feel. If you want to deaden your authentic self, denying you feel what you feel is the fastest way to do it.

Authenticity is not about forcing yourself to do something you can’t. And if you can’t notice the world around you in a constant state of wondrous glee, I don’t blame you. Days of being in a bad mood are just as real as days of letting your thoughts wander into your inner rose garden; they may not feel as pleasant, but they’re just as real. Okay, maybe the sun isn’t shining on your inner landscape; maybe you don’t feel terribly imaginative. But consider that stories are written every single day about the most mundane things: washing dishes, cleaning up after children, changing flat tires.

Accessing authenticity when you're no spring chicken becomes the question of one's middle years

A great deal of writing is motivated by authentic curiosity. That means that most writing begins with curiosity about some subject or other; your curiosity leads you to do some form of research (either formal, through books and libraries, or informally, by observing your own or others’ behavior). We’ve all been told that this curiosity is fundamentally child-like, and of course children are curious, but so are adults.

You are, authentically, an adult. I have grown very tired of hearing, over and over, ad infinitum, how every single emotional state reverts back to our childhood. I disagree. Most of the emotions I experience now, I did not have the maturity or depth to experience when I was a child, if I could ever even remember them. If I were to write from my authentic childhood memories, I’d have to try to recreate that lack of sophisticated vocabulary, and that would mean my writing was highly inauthentic.

I say, start now, today, from where you are. If you want to begin with a state of wonder, let it be okay that your wonder might lack the same kind of wide-eyed innocence so valued by all the how-to books I read. I lack wide-eyed innocence; that fact does not make me inauthentic, nor should your maturity or age in years make you feel as though you cannot write ‘authentically.’ Seems to me that it’s more authentic to write about what you’re looking at through your kitchen window than it is replicating the experiences of yesteryear.

As an adult, if you want to jog the part of you that is far too jaded and experienced, all you have to do is take yourself out of your comfort zone. Go without electricity for 24 hours (a not uncommon experience here in the ‘great’ Northwest in the winter, it turns out). Stop eating meat. Don’t use your car unless you absolutely have to. Read a book you would never have read under any circumstances. Wear a color you usually avoid. Drink something electric blue. The key is to write about your response to anything you do, taking note of your feelings and what comes up for you as you try each new thing.

The primary difference between being an adult and seeing the world and being a child and seeing the world lies in how many things you have already done. As an adult, you have gotten used to doing many things a certain way, but it is disingenuous for us to pretend that as children, every single thing was new to us and we experienced each new thing that happened consciously and with total awareness. Childhood was not idyllic or even all that interesting for a lot of people, and is not necessarily representative of an emotional state we all want to hark back to. Maybe you felt idiotic and dumb as a kid; that’s okay. Just as many things are, or can be, new to you now. 

Therefore, never think you can’t write with new eyes, or authentically from a place of surprise and wonder—even if your sense of wonder is tempered by age and experience and is no longer dripping with the dew of your own personal spring morning.

All you have to do is step off the place where you currently stand, and do something even just a little bit different. You will have a new experience, and for most readers these days, reading about how you handled that new, yet very real, experience, is fascinating. This fact will always be true: humans want to know the real, true, authentic stories about other humans, fictionalized or not, and will always find those stories interesting. You might not believe that, but the next time you’re stuck in a long line at the grocery store and you catch your eye wandering to the bright cover of People magazine, you will be another moth drawn to the flame of the human drama.

All you have to do is tell it like it is (for you), as they used to say. That’s as authentic as it gets—or needs to be, for that matter.

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What Does Your Main Character Look Like? Why Your Readers Care

Posted on February 25, 2012 by

Joan Fontaine as Jane Eyre? I don't think so!

How often do you imagine what your favorite fictional character looks like?

How often do you wrestle with the author over the amount of detail you need to actually see your favorite character clearly in your mind’s eye? We make an emotional connection with the protagonist, and it ends up mattering very much to us what the main character looks like. Characters have the potential to become more real for readers than their own family members, and can elicit just as much sympathy and concern.

Do these people look odd? They should; they're police sketches of fictional characters!

Charlotte Brontë sketched her protagonist, Jane Eyre, as not particularly pretty. Jane had a small mouth, a high forehead, and unhealthy skin. I have no real idea what Jane Eyre actually looked like; I have to create her in my mind’s eye. Yet when I’ve seen actresses portray her, most of the time, they seem mis-cast. One is left wondering, in fact, what did Jane look like to Charlotte Brontë? She certainly didn’t describe a woman who looked like Joan Fontaine!

This image of Jane Eyre makes sense to my imagination

When a movie is made, or TV series created, you see the actor portraying your favorite character, and you sense, without knowing why, that the casting is simply wrong. The character isn’t supposed to look like that! But how do you know?

We’re relying on our sense of what this person looks like, the person’s face we create in our minds based on the bits and pieces the author gives us. As a writer, I believe that creating the character’s face for my reader is one of my most challenging tasks.

It feels very much like painting on a small canvas using too-large brushes, because the level of detail I’d need to let you see what I see seems obsessive to get into. I must, for the sake of brevity, leave you to fill in the missing pieces of the visual mosaic I’ve attempted to create for you. Hopefully, you will care enough about the character to fill in those blanks.

This is the right look for Jane Eyre (Charlotte Gainsbourg; 1996); not glamorised or prettified.

BBC News reports today that it’s possible to apply police sketch technology to recreate the characters of our imagination, making it that much easier to be sure the character’s representation matches our inner vision:

No matter how lovingly a fictional character is rendered in print, he or she is still just a figment of the literary imagination, with a face readers can only imagine.

Inevitably, a film adaptation prompts protests that whoever was cast doesn’t get the look quite right, though it’s never truly clear just what the look should be.

But now a new website uses police technology to sketch out faces of characters described in notable novels. Called The Composites, it shows images of literary characters created by using the author’s description of a character with law enforcement composite-sketch software.

The website shows the faces of Humbert Humbert,  from Nabokov’s Lolita; Vaughan, from J.G. Ballard‘s Crash; Aomame, from Haruki Murakami‘s 1Q84; Emma Bovary, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and many others.

Now that we can see what our favorite characters look like, though, will we want to? Perhaps some things are best left to the imagination.

 

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Making Peace With Time

Posted on January 24, 2012 by

What is the meaning of time?

When you’re deep in the midst of flow, you have no awareness of time passing. Your mind, intentions, and will connect, and time, as they say, flies. It’s the rest of the time that turns us into philosophers as we try to make peace with time.

Coming to an acceptance of how you use and misuse your time, as a writer, is a daunting prospect. Making peace with the way you think about your work as a writer can be something we really just don’t ever let ourselves dwell on; after all, the word ‘writing’ is a verb. When we want to write, we’re supposed to be doing something associated with writing, ‘doing’ being the operative term.

How you imagine the concept of time has everything to do with your identity as a writer. Time does not seem like much of a metaphor when a clock ticks loudly nearby. Time is not a philosophical construct when you’re brushing your teeth—but we don’t think about the amount of time brushing one’s teeth requires. We’re too busy doing it to think about the nature of time, or to think that the amount of time we spend doing quotidian tasks, applied to writing, would seem inadequate to the task of writing (or so we believe).

Those who write must think consciously and deliberately about time— resistant or reluctant writers even more so—because the idea of time fills our thoughts in a way it does not for any other pastime. We become obsessed with the amount of time we have to spend writing. We measure the quality of the way time passes. We assess each moment critically, asking ourselves whether we’re ‘doing’ anything purposeful. Writers, and those who want to write, but aren’t, are terribly aware of

each

passing

second

as though the sun were perpetually sinking beneath our personal horizon.

Those who want to write are painfully aware of how little time is available to do the one thing they’ve decided they most want to do. When it comes to writing, we give time an awful lot of power, if you think about it. Ask yourself if there’s any other task in the course of your day you glorify in this way? If you break down the way you spend each minute of the day, you’ll find that you really don’t need anywhere near as much time to get something written as you might believe you do.

And yet, the illusion prevails that we must allot a significant amount of time to the task if we’re to give our writing the attention it deserves. It’s the way we think about writing in the first place that creates our perception of time. I see this belief often, in aspiring writers in particular. Until the writer makes peace with time and gets control over the emotions that prevent him from doing something as straightforward (yet difficult) as believing that fifteen minutes a day will lead to a finished manuscript soon enough, he will continue to procrastinate about his writing project.

The key to managing your sense of time when you want to write is to make an appointment with yourself. However, to do that, you have to first take yourself and your need to write seriously. I believe this is the most difficult hurdle for too many writer-wannabes. It’s difficult even for those who are familiar with this process, who know what to expect. There are too many hurdles, and too many books tell you some version of “oh, quit wallowing in your fears and just get on with it!”

The writer who lets himself believe that unless he has a full year of completely free days to write his novel is trapped in a perception that amount of time available to complete a task equals quality of outcome. In no other area of life do we make that belief limit our behavior as severely as we do with writing. It’s because of our beliefs about what writing means, what it entails, and what the doing of it requires that we tell ourselves we don’t have enough time to write.

It’s only when you begin to think of yourself as a writer, and at the same time, discipline yourself to see writing as a task that can be accomplished within a set amount of time each day (a half hour, for example; no more, no less—it’s important to break down the task into manageable chunks of time) that you begin to get some control over your ideas about how writing and time are interwoven.

Once we stop putting writing on the mystical pedestal we have it on, and turn it into a task that requires only a reasonable amount of time each day to effect the perfectly reasonable outcome you desire, which is to emerge, over time, with a publishable manuscript, we’ll see writing for what it is: a technē, an ability we can hone and polish with care and time.

Although Ms. Doughty over-emphasises writing's difficulty at times, her overall approach is practical and wise.

Come to the task of writing believing that you will best accomplish your eventual goal, whether it is to publish one novel or fifteen articles, by:

#1: Breaking down your larger goal down into reasonable, manageable units of time. Fifteen minutes a day is completely adequate until you’ve built up enough material to build on.

Don’t overwhelm yourself by saying, “I have to write the Great American Novel in one year.”

You very well might write the Great American Novel in one year, but not unless you determine ahead of time how much time you can reasonably spare each day to get some—not all; not a chapter, maybe not even an entire page, but some—writing done.

It is entirely realistic to think you can write a novel in one year, and/but it will require self-discipline, and self-discipline means you cannot give in to the mystique that the “best” writing can only be done with a free year of no outside work impinging on your time.

Most writers of great renown were working at some other job when they wrote their first, second, and even third or fourth novels. Don’t quit your day job, not because you lack talent, but because you do not have to.

#2: Placing a boundary around your work: set up a space and time that is inviolate and cannot be interrupted or affected by the outside world and its demands. Take your needs seriously, and don’t be swayed from your goals.

#3: Thinking about your relationship to time. Do you think about time philosophically? Metaphorically? Philosophical attitudes to the passing of time allow us to see our use of time from a larger perspective. It’s difficult to panic about having enough time to write when you know, with certainty, that you will have all the time you need—you simply have to believe it.

#4: Asking yourself, what metaphors do you use to describe time? Do you “spend” time? Do you feel that time “has gotten away” from you? Listen carefully to the metaphors you use to describe time; they will tell you a great deal about the attitudes you have that hold you back from believing in yourself as a writer.

Most importantly, do not intimidate yourself into the fear that you cannot do this. You can.

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The Silent Dialogue

Posted on January 12, 2012 by

The real story is created as we read

One of the most interesting things that happens to us as writers occurs when we read. We conduct a ‘silent dialogue’ with the text, and, to the extent we imagine the writer in our minds, making him or her seem real as we read, with its author. This imagined collaborator, the ‘author,’ guides us as we make sense of what we read, but we do all—or most—of the real work involved.

If you take notes while you read, you will inevitably ‘talk’ to the piece of writing. You might even talk out loud. If you’re like me, you ask questions of the text as you underline phrases, or draw circles around crucial words; or perhaps, words you don’t understand; ideas you agree with, disagree with, have a strong opinion about.

As soon as you begin to interact with the text, you’ve formed a relationship with its author, but it’s a silent one (unless you can somehow meet the writer and ask him or her your questions). Even so, the real relationship you’re having is not with the writer, for you are imagining him or her, even as you imagine the characters she’s created. The real relationship you’re having is with her writing, which becomes real for you as you interweave yourself, your values, your beliefs, your experiences, into what she’s written.

How could Lizzy and Jane be so patient?

I remember the first time I read Pride and Prejudice, for example. I was 16 or 17 years old, and I found myself frustrated by the slow pace the heroine’s life was taking. I could not understand how Jane Austen, with such sanguinity, allowed her protagonist, Elizabeth Bennett, to endure months of unhappiness and uncertainty over Mr. Darcy. Why couldn’t Elizabeth write to him? Why couldn’t her sister Jane let Mr. Bingley know how she felt? Why did nothing happen?

I remember yelling at that book, tossing it down in frustration, unable to continue reading. The relationship I formed with the writer I’d constructed in my mind was one of tension and irritation. I didn’t understand a lot of things in those days, but the primary thing I did not understand was that in my responses to the text, I was creating my very own version of Pride and Prejudice, the one I interwove with my responses, my ideas, my attitudes and opinions as I read.

My frustration at how slowly Darcy and Elizabeth fall in love, coupled with the arcane, stultifying social rules of Regency England, stemmed from beliefs I had formed in an era very different for young women than the one in which Austen wrote. My responses made excellent fodder for my writing, because my values reflected the changes that had happened for women since Austen’s era, and therefore inspired a paper on the freedoms young women in America took for granted.

As a teacher, I’ve encouraged students to respond to the text conversationally, focusing less on the author as we have been taught to think of him or her, instead conceiving the text as a piece of writing you can engage with directly, commenting, complaining; noticing similarities or differences between the writing and our own experiences.

Although this process is considered a form of reader-response theory or critique, my goal has not been to get the student to critique the text, but rather, to form ideas and responses that will inspire writing and assist in self-awareness and critical thinking skills.

The values and morés of the Regency Era baffled me

One of the most valuable pieces of writing any reader can engage in, therefore, is a journal or diary of responses to a piece of writing. By silently engaging with a text, you will find that you have many things to say. Your personal responses to any piece of writing will inspire you to create something new, and you’ll learn about yourself and your values as you interweave your own reality with someone else’s words.

To get an idea of how to inspire your own writing through responding to someone else’s work, see Lisa Ede’s Work In Progress. To understand the culture in which the idea of the reader or audience’s response to the writing, rather than the author per se, became an important discussion, compare and contrast New Criticism with reader-response criticism. Following I. A. Richards‘ study of reader misunderstandings and misreadings conducted in 1929, theory began to center around the idea that the reader creates the text they read, that there is no textual reality that exists a priori containing one—and only one—’correct’ meaning, that instead, the individual’s interpretation matters tremendously to how we make meaning.

In addition to this, and important to me when I teach, has been trying to convey the concept that the individual author’s personality or characteristics, while ‘important’ from the perspective of imagining authorial intention, should not derail teachers from what is even more important: getting the student to value their own writing.

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