Figures of Speech, a poem revisited

In the early years of this blog, when I was writing and posting poems, I posted this one.  It has become, over the years, one of the most visited posts on my blog; the vast majority of those who seek the page hail from the Philippines.  Because "Figures of Speech," about the young man now headed off for his senior year of college, is still essentially true, I revisit it this afternoon. 

Sometimes just a few white saucers will float down from the sky
and I want to wake you. Snow, I might say. Open your eyes.
Or somebody funny standing on a corner will, apropos of nothing,
throw a jigsaw dance, and I want to instruct, Now there’s a scene
for your next story, as if you were not already
looking through windows.

That’s the hardest part, for me, of getting old — remembering
your independence, asking your opinion before lamenting mine,
understanding that the way I happen to chase hawks at dawn
is something you’ve already made excuses for.

There were years of being your mother when your childhood
was the first childhood, when time was you trailing balloons,
the hat you wore, the afternoon we climbed the rocks in Maine
and squinted at the sun, and that was how I learned love and why
I could not foresee not waking you to snow,
to the first factor in a suburban metaphor.

Time isn’t then anymore. You leave when you want to,
you sing behind your door, you paper the table
with the morning’s news, and in the spaces in between
the instances you spend with me, I am assaulted by the memories
of my own first childhood. I calculate figures of speech at dawn.
I write until I bless us both with losses.

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I have written

... the first full page of a new novel.

I had not started on something utterly new in at least three years.

I was afraid I had forgotten how. 

A first page is a stake in the ground, is all.

A first page says anything is still possible.

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After a hiatus, I consider writing again

"You'll never even know that you are taking the antibiotics," the doctor said, and given my size (not quite 105 pounds) and my history with medications (abysmal), I thought, hmmm.

So that perhaps I am the only person ever on whom antibiotics worked a strange kind of un-magic, or maybe it's the heat, or maybe waiting for literary news plays tricks on my mind, but I have not been me for awhile.  Yesterday it took me seven hours to write a client proposal that should have taken half the time.  Two days ago, I was stumbling about in the opening pages of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (This is Benjy, I kept reminding myself.  You are not supposed to understand everything at once.)  Every night now, I have either not slept or had terrible nightmares when I tried.  And writing a book, or even a page of a book, seemed a task that only either a fool or an infinitely smarter person would undertake.

Today I am that fool (I know I am no smarter).  Today (give me an hour or three, to warm up even more to the notion), I am going to see what happens when I stare at a page and ask myself, Okay.  So.  What in the world happens next?

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Editing Thyself

Last night, toward the close of my talk at Rosemont College (what a fine group of people), a question came up from the very back row: Can you tell us about how you go about editing?

I answered thusly: The work begins with paper and pen, scribbled at some strange hour in handwriting I can barely interpret a day or so later. I then rewrite my scribbles, still with pen, making numerous changes as I go. Next I'm on the computer, typing things in, and here again, every sentence is weighed, and many are shifted. Two pages at a time, typically, and when the next two pages are layered in, they never quite fit with the first two pages, so editing begins again in earnest. Every time new pages come in, I'm reading back, several pages, then reading forward, to help achieve a seamlessness. And all of that leads to a first draft, which is only a first draft and never nearly a whole.

It is creating the whole, I indicated, that is in the end the hardest thing. It's easy to write sentences. It's possible to write passages. Often chapters congeal. Books, entire books, remain, to me, a mystery. Sometimes I get there. Sometimes I don't. My drawers are littered with lovely passages that never found their home.

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Verb Wars

Whenever the book that I am writing isn't working, the problem lies mostly with the verbs. Nouns can be too easy. Adverbs and adjectives, used injudiciously, obscure. But if the verbs are wrong (dull, passive, unlustered) then the story is wrong, too—flat and fizzled.

I've got myself a verb problem right now. I need lift and soar.

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Let the Writing Take You Where

The only way to free yourself from the fear of writing is to do the writing. The only way to advance the work is to sit with it. Perhaps the hardest part of writing is the book's final quarter. And if you write like I write, which is to say scene by scene and absent an outline, you are writing with no safety net. You have jumped and you are hanging from a bungee cord. You do not know if you have a book until you write its final line.

There's panic bound up in that. There is (but of course) anxiety.

But there is also the essential-to-me element of surprise, the waking up to the I don't know what, to the question, Where is this story taking me?

Yesterday, after a morning of mulling and worry, sketching and retreating, I turned to the computer to type up the page I thought I had in my head. The first sentence was how I'd constructed it, rehearsed it. Into the second I inserted an uncalculated detail. That detail took me off the expected trail, so that by the fourth sentence, my well-rehearsed scene was being substituted by the unforeseen and strange. I went with it—what was my choice?—and just as I came to a stopping place, a tree limb fell on a wire nearby. Our house went off the grid; my page went off the screen. When power returned just a few minutes later, I had nothing but a vague sense of what I'd written moments before.

I couldn't, I discovered, recreate the scene. I tried. I got that first sentence in, the second one, too, but now somewhere inside sentence number five, a new detail fought its way in. Trust it, trust yourself, I told me.

Never the light at the end of the tunnel until there is the light.

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Excess

The hardest thing, I think, is to identify excess in your own work.

The best sort of editor helps you see it.

I move through the revisions of this Centennial novel, trusting the instincts of my editor, Laura Geringer, learning from them. I move through it considering this third season of Mad Men, which seems in some ways thwarted by too many competing story lines. Something about the rhythm feels slightly off to me. Something about the places and things on which the directors choose to dwell. Mad Men remains my favorite show on TV. But I am watching it as a writer, measuring its rhythms, standing back, even as I try to think and work harder against my own story-telling obsessions.

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Why All Writers Should Watch Mad Men

Tell me why you love "Mad Men", the AMC TV show that vivifies 1960s Manhattan, the dawn of a certain kind of advertising, the red pucker of big lips, and unblinkered gazing into another's eyes. All right, perhaps you haven't seen the show, perhaps this post is thereby to you seemingly irrelevant, but nonetheless, I have climbed onto this cliff and I will stay here until I explain:

I love "Mad Men" for its subtlety. Yes, subtlety. I know we are talking ad men and 1960s style TV, but I claim subtlety as the reason that all writers out there should be watching this show—sitting up straight and taking note of how the hard stuff gets done.

There are, for example, those leitmotifs. There is the submergence of the same, the way the show seems to move on, spiral forward, until suddenly the show's past is its present again—an old argument surfaces, a familiar sweater appears, a longing is ripped back open, and the whole thing burgeons with the messy complication of life and how life is lived. I am not going to fight you, Don Draper says to his wife in one episode. I'll say what you want me to say, but I won't fight you. And there it is—an answer to a question, all a viewer has to know about what has gone on behind the scenes in a household that is permanently unsteady. Somewhere off stage, an argument we had seen coming but did not fully witness has been had. Agreements have been made. The rules have changed.

One of the hardest things about writing well is recognizing that life is never neat, never only present-flowing, never summarily concluded. Writers have to honor that fact without burdening the reader with knotted tangents. "Mad Men" honors the messiness of life while being one of the most gorgeous and most carefully crafted TV shows of all time.

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Untitled

Do you know where you are going? I asked yesterday, and I loved the diversity of responses—the absolutely and the never, the somewhere in between.

I live my life lost, I said, and what I meant by that is this: When writing any story I am, from the very start, grounded in place. I am grounded in voice and in mood and in an elixired idea, and soon—perhaps thirty pages in—I have a general feel for structure.

And yet and nonetheless I feel strange, off kilter, lost because at first and for a very long time, things happen, and I'm not quite sure why. A character will speak, insist, remember, and I cannot claim to know just what her motivations are.

So I let her loose. I let her dwell or skirt or fear or flashback, and in all of this I am coming to understand just who she has the possibility of being. Half of it will be jettisoned later, maybe more. The apparent meaning of words will shift. A sliver of something will become a key, recurrent theme, and I simply yield to it. Over and again I write these books, until they let me into themselves.

This is not economical writing, but it is writing toward knowing, toward finally finding out. It is the antithesis, as I have written previously in this blog, of Mr. Irving's write-the-last-sentence-first. I don't suggest my process as right or wrong. It is only that: my process.

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Novel in Progress/An Excerpt (2)

The house is a storybook house. A huff and a puff and we’ll blow it down house. The roof is soft and tumbled. The bushes grow tall past the sills. Evergreens lean in from high above the cracked slate path, torpedoing pinecones to the ground. The floor slats are slants and the furniture slides, clawing away at the varnish. Big sheets of snaggled paint have split from Sophie’s bedroom wall and, like glaciers, crashed.

But there is a window—one—that is not tumbled, that is whole. Sophie waits until her mother leaves for work before pulling down the mid-air stairs and climbing into the pink scratch of the attic. Through the window at the far end of the room falls an oblique square of sun. Toward that oblique Sophie makes her way (careful on the cross beams, careful with the splinters, careful not to fall into the quilty insulation—that’s what the pink is, insulation), then sits watching the world beyond, the house across the street, the sloppy dog, the scramble of legs and tail that is the dog. The dog rumbles and slides, keeping guard over his house. He runs the grass alley between the fence and the porch and scurries a squirrel into a tree. He barks at the white car with the pistol muffler that goes roaring past—down the narrow asphalt, gone.

The dog is preamble; he waits.

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Headed for Perfection (or at least pointed that way)

Those of you who are in the middle of writing something are also, inevitably, in the middle of revising something.

Over at Brimstone Soup, Holly Cupala, a young adult author (and a Readergirlz marvel), has been shining light on the revisionary path with a program called Summer Revision Smackdown. I've learned a lot in previous posts, and today Holly is hosting me, as I think out loud about my own revisionary patterns, and instincts. Check it out, if you have a chance.

Also, Kathye Fetsko Petrie, a big-hearted local literary legend has a piece in the Examiner about authors' summer reading lists. What, she wanted to know, are some of us reading this summer?

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Waiting for the Words

Sometimes you just have to decide: A book, this current book I'm writing, is going to take a long time. Days to conjure a single scene. More days to find the words. Many more to find the right ones. I'd been upset with myself for thinking (it seemed) inefficiently and without directed purpose, but then this morning I decided: Let the process be. Let the book find itself. Wait for the fog to burn off. Know that what I have is good, and trust more good to follow.

Live in the meantime.

How freeing it was, to decide. To say: On this one matter, at least, I will not berate myrself. I will, when I am stuck, read. I will sit outside. I will take a long walk with my son, and tonight I will join old friends at dinner and laugh until I cannot even breathe.

Now, alone in the house, I watch the clouds unstack themselves. I sit near the breeze.

Tomorrow a page may come, or it may not. That, too, is writing.

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Heart Healing

In a story posted yesterday on MSNBC.com, Bill Briggs writes of the doctors who are "increasingly studying—and employing—the physiological dance music does with the body's neurons and blood-carrying cells." Of patients whose rooms are filled with the sounds of harp or Brazilian guitar, post surgery. Of melody's vital role in slowing heart beats, spiking pituitary growth hormone, or dilating the tissue in blood vessels. Of the relationship between song and healing. The harp, as it turns out, has extraordinary healing powers as an instrument whose vibrations are capable of going "to the deepest places of the body," according to Tami Briggs, a harp therapist. But listening to "joyful" music is essential, too, a newly prescribed regimen for those concerned about heart health, and Mozart, too, is a recommended cure.

I write often, on this blog, of dance. My house, when I'm not working, is jammed with song. At night, in the dark, music is there, in my thoughts, and everything I write is pinned to rhythm.
I have never been able to tame my own urgent need for lyric, melody, lift, and sometimes I have been ashamed by that—ashamed by my need to dance, my desire to move, my insatiable want of more song.

Perhaps, I think now, the music is keeping me alive—saving me (mostly) from the extremes of myself and, at least for now, for a while longer, protecting my big, fractured heart.

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Speed and Power

The question becomes: How does one write a scene that powers forward (can't be stopped) and yet (and for me there is always the and yet) makes room for the stop-to-watch-it-work invention of language?

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"Dare you,"

she said, with her eyes, and I took the dare; why not? I took it for who I haven't been and for who I might still be, took it for all the times that somebody said, What you are isn't right enough. What you want won't be yours. What you write is too small.

But puny can be outsized, too.

And small has meaning.

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The Rehearsal

It was late, Easter Sunday. She was putting on her show. No one but me, my son, my husband in her audience, and we were in shadows, in the brisk night, on the wrong side of the glass. We were, I am certain, unseen.

She stood and declared. She fluttered her hands, bent forward, seemed to walk away, but then came back so that she might peer out over the empty chairs and tables, and begin again. More feverish now, more determined to enrapt and engage, and I thought of me writing. Of me in my various rooms, alone, on my walks, alone, in my head, alone, exclaiming and gesticulating just the same—trying to hear myself first, trying to persuade me, so that later, when something I write is in another's hands, the words break free.

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For Whom Do We Write?

In my post yesterday, "Boy among Girls," I riffed a bit on a conversation I'd recently had with my always dashing, never boring ballroom dance instructor, Jean Paulovich. He'd made a claim a week ago that turned on this fortissimo: men and women are two separate species; hence, the stories women tell about men have always and will forever devolve into a frustrated yelp of incomprehensibility.

I should say here about Jean that he is a purebred Belarussian and yet, since coming to this country less than ten years ago, he has become fluent in English, knowing more about root terms and grammar than most native speakers. He reads widely and deeply, is astonishingly quick witted, and he's an amateur psychologist to boot, a skill that, it seems, any ballroom dance instructor with aspirations for success must acquire and daily hone.

So that his comment caused me to step back and think, and now Kelly, aka September Mom, has thoughtified me (shall we say?) once more, with her comment/question: Beth, when you write, do you prefer writing to a primarily female audience? Does it change how you approach a story? I love the question so much that I yield this blog to it, and hope, of course, for your thoughts on the matter.

For me, the answer is this: I write the truest story I can find (be that memoir, poetry, fable, history, fiction) with the most-right language I can muster. I am by nature and by turns contemplative, ornery, outspoken, muted, at peace, distressed, entirely set on establishing a rhythm, then full of schemes to shatter the lyric's spell. I don't write for women, per se, nor for men, but for any who are willing to enter into the worlds I create. Much of the time, it is true, the willing are women, though I have heard from male readers of all my books, and I have treasured their responses to, say, Into the Tangle of Friendship, my memoir about friendship, and Still Love in Strange Places, my memoir about marriage, and Ghosts in the Garden, my memoir about growing up and older at Chanticleer, and House of Dance, a novel whose narrator is a 15-year-old girl. Flow, my autobiography of the Schuylkill river, was written in a woman's voice, and yet so many of its readers were men—men with whom I have had long conversations about time and love and hope and survival.

I have four brand new books on my desk to read. Two are by men, two are by women (more on these soon). I need, in my world, both men and women. I need their thoughts, I need their stories, I need their friendship.

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The Preemptive Howl

These claims, only, can be made for this day: I gave it over to dreaming. To preparing even more for the young writers' workshop I'll be teaching tomorrow, though my agenda is jammed already—more to do, more to see, more to talk about than the girls and I could possibly squeeze into one day.

And yet, how can we call tomorrow a success if we don't also speak of Rebecca Solnit's way of seeing, for example, the color blue? The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. How can we not retrieve Jean-Dominique Bauby from the brink? The last time I saw my father, I shaved him. It was the week of my stroke. How can we talk about beginnings and voice if we do not begin with Ondaatje? Drought since December. How can we claim to move toward the authentic and raw, if we do not tantrum with C.K. Williams, if we do not share his "preemptive howl"? And did you really think it would be possible for me to face a group of aspiring teen writers without reading aloud, with them, from The Book Thief? An original book and a popular book. You see, I'll tell them. It can be done.

And then I'll remind them of what Natalia Ginzburg had to say. I'll warn them, so I can warn myself: There is a danger of cheating with words that don't really come from within, that we have fished up from outside at random and skillfully pieced together, for we do become cunning. There is a danger in becoming cunning, in cheating. It is a very difficult craft, as you can see, but the most wonderful in the world.

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What is the Point?

These things happen in a day:

1) The sky breaks bright but the neighbor's chimney steams, predicting the weather to come. You sit with the writing that wasn't working yesterday, and then you add one word to a once-stuck sentence and the passage tilts and the world opens, but just for a moment.

2) A crane flies just west and lands on the roof of the house that stands on the diagonal across the street. The house they've been building for two years now. The house that has yet to suggest welcome. Then the crane takes off again and you're at the window of your office, chasing it with your eye, wondering what it knows that you don't, and where it's going.

3) A friend reveals the things the friend has grown to envy; the list is almost precisely your own. Not wealth. Not things. But talent, yes, and sentences that come when you beckon. And also (not on the friend's list, but yours): Beauty unimpeached by regret.

4) You face a long list of things that must be done, and precisely because of that you read the latest New Yorker instead. The Daniel Zalewski article about Ian McEwan. The thousands of words. The penultimate paragraph. You have to read that far to get the matter you need, which on this day echoes the thoughts in your head, only with greater and more resolute precision, for this is McEwan, after all:

"You spend the morning, and suddenly there are seven or eight words in a row. They've got that twist, a little trip, that delights you. And you hope they will delight someone else. And you could not have foreseen it, that little row. They often come when you're fiddling around with something that's already there. You see that by reversing a word order or taking something out, suddenly it tightens into what it was always meant to be."

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Writing my Life: Excerpted from Talk

I take my camera most everywhere; it is my habit. I take it because the weight of it around my neck reminds me to see—to decide against deciding that my world is overly familiar, already known. I look for cracks and fissures, for the new or the newly announced. I look for the water to run a different color in the stream, or for the sun to strike the pond at winter with deafening, delirious force. If I can’t see, then I don’t know, and if I don’t know, I’m not writing, and while some may question the value of the written word, I shall make this claim for stories: They spook and spur us. They recall for us. They suggest the tremble of the whole so that we may believe in the lives we’re living.

Live your life, some say. Don’t write it. But I don’t know how to do one without the other. I don’t know how to feel alive unless I’m writing.

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