Pumpkins

This week-end, I did a two-hour workshop at the wonderful Wabi-Sabi, the goal of which was to create a felted pumpkin. Something just for fun. A little harvest themed bit of "me time."

The instructor showed the three of us how to wrap our wool to make the pumpkin shape. It was all very herbal tea and hand-knitted sweaters. Not one of the six women I encountered that morning wore an ounce of make-up.

I was pretty sure I'd be able to finish my pumpkin first, once I worked out a hold for the form that allowed me pierce the thing faster. I moved on, before anyone else, to the gussets and stem. Unlike the others, I fashioned my leaves without resorting to cutting. Everyone oohh'd and aaah'd my final product, as they continued to finish their own.

Of course, I concealed the ridiculous amount of pleasure this gave me.

I have a problem.

I'm working on it.

The Mark

You know that thing about how 90% of success is showing up? I thought about that as I hustled to Pilates class the other day. On my way to showing up,the way I do every week.

On my way to showing up, exactly three minutes late.

About 20 minutes before class, the bargaining starts. I know its time to go. A voice whispers to me about one more phone call, or an email. Or maybe the voice just tells me to stare out the window. I obey that voice. 7 minutes later, I'll be flying out the door, still deluding myself that I won't be late. Again.

"How can I always miss the mark?", I wondered. Until I saw that I was right on target. Every time. Precisely, predictably 3 minutes late. I just hadn't seen where my real mark is.

My real mark isn't failure. But it sure isn't success, either.

Time to move the mark.

Perspective

Boys spark the imagination.

I mean the ones who have only recently become men. The ones who seem unaccostommed to their beards, and the squareness of their shoulders.

I used to try on the skin of their girlfriends. Of the girl who woke up, perhaps, beside that sleepy boy. Or who broke up with the tall, lean one, who always thrust his hands in his pockets. I used to look at a boy's hands, and feel his touch on some other woman's skin.

I would gauge whether he could break her heart.

These days, my vision is stronger. I see into the past, to smaller hands, reaching up. To bike-riding lessons. To playground days and sleepless nights. I see boys as their mothers see them.

From this perspective, you feel the heart break every time.

Why, Revisited

Most of my meta-writing thoughts are about how, rather than why.

Why I write seemed obvious. Because I want to; it makes me happy. Five Lies made me re-consider all that.

Five Lies (which I wrote) was part of the Ottawa Fringe Festival, hence my recent hiatus. We sold out our 35 seat venue (a pub basement) almost every night. The actors and director did an amazing job with our limited space. We got great reviews. Audiences seemed to like the thing.

Each night of our 8-night run, I stood at the back and watched. That was cool.

It just wasn't satisfying.

It wasn't satisfying, I think, because I want to write a novel. Novels have been my friends all my life. I need to produce one. Its just really, really hard. Probably because I care about it so much.

More than I cared about Five Lies.

Back to the drawing board.

Exhaustion

Its been a complex summer. Some of it was good (Bermuda, Muskoka and completely re-decorating my teen daughter's closet). Some of it was bad (won't bore you with that part).

I didn't write. Too exhilarated and empty from my play being staged in June, too tired from the bad stuff and too unsure about which of my 3 unfinished novels to dive into.

I also have a great new novel idea, but four unfinished novels seems promiscuous.

Its my birthday. I did some stock taking, registered for some courses in pleasurable things like felting and pottery. Today I get celebrated by people who love me. That's pretty great.

I was exhausted, but I'm not any more. I feel cleaner. Ready to go. Maybe exhaustion is like a good mental bleach.

I hope so, at least. I'm going with that.

Doing What Comes Naturally

My 12 year old daughter, who has a flair for things artistic, recently told me that she can only write when she's "emotional."

"Why is that?" I asked. She told me that the words only flow when she's wound up about something.

I get this. When I was 12, I wrote only when gripped by unbearably strong emotions. Fortunately, this happened every hour or so. In my twenties, the hormonal storm subsided, along with my productivity.

A lot of what makes writing good - the structuring, the editing, the organizing - is entirely unnatural. It needs to be learned. It can be practiced even when your inspiration is minimal.

If you're no longer 12 (alas!), you can wait a long time for inspiration to flow naturally. When it won't, why not focus on the unnatural stuff? I think of writing exercises as being akin to gardener's work. What's natural may bloom more easily once you've cultivated your skills in an entirely unnatural way.

Rules

As you may have noticed, I love making them up. I'm not as big on following them. Your personality, like mine, is rooted in how you relate to rules.

Ready for a test? Which one of the five answers below best describes you?

Rules are:

1. Helpful guidelines for stupid people;
2. The basis of civilization as we know it;
3. Valuable in direct relation to who made them and why;
4. Always capable of being turned to your advantage;
5. What rules?

Made your pick? OK, here's what you should be writing:

1. Novels
2. Non-fiction
3. Plays
4. Self-help
5. Poetry

Make sense? Good. Remember to send me my commission.

My Youth in Pizza

How many slices? Hundreds? Thousands? Like kisses, few are individually memorable. The Bronx pizzas of my eary childhood are lost in the mists of time. Only a handful (plateful?) of others offer themselves up for recall.

1. Mike's Submarines, Montreal, 1975. I was 11. I had never seen mozza that artificially elastic. Appallingly, I was expected to eat it with a knife and fork. Worse was in store. I had to take off my shoes on entering suburban homes, use a "serviette," and attend a sex-segregated Sunday school. Hello middle-class Canada, good-bye preppy/bohemian NY.

2. Portofino Pizza, Vienna, 1979. 15 years old. My best friend was an orthodox Jew. The pizza wasn't great, but (accidentally) it was kosher. We felt utterly grown up as we sipped our cheap wine. Three topics of conversation (boys, school, the future) in endless rotation.

3. An unnamed counter, Rome, 1981. 18. I threw countless dorm-room parties at my boarding school. As these reached full-tilt, and often just as some boy was starting to hit on me, I'd head out into the cool winter night, wearing my grandfather's green jacket.

The place was 2 blocks up the hill. Standing room for three customers. Two men, shirts pasted to sweat-soaked backs, heaving massive slabs of ai funghi from the ovens. 800 Lira/100 grams. Then I'd go back and let the boy keep hitting on me. This rarely turned out as well as the pizza.

4. Gino's, Kingston, Ontario, 1985. 22. A dozen toppings graced the Gino's special. My boyfriend and I substituted pineapple for sausage, and got anchovies on (my) half. After months of phoning in this order several times a week, we discovered that Gino's was only 2 blocks from campus. Gino was so tickled when we made our first order in person, he gave us free drinks.

That boyfriend has been my husband for 19 years.

There have been many pizzas since. Some were memorable. But you remember the slices of your youth with a sharpness and sweetness that the others never achieve.

Building the Platform

Not so long ago, I was fat. Sixty pounds overweight to be exact.

I hardly even saw it. I assumed that clothes were getting shoddier (and tighter) and that there was something wrong with my haircut.

When I started going to the gym, it was because a half-hour on the stationary bike meant I could watch TV uninterrupted by my 3 year-old.

One half hour. Three or four times a week. At the pace of a senior citizen.

After three years of this, I got a trainer. I ignored half of what she recommended.

But I did the other half. Three or four times a week.

A few more years passed.

I wasn't fit. I wasn't strong. I was still fat. But I was ready. I had built the platform.

When a rare lull at work let me go to the gym every day, the scale started to move. So I trimmed my intake, just a bit. In a year, I lost 40 lbs. 20lbs more went in the next few months.

Without the platform, I never could have done that. Five years where I got little to no results, except for the pleasure of dropping by the gym, watching the tube, and showering in peace.

The Lessons:

1. Keep writing, undettered by a slow pace and barely adequate performance.

2. Make it a pleasure. Otherwise you'll quit. All that slow work you've done on your platform will be lost. Write about what you like, when you like.

Don't worry about progress, as long as you're showing up at your desk at regular intervals.

Just like the lull at my work, your great opportunity may be coming. Make sure your platform is ready when it does.

How I Know

I've been busy lately. You know how it is.

The busy has been snowballing. When this happens, I build a pebbly crust around it. The current crust is about a week thick, and consists mostly of emails, and bits of my to-do list.

Not so long ago, the layers of my crusts were numbered in years.

The crust's insides can ripen into dusty emptiness, if left unchecked.

When I find some quiet time, the crust cracks. The busy blows away.

Then I start to write again. It makes me happy.

That's how I know.

100% Unguaranteed Anti-Block #4

So how do we clear the forest from the trees of your writing? Today, some cheap tricks.

Its a beautiful day, you should be writing more of your novel, but you're blocked.

Try this.

Take a good chunk, say 15 pages or so. Ideally, this is something you DIDN'T write recently and haven't read in a while.

Cut and paste this chunk into a three new documents. Open the first document. Take a deep breath, go through and cut out every other page. It'll take you less than thirty seconds.

In the second document, cut out every other paragraph. This will take longer, maybe 3 minutes.

In document three, cut out every other sentence. Its sounds tedious because it is, but it'll take less than ten minutes. Your writing is worth that, right?

Close the files and let them cook for a week or so. No peeking at the original chunk during this time. Now open the first of the files. Fill in the missing bits from memory if, and only if, you need them to maintain the integrity of the story.

Repeat with the other two files.

Prepare to be amazed. And yes, I plan to patent this technique.

A short bit of clarification....

I promised you tips for pulling the weeds out of your work, but that's going to have to wait for tomorrow.

First, a brief note of clarification.

I know you are probably not trying to write a bad novel. I get that. I'm not trying to write a bad novel either.

I'm a realist, that's all. Our stuff will likely be bad. Oh, I could use weasel words, like amateur or starter, but I respect you too much to waste your time.

Loads of other people will tell you how to a novel. They'll suggest that you can get great results by just following the rules, or, at the very least, they'll hide from the truth that the odds are dead set against this result.

I consider my willingness to admit that our results will likely range from adequate to abysmal to be my distinguishing feature.

Any badness is just a result of the probabilities and our own frailties.

As for writing a good novel, I don't think any one can tell you how to do that. You have to figure that out for yourself.

Ditching the junk

Lurking in your work are likely flashes of truth and beauty. Odds are good that they're buried under a load of junk. Your junk.

If you lack faith in your readers, you do a lot of explaining to them. This would make sense if you were teaching grade 9 English, but you're not.

If you lack faith in your ideas, you repeat them. Again and again. Over and over. See how annoying that is?

The antidotes for this faithlessness will be personal. Good editing requires detachment. There are a few tricks that can help (which I'll share next post). But there is one pre-requisite before any of these will work, and that's time.

You can't edit something you just wrote. You can and should proof-read it, but that's not editing. Your only hope of seeing your work as others see it is to put it in a drawer and forget about it.

For how long? Here's a rule of thumb: One month for short stories, 2 for one-act plays, 6 for longer plays, and a year for a novel.

A year.

Why?

In a year you will become a slightly different person. And you need those new eyes to show you what your old self couldn't see. Because your new self will see the junk covering up whatever your old self wanted to say.

My Microwave

My $800 microwave died four months ago. Its metallic corpse is still mounted above our stove. Like an exotic thoroughbred, it was elegant but frail, and fell ill if handled without ritualistic care and attention.

Life without a microwave was unthinkable. We consoled ourselves that we could drag our old one (an unsightly plastic workhorse), out of the cellar in an emergency, until we bought bought our replacement.

Imagine our shock to discover that you don't need a microwave. Period. You can defrost your breakfast blueberries on the stove top in the same time that it takes to zap them. Bagels are tastier from the oven, as is anything involving cheese. Popcorn without the chemicals is a revelation. Other foods no longer taste like science experiments.

There's even a convenience advantage to ditching the microwave. Thirty seconds too long in the mike can be a disaster. Five minutes too long in the oven is (mostly) no big deal.

Life without a microwave is not only manageable: its better.

I haven't missed the microwave once. Really. The old one is still in the cellar. I would never have thought that was possible, if it hadn't been forced on me.

Sizable chunks of your writing (and mine) are just like that microwave.

Next post, we'll talk about how to find them.

Filling up the Bank

This morning, I had 2 clear hours when I could have been writing.

I didn't.

Instead, I surfed youtube for every inspirational movie or voice performance I could find.

Sometimes you have to take it in before you can put it out.

Like Me

There are a lots of strong views on writing about race. They don't come from people Like Me.

When I was little, no one was like me. Of course, all parents say: "You're very special, dear - there's no one just like you." Generally, this is a patent lie.

Most kids had virtual doppelgangers - same blond hair, same dimples. Same cowlicks. OK, maybe they weren't identical, but the likeness was so close it forced Moms to use that weasel word: "just." And that was in my school alone. Nation-wide, I knew those kids would resemble gazillions of others.

There were no kids like me, because there were no couples were like my Black father and White mother. On TV, at least, we could watch The Jefferson's long suffering neighbours. But they didn't live in my neighbourhood, or any neighbourhood. They were fictional and childless.

Now, we're everywhere. Some of us are famous; Barack Obama, Malcolm Gladwell, Tiger Woods, Halle Berry. Many of these people side-step the issue by being known as black.

That's not a lie, but its also not the whole story.

I wish I'd known more of us. I'd have asked a lot of questions. Like, how did they answer stupid questions about their "nationality" or "background" ? I found my own road, but it would have been nice to talk to a fellow traveler.

Characters or Concepts

In script writing class, we share our initial ideas together.

This process used to scare me. I now liken it to a circle of eager farmers comparing the seeds which each cradles in the palm of his grubby hands.

Some of us talk about concepts. Class struggles, redemptive missions, the tense pull between nature and technology. The ideas sound lofty. The better ones have the potential to be spun into essays, or even textbooks.

Some of us talk about characters. Jill's still secretly furious with Emma, who had an affair with her husband twenty years ago. John got the promotion Marco wanted. Leanne fancies her priest.

The characters often sound cartoon-ish. Worse still, they reveal things about their creators. Like the time our obese classmate mournfully outlined a character who needed to escape the heavy woes "weighing her down." The rest of us steadfastly did NOT make eye contact with each other.

Here's what I've noticed, over my two years in the class. The concept plays may shoot up a few hopeful scenes, but eventually they wither and die. Every last one of them.

The character plays don't all grow to maturity. But at least some of them do. They have a fighting chance.

Let your characters tell you the story.

Concepts may have gotten you A's at school (especially when you lifted your prof's) but, as the basis for a story, they suck.

46

My age.

I remember my own mother at 46. I was 19. Invincible. My Mom, newly divorced, worried about whether she could get a job or date. Or make new friends. Or dance. Ridiculous, I thought. She's only 46.

Only 46. I'd like to reinhabit the glibness with which I spoke those words.

46 is old enough to give rise too the question: Why haven't you? As in why haven't you won the Nobel prize? Or had one of your novels published? Or even finished one?

Because lots of people have done all those things (except winning the Nobel), by this age.

Why haven't I? Why haven't you?

The answer we're afraid of is: Because you can't.

That's why authors first published in middle age cheer me enourmously. Thank you, Annie Proulx.

It can be done, even if my mother never really did learn to dance.

True Confessions # 2

I'm an adult-onset atheist.

I was an easy sell for the warm and fuzzy parts of religion. But not for nothing am I a lawyer. I can recognize a losing argument.

Religion endures. Not for much longer, perhaps, but its had an awfully good run. Sure, lots of the Bible now sounds bizarre. Like offering your daughter to satisfy the sexual appetites of house guests or the death penalty for wearing mixed fibres. Or human sacrifice. The Bible's world was different from ours.

How different? Well, 100 years ago we seriously debated whether women should vote. 250 years ago, slavery made a lot of sense to a lot of people. 2000 years ago, 1000 was M.

Now, imagine the world was 1000s of years ago. The earth is flat, and almost everything in it is a mystery. You likely believe in lots of Gods, on the QT, even if you're Jewish. Your tribe is your universe.

That's the world of the Bible. A world I love.

Not for the mind-numbing genealogies. Not for the obsessive-compulsive brutality of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, or for the psychedelic sadism of Revelations.

I love the stories. Jealous Cain. Joseph, weeping on his reunion with the long lost brothers who almost killed him. Esther's courage. Jacob's love for Rachel, burning bright for all those years that he tended her father's sheep. The good Samaritan.

Thousands of years ago, without pens, pencils, books, or paper, people recorded these stories. They're still compelling.

That's more than miraculous enough for me. If I have faith in anything, I have faith in stories.

Where does it happen for you?

Ideas have been hurling themselves at me for a long time.

Sometimes they slip by before I can write them down. Sometimes they stay with me stubbornly over months or even years, until I yield to their demands to let me out of your head and onto a page, goddammit!

I don't pursue them. Not usually. Every once in a while I have to: for assignments, or because I'm expected to make some original remarks, or something like that. I find inspiration doesn't take well to being chased down and trussed up. The results of this process are rarely appetizing.

This morning, an idea came to me as I was lying in bed, with an hour or so left to go before the alarm would sound. I've now lost that idea, which is annoying, but its also quite aside from the point I'm about to make.

It also struck me - and I managed to remember this part - that most ideas come to me in the wee hours, while I wait for the alarm.

Why? Its warm and secure, perhaps. Most of the year, where I live, its also pitch black. I won't be interrupted. I'm relaxed. I'm still wrapped in the texture of dreams.

I'm also just a little bit bored. Ideas abhor a vacuum.

In about 40 years of thinking about stories, I never appreciated the importance of being in my bed, 6 am.

Where and when do your ideas get delivered?