Writing on . . . Reheating

It’s been an exhausting week: what with admin meetings at work, friendships, looming finals…and the manuscript. The admin meetings are part and parcel of the job; I’m not particularly good at them, but as I become more comfortable with teaching, I become more comfortable with teachers (professing/professors?). I wouldn’t be without the friendships. For perhaps the first time in my life, they are real and while they, for the most part, glide happily below the surface, occasionally, like turtles, they stick their heads above the water and have me pointing and shouting from the bank. Finals are finals: lots of proof-reading and copying and stuffing into envelopes. Rather be setting them than taking them. Which leaves…the manuscript.

I need to find a new name for it. Manuscript makes me think of parchment, illuminated letters and monks. Book sounds like something that’s published…and this isn’t. I am open to suggestions. But whatever I call it, I had to force myself to open the ring binder and start reading. I had to know. Was I still in love with it, or was I, as with a husband or two, blind to its faults?

I started reading in bed on Thursday morning. With a green pen in my hand. I reached the halfway point by lunchtime, ate a writer’s lunch of soup and stale bread (more bad planning than penance), and then pushed through to the end. I spent several hours rewriting tiny sections, sorting out some continuity problems, and some grammar issues. But at the end, I was okay. I kind of “fancied” the first three chapters but didn’t feel they would work long term, was strongly attracted to the middle bit, and loved the end.

I emailed it to Kay. I wouldn’t trust it with anyone else. She’s both my critic and my best and longest writing friend. I know she’ll tell me what she thinks. And then I’ll have to act on that—whatever that means—and send it out.

It’s a relief to know I still believe in the book. I couldn’t face re-entering the submission/rejection arena if that wasn’t the case. I’m also glad because now I can change focus to finishing The Weather House. I am very excited about that project. Two weeks at VCCA, solitude, a suitcase of diaries, photographs and poetry for inspiration, and no distractions. Bliss.

Writing on . . . Editing in the Woods

I’m camping over Thanksgiving. They’ve forecast snow, so I packed thermals and a woolly hat and gloves. I’ve also packed a hard copy of The Beginning Things; I’m going to drag a chair down to the river and read through the manuscript. I need to reconnect with the characters and the story before I can bear any critique. My good friend Kay Sexton has graciously offered to read it and comment before I send it to Scribe, so I want to be able to send her a PDF when I get back on Sunday.

Did you ever see The Flintstones? When Fred needs to slow the car down, he sticks his feet through its floorboards, and in a stream of grit and gravel, rocks and steam, he brings the car to a halt before it hits the house. Kay is my Fred. Or at least his fee: she recommended a month of clear time between rejection at PP and submission to Scribe. Time, she said, to review the words that could be cast, if not in stone, then on antipodean paper.

So The Beginning Things gets to spend a few days in the woods and then a week or so in England before it heads for Australia.

On another tack, I head out for VCCA in just over a month. I’m gathering together materials: notes, diaries, journals, photos, poetry I want to read. I intend to hibernate in my studio for the full two weeks, surfacing only to collect trays of food.

Writing on . . . Isolation

While driving over to Hurt yesterday, trying both to put together a game plan for publishing The Beginning Things and to reconcile myself to its recent rejection, a thought came to me. In the two years of its writing, I had shared only four or five chapters with a fellow writer*. The other twenty-one chapters went from my head to the page and to my publisher with zero input from anyone.

What presumption! What recklessness! What sheer foolhardiness!

Especially since on Thursday evening, I had told a classroom of new writers how important it was to gain input and insight into your own work-in-progress from peers whose writing you respected.

I have moved away from the very things that helped me to get where I am today: a community of writers, critique, and revision. I have lost that which my friend Kathy holds high on her writer’s list--an open mind.

For me, the thing that moves me away from workshop is always the same: fear. Fear of rejection, fear of revision, fear that the work is as good as it is going to get…and that’s not going to be good enough. The reality is that workshop provides pre-submission feedback: the good, the bad and the ugly. Better to have it up front from writers you respect than to receive it in the mail from publishers who can only point out the problems, and who can offer no concrete advice as to solutions.

The game plan is still the same. Wait on Scribe Publishing for an answer and kick start an online-writers group of six or seven fellow writers.

* Kay told me that Tot was whining and that she didn’t like her very much in one of these early chapters. Much the same remark I received from Judy Shepard. There’s a very good chance that they are both right. A workshop in which I TOOK the advice offered could have turned the voice around right at the beginning.

Writing on . . . Wanna buy a book?

I had forgotten how slamming rejection can be. I think I knew when I saw the Permanent Press envelope in my mailbox this morning that it contained bad news. Bad news is easier to write and read than speak and hear. And so it was: while one of the partners enjoyed reading The Beginning Things, it didn’t, on some level, satisfy her. The other partner, who was also lukewarm about Sticklebacks and Snow Globes, was “not as involved [in the manuscript] as he would have liked.”

I use the phrase “slamming.” That’s what it’s like. I read the letter in the car in the driveway, and it slammed me down into my seat and into my head. I reread it on the sofa and could feel my own negativity pushing its way into the house.

Rejection is nothing new. I had hoped that Stickleback's successful hard cover run followed by a paperback reprint followed by two foreign rights sales would help get this second title on the shelves. But if the financial backers aren’t behind it, none of the predecessor’s history matters.

So, here’s the plan. I’ve contacted the Australian agent to see if she would like first refusal. And I’ve emailed two writer friends to tell on myself and on the situation. I’ve set up a new “Submissions” spreadsheet in Excel for The Beginning Things, and I’ll sit down with it tonight and re-read to make sure it’s as good as I can get it.

And then I start again with the whole submissions deal.

Ack.

Writing on . . . Relief

I finished the sequel to Sticklebacks at the end of July. It took two summer breaks to complete. Summer 2008 took me to chapter 12 and summer 2009 took me to chapter 24. I proofed it, printed it, wrapped it in its paper band and shipped it to Permanent Press, my publisher, before I left the country to visit my family in England.

That was about seven weeks ago, and I haven't heard a thing yet. I bugged the office manager to make sure they received the package...and they had.

Writing is hard, but there is something driven about it. I can dread sitting down, fearful that the words won't come, and yet, words do. Sometimes they're not great, but always there's that tumbling sensation as the images and their words arrive and I struggle to keep up, to keep them as fresh on the page as they were when they first turned up. By the end of the session, I'm tired but happy.

The waiting for acceptance or rejection is hard, too, but in a scarier way. No news means no rejection which means I don't have to do or face anything: If they accept it, brilliant. But they're "meant to," aren't they? I mean, if I'm a "real writer," I will have written a book worth publishing, won't I? And if they reject, what then? The long slow slog for an agent, the endless submissions, the endless turn-down slips.

So I press "Send/Receive" and wait for an email and then, when it doesn't arrive, I get on with the day. School work, friends, reading, new poems and ideas for chapters for books not yet written. I have it on good authority that this doesn't get any better.

Writing on . . . Pirandellism

Just finished Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author and musing on Pirandello's quest for answers to the "what is real" question. The play is a great arena for the question and, for me, an exploration of the whole character creation deal.

The father (a pure Character) explains to the Producer (an expert at staged reality) that he should maintain a distrust of the moment's reality since it morphs into illusion once the moment has passed. He then goes on to explain the Character's reality and how it can be expanded by the audience and yet limited by the author. He says, "When a character is born he immediately assumes such an independance even of his own author that everyone can imagine him in scores of situations that his author hadn't even thought of putting him in, and he sometimes acquires a meaning that his author never dreamed of giving him."

It's perhaps trivial, but consider the heart throbs of modern day soap operas and hospital dramas. As women discuss (or consider) Grey's McSteamy or other similar characters, they no doubt place him in a host of personal situations that have never (and maybe should never) be written for him. And yet each situation can be satisfyingly real for the Imaginer.

Pirandello's father character goes on to discuss the Character's nightmare--the author who gives birth to the character in their own imagination and then refuses to give them life on the page. The Stepdaughter describes the way she "tempts" the author to move her onto the page, all without success. She tells herself, "Ah, what scenes, what scenes we suggested to him! What a life I could have had!"

As I work on The Beginning Things and get reacquainted with Tot and meet Dan Grad for the first time, each one moves from the imagination onto the paper and into my own reality. It scares me a little to think there might be a Stepdaughter somewhere outside hammering to come in.

Writing on . . . Orwell

I heard on NPR that yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the publication of Orwell's 1984. I read 1984 last year and, as ever, kicked myself for not having got to it much sooner. As a writer and a general dickerer with words, I'm fascinated by Orwell's projections re. the demise of language. His character Syme is working on a new edition of the official dictionary and is excited by his task of "destroying words--scores of them, hundreds of them, every day." He says the team is committed to "cutting language down to the bone" (page 45 of the Signet Classic version).

Orwell, the master of the snappy declarative sentence, was keen on cutting, if not to the bone then to the quick. He believed that the English language was being assaulted from all sides, with one of the main attackers being Insincerity which hid inside ornate language, phrases and cliches.

Orwell's essay sets out six rules that will save the English language. With another semester of Freshman Comp looming for the fall, I'm going to add the essay to my summer reading list.