False Starts

One of the odd things I learned after (finally) getting serious about writing last year: the pure mechanics of the thing matter as much or more than the quality of the ideas. In other words, writing is as much about sitting in a chair, hands on the keyboard, fingers moving, as it is about having something to say.

You see, inside every writer there's an inner fourth-grader—the one who got beaten up on the way to school, the one who forgot her lines during the play, or, in my case, the one who wore big leg braces and gray-plastic framed glasses thicker than scotch tumblers—who still hates him or herself. This inner fourth-grader says, with a voice in much the same timbre as Carrie White's mother, "They're all going to laugh at you!" So, instead of writing sentence after sentence and piling up draft pages, you end up killing everyone in sight with your telekinetic ability. Well, maybe nothing so extreme, but you don't write any drafts. And this leaves you feeling like killing everyone in sight with your telekinetic ability.

Without a draft, there's nothing to edit. With nothing to edit, there's nothing to send out. And so it goes.

It works like this: you wake up with an interesting thought. You lie in bed for awhile with this interesting thought. This thought is good. This thought is better than good—it's book-sized. This thought has energy, profundity, it is so great and so huge it will spill over from chapter to chapter until you have a manuscript, perfect and precise and ready for the printer.

You get out of bed. You make a cup of coffee, tea, what-have-you, and you sit down to write. You write two sentences. You sip whatever is in your mug. The sentences don't look so good. You revise them. That's better. Now what comes next? Ah, one more sentence. No, that's not going anywhere. More sips from the mug. I'll start again, you think. And you erase the meager sentences you have. And the page remains blank. Or you write a little more and then erase again. And now the idea is gone.

The inner fourth-grader has just played a hideous false note on his saxaphone, and, instead of continuing the solo already in progress at the school talent show, he reddens and starts over, and starts over again, until he finally quits the stage in tears.

At some point, you must let the fourth-grader make his mistakes. It's too difficult to shut the poor bastard up! Trust me, he's 10. He knows how to annoy. He will provoke, wheedle, and irritate you right out of productivity with his constant questioning and self-reproach. It doesn't matter if the solo sucks—let it rip, kid. It doesn't matter. Nobody's really listening, and you can go back and make it better or cut things out when you are editing.

Of course, it's easier to do this if you imagine completing something manageably short each day. I write 1,000 words. My word processor has a nifty word count in the lower right corner that lets me know how far along I am. Most of the time the writing is crap. But it doesn't matter. No one cares. Save caring for the revision.

I know these things; still, I have quite a few false starts this month. Each false start is now between 1,000 and 2,000 words long instead of just a few sentences. The new problem is that I have a finished manuscript with which to compare what I'm working on today. The fourth-grader still won't shut up, and he's found new lines of attack—what if it's not as good as the last one? shouldn't this manuscript be longer? your characterization sucks compared to last time! you call that plot development?!

So the fourth-grader never goes away, I guess. Fortunately, I can remind myself I don't care what he looks like anymore. It doesn't matter. It never really did.

A Query Letter

I sent off fifty pages of the novel, bundled with a SASE and query letter, to a literary agency. This, I suspect, is much the same as approaching a stranger and asking for bus fare. "Dude! I'll pay you back double tomorrow!" Ah, well. It seemed like a good, small agency with a nice client history. To my amazement, they said they were actually interested in representing "literary fiction" and "seeking new clients." This is like seeing a unicorn. I felt I had to act before it teleported away.

I spent two days on the query letter. As with writing the novel, simply finding the courage to face my appalling lack of perfection, to write something down, and to send it out seemed to be the primary issue. Since I'm procrastinating before writing my 1,000 words today, I might as well address a related literary incident (ok, loosely related—it has to do with courage, both in deed and (again loosely) in symbol). Apparently, the latest winner of the Newbery Medal for children's book of the year, The Higher Power of Lucky by children's librarian Susan Patron, contains the word "scrotum." In the book, the scrotum in question belongs to a dog.

Naturally, the American Tightass Club of Children's Librarians have organized to ban the book from school libraries. The ATCCL wants to be sure that no scrota pass through the hallowed doors of our nation's school libraries. Sorry, boys.

One of the most hilarious aspects of this story is a quote from Dana Nilsson, a leader of the anti-scrotum charge and apparent contender for president of the ATCCL. Nilsson, a teacher and librarian (god help us), said in this Sunday's New York Times, "I don't want to start an issue about censorship, but you won't find men's genitalia in quality literature." Nilsson, having not read the book she seeks to ban, seems unaware that the scrotum in question is canine, not human. She also hasn't read much Lawrence or Joyce, I suppose. (One of my favorite jokes in Ulysses, by the way, is about the "scrotumtightening sea.")

To be fair, Nilsson did modify her remark later, restricting the necessary absence of male genitalia to quality literature "for children." This seems even more troubling to me, though. Why define children's literature negatively? Why should children's literature consist of books with things left out? How odd to refuse to give the proper name for a part of the body to an audience of 10-12 year olds. That seems like a good way to produce gutless and unimaginative adults.

But then, the ATCCL needs future members, I suppose.

Bleeding Radiators, II

I had hoped that the benign spirits of Washington and Lincoln would shine down upon our heating system over the weekend and restore order. Alas, the pressure remains low in our boiler. Like Washington himself, perhaps my radiators were bled a bit too much.

I'm feeling a rising sense of anxiety because our tenants, my friend J and his son E, only have a few radiators working at capacity now. And it is still winter.

When T and I decided to buy a house in Buffalo, we bought one split into two apartments (upstairs/downstairs) so we could pay our mortgage with the rental income while I wrote. And it was a good plan. I make almost as much from rent as I did teaching multiple college courses (sad, isn't it?), and we can write off a good deal of the improvements to this very old house on our taxes.

The downside is I have to work on the house, which takes time away from writing. A few of the small projects I have done by myself this year include: tearing old sheathing off the garage roof and reshingling, painting 1/2 of the exterior of the house (so far), putting a new floor in the rear entry, hanging a new steel door in the rear entry, and replastering and painting the walls in the foyer (which are 25' tall). There is more, but I forget.

I enjoy the work. It is not so much the desk time stolen by these projects that impacts my writing, it is the sense of accomplishment that is the problem. I enjoy the work too much.

When I build, renovate, or restore some part of the house, I have very nearly the same emotional experience as when I draft, revise, or edit some piece of creative writing. My compulsion to write comes from the need to craft something—to make something out of nothing or to improve on what I've already done. Once I get that feeling from a house project, my jones for writing begins to flag. I wonder if other writers feel this way? I'll bet they do.

At any rate, I'm calling professionals to deal with our hydronic problem. Now I can work on a query letter.

Bleeding Radiators, I

I grew up in Newport Beach, California. I went to college in San Diego. I never knew until today that radiators bleed; or, rather, that they need to be bled.

You see, now I live in Buffalo, New York—a writer's city. Mark Twain lived here and wrote for the newspaper. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived here. Ishamel Reed used to teach at the high school in my neighborhood. I could go on. Really.

Quite a few literary luminaries have called Buffalo home. Why am I here? Well, I moved here for graduate school; primarily I wanted to study with one of my poet-heroes while earning a Ph.D. in American lit. I thought it would make me a better writer. To be honest, the more compelling reason is that I was afraid to strike out on my own earlier. So my adviser at UC San Diego said I had, absolutely had, to go to SUNY at Buffalo's maverick, theory conscious, raucous English department for my Ph.D. And he was right. And it was great.

But then we stayed, my wife and I. We stayed because we love this town. For one thing, it's gorgeous. I'm serious. It was the wealthiest city in the U.S. around 1900, and the architecture still shows it. Frank Lloyd Wright built several homes here. Frederick Law Olmstead layed out the system of parks and parkways. Joseph Ellicott designed the core street system—not a grid, but a series of traffic circles joining the major arteries. Late twentieth-century stupidity obscured some of the grandeur, but if you go for a walk, it's still there. Getting out for a walk and being surrounded by historic beauty is good when you've changed three lines of dialogue 1,356 times over eight hours and it still doesn't sound right.

Oh yeah, and we bought a five bedroom Victorian house, with a three car garage and hardwood floors throughout, for less than $80k. That would not have covered the down payment in San Diego.

So I write and enjoy the educated people (there are over a dozen colleges and two major universities here) and the parks and the art and the gorgeous summers and the snow in winter. But I don't care for the cold. And that's why I had to learn about radiators today. Now there are buckets of water in my basement, and I'm nervously eyeing the pressure gauge on something called a boiler. Sometimes I'm still just a tourist from a beach town. I think things will be ok, but I'll let you know more later.

Love Plus One

So the other big change in my life is that T and I are going to have our first child. The due date is August. (Yes, I was prolific this year.)

We decided in November. (If you're clever and counted back from August, you're right—T got pregnant right away. Well, we had a thirty-day marathon, so "right away" is open to interpretation. I still feel tired just thinking about it.) At any rate, we made the decision in November, and I've been thinking about decisions and decision-making lately.

Daniel Dennett, in a New York Times article from 1/2/07, commented on making decisions. If you don't know his work, he's a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts who writes about the concept of free will. He's a materialist. (A materialist in the scientific sense, as in a monist—I don't know if he has a big screen TV or drives a Mercedes.) Anyway, Dennett said that when we consider whether the traditional idea of free will is merely an illusion, as he seems to think, we confront "nihilism or despair." Thinking about whether we're just meat puppets driven by DNA and the vicissitudes of our endocrine systems, in other words, can be depressing.

But, says Dennett, his particular materialist view of choice isn't really a downer because we have what he calls "imagination": "We have the power to veto our urges and then to veto our vetoes." Whoopee. The story, then, runs something like this: after years of vetoing our urges, T and I vetoed our veto and conceived the kid. How parliamentary!

As a writer, I have to say I'm more than a little invested in free will and the imagination. I can't see how one writes a novel by vetoing one urge or another. I can't see how one has a child that way, either. [Insert joke here. (Probably a joke with the word "insert" inserted in it.)]

We decided, T and I, to live how we want to live—as ever. I prefer my philosophers to be nutty, so I'll quote some others who are more fun. Here's Deleuze and Guattari from A Thousand Plateaus (I think it's plateau #367), "Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the full Body, the stationary Voyage ... Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation." Why try to fix definitions for "free will" or "imagination?" Why not exercise them instead?

Some of our friends might be worried that T and I will sell out or grow into bourgeois idiots because we're breeding. Well, perhaps I'm already an idiot. But I'm not going all bourgie. For one thing, I don't have the money. For another, I'm not giving up my art. (Which means, of course, that I'll never have the money. Damn.)

Having the kid, for me, is writing another kind of novel. This novel will be cool in the same way the ones made out of words are: she/he will generate his/her own metaphors in a manner wholly unpredictable. This novel might form a punk band or become a corporate lawyer (hopefully the former). This novel will almost certainly drop something expensive in the toilet by age four. But who knows? The way I look at it, I'm inviting a healthy dose of chaos into my life—the same way I invite chaos every time I sit down to write.

Yoga, Krishna, Love, Experimentation.

New Career

I wrote a novel this fall. Well, I wrote the first draft in the fall, and then I revised it—sentence by sentence, all the way through—six times during the winter. It's my first novel. It's finished.

So now what?

Last week I sent the sucker out to a publisher's first book contest. Since then I've been harried by doubts—which I try to choke down like so many meatballs rising in my gorge after a heavy Italian meal. When I wrote the first draft it was more than 50,000 words long. Now it's less than 50,000. So I look at it and think, Is it too short to be a "novel"? The events occur over the course of five days, and the whole narrative is told from the first-person p.o.v. of a 13-year old boy. Structurally, therefore, it's clearly a novella. But a long novella? Does that make any sense? Who the hell will publish this abberration?! And so on.

I'm starting to write another novel this month. It will be longer. Last February (2006), I quit my so-called career lecturing in American literature to become a full-time writer. Desire trumped fear. Actually, my adoring wife (spouse, life partner, etc.) pushed me to take writing seriously and quit wasting my time in "real" jobs. I listened to her. Now I start work at 8 AM and write until she gets home at 4:30 PM. This has been going on for many months, and there ain't nothin' in print yet, y'all. Maybe I should stop using words such as "ain't" and "y'all" in my query letters.

Perhaps I'll teach again after I have a few manuscripts in the rejection rotation. I don't know. One thing I realized: I loved, absolutely and without reservation, the feeling of putting this first novel(la) together. John Gardner said one does not write merely to publish, but for glory. Well, ok, I feel good about the thing itself. The funky architecture of it, how obdurate it now seems—as if the story always existed in just that form. It's a peculiar sort of glory, and it's utterly insular—though better than spending your days masturbating in a dark room. Someday, at least, you can show people the results.