Look closely...

In her advice to a young writer, Collette said, "Look closely at what you love, but look most closely at what hurts." Stands to reason, since the most painful things in life are the most unresolved, the most likely to haunt a lively sleepless night, with long-past friends, enemies, and lovers always waiting for your visit.

My husband gave me a jumpy look when I asked if he'd read my last post. "I don't know what that was about," he said. "It really came at me sideways," and he gave a little shudder. It was one of those shudders I've come to recognize in my readers, a small twitch that means, Who are you writing about, and why are you doing it? I mumbled something about wanting to show how fictional characters are created, and that was true enough. But I also remembered another writer's quote, one by Joan Didion, "A writer is always selling someone out," she said, and she's right as far as she goes.

Family and friends are naturally spooked by those bright recognizable scraps of themselves they spot in print. But scraps is all they are. A scrap is what you begin a story with, usually a scrap of pain...a conversation that didn't go well, a relationship that was never meant to be, a small lie, a forced act of kindness, words said out of pity, a misplaced silence.

Perhaps you begin writing with actual people in mind, perhaps you try with all your heart and skill to make them as real as they were in a certain place, at a particular time. Try it out for yourself. Maybe you'll find, as I have, that the more you work with what you've staked out as reality, the more like scarecrows your characters will be...dummies pasted together with chewing gum. I think that's because fiction exists as another reality, with its own physical laws, its own dreams, its own myths, its own people, and those are only revealed in the writing. Word by word, draft by draft.

Why you turned into fiction...

There you are, small-sized and blinking, looking at me shyly from the 1970's, stranded miles from anything out in the country, wearing a hairy plaid shirt, and probably living in Iowa. Sorry about that. I never should have gotten mixed up with you in the first place, but it happened the way these things do. Then I found out you believe aliens are making crop circles in the corn fields and you have memories of Satanic abuse. Understand? I didn't have a choice. I had to stuff you into a short story, one set in Iowa City, since that's what I seem to write about these days.

Maybe we could have talked things over instead, but I doubt it. You thought I was pretty nuts too, since I mostly just read, watch movies, write about stuff, and talk to my cats using these different voices. Thing is, I didn't really want to find out why you pack your own rounds or why you think carrying concealed is a great idea. When you start droning on about the Masons and how they engineered the Kennedy assassination, I just want to hit you with a brick. So now you're in a hunk of fiction, a major or a minor character...I don't know yet. I'll have to keep writing, see how it goes.

It's not too bad. I put you in a commune I lived next door to for a while. It was kind of on the low-rent side as communes go...not one of those big flashy jobbers with hundreds of people who got baked everyday, had sex in the mud, went around bare-ass, and wove hammocks to pay the bills. No, you're living in a beat-up farm-house with about thirty other people and you all have fights about who's going to do the dishes. So much for the revolution, right? Even so, it's a pretty standard commune you're in, nothing to mope about. There are five or so mutts, and two are really good hippie dogs...always ready to tussle with you or chase something. There's a big box of clothes in the front room. When it's nippy out, you fish around in the carton and dig out sweater: the kind with a reindeer pattern on the front and raveling cuffs. The women there aren't all that good-looking, but they're not into being good-looking, okay? They've got other stuff on their minds, like taking care of the seven kids who run loose all day, baking a metric ton of bread, and cleaning that lid of new weed.

Personally, I feel better now that you're in a short story, even though I don't know what you'll be up to. You seem more manageable to me, and I know you'll probably be happier. Try out some of your crop-circle bullshit on the commune folks...they'll listen for sure, maybe even eagerly, all the while wearing those sweet hippie smiles. Now your gun-thing probably won't go over them, but fiction needs conflict. It'll be exciting for a while, and then something will happen, and then something else. That's how it works.

Yer blues...

An editor of mine sometimes takes me to task for the lack of redemption in my stories....his phrase, and one that never fails to enrage me. I was so puzzled by it, this word redemption, that I took to searching out different dictionaries in order look up the word. I never found a definition I could accept. What I suspect my friend really means is that literature should contain a nugget of crunchy goodness...the notion that every experience is worthwhile, or even worse, that events, particularly terrible events, make us better and wiser. Clearly, life doesn't share that idea. Some happenings are perfectly dreadful and the sooner we can forget about them, the better off we are.

Some years back I was mugged in a parking lot, in broad daylight and wound up badly injured. My hip was broken, my rotator cuff snapped, and my left side was skinned like a field-dressed deer. During my weeks of recovery, I had to sleep sitting up, my legs strapped into a flesh-colored chunk of foam. Except that I didn't sleep. Despite heavy doses of pain-killers, a ferocious insomnia took hold of me. It was the sort of sleeplessness that usually ushers in brooding self-recriminations. I didn't indulge in that. Instead, I remember being wide-awake, saying to myself, again and again, fiercely: There is no lesson for me to learn. There is no lesson for me to learn. There is no lesson for me to learn.

My own view of the world is that it is endlessly expansive and nutty. Its humor boils up into full view when you and I believe we have a grip on what's going on. This self-confident sense of things is usually a hot-pot of our own desires peppered with a hefty sense of our own self-righteousness. It makes jerks of us every time.

No journals...

There was a moment in recent times when keeping a journal became referred to as journaling. Further, a troubling tendency in the culture began transforming long-time respectable nouns into verb-forms. Giving a gift became gifting, commiting suicide was now suiciding, and for all I know, selling Girl Scout cookies transmogrified into cookieing.

The innocuous journal listing people met on a particular day, the memory a good meal, a description of the garden, or a musing on the seasons vanished. In its place was a gnarly description of internal weathers, and this was labeled journaling. In journaling, resentments were listed, self-castigation was analyzed, preferred outcomes were plotted, and recovery mantra's were quoted. At my most charitable, I sometimes wondered if a particular consciousness had become manifest overnight. After all memory is the only novel everyone writes, largely composed from those emotional recollections of the heart. Perhaps, in an odd evolutionary leap, a literary mind-set had spread to everyone.

As I said in my first post, I was given a fat little daily diary at a young age. Once I quit thinking this was a pre-adolescent drudgery foisted upon me, I finished it and began my next one, and the one after that, and the one after that, and the one after that. I scribbled in in my diaries for a hodge-podge of reasons, the largest one being loneliness. When I lived at home, no adults were particularly interested in talking to me or discovering in what I thought. I put that down to the times--the '50's--when children were viewed in the same fashion as plants. Parents examined you periodically to make sure you looked like the other plants, didn't show any rot on your roots, or exhibit a rebellious tendency to hang out with bad weeds. It was never thought that a kid might have a singular point of view...that most interesting human trait.

But I kept writing everything down in a variety of books...copybooks, accounting books, school theme books...and then I would set them aside, rarely going back to re-read them. Later I enrolled in art school, then became a painting graduate, and finally a professional artist. During this time I kept sketchbooks--always the same type--a black hardbound book. After drawing and sketching in the front of it, I would turn it upside down and write in the back. When the drawings and the writing met in the book's middle, like two opposing armies, I'd put it aside and buy another.

Would it amaze you that I have no idea what I wrote about? I simply wrote. At an early age, I had the good luck to marry a man who rarely talked to me and who, in truth, bored me silly. His indifference and my boredom threw me back on myself. Perhaps I was writing things I wanted to say to someone, perhaps, once again, I was bitterly lonely. I don't know. But in that way, I met that cosmic and patient ear all writers first whisper into.

I became aware I could not help writing. Writing things down was an atmosphere I moved in easily--a bug in the air. It still did not occur to me that I was a writer. I just wrote, and from long habit, I wrote secretly, sensing how much I loved just the act of forming words on paper, the feel of the paper, the whisk of my pen across it. I suppose I had a mild case of graphomania, a condition that impells the practitioner to write down everything, even the most mundane events: Tonight I fried chicken for supper, but ran out of bacon grease and had to go next door etc..... In far-gone cases, such people cover the walls of their houses with moment-moment accountings.

But I quit writing in my journals once I became a professional writer. As a painter friend of mine remarked, doing private art is very different from public art. I know what he means: other forces are in play. Suddenly my journal-keeping seemed embarassingly self-indulgent...internal squawkings that went nowhere. But then, going somewhere is not the point of a journal, and it is very much the point of a short story, a novel, or even an advertisement. Professional writing is aimed like a gun at real people. It is no longer scribbled just for the invisible ear of God although, as I write, in the deepest part of me, I believe He listens.

The bad client....

Another reason why I started blogging again is that I discovered these bits and pieces in my notebooks that had nowhere else to go but blogside. There's always McSweeney's, of course, but even they clutch at open-endedness, and no-conclusions-drawn writing.

Did I say I've been a freelance writer for a long, long time? The emphasis here is on long, long time. It's only been in the past few years that I've really gotten comfortable with my business...before that I was too busy making mistakes. For a while I seemed to specialize in terrible clients...that isn't true anymore, and I think it's because I became progressively more gimlet-eyed, on guard for tell-tale symptoms the bad client exudes like a vapor trail. One dark night I poured out everything I knew about bad clients, scribbling in my notebook until the wee hours. Here it is, in no particular order.

The Bad Client

The bad client carries a gun and lets you know he does.
The bad client thinks he's a badass, which he is, but not in an interesting way.
The bad client's project is clearly insane and you suspect the client knows it.
The bad client sometimes gropes you absent-mindedly.
The bad client will ask you to get his employees out of jail and counsel his fat receptionist about her diet.
The bad client doesn't know what it is you actually do.
The bad client is prone to exotic maladies, like gangrene and flesh-eating viruses.
The bad client buys you clothes.
The bad client's children call him by his first name.
The bad client has terrible employees who sometimes come to the office drunk.
The bad client sleeps on the couch in his office.
Sometimes, the bad client's mother is there with him. You are occasionally asked to bring her food.
The bad client has no recognizable business practices.
The bad client has no sense of time either...he has been known to call you at 3 AM from a pay phone near a freeway, where you can hear the 18 wheelers going fwhish.
The bad client hardly ever opens his mail.
The bad client wants to be your friend.
The bad client never works during business hours.
The client tells you that he always wanted to be in the CIA...this happens more often than you might imagine.
The bad client is being evicted.
The bad client has no files.
The bad client wears expensive clothes, but with stains on the cuffs or missing buttons.
The bad client wants a job for which he is the most unqualified human being in America...like being a kids' show host or a race car driver.
Strangers will suddenly appear at the office to announce how much they hate the bad client.
The bad client has dreams of glory, like becoming governor or a US senator.
This is because the bad client smokes crack.
The bad client takes you to terrible places for lunch, like Arby's, since he already has a coupon.
The bad client is in the middle of a divorce.
The bad client weeps at his desk.
The bad client will never pay you.
The bad client thinks you will forgive him.

It's time...

It's time to start writing again--my own stuff, that is. I have the usual symptoms...my head has gotten stuffy with non-sequiturs and thoughts that go off roaming like a pack of loose dogs. And yet, and yet, I don't dive right in and finish those short stories, edit an article that's already been accepted, or beaver on my novel. I have my reasons--all of them good, as rationalizations always are. The reasons don't matter, of course. They just keep me off-balance.

What always forces me back to the page is that nothing except writing makes me feel fully alive. So, as happens when I'm ready to do something, I take baby-steps and choose something from my long guilty list and do it. Setting up this blog has been on my list since January, so today I can x through another item.

I had a blog a few years ago--back when Blogger wasn't terribly friendly although that never put me off posting. What caused me to let that blog wither, turn black, and drop off the vine was that I took it so seriously. Nothing was ever quite good enough to post. My blog started to remind me of that bubble-gum pink diary I got for Christmas, when I turned eleven.

Probably every girl in America had that identical diary. Of course, it had puffy covers, was labeled Diary in curly gold script, and boasted a tiny laughable lock and key. When I began writing, those daily pages loomed before me like a fat impossible chore. (Did I already sense that my mother and father would be sneaking into my room to read it?) Soon enough, I was hopelessly behind and started every page with a note of apology to my own diary, whenever I dragged myself to its demanding pinkness.

Of course, when I abandoned that first blog, thinking of that first oppressive diary, I'd forgotten that eventually I finished it, then went on to write many more diaries, numbering in the several hundreds. Recalling that, this particular log doesn't seem so daunting. I know my prose doesn't need to be so deathless. I'm content to let it take its own shape.