Fighting off the internal critic

When stuck on a book, Anne Lamott writes about letting your characters speak, giving them the opportunity to work their way forward, and even showing you what the climax should be. 

For myself, stuck in the middle of a book that refuses to move forward, I have occasionally in the past used a kind of monologue from various characters to give me some better understanding of their 'thoughts' and 'aspirations.' So it's worth considering what Lamott has to say, since my book has been stuck for some months.

But...

Immediately I sit down to let my characters speak, the You Can’t Do This voice arrives.  I ask, Who are you, and what position do you hold in my writing world that allows you to put your oar in the moment I try to write something on this book?

Okay, well firstly, I’m not one of your characters, so you can’t treat me as though I can be bullied into a plot at your whim. 

The truth is you are one of my characters because you don’t exist outside my head. So sod off before I put you in the reject file.

I’m not one of the characters in your piffling book, the one no one will want to read. Wait, are you saving any of this? I don’t want what I say to be lost.

Good grief. Saved.

Right. Now. Every time you sit down to write, I believe you must go back and re-read the entire draft, you must check your synopsis, and your structure, because if you don’t have a structure there’s no way this book is ever – and I mean ever – going to work, and only then think about moving forward and doing some supposedly productive writing. Just because Anne Lamott mentions authors who start to write from the middle of nowhere and think they can get a book up and running doesn’t mean you can. I’m mean, are you seriously published? Do you think a few sales here and there identify you as a writer? You’re pathetic. I hope you just heard the word I used: pathetic. P...A...T...H...E...

Are you going to rattle on all day like this? I'd like to give my real characters some room to speak.

They’re not going to talk to you. They’re sick to death of being stuck in a so-far-undescribed room, or virtually forgotten since chapter seven, while you say, 

nah I won’t finish this,

yes I will finish this, 

nah I don’t know what to do, 

yes I have an idea, 

nah that doesn’t work. 

Make up your frigging mind! The characters have had it up to here. They're contracting themselves to other authors because they need a job. They've given up on the so-called author who can’t get his act together.

You’re talking piffle. No one else would have them because they belong in THIS story.

Don’t you believe it. They can go where they like, even if they have to change their looks a little or bend the arc of their character. They’ll get jobs, don’t you worry.

So you’re saying they're good characters?

Good? Nah, they’ve got the ability to do a bit part in someone else’s novel, maybe, but they’re not going to get anything big in a real book that needs characters crammed with personality. They're cardboard copies of whatever first came to your unimaginative mind. You probably think you’ll get away with calling the load of bollocks you’ve got there a ‘shitty first draft’ a la your mate, Anne Lamott, but that’s not cutting any mustard with them. They want something polished and finished, and you’re never, never going to get around to doing anything like that. You wouldn’t even know where the bottle of polish was. Throw your stuff down the toilet and go and do something worth doing. Don’t ask me what because I haven’t a clue, but no doubt there’s some menial task you can do with a piece of paper and a pen…the easy crossword in the morning newspaper, maybe.

Hmm. I still have a couple of heavies sitting around…they've tried out for a role in the second half of the book…

Rubbish! Now you really are making things up. 

That's my job. They’re going to grab you by the elbows, lift you two feet in the ear...air…

See, you couldn’t even remember how to spell air.

And march you off to the dustbin where you belong. I would get them to flush you down the toilet, but I don’t want it blocking up.

You don’t scare me. I'm the only real voice you've got here!

You’re just a voice without a body, without any physical presence  whatsoever, and what's more I don't trust you. So quit your insistence on standing in the way of my getting on with the book. I’ve already wasted ten minutes writing time listening to your rants. And that's only today. 

[Author whistles up the two heavies, who are glad to get something to do earlier in the piece than they'd expected. They oblige the author and remove the anonymous voice which seems to think it rules the writing-landscape. With a couple of cheerful 'Watch 'er, mate' mutters out of the sides of their mouths, they lift the voice off its feet, as recommended, and carry him/her/it babbling to the dustbin.

'Babbling to the dustbin.' The author immediately jots this down in case he wants to use it at a later point, and feels as though the day may not be a total disaster after all.]

Write Fast (er)

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

My last two posts have both basically been about procrastination. It's a word you'll find a lot if you search this blog.

When procrastination (a word I apparently can no longer type at the first attempt which may indicate that I'm trying to avoid it in yet another way) is the modus operandi then you go looking for all sorts of ways of overcoming it, in a kind of back door fashion.

Perhaps I should really, really try outlining. Reads books on outlining.

Perhaps I need to write and write around all sorts of ideas and see where they take me. Lots of ideas and an inability to put them in any order. (Though this is more helpful than the first approach, and does at least let the creative side of the brain do some work.)

Perhaps I need to rewrite what I've already rewritten at least once (or twice). Yup. Just forestalls any progress in the section that I haven't written at all.

I should introduce a dragon!! Wow, great idea, and the dragon takes off and takes over all the other ideas and still doesn't seem to have an actual role to play.

Wait! Here's a thought. I could just get on and write. Phew! Radical. While trying to work through the Save the Cat beats approach (and running into a huge blank spot in Act II) I noted that Jessica Brody, who has written Save the Cat! Writes a Novel says that she can't even look at sorting out the STC beats until she's actually got to know who her characters are and what they're doing. And the only way she can do this is by writing an awful first draft. (A 'shitty' first draft, as Anne Lamott always calls it.)

Kristen Lamb in a post called Is your story stuck? says basically the same thing. She cries "STOP!" and adds, "I am a HUGE fan of fast-drafting because then we simply don’t have time to over think every step we’ve made."

She suggests three ways to move forward out of the quicksand.
1. Refuse the urge to edit. 
2. Learn to Fast Draft
3. Kill someone

I'm great at the ignoring the first suggestion, am able to do the second (although not as quickly as some writers) and haven't tried the third - in this book. Nasty, horrible people who are harming my hero/heroine have been killed off in the previous three books. And it's probable it will happen to the current antagonist. But killing off someone random? That takes a bit of guts. 

Meanwhile, here I am blogging. Instead of writing. Fast - or slowly. Procrastination is beginning to set in again (it's past time for lunch; you've got to go and see a sick uncle; the dog needs a wash - no wait, I've already done that today).

Time to wind this post up and make some progress...

On writing: Exercising your writing muscles

In January, 1990, I began keeping a diary on my computer. I'd often kept handwritten diaries before, spasmodically, but this one was much more regular, and more detailed. It was written on my old computer and then printed off regularly, finally amounting to some 700 pages. It was good that I printed it off, because the disks that the diary was saved to are long gone, not being compatible with later models.

Much of the stuff, of course, is private family material, but in 1989 I'd been unemployed for six months, and had started doing a writing course by correspondence. (My father, Frank Crowl, used to play chess by correspondence.)

By 1990 I was well through the writing course and between being father of a family with five children and working as a manager of a bookshop, I found time to write articles and the occasional short story. Most of the articles got published, because I'd been advised to aim not only for the major New Zealand magazines but for the small ones: trade mags and special interest magazines. The latter proved to be the place that was happy to publish my work. More on that in later posts.

Anyway, scattered with varying degrees of frequency throughout the diary are references to my writing joys and woes. I thought these would be of interest on this blog, and have decided to include posts with extracts from the diary as and when I can. I'll keep an index of these on the blog for reference.

Here's a brief opener from the 6th of January, 1990.

In doing the index for my filing system I came across a quote again by a poet who talks about the need for exercises, even in writing poetry. He compares it to the concert pianist who must exercise each day in order to play the pieces well. I think it's something I've avoided because it appears to take away too much time from 'real writing,' but in fact it's out of that exercising that the ideas often flow, and the work of writing is limbered up. I've been reading two books in the last few weeks, one on writing plays, and the other on writing in general. The latter has some excellent ideas for working out as exercises and the other, though it sometimes seems simplistic in its exercise approach, is probably what I need to really write plays well. I don't want 'just' to be a playwright, but an all-rounder. However, I want to be able to write plays as well as I can when I do.

I'm not sure that I took my advice about doing writing exercises as seriously as I should have, subsequently, but I do recommend this all the same. There are other ways to do exercises, of course. Blog posts are a great writing exercise, as are typing notes galore for the children's book I'm currently writing. In fact, anything that gets you putting down words on the page/computer is worth doing, even if those particular words aren't ever used as part of something publishable.

I have an interesting book called The Exercise Book which lays out dozens of ideas for exercises, some of which various people have turned into poems, stories, books. The book is by Bill Manhire and others. Manhire is one of New Zealand's literati, and a creative writing teacher. Don't let that put you off. The exercises are the thing, along with the stimulation of approaching writing in a different way.

See also an earlier blog post from 2014, in which I mention Peter Elbow and Anne Lamott, both of whom saw first drafts and writing even without any aim in mind as of great value.

Writing and reading

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

Anne Lamott

Bird by Bird

Don't stop too soon

While looking through my Evernote clippings for references to guitars (and there were a distractingly large number of them) I came across this quote by recording artist, John Mayer (who may or may not use a good Telefunken M80 - I only discovered that a Telefunken M80 is a mic a few minutes ago).

“I can’t stress enough how important it is to write bad songs. There’s a lot of people who don’t want to finish songs because they don’t think they’re any good. Well they’re not good enough. Write it! I want you to write me the worst songs you could possible write me because you won’t write bad songs. You’re thinking they’re bad so you don’t have to finish it. That’s what I really think it is. Well it’s all right. Well, how do you know? It’s not done!”

The paragraph's a bit cluttered - it may have been taken down verbatim, of course - but it has a kind of truth in it. You can't write good songs unless you've written bad songs, and even bad songs have to be finished in order to prove for all time that they're too bad to be bothered further with. Over the Christmas/New Year period I wrote three or four, or maybe five songs. At least two of them breezed off the page without looking back and proved their worth from day one. The other three...? Well, they've got potential but they're not quite sorted yet. I could abandon them but that might mean that good material gets dumped because it isn't quite right yet.

Equally, when you write a scene for a play or a novel and say, 'That's so bad I can't even go further with it,' you may not have got to the nut of the thing.  Yup, you may be right about its badness, but more to the point, you'll do two things: you'll have decided on the badness of the scene before you've finished it, which may mean you won't discover something good that's still to come, and, you'll begin to tell yourself I'm not very good, so why should I bother? Once again the internal critic will have got you by the short and curlies and another possible writer may bite the dust.

I can remember trying to write a scene for the musical Grimhilda! We had a rough idea of what the scene had to do within the overall structure of the story, but the characters that were needed just weren't there. I sat and thought about it, and thought about it, and thought about it, and never quite got to starting to write it. (I can procrastinate like nobody's business.) Finally I took my co-writer's advice and just wrote, anything, something, just to get started. The scene took off, characters turned up, and we were away. I haven't gone back to look, but I doubt if that first draft is anything like what was eventually performed on stage. I know however that in the midst of the 'stuff' that the scene eventually came out of there will be some things that stayed, that were the true elements of that particular scene.

I've got a book amongst the innumerable books on writing that I possess by a guy called Peter Elbow. It's entitled, Writing without Teachers.  I don't think I've ever read more than the first chapter, but I keep the book because in that first chapter (or at least very early in the book) he makes the valuable point. When you don't know what to write, just start writing - anything, the most utter drivel on the face of the earth, stuff that you wouldn't let your mother see, stuff you wouldn't give the dog to eat. (This is my paraphrase; it's not what Mr Elbow actually says.)  And this is all you can do. Writing requires you to write. Of course there's thinking to be done, but sometimes that comes after you've started writing. I remember starting a story - I think there were about thirty pages - and realising that two or three vivid characters had turned up out of nowhere, and were determined to stay. Eventually, of course, they were changed and the story was changed and little of that original thirty pages survived, but the fire had been lit and was burning in that stretch of just writing.

Anne Lamott calls this kind of writing shitty first drafts. Yup, that's what they are, but out of the manure grows something that's beautiful and edible. Don't stop too soon.

Weddings

One of my favourite writers on weddings...she also produced pretty much the best book I've read on the process of writing...and I've read quite a few.

Everyone in the family was more joyful and excited and anxious as the wedding day approached. That's what's so touching about weddings: Two people fall in love, and decide to see if their love might stand up over time, if there might be enough grace and forgiveness and memory lapses to help the whole shebang hang together. Yet there is also much discomfort, and expense, and your hope is that on the big day, energy will run through the lightest elements and the heaviest, the brightest and the dullest, the funniest and the most annoying, and that the whole range will converge in a ring of celebration.

Anne Lamott in Plan B

Start at the very beginning

I came across an interview with the American poet, Richard Wilbur, the other day.  It goes back to 1977, so in one sense it's well out of date.  In spite of that, what Wilbur has to say (often funny, always perceptive) remains worth reading not just for readers of his poetry, but for poets and writers in general.  

He's asked, fairly early in the interview, that typical question: how does he go about writing?  The interviewer means in practical terms, not in reflective ones.   Wilbur's response is:

With pencil and paper and laboriously, very slowly on the whole. I do envy people who can compose on the typewriter, though I reject as preposterous Charles Olson's ideas about the relation of the typewriter to poetic form. I don't approach the typewriter until the thing is completely done, and whatever margins the typewriter might offer have nothing to do with the form of a poem as I conceive it. I write poems line by line, very slowly; I sometimes scribble alternative words in the margins rather densely, but I don't go forward with anything unless I am fairly satisfied that what I have set down sounds printable, sayable. I proceed as Dylan Thomas once told me he proceeded—it is a matter of going to one's study, or to the chair in the sun, and starting a new sheet of paper. On it you put what you've already got of a poem you are trying to write. Then you sit and stare at it, hoping that the impetus of writing out the lines that you already have will get you a few lines farther before the day is done. I often don't write more than a couple of lines in a day of, let's say, six hours of staring at the sheet of paper. Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.

 

Wilbur as a young man

That wonderful last word, catatonia, is at once a joke and a truth.  To the outsider, at the best of times, it often looks like a writer is doing nothing.  (In the movies writers are always hammering away at typewriters or keyboards; this is only true in part.)  Wilbur here explains why it looks like that. 

What he says also explains why writers have a tendency to fiddle with things when they're 'supposed' to be writing.  The desk name plates, for instance, or a family portrait, or the pens and pencils in the holder, and so on.   It's like writer Anne Lamott wrote in a recent tweet: Wrote one hour, 7 minutes. Not great but had VERY low expectations: and met them. Not life-threateningly bad. So I get a partial credit.

I'm intrigued by Wilbur's approach to writing - he seems almost to be saying that once he's got one line right he proceeds to the next.  I don't think it's likely to be that simple.  However, there's a parallel in how I do much of my writing, I think: poems tend to start at a point and go from there.  They seldom start in the middle and work outwards, or backwards.  Music, especially songs, tends to start with the first words of the poem I'm setting and keep moving forward.  Of course in each case there's lots of revision and sometimes there'll be switching around of material, but in general the framework applies: start at the very beginning; a very good place to start.  

I haven't read much of Wilbur as yet, though I got his Collected Poems out of the library today.  However I came across one of his wittier poems the other day: The Prisoner of Zenda. 

Spirituality of Creating and Anne Lamott

John Chandler has written a post about the Spirituality of Creating, which is worth reading. But in it he quotes Anne Lamott (it's from her book on writing, called Bird by Bird, one of the best books on writing around):

You are going to have to give and give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.

There is no cosmic importance in getting something published, but there is cosmic importance in learning to be a giver. That's a statement to chew over during the day....

On not being perfect

I'm indebted to Jurgen Wolff for the following. He writes:
On Ali Edwards' crafts blog she wrote about working through creative fear. She identified five typical fears. I really liked what she said about this one:

"Thinking this is the one and only chance to tell this story so it simply must be perfect. Oh man, what a way to stop you in your tracks. What does perfect mean to you? And who is the judge? Perfect is so very relative. What is perfect to me in this moment may be entirely imperfect to you. To me, perfect is actually taking time to tell your stories. Risking that bit of yourself to document your experience. Perfect is carving out a bit of time to be creative. Perfect is embracing the imperfection inherent in creating something that comes from your heart, and your head, and your hands. Let it go. Simply begin writing. Tell the story in simple, plain sentences one word at a time. Keep writing until all the words have spilled onto the page and then go back and edit. Perfect is actually telling the story rather than letting fear keep you from sharing the lives and lessons of your family."

This reminds me of the essay I was writing on Saturday: I kept struggling with getting started until I remembered (yet again) that getting it down right the first time is an impossibility. Getting words down is the way to start. Once there are some words - any words - on the page you start to see progress, but not until then. It's that Anne Lamott axiom about 'shitty first drafts' - nothing is right the first time round.

Anne Lamott

If only more New Zealand novelists would observe this point, from author, Anne Lamott:
"Nothing is more important than a likable narrator."
The narrator doesn’t have to be good but you do have to like him.
And she adds: I have a friend who said one day, “I could resent the ocean if I tried,” and I realised that I love that in a guy. I like for them to have hope – if a friend or a narrator reveals himself or herself to be hopeless too early on, I lose interest. It depresses me.’
Funny hopeless is different. and can be endearing.
I think these quotes come from Bird by Bird, Lamott's book on writing, pages 49-51.