Process Stories

There are many reasons why I'm not being read by millions. First, I've got a lot to learn before I reach that kind of an audience. I need to learn how to write better (I always need to learn that), how to serve an audience, and how to get the word out. I read a great short piece by Damon Krukowski and was struck by what a fine writer he is, how he does things that I almost understand but can't yet make happen in my writing. I've been reading Dani Shapiro and there's an art and grace to her work that is clearly the result of having put in the work. I need to put in a lot more work before I reach millions.

There are other reasons why I'm not yet a household name (outside my household and that of my mom), but the one I'm thinking of today is how interested I am in process stories. I'm loath to look back and count, but my guess is that I've published at least fifty stories about how I work, tools I use, and even times of day when I'm most productive. It's not that I'm so full of myself (though I am too full of myself more often than not) as much as I love these kinds of stories from other creators and want to tell my own. Austin Kleon often talks about his processes and shares what he has learned of other people's work. Annie Dillard, Anne Lamott, and Natalie Goldberg have written books about process and I've read each of them multiple times. In the words of the great philosophers Depeche Mode, I just can't get enough.

Were I to meet any of these writers I so admire, I would ask them to tell me about their days. When did you get up? Did you make coffee? Do you stay in the house or go out? Do you need to write first thing or does it wait? I'd want to see their writing spaces, ask what word processor they each use, and know what they do about their phones and other distractions. I'd want to know every detail.

There's an entire network on cable (probably more than one) devoted to watching people cook. There should be one on which we watch people write. I want to just see them at work. Ohhhhh, so they keep their back to the window. Interesting.

It's a wonder I'm not a television exec.

Today I'm happy to have heard Chris McDougall, author of Born To Run, Natural Born Heroes, and the forthcoming Running With Sherman describe his process on The Consummate Athlete podcast. McDougall can't write first thing in the morning. Instead, he screws around all day — feeding the chickens, goats, sheep, and donkeys, riding his bike, walking and running with friends, answering email, and calling in for podcasts. Then, at night, having gotten all hyperactivity out of his system, he sits and cranks out work until one in the morning.

This is great!

What excites me is that I could never work that way. I'm a morning person. After dinner my brain turns to sludge even without bourbon. There's just nothing there. (It has been argued that there isn't much there to begin with, but I'll leave that for another time.) In the morning I'm ready to go, can't wait to start. I'm just that way.

As I push on this writing thing, I get nervous that successful writers work so differently than I do. I find myself thinking, maybe I should... There's something to be said for learning from other people's methods — I don't have everything worked out — but the point is to craft my own methods. I'm not going to spend the morning feeding animals (it's not that involved a process to feed two cats and a dog) because I need to start the day with the pen in my hand, the keyboard beneath my fingers, ideas appearing on page and screen as if by magic.

I'm working on the reasons why a million people aren't reading this post. One thing to work on is refining my process. Every time I read or hear of another writer's methods, it inspires but also relieves me of the worry that I'm doing this thing all wrong and should give it up. That's good because because I don't have any kind of future in developing television networks. None whatsoever.

Positive Reinforcement

My writing group meets about once a month. D is busy with teaching and family. L is busy schedule with children, jobs, and other gigs. I have my family and the writing I'm doing. The three of us make time for our writing group for one simple reason: it is good.

We meet at D's empty church at eight on Saturday mornings. Public spaces with any people in them aren't good because I'm too easily distracted. We gab for the first few minutes catching up on our adventures, then one of us reads.

We each come with a piece to share. L is working on historical fiction. D is deep into a literary memoir. I bring an essay or story. Today D told us his concerns about his piece and read it. We talked back about what we liked. He read a second piece I told him would be perfect for The Sun Magazine. L and I loved both pieces.

Then L shared a piece about visiting the New York Public Library. I told her all I could think was how much I wanted to be in the space she described. She had made it real for me. Her pieces are all journeys, kinds of travelogues, and they take us places.

I read a rough draft in which I'm combining five things into one essay. They talked back to me about what they heard and told me things they loved.

There are a lot of ways writing groups can work. Some write together. Others exchange and read drafts before the meeting. We meet and read aloud then talk about what's good, what we liked, what worked. We almost never say what's wrong or how we would change it. We might suggest some idea to pull the piece further along, but we don't tell anyone how to write their piece.

This may like everyone gets a participation trophy, but it's more interesting than that.

We come together as a writing group because we want to learn the craft. None of us learn well by hearing what we do wrong. We aren't trying to avoid mistakes. We are learning by creating and sharing. And though we stick to the positives, there is real pressure.

D's work is exquisitely crafted and lyrical, poetic really. L's is passionate and meticulously researched. Mine has a clipped style that might be better read aloud than on the page. There's pressure to impress one another that comes from so respecting the work each of us brings to the table. I'm not alone in wanting to give them their money's worth.

I don't need them to tell me what's wrong. They tell me what's right and then I know what's wrong. We are positive and supportive, but it isn't a free ride in which anything goes. L and D are too smart, thoughtful, and talented for me to read any old tripe. It's not that they would ever say my stuff sucked, but I can't stand to even imagine bringing less than my best.

I brought a draft about which I was unsure. It worked in my head but it has to work for others. L and D told me what they liked, what they loved, and what they remembered. I heard gaps that confirmed my suspicions about some holes in the piece. I'll work on them tomorrow as I move into another draft.

Note that last bit: "I'll work on them tomorrow as I move into another draft." L and D encouraged me. That's enough for me to know it is good enough to continue. They gave me positive reactions and now I'm ready to write and already a better writer.

Find your group. You don't have to meet often. Once a month will do as long as you have the right people. Make sure they are kind and want to build you up. But don't come asking for L or D. They're mind, damn it. Get your own people and get writing.

Never Write In The Second Person

You've got to show them something. It isn't as if the deadline is breaking news. You've been thinking about it for weeks, panic settling in like sand falling through the hour glass, running out of the top, the bulb almost empty, falling down in a pile that seems as if it's burying you. All you have to do, you tell yourself, is write something. Almost anything will do. Except you don't really believe that last bit. It has to be good. Or maybe it just has to be good enough. It has been weeks since you've written good enough. 

It isn't that you haven't tried. You've got beginnings, half a dozen of them, maybe more. You've even got a big idea to write about—more than one—and it should carry you through. It should work. You can imagine reeling it off in one big push as you so often have. You're set to go. You know the routine. You sit down, committed, and you work it through. But eight hundred words in—sometimes sooner, sometimes later—you run out of steam, hit the wall, peter out, or whatever you're calling it today when you push back from the computer staring at the blinking cursor. You wonder how that cursor can beat like a heart when clearly the draft is dead. You take your own pulse, curious if you've still got one. You count it off to see if it's racing or slowed to a lethargic rhythm. It feels like the sort of thing you need to know. 

When you get up from the desk and walk away, your thoughts turn to the idea of writer's block. Why not? It seems the most likely diagnosis, but you hate the idea of it, have denied its existence for years. Writer's block, you've said, is a crutch for writers too lazy to work through doubt. It is choosing not to write when the going gets tough. Hypochondria, that's what you've called it. Sure, you've experienced droughts, dry periods of desperate frustration, but you've come out of them every single time. Every one. The piece always comes and you find again the easy rhythm. There's no such thing as writer's block. You remember saying that. Worse, you remember believing it. 

But you remember too the sure feeling that you're not coming out of it this time, kid. That feeling wipes out the knowledge that these moments of inability pass. Or maybe it doesn't wipe them out so much as leave you wondering, is this time different? You have thoughts such as nothing kills you until something does. This, you think, might be the time you're blocked for good. You're washed up.

As a kid, you could pull things off at the last minute. You could write the essay in homeroom or at quarter to two the morning it's due. You threw so much energy at it things just worked. How much energy do you have now? There are your kids and spouse, your job and bills, and your car won't start. You're too old for all-nighters and youthful enthusiasm. Your best days are behind you, of that you're sure. 

Still, there's that good idea you've been chewing on for months. It's not even in your head so much as somewhere deeper. For a moment you smile, thinking the idea is up ahead of you, that it's just not time for it to come out and all you have to do is be patient. Let the clock take you there. 

Lot of good that does you with this deadline. But you admit, quietly, it feels a little better thinking this way, feeling that the idea really is good and coming to you, that you may still be up to writing it. You know too that you're the only one who can ever write it. 

"But I've tried," you say and can hear that you're whining. You try to sound grown up as you explain the number of drafts that have died a few hundred words in, but you still sound like a child who has dropped his ice cream and would rather cry than get another. Embarrassed, you sigh and wonder if this is the sound of acceptance. You hope so. 

You're weighing a simple, binary decision: write or don't write. You're either can or can't. You either will or won't. Whatever you decide, the world will likely keep spinning in the same direction and speed as if your decision didn't matter at all. Make the deadline, miss it, half-ass your way through. How much, you wonder, does any of it matter? 

It matters to you.

You want to show them something. You want to get through. You want to stop worrying and whining. How can the movement of a pen or the tap dance on a keyboard save you? Seems impossible. But you pick up the pen and put it to the paper. You open the laptop and type. 

Just so long as you never write in the second person. The rest of it, you'll figure out as you go along. 

Process Story

Sometimes it's good to hear how someone creates. I like pieces about process: I did this, I did that, then I did this, and then this came of it. I would love to have Mark Rothko show his process, but he's dead and was too secretive while alive. Stephen King's On Writing is a good insight into his writing. Decades ago The New Yorker profiled Don DeLillo about his work. I love that stuff. 

When I'm composing well, I begin with an idea, most often a good one. I'm not much surprised by that. Of course I have an idea. I almost always have ideas. It's usually a beginning or a question I want to answer. I open my laptop and log into Writer, grab my fountain pen and notebook, or lift one of my typewriters onto the desk and roll in paper. I start writing without planning much. 

I might guess at how long the piece will be. It depends on how much time I have and how interesting the idea feels. This piece will be about 700 words, but others are going longer lately, and I bet I'll tend toward longer still. I may be growing. Who'd have thought? 

I write until I feel an ending coming. I've answered the question, come back to the beginning, or am arriving at a good place to get off that particular train and call it a day. When I feel it coming, I start listening for the sound of an ending. It has to feel final. 

After that I don't do what most writers suggest: stick it in a drawer for a week. When I do, the piece molders and dies. Instead of waiting, I go right back and begin cutting words. 1,200 words becomes 900 before I build it back up to 1,000. I do some of this on the screen, but it feels and works better on paper with a blue felt-tip. Feel matters.

When I'm disciplined, I read the cut draft aloud and hear what's left to be done. I catch typos. If mistakes remain, it's because I didn't read it out loud or fatigue got the better of me. There's always a point at which I tire of the piece and doubt it's worthy of publishing. That's when I give it a last scan and send it out. 

Occasionally, something draws me back to reshape an old piece and fit it to how I feel now. This is especially true with my prose poetry which I only come to understand after a very long time.

Mostly though, pieces are done and I move on. I can't imagine being a musician who revisits "Hotel California," "American Pie," and "Stairway To Heaven" ad nauseum. Going back requires a whole new vision and sympathy for the writer I was. I prefer to move on. 

I drafted this at the kitchen table and went to get my daughter from swim club. After dinner I cut 900 words to 700, then pasted it into the blog editor. There I read it again, amazed at all I'd left undone, correcting problems. I went to sleep and, a day later, read it again, made more changes, and am ready now to hit "Save & Publish." 

Now I'm off to the next one. I want always to be on my way to the next one.