Bouncing Toward Writing: A Beginning

Getting started with writing can be elusive. We believe we want to write. We have ideas for stories. We find a phrase turning over and over in our minds. But somehow, we don’t start. Or we do, and it seems to go nowhere. 

This is where the professionals have us. They have habit. They write regularly. Often every day. That habit not only strings words together, but it makes it easy to sit down and capture ideas. For the pros, their expectations are lower than for the rest of us mortals. They don’t expect the perfect draft immediately. They know that the writing will twist and turn away from the anticipated destination. They are confident that some of today’s writing will be thrown away. 

They are confident.

That’s the big thing. They know that by returning to their craft day after day they will amass, revise, refine, and ultimately, after much work, have a text they are willing to share with readers—be they friends or editors or the paying public.

The rest of us have dreams, ephemeral dreams that we worry will disappear in the light of day. And so they do. Because we don’t have habit and we lack confidence and so we let our worst nightmares take over and we don’t sit down and string words together. The feeling of failure grows within and we say, feeling like frauds: “I’d like to write.” “I can’t find time to write.” “Someday I’ll write the great American novel.”

To do that, we must start. One word in front of another, steps across the page. In the best of circumstances, when the phrase gets caught in my head I sit down not just to write those seven words, but to follow where they lead for 20 minutes or so. Most of the time, I don’t even have that much inspiration so I trick myself into beginning. I read a favorite passage from a writer I admire. I google a bit of research on an idea I heard on the radio. I write an email to someone about something I want to write. Each of these tricks moves me toward beginning without calling it that, without putting the fear of failure front and center. 

I also say, “This won’t be part of the story, I’m just getting down some notes.” It’s a little lie, but an effective one. Without the fear, notes can turn into something if I stay with them awhile. 

I’m also not averse to opening multiple documents for multiple beginnings. That act starts a revision process. It signals I’m not looking for perfection, I’m looking for an opening, one that will take me through the door, the door to the other side of consciousness where I let my intuition create and I stop trying to be in control. On that side is a bouncy house like they have for kids’ parties. 

I jump around in pure joy. I sometimes crack my head on someone else’s knee, but only slightly injured I bounce up again and try another tack for where my character might go next. 

Even without the professional habit of writing every day (how we all long for that!), I can establish habits that let me go through the door, habits that let me start bouncing, start writing, without a consuming fear that incapacitates me. 

Or I can wait for tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow. And while the petty pace of life beats on, I will not be the writer I dream of, only the nightmarish ghoul I fear. 

When an idea strikes, write it and more. When you find that 15 or 20 minutes and you wonder what to do. Write—or do the acts that lead there—read and research. Lie to yourself that this isn’t writing as you sit at the keyboard and begin: you’re not writing your masterpiece, you’re just writing…one word…after…another.

Begin…

Inspiration for Isolation

In my youth I was an idealist. Maybe that’s not that uncommon, but I lived out my idealism as an activist. When the United Farm Workers sought better conditions, I boycotted grapes. When I was in college, I wrote letters to Congress in church-related efforts to feed the hungry. When a friend ran away from an abusive home, I began volunteering at a women’s shelter. In the 80s, when the US and USSR were poised for anhiliation, I organized peace protests against nuclear weapons. Then I went to grad school and found I needed to focus my limited time. I didn’t stop caring, but I read little news, wrote few letters, rarely stood in protest. My values didn’t change, even though I wasn’t acting on them outwardly.

The germs of my novel Isolation came from the fear of a swine flu epidemic in the fall of 2009, changes in behavior that swept through the country, my concerns about the overuse of 99% bacterial killing soaps and sanitizers, and a line that came into my head: “laying a finger aside of his nose.”

The flu that year went pandemic, around the world, but not epidemic; it didn’t wipe out humanity. Though it killed tens of thousands world-wide, that’s a tiny, tiny fraction of the population. The fear, however, was palpable. The Centers for Disease Control in the US and the World Health Organization, among others, mounted campaigns to reduce the spread of the virus by teaching us to sleeve the sneeze and catch the cough. They produced posters about the importance of hand-washing which were bright yellow and still adorn the classroom walls on my campus.

Simultaneously, access to hand sanitizers became ubiquitous in many public places, like grocery stores. Though I’m not a scientist, I worried that we didn’t want to kill all of our bacteria because I knew that we needed it for digestion and to build a healthy immune system. Personally I wondered if we should use all of the 99% bacteria-killing soaps. But I was clearly in the minority.

One day while walking, I heard the line “laying a finger aside his nose” from the “Night Before Christmas” echoing in my head. I imagined a boy who found the children’s story in a box of old things from his mother’s childhood. Seeing Santa touch his nose, the boy recognized the book as contraband, since face-touching was not allowed in his world. He secreted the page under his mattress like the pornography it was until he could show it to a friend. Suddenly I was thinking about a world in which face-touching was prohibited; that reality didn’t seem far off.

Along the way I realized how much our food supply had already been contaminated by sudden and frequent outbreaks of E. Coli and other dangerous bacteria. I worried about the dangers of GMOs, though I knew little of the science. Given that I’d never lost sight of the farm workers I’d supported in my youth and given that I’d been a vegetarian more than once over the years due to concerns about Alar in apples, the way chicken is processed, or the dangers of raw spinach, it wasn’t a difficult leap to make Agri-Biz into the evil backdrop to the dystopia I imagined.

These ideas stayed with me for a couple of years. I read news about the various threads and occasionally wrote short vignettes that I shared with my writing group, but I didn’t imagine I was preparing for a novel until I had the opportunity for a sabbatical.

And even then, I was intent on not saying a novel was my goal. It was too frightening. As a writing center director I created a project which required me to write more than 100 pages of fiction. The intent was to recreate for myself the conditions college students face when they have to write a longer paper than they experience writing in a genre or discipline they have little experience in.

At that point, the stage was set for me to write Isolation. Though at the time, I kept emphasizing that I wasn’t writing a novel, just a long piece of fiction. Secretly I hoped for a novel, but I denied it to everyone outwardly. I didn’t want to fail.

Oh, and the activism of my youth, oddly, writing this dystopian novel has led me back to it—a bit. Promoting my book through social media has led me to follow several bacteria-related entities as well as anti-GMO and food safety advocates. They’re a good source of news as well as marketing opportunities—how life changes.

Originally posted as part of Isolation's Blog Tour on Always a Book Lover.

Dystopia: The World Falling Apart*

Notice my title says the world, not a world. For me, dystopias work best when they are recognizably the world we live in now, altered to become the future that’s imaginable yet objectionable, frightening. It’s the world we don’t want to occupy.

There are always other options for our actual future and that is another reason for loving dystopias—they call us to look at the world we live in and to reconsider the ways we live, the values we hold, the choices and consequences of those choices.

I love dystopias and have read many of them, so it’s not surprising that my first novel, Isolation, is dystopic. In case dystopias aren’t your usual read, let me offer an example of how dystopias work. In Farenheit 451, a favorite since my childhood, the world of ideas has become so threatening to those in power that all books must be destroyed. The government spoon feeds the population its rhetoric as entertainment. People are dumbed down by the parlor walls (think big screen TV).

Written in 1953, televisions gaining in popularity, a cold medium luring the masses to sit around and watch in silence rather than discuss the world of ideas. After WWII, with the U.S. leaving Korea and moving into Vietnam, from the quietude of the suburban 50s toward the uprisings of the 60s, civil rights, women’s rights, a peace movement that wouldn’t be still. But let’s not talk about any of that.

In ’53 the horizon was filled with ominous changes which would be averted if every woman was the quintasential housewife watching soap operas and eating bonbons. Every man the worker who did his job without question, even if that job were to be a fireman, one who did not quell fires, but started them, by torching books. Both of these roles are fulfilled brilliantly in Farenheit 451 by Mildred and Guy Montag. She’s depressed; he begins to question the state of things, fearing he’ll be caught in possession of the book he irrationally saves from flames.

Dystopia, the world falling apart.

In 2009 as the swine flu threatened epidemics of Black Plague proportions, the CDC and World Health Organization spread fear, changing behaviors overnight, getting people to sleeve the sneeze, and use hand sanitizers frequently. It was then I began to imagine the world of Isolation, a world in which the government, there’s always a powerful government backdrop in dystopias, banned citizens from touching their own faces, for human safety, of course.

From that premise, characters emerge, fighting one bacterial infection or another. Agri-Biz plays its role in creating anti-bacterial resistance through large livestock operations. Big Pharma keeps its hand in by developing anti-bacterial products one after another after another, lining their pockets while fleecing Homelanders and building anti-biotic resistance.

The stories in Isolation are driven by an illusive safety which everyone seeks, but no one achieves. The world falls apart—in California, West Virginia, Alaska, Michigan, Hawaii. The world falls apart and readers watches in horror, realizing how close this fiction is to the current world they live in.

Fast Forward—May 2014: E. Coli causes product recalls for hummus in Idaho and ground beef nationwide, as well as the need to boil water in Portland. Anti-biotic resistance is growing at a pace which threatens a near post-antibiotic future where bacteria will return to being a major cause of death, as was true pre-WWII.

The thinking person, the one who pays attention, reads a dystopia like Isolation realizing that this could be the future. The world could fall apart in just this way.

I love a good dystopia.

*This post first appeared as a guest post initiating Isolation's blog tour at So Many Precious Books, So Little Time.

Cutting Out Fish—A Process

Intercut vignettes weave my texts into a whole. For me, it was a common device, long before my novel. I even wrote about it in my dissertation. I’m certain other writers must go through similar processes, and yet I’ve never read about it. So here’s a brief attempt to describe what I do.

I write story after story. Sometimes they are parts of a single monologue, sometimes parts of a novel, sometimes parts of an academic argument I am making. But I start with parts. I don’t plot or outline. I write. With fiction, from the writing emerges the characters. I get to know them, go for walks with them, take them to lunch. I discover what makes them tick.

At some point, I have the body of the work drafted, and I start figuring out what goes where. This is where we get to cutting out fish. I can do all kinds of editing on the computer screen–large and small order. I sometimes have several documents open at one time and cut and paste among them to revise.

But when a text is truly composed of independent pieces which I want to intercut–meaning cut each apart and then paste them back together with part of story A followed by the beginning of story B followed by the middle of story A and then the opening of C, etc.–then I have to print them out and physically cut them into chunks.

I start that process by reading each vignette and selecting possible cut locations. When I’m smart, I do this on the computer before printing so that I have space to cut stories apart or even so that I have to cut fewer individual lines from one sheet of paper to tape to another. Though I often have to do that because I can’t always focus on the computer at this stage. It becomes visceral and I need to hold the pieces, to lay them out across the counter, to scan across quickly rather than read closely.

Once I have the cuts identified and completed, then I number them in a way to keep track of which piece came from which story. So I might have story A pieces 1, 2 and 3 or A1, A2 and A3. Though typically I label them with a word or name that makes sense to me rather than A, like Hawaii or Cho and Hosuk (a story location and the characters from that story in my novel, Isolation). Hawaii 2 makes more sense in the middle of assembly than A2 does.

To assemble the pieces, I read the beginnings and endings of chunks of text (the numbered aspect) to look for connections. The connections are not direct. I’m not looking for one character to talk about eating E. Coli-laden spinach and the chunk next to it to also mention spinach, though that sometimes happens fortuitously. I look for a connection–content is possible but so is mood, language, or activity. This is more intuitive than conscious.

To be honest, while I call this connection, it creates a kind of dissonance for a reader. With the spinach example, a reader might anticipate that she is still reading about the same character and situation because spinach is mentioned, but in fact, it’s a different character and place. The combination of connection and disconnection builds readerly engagement.

I don’t want readers to struggle with this too much or they could get frustrated. So once I have all of the texts cut up and ordered, I read the beginnings and endings again and ensure that I signal where the reader is after each break. I usually do this by mentioning a character by name in the first sentence or two though rather than character, it could be setting or really anything that situates a reader clearly in the particular story and not the former one.

At several places in this process I read the entire section of text I’m working with–all of the combined stories being cut apart. To be more accurate, I read until I stumble upon something I don’t like. Then I either stop and revise a bit of text or reorder again. This might happen repeatedly, or I might put them all together in a readable order the first time. Though even then, if stories change, I might need to redo the entire process–which is why this happens late in the process.

For example, I’d been “done” with Isolation for nearly a year, giving readings, seeking a publisher, sending out shorts to contests and literary magazines. In the process of getting it ready for self-publishing, I received feedback which suggested a massive cutting was in order. In the first section of the novel nearly 50% was cut. Needless to say, I had to re-order the cut pieces which now often started and ended differently than they had in the earlier version.

As I hit the end of page two of this blog entry, I think, wow, this must be complicated. But it’s really not. And it’s lots of fun. As humans, much of the meaning we make in the world comes from juxtaposition. You know the saying: "It’s all context"? Well, that means that the juxtaposition of “things” whether they’re stories or the contents of your refrigerator or the objects on your desk create meaning. Well, the things' juxtapostions don’t really create the meaning, we do—as we look, contemplate, rearrange, reconsider. For me, it's the essence of writing, the essence of creativity.

Somehow, the print I made several years ago “Cutting Out Fish,” which accompanies this article, provides a visual for this writing practice. Rock, paper, scissors. With more than two choices, randomness enters the equation. From the way I see it, that means we all win! Play with cutting up and reordering text. See what happens. And let me know.

The Hard Choices

You'd think that choosing character names and plot lines and ways to kill off characters would be the hard choices. They were. Once.

Currently the hard choices are about whether to read through the manuscript one more time, even though other writers have read it searching for error. Even though it's been professionally proofed. The hard choices are where to spend my marketing dollars and what to do myself.

Hard choices move around. They often have time lines. Consequences.

In writing, funding, and publishing Isolation, I've found hard choices at each stage. In writing, most of the hard choices were at the starting gate. In setting up and running a successful Kickstarter, what was hard wasn't so much the choices as the amount of emotional energy needed each and every day. In publishing, the hard choices have been surprisingly frequent. In fact, almost every choice seems hard. Maybe that's because there is no immediate reward. And though I pride myself on my love of delayed gratification, perhaps things are harder when there is no perceivable positive in the moment of (in)decision.

As I move into marketing, the hard choices just keep coming. Spend money online? Traditional routes? Perform social media tasks myself or hire someone? Do a little? Do a lot? 

Maybe it's a matter of perception. Everyone around seems to think I should be overjoyed: I'm publishing my novel. I am. Happy. But there are seemingly endless hard choices, and I let those feel heavy. I languish amid them. I become enervated. (Yes, passive voice. It's not a choice. I don't boldly get enervated. Obvious once I write it, right?)

"Habits learned early are habits for life." At least the characters of my novel find this cultural imperative begs repeating. 

It's not early for me, but it's time for a new habit of perception: choices are energizing. Good things come to those who make choices! I love questions, but it's time for exclamation points!!

Balancing Act

When I was on sabbatical, I wrote every day. It was easy. I was on sabbatical. It was my focus. Isolation. It was what I was doing. Every day.

After returning to work, writing every day fell away as other tasks replaced it. Then the Kickstarter emerged and everyday I promoted the KS campaign. I was charged. Dollar values went up when I marketed. It was visible. Exhausting.

Now I need to market again. I need habit. Energy.

I must balance.

I must not let the ball roll off the pile. But how to do that? How to write material? How to post material—to FaceBook, LinkedIn, GoodReads, Twitter? Regularly. Daily.

All of this and work too. Friends. Family. Eating. Exercise.

I think I can, I think I can…return to childhood. Play at it. I think I can…be confident. I think I can…