If you stay in bed

This morning I lay in bed before
the alarm went off wondering about
the shape of my day and what would
happen if I didn't go to my desk to
write before doing anything else.

It was the first time in months
that I thought about switching
my routine.

I lay there thinking
I don't have anything to say,
so why bother to get up and
sit at my desk with pen in hand
waiting for words that will never come?

But then my alarm went off and
out of habit I went to my desk
and sat down and took a pen in hand
and opened my journal to a blank page
and found the words waiting there
I couldn't see while lying in bed.

Maybe I'm just inherently lazy?

Or maybe it's just an illusion,
and you can't see it as an illusion
(that's the nature of an illusion)
until you get out of bed?

Or maybe writing comes down to habit--
a routine, a reminder to sit at your desk,
a need to find, through the familiar,
what's not yet known?

You don't know what you'll write
until you pick up your pen and begin.

If you stay in bed or go for a walk
instead of sitting down to write,
you'll never know what words are
waiting to give themselves to you.

A Writer’s Inner Library

Over the course of a lifetime—from the time as children when a parent or adult begins reading books aloud to us to the time when we can read to ourselves—a writer is likely to read hundreds, if not thousands, of books (as well as the back of a lot of cereal boxes).

Picture books, comic books, ghost stories, mysteries, adventure tales, pirate plots, science fiction, westerns, romances, classics, plays, poetry, literature—it all becomes part of us as we rise early or go to bed late, covering our flashlights with our bed sheets so no one will catch us secretly reading. As long as there are words and pages to turn, we will read and read and read.

Now imagine this. Imagine each book that we ever read or heard read aloud to us has found a place on a metaphorical library shelf that exists within us, a resource hidden inside every writer to sustain us for a lifetime.

Imagine—all the books we ever read! From The Cat in the Hat and Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are to Charlotte’s Web, Robin Hood, Amber Brown, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice, The Iliad and Odyssey, A Room of One’s Own, The Scarlet Letter, My Antonia. Any book that we ever picked up and spent time reading, it’s there, sitting on a library shelf and catalogued inside us.

Imagine, too, when it comes time for us to revise our work—whatever pages that we are writing to tell our stories, our poems, our plays—we subconsciously hear the sounds of these books, the cadences and music and rhythm of the words, the pacing of the plots, the feelings that we had for the characters and the settings.

These elements of a story stay with us long after we finish the last page. And they become our guides in revision, a kind of background music, so that as we read our own words, we compare them—their cadence and rhythm and music—against the music of words stored in our inner library, the words that guided us from one book to another, that made us into readers and then into writers.

                                                                                        

I used to think that reading was just about reading—about the joy of holding an imaginary world in one’s hands and immersing oneself in that world—but now I wonder if, as a writer, reading involved more than reading. Certainly it involved reading for pleasure, but I suspect there was also a question gnawing at the back of our minds as we turned the pages: how did the author do that, pull off that trick, make that magic? We read for pleasure, but also for understanding how to construct a story. 

Of course, there aren’t any physical books inside us. But it’s as if the memory of every book that we’ve ever read exists in some way inside us. It's there, available from memory, as we write and revise our manuscripts. And we can hear the background music of these other books as we revise, listening and looking closely at every word, every sentence. It’s as if there’s a monitor of sorts, a revision meter, lets call it, and it sends up a flag whenever a word, sentence, character, or plot needs more work. A flag goes up, I suspect, based on our understanding of the relationship of what we’ve written to all the words that we’ve ever read.

Perhaps it’s a certain sensibility that we cultivate by reading. We gain a sense of taste. Each of us acquires our own sense of taste, and we fine-tune that sense of taste by reading, culling what we love from what we find distasteful, uninteresting. And it’s our sense of taste, which becomes more sophisticated over the years, thanks to all our reading, that helps us write the things we need and want to write.

It can take years to trust one’s sense of taste, one’s love of a certain sound, a particular pace, the way a story is told. And I suspect that long after we’ve written our stories, we will be able to see in these stories some of the books that we read that influenced us along our journeys, and that we still hold safe, well-worn and beloved, inside us.

Looking Between The Lines

I started a new project in February, and I found myself surprised -- the way I'm always surprised when an idea pops into my head -- that suddenly I was writing with eagerness every morning to see where this new idea might lead, curious to discover the story that might be hidden somewhere inside it.

Since then I've written many pages, and I've forced myself to go back to the beginning again and again, and to revise the manuscript's pages with an eye toward discovering what might be missing and what might be added to get the full story on the page.

Each time I begin revising again, it's like starting anew, like climbing up a ladder again, except there are words on the page, unlike when I started out in February and the pages were all blank. This evidence of having written provides some comfort and reassurance, even if the words aren't quite right.

There's still so much that's not yet on the page--even after three months of work--and which needs to be brought into the light.

Much of the revision process, I've learned over time, is trying to figure out what's not on the page but needs to be there. That's often the most frustrating part of the process, too, because although I may know that something feels like it's missing, I don't always know what might be missing or how to find what's missing (except to keep writing).

So, I've learned to work slowly, to go back to the beginning after finishing each draft, to return to the first page and try to see between the lines, to find in that empty space not only words but images and scenes and dialogue.

I try to understand the characters who are making their appearance (often shyly) on the page and who seem reluctant to let themselves be seen, as if they're worried (in the same way that I might worry) about what might happen to them if they reveal themselves fully. On some days I'll find myself with a flood of pages, while on other days, only silence.

Here's something that I don't admit to many people: I worry about making a mistake in the way I am approaching the project. I'm afraid it'll all come crumbling down or the words will turn into a mush of spaghetti before I can finish the story. I worry about not making enough mistakes. And I worry about making too many mistakes and that I'll need to ditch the entire project months from now, a total failure. Sometimes, on days when words won't come, I think revision is just another word for worry.

It helps, I've found, to sit down at the same time every day to start work, whether I have any ideas about where the day's work may take me or not. Just sitting down, opening my laptop, and beginning to type somehow loosens the words and frees my imagination so that I can re-enter the world that I've discovered on the page.

After years of working on different projects, I've learned not to be fooled into thinking that I've finished the revisions just because I happened to finish another draft. Just because words are on the page, just because I've created something that feels finished, doesn't mean it's finished.

I've had to learn how to be patient and to take a long-range view. Not weeks or months but sometimes years. And I've come to enjoy the process of beginning again... and again, even though it isn't easy on some days to be patient and enjoy the process.

What I've found, though, is that patience is often rewarded with new discoveries and new ways of understanding the story, and with these discoveries comes a greater depth and greater clarity to the story.

Layers appear as if by magic, and with each pass another layer appears that I might not have discovered if I hadn't kept working on the manuscript.

Each revision brings a new way of understanding the story, of seeing the story.

Revisions are an integral part of the writing process, a kind of miracle that lets a story unfold in unexpected ways, but only if the writer is patient and willing to return--sometimes against all odds--to begin again, and yet again, to see where the words might lead.

The Shell Path

Even though I don’t live near the sea, there’s a shell path on the side of our front yard, a narrow swath of white seashells that marks the boundary between our property and our neighbor’s yard.

It’s not a very wide path, perhaps two feet across, and it’s not a very long path, maybe thirty or forty feet long, but it helps establish a clear line between the two yards, and I love the way the shells remind me of the sea, even if I can’t see or hear it from our home.

Every month or so I spend a few hours moving up and down the path pulling weeds. It is tedious work because the weeds are often long and stringy and deeply rooted. It’s not easy to grasp them, especially when wearing gardening gloves, and it’s never easy to pull them out entirely.

I’ll squat on my heels, stretching my calves and Achilles tendons, straining my quads, until I switch legs for balance or to relieve a cramp, and I’ll work with my back bent beneath the warm sun and think about the sea and how the sunlight sparkles off its surface and how the waves roll into shore and then retreat out to sea again.

After ten or fifteen minutes, it’s easy to lose my patience and perspective, to forget the larger picture—how the path serves as a boundary between our yards, how the shells, once weeded, look so beautiful, like a path stretching toward the sea—and it’s easy to become frustrated because the work doesn’t go faster.

But becoming frustrated doesn’t help the work. It only inhibits my ability to enjoy the sight of the shells and the vision of the finished path in my mind.

That's when I have to remind myself to slow down, to let go of my expectations of how the work should go, and to see—really look hard and see—what’s in front of me at this moment, to understand what needs to be taken care of now.

Maybe the weeds don’t belong where they are growing, or I'd prefer them to grow elsewhere, but rushing to pull them will only mean that I’ll miss more of the weeds than I’ll pull. And then I’ll only have to return to pull out the rest at some point.

This process of weeding, of keeping the shell path free of weeds, reminds me of the way the revision process works.

I’ll put down words in the same way a gardener might put down a shell path. At first, the words look perfect. The sentences appear straightforward, the verbs and adjectives strong and firmly rooted, and there isn’t a weed in sight.

But then I begin to see things that I didn’t see, not because I wasn’t careful or precise when I put the words down, but because I simply lacked the ability to see the weeds. I was too close to the material.

So, when I go back to the beginning of a manuscript to revise it, I try to slow down, to look at it as part of a larger picture, to understand what needs to be done in this moment. It’s the same process as weeding the shell path.

I have to pull unnecessary words the same way I pull weeds on the shell path. I have to go back to the beginning and start over. Neatening, straightening, clearing out clutter, cleaning up.

I want the manuscript to read cleanly, without any distractions for the reader, just as I want the path to offer a clear, unobstructed path, whether it leads to our back yard or to the sea in my imagination.

This kind of work takes patience. It requires a willingness to slow down and really see what is on the page (not what I might hope or think is on the page but what is actually there).

Most of all, it takes a certain commitment and devotion to work on the path, to keep working, even when my legs and back ache, even when my fingers start to bleed from reaching past the sharp edges of the shells and the gloves have torn, even when the mosquito bites itch and the red ant bites burn as if my skin is on fire.

Each writer must learn how to stay in the moment and do this work.

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Cracking Open Your Words

When we revise our work, it is often difficult to see past the polished prose that we’ve spent so much time burnishing to a high gloss.

And that’s the problem.

Words that are too polished can provide the illusion of completion while hiding the flaws of a story beneath the glimmer and shine of the polish.

When you revise your work, you have to look differently at your words. You have to look past them. You have to feel your way under them.

Even though it may be painful, you have to crack them open, like cracking eggs, to see what’s inside.

It’s not just the emotional content of the words that we’re curious about but the structure of the story on which the words are overlaid.

Is the structure sturdy? Is it built to last?

How can we tell for sure?

When you re-read each successive draft of a story, you want to make sure each scene contains a beginning, middle, and end, and you want to re-assure yourself that each scene moves the story forward, one scene not just leading to another but causing another.

And you want to know if the words in each scene show the reader a clear, concrete picture instead of describing the picture in an abstract, general sort of way. You want a sharply focused picture rather than one that's blurry and indistinct.

As you’ll discover when you begin cracking open your words, it takes a good amount of discipline, not to say courage, to pull up words like pulling up bricks that you’ve already laid down with such patience and precision.

Cracking open the words that you’ve set down with such care on the page can feel as painful as tearing apart a beautiful mosaic floor.

But you have to pull apart the words if you want to see what’s beneath them.

And cracking open each draft is the only way that way you can know if your story is poorly constructed and in danger of collapsing or built solidly on a sturdy foundation.

On Seeing

The other night I came across this passage in The Education of a Photographer, edited by Charles H. Traub, Steven Heller, and Adam B. Bell:

There are two phases of seeing in the making of a picture. The first takes place when the photograph is actually shot. This is when the instinctive decision is made which results in the picture being recorded on the film. The second seeing comes in examining the contact prints of the pictures. It is important to be able to recognize the pictures which express your viewpoint and also how these pictures can be printed and cropped to bring out that view. It is also important to be able to recognize the lucky accidents which can often result in good pictures. When a photographer takes a picture, he does it because something has interested and excited him. He must become expert at studying his contact sheets to discover what caused that excitement.

The passage is an excerpt from an essay by Alexey Brodovitch, who, as art director for Harper’s Bazaar, worked with some of the greatest photographers of the 20th century.

If we take a closer look at Brodovitch’s thoughts, I think we may find his way of viewing the phases of making a picture can help us as writers, as well.

The first stage of seeing, he suggests, occurs “when the instinctive decision is made which results in the picture being recorded on the film.”

Now, writers don’t record pictures on film. Instead, we use words to capture the images that our imaginations offer us.

These images are pre-verbal and often serve as the source for our stories, although we often lose sight of the original images, as well as the source of the images, because we’re so deeply immersed in words.

But if we step back from the page for a moment and remind ourselves that our stories flow through our imagination as pictures, we may be able to strengthen our stories and our connection to those stories.

Why not take a moment to reconnect with these original, pre-verbal images?

Put down your pen, close your notebook, shut off your computer, and simply close your eyes.

Let your mind wander into the setting of your story.

Can you “see” the images of your story–where it’s set, or the characters who might inhabit it, or what's happening on the "screen" of your imagination?

Before you pick up your pen and begin writing again, let the scenes and images of your story flow freely in your imagination.

Take pleasure in the simple act of seeing your story.

If you watch without writing, you’ll come upon an image or scene eventually that will trigger your “instinctive decision,” as Brodovitch calls it, to record the scene or image on paper.

That’s the writing process equivalent, I think, of Brodovitch’s first phase of "seeing" a photograph.

Try not to worry about that “instinctive decision.”

As Brodovitch says: “When a photographer takes a picture, he does it because something has interested and excited him.”

All you have to do is to note as you visualize the story when something interests or excites you.

Once you're aware of that stimulus, you can follow your instinct and write it down.

The second phase, which follows the instinctive decision to write it down, involves “studying his contact sheets to discover what caused that excitement.”

Once you’ve put the words on paper, you need to review the scenes (and the words that you’ve used to describe the scenes) in order to understand why the scenes are important to your story.

How do the scenes, as Brodovitch puts it, express your viewpoint? Or the viewpoint of your narrator? Or your main character?

This ongoing search for a viewpoint is one of the most challenging parts of the writing process. Often, it involves writing draft after draft to figure out why a scene is necessary (or unnecessary) and how each scene is linked together to reveal that viewpoint.

This process of searching for a viewpoint requires a constant shifting back-and-forth between these different phases of seeing.

As you envision your story, you need to monitor your own level of excitement as you let the images flow through your imagination.

And once you’ve gotten the images down on paper and begin examining them more closely, you may find it helpful to return to the original images to note what caused you to feel that initial excitement.

And then, of course, you'll need to find the words to capture that excitement for your reader to feel, too.

For more information on The Education of a Photographer, visit:
http://www.allworth.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=1-58115-450-X&Show=ExtInfo

And for more on writing and seeing, take a look at these sites:
http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/seeingwriting/online/homepage.html
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/28/specials/dillard-tinker.html
http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME09/On_seeing.shtml