More than an essay
When I started writing group, when I started writing all together those many months ago, I knew that I had a particular destination in mind. My group didn’t know it, so it was nice to hear them tell me that I should be heading in that direction anyway.
So far, in three of our four group assignments, I’ve written about a single year of my life, my last year in Fredericksburg, Virginia. It’s a town that I could have sworn had some kind of spooky energy flowing through it. Now, I’m not so sure it wasn’t my spooky energy that drew me to a year so filled with drama.
Each story has been around the same length, and each has focused on a single thing. The adorable apartment where I lived for that first year. My friend Heather. And my birthday just after I arrived. And there are so many more stories to tell. With each assignment comes another essay, with each essay a different voice or style or focus, so creating one cohesive piece still feels a little distant. But more than ever it feels possible.
Especially after last week, when I wrote and recited the story of holding the keys to my friend Anne’s car in my hands just hours before she died in a drunk driving accident. My group, though they were curious about the personal side of the experience, asked some provoking questions about the process of writing the story. As usual, they were in awe of my ability to tell the truth about my life in writing and share it publicly (which continues my craving for some non-fiction writing peers). But more than anything, what they were starting to hear was the beginning of a collection.
What they heard was more than an essay; it was a chapter in a book. They wanted to hear more, and to help to find the thread that would tie that more together.
Two of the other writers in the group also wanted to expand on past pieces, so our assignment this month is to write what we want. Instead of a prescribed style or prompt, we have a prescribed duty: we each have to write every week and collectively report on how much we’ve written so that none of us can have the excuse of “I did this at the last minute”, a common favorite for when we’re feeling uncertain about a given piece.
Hopefully blogging about it first counts as some time clocked in on the process. But to be safe, I’ll have to find some way to get myself started before the first check-in later this week. Like the little sticky note on my computer says, “don’t just sit there, write!”
When the words don’t come
What does it take to keep going once I’ve started writing? Is there any guarantee that this time will be different than the 50 other times I’ve started a journal or book, only to abandon those endeavors weeks or months or maybe just days later? So far, the writing has been working out. Writing group is a help, although the composition of the group has dramatically changed, and it feels a little less about writing and more about hanging out now. It was our targeted focus on our writing process that made the first few sessions together so inspiring. But what I don’t need is coffee klatch. I’m determined to take this as seriously as I can.
Maybe I need a group filled with people I don’t know. But in the meantime, how do I let life, and my job, and relationships not get in the way of actually sitting down and putting words on the page?
It’s been a while since I finished my last piece for writing group. And I’ve had a hard time even setting aside time to think about my next. My job’s been crazy, my life is perpetually busy – but that was true at the beginning of this process. Is it a 5 month slump? I wonder if I could look back on all of my failed attempts at being a regular writer in the past and find the average length of time those attempts have lasted. It would probably be about 4 months.
So, here it is – the test. It actually feels a little like my relationship with Jack. When we made it past 4 months, I knew it would last forever. Could that be the same for my life as a writer?
I hope so. Even lamenting my lack of writing by writing about it feels promising. What else can I do? Write some more, obviously. But even as I’m sitting here at my office desk, I’m eyeing my brightly colored Post-It notes and…done! A hot pink note to myself on my keyboard reading: Don’t just sit there —WRITE! Maybe egging myself on will help.
Then, I’ll need to figure out if this group, productive though it is, is the right group for me – a lonely non-fiction writer in a world of women with unending imaginations. Many of the questions that I still have, that I had from the beginning of this project about how far I can take non-fiction, will never be answered by this group, because from the start they admitted that they’re afraid of non-fiction, and would rather take out their real life feelings in a made-up world.
So, I guess I’ll just have to do it. Maybe I’ll go back to my own non-fiction writing prompts in between group assignments. I know a few other writers, maybe there’s a non-fiction writing group I can join. I want to be challenged by other writers, pushed. And, knowing what I want should be the key to getting there.
The Big Reveal: Writing Group Tonight!
So, tonight is the first official meeting of our writing group. Our numbers have grown from 3 to 4, our stories are written and printed out, snacks have been procured. We are ready.
Here’s the breakdown on the membership:
P wrote a novel, started working with a professional editor, quit her 9-5 (ish) job in part to finalize the book, and then shelved it for a year. She hasn’t written anything since.
H does not really identify as a writer, although she’s a great story teller and hilariously funny. She is also the catalyst for the group, having approached D one day saying that she believed she had a story in her.
D, like P, is a real writer. She’s hidden her talents away for about the past 10 years, satisfying the itch with ad copy and other marketing-type writing. She loves short stories, and is bringing her favorite to read to us tonight before we begin reading our own.
And then there’s me. Harboring elaborate fantasies of being a writer for as long as I can remember. Crafting dark poetry in my early teens and long, drunken, scribbled journal entries in my 20′s. After graduating from college I took a road trip, intended to be the great female on-the-road buddy story that turned into an incredible solo experience instead. Following that I spent a year trying to turn it all into a book. Unsuccessfully. And since then I’ve become the master of talking points and press releases, carefully shaping other people’s realities into quippy soundbites.
My cohorts – P, D, H – are all fiction writers, so tonight I’m putting it on the line with my non-fiction peak into what could be a new start to the book I never wrote. Or just one excercise in a bunch of disconnected exercises. Either way, it’s given me a sense of thrill, to have immediate human reaction to something I’ve written. To be writing with great intent. To attempt to have a beginning, a middle and an end to an actual story.
So, for all of us there, the shy, the rusty, the un-inspired, the unfulfilled, the journey begins!
Focus.
Ah! It happened! Thanks to the magic of deadlines, this one in particular being the impending first meeting of my writing group, I had a FOCUS breakthrough.
The song lyric exercise ended up being much harder than I thought it would be. ’How hard can it be to relate a song lyric to a story – one about my life or any other?’ I wondered. As it turns out: So. Hard.
And the problem was focus. I had these grand notions of love and life changing moments and major personal revelations, when what I really needed was something to write about, not some big idea. We’re talking about an 8 page story here.
The thing ended up being a balcony, the balcony of one of my favorite places to live, a tiny apartment in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The apartment was on the second floor of a duplex, and I lived there for about 9 months, the first 7 months with two friends, a dating couple. Yes, it got complicated.
But the porch! Ah the porch. It was just big enough to fit a table and a couple of chairs, it had a railing almost too high to prop your legs up on…but not quite. It got a little sun, protected us from the rain. It was the best place. And so the song lyric, cheesy though it might be, is one from an old old Indigo Girls song, appropriately titled “Least Complicated”.
I sit two stories above the street…
The story and the lyric seemed to happen all at once, after about 10 other songs and 10 other drafts that slowly spiraled down to this one place and one time.
What’s incredible to think of is the sheer volume of living that happened in a space that measured out to about six by six feet of floorboards, all in less than a year. Now, the place where all the living happens might just be the couch. I’m going to need to start finding a more interesting place to hang out.
One Quick Question
A few days ago, my friend Denise and I were talking about our wayward youths. It’s sometimes hard for people who meet me now to believe me when I talk about the crazy things I’ve done and learned from. (My theories about why that might be – and the crazy things themselves – are other topics for another time.)
Denise commented that she’d like to go back 20 years knowing what she knows now. She wondered how differently things could have turned out. “Wouldn’t you like to know what it would be like to be able to go back?”
Well, I wouldn’t. The only thing I could think of doing differently if I could do it all over again was not let my sister’s friends convince me I had to be in a different dorm my Freshman year of college. It’s the only decision I ever really let someone else make for me, and I wonder what my college life would have been like if I’d accepted my first living assignment. But that’s life, and I wouldn’t want to change it.
Nevertheless, the question kept needling at me. If Denise had so many things she’d do differently, what about other people I know? So, I opened up my email contacts and clicked on about 40 email addresses, representing a diverse cross-section of people my life, and asked them all this:
What would you do differently in your life if you had the chance?
I asked for a sentence or a story, something funny or serious, whatever my respondents felt covered the answer for their own personal situations.
So far, I’ve heard back from about 10 people, and it’s been incredible. Each person has had an extraordinarily clear idea of what they would do differently if they could. And it’s fascinating to see. Now, of course, I want to know about the people who didn’t answer and why. Is the answer too personal? Do they, like me, not have something they would change?
The problem with starting this project is that now that I’ve had a taste of what people are saying, I only want more. Story crack. I can’t get enough.
And thanks to the richness of the responses, I want to honor them in a great and interesting way. Have I found my direction? My topic of choice as a writer that goes beyond me and my life? We’ll see… in the meantime, here’s a taste:
Taken up Spanish instead of German in high school, and continued it in college. Everyone should know Spanish, as it is our de facto second language.
I think that I would have had another child. We love our kids so much that I wish we had at least one more.
I would have realized how wonderful and perfect I am much earlier and not have wasted all those years believing the voices in my head.
What about you? Want to be a part of my project? What would you have done differently?
The Assignment, Part 2: Details
I started writing my first short story for our new writing group. The assignment was to take a favorite song lyric and create an 8 page short story from it. I narrowed my choices down to a single line of a single song and proceeded to write one whole page.
Then I hit a wall.
I really thought I’d made some clever insights with the whole “how we measure time” post that I wrote here last week, but I’ve realized that those measurements might be useful for chapters or books in our lives (or epochs or eras), but not for the short stories.
At least not this one. I felt like I was trying to cram one huge story into 8 pages. I was great at summarizing 11 months in 2 paragraphs, but getting down to the level of detail that could make one night last 8 pages felt impossible.
I have a compulsive need for exposition. It is stomping all over my creative need for engaging detail. It’s like the expository essay lesson I learned in 8th grade (introduction, body, conclusion) is finally coming up to bite me on the ass 20 years later.
Well, kudos to my 8th grade English teacher, but I think tonight Part 2 of my assignment is going to have to be a trip back to the muse, Ms. Margaret Atwood, to read some short stories that barely begin or end, and remember how to describe things like sweat, and desperation and rain and what it’s like when they all combine in the middle of the night.
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Here’s a start:
I always loved the way cigarette smoke smelled in the summer more than any other time of year. It was, without fail, on that first hot day, when I’d be in just a skirt and tank top, no shoes, as little clothing as possible for the smoke to cling to. And that first drag of that first summer cigarette would swirl around me and come up to my nose untouched by wool sweaters or heavy jeans, just the air and my skin and the smoke. And every time, every single time, on that first hot day, I would think to myself, “I always love the way cigarette smoke smells in the summer.” And then I’d inevitably chuckle to myself and think about how I always thought that. And it was comforting, and summer would have started and endless possibilities would be laid out before me in the long hot days ahead.
5 reasons not to write (especially about myself)
There are SO MANY great reasons not to write, so why am I compelled to do it all the time? Am I crazy? I thought maybe if I put the reasons themselves into writing, then I would recognize how lame they were and get over it. So, here goes:
My Top 5 Reasons Not To Write (Especially About Myself)
5. Maybe I’m not that interesting. I mean seriously, self-indulgent much? What could be new or exciting or told in some other way about my life that hasn’t been written about by a better, more interesting writer before me?
4. Who has the time? Every one of these blog posts has been written while sitting at my desk at my job that does not pay me to write a personal blog. Every. Single. One. I’m not the kind of person who gets up early in the morning and writes before showering. I work hard during the day and like to rest my brain at night by the soothing glow of reality TV. When could I possibly find the time to write!?
3. Once it’s written, what would I do with it? I’m a nonprofit communications director in New Hampshire, my network isn’t exactly one that a manuscript could ride through into the hands of a publisher. As for pounding the pavement for publishing? See Reason #4.
2. It’s embarrassing. Let’s face it. I haven’t exactly been the picture of smooth during some of the tougher times in my life. And I’ve done some things that, to think back on now, make me blush. I can only imagine what my friends, family and fiance would think if I made my business public.
1. I’m not sure I have enough faith. Being a writer, in my mind, is like being a devout follower of a faith or philosophy. Zen in the Art of Writing and all of that, right? I’m not sure I believe enough yet. I’m a dabbler, an experimenter, a doubter, and a questioner. My own faith is a totally made up set of rituals and convenient beliefs, while writing falls under the category of “ancient art”. Maybe it’s just not in my constitution to believe in something that much.
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Okay, so after having read The Reasons over and over again, I can admit it. They are a little lame. And to know me is to know that I’m not exactly a person who tries to skirt my way around things. Some might dare to describe me as “very direct”. So the very existence of The Reasons is a little out of character.
The other helpful thing here is that I think if I can overcome Reason #1, the rest will just go away. So, from now on, consider me a suplicant to the alter of the page. A devotee of the written word. An apprentice of the ancient art of writing.
So it is written…
Inspiration
I never wondered what it was like to be the child of someone famous. The idea just never crossed my mind. Then, on Friday night when Jack and I went to the Press Room to hear Eric Mingus, son of famed jazz musician Charles Mingus, perform jazz and poetry, we learned more about him than we’d planned to, including bits about growing up in his father’s shadow.
Not shy on the microphone about his autobiography when he performs, whether between pieces or within his poetry, Mingus though rambling in style, gets right to the point about himself, his life, his beliefs. He howls in agony, yelps in glee, and mumbles through descriptions of growing up the son of a white woman and a black man.
Another musician, there only to listen, but who has played with Mingus in the past, talked to us about the stories he told after their show together years ago. Stories about how lost he was, trying to find a way to break past the fame of his father. How hard it was to create an identity of his own when destiny gave him the talent to be what his father was, just in another time.
It had been my idea to go to the show, to bump up my street cred on the writer’s block. I’d remembered Mingus from a performance at Jazz Mouth in Portsmouth from a year or so back when Andrei Codrescu was the featured poet. I remembered that night feeling like the two men had peeled off their skin to show us what lay hidden beneath the surface. It was amazing.
That’s why I went back to see Eric Mingus now – now that I’ve started up writing again. I needed to be reminded not to be shy about revealing what is under the surface. I needed to get past the fear and figure out how to howl.
After we heard about the stories of a youth troubled by his father’s fame, I joked that our future children wouldn’t have to worry about that. “Not yet,” Jack replied. “Not yet,” I agreed.
The Assignment
The writing group is officially assembled, our first meeting scheduled and our first assignment decided on. Before we meet, a month from now, we’ll each write a short story, 8-12 pages, to be read aloud to the group at our monthly meeting. The group will react, without the story in hand, to what they’ve heard, and then be allowed the opportunity to comment on the story in print before the next meeting, where we’ll share a new story based on a new topic.
Pretty straightforward. We’re a small group, only three of us – two of us professional writers in some way, the other an incredibly smart, funny woman looking to find a way to express the story she’s felt brewing in her.
Our first assignment: write a story based on a favorite song lyric. When I first started thinking about it, I thought I’d be writing a creative story, fiction. But as my brain churned around the task of identifying a favorite song, I realized that the assignment seemed to necessitate an autobiographical story. Loving a song lyric usually means a connection somehow. That I’ve got in spades, so now it’s time to narrow down.
Every little thing she does is magic.
When will we get the time to be just friends?
Winter just wasn’t my season.
You could’ve done better but I don’t mind. Don’t think twice. It’s alright.
I did my best, it wasn’t much/I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch/I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you.
And there are so many, many more. But the story, for most of these lyrics, comes from the same place. From the same time. From the time when music was all I did and all I knew, when I sang in a band and spent all my time with musicians and at music shows and with music lovers and friends. I wrapped myself in the music I sang and wrote and listened to.
I don’t sing anymore, or play in a band. In fact, I rarely listen to music in a meaningful way. So, I’m a little nervous about where the assignment might take me, but I’m ready to ride the nerves and jump in.
