Recently in Essays on Writing Category

Check out this Adam Gopnik piece from the New Yorker on why young people like fantasy novels. For a change, it’s NOT insulting to youth or to fantasy. (Much.)

I’m not sure I agree with everything — though it’s always hard not to agree with Gopnik; he’s such a good writer that he can make anything sound reasonable and insightful, if not revolutionary. But he’s spot on about this: fantasy elevates ordinary and eternal problems of young people (and the rest of us, though Gopnik doesn’t say that) into stories via the language of myth. It turns “No one really knows me” into “I’ve got a secret identity.” It turns “I don’t understand why other people act the way they do” into “I’m trapped in a faerie realm.” It turns “my high school must have been built over the mouth of hell” into “my high school must have been built over the mouth of hell.”

I once told a class of 12th Graders that Plain Kate was autobiographical. “Not that I’ve ever fallen victim to a witch hunt because I don’t quite fit in,” I ad-libbed, “except that high school is exactly like that.” As one, they locked eyes and some even nodded. It was an electric moment: my hair stood up. All of them looked at me, all of them. Even the cheerleaders.

“Be kind,” says Pliny, “for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

There are certain things in life that are glorious, and they are glorious for everyone. There are more that are hard, and they are hard for everyone. We like to see these things retold, but with dragons.

I think Sorrow’s Knot may be slightly less stuck. This week, I had an 800-word day, a couple 700-word days, and yesterday at last a sticker day, a 1000-word day. There was a brief relapse on Tuesday when I went: “But what if this is all WRONG?” and was again paralyzed for a bit. But I am slowly shaking it. I again feel loose and even a bit excited when I walk into my writing office in the afternoons.

Embarrassingly, the breakthrough came from using one of those “oh, just try for ten minutes: you won’t get much done, but that’s okay, and then you can have chocolate” mental tricks. This particular iteration of the just-ten-minutes trick came in the form software called Vitamin R.

Vitamin R is another in the family of software that urges you to work for just a little bit. I’ve used lots of them, over the years, and particularly like Freedom for the Mac and Write or Die. But when you’re as fragile as I’ve been these last few months (and the “or die” part of Write or Die seems like a real possibility), a nice friendly version is perhaps called for, and Vitamin R seems tick that box for me.

Why did it take me so long to figure this out? I don’t know. Recently I did an interview at an online community for teenage writers, Write On. There I talked about the universal writers’ experience of My Writing Sucks, and how to keep going in the face of that. This was my advice to them, which I myself proceeded to turn around and forget:

*”lower the stakes for yourself. It doesn’t have to be the next New Yorker short story, it just has to — and here you should fill in the blank. Be a fairy tale told from the villain’s point of view. Be a soap opera that’s so over the top it will make people laugh. Use rhymed couplets. You can’t succeed at a whole novel/play/book of poems all at once, but you can probably do this, and it will hone your skills and sharpen your confidence.” *

For me, lowering the stakes turned out to be “write for ten minutes on the scene where Otter rescues Cricket from the ghost in the cornfield.” Compare this to the previous stake, which was: “rescue a book you used to love, but which your editor doesn’t seem to, by making it totally perfect right NOW.” I mean, which of those tasks would get you to lift your head weakly from your desk and peer around with a tiny bit of hope?

I feel silly, but hey. Silly is in fact one of my favourite words. Did you know that “silly” originally meant “blessed”? Sounds unlikely but it’s true. The drifting path of its usage went roughly like this: happy —> blessed -> pious -> innocent/childlike -> weak/pitiable -> foolish. The root is an Old English word, gesælig, meaning happy or goodhearted. It may be related (distantly) to the word “soul.” Fairy story readers will know its much closer cousin “seely” (also spelled “seelie”), which is just silly with an older spelling, and an older meaning hanging on.

What an important idea, an important insight: that to be silly and to be happy and to be holy are the same thing. I am at my most creative and productive (and happiest and holiest) when I remember this.

Even if it takes a rather silly bit of software.

Well, I’ve reached a new phase in my professional life. I shall call it the Great Stuck phase.

Backstory. Last Christmas, I finished up a solid draft of my second novel, Sorrow’s Knot. I’d already sold the book, as an unspecified “book two” in a two book contract, so I took a deep breath and sent it off to my editor. The draft I sent was not a first draft (I would sooner break my fingers than share my first drafts with my editor) but it was not a finished draft either — I still had ideas about things I wanted to try. But deadline pressed, so I dutifully sent the draft on.

I was excited about the book at first. It had problems, but I loved the main character, loved the world, and was giddy about the ending. The ending makes me cry and grin like an idiot at the same time. It’s probably my favourite of all the things I’ve ever written. I wanted to dive right back into it and try to make the rest of the book live up to that ending.

But, well, circumstances. I won’t get into them here, but Because Of Reasons, it was impossible for me to dive back into the book. That hurt. A lot. I began to see only the book’s weakest points. The frustration began to border on heartbreak. It was like sitting next to the phone, waiting for That Call, and every moment it doesn’t come is worse than the moment before. So, eventually, I put Sorrow’s Knot into the past tense. I thought: well, that book is done. It will come back some day, but for now, it’s done. Put it in a box with the other failed projects and move on.

And I did. I wrote a different book, Children of Peace. I have always been a slow, careful writer — Plain Kate took me six years, Sorrow’s Knot three so far — but Children of Peace came tumbling out in about six months. Lightning fast. Lightning exciting, too. I even started a sequel (a sequel!) and got about 20,000 words in.

And then, those circumstances? They changed. And it was suddenly time for me to write Sorrow’s Knot again. That was two months ago. And here’s the thing. I can’t get the book out of the bloody box.

I have a revision plan, good ideas for what I want to change, and how, and why. But the words themselves won’t come. I try and try, but they just WON’T. I feel like A.A. Milne’s Rabbit, “braining out” notices: “Notice a meeting of everybody will meet at the House at Pooh Corner to pass a Rissolution By Order Keep to the Left Signed Rabbit.” Just that artificial, knocked together of prefabbed parts. If it were up to me, I’d give up. I’d leave the book in the box forever. But it’s not up to me: it’s a sold book. A lot of people have put a lot of work into it already.

So, now what? I’ve always advised young writers — and always believed for myself — that you should follow your writing passions, and not be concerned about what you “should” be writing. “Should” is so often a trap. And there are few good reasons to write beyond passion. I usually throw in a caveat here about the difference between following your passion and chickening out halfway through — but really, that doesn’t feel like chickening out. This is different.

What do you do when you want to quit but can’t? I’ve thought a lot about this this week, and here is what I’ve come up with.

• First: forgive myself. I’ve had very little time to write, recently, because of publicity pressures and dayjob craziness. (Recently my “half-time” job has seen me leaving at closer to 3:00 than 1:00 — I decided that that was temporarily okay to deal with a temporary problem. I’m redrawing that boundary now.) With all the stuff going on in my life in September and October, it’s no wonder there’s been little time to write. Good Stuff is still Stuff.

• Realize, too, under the heading of “forgive myself,” that part of this is reacting to the “You Must” nature of having a book on contract. My muse says: Make Me. That is the nature of the muse (and possibly the reason sophomore books are … ahem … problematic). Realize this, shake my head at myself, and move on.

• Second: realize diving back in is about more than just plot. Oddly enough, each of of my light little fantasy novels turns out to deal, in fact, with one of my Big Scary Personal Issues. (The plus side of writing about talking cats is that no one asks you if they’re autobiographical.) To get back to Sorrow’s Knot, I probably need to get back to the thing about it that moves and scares me. (Swell, that should be fun.)

• Third: be less like Rabbit and more like Pooh. By this I mean, sit quietly with the stuckness and have faith. This is an act of creativity, and creativity is more about faith than will. (For me.) This week, I’ve decided to trust that there is a door back into the work — just one I have yet to find. It’s my book, after all. I liked it while I was writing it. I loved Otter. And I still love the ending, unabashedly. Nothing there has changed. It will happen.

So I record all this so that others can see that Real Writers Get Stuck (I have many students who read this blog) and so that someday when I’ve written a dazzling book that I love beyond all reason, I can remember that I once hated it and wanted to leave it in a box. At that time I will probably have another book I hate and want to leave in a box, so this note to myself may be useful.

I am stuck, but I am waiting with faith. Someone can come read me a Strengthening Book, such as might comfort a Bear in Wedged in Great Tightness, if they’d like.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview, up today, at WriteOn, a cool blog and forum for teen writers — that is, writers who are teens, not writers who write for teens. (Oh, internet. Where were you when I was fourteen?) Anyhoo, Maggie at WriteOn does a good back and forth interview — a not-to-be-underestimated skill — and this piece has more than the average number of interesting bits. Read this excerpt, then go read the whole thing.

MAGGIE: Voice is so important in a novel, and you’ve really got yours down. What are a some tips for teen writers on voice?

ERIN: I think having a voice as a writer is mostly about confidence. It’s sort of the same as public speaking: you want to sound like some version of yourself, not nervous or stilted or artificial, as if you were about to faint at any moment. People will feel bad and awkward and want to leave. That confidence might come naturally to some people — I think many writers have never thought about their voice at all — but for many of us, it has to be earned.

How do you earn it? Two things, I think: practice and play. Practice is just writing a lot — and particularly finishing things. Most young writers start things and don’t finish them. It’s so hard to push those early stories or poems forward. Ira Glass said something amazing about this — that writers get into the game because they have taste: they know good writing when they see it. And then, because they have taste but don’t yet have skill, they dislike their own writing. They can see all its failures. How do you keep going when you’re failing like that? Well, first know that everyone fails at first. Ray Bradbury said you have to write a million bad words before you write one good book. Let’s hope he’s overestimating that, but still, take it from Ray: everyone fails. But it’s by making yourself finish, keeping going at things, that you’ll fail better.

The second way to earn confidence is to play. …

(Read more.)

So! Prairie Fire took a handful of my ghazals. It's the first time I've had ghazals published, and Prairie Fire is a good catch. I'm pleased. But of course the burning question is: "what's a ghazal, anyway?" (And by "burning" I mean "three people asked me.") I recycle my little piece below that answers that question.

The ghazal in its traditional Arabic and Urdu is built of couplets, each self contained, but connected in the ear by both a refrain at the end of each second line, and a rhyme that occurs both at the end of the first line and just before the refrain in the second line. There are other formal requirements, too, but those are the main ones. It's traditionally an oral form: the poet recites it and the audience comes in for the refrain. The rhyme just before the refrain helps cue the listeners.

Contemporary poets experimenting in English have made free with this. Understandable: English is so rhyme-starved, and most of us don't recite to enthusiastic, poetry-literate crowd, alas. As with the haiku, those of us adopting the form in English are missing some things, but finding others uniquely our own.

I am just beginning to play with the form, and have kept only the requirement that a ghazal be five to seven couplets long, and that each couplet be self-contained. (They are connected, but the connections are mysterious.) The addition of the borrowed first couplet is my own idea -- echoing other poets being close as I would come to a call and response. Here's an example (not one of the ones in Prairie Fire).

Ghazal beginning with lines by Roethke

The river turns on itself,
The tree retreats into its own shadow.

Like a breath, the bay empties
before the wave.

Old photographs. Setting fire to them -
almost a murder.

... as sparks fly upward, the Bible says.
But they do, as if reaching.

Night windows are not stars, though many birds
mistake them, fatally.

Over at Squeaky Books (a fun book blog which takes its name from Shannon Hale: “I couldn’t remember the last time I had stayed up into the squeaky hours of the night because I couldn’t put a book down, and that was a tragedy.”) there’s an interview with moi. Here’s an excerpt. Go read and subscribe, though: it’s a fun site.

We had a discussion on twitter about how you didn’t like people using the word “depressing” when talking about your book. Can you talk a little about that now? Why do you think people feel the need to use that word, and how would you better define it?

That word, “depressing” — I don’t like that word. It means something real: it means paralysis, the loss of hope. Now, I’ve read and liked books like that: 1984 is depressing, for instance. Or MT Anderson’s Feed. They are books that suck you in and beat you up. When you’ve read them you feel less good about the world — though perhaps willing to do something about that, which is the point of such books.

“Depressing,” then, is distinct from “sad.” Depressed people in fact do not feel sad: they feel horrible pain, they feel (contradictory) numbness, and (contradictory again) rage — but not anything as simple and redemptive as sorrow.

I will accept that Plain Kate is sad. It made me cry, and I selfishly hope it makes other people cry too. If I may channel my inner Bugs Bunny: What do you want from a Russian Fairy Tale: a happy ending? I personally think that the novel — particularly the ending — is uplifting and driven by hope, but it’s okay with me if people don’t get that layer, and feel nothing but the sadness. That’s one level at which the book can be read.

But “depressing” — no, I hope not. I don’t want it to be a book that beats you up, that makes you feel hopeless and numb. That’s the opposite of why I write. (I take as my motto E.B. White: “All that I want to say in books, all that I ever want to say, is that I love the world.”) And so when people that the book is just too depressing to read, that’s a charge that hits home.

Here’s a video of me on my personal connection between literature and science: both are simple-minded, monastic, and willing to dig deep. Simple-mindness is a virtue to me. Want to know why? Here:

I’m addressing the Knowledge Integration Students at the University of Waterloo: students who decided to integrate a number of different passions instead of narrowing themselves to one. They are an impressive and exciting group and I was honoured to get to talk to them. The book I mention researching is Sorrow’s Knot.

This is up online thanks to the good folks at The New Quarterly (hi, Melissa!) who edited this down from an hour. The edit is so good it makes me wonder what else I said. Over at their “QuArc” issue (a joint issue with Arc celebrating the intersection between science and literature) you can see more video from this talk, and read my essay on the history of the names of quarks.

(Or: one writer’s neurosis in three stages.)

First there is a euphoria. Ending a book always seems to take a huge push; it takes all I have and then some. Maybe if I were a successful outliner it would be different, but I always feel as if I’m discovering the story as I go along, nearly living it alongside my characters. To live through the climax with them is excruciating. I remember that I delayed drafting the climax of Plain Kate (I mean the chapter called “An Exchange of Gifts,” for those who have read it) for weeks, unable to gather the courage to face writing it. I finally tackled it in a coffee shop while killing an hour before an radio interview. I had nothing but my notebook with me: no choice but to write. I sometimes think if I had had a book that day the novel might still be unfinished. I remember drinking cranberry cocktail and positively davening over my notebook: rocking back and forth, wrapped tight in the story. I’m sure the poor Tim Horton’s workers were ready to call the men with nets.

After the climax, if the men with nets don’t get me, there’s the part where I just refuse to stop after the climax and stagger onward toward the finish line where the paramedics are waiting. To reach it is an accomplishment on par with finishing a marathon or giving birth. The emotional and physical exhaustion wrap together with triumph and I am caught between tears and insane whooping. (It’s best not to do this in public, by the way.) Rapture might be one word for this stage. I am seized up and lifted out of myself. It’s an altered state.

And then, whiplash fast, the crushing self doubt.

All novels are failures, of course. They are never everything you want them to be. And of course a newborn novel is not yet grown into everything it could be. But somehow in the process of finishing a novel I always forget this. I believe instead that the novel needs to be perfect, genius, staggering — and needs to be so right now. And it isn’t.

It may be that the altered state of the euphoria and the lowered defences of the exhaustion make me more vulnerable to Crushing Self Doubt syndrome. Perhaps writers are prone to it as a group. I’m not sure. But it strikes lots of us. It’s been known to hit me hard.

This is one place where it’s good to have other writers in your life. I’m lucky to have a bunch, and it happens that three of us finished a book at the same time. Rebecca and I went out for high tea (as one does, la de dah!) and discussed (among other things) how excited we were about our books but at the same time how complex their awful problems were, such that we weren’t even sure where to begin fixing them. (Her book is brilliant by the way. I don’t know what she’s on about.) Pamela and I, meanwhile, have scheduled cupcakes of crushing self doubt (and coffee) at the Cake Box next week. We’d do it sooner, except that Pamela has to go to Moncton. No worries. I’m sure I’ll have still have crushing self doubt when she gets back.

You notice I say “self doubt,” not doubts about the book. During the crushing self doubt, I remind myself that I am not the work. That writing a bad novel (if in fact I did) would not make me a bad person. Or even necessarily a bad novelist. Remind myself doesn’t work, mind you — but it still seems worthwhile.

It’s worthwhile, too, to try not to project one’s doubts about the book onto the process of editing and publishing. A book is met mostly with silence, even if it’s only the silence of people happily reading. To us writers it’s as if we walked into a room (say, our junior high cafeteria) and a dread hush fell. Possibly a dread hush with some tittering. Or if not a dread hush, it’s a polite silence, tense, while our friendly first readers or our agents or our editors try to figure out how to gently break it to us that we’re personal and professional disasters and need a stint in writer rehab and a job in a bank. All of this is normal. None of it is true.

After the crushing self doubt equalizes, or at least settles into a background whine, I often have an emotional crash. It’s a postpartum thing, and for me it’s so predictable that my husband (also a writer, bless him) knows how to take precautions, such as stocking up on ice-cream and backrub lotion.

I work so hard to finish a book — often at the end there are long hours, and always there is emotional intensity — and then it’s over. Then what? Now what? On reflection the book probably isn’t terrible, at least not irredeemably so, so there’s editing. But editing doesn’t produce the adrenaline to which one can become addicted in the rush of finishing a book. Certainly it doesn’t fill the same place in the heart.

And maybe it’s the place in the heart that is the problem. Maybe, just maybe, what’s happening during the crash is grief. Now, I know me some grief, so it’s not a term I’m throwing around easily. But maybe when one lives with these characters, walks with them through the best and worst of their lives … well, maybe one is entitled to love them, and miss them when they have moved on. Certainly the numbness and unreality of the post-book crash are something like grief.

Unlike grief, though, the post-book crash fades. The cure, as it is for most writerly ills, is to take care of one’s self, pout for a little, and then start something new. And AFTER that, you can look back with joy and accomplishment and fond feeling, and kvell over every little good thing that happens to your baby book.

(Note: as part of my “I don’t blog much but occasionally write guest blogs” I wrote for Candaces’s Book Blog. I don’t usually cross-post whole essays, but this one is hard to break a piece from. If you go over to Candaces’s to comment, you can enter to win Plain Kate! Note, too: I wrote this essay some months ago. Greta and I are both doing better; thank you. Note, three: if you’d like to host a guest post by me, drop me a note.)

I write YA fantasy and science fiction. I write it for what strikes me as the only possible reason: I like to read it. I feel there are not enough books like LeGuin’s Earthsea, Beagle’s Last Unicorn, or McKinley’s Beauty in the world, and it is my ambition to write more of them.

But writing F/SF does have some fringe benefits. One of them is that if you write about talking cats and the restless dead and our robot overlords, no one asks you which parts are autobiographical. Which is good, because the answer is: it’s complicated.

For instance, in the last few days, my writing has paused, as my emotional life has spun out of control for reasons that I won’t get into here. For the purposes of telling this story, you just need to know that ten days ago a familiar disaster began to roll up and crest over my family. We guessed it was just a matter of time before that wave broke.

While waiting to be smashed against the rocks, I wrote two chapters in which my character, Greta, was under unbearable stress, waiting for a terrible thing to happen to her. Finally I wrote the bit where it did happen, and at this point in my book, Greta is emotionally crushed, numb, and is not sure what to do next. Ah, Greta: I know the feeling.

Part of this is just the work-a-day miracle of fiction, the thing that allows us to write about, and read about, people other than ourselves, and be moved by their stories. The mind builds the wheel of the plot, but the heart must turn it.

This is not to say that one’s life goes directly into one’s writing, necessarily. My pain does not have to be the same as Greta’s, and neither does yours. Neither does either of us need to be in pain right this moment, though it happens that I am. The mind can build any kind of wheel. The miracle is that the heart does turn it. The miracle is that I, the writer, can reach into the page with my life, and you, the reader, can reach out to the page with your life, and together we can conjure this new life, this fictional soul, Greta, and be moved along with her.

So far, what I’m talking about is miraculous and mystical, but routine. I would bet (and hope) that the most jaded, plot-driven, hack writer out there (you know, me, on Tuesdays) has a drop or two of faith in fiction as miracle.

But let me tell you what’s strange. I outlined Children of Peace — Greta’s book — months ago. I knew she was going to wait to be destroyed, and then be destroyed. It was pure coincidence that the moment of my writing it corresponded so tellingly to the moment I felt it in my own life.

Another instance, more dramatic: In Plain Kate, I wrote a story about the death of a sister by drowning and violence, and had nearly finished it when I lost my sister to drowning and violence.

It was before Wendy died that I created Linay and his lost sister, built the whole wheel of a novel that spins around grief — Linay’s for his sister, Drina’s for her mother, Kate’s for her father, on and on. And yet I myself had never had cause to grieve in this way. I didn’t write Plain Kate autobiographically, or to expiate my grief. But having written the first two thirds of the book, built the wheel, I certainly found I had a lot of heart’s blood with which to turn it.

Sometimes I have felt as if I conjure things in real life to put into books. I do not mean I cause them; I feel no responsibility for them. I do not even mean that I foreknow them or forefeel them, though that is closer. What I mean (and now you should hand me my tinfoil hat) is that I was drawn to writing what I did — given that writing to do — because I was going to need it.

Given by whom? Ah, that’s not answerable. My tradition coaches me to start talking about the Holy Spirit, but I’ve found that people back away when I start.

This is not something I can write about with any authority or certainty. It is not something I’ve studied deeply. (I should, for instance, go read Jung’s essay on Synchronicity, which Wendy thrust at me every time I got going on this theme, and which I’ve never finished.) But it is something real: of that I’m convinced. I have heard it reported too often, by too many different writers, to dismiss it easily.

And right now, today, while I wonder how to pick up the pieces and what to do, I also find my character numb and shut down. I look at how her disaster has shattered the outline of the rest of the book: surely I need to throw that away, and find a new path. I have begun to glimpse the path of the book, and Greta’s path; it is beautiful and whole and exciting. And so will my life be again, insha’Allah, someday soon.