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  Around this time, I read a quote by Emily Dickinson that remains among my favorite writing advice: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

  I started reading poetry avidly, just to shake up all the words and stories in my head, and I discovered that by focusing on the exquisite slant poetry offers, the truth I was trying to capture became more piquant, surprising, nuanced, playful, and meaningful to me.

  Now, I make it a point to always be reading a book of poetry—and to occasionally write a poem—to nurture a slant sensibility. Poetry helps me create the mood of a story because it can be almost like an incantation or prayer in its use of repetition and alliteration to establish atmosphere. Poetry helps me write with more nuance, to recognize the elusive interludes of life rather than focusing on the connections that much prose is dedicated to. Poetry helps me delight in specificity, in the drama of minutiae, so I can try to capture the world in an arresting precision of language that resists cliché.

  We’re living in an age of specialization, which holds creative dangers. Fiction writers tend not to write poetry. Literary fiction writers tend not to write fantasy novels. Genre writers tend to burrow into their preferred genre. And then how many writers of any kind take time to play the banjo, tap dance, or make collages?

  The more we experience other arts—the more we allow them to play together—the more we’ll bring their spirit and textures to our works.

  While specialization might be good to build particular writing muscles, it’s important to dabble in other writing forms—or dabble in other arts. Consider it a type of artistic cross-pollination, an opportunity to enhance your motivation by bringing variety into your practice. Just as in the plant world, where new life arises from the introduction of pollen from other plants, ideas arise from combinations of ideas that haven’t met yet. The more we experience other arts—the more we allow them to play together—the more we’ll bring their spirit and textures to our works.

  Gertrude Stein drew from Cubist painters’ aesthetic of fragmentation to infuse her sentences with a multiplicity of perspectives. While writing Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison was said to have picked up his trumpet when he hit a snag so that he could sound out his thoughts in music before turning back to the page. In fact, writers as diverse as Langston Hughes, the Beats, and Haruki Murakami looked to jazz to shape their aesthetic. Murakami described jazz’s influence on him: “Something like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible for me to transfer that music into writing. That was how my style got started.”

  An author is constantly trying to put words to the inexpressible, to make worlds come alive through language. Often, though, we must look to an artist in another field to pump fresh air into the recesses of our stories, to literally redraw the lines. So if you’re a sci-fi author, consider what you might glean from a horror novel, or how you might shape it through the lens of a mystery? Spend an afternoon at an art museum and absorb the techniques that artists have used in their paintings and sculptures. Listen to a genre of music you know little about as you daydream about your plot. Use your hands and your feet, your paints and your songs, your poems and your images to infuse your stories with new textures, new boundaries.

  TRY THIS

  EXPAND YOUR ARTISTIC TOOLKIT

  What is an art form you rarely engage in, but have respect for? What similarities do you see between it and your writing? What differences? Pursue it and notice how your writing is enhanced by your practice.

  42

  THE ART OF MELANCHOLY

  Please excuse me while I indulge in the pleasures of my melancholy.

  I’ve never uttered such a thing, but I should. When I feel the wispy tickles of melancholia’s moody clouds start to drift through my mind, I yearn to go off and wrap myself in melancholy’s strange and seductive mix of yearning, doleful thoughts. I want to cue up Verdi’s Requiem, pull down the shades, and tell the world to just let me wallow in my wistful sullenness so I can indulge each prick of the brooding agitations of my soul.

  What sort of masochistic, twisted person am I to find such a state pleasurable? I don’t know how to explain it. To breathe in melancholy is to breathe in rarefied air, for melancholy, despite all its dark and foreboding swirls—or perhaps because of them—is such a pure and nourishing aesthetic state. It’s not a state to escape from; rather, it’s a forest with many wending dark paths to explore, a series of melodies that promises new songs, new answers. Melancholy is a mood as mysterious and artistically valuable as inspiration.

  The Greeks thought melancholy came from an imbalance of the humor black bile (or melaina kole). That’s not scientifically accurate, of course, but I think the general concept is right: melancholy occurs when your spirit loses its bearings, when the solid foundation of your everyday equilibrium tips toward a more acute sensitivity to your emotions and thoughts.

  There’s a deep history of artistic kinship with melancholy. Francis Bacon thought such somber feelings were useful to the artist because “desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.” Søren Kierkegaard considered melancholy an “intimate confidant,” and believed he was used by the hand of a higher power through his melancholy. And then the notorious melancholic Keats wrote that “a World of Pains and troubles” is necessary “to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul.”

  Melancholy’s world of pains is sometimes confused with depression, which I don’t want to romanticize in any way. The difference between melancholy and depression is that depression smothers creativity. Depression doesn’t make a soul, it yokes one to the heavy weight of a darkness with no stars. When you’re depressed, you’re unmotivated, inactive, defeated, and perhaps suicidal, whereas a state of melancholy invites reflection, inspires a contemplative search that transforms its gloominess into an active, fruitful, and even exhilarating state.

  Melancholy can be unnerving, and even scary. You are on the precipice of an abyss. You don’t feel yourself as part of the whole, but a stray fragment. You realize that something is missing, but you either can’t identify what that is, or it’s unattainable. Melancholy brings on a striving to be whole, to find the unattainable piece. Melancholy requires you to delve into the riddles of being, to attune your mind to the shiftings and rumbles within you, and it’s that pursuit that gives it its uplifting powers.

  A melancholic mood isn’t a single emotion like jealousy or anger, but a state with various shades and layers—a discontented longing that stirs your imagination, returns you to whatever desolate moors you’ve waded through in your life, makes you pause to notice things you might not have otherwise, and gives you a heightened sense of self-awareness. It is a state in between, a twilight fading toward darkness, where opposing forces reside. Life and death. Love and loss. The things you should have said to your mother or father. The things you should have done when you were younger. Melancholy beckons you to step into your dissatisfaction and find a way to something like grace. Melancholy is the piquant realization of an existential crisis. We’ve all wasted years. Our lives, our loves, our cares, our griefs, our triumphs will be washed away. We have to answer the question, “Does any of this matter?”

  Melancholy summons us to be creative.

  We live in a culture that privileges stoicism, so we’re often told to repress our darker emotions. Put on a good face. Change the channel. Smile and you’ll be happy. But melancholy isn’t an aberrant state—not something to stuff away behind a stiff mask—but a gift. I don’t think people should court misery, but we might privilege such moments of intense introspection to sublimate this malady of life to empyreal epiphanies. To make the unsayable sayable. To make tragedy into something beautiful. We have this choice: to dwell in the lugubrious or to transmute our sadnesses into song.

  Just as we can take sick days when we have a cold, we should be able to take melancholy days when we’re gloomy. Not to recover—but to indulge in the splendors of our brooding. Melancholy summons us to be creative. There
’s something generous about melancholy. It’s not a pity party, but goes beyond self, to a wider, broader we—you’re not just feeling sorrow for yourself, but for everyone, for the human condition. At its best, melancholy can connect us to others.

  So don’t paint a smile on for the world and act like everything is normal. Pollyannas tend not to create great art. Wade through the bracing complexities, the tragic beckonings, the anxious possibilities. The dampness of your spirits just might be the water you need for your story to grow.

  TRY THIS

  LET YOUR MELANCHOLY RAVE

  When was the last time you remember being melancholic? How did it impact how you wrote? How did it impact what you wrote? The next time a “melancholy fit” (as Keats called it in “Ode on Melancholy”) strikes, don’t run from it. Treat it like a precious gift, an invitation that needs to be observed and experienced fully. Think of Keats’s advice to “glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,” to let melancholy rave and “feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.”

  43

  THANK YOUR MUSE

  If there’s one thing we writers specialize in, it’s self-loathing. We tend to beat ourselves up, especially during the long march through multiple drafts of finishing a novel. We somehow forget the wondrous flow of a mellifluous sentence we write one day as we clank our way through a ragtag snarl of words the next. The novel idea we were once so thrilled by too quickly becomes a burdensome yoke around our neck. Our demands are akin to a candle snuffer that smothers the flame of a candle. We forget how to appreciate the beauty of the flame, so we take away its oxygen without even knowing it.

  Despite all the artistic mythology built around the anguished artist creating great works in fits of dark thrashings, ideas are like people: they’re attracted to positive energy, warmth, kindness. They don’t like being taken for granted or used and tossed aside. They don’t like to be ridiculed or disparaged or abused. They yearn to be lifted by the love and excitement around them—and when they feel the buoyancy of such exultation, they call out to their friends to join in the merriment.

  So it’s good to pause and give thanks for your story, to bow to the transcendent powers of your creativity, to remember those fine moments when your words glowed, and pay heed to the specialness of your ability to conjure them. Give thanks that you have a story breathing within you, and that you have the pencil and the paper or the computer to write it. Instead of focusing on the things you think you deserve or your inadequacies, take a few moments to focus on all that you have. Give thanks that you have a desk or a favorite mug for your coffee or tea. Give thanks for your singular life experiences—experiences that only you have. You’ve traveled to another planet in your life, and it’s a planet whose terrain only you know. Give thanks for your imagination, all those synaptical sparks constantly firing in their mysterious ways, seeking meaning, seeking thrills, seeking life.

  Gratitude makes you healthier, happier. Gratitude makes you less self-centered and friendlier. Gratitude leads to more exercise and better sleep. Gratitude makes you a better manager or employee, a better teacher and student. Gratitude makes you more optimistic and builds your self-esteem. Gratitude builds your resilience and improves decision-making. Gratitude builds empathy and reduces envy.

  And gratitude makes you more creative. It instills a peace into the present that opens up possibilities on the page. When you appreciate the incandescence of your creativity, it’s like putting on a sweater that keeps you so warm that the chills of any failure won’t make you cold. Gratitude opens the soul to those everyday epiphanies that enrich us and our stories. It lightens the burden of all the baggage we’ve loaded upon ourselves so that you suddenly can remember what it’s like to be yourself, a creator. When you recognize and acknowledge the abundance you have, your abundance grows.

  Gratitude opens the soul to those everyday epiphanies that enrich us and our stories.

  You can replenish your gratitude each day as you sit down to write. Give thanks ahead of time for the chapter you’re going to write. Don’t focus on what you don’t have—don’t pick apart your writing ability or seize upon what’s wrong with your story, because you’ll always find yourself lacking. The next sentence you write is going to be a special one. Do you know how I know? You’ve never seen it before. And it’s going to lead to another sentence, and then another one after that.

  So praise each word that flows from your pen. None of these words are bad. None of them wish you ill. If they’re awkward or cantankerous or just don’t sing in quite the way we’d like them to from time to time, we just have to be patient with them. Don’t disparage roses for their thorns. They wouldn’t be roses without those thorns.

  TRY THIS

  MAKE A GRATITUDE JAR

  Write down one thing about your creative life you’re appreciative of each day on a small piece of paper. Perhaps it’s a sentence you like. Perhaps it’s the title of your novel. Perhaps it’s the way you show up each day to write with fortitude and gusto. Or perhaps it’s the way you’ve helped others to write, how you’ve formed a creative community.

  Put each piece of gratitude in a jar. When you’re feeling down, take out a piece of paper and read it. Read several at the beginning of the week or the month. Read all of them on New Year’s Eve and toast yourself.

  44

  WRITING WITH A PERSONA

  Sometimes a name—your name—can get in the way of your creativity. Sometimes your very sense of yourself, your identity, your history, and your expectations for who you are and want to be, narrow your story instead of widening it.

  Wouldn’t it be nice to write with a degree of invisibility, where we don’t feel ourselves scrutinized or victim to the Rottweiler-like snarls of potential critics? Wouldn’t it be nice to write as an entirely different person—one who is brazen and dashing, and maybe a bit reckless? Perhaps someone who is even a different gender or age? Just someone else—someone who is a conduit to our story, who enlivens it with brio and possesses an angle that we somehow don’t have access to?

  Sometimes you need a twin—a brother, a sister, a new friend, or all of the above—to gain access to your story. The story is within you, as a seed, as a possibility that wants to grow, but it needs just the right path to do so.

  If you feel such a way, then you understand the long history of writers who have used pen names, noms de plume, pseudonyms, noms de guerre—entire personas with complicated, nuanced backstories that form a new author with a new voice.

  A new name can provide a fantastic sense of liberation. A shy Victorian mathematician at Oxford named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson only felt free to let his imagination run wild through the protective guise of Lewis Carroll. Sci-fi writer Alice Sheldon (aka James Tiptree Jr.) decided to hide her gender within the male-dominated field of science fiction, as many other women writers have done, sometimes just to have their work considered for publication. The Bronte sisters initially wrote with the male pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin wrote as George Sand, and Mary Ann Evans went by George Eliot. George Orwell changed his name from Eric Blair because writing about poverty demanded an authorial authenticity that the upper-class Eric Blair didn’t possess. Patricia Highsmith published the first lesbian novel with a happy ending under the nom de plume of Claire Morgan.

  A nom de plume allows you to change your own self-perception.

  A pen name allows you to write more dangerously, to take risks that are too foreboding or forbidding under your real name. A pen name allows you to inhabit a persona that’s more exotic or exciting than your own. A pen name allows you to change the perception of yourself to others. It’s like a force field you construct around yourself; it will protect you from recriminations, unwanted critiques, the judging eyes of others. You might want to write a story loosely based on your life, but don’t want people to read between the lines and make judgments. You might want to make sure your friends and family don’t search for themselves in your stories (because people tend
to think you’re writing about them even if you’re not).

  More importantly, perhaps, a nom de plume allows you to change your own self-perception. We’re all boxed into some sort of corner of identity—a box that we sometimes construct ourselves. So a new name = a new self = a new writer.

  While a new name comes with a new identity, don’t just stop at the name. J. K. Rowling—who was well acquainted with writing through a mask because her editor advised her to go by her initials and added the “K” because she didn’t have a middle name—constructed an entire background for Robert Galbraith, the name she gave to the author of the mysteries she wrote for adults. Rowling created a detailed biography for the “craggy” Robert Galbraith, an ex-military agent working in the private security industry. Galbraith became a real person to her.

  I’ve never published a story with a pen name, but I have written the initial drafts of stories under the guise of a character I call Ted Paramour, the name of a writer I encountered in a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. For some reason, I just liked the name. Ted is better read than me, and far more sophisticated. He lives with a fantastic disregard of what anyone thinks of him, and likes to write the occasional shocking scene. Just because. He’s never encountered a new experience he didn’t want to try, and he’s the type of guy who knows everyone in town, so his parties include artists, ballerinas, boxers, former matadors, train conductors, and chefs. When I write as Ted, I gain a verve that I don’t quite have myself.

  Also, you don’t have to stop with one pen name. Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) had three. Lawrence Block has six. At last count, Dean Koontz had eleven. I’ve had dalliances with other pseudonyms (such as Mathilda Porter, who has co-written several of my stories with women protagonists). Seeing the world through another’s eyes can draw in an entirely new language, a poetry you might not possibly consider otherwise.