Pep Talks for Writers Read online

  13

  CHANNEL YOUR SUPER HEROIC OBSERVATIONAL POWERS

  How often do you pause to notice what is going on around you? Truly notice, as in being in the present, absorbing your surroundings with all your senses, and putting words to your reflections.

  If you live in an ever-tightening grid of time (as most of us do), it’s easy to get so caught up in the bustle of our lives that we walk through the world with blinders on. I’ve noticed that I sometimes weave through people at the grocery store as if they’re pylons on an obstacle course, not even noticing who they are. I tend to lower my eyes when I walk down the street, bound by coils of thoughts. I sometimes get so caught up in the march through my to-do list and the obsessive concerns that race through my brain that I wonder if I’d be able to provide any meaningful details to a police officer if a crime occurred right in front of me.

  And yet I’m a writer, and writers depend on their observations of the world as much as Sherlock Holmes depends on his keen senses to solve a crime. “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes,” Holmes says in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

  Being attuned in such a way to let your senses be enlivened is a gift that writing offers. Our concentration consecrates the world around us; our attentiveness deepens what it regards. We get to look through the keyholes of life, spy on people, and eavesdrop on their conversations. Every scrap of information is useful. When we imagine a scene on the page, we draw from a cauldron of details in our mind, and we stitch them all together into a new world. The ominous heft of the clouds in the sky. The peculiar foreshadowing in a lover’s eyes. The singular vibrant orange of caviar in sushi. Nothing is too trivial for what the writer may make of it.

  It’s our duty to our stories to be able to draw from a vast store of sights and smells and sounds, so we must embark on each day with a reminder to notice the world around us. That sounds easy, but it’s a challenging task. The art of seeing has to be learned and practiced. Why learned? We’ve been seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, and smelling the world for years, right? But proceeding through life and truly noticing it are two very different things. Our brains aren’t meant to see everything. We focus on specific things, then filter out everything else. That’s good in most cases because if we paid attention to everything, we’d never be able to get anything done, yet by training our minds to march in such a focused lockstep, we miss the smaller details of what’s going on in the world around and within us. That’s why sometimes people might not notice storm clouds slowly gathering above them, and then they’re surprised by a heavy downpour.

  We need to practice being observers, just as we need to practice anything to become good at it, and only in the practice of paying attention will we begin to build questions and stories and insights from the life around us. The question we need to ask ourselves as writers is how to go beyond merely filing reports, but to live life by noticing the richness of its nuances, the weave of mysteries running beneath it all. Artists need to see the world with such enhanced attention to uncover the truth that a casual observation can’t draw out—to detect the unfamiliar in the familiar.

  Imagine stepping into the world as if it was another planet, and you’re seeing it for the first time, each plant exotic and strange, and potentially dangerous. When you look at the sky on this planet, you can’t possibly know what the clouds do, or why the sky is blue. If you see an apple on a tree, do you dare eat it? How do you decide it’s not poisonous? Use all of your senses. Feel it, smell it, listen to it. Then bite it and see if it tastes differently in this new land.

  Imagine stepping into the world as if it was another planet, and you’re seeing it for the first time.

  Or look at the world as a child might. The bug you see isn’t just a bug, but a creature with a mind and a soul, and as it flies by you, it’s trying to tell you something important. Children pause to not only notice things, but to create story worlds around them, because their minds haven’t been stamped with a time grid and a set of pressing goals. They feed widely on the world around them. They are omnivores of perception, alive to all the little things that enter their senses, and since they don’t know the world in the way we think we know it, each thing they observe is alive with questions and possibilities. “Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships,” said Zora Neale Hurston, and it’s exactly that kind of imaginative transformation that a writer needs to bring to the world.

  Sometimes I like to pretend I’m a super hero with three powers: (1) the power to see people’s auras; (2) the power to discern what hidden or unused energies they hold within; and (3) the power to see their life span. Each person, whether a clerk in a grocery store or a good friend, suddenly becomes heightened in my imagination, and I’m more attuned to each of their traits. If you look closely at anything, even the most familiar object transmogrifies into something new and different.

  God is in the details, as the saying goes. Or, rather, your story is in the details. So pause to notice. Think about how you can truly notice.

  TRY THIS

  NOTICE

  You might think you know the world around you, but challenge yourself to find the unusual in the usual? Make it a goal to notice one arresting detail each day and write it down. Go on a sound walk, and pay attention only to sounds to see how sounds tell a different story of the world than sights. Or, when you meet someone, observe everything about him or her, and then choose a telling detail that encompasses who that person is.

  14

  CAVORT . . . WANDER . . . PLAY

  There’s a moment that occurs in every writer’s life when your fingers begin to cramp into a claw-like formation as you madly type toward another word-count milestone. “Perspiration trumps inspiration,” you chant, but the problem is that your brain is so fried that it feels like a wet noodle. (I’m using clichés and mixed metaphors at the same time, so I must be in such a state now.)

  Too much work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, as the saying goes. I never underestimate the propulsive powers of self-discipline in any creative endeavor, but self-discipline’s bark can resemble a nasty drill sergeant. Self-discipline can divide the self in half, into the good parts and the bad parts. We’re often told that if we don’t conquer the bad parts—our emotions, our daydreams, our aimless wanderings, not to mention long periods of time in a Jacuzzi—we can’t truly progress. Self-discipline gives us control of our lives, leads us to our goals, and fluffs up the comfy chair of living a rational life, yet there is more to life than rationality and control, isn’t there? The heart knows nothing of grids, lists, spreadsheets, and timelines.

  Too few stick up for loosening the reins of discipline to frolic in our baser selves. Socrates said, “An undisciplined life is an insane life,” but letting a mood, an appetite, a passion flow through you is as necessary for your stories as pen and paper. Repeatedly subjecting yourself to doing things you dislike can become numbing—and anything, even your wonderful novel, can become unlikeable when you feel like an ox pulling a plow through clods of dirt. You are not an ox, and your creative life shouldn’t be about getting whipped every day to work harder and harder.

  Every once in a while, it’s good to go the way of the insane, leave your writing boot camp, and go to a different side of your writing life—a rollicking party, where you can revel with your inner clown, give a big hug to every wacky thought that comes your way, and put some proverbial flowers in your hair. “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing,” said George Bernard Shaw.

  The mind needs to wander.

  The mind needs to feel unfettered.

  Do you remember when you were a child and rolled down a hill just for the sake of getting dizzy? How often do you do that now? I never do it, but recently when I was in the park with my daughter, she challenged me to a spin-off, and we both twirled around until one of us lost our balance and fell. I discovered that if I allowed my body to move in such a silly way, I
actually thought differently afterward. My linear, problem-solution mindset wobbled all about, which was exactly what my writing project needed—not perspiration, but a fanciful twirl or two.

  The mind needs to wander. The mind needs to feel unfettered. Answers to thorny problems tend to present themselves when you’ve stopped trying to figure them out—when you play. Have you ever seen a cockroach or a worm play? No. They’re not problem-solving animals. But dogs, cats, chimps, and humans are born with frolic in their DNA because play allows us to experiment, test limits, and jovially joust with the world. Laughter opens us up, physically and mentally, allowing wonder to bloom and grow. Goofiness is liberating, if only because it is unruly, nonsensical—a breath of another world where anything can happen. Mistakes and pratfalls ring with a different musical truth. When you’re laughing hard, tragedy seems impossible. We don’t think when we laugh, yet we’re at a pinnacle of life, exhilarated, and intoxicated, as if experiencing a rush of love.

  “If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer,” said Ray Bradbury. Take that, inner drill sergeant. I want my writing to be merrier, not drudgier (which sometimes means using words that don’t exist). I want to gambol through my novel, not grind.

  Discipline without motivation is nothing, and being undisciplined can rekindle our motivation. Remind yourself how to let loose, in big ways and small ways. It’s necessary to get out of the grind of daily production—to celebrate the ability to be playful, capricious, and irresponsible. Take a respite from the work of your novel and indulge in a moment of play before pushing forward again. Build a fairy village out of sticks, pebbles, and leaves. Trade Mad Libs with your friends. Let laughter jostle you all about, intoxicate you. And then skip back to your keyboard—and write with diligence, perseverance, and gusto toward the finish line!

  TRY THIS

  MAKE YOUR DAY A PLAYGROUND

  This is a rare one. Take a day off from writing. Go to a playground and swing. Get in a water gun fight. Climb a tree. Don’t plan too much—you want to go with the wind. Carry this playful energy with you to your writing. Think to yourself, Let’s make this a playground. How does your mood shift? Do you discover other entry points to creativity?

  15

  USING YOUR LIFE IN YOUR STORY

  “Write what you know” might be the single most uttered writing maxim. I was both compelled and repelled by the phrase for years as a young writer. Compelled because I wondered what it meant—what did I know? What was there in my ordinary life that could manifest itself into a good story? And then repelled because I wanted to write fiction, not memoir—I wanted to imagine stories, to write about other worlds and other people.

  Also, truth be told, I was timid to use my life as a source for my stories. To put my experiences on the page, in any form, was an act of exposure, of possible embarrassment. And, beyond that, I didn’t want to infringe upon the privacy of my friends and family by portraying them.

  So, I didn’t necessarily write what I knew. I imitated some of the authors I admired. You might say I wrote what they knew. I wrote a love story in the vein of Raymond Carver that was set in a trailer park. I wrote a novel patterned on Crime and Punishment set in the bowels of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. I wrote short stories about wayward, transient characters similar to those that peopled Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. These were all fine enough stories, but they weren’t brave stories, despite being about edgy characters living on the margins, because I resisted truly putting my life into the story.

  I didn’t realize that most fiction is full of an author’s story, whether real life is cast through a fictional lens or in the themes, motifs, and conflicts that preoccupy the writer. Aristotle said that the secret to moving the passions in others is to be moved oneself, and moving oneself is made possible by bringing to the fore the visions and experiences of one’s life. “Write what you know” doesn’t instruct you to put your life directly on the page, but rather to take the rich mulch of your experience and let stories grow from it in other forms. As Saul Bellow said, “Fiction is the higher autobiography.” Writing what you know becomes something like a pilgrimage, a chase scene, a dreamscape, a meditation, and a scientific experiment all in one.

  Don’t shortchange your experiences.

  One way I suggest to write what you know is through method acting, a training ground many actors use to fully inhabit their roles. Method acting traces its genesis to Konstantin Stanislavsky who believed that great acting is a reflection of truth conveyed both internally and externally through the actor. He didn’t want his actors to simply create a facsimile of an emotion; he wanted them to actually feel the emotion, which is equally important for you as a writer. At the core of his approach was the magic if—the question, “What if I were in the same situation as my character?”

  It doesn’t matter if your main character is a tap dancing mongrel dog, a spidery creature from planet Xytron, or a person that just happens to closely resemble your mother, the trick is to literally get into that character’s skin and see the world through his or her eyes—to imbue your characters with their own lives through your experiences, your knowledge of life.

  Stanislavsky employed methods such as tapping into one’s emotional memory. To prepare for a role that involves fear, the actor must remember something frightening and use that emotion as a conduit to playing the character on the stage. In life, we tend to live through a variety of facades that hide our vulnerability, but on stage—and on the page—we need to dramatize our wounds.

  Shelley Winters, a great method actress of yore, said that the actor must be willing to “act with your scars”—to relive painful experiences onstage as the character. To do so, she didn’t will an emotion to come on its own accord, but concentrated on the sensory aspects of the actual memory of a conflict or traumatic episode. She focused on where the “event” took place, and then explored the room in as much sensory detail as possible. She asked herself what time of day it was, what was the angle of the light, and what was she wearing. These details helped trigger the memory so she could go more deeply into it.

  We bury some things deep within for a reason, and it’s anguishing to try to uncover them. We’ve all experienced painful moments, whether it was being rejected in love, getting bullied on the playground, or losing a pet. Those are perhaps the experiences that will give your stories the greatest meaning, so be brave, and dive into your own past to relive those experiences. It might not be easy, but sense memory is about going back to those moments, re-living the emotions, and then imbuing your character experiences with a similar kind of essence.

  Don’t shortchange your experiences. You have a rich life to draw on in your writing. No matter if you’ve fought in wars or served on the PTA in your kids’ school. No matter if you’re a trapeze artist or a security guard. No matter if you’re an Olympic athlete or a weekend jogger. We’ve all felt a deep range of emotions, emotions that we can amplify with our imaginations to infuse our stories with the deep truths of life. So write who you are. Write what you love. Write what you need to know.

  TRY THIS

  GIVE YOUR CONFLICT TO ANOTHER

  This is a moment to explore who you are. Write down a list of different conflicts you’ve had in life, whether it’s unrequited love or a time where a parent or teacher punished you unfairly. Now, conceive of a character who is decidedly not you—make the character a different gender or race, taller or shorter, more slovenly or tidier. Write a scene with your character placed in your conflict.

  16

  OVERCOMING CREATIVITY WOUNDS

  Somewhere deep within most of us, there is a wound. For some, it’s vile and festering; for others, it’s scarred over. It’s the type of wound that doesn’t really heal—at least not through any kind of stoic disregard or even the balm of time.

  I’m not talking about a flesh wound, but a psychological wound—the kind that happens when someone told you in an elementary school art class
that you didn’t draw well, or when you gave a story to a friend to read in the hopes they would shower you with encouragement, but they treated the story with disregard. We put our souls, the meaning of our lives, into the things we create, whether they are large or small works, and when the world rebuffs us, or is outright hostile, the pain is such that it might as well be a flesh wound. In fact, it sometimes might be better to have a flesh wound.

  To be a creator is to invite others to load their slingshots with rocks of disparagement and try to shoot you down.

  I’ve been hit with many such rocks. Perhaps the most devastating rock was slung by a renowned author who I took a writing class from. My hopes were ridiculously high, of course. I wanted her to recognize my talent, to affirm my prose. I wanted her to befriend me, to open up the doors of her mind and show me the captivating way she thought. I was young, and I walked into her class as if I was a puppy dog, my tail wagging, expecting to play. My first day of class might as well have been the opening scene of a tragic play.

  When I turned in my story for her feedback, not only did she not recognize my talent, but she eviscerated my story. She might as well have used shears. “No shit!” she wrote in the margins of one page. I met with her in her office hours to ask her questions and hopefully make a connection, but she was equally cold and cutting, offering nothing that resembled constructive critique, just the pure vitriol of negativity. She said my story was boring, pretentious. She said my dialogue, which others had previously praised, was limp and lifeless.