Write Talk

Fixing this book may actually be fun.

A couple of weeks ago, Roseanne Cash was blogging about her songwriting process at the NYT. This week it’s Suzanne Vega (who I was listening to in the car just this morning). I like this:

Many times a song will begin with a clear image in my mind, but sometimes a song can begin with a melody popping into your head. How does it come? On an instrument? With a voice? On something unearthly that is neither, maybe. It could be a clear voice that says, for example, “Men in a war, if they’ve lost a limb, still feel that limb as they did before.” I heard that line clearly in my mind and it sounded like a voice to me.

But voices and visions are scary to admit to.  And also you have to make time for them, or they go on to someone else.

Like what Cash had to say, this strikes me as equally applicable to the writing of fiction. Which I should get back to right now…

Jenny points to wise words from Roseanne Cash, who’s guest blogging at the NYT this week. I am stealing her excerpt whole cloth and even adding a chunk, because I’m lazy like that and might want to be able to find it again sometime (whole thing behind the cut):

Sometimes songs are postcards from the future. Often I have found that a song reveals something subtle but important about my own life that I was only vaguely aware of while writing, but that became clear as time went on. I wrote "Black Cadillac" six weeks before a rash of deaths began in my family. The day I finished writing it, I played the completed song to myself, as a kind of last run-through to check for rhyme scheme errors and syllable scanning, and a tidal wave of anxiety started rising in my gut. I knew I had given myself a message.

…

True ThingsRead More »

Well, not really. But over at Contemporary Nomad, Kevin Wignall does have a great little post about the controversial, rarely humble adverb. He offers the last paragraph of Joyce’s "The Dead" in the adverb’s defense:

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

At least one other writer would agree. (There’s some interesting conversation in the comments.)

In writing, as in life: Everything in moderation, except when excess is demanded.

So over at Seven Imps, Jules posts:

At the Southern Festival of Books a couple weeks ago here in Nashville, I heard author/illustrator/novelist Rosemary Wells speak briefly. She said — and I quote this exactly — "process doesn’t exist. Any good writer will tell you that." What say you, authors?

Now, you may find my response shocking, what with the process questions and the write porn around these parts and all. But here’s what I said over there in the comments:

Oh, I definitely agree with her! The reason I’m so fascinated to "talk process" is because I think it’s all lies — seriously, I think we all make up our processes as we go along, and that we probably aren’t even right about what we think they are. Plus, there’s the not wanting to embarrass one’s self when discussing such things. I mean, honestly, so much of it is just thinking, wandering around, taking things in and reforming them into something else. Life is the real process, right?

Still, sometimes what we perceive as the process of creating any given thing can be illuminating, and it’s always an interesting procrastination tool.

I suspect process is just another story we tell ourselves. Thoughts?

Now back to the actual process of TYPING.

Updated: Okay, so I was a bit flip yesterday — I didn’t actually mean it’s all lies. And, besides, note the probably(s) and things in there. Sometimes I forget that this is not actually a window into my brain and so if I don’t frame the whole thing, there is no context.  Here’s a bit of a clarification from the comments, which only convinces me I should have made this the longer, more fleshed out post about process I’ve been wanting to do:

Oh, I’m definitely _not_ saying that none of it can be described, that the _entire_ way we say we work is a fiction. That’s not it at all. And I’m using process in the (yucky arty term alert) "creative process," sense, which is larger than habit.

What I’m saying, I suppose, is that the magic is _part_ of the process, and so we can only describe the most mundane aspects of it? So someone saying they sit down for two hours every day and write for 500 words describes something (and definitely captures _part_ of the process), an action that either happens or doesn’t, but it doesn’t say anything about the rest. Or about the six months in which not a word was written immediately before that. 🙂

And, Dave, yes, yes — all I’m saying is that most quantifications of this stuff are missing a lot at best. For instance, if you answer a question for me about your process today, you give me an answer and it’s "true." But how about when your biographers dig that out fifty years from now — was that your process? Because often what a writer said at one certain time gets reprinted a million times and this one’s a moving target for most of us, I suspect.

We want to be more in control of it than we are.

And I will add that the big revelation in terms of my own "process" this year was the discovery that I basically have to write every section of my novel about four times, to get anywhere approaching something I’m happy enough with to move on to the next bit. Honestly, the four times thing is probably inaccurate, but it feels right, to Dave’s point below. (And the flip one I was making yesterday.) At any rate, the reason why this was a big revelation is that it staves off the utter despair that comes during the third revision, when the chapters still aren’t right and I don’t know why. The next novel will probably be entirely different.

I love it when I discover that I buried something extremely useful and necessary in a crappy first draft … just as I’m getting ready to delete that part.

It’s a victory just to talk yourself into opening the file.

(Why, yes, Gwendagras — defcon subdued this year — is Thursday and I’m also preparing for departure to Vermont for two weeks on the 15th, so, yeah, busy … but tomorrow I will manage to make an actual post with content about books. Pinky swear.)