What the campaigns have taught me about writing

Spent all day trying to write a speech, to no avail. Just realized: I should write a story instead.

I also don't seem to mind

...laugh-talking about my books for a half hour on the radio (the John McMullen show, K-NEWS in Palm Springs, California -- I'll update the link tomorrow when the podcast goes up). Many congratulations to John, who recently announced on his show that he and his partner of thirteen years are getting married in October -- yay marriage equity! Enough of this, and Bill and I get to have another wedding!

Delighted, I'm sure

Both Girlbomb and Have You Furnished Her are mentioned in Entertainment Weekly this week, in an article called So, You Want to Write a Memoir?

It's not world peace, or a solution to the existential condition, but I must say, I certainly don't mind being mentioned in magazines.

Writing in my notebook while trying to write

Thurs. 5/29, 11:30, Paragraph

Here! And no appointments today, no people, just working, hooray. J. blew off lunch on Tuesday, which was fine; went to Judith yesterday and talked about all the lousy relationships I'm still in. Was in a shit mood because I had to pay Oakwood and my AmEx is no good right now and it was stressful. Didn't write last night, just made dinner and watched a movie, went to bed. Still arguing with M. in my head. Never should have reached out to him in the first place. God, even writing in my notebook feels so hard, feels like I haven't done it in a week. And this haircut is the bane of my existence. Anyway, now that I'm here and sworn to being productive I don't want to be, I want to blow it off and go buy sunglasses, blunt myself, kill time. Have to call B. at lunch. Everyone's a pain in the ass. I'm done with people. I'm the cat that hated people. I'd like to come up with a blog post today, I'd like to start the travel piece. I should try writing about what an asshole I am instead of always writing about what assholes people are to me. I'm angry but I don't want to post about it. Anyway, let me get back to the Danielle piece.

12:50 Two pages! Now I can get some lunch, then pick it up again, then maybe a blog post re: leave me alone? Hard to say. I'm not anti-social, I just don't want to deal with anybody. Fuck everyone, just fuck them. Go me.

1:45 Ughsters. Got some lunch, keeping at the Danielle thing, also checking email on my phone, which is deadly slow for some reason. And my neck and back hurt, and I feel like quitting. Have to sign the power of attorney form before we go away. Write to Gillian from On The Rise, a pile of other emails to respond to. But good. I feel good. I got some writing done, not that anything's "done," but something got worked on, and even if it goes nowhere, I got that feeling, I got into a voice, it's something I can say I'm working on, the Danielle piece. Now try to work on a blog post. About?

2:15 Holy crap. I can't write a fucking blog post to save my life.

2:50 Still nope. Just a bunch of angry shit about being abused by people. M., that pile of shit. You're a pile of shit.

3:10 STILL NOTHING. Because I am angry.

3:30 If I'm not going to write about M. and/or people blowing me off for lunch, then I need to pick another topic and go with it. Although maybe what I should do is go home. Almost 4 hours today, that's enough, right? Or I could write a post about being grateful.

3:45 I QUIT.

Guest blogger: Lori Mocha

Writing Sucks I Mean I Love It

By Lori Mocha

Well here's the deal, writing isn't always so very super fun. I sorta hate it actually. It's lonely and can be super boring.

But I love it too. It has its obvious rewards or I wouldn't do it. And I love to make people laugh. LOVE IT.

Yet what I love most is the connection.

I like to think of us all laughing together, my readers and I. And them going yeah and! And me going yeah I know! And we are all laughing and going oh my god I know what you mean! And then we laugh and laugh and laugh some more.

That is why I write. For that feeling. That is why blogging is my first true love. The instant connection. It feels so great. No revision required.

Now revising. That is the hardest part of writing for me. Chopping up the same damn thing over and over. Soooooo boring.

Oh and lonely. It's total isolation.

I struggle with that HARDCORE. I don't want to sit here all alone condensing life. I want to write and move on to the next thing.

However, I know when something I write could be better. I know I should fix it. But fixing it is tedious busy work. Ugh.

Instead, it might seem I prefer to just lie on the couch crying about my buckets of lost dreams when I should find inspiration in making buckets of cash for what I ultimately love to do. I know that's unoriginal. But I need more than integrity to live. And not just for my underwater ipod but for important stuff like all my medication.

For now though, I'll just sit back and blog. Oh and write inappropriate emails, especially late at night. Oh man, do I love to write those. Probably because I don't have to revise them.

But if I ever want to be a "real writer" then I probably need to revise something once in awhile.

What a bunch of baloney.

In the end I guess less is more, but when is more enough?

Me again, again

Two exciting bits of news for me last week, both involving re-publication:

1. Gather ye first editions while ye may, because Have You Found Her is going into its second printing! Hooray for my wonderful agent and editor, and for publicists Patty Park and Lauren Cerand, for helping to make this possible.

2. The UK version of Girlbomb (which is called The Runaway, and is otherwise the exact same book with a few extra vowels in it) is being re-released in the next few weeks with a new cover:

So pulpy, right? Doesn't she look terribly young and vulnerable? Don't you just want to give her a good home? She's on "the streets!" (Which...technically I wasn't, but if it's going to get all the little Lily Allens and Amy Winehouses to pick up my book, fine.)

All of this is exceptionally good news for me, as now I don't feel the pressure to write another book, since the first two keep multiplying like rabbits. Little, inert, square rabbits with pages instead of feet. Rab-books. Whatever -- it's good.

Recapping the NY Round Table Writers' Conference

First impression: All tables are in fact rectangular. Also, my suit of armor appears to be out of place.

Friday 2pm Non-Fiction panel:

Moderator Janet Reid is funny. Beloved editor Bruce Tracy has a goatee, looks like evil Bruce Tracy from another dimension. Janet asks how many people in the audience are memoirists. Fifty percent of us raise our filthy hands.

Top three questions from the audience:

1. How do we break in?

Answers: Write a proposal, get an agent. Get published in magazines and online. Be a good writer.

2. What else can we do to increase our chances?

Answers: Research your market, get a platform, don't be a rude asshole. Be a good writer.

3. Here is a summary of my book idea, which I will present to you for as long as I am allowed to hold on to the microphone.

Answers: ...

Saturday 2pm Memoir panel

I am on this one, along with five other memoirists and a moderator. There are enough people on the dais for a scrimage. I sit down between Phoebe Damrosch and Stephanie Elizondo Griest and immediately bump my knee on the table leg.

Top three questions from the audience:

1. How much can you fudge?

Answers: (Varied, depending on who was answering. General consensus: Tell the truth.)

2. My family's going to kill me.

Answers: Yeah, probably. But don't worry about that until you're done writing.

3. Here's my entire life story, not that you asked.

Answers: All right, then.

Saturday 4pm Master Class with Sharon Mesmer

"When Words Won't Come: Generating New Work When You Think You Can't." Excellent. I really need this one. I pull up a student desk and get out my notebook. Sharon, who I used to know back in the Nuyorican days, and who is now associated with the Flarfists, says that block is often a result of "being too invested in your own ideas, clinging to familiar themes, characters, your own 'voice.'" To get us out of our own heads, she has us do surrealist exercises -- working with random phrases, rearranging cut-up strips of words. I wind up with two really dark existentialist pieces about death. Hello, third book!

Pontificating times three

Longtime reader and recent delurker Luisa emailed me with three questions, which I’ll summarize here:

1. If I write my story, it may be painful for people I care about, which makes me feel guilty. Should I go ahead and do it anyway? How do I deal with this, practically and emotionally?

Luisa, this is another big issue that comes up frequently with writing memoir. Should you write your story, even if it might be painful to others to read? I think you should. If you feel compelled to write your story, you will not be satisfied until you do so. And anybody who returns your love and caring will want you to have the catharsis and satisfaction of writing down what happened to you, and what you did about it. As you said in your email, your life story belongs to you. And the events happened as they did whether you write about them or not; there’s no taking them back or changing them now. You can pretend they didn’t happen, for the sake of other people, but they did happen, and you remember them, and now they want to come out of you. So it’s time they did.

There may even be ways to make it less painful for those you want to protect. One way is to shield them from what you’re writing by not sharing it with them. I usually recommend that writers don’t share their first drafts with anyone except people who are explicitly helping them write. This includes teachers, classes, mentors, and writing groups; this does not include family, friends, or anyone who may be mentioned in or affected by the material. First drafts are precious and fragile, as are the people who write them, so protect your first draft and yourself and your loved ones by not sharing it with them.

Once you’ve gotten through a first draft, you can then go back to the material and see if you want to edit out parts that might be especially upsetting to people you care about. There are many things I left out of Girlbomb, because I thought they’d be upsetting to others, or a violation of their privacy. Then there’s stuff that was upsetting that I left in. But you have to write it first for yourself, and then worry about others.

Other ways to protect people you care about: Leave them out of the story, to the extent you’re able to; change their names and identifying characteristics; call the thing fiction. The author Stephen Elliott also had this advice: “Make them physically beautiful in your story – if you do that, they’ll probably forgive anything else you wrote about them.”

But in all honesty, people may be hurt by what you write. It happens. And it sucks. It sucks for them, and it sucks for you. But please don’t let that stop you from writing down your story. It’s important that you do so, especially if there is pain, shame, guilt, and other negative emotion attached to it. Write it for yourself, and worry about others later. Just write.

2. As a speaker of both Spanish and English, in a country where many people speak French, finding my voice is a challenge. What language should I write in?

Your “voice” has little to do with what language you write in, and lots to do with word choice, sentence length, rhythm, and the level of formality or intimacy with which you address the reader. Books are often translated from one language to another, but the sense of the writer’s voice and the meaning of the writer’s words remain the same – when people translate Kerouac, they retain his sentence structure, his slang, and his poetic style, no matter what the language. Nobody’s making Kerouac sound like Nabokov, or vice versa. So I think you should write in whatever language is most comfortable for you, in the voice you’d use to talk to a trusted friend, and if it needs translation into another language for purposes of sharing it with others, you can either translate it yourself when the project is finished, or find native speakers of whichever language you’ve chosen to be your support group.

3. I feel guilty about writing when there’s stuff that needs to be done around the house. After all, I’m not a “real” writer with deadlines, so how do I justify the time I spend?

Luisa, do you ever watch TV? Read books? Take long baths? Do anything “unproductive”? Well, then you can certainly take the time to write, which is totally productive, even if you don’t have deadlines or publication credits. It produces a happier you, and that’s all the productivity you need. So get to it!

The pontiff strikes again

New commenter Ann writes:

"As soon as I gave my book proposal over to my agent a couple of weeks ago, I began to think it was all a big mistake. I keep telling myself I'm a fiction writer not a nonfiction writer. It's crazy. So, my question is: How do you cross from nonfiction to fiction with ease? I've written essays and book reviews, but a longer work is much different."

Ann, I think the transition from fiction to non-fiction isn't as dramatic as it seems, if we can stop psyching ourselves out about it. I say "we" because I’m experiencing this problem in reverse – I’m trying to go from writing non-fiction to writing fiction – and right now it seems daunting. In non-fiction, you already know who the characters are and what the events are, whereas in fiction, you’ve got to make up all that stuff, and it has to be as believable as the truth. It’s kind of been freaking me out, so please pardon me if half of what I say to you is stuff I need to be saying to myself.

For instance: Try not to focus too much on the fact that you’re switching genres. Writing is writing, no matter what the genre is – you sit down at the desk, you think hard about what you want to convey, and you put words on the page. You get through that first draft however you can, and you worry about making it “good” in the second draft. The more organized you are when you sit down at your desk, the better off you’ll be, so if you can make any kind of outline or scene list, do so. All of that holds true whether you’re writing a screenplay, a poem, a short story, or a listicle about seventeen ways to apply lipgloss (16. With chopsticks!).

The thing is, good non-fiction uses all the same elements as good fiction. You’re still trying to tell a story, you’re just trying to tell a true story in this case. You still want to describe things accurately, clearly, using all the senses, and with apt choices of words; you still want to invest scenes with emotions, and let the reader know what’s at stake for the characters at every turn. You want to include only the relevant action, and leave out the stuff that doesn’t affect the plot. So non-fiction and fiction have a lot in common, especially in book-length projects.

The differences are these:

1. In fiction, you can play around with the story, and add or delete plot points as you see fit. In non-fiction, you’re dealing with a fixed set of events. It can be tempting, when writing non-fiction, to include every single piece of information that relates to your subject (I’ve been accused of doing this in Have You Found Her – my accusers should have seen the first 500-page draft of the book), but you’ll have to find the throughline of the story (what do the main characters want, and what’s in the way of their getting it?), and stick to it, leaving out anything that does not relate to the main characters’ pursuit of their specific goals.

2. Instead of using your powers of imagination to create scenes and characters, you’ll have to use your powers of imagination to empathize with characters who already exist, and to focus on the details that will bring those scenes to life. If you’re Simon Winchester, and you’re writing the story of how a convict in a mental ward helped write the Oxford English Dictionary, you’re going to have to use a mixture of reportage and imagination to help us envision what the prisoner’s cell looked, smelled, and felt like, and how he felt when he succeeded or failed in his attempts to contribute to the book. It’s still imaginative work; it’s just in the service of truth.

Ann, you mention that you wrote a proposal for this book, so you’ve already considered the story and what the events of the book will be. And since proposals usually contain chapter summaries, chances are good that you’re going into this with a solid outline. So you’re probably ahead of the game when it comes to this project. It may just be a matter of relaxing (the hardest thing for writers to do), breaking the thing down into manageable chunks, and doing what you already know how to do – expressing action and emotion through words.

I hope I managed to say something helpful here – now I’m going to go back and read it all in reverse and see if I can’t apply some of it to my own quandary. If there’s something I didn’t address, or you have a follow-up question, let me know, and I’ll see if I can’t pontificate on it. Good luck with the book, and let us know when it’s out there in the world.

Janice is a Pedantic Ham, Part Three

Esteemed reader and commenter Georgia asks:

"I'm struggling with how much internal thought to infuse my scenes with. Ahem – with which to infuse my scenes. I want my audience to know that there was internal conflict, so that when things fall apart, it's backed up. But I also want the audience to see how easily swept away I was, and I'm afraid I'll ruin that momentum with too much thought. Help?"

Okay, here's another really good question: How much internal monologue is enough, and how much is too much?

It's great that you're being sensitive to issues of both pacing and plot. On one hand, you want to keep the reader emotionally engaged with the narrator; on the other hand, you want the plot to move forward. So how do you balance the two?

Generally, I think you only need to describe an emotional state when that state changes. If your character starts a conversation feeling good, and over the course of that conversation she starts to realize that something is amiss, then naturally we need to hear that realization occur. But it doesn't have to occur after every single line of dialogue – "(Dialogue) I could tell by his distant tone that something was wrong, and I felt anxious. (Dialogue) There it was again, that distant tone! My anxiety grew. (Dialogue) Now it sounded like he was holding the phone a mile away from his ear, emotionally, that's how distant his tone was, and my anxiety was like one of those novelty sponge animals that comes in a plastic capsule and when you put it in water the capsule dissolves and the sponge expands to 100 times its original size. Boy, was I anxious!" Just one well-placed "I started to feel like I’d swallowed a peach pit, something pointy in my throat that was blocking all the air" will usually do fine.

Because describing emotion is tricky. Most of the time, the events and the dialogue speak for themselves – if someone says something heartbreaking to you, the reader will probably guess that it's heartbreaking, and you don't have to say, "I felt heartbroken." Most of the time, you can go light on the explicit "I felt ____" sentences, unless you're having a surprising emotional reaction – "The doctor said she’d died, and I felt an eerie sense of relief; happiness, even." And if you can show emotion rather than state it – "My lungs filled with lead; I couldn't even gasp for air," instead of "I felt awful" – so much the better.

You also mention "internal conflict," which is often an important part of a story’s plot, and is really hard to represent on paper. How do you show characters' struggles with themselves?

1. You can have one of those internal conversations – "I kept going back and forth between wanting to call, and not wanting to call; wanting to have it over with and yet being afraid to have it finally settled," but it doesn’t have to be a long conversation. Readers will already know what most of the pros and cons of the phone call will be – unless there’s something surprising on that list ("Most of all, I didn’t want to call because I didn’t have my tinfoil hat on, and I was afraid of the gamma rays") you can probably go light on this.

2. You can show it cinematically, through action. If someone is struggling with whether or not to call their friend's ex-boyfriend, even though she knows it's going to hurt the friend, you can show her hesitation through her gestures, her posture, and her reportage of the physical sensations she's experiencing.

So the short answer is: In your first draft, I think you can put in all the internal monologue you want. You can give yourself internal soliloquies that go on for pages, if that's how you identify how you were truly feeling at every single second. And then in the second draft, you can condense those feeling/thinking/deciding moments into short bursts of description, or small actions.

Sound good?