Reality. Perspective. And Primo Levi.

For this semester's Craft Essay component of my MFA in creative nonfiction, I have decided to focus on the role of the Afterwords in memoir. As part of my reading list, I just finished Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz  - both the book and the Afterwords. And even though I see no value in comparative pain - what hurts us hurts us, regardless of the pain someone else may be experiencing - I also think that perspective is a great teacher.

Oppressive heat, a couple of challenging coworkers, trouble breathing, a demonic puppy -- my today includes all of these things (most of them, I suspect, are actually because of the oppressive heat).  Yet I am free to have these things, and what's more, most of them are within my control, not because I can stop them from happening, but because I can choose to see them for what they are: annoying, upsetting, exhausting ... luxuries.

So here's what I think:

A bad day is carrying 200 pounds of metal on one's back all day, every day, as punishment for simply being born. An argument with a coworker? Nuisance.

A bad day is bunking with a roomfull of strangers in a freezing camp while listening to their stomachs growl with starvation. A bland lunch? Bummer that it's bland, blessing that it's lunch.

A bad day is knowing you could die at any moment - and sometimes hoping that the moment is now. A bad mood? A fleeting thing, and nothing that will cost me my life.

Reality.  Perspective.  And Primo Levi.

How and where do you write?

Talking with some writer friends of mine has made me think (or feel like) I am the only writer I know who generally writes in silence (no music or calming "sea sounds" DVDs) and private (usually at home, in my writing room).

I so want to be that writer all nestled into a corner table at the local cafe among other writers and coffee sippers reading their novels (we totally have that coffee shop near me, by the way) but I'm just not. I get easily distracted and taken off track. Even my favorite classical music at home has me stopping to appreciate the complexities of Mozart's manic style and the crisp precision of Bach, instead of solidifying my own passing acquaintance with my always struggling narrative arc.

So out of curiouslty, I was just wondering how and where other people write. I'm talking about the planned writing we do, since I have plenty of those "pull over on the side of the road and jot things down" or "scribble notes on gum wrappters and body parts so I can deal with them later" moments.  But what does your scheduled writing time look like?  Have you ever tried a different approach just to see what the outcome might be? 

As I mentioned, I have gone the coffee shop route and all I really ended up with was a belly full of coffee and several hours of a really active Facebook wall, but I think there is a lot to be said for writing "in the middle of it all" - life, activity, people, noise, reality.  Putting it all together in the silence of my writing room works on a technical level, but I often worry that the pulse of my work, some living, breathing element of it all, is missing from the process, too.

Feel free to share!

~~ And keep writing

On being a writer ...

Being a writer  is tiring. Sometimes it isn't enough that I give myself the luxury of shutting the world out while I indulge what I call "a need to create" as if not putting myself on paper were the same as denying myself food or air. Certainly, the practice and craft of writing is food for the soul, and, if done well, it absolutely lives and breathes and has a pulse that is connected, yet somehow separate and self-sustaining. 

But writing is a gift I give myself because I want it.

And because I feel compelled by it in some way.

And then, after I have opened that gift one more time, put my thoughts down and lived with them a bit, I ask others to gift me by reading and living with them too.  My words. My thoughts. And not just live with them, but embrace them and love them. I want people to talk to me about my writing, to talk to others about my writing, even though so often all I am doing is writing the same story over and over and over again, adding a person here or an image there, or perhaps looking at the same story at a slightly different angle this time. I want people - my friends, my family, my readers (whoever they may be) - to find something new and unique in every one of my words, whether or not they are familiar because I have already written various versions of them several times. Or because someone else has already written them.  I am a human  being telling a human story and a person telling a personal story.  And it is wonderful.  And powerful.  And tiring.

For all these reasons, I often hesitate to admit that I love to write. That I do write. That I am a writer. And yet these are the very same reasons that I proudly insist -- when asked "And what do you do?" by people who assume I will give them a laundry list of my Monday-Friday, 9-5 desk job duties -- "I write. I am a writer."

Writing Process: The Who/What/When/Where/How?

Amy Tan

Writers always want to talk about process.

Do you write every day?  At certain times of day?  In certain places? 
Do you listen to music? 
Do you wear certain clothing?  Lucky clothing? 
Do you use certain pens or paper?  Or do you draft, revise, and finalize on computer? 
Do you eat while you write?  Drink while you write?  Surf the internet so you won't have to write?

Having just returned from my third of four MFA residencies at Lesley University with all these questions still playing like a soundtrack in the back of my mind, I have started to look at whether I actually do have a writing process -- an identifiable, planful, consistent process, that is -- and whether or not I need one.   And the interesting thing is, I actually do have the hint of a partial process-in-progress, which means a full blown writing process is just around the corner.  On the one hand, I think writing is like breathing - we should be willing and able to do it anywhere, anytime, under any circumstances, in order to survive.  We should be constant, diligent observers of the world about which we write, not the world a mere ten feet from our perfectly organized, perfectly lit, perfectly quiet writing desks.  We should take notes on whatever surfaces we can find - sales receipts, gum wrappers, body parts (our own, of course) - to capture immediate sense impressions and ideas that will be nothing more than vague memories of a what once seemed like good ideas by the time our next scheduled writing session rolls around.  And instead of avoiding or drowning out the noise -- or worse, silencing it altogether -- we should listen to it.  Noise is the context of life, after all.  How better to capture -- and differentiate between --  terror's intensity and love's complexity and grief's pain than with the detail that only the sounds and the words and the noise that we so often tune out can provide?

So that is the free-spirited writer in me.  The one who loves my writing for the art it brings to my life and the art it allows my life to put into the world.

EB White

But then, there is that other part of me.  The planner.  The diligent student.  The self who takes refuge in schedules and feels slightly threatened by spontaneity (and slightly jealous of anyone who seems to wear it well).  That part of me is just as much a writer as the non-planner, but is definitely the overbearing control freak who keeps me on task and forces me to meet deadlines and is always, always, always singing in my ear: "Focus on your craft elements.  Modulate your tone.  And for the love of all that is holy, stop trying to make semi-colons work. Just use a period and get on with it."  There was a time in my life when this part of me served me well.  And it still does, to a point.  But my goal now is to more effectively merge the two halves into a whole writer who is focused but open, planful but flexible, artistic but profound, and an editor only of what is on the page and not of what is in my heart and on my mind.

So with that, I have developed what I think is a reasonable combination of the dueling Heathers, in the hopes that my writing grows more inward this semester than it does in length.  Last year was about generating words - 250 pages of words, to be exact - some of which have to come out of the book I now know I am writing so I can nurture the pieces that belong by building them up from the bottom and filling their insides with the substance and the noise of the story I am really telling.  Of course the "extras," the extractions (certainly as painful as losing a tooth, or perhaps the shot of Novacaine that happens before the loss itself) will live somewhere, and they, too, will find a process through which to form their own noisy tale someday. 

Stephen King

One thing is always consistent for me - when I am writing at home, my dog Beckett is always at my feet.  Usually on my feet. Warming my legs with his little body and licking my toes to the rhythm of my typing.  Though I am not a fan of the licking, as long as Beckett is slobbering, that means I am producing something, so I'll take it.  It's part of the journey out of that rigid need to control the world and into that peaceful place of seeing things differently, in a world where a licking dog means a growing manuscript and a honking horn in the middle of a rush hour traffic jam can sound like poetry - if I let it.

Do you have a writing "process" that you can identify/define?  Is it what you want it to be or are you thinking about changing it?  What has worked for you and what hasn't?

~~  Whatever you do ... just keep writing