Jessica Page Morrell

The Tortured Bloggers Department

Taylor and Travis are getting married. Everyone is talking about this. Now I must, too.

Travis, of course, plays football, which immediately makes him of zero interest to me. Also, no character in a book, film, or song will ever be named Travis. Yuck. Imagine these famous lines with his name:

Travis, can you hear me?

You’ll have to think for both of us, Travis.

Tell me about the rabbits, Travis.

Travis Jones, I always knew someday you’d come walking back through my door.

[Whispered before dying:] Travis!

With Travis out of the way I can discuss Taylor. I recently learned that two men of my acquaintance are Swifties. I will call them Swifty 1 and Swifty 2. Swifty 1 is an internationally recognized expert on Bruce Springsteen. Swifty 2, when we lived in the same city, was in my face every day with his love for Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, plus he could catch anything hit to him in center field. Both men are devoted to Taylor, despite the fact that each of them was already a walking, talking, go-to-work-every-day adult in his 30s when Taylor was born.

Obviously, I’m missing something. Also, my wife says I’m being a grump, or just stupid, for ignoring her. And my wife is not Swifty 3. So let’s move on to Taylor and writing, because people already have, as in this workshop, “Write Like a Popstar.”

Continuing the discussion I began in our last, very exciting post, I will quickly mention a few more writing books because I believe they can help you. Just don’t get bogged down in them and forget to write. You can be sure that Taylor and Travis read these books to each other on their date nights.

In my first post, back in 2016, I wrote about Jessica Page Morrell’s Thanks, But This Isn’t for Us: A (Sort Of) Compassionate Guide to Why Your Writing Is Being Rejected. I stand by these thoughts.

You can’t go wrong with Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, and I guess that proves I’m not a grump, O my wife, because I really resisted reading this thing. The overall tone is ornery; King wrote a chunk of it while he was in terrible pain from being run down by a van in the middle of the night. But the book came along at the right time for me. I felt as if Stephen King were giving me permission to write again following a lengthy silence.

Elizabeth Benedict’s The Joy of Writing Sex (good sex scenes should always be about sex and something else) is enlightening and fun to read. It was published in 1996, when Taylor was listening to Britney and Travis was playing T-ball, but sex is still sex.

I’m not going to tell you that Bruce Holland Rogers will always be helpful in Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer, but he’ll always be friendly and I found some real inspiration in these pages:

“Even if the overall odds are terrible, a story that you wrote in the glow of overconfidence has an infinitely greater chance of publication than the story you didn’t write while you were feeling more realistic.”

Rogers includes something I have never encountered in a writing book. He believes that writers can’t make it without willpower and discipline; no argument there. But he also believes that willpower and discipline wear out. “What helps more is to profoundly overestimate your chances for success,” he writes. “This isn’t just a matter of positive thinking. You’ll perform best if you actually change your state to something that’s close to hypomania.” Dear Readers: Would one of you (other than Taylor) please try that and tell me how it goes.

Lastly, I want to mention Jane Anne Straw and Unstuck: A Supportive and Practical Guide to Working Through Writer’s Block. It’s not a great book, but Straw is unflaggingly honest, and frankly, reading about how screwed up she is, and her writing clients, I felt better about how screwed up I am.

Straw says good things about your writing practice, writing as a process and a product, “positive interactions with the page,” and the importance of showing up for yourself. She also suggests that you take your book on vacation. Just as sales people follow the rule of ABC (always be closing), you should always be writing. The only complication with this advice is taking your book on vacation while you are also taking your partner on vacation. On a nine-day road trip through the Great Cities of the Pacific Northwest in July, I managed to write three days out of nine while successfully maintaining my marriage. A .333 batting average was probably the best I could have hoped for.

And that’s my writing advice for my favorite tortured poets, Taylor and Travis.

Word count: 68,217. Sometimes I leap forward and sometimes I’m learning to crawl. That’s Steve’s version.

Keeping cool in the dog days of summer.

Day 9: Today I felt the baby kick

Today was the first day of the last year of my working life. It was a good day. I woke at 6 a.m. Lucky and I were at the park with the other dogs and their sleep-deprived owners at 6:30. Little do those workin’ stiffs know that a year from now I won’t be standing around with them while our dogs chomp and sniff each other and that coming up is the last winter when I’ll be chasing Lucky around in the pre-dawn rainy blackness with a flashlight and handing out extra plastic bags. No way will I ever see 6 a.m. again unless I go to bed at 6 a.m.

(Loyal Reader Accused of Lurking celebrated his birthday last week by sleeping in. He didn’t get up until…5:30 a.m. Normally, he gets up at 10 o’clock at night, half an hour before he goes to bed, drinks a cup of sulphuric acid, works 29 hours a day down-mill, pays the mill owner for permission to come to work, and when he gets home, his parents kill him and dance about on his grave singing “Hallelujah.” But you try to tell the young people today that…they won’t believe you.)

Work was OK. I took two naps under my desk. Nobody knew I was unconscious. I shelved problems, reordered priorities, and rationed productivity. Today was also the first day of the company’s fiscal year, and to celebrate, we had donuts rather than bonuses. I ate a donut. There are fewer calories in a bonus, but you take what you can get in this life.

As for the Clarion West Write-a-thon, something is simmering inside my book. Finally. I’m imagining scenes and hearing dialog. I’m not sucking on a bong, either.

I’ve recently reread some of the work of a writing teacher I respect, Jessica Page Morrell. She once wrote an essay about manuscripts that have entered a coma and what to do about them. A brief quote:

Problem: The plot is meandering, stalling. You keep changing your mind.

Solution: All writing requires a deep understanding of structure. Without this understanding you’ll waste time, hit dead ends, and write endless drafts. Find a structure that works for you and stick with it….Always know where you’re going before you start writing and head toward that ending.

The time I’m putting in now on structure is the time I should’ve put in years ago. (Although it could be that years ago I wasn’t ready. Trying to write a novel has meant learning more about me.) I can’t get by on enthusiasm, though God knows I tried.

Now I’m feeling organized, energized, somewhat enlightened…and one day closer to retirement.

Aloha.

 

Recommended reading #1

Thanks, But This Isn’t for Us: A (Sort Of) Compassionate Guide to Why Your Writing Is Being Rejected
Jessica Page Morrell
2009

There are more books on how to play chess than there are books on how to play all the other games ever invented. The first book that William Caxton ran off his printing press was the Word of God. The second book was several thousand words on chess.

I can’t make the same authoritative statement about books on how to write, but I’m willing to wager there are more writing books than there are painting books, sculpting books, sewing books, etc. Plenty of people think they know how to write and plenty of them are convinced that they should pass on that knowledge. Most of these people are wrong.

Not Jessica Page Morrell. Thanks, But This Isn’t for Us is a no-illusions guide to writing fiction (and, to a lesser extent, memoir). If you’ve been writing long enough to really get bloodied by uncooperative characters, plot holes you can’t plug, stacks of rejections, and bare-knuckle writing workshops, you’ll know most of what Morrell presents here. But you might not have stated it with her punch and pith.

“Fiction is about interesting people in a mess of trouble” is the most economical definition I’ve read, but just as William Strunk balanced his verbal frugality by repeating everything, Morrell reminds us later that “fiction is messy, a smackdown or battleground.”

Stop arguing with yourself
Morrell was inspiring for me because I’ve been slowed to a zombie-like stagger in the first draft of my novel by my need to perfect every scene. Instead of writing new chapters I keep revisiting old ones. Morrell basically told me to shut UP. “Your inner editor is clear-eyed, helpful, and sane. Your inner critic is sneaky, undermining, and nutty,” she writes, then advises us that, rather than passively listening to our inner critic, we should “engage it in a dialog.” Instead of always noticing your mistakes, focus on what you’re doing right.

Remember: “…the purpose of your first draft is to cling pitifully to life until you have the time, stamina, and insight to revise (or revive) it into a respectful rendition of itself.”

Morrell’s idea of what works in a novel can be formulaic. She doesn’t account for the success of unconventional writers such as Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, William Faulkner, etc. But like any good chess player, Morrell is playing a larger game. She wants you to learn the rules before you break the rules.

Calm down
She also wants you to take it easy on yourself and have fun. After all the advice about plot, conflict, suspense, and overarching structural issues such as the importance of basing your story on a question that must be answered, she tells us that writing is like “opening the door to friends arriving for a dinner party.” We should stop beating ourselves up because “writing is a lifelong and sometimes lonely apprenticeship.”

“Writing starts from creativity, not anxiety – it is a great joy, so splash around and don’t worry about making a mess….write smart and know what you’re doing in your story and why, but also take risks and try to create with trust and abandon. Think grade-school science experiments. Stay loose and enjoy the writer’s equivalent of mud and finger paints and clown hats.”

I took a half-day class from Morrell some years ago and it was a half-day foot-plant in the posterior. I recommend Thanks, But This Isn’t for Us to all beginners and to anyone in need of what Bruce Springsteen once called “a shot of redemption.”