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Ooof.
A few days back, I wrote about style and routine. I concluded that post by saying: “The habits that matter most to a writer’s development are not writing habits, but living habits: do you put yourself in the way of situations worth writing about?” Oh man. Let me clarify and qualify that.
I do not believe that a writer needs fight in a war, or even be a soldier, to write a good war story. Do I think it helps? Absolutely. Stories are made compelling by their details. Descriptive detail is what puts the reader in the story; it creates the world. Like continuity errors in a film, unnecessary, inconsistent, or overly generic descriptions of characters, settings, events, etc., are like puppet strings, drawing the audience’s eyes away from the show, to the hands pulling the strings. They destroy the audience’s necessary illusion of “being there”. Instead of thinking about the story, we start thinking about the writer. This can be used by the writer to self-referential effect, but that’s a topic for another time.
So if the story’s in the details, where do the details come from? In my experience? Experience. The old saw applies: “Write what you know.” The way a character does something, whether they move this thing with their left or right hand, if their hands are dirty afterwards, etc., these details come from the experience of the writer. Observation is a useful tool, more useful to some than others. I learn best by doing, and I certainly can’t “show” someone else how something is done without doing it first. Experience matters.
But not if you can’t put it on paper. It’s an old joke for the downsized that now they’ve finally time to write that novel. There are millions of books lolling around in heads, waiting to be written. There’s probably a million more books half finished, or half begun, in desk drawers all over, destined for incompletion. So what’s the difference? What’s the difference between Hemingway and the countless others wounded in his wars? All the faceless others who fought and fucked through the same country? Maybe some didn’t want to talk about it. But I’ll bet most couldn’t write.
We’re always writing our own stories in our mind. We’re usually the hero, but sometimes the villain, and sometimes the damsel in distress. It seems like it would be so easy to simply transcribe this mental narrative. But our mind’s style is terrible! What details do we include in our stories? Those most pertinent to ourselves, to our interpretation of the story. What would those wounded soldiers write about? My pain, my hunger, where I was wounded, the name of the man who held my hand as I lay shot and bleeding. They would be exciting stories, to be sure, because they would be true stories of dangerous things. But they would not all be good stories, they would not all move us like Hemingway’s story about blowing up a Spanish bridge, or Vonnegut’s story about hiding in a basement while Dresden burns.
The great stories, Vonnegut’s stories, Hemingway’s stories, move us because they are that rare synthesis of experience and craft. Each writer’s stories are compelling because he captures the details: the movements, the accents, the fears. His stories are remembered because he spent enough time writing them to whittle the details into their own stories.
March 17, 2009
meringue style
What is style? What constitutes an author’s style? Vocabulary? Syntax? Subject matter? Certainly, obviously, all of that and more. What about process? It seems unsporting almost to consider process in examining literature. After all, it’s on the page, or it isn’t. But we, as writers, as readers, as critics, are clearly interested in the writing habits of our literary heroes. I somehow know that Thornton Wilder would write correspondence or a journal entry before beginning work on his novel or play each day, as a warm-up of sorts. I know other famous writers had this routine as well. Hemingway wouldn’t drink while he was writing.
So what is to be gleaned from this arcana? What do we hope to learn? How to write, of course. We hope that picking up these little habits, mimicking the motions of the titans, will imbue us with the ability to craft winning prose, or at least cleaver conceits. In Little League, I used to wave my bat around in circles like I saw the big leaguers do on TV. As a young man desperate to “become a writer”, I sat in cafes and scribbled in moleskins, as Hemingway had done.
But the deficiency was the same in both instances: all the mannerism, none of the substance. I hadn’t spent my life in a batting cage yet, I hadn’t earned the arrogance implied by waving my bat around like Daryl Strawberry. And all the cafes in the world wouldn’t give me the material to write For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway had to go to war for that. I loved the affectation, just hold the nonsense about blistered hands and bombed bridges. My view of process was too minimal, is still too minimal. The habits that matter most to a writer’s development are not writing habits, but living habits: do you put yourself in the way of situations worth writing about?
March 11, 2009
After the rain, from the living room.
The most difficult thing about writing, for me at least, is sitting down to do it. It’s strange, because I enjoy writing so much once I’ve started, but I have a hard time clearing the time and physical space necessary to work effectively. One of the fatal errors I make over and over is failing to set my writing space apart from my living space in general. I’m writing this from the kitchen table.
This is a problem for my writing life, and my personal life. I start writing, but to Andrea, it looks like I’m just sitting at the kitchen table, surfing the internet or whatever. So she asks me the sort of inane question all people who live together ask each other, like whether or not I’ve seen her coat, and, in my feeble mind, she’s interrupting me in the middle of a torturous sentence. I lose my train of thought, I get mad, she gets offended, no good. Tomorrow, after my job hunt, I’m making myself a workspace in my grandparents’ bedroom, locked away in the unused back part of our borrow home.
The problem with setting up a dedicated workspace is that I share my writing instrument with Andrea and my other computing activities. Her computer’s on the fritz, so the problem is especially acute right now. I’ve been playing around with an old typewriter, but its quaintness and air of gravitas do not outweigh its inefficiency, at least not for me. So I’ll have to start kidnapping the laptop too. Sorry, baby.
This is a lot of bitching about the minor hurdles I have to deal with. Things are otherwise as good as they’ve been in a long long time. I’ve been vacationing in this house, where Andrea and I are now living, since I was a kid; these are comfortable surroundings for me. The house itself is beautiful, set on a beautiful piece of property with a creek in the back. The kitchen table is actually a great place to write from, I can see the birds pecking away at the feeder, at the food Andrea left out for them.
And here’s why I need to establish a good writing routine, a better life routine, in fact: I don’t want to write about San Diego. I mean, I want to write about, I want to get the story out of me, put it all on paper, sort it out, make sense of it all, put order to it, or write it off as a series of random events, but I hate to think about that city, and everything that happened to me there, and everything I did there, and the noise, and latent violence, heavy in the air as the humidity, as the smell of the ocean. I need the routine so that I can say I gave it my best effort. That I really tried to write that damned story. And if I still can’t pull a coherent story from the mess of my memories of San Diego, after I’ve really assigned myself to the task, well, then I’ll say, “It’s just too soon, I’m still too young.” And I can start writing a different story. But if I keep pecking at this book, writing when I feel like writing, instead of regularly, every day, I’ll be left with a pile of pretty vignettes and a knot of loose strands. That sounds much worse than having to borrow the laptop from Andrea.
Personal Note: Four days off the smokes and counting! Thanks Nicopatch! Kids, never ever start smoking. Ever. Seriously.
March 5, 2009
