Wild Heart

Letter to Blaze

She thought she might be dying herself, and was curiously objective about it. For once she felt some relief from the itch that could be satisfied only by inserting a pen between her thumb and fingers and working it against ruled paper. ~ Gregory Maguire, from Lost

Dear Blaze,

You ask how I'm doing, how the writing is going. For days I've put off answering your email. Too embarrassed to admit that I am, once again, in a funk. I'm in a super-funk. I want to give up but I don't know how.

Today I'm finding it funny, but really, I have an undercurrent of who-gives-a-damn. My belly feels tight and my breath is shallow.

I have no faith in what I write or in the writing process. I've been writing since forever. My first journal was a tiny address book someone gave me when I was 12. It's red and the pages have come unstuck. I still have it. I say I have no faith in what I write, but I can't throw any of it away. When I die, build my coffin from all my notebooks and send them through the flames with my gnarl-fingered hands still clutching a pen.

That's how the writing is going.

I think about writing all the time. I think about the characters I've created and I wonder what they're doing. I think about that house in San Jose where most of my Married stories come from. I think about Childhood in San Francisco, and I mix up the true part with the parts I've incorporated into fiction. But what's the difference? It's all memory now, memory and photographs, and so I give a Stardust character my grandparents' home on Diamond Street. It's mine to give. In my memories, I meet her at the top of the stairs where it smells like Grandma's talcum powder and the shadows are deep.

It's February. And for some odd reason, I'm living in Colorado. Is that a story I made up?  I look out the window and see melting snow. Not San Francisco. I go outside to collect the mail and I hug the fleece jacket to my body and squint against the glare of the sun and skate carefully over ice and curse the ache in my bones.

Twenty years ago I had such an ache for the Bay Area that I moved back there, but what I ached for wasn't there anymore. My daughters were grown, and I couldn't go back and do it right this time. My grandparents were long dead, their San Francisco house almost unrecognizable from a street I remember being much wider. And where did the trees come from?

I talked to my youngest sister yesterday and told her I feel like I'm going through yet another mid-life crisis. Can you have a mid-life crisis at 66? Here's something I know from this wise old age. I can whine and complain and throw hissy-fits all I want, and each hissy fit is just an older (and more pointless) version of the ones I threw when I was 12, 27, 36. The big difference is that now I'm old enough to know better. Of course, that doesn't stop me, which makes it even more embarrassing.

There are as many ways to waste a life as there are stories about wasting a life. So I may as well tell the stories.

Nancy Blaze, here's where I land today about how the writing is going: The only thing I know to do is to keep putting the pen to paper, stop judging the stories, forget about how an audience will or won't receive the pieces I write. It's not about audience. It's never been about audience.

And it's time to stop whining. I wallow. I'm over it. For now.

Thank you for asking.

From Words to Writing

It's work. It's a small idea that becomes a bigger one, and then where is the language for it? It's one word at a time. One idea. It's constant revision. Trying to make it look inspired. Trying to make it appear effortless. Trying to make it appear comfortable and exciting and at the same time revelatory. And that for me is not a question of inspiration. It's a question of very, very hard, very sustained work. ~ Toni Morrison, on writing

Today I worked the entire New York Times crossword puzzle and only had to cheat once - or maybe twice. I work a lot of crossword puzzles and am not very good at it. If I get half of the NYT Sunday puzzle, I've had a good day. Then I look at the answers and feel smug if it's one of those stupid ones that no one could get, never, I mean it. Then there are the ones I get stuck on because the Down clue is a river in Rom. and the Across clue is Ukr. coin. Right.

Then there are times when I know the answer without knowing how the heck I know that answer - like the 1937 heavyweight boxing champion (I am making this up). I know that Willie Mays was called the Say Hey Kid (we lived within spitting distance of Candlestick Park back in the day) and the Edsel was Ford's Folly. Very often when I work these puzzles, I'm taken into my childhood, and while I'm working on the clues, I'm a kid again, seeing the Edsel for the first time and laughing out loud. Back then we knew our cars, and we'd play a game where we sat on the low fence in the front yard and yelled out the makes and models as cars passed on Hillside Blvd. Back then you could tell a Pontiac from a Chevy from a Ford, and the only foreign car on the road in our neighborhood was the VW Bug.

Here's a little known fact I just made up: Did you know that anyone who has ever owned the original VW Bug has either 1) started the ignition with a screwdriver; 2) learned to park it on a slope, nose down; 3) has watched the pavement through the floorboards. I had a friend who built a Bug from parts and pieces. I still can't believe I let her drive me anywhere in that car. She kept an old pajama top in the back so that she could protect her clothes when she had to scoot under the car to start it.

Back to words: Crosswords are made for people like me: older and a reader. Lately I've been playing Words with Friends on my iPhone (Scrabble for tech gadgets) and my friends whop my butt in that game. I have a large vocabulary (really, I took an on-line test that confirmed this); I have a Master's in English; I read a LOT. And I work crossword puzzles. But Scrabble is not about words - it is about strategy. I know this. My head gets it that the only way to get a word worth 63 points is to play a Q in a triple-word line. But I am so hung up on words that I don't think like a Scrabble player.

Yesterday morning I was reading some notes about a mystery novel I wrote many years ago and have revised so many times that only the basic plot still holds: new characters in, old characters out; moved the place from Colorado to Indiana to California; changed the timing, the POV, and the suspects. And still - the characters keep calling to me and the murderer keeps telling me he didn't do it and the setting is - I know this now - exactly right. But I still don't finish the book.

I've got three and a half drafts of this mystery novel. I've got the words - it's the strategy that continues to elude me. I've read hundreds of books and articles on writing. I've taught writing and led workshops and now I coach others on how to get those words out. I know what to do. And I'm not getting any younger.

When I had finished the second draft after spending many years on it and was wandering my way toward the third, my best friend Mona narrowed her eyes at me one day and said, "You'd better finish this novel because you don't have another 30 years to write the next one." She was exaggerating about the 30 years - but sometimes I have to be hit over the head with hyperbole. Mona died in 2004, never having read the final draft because there wasn't one. But she still narrows those blue eyes at me and kicks my butt when I'm dragging around whining about not knowing what to do next.

I know what to do. Apparently I need to have my butt kicked to do it. Mona? Is that you?

 

 

Hyla Kaye and the Railroad Tracks

I woke early this morning soaring with wonder, and I wanted to get up right then and write. I fell back asleep and woke as myself an hour later, wonder left behind in the dream.

But morning is writing time, so I made tea and sat down at the computer, composed a post - it was bad, I deleted it - checked email, checked FaceBook, more email came in, checked that. And sat, laptop on my lap, fingers on the keyboard. 

Then I decided I would play with GarageBand, test the microphone, try out the Podcast feature. La-la-la! That was fun. So here is another trial run. Would love your feedback.

 

Hyla Kaye and the railroad tracks

 

A World of Time

Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories. ~ Mary Catherine Bateson

Last night was another pillow-puncher. I drifted in that twilight between awake and asleep, seeing bits of my past, like my third-grade classroom where our dioramas were displayed all in a row on the wall above the chalkboard. There was one of the Golden Gate Bridge, which I like to think was mine but I'm pretty sure it wasn't. But then, how would I know? What I have is a memory of dioramas on the wall, but even that may not be true. What I know for sure is that I have a class photo that shows them on the wall behind us, and maybe that photo serves as my memory.

 Lying awake in the dark, I float on time, and time is thick and slow and dark as mud. But each memory is a diorama in a bright flash of light, full of depth and color and layers of meaning. In that flash of memory last night, I was a child in San Francisco: one flash of memory = a whole world of childhood. I could go anywhere from there, skip to other memories and into a deep well of emotions and a whole city-grid of meaning - all in one image that serves as memory.

Here's what I'm trying to get at: Life is what we live right in this moment - it flows, not one moment indistinguishable from the next. And this is always true, whether we're in the middle of a huge life transition or we're doing the laundry, whether we're grieving the death of a loved one or laughing with friends. Then when we think back on any moment, we are no longer in the flow of time: what we remember is laid out like a row of dioramas. It's static. If the memory moves at all, it's in stop-action.

And that's where our personal stories come from, not in the moment but in the  memory. I think to myself, "Well, duh!" A story from this moment would sound like this: "I am at the computer and just typed the word 'computer,' and Oh! there I go again, typing the word 'computer.'"

When I'm staring at patterns on the ceiling in the middle of the night, I think about stories and telling stories. I think about how I have always written "pieces" rather than "short stories," and I remember how much I love dioramas, like looking into an unshaded window after dark and seeing a family sit down to dinner, or like going to the natural history museum in San Francisco when I was a kid and seeing  a large-as-life diorama of the early inhabitants of the state I grew up in.  The DeYoung Museum used to have rooms set up as they would have been in 1920, say, or in 1850. I would stand behind the velvet rope and imagine that I am left alone in the museum after it is closed and I would duck under the velvet rope and sit in those chairs and lie on that bed and pretend a world.

It makes sense to me that my stories are vignettes, little worlds that I can enter and where I can pretend, little worlds where time is whatever I make of it.

 

 

No Hoosiers Were Harmed

If you don’t know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don’t know the stories
you may be lost in life. ~ Siberian Elder

When I was in college taking writing classes, I remember longing to "find my voice," as if it were out there in the ether somewhere and with the right equipment and the right attitude, I could suss it out and claim it. Years later I realized that the voice I had been searching for was the very one I kept trying to avoid: That Terre Haute part of myself.

I was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, and lived there only until I was three, when my parents moved me and my brother and sister to San Francisco. Every few years, we'd all pile into the car and drive to Indiana, even when there were seven of us kids. We didn't have seat belts back then, or AC, or enough money to eat in restaurants or sleep in motels. We always went in the middle of summer, leaving the cool fog of the Bay behind us and resigning ourselves to the heat by the time we hit Sacramento.

Those were the days of Highway 40 that led us straight through the downtown of the major cities: Sacramento and Reno, Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis - our station wagon full of kids joining the city traffic, looking our the windows at inner city kids sitting on front stoops looking back at us. We ate at rest stops - bologna on white bread, iced tea, dill pickles. And we slept in the car, all of us drooping over each other, Mother and Daddy up front, sitting upright to sleep.

I loved those trips. I loved stopping in Effingham Illinois to wash up and change clothes because we were almost there. I loved the heat and running all over the neighborhood with my cousins, penny candy at the corner store, lightning bugs, and the smell of Noxema on our mosquito bites.

It must have been those summer trips that kept the Hoosier in me alive, even in San Francisco. And I am grateful for that. I make road trips by myself now, Denver to Terre Haute, where my parents grew up, where some of their siblings still live, where I have cousins and second cousins, two brothers, nieces, nephews. When I finally accepted that my true voice is a Hoosier voice, I also finally understood what my aunts and uncles meant when they would say, "I'm so glad you're home, Verna Jeanne."

This is the home we can never leave, no matter how far we run or for how long. So a few years ago when I woke up in the middle of the night, seeing as if in neon across the ceiling, the book title, "May Belle Rooney and the Dickman Sisters," I didn't question it. I turned on the light, got out my notebook, and started writing. My true voice comes out in true people, but I want to clarify this one thing: None of the characters are based on anyone I know, and they aren't thinly disguised versions of any of those relatives I love so much. I had an Uncle Cecil once, and I liked him very much, but Cecil Duggan is nothing like him.

There is a real place called The Grill in a real town called Linton, where Dad used to live, and I did, in fact, take that real place and put it in my pretend town, only because I consider my road trip unfinished if I don't eat at least once at the place that serves the best fried eggs in all of Greene County and the best iced tea, too. But the people who inhabit The Grill in my stories are not the real men and women of Linton and The Grill.

I've read that fiction writers put a little of themselves in every character and in every place they create. I don't know how true that is in general, but I can tell it's true for me personally. So if Cecil is like any real person, he's like me.

When I consider how much I love all the characters that come to me, I think this must be a weird version of self-love, right? If I can love Lacy Dickman, who sits on her fat ass and complains, then I must love that part of me that created her. This is a new idea - I'll wonder on it.

Every story brings me home again. Every one brings me a little bit closer to understanding that little hint of something in the air we feel every now and then, that thing we catch out of the corner of an eye that isn't there when we look full on. Whatever it is, I know it's beautiful. Whatever it is, I know it's mine, and I am not lost.

 

Secrets

I was thinking last night about how many secrets one family can keep and that the bigger the family, the more secrets. Some people won't tell me their biggest secrets because I'm a writer and they think I'll use the details of their story in my story. One friend even told me I had to swear to never use the details--in any form--and I have to admit that it was a juicy story.

But I don't work that way. I don't start from the outside in. I start by opening a door, usually in the middle of the night, whether I want to or not--you know--like trying not to keep humming the song you heard in the grocery store. So I'm punching pillows, doing the usual rituals to try to fall asleep, and that damned door is open and I'm seeing into another world where my characters live, and one of them, I discover, is growing weed in the woods out back of the old house where the Buddhist nuns live. I'm not kidding.

So I lie there staring at the ceiling and wondering how she gets away with this and why she would even do it in the first place. Seems out of character for her. And gradually her story unfolds in that space between my open eyes and whatever they're fixed on, and I see what the secret is and how it unfolds in the lives of the people who populate this town I made up. Who needs someone's family secret when there are doorways into other worlds where the stories are rich as the loamy earth the farmer is tilling off in the distance?

And speaking of farmers, whatever happened to Cecil's wife? Why didn't she ever come back from that trip to Akron to see her parents? What secrets is Cecil keeping and why?

See what I mean . . . ?

 

Tell Me a Story

If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. ~ Barry Lopez

For years I've been collecting stories that I call "pieces" because they're short, and as far as I know, there is no fiction or non-fiction genre called "pieces," so I just collect them in notebooks and on the computer. They come to me not with a worked-out plot, no obvious beginning, middle, or end, but in the form of characters who want to tell me something. So I listen and I write them down. Now they're clamoring at me to be heard, so I decided to create audio files and share them.

When I was a kid, my sister and brother and I would pester Dad: "Tell me a story!" I don't know that he ever did; I just remember longing to be told a story. Now I'm all grown up and I can read all the stories I want and I can even listen to audiobooks, but when someone in my writing group reads aloud a new story, I close my eyes and drift on the bliss of their words.

I need stories. I think we all do. I need to write them. I want to share them.  And that's what this blog is about: sharing stories. Watch for my podcasts and let me know what you think.