Jen Michaski's Open Salon Blog

The Second Draft, or what I hate about writing

Wed, 8 Aug 2012 11:08:29 -0400

I finally waded into the cold water of the second novel draft, summarizing each chapter's plot, desires, description, story arc, and character. It's about what I've expected; some areas of description and characterization are thin, but I am often struck by a beautifully rendered paragraph or description or sequence of words, and it's an affirmation to me that, hey, you're an okay writer!

I have also found a tangled, weedy mess of participial phrases. For some reason, I love to sling them onto the ends of sentences. I used to think there was a lyrical element at play, but, reading over them, I wonder now if they are just the result of my extended thought process while writing, ie, she thought of him, lying on the beach, the muscles of his stomach like browned muffins, warm and soft. It's as if I'm drifting away into the image, trying to describe it. At any rate, I've been doing a lot of sentence chopping, adding periods and verbs and action to try to eliminate the feeling that the reader is always wading through something. Only one person should be trapped in the murky depths of my mind, and that should be me.

Another challenge during these drafts is to decide when is too much, or too little. Do the characters feel too thin, defined only by the skeletons of their actions, or should I fatten them with description? Who needs to know if the character's eyebrows have a funny slant, or that her t-shirt was blue? Writing groups never seem to help in these situations. When you give the manuscripts to five people, three want to know the color of the shirt, and two ask you why you've included the color of the shirt. Likewise, are the character's motives always understood by their actions, or is a window into their thoughts needed? When I do offer this glimpse, am I "telling" too much instead of "showing?"

No one ever said writing was easy. However, I find revising the worst part of the process. The initial draft is full of freedom, of discovery, of spontaneity. Although a lot can be cleaned up, tuned up, organized, answered, at the revision stage, a lot of the subtlety and magic of the uninhibited first draft can be poisoned, destroyed, and there is so much of what feels like second-guessing at this stage. When does a pointalist decide that the last dot is enough, or the abstract painter the last streak of paint?

I guess writing can be a lot like building a chair. You have to make a sound structure with good materials, but then the rest of it--the carving, the varnishing, the painting, the decorative flourishes--are just so much a matter a taste. Not everyone will buy your chair, in the end, because some hate Chippendales or basket-woven seats or metal legs, but no one will buy your chair if it's liable to land their ass on the floor when they sit on it.

Is there any part of the writing process you hate mores than others?

New class at the Creative Alliance!

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 08:07:42 -0400

Stay out of the Baltimore heat on Thursday nights—by jumping into the frying pan! My fiction class at the Creative Alliance starts in August. Hope to see you there!

Let's Get It Started in Here!
With apologies to the Black Eyed Peas, sometimes all you need is to get the rhythm going. Are you itching to start that novel, or bogged down in the memoir marsh? Jen Michalski—author, editor, and host of the wildly popular 510 Reading series—leads newbies and nearly new writers through the early stages of the creative process. Perfect for any prose writers working on a novel, creative nonfiction, or short stories. August 2-23rd, 7-9pm.

For more info. and signup: http://www.creativealliance.org/events/2012/lets-get-it-started-here

Subterranean

Fri, 6 Jul 2012 11:07:08 -0400

I'm so close to finishing the first draft of my next novel. It's taken almost a year, but I've got 65,000 words that aren't in terrible shape. I know I need to set it aside for a bit before I dive back in. What interested me most, scanning through it last night, was the metatext of my life that ran through the pages. I remember writing page 66 and the ten pages before it on a Sunday night in November, the football game on. Pages 213-219 were written sitting in bed on a Friday night, the first 40 pages written during 3-day span of my residency in Georgia, and some were written the week before my beloved Boston terrier, Shirley, passed away, in early October, and the novel became the last thing on my mind for many weeks.

When I read other people's work, I sometimes think about the subtext. Did the writer go through a terrible divorce, the loss of a child, at the time of writing? Do strange choices of diction offer any clues? Is there a subconscious energy on the page directing the author places they would have not gone, had their own internal circumstances been different? How often has the novel outline we began with ended up somewhere else completely, and how much of that tangent was the influence of our other life, our "real" life, happening off the page?

If I have the patience next time, I'm going to keep a novel journal while I write. Not the normal novel journal, with plot points, research, and character sketches, but more of less a memoir of my life. Perhaps then my own novel will be peeled open to me, its motivations, my demons, in a way I could have never imagined. Writing is therapy, they say.

While Supplies Last

Thu, 5 Jul 2012 13:07:17 -0400

Did you know the can of women's shaving cream I used this morning is a limited edition? So is the candle I got on sale at TJMaxx. Just about everything you can buy boasts a limited edition style or flavor. But why? Am I really going to hoard Skintimate shaving gel at the thought that I won't be able to purchase the neat holographic shaving cream can in the winter, when my SAD kicks in and I'll need the sparkling, rainbow-trail fruits the most? And what about the green tea leaves candle? Will I feel a pain that will cause me eat small children if I never again smell the synthetic-crafted scent of green tea?

I don't understand the whole limited edition shtick. Except that I do. The advertising world understands our fears of a fleeting life, of happy memories, of so many things, in our instantaneous world, that seem gone forever. Their solution? More anxiety. Buy now, or forever hold your peace. Spend more, or don't blame your unhappiness on us. Hoard these products and stop time, and forever have access to objects we have decreed to be limited in quantity (as if anyone ever melts down the die or deletes the recipe). Suspend your life, your face, your olfactory sensations. Live now, always.

I suppose this could work on some level, except that you first need an emotional attachment to the said object. If you are creating new signature, limited-edition scents; limited-edition collector's pins of new Disney characters; a limited-edition Blu-Ray of a movie that went straight to DVD last year; or a limited-edition gold iPhone, what emotional memory is the company mining? I can only conclude that they're only mining some vague fear of loss. And what have we lost because we didn't buy that limited-edition NSync Monopoly game that now sells for a penny on eBay because limited edition actually meant 1 million units? This type of advertising in particular is deceptive, predatory, and cynical. It's the reason why television shopping networks make some much money off of invalids and homebodies. Preserve your present through physical memorabilia, aka life, the living souvenir shop. And we wonder why there are so many hoarders.

Perhaps advertising executives should devote their attentions to the real limited editions in our lives—water, clean air, land suitable for farming. Because that limited edition Furby has little hydration value when the rivers dry up and the landfills over-floweth. But by then we will have all purchased Dune-esque hydration suits that recycle our fluids into drinkable water. Some of them will even be limited editions—gold ones that turn your pee into champagne. I'm eyeing the one with the hologram on the back.

Home, Body

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 12:06:52 -0400

Last week, we bought a house and moved. Granted, it wasn't far—a few miles and within walking distance of our city's largest, most beautiful park, but I fretted about it for months. I hate change of any kind (except, ironically, I'm not very brand conscious and love trying new products on sale). I have lived in Maryland for all of my life, and Baltimore for the last 18 years. I have always maintained that I would never buy a house. But then, through no directive of my own, we had to move from my grandmother's abandoned place in the county, where I had been squatting for seemingly decades (—actually, five years—after getting out of an 11-year relationship), because my younger cousin wished to buy it and start a family. Finding a house was surprisingly easy—seven houses with a real estate agent on a Sunday and an offer made on one the next day.

Then the hard work began. Those last few weeks, packing my things in the old house, I wondered whether I would ever survive the heartbreak of leaving my childhood home, the sound of birds, the brilliant blue twinkle of my neighbor's swimming pool, shimmering in my peripheral vision, outside my office window as I worked.

And now, I don't miss it a bit. And I'm relieved, albeit not surprised. A similar experience happened to me last year when I went on a two-week writing residency. It was in the mountains of Georgia, and, except for college, I'd never been gone that long from family and friends. I dreaded going and wondered how I would get out of it. By the second week I was there, I was hoping I could live in the Georgia mountains for the rest of my life. Screw Baltimore. The same thing happened when we were in Paris earlier this year. And yet I harbor such terrible anxieties about going from one thing to the next, about having to adjust to a new normal.

What have I learned from these lessons is that home is less of a physical place than I've always thought it was. Sure, it is comforting when layers of decisions are removed from the frantic sandstorm of possibilities in one's life—where the good restaurants are located, where to grocery shop and jog, not having to make new friends—but I am highly adaptable. Now that I've moved a few times as an adult and gotten rid of everything from school papers to books to favorite but antiquated CDs and cassette tapes and combat boots, I've realized that I am not a person defined by what I like and own.

It's hard to describe yourself without the context of what you like. But you are more than the summation of your favorite bands, books, clothes, and cars. Your vista does not make you. You are not your Facebook page or your twitter. Your kindness, your ability to be patient and give of yourself in situations both rewarding and tiresome, your ability to appreciate moments and people and be gracious and to experience terrible loss and not hate those around you who have not yet experienced it all make you less of a person and more of a human. And when you're human, really, all you need is a body, and you're home.