Write On!: How to Write for Yourself

 Every blade of grass has a story to tell

— Darshan, “Animate My Anatomy”

Hey! I'm just taking some questions from the ol' email inbox. Ready? Set? To corrupt Montell Jordan, this is how we go.

How do you become a professional author?

Poverty is the secret weapon of the writer.

I’m not saying that being poor is a good thing, because it’s not. It sucks. (And I realize that I just contradicted the wisdom of Fiddler on the Roof, which is only slightly more sacrilegious than doubting the authenticity of the Bible. It’s okay. Let’s keep going.) And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t get paid well from your writing — thank G-d, there are ways to do it.

I’m saying, have a job that isn’t writing — at least, that isn’t writing what you deeply and passionately want to write, that comes straight out of your heart and keeps all that passion and fire and rawness and fragility intact.

Because if that’s what you want to write, it’s a good thing to tell yourself, I’m not doing this to make money.

And keep repeating it to yourself.

Repeat it when you don’t believe in yourself.

Repeat it when you don’t believe in your characters, and so instead of making decisions you open yourself up to them and let them take the story in whatever crazy way it wants to go.

Repeat it when you don’t even know what the characters want, so you kill one of them in a freak thunderstorm. (It’s ok! Do it! If your brain is telling you to — and this is in writing, not in real life, mind you — then there might be a reason. You can come back later, after you’re finished writing, and figure out the reason, and what it Means for the Rest of the Story. Or you’ll realize that maybe you needed to keep her alive for the rest of the story. Don’t worry! By that point, you’re already at the end, and you have a complete story written, so you can pretty much do whatever you want.) (Also, if you’re curious about where I got this idea from, skip to the end of this essay.)

Repeat it when there’s one really obvious way you could take this story — it’s your first day of school, you’re so nervous you don’t know what to do, you’re gonna get beat up and teased and eventually win the science fair, but really you just want to write about the cookies you stopped to grab at your grandma’s house on the way home.

There’s a power to writing that comes from its powerlessness. Even more so with poetry. Nobody reads anything these days, and especially nobody reads fictional stories or poems, so you don’t have to feel bound by them. You never have to be the poet who only writes rhymed poems about storms and pain — that is, unless you really want to be; the only one holding you there is you. Today it’s not raining and you’re the only person who caught sight of a rainbow before it disappeared. Why not write about that? Go for it. Nobody’s looking. And even if they are — well, hey, then you’ve got a reader.

We’re surrounded by stories. Literally — they’re everywhere. At one point, I remember asking David Levithan — my editor at Scholastic, who edits a crazy number of books and puts out one or two of his own every year — if he’s ever afraid of running out of ideas for stories. He said, I’m more afraid of having so many ideas for stories that some of the best ones fall through the cracks.

Every idea can make a good story. Just honor it and let it do its thing.

At what point in the writing process do you involve an agent or a publisher? Do you let them know as soon as you have a good idea, and get their… go-ahead? Their blessing? I don’t know what you’d call it. Or do you attempt to write a full, complete draft of whatever it is and then start shopping it around?

Okay, fine. Let’s talk publishing. EVEN THOUGH I just spent the past 400 words or so telling you why you shouldn’t think about that.

I’m going to first paraphrase Joshua Henkin, my writing professor, and say: as late as humanly possible. There’s a saying about too many cooks in the kitchen, and for most forms of storytelling, the exact number of “too many cooks” is 2.

It’s great to meet an agent or an editor. It’s double great if you want to show them what you’re working on, and it’s super double great if they actually ask and you offer. The thing to remember is: You’re still working on it. The sooner you show an agent, the sooner you open yourself up to them saying something like, “Hey, you know how you’re mostly writing a historical novel about the Second Temple, but with aliens? Maybe you want to lose the aliens.” And even if you say no, you’ve opened yourself up to the possibility that doing a story about the Bayis Sheni with aliens might not be the coolest thing ever. (Side note: this example might be the coolest thing ever. Can someone please write it?)

But: Doubt. In one word, doubt is why you shouldn’t show your story to publishers, or agents, or anyone except for helpful and supportive friends — and even if you do that, make them swear up and down, no bli neder involved, you DEMAND the neder, that they won’t say anything critical — until your story is finished, and edited, and you’d feel comfortable having it published exactly the way it looks at this moment.

As a side note, the literary industry is in a perpetual time- and money crunch, and editors and agents are looking more and more frequently to take manuscripts that require the bare minimum of editing. The more you can make it sound like a finished book — the closer it is to a finished book — the more likely they are to take it seriously.

Where did you get the idea for the freak thunderstorm?

Lolita. Which I never wanted to read, because the idea was gross, then needed to read, because Vladmir Nabokov basically taught himself English so he could do his own translations, and is one of the best writers this language has. It’s in the first few pages, and known as the shortest death in literature: “‘My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.”

My new chapbook!

So I wrote a bunch of poems and bound them together, and the collage artist Katie Skau cut up some images for them, and Ghost City Press crumpled the whole dang mess together and threw it into a book so that you can have it for free. Go here to get it.

Write On!: But How Do You Make a Plot?

Hey, welcome back to the writing space. If you have writing questions, send them to me! It’s just my first name at gmail.

First lesson today: Always show up. I wrote 700 words of a different story, decided it was too depressing, decided to stuff it under my bed alongside those clothes that are almost-dirty, but still clean enough to maybe wear again some day. I wasn’t going to write anything. I didn’t have time, didn’t have another idea, was still pretty buried in my old idea. (Maybe you’ll see some traces of it in this one.)

So I dove in. This is a question I’ve been dying to address, but kept getting distracted by things like Aristotle (who is worth his own column) and Joseph Campbell (ditto) and the Torah (um, probably worth more than one column).

How do you develop a plot?

When I enrolled in a master’s program for creative writing, I assumed it would be all about answering this question. Two years, twelve classes, you’d figure that, of the three primary elements of story (plot, setting, characters), this one would happen first, right? WRONGEST.

That’s not to say we didn’t talk about it. But we didn’t talk about it enough. Of all the elements of writing, plot seems to come hardest to most writers I know. Plot is a monster. Characters, we have inspiration for all over the place. We know characters, we breathe characters, most of us are characters, of a sort, from Tom Wolfe’s rock-star white leisure suits to Virginia Woolf’s breathless romance and incomprehensibly sad suicide. And setting — we love settings; we love places; from writer’s nooks to exploring new places to the Narnias and Hundred Acre Woods of our mind.

But plot? Plot’s the nightmare of nightmares. Once you have these kinetic characters, this perfect place, what are they gonna do there?

Here’s why, in my opinion: Plot has to make sense. Not only that, it’s taking all the things that don’t make sense about your story — why does the detective have a limp? what’s in the nanny’s closet? — and it forces them to make sense. It’s the cowboy riding through a field of rebellious teenage cows, trying to wrap a lasso around every last neck. It is the most left-brained part of a right-brained activity, the part that collects all the random stuff we’ve sprinkled throughout a story. And it’s the part most readers nitpick the most about. If you’re a reasonably good storyteller, people will find very little to complain about objectively in terms of your characters — maybe they don’t like them? maybe they did something stupid?

But in terms of plot grievances, you hear it all the time: “That ending sucked!” “I didn’t understand what was going on!” “Those middle 200 pages completely lost me!” And probably for good reason.

EVERYTHING has a plot. Poems have plots. What’s the definition of a story, as opposed to an anecdote or a joke or a drunken/sleepy story (because we all know those aren’t real stories, they don’t make sense, and most of them don’t even get finished being told)? A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The main character starts in one place, physically and mentally and spiritually, and gets the chance to change — they might take it, they might not, but that decision gives a story its story-ness. We want our characters to be bigger than they are.

When Shirley Jackson wrote “The Lottery,” she didn’t write about the Lottery in the abstract — she wrote a story of the day it was taking place. She described a typical Lottery that wasn’t typical at all, and the things that were normal taught us what the Lottery was, and the moments that weren’t typical also taught us what the Lottery was. The turning point of that story — the moment you realize who won the Lottery, and what winning the Lottery means — is both completely surprising and completely unsurprising. It makes a horrible sense; it feeds a feeling we’ve had since the first lines of the story.

Plot is driven by character. This is a big one. My professor, Josh Henkin, says that if you really know your protagonist, you’ll never have to stop and think, what happens next? This never actually happens, partly because we aren’t perfect, but also partly because we aren’t really in the character’s head space. We’re creating people. And people always find something to do. They always keep moving.

Plan ahead. Yes, you hate outlining. We all hate this. Outlining robs our story of its soul. When we tell a story naturally, the writer’s head is in the same place that the reader’s is — we’re learning about the characters, we’re diving deeper into the story. And this is good. Sometimes I’ll startle myself by throwing a major surprise into the story as I’m writing it — in Never Mind the Goldbergs, I knew that Moish was secretly filming a movie everywhere he went, but I didn’t know that he would return to Los Angeles and go straight to the movie’s premiere. It made sense within the context of the story (if you haven’t read it, it did! I assure you!), but it wasn’t something I’d prepared for.

Here’s what I do: on the last page of whatever I’m writing (short story, novel, haiku) I keep a running of what I think should happen next. In the scene, in the chapter, in the book. It’s never set in stone, and often changes — as I get closer to a Big Event, I’ll add in new little things that need to happen before and after it, and when something big changes, I feel totally free to change or trash other things.

Basically: keep a map. But remember that your destination will change.

Any time you open a door, make sure you close it. It doesn’t have to be a big deal every time. Sometimes the biggest buildups lead to the smallest payoffs — Netflix series have become experts at this, where 9 episodes’ worth of hints will lead to a really good one-liner between two characters. The important thing is, you close it. Keep track of these things. (An outline, ahem, works wonders.) Not only will they make your story feel more professional, it’ll feel more satisfying, too.

Less is more. This isn’t a plot tool so much as it is a tool for everything you write. I’m hyper. I try to leap from idea to idea, to get as much in as possible. DON’T. One of the best things about writing, and there are a lot, is that you have control of the reader’s mind. When you play a song, you have the reader’s ears. When you make a movie, you control the reader’s eyes and ears. Words are the least and the greatest of all powers: you can tell a story that lasts a moment and make it last an hour of the reader’s life, make them think about the same thing twenty different ways, take them inside the mind of two warring characters.

There are so many ways for this to go wrong. But there are also many, many ways to do it write — and do it different than anybody’s ever done.

Our minds are yours. Now go and do something with them.

The Friend I Never Called

 I steal names. You should know this, first of all, if you want to be friends with me (or friends of friends, or one-night drinking buddies, or if you just wanna ask me about my weird hair). If you have a good name, or a strange name, or a musical name, I might swipe it and stick it in a story.

Alexandra Blitman didn’t just have a name that stuck in my head like a song, but she was a person who did. She was the first person I knew who played cello — before her, the only actual cellist I knew about was the Slovakian cellist in the James Bond movie The Living Daylights, which my dad let me see with him when I was 9.

So I’m writing a story about a kid named Alex who’s a boy, and his best-friend-who-he-maybe-has-a-crush-on, also named Alix, who’s a girl, and I used real-life Alex’s name. Two strong trochees that might rhyme even though they mostly don’t. And Alex herself — she’s one of these people I always meant to keep up with and never did, and the few times I searched her nothing came up.

Then, last night, this did.

I tell stories for a living, and know that each is more than its headline. But Alexandra Blitman’s feels different:

I met her when we were kids, and we graduated from middle and high school together. We weren’t close, but we were friendly. Alex was friendly with everyone, though — a bright, free spirit whose genuine enthusiasm for life drew all of us to her, the straight arrows and the skaters and the jocks and everyone in between.

She died March 7, days after overdosing on heroin. She was 38.

**

Most of my friends, I don’t deserve to call friends. Most of the people I’d like to be friends with, I don’t even talk to. They seem like such magical people, with magical little worlds, and I’d hate to disrupt that with my stammery bad-haired self.

When you know someone even a little bit, they’re limitless. We see tiny glimpses of other people, two-second .gifs of a ten-hour series. Those people we think are our best friends, we’re only with them for a fraction of their lives.

And those people we barely know, we don’t even know how much we don’t know about them.

Alex and I were never part of the same social circle, although we were in orchestra together — Alex was the only cello, and I was a horrible second violinist who sat all the way back at the end of the section, even as an eighth-grader. I thought I would’ve gotten promoted maybe, just out of charity, except that Mr. Meyers was brutal and honest. When Alex played, he had none of the overwhelming praise he saved for Ashley Wilkes who played oboe or Lori Pay, the concertmistress, but she always hit her notes, and that made him proud.

We got along. I probably had a crush on her, but I had a crush on anyone who deigned to talk to me in those days of pimples and squeaky violin solos. More, I always just wanted to be her friend. She seemed like she’d be a good friend. Our lives converged, and then diverged, when she got in an accident with my best friend Patrick. He was trapped in a halo for the next three years, and she emerged relatively unscathed, and maybe I felt guilty being friends with her after that, or felt that I shouldn’t. Or maybe we just had different groups of friends. The Patrick business overshadowed everything, governed most of my social interactions over the next few years (my mom racked up hundreds of miles driving me to the hospitals where they reconstructed his spine). A few years ago I wrote a little book about it and this is one of the things I said about her:

In another life, we could have been sisters or maybe best friends, hiding out at each other’s houses, tumbling into bed and telling each other everything. In this world we were lunchmates, and we shared that with a tableful of other kids. I don’t remember how it first happened, whether she asked if she could sit at our table or if Patrick and I took our seats unobtrusively at the far end of the bench, sliding closer each day, having similar conversations about the same things until one day they finally converged. Pam’s conversational strengths were classical music, cartoons on TV, and what other people were really thinking.

(I changed her name to Pam. Patrick’s name isn’t really Patrick, either. Maybe I just save people’s names for what they sound like they should be doing, or for what I wish they would be doing?)

I should not be surprised, right? The opioid epidemic is everywhere. It’s hitting all kinds of people. According to the articles, this is kind of person Alex was:

She worked as a therapist with women and children in crisis, kids who were being raised amid abuse and addiction. It was hard work, emotionally taxing, and Alex often internalized it.

Alex loved the beach and the mountains. She was forever dancing, listening to and talking about music — everything from trance to Tori Amos, classical to Alicia Keys.

“You’d be walking through the mall and she’d see someone and say, ‘He looks like a really interesting character. I want to meet him,’ ” Sarah said. And she did.

Alex was an original — quirky and complicated, restless and gifted. Her parents didn’t give her a middle name at birth, but Alex declared one for herself, Victoria. She liked the way it sounded, cool and feminine. She started spelling her own name Alecks, just to be original.

**

I don’t want to quote the whole article — every little paragraph of it is another little treasure — although, maybe, I do. I didn’t know her that well. Some of the people the reporter spoke to, I vaguely knew (most of them, I knew as the kids on the other side of the classroom, the ones who were either way cooler than me, or not as cool as me, depending on how you felt about Dungeons & Dragons as a way to spend a Saturday night). The only one I knew was Alex, and I barely knew her.

Are we drawn to death because it reminds us of ourselves? Is it what these people meant to us, or didn’t mean to us, or because we’re hitching a ride on their final journey, wanting to claim some of the glory of it for ourselves, or some of the pain, to use it to define us, to make ourselves martyrs so other people feel sorry for us, so they feel jealous of us, because we have touched a piece of the infinity of this person that can no longer be touched? I read that, when someone dies who knows you, a tiny part of yourself dies along with them, the things you shared with them that you didn’t share with anybody else, the way they experienced you, which no one else will ever have the exact same experience.

If that’s the case, Alex barely took any of me when she died. And the parts of her — the microscopic, insurmountable parts of her I carried — are contained more in that article than anything I can write.

You know how I said that, even when you barely know someone, you don’t even know what you don’t know about them? I just want to tell you about the person who wrote the article. In middle school, she was one of those cooler than/not-as-cool-as people. We were definitely friendly and definitely not friends. Maybe she wore shirts with sports teams on them and I scoffed at her. Maybe I wore shirts with sports teams on them, hoping people didn’t think less of me because I was in camouflage.

Let me tell you what she does today. She’s a reporter for the Philly Inquirer. She’s won a Pulitzer. She’s a reporter — she uses the paper as a platform to show how public schools are fighting dropouts and raising prodigies and how a ghetto school went a year without fights. I think of what she’s doing and I tremble. I feel reverent. I think of the once-a-month phone calls I make to my state senator, the stories I write that try to make people laugh — it’s necessary, I know, but with the few people I make feel a little better, I wish I could figure out how to do as much straight-up good with my life as her.

Is that hubris? Chutzpah? A wish to touch more other lives, and my own basic egocentrism? Or is it that same feeling we get when people we know die, wanting to absorb their life’s glory into our own?

It is neither, I think. Maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe it’s covetousness — the kind we talk about in the Bible, the kind that’s not I wish I had that but how can I get one too, the kind where we see greatness and it inspires us to do great things. It’s been eons since I’ve talked to a stranger but maybe I should. It’s been forever since I’ve put on Tori Amos, since I’ve listened to music that made me dance without thinking about it. Our long winter is over. Maybe I should.

 

photo by Bostankorkulugu

Sympathy Pains for the Speaker’s Stand

I wrote a new poem! Go here to read the whole thing. Usually I write (well, usually I try to write) on paper, because I take more time with each word, the physical effort of it. Today I had too much to do, and I just opened the posting screen and let the poem all fall out. I knew exactly the image that it should have, but by now (January 2021, still a week after the Capitol insurrection) we're all sick of that image. A little creative Googling, and I found this. Felt right. And just enough of a twist on the original image. (I tried to find a source for it, but couldn't. Whoever created it, fait accompli.)

Anyway, here's the poem.

I’ve been drinking soup out of mugs in the morning
calling it coffee
stretching my mouth wider so that
nobody notices the noodles

These days I feel so sorry for the world
everyone is upset about a faraway foreign government
being overthrown in Washington
I’m just like, at least it’s not your family

This morning my flavor of coffee is my own anxiety
and I’m blowin’ on it right now cause it’s too hot
Needing the simple on/off switch of caffeine
while everything else is too unreliable

Feels a little too much like an abandoned store
at the end of an apocalypse, mobs of moms and incels
ransacking baseball bats and canned vegetables
while I’m patiently waiting in a line that never advances

Me, I’m nothing
selfless self-important something stuck on the way to salvation
trying to feel the pain of the universe
and drown out my own while I’m at it
Me I’m nothing          and I like it that way

Monument Valley, a poem

Tonight I just wanted to sleep alone
each touch of skin and furtive blanket movement

nails across the blackboard 
of my sleep.

Sometimes I pray because I don’t know what else to do
then drive myself crazy till sunset.

Freed prisoners will commit a crime
to return to the solace of jail.

I’ve been listening to music by dead people
hoping to set their souls at ease

though it might be because there’s nothing
I want to listen to.

Tonight I am having trouble surrendering
to the night, my body quaking 

with each wave of thought, unable to disconnect
from the maelstrom of my head

How I wish for something diagnosable
The ability to put a limit to my problems, say this is it

draw a box around them
then step outside it

G-d just seems to never want tonight to end
I open the blinds to the field of unblinking stars

Wondering what happens if I start walking among them
and don’t stop till I reach what comes next


______
Image from page 138 of The call of the stars; a popular introduction to a knowledge of the starry skies with their romance and legend (1919)