Grant Faulkner

On Failing Better, Failing Bigger, Failing Magnificently

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No one knows quite how to fail like a writer. Each day brings with it wrong turns, doubts, swaths of deletions, endless rejiggerings, and even the thought of giving up entirely.

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars,” Flaubert said.

There’s an inherent chasm between the book in your mind and the one you manage to get onto paper. It’s difficult not to measure your words against an ideal of your vision, not to mention the works of your favorite authors, so your words inevitably resist singing in the way you want them to.

You might actually say writing is a special training ground of failure. “Writing is frustration—it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time,” said Philip Roth, who won such awards as the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his “failures”.

Perhaps “fail” isn’t quite the right word, though. The word “fail” is fraught with negativity, catastrophe, and downright shame, but failure, especially in writing, isn’t necessarily any of those things. In fact, failure can be the breeding ground of innovation.

How so, you say?

Consider Thomas Edison’s approach to failure: “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Edison viewed failure as just another part of the scientific process, and the scientific process isn’t all that different from writing a novel. At the heart of both is the question, “What if?” Both include theories followed by tests. For example, a scientist might ask what would happen if a person fell into a black hole (a good science question that is also a good novel question), whereas a novelist might ask what will happen if my main character decides to call the married man she’s in love with? Or, to ask a question of narrative technique, what if I interrupt the chronology of the story with a flashback to tell the character’s back story? Or you might experiment with perspective. What if I write this story in the second person, or from different characters’ point of view?

That’s one of the beauties of National Novel Writing Month: it encourages such risk taking. Its credo is that if you trust in your intuition, immerse yourself in your story, focus on moving your story forward, and banish the notion of making mistakes, you’ll experiment in ways that you might not have.

Samuel Beckett famously wrote, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” The quote has been wrested from his oblique and gloomy experimental work Worstward Ho, and Beckett didn’t have any intention for it to become the inspirational mantra it’s become, but this notion to “fail better” is interesting to ponder. It’s a Zen koan of sorts that demands individual interpretation.

For me, to “fail better” is an invitation to experiment, to pause and truly scrutinize your story. Are you holding back from what’s truly at stake in the story? Are you being too nice to your characters? Have you allowed yourself to truly push your language? Or perhaps you’re suffering from the dreaded notion of the “right way to do things,” which has plagued many a writer. With all the how-to-write books available, it’s easy to think that you need to write your story correctly, according to others’ rules. But in the end this is your story. You have to write it your way.

Failing better is also a matter of ridding oneself of the fear of failure. That fear fences one in and doesn’t allow for creative risks. Imagine if Virginia Woolf feared writing with the lyrical stream of consciousness that opened windows into her characters’ interior lives? Or if Vincent van Gogh feared that people would see his paintings as smudges of color instead of vibrant representations of his fiery spiritual state? Woolf and Van Gogh each had to go through Edison’s 10,000 experiments to master their groundbreaking approaches.

Failing better is a creative mindset that must be nurtured. In psychologist Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she explores the difference between “fixed” and “growth” mindsets. “In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits,” writes Dweck. One is born a great athlete or a great author or a great mathematician. In a “growth mindset,” however, “people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work,” says Dweck.

If you establish a growth mindset, in other words, you view failure as just another part of the creative journey, not as a roadblock, not as a damnation of your talents or you as a person. As C.S. Lewis said, “Failures are the finger posts on the road to achievement.”

So what is failing better? Maybe it’s just openness, the desire to see, and in seeing to learn, to begin again, always. That is where the joy of life and creativity reside—in the constant testing, the constant searching. Failing better is an attitude of always moving forward, of looking around the next corner. It’s a mindset of not looking for rules, but of following one’s curiosity. It’s a mentality of fun, of self-reflection, of privileging the integrity and unique personality of your story.

Failing better is also doing what you’re afraid of. For many writers, this might be making your work public, whether that means giving it to others for feedback, submitting it for publication, or reading in public.

For years—no, for decades—I wouldn’t read my work in public. I told myself it was because I wrote my stories to be read, not performed. That was true, but the larger truth was that I was afraid to read in public. Finally, I was forced to read, and in doing so, I learned what stories resonated most with people. I learned what they listened to and when they tuned out. I also met other writers and developed a writing community, which helps me fail and succeed better every day.

“Failing better” is the exact opposite of “failing worse”. Failing worse is failing from a lack of effort or a lack of imagination or a lack of verve. Failing worse is comparing yourself to other people’s talent or accomplishments and deeming yourself on the short side of things. Failing worse is not testing the limits of what’s possible.

Failure, the failure of constant experimentation, is the thrust of a writer’s life. “Failure is easy,” said Anne Enright. “I do it every day, I have been doing it for years. I have thrown out more sentences than I ever kept, I have dumped months of work, I have wasted whole years writing the wrong things for the wrong people. Even when I am pointed the right way and productive and finally published, I am not satisfied by the results. This is not an affectation, failure is what writers do.”

John McPhee once famously tied himself to his chair to to force himself to face such failures. One must be obstinate, intrepid, and maybe even a bit reckless, for if we aren’t, we’ll reside in a “safe place” that doesn’t yield the results we desire or dream of. As Einstein was said to have remarked, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Risking mistakes offers us the opportunity to do things differently, to explore beyond where we thought we were going, to include the spicy element of chance into our work. You can’t create anything good without mistakes. Mistakes are a foundation of art and creativity, so you should search them out.

“Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before,” Neil Gaiman counseled writers.

Writing through failure in the search of beauty is what makes writers such a rare breed. We’ve chosen to practice an art that is so challenging that it practically damns us (or it can feel that way). We’re so often alone with our words, and write without much approbation, or never enough of it, but even as our words fizzle, even as our plots falter, we show up to fix things, and fix them again and again. We know that with enough tinkering, with enough alchemy, with enough moving things around and shaking things up, we can capture the elusive beauty of the story at hand. We can fail better.

Inspiration is a rare sighting (like Bigfoot)

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Inspiration is a funny thing. It’s powerful enough to move mountains. When it strikes, it carries an author forward like the rushing torrents of a flooded river. And yet, if you wait for it, nothing happens.

The irony is that so much is actually created—mountains moved, sagas written, grand murals painted—by those who might not even describe themselves as particularly inspired. Instead, they show up every day and put their hands on the keyboard, their pen to paper, and they move their stories forward, bit by bit, word by word, perhaps not even recognizing that inspiration is striking in hundreds of tiny, microscopic ways as they push through another sentence, another page, another chapter, of their novel.

This is the principle way writers finish 50,000 words of a novel each year during National Novel Writing Month, and it applies to being creative the rest of the year as well.

Inspiration is often characterized as a thunderbolt—a brilliant flash that strikes from the heavens—and that metaphor certainly holds truth because inspiration can be a sudden igniting force, random and illuminating and otherworldly (and even a bit dangerous). Yet I sometimes think of inspiration, at least the big, gobsmacking moments of inspiration, as more like Bigfoot. Sightings of Bigfoot are rare, and he’s so elusive that he can’t be captured, physically or even truly on film, so his very existence is in question. It’s wonderful to believe he exists, because it’s nice to think of the world as strange and beautiful enough to spawn such a creature, but if you go out into the woods and look for Bigfoot, you’re not likely to find him, just as you can’t force sweeping gusts of inspiration to appear on any given day.

“And the muse? I have no idea who has one, but if anyone does, I’d like to know so I can stage a kidnapping,” said author Kami Garcia in a NaNoWriMo pep talk.

The fantastical “muse” Garcia speaks of is the source of inspiration in Greek and Roman mythology. Ancient authors invoked muses near the beginning of their work, asking the muse to sing directly through them. As Homer puts it in Book I of the Odyssey:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns

driven time and again off course, once he had plundered

the hallowed heights of Troy.

This mythological muse was often illustrated as a creature in a beautiful flowing gown, playing a harp and singing a song from the heavens, but I’d like to recast this muse because maybe, just maybe, the “kidnapping” Garcia mentions is possible (or at least a type of kidnapping). I see the muse as invisible sprights that sleep in the whispery spaces between each word. This sprights are enlivened only by the breaths of a churning imagination, by the stirrings of a story moving forward. Such a muse is ineffable, so miniature that she often goes unnoticed, yet an author must trust that the responsibility for bringing those story sprights to life resides in the spool of words spinning onto the page. The muse doesn’t sing the words of a story; the muse is conjured in the telling.

“No one looks forward to those lulls in the writing process, but they are natural, and they can be overcome,” Marisa Meyer wrote in a NaNoWriMo pep talk. “These are the times when we must proceed on willpower and caffeine and the unflappable confidence that each word we write is one word closer to a finished novel.”

When willpower isn’t enough

True words, but such tough moments can certainly feel like they’re killing inspiration more than they’re nurturing it. Your thoughts dull. All of the synapses that used to fire with such eager alacrity have either gone into a deep hibernation or abandoned you all together. Perhaps your initial bolt of inspiration carried you through the first hour, the first day, the first week, or even the first month of your novel, but it’s becoming a faint memory, a cruel con, because without its strong winds, you feel adrift, your journey stalled.

This is a dangerous moment because when inspiration stops carrying you, the doldrums of self-doubt creep into your thoughts (perhaps in between sips of your favorite caffeinated beverage and your diligent intentions). You tell yourself no one wants to read your story. You tell yourself your characters are clichés, your plot unremarkable. And you—you!—are not a writer. You are a person with silly dreams who should know better, and you should just return to a life where you sit and simply be entertained by other people’s imaginative creations. A life of binge watching Netflix isn’t all bad, is it?

Here’s what you must know: Every single creator throughout history has experienced such moments. The question is how to deal with such deadening humdrummery.

“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time,” said Leonard Bernstein.

The unromantic and unheralded “rest of the time” is actually a yeasty opportunity. It’s an invitation to fertilize your imagination. If a dulling lull is smothering your willpower and caffeine’s power to propel you through another paragraph has dissipated, then pull away from the page for a spell: Pick up your favorite book to be reminded of the fantastic places words can take you, take a walk and marvel at butterflies twirling about in dapples of sun, or go to a museum and stare at paintings and people—anything that it takes to stir and heighten your senses, to let your mind dash back onto the playground of the imagination and caper with your new ideas.

Every writer needs a strategy to deal with those dulling lulls. Joan Didion describes her method of retrieving her imaginative oomph in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook”: “When the world seems drained of wonder … when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write … I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest … dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavilion (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, ‘That’s my old football number’).”

“It all comes back,” Didion writes.

Yes, it all comes back. If you revere and remember the natural, irrepressible gambols of your imagination, writing won’t be all about a ponderous and painful plodding forward. And it’s necessary to make sure you don’t write with too much of the “no pain, no gain” approach (those tiny story sprights can only handle so much discomfort). “If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun,” Ray Bradbury posits in Zen in the Art of Writing, “you are only half a writer.”

So step away from your writing if need be and find a source of inspiration that will put air beneath your wings. But don’t step away for too long. Many a writer has made a lifestyle out of stepping away. You must return after an hour or an afternoon and concoct inspiration on the blank page. Let the blank page be a spigot for all of the dramatic, ornery, lyrical, and shocking thoughts in your head that are eager to come out.

“The blank page is yours,” wrote Chuck Wendig in a NaNoWriMo pep talk. “Cast aside worries over art and criticism. Imagine a land without rules. Imagine that nobody has ever told you that you cannot or should not do this thing. Those people were wrong. Forget those voices. Because, for real?

It’s an empty field and you’ve got the keys to a freaking Ferrari.

It’s a white tablecloth and you’ve got ketchup, mustard, and relish.

It’s a blank page and you’ve got all the letters and words you need.

Rev the engine and take the ride. Paint with all the colors the condiments at your table allow. Create whatever robot-human monstrosities your mind cares to conjure. Crack open your chest and plop your heart onto the page.”

When you plop your heart onto the page, you’ll realized that the words you create every day are each fruit-bearing kernels of inspiration. Each word wants more and more words to follow. And you are the God that sends those words—those story-igniting lightning bolts—into a world that’s coming to life before your own eyes. You are your own muse.

Here’s an inspiration exercise to fuel your inspiration engine:

Exercise

Write a page or two about what inspires you to write—whether it’s the desire to create lyrical prose, escape this world, or explore your inner world. After you’ve written this short piece, focus on the things that inspire you as your guide to sit down and write on even the worst days. Your big “I” inspiration can open a pathway back to writing.

The Key to Whole-Hearted Writing: Embrace Vulnerability

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What’s the key element of any good story?

If you peruse the how-to-write section of any bookstore, you might think good stories are all about craft: plot, suspense, dialogue, etc. Sure, such things matter, just as the ability to string together a good sentence or draw arresting characters matters.

But in the end, I think the thing that matters most is an author’s ability to be vulnerable on the page—to be open, daring, unabashed, unashamed—fearlessly willing to bow to any taboo, unwilling to heed any notions of embarrassment.

Writer's Digest - Creativity Issue - Grant FaulknerAs I put it in an article that just appeared in the Writer’s Digest Creativity issue, “a good story occurs when an author travels, or even plummets, into the depths of vulnerability and genuinely opens his or her soul in the search of truths that otherwise go untold.”

I’ve been interested in pursuing a more open and vulnerable writing style since I saw Brené Brown’s TED Talk on the power of vulnerability. To be vulnerable is not weakness, Brown says—rather, it’s “our most accurate measure of courage.”

The original definition of courage comes from the Latin word cor, meaning heart. Brown says that to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart takes courage. It’s only through such vulnerability that the connections that give purpose and meaning to our lives are formed.

“Vulnerability is essential to whole-hearted living,” says Brown. It’s also essential to whole-hearted writing. It’s the birthplace of creativity. Our stories won’t truly connect with readers unless we take the emotional risks that spark kindred feelings of authenticity.

The urge to be a writer is a generous act at its core, after all: We want to share our story with others, to give them a world that will open doors to insights and flights of the imagination.

I unfortunately can’t share the Writer’s Digest piece because it’s only available in print at the moment, but here are some outtakes.

On overcoming shame

I had to ask myself, Why did I become a writer in the first place? I made a list. And here’s what I discovered was on it: I wanted to put words to the shadowy corners of people’s souls, to understand the desperate lunges people take to give life meaning. I wanted to explore the enigmatic paradoxes of being, how desire can conflict with belief, how yearning can lead to danger. Life is so mysterious, nuanced, ineffable—equally disturbing as it is beautiful—so I decided it was my duty as a writer to be brave enough to risk ridicule in order to bring my truths to light. Why write a sanitized version of life?

On writing improv style—saying “Yes, and …”

Do I end up writing foolish things? Blessedly, yes. In literature the archetypal Fool babbles, acts like a child, and doesn’t understand social conventions (or at least pretends not to), so the Fool isn’t held culpable for breaching any rules. As a result, the Fool can speak the truth in ways others can’t. You might say the Fool is the ultimate storyteller: He takes the conniving risks necessary to tell the tale only he can see.

“Looking foolish is good for you. It nourishes the spirit,” wrote Twyla Tharp in The Creative Habit.

On boldly declaring yourself a writer

The life of the imagination can feel trivial or even forbidden in the adult world where life’s practicalities rule. I didn’t call myself a writer for years because I thought it was pretentious to do so until I’d published. I needed a badge of validation from the external world.

But by not calling myself a writer, I realized I was not only putting up a shield, I was unwittingly diminishing myself. A secret identity weakens one and brings on the urge to hide yourself in your words. To write with verve demands asserting yourself as a creator—to yourself and to others.

The worst thing about not allowing yourself to be vulnerable on the page is that your story will never be written with the force or vigor it deserves. It won’t truly exist in the world, and you’ll feel that lack as a writer.

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised and misunderstood,” wrote the poet Audre Lorde. “For it is not difference which immobilizes us most, but silence.”

“A work of art is a confession,” as Albert Camus said. Camus didn’t mean a personal confession, but a revelation of the raw truth of the soul. Everything I write must now measure up to such a standard.

On the Publication of Fissures

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Today marks the release of my collection of 100-word stories, Fissures, so I thought I’d share the book’s preface to introduce it.

Grant Faulkner FissuresCoincidentally, while preparing for a reading I’m giving at U.C. Davis later this week, I stumbled on this quote from Baudelaire that describes the whole enterprise of writing these short little ditties, which exist in the blurry boundaries between short-short fiction and prose poetry:

Who among us has not, in his ambitious moments, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without meter or rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of the psyche, the jolts of consciousness?

I don’t know if I accomplished such a thing, but Baudelaire’s quote neatly sums up my attraction to the 100-word form. I like to say that writing 100-word stories allowed me to nurture my “inner failed poet.” The preface from Fissures, below, takes this idea a bit further. And, if you’d like to read some 100-word pieces, several stories are available online.

Preface to Fissures

I’ve always thought life is more about what is unsaid than what is said. We live in odd gaps of silence, irremediable interstices that sometimes last forever. A lingering glance averted. The lover who slams the door and runs away. Unsent letters. We all carry so many strange little moments within us. Memory shuffles through random snapshots. Sometimes they seem insignificant, yet they stay with us for some reason, weaving the fabrics of our beings. In the end, we don’t seize the day so much as it seizes us.

The idea of capturing such small but telling moments of life is what drew me to 100-word stories (or “drabbles” as they’re sometimes referred to). I’d previously written novels and longer short stories, forms that demanded an accumulation of words—to sew connections, to explain, to build an entire world with text. I wondered, what if I did the opposite? What if instead of relying on the words of a story, I relied on the spectral spaces around those words? What if I privileged excision over any notion of comprehensiveness, and formed narratives around caesuras and crevices?

We live as foragers in many ways, after all, sniffing at hints, interpreting the tones of a person’s voice, scrutinizing expressions, and then trying to put it all together into a collage of what we like to call truth. Whether it’s the gulf between a loved one, the natural world, or God, we exist in lacunae. I wanted to write with an aesthetic that captured these “fissures,” as I began to think about them.

Perhaps I could have accomplished such an aesthetic of writing in a longer form, but the hard borders of a 100-word story put a necessary pressure on each word, each sentence. In my initial forays into 100-word stories, my stories veered toward 150 words or more. I didn’t see ways to cut or compress. I didn’t see ways to make the nuances and gestures of language invite the reader in to create the story. But writing within the fixed lens of 100 words required me to discipline myself stringently. I had to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert’s mot juste in a way that even most flash fiction doesn’t. As result, I discovered those mysterious, telling gaps that words tend to cover up.

We all have a literal blind spot in our eyes, where the optic nerve connects to the retina and there are no light-detecting cells. None of us will ever know the whole story, in other words. We can only collect a bag full of shards and try to piece them together. This collection is my bag full of shards.

Boredom: the Secret Passageway to Creativity

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Haring_computermanI’m increasingly disturbed by my behavior.

I have a tic, an affliction, a virus. Like many, when a moment of emptiness descends upon me, I reach for my phone, tap it madly, and hope to find stimulation. I do this in line at the grocery store, during one of my kids’ soccer games, or even at a red light.

I’m searching for the dopamine spritzer I’ve become addicted to, but I don’t think anything productive comes of my impulsive neediness. I scroll through photos, read some random updates, and then when the red light changes to green, I go on my way (if I see the light).

I’ve become the “computer man” Keith Haring presciently depicted in his art in the 80s, with a computer monitor for a head and a phone for a hand. I’ve merged with my gadget, and lost myself in the process.

I view these spaces of boredom as unwanted instead of the gifts that they are. Our minds need these little pockets of rest to create, after all. Moments of boredom resemble sleep; when the mind finds itself in an interlude of rest, synapses connect in different ways, new thoughts form.

Also, this supposed boredom is an invitation to actually pause and experience the world. Before I had a smart phone, boredom was an occasion of observation, a wonderful juncture of daydreaming. I could conjure a new story idea while standing in line for a burrito. I could observe the way a person’s face moved through thoughts while riding the bus home from work.

As the poet Mary Oliver wrote, “To see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer.” Oliver tried to see through “the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles,” something that requires absorption in those stray, lingering moments of life.

Just as we’ve forgotten how to make butter or build chairs, like our ancestors of yore, I think we’re increasingly losing the art of being bored. On family vacations as a kid, my parents drove hundreds of miles each day. I had to read a book, stare out the window, play a game with my brother and sister, or squabble—and usually all of the above. Nowadays, we stick a screen with a movie on it in a kid’s hand.

We’ve forgotten that on the other side of boredom is the most exciting experience one can have as a creator—the state of discovering new possibilities. The mind doesn’t seek boredom—it seeks stimulation, creation—so these moments of stasis are actually a breeding ground for ideas.

There are even psychological studies on the merits of boredom. Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman, psychology researchers at the University of Central Lancashire, found that boredom felt during passive activities heightens the “daydreaming effect” on creativity. The more passive the boredom, the more likely the daydreaming and the more creative a person is afterward.

Being bored actually signals to the mind that you’re in need of fresh ideas and spurs creative thinking.

One of my resolutions this year is to not only slap my hand every time I mindlessly reach for my smart phone, but to revere boredom for the sacred, creative moment it is. I’m going to surrender to boredom, drink it in, taste it, let its waves wash over me and … see what happens.

“Boredom is time’s invasion of your world system,” wrote Josephy Brodsky in “In Praise of Boredom”. “It puts your life into perspective, and the net result is precisely insight and humility. The former gives rise to the latter, not a bene. The more you learn about your own format, the humbler and more sympathetic you become to your fellow-beings, to this dust that swirls in the sun’s ray or that already lies motionless on your table top.”

To ponder dust motes, to ponder other worlds.

The Power of Getting More Ideas Faster

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speedFor years, my writing process formed itself around the notion of ponderous preciousness. I distrusted the idea that anything of quality could be written quickly. A story, a novel, a script had to be as finely aged as a good bottle of wine in order for all of the nuanced tannins and rich aromas to fully develop.

I’d conceive of an idea for a story and then burrow into it. I’d write one draft, usually in a somewhat plodding fashion, and then I refined and refined, and then refined some more, sometimes over the course of years. It was as if I held a very tiny chisel and carefully maneuvered it again and again through the practically microscopic contours of my story world.

Steeping a story in deep and obsessive ruminations has a place, but I’m becoming more interested in the benefits of hastening my creative process after reading an interesting study that counters my “a fine wine takes time” approach.

The book Art & Fear recounts the story of a ceramics instructor who did an experiment in his classroom. He divided the class into two groups. The first group was graded on quality, represented by a single ceramic piece due at the end of the class. The second group was graded on quantity, literally the amount of work they produced.

Who produced the highest quality work? Not the group that practiced my refine, refine, refine approach. Those who threw pots “with abandon” (as we might put it at NaNoWriMo) created the highest quality pots.

Why? Because they tried more ideas. Instead of creating one overwrought pot, they produced pots that held more verve because of the creative pressure put on them and the loose structure of banishing the restricting limitations of “quality.” They might have encountered more botched pots, but they were astute enough to learn from those failures and build on them.

As Thomas Edison said, “The real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into twenty-four hours.”

Yesterday, I spoke to the Sacramento Writers Club. As part of my presentation, I had everyone do a five-minute automatic writing exercise, to just choose a subject and write as fast and loosely as possible.

Honestly, even though I’ve done this several times with groups, I never know how it will turn out. I always expect to be challenged by a naysayer from the “ponderous precious” camp. I was so gratified to feel the risk-taking energy in the room and see the deep immersion in writers’ eyes. Afterward, people told stories of newly found character insights, wild plot discoveries—and in just five minutes of writing like a dervish.

I felt the same. I jumped in and wrote to this prompt: “When I was five, I ____ .” “When I was nine, I _____ .” And so on. I somehow struck upon a recurring vision that a character in a my novel has, a vision that guides, taunts, and troubles him throughout life.

The dangers of such free-flowing expansion is that you’ll encounter too many “plot bunnies”—that a story can bound out of control when you get too many ideas, because one idea breeds with another like rabbits.

I think that’s a good problem to have, though. In fact, I’ll take that problem any time because I can slow down in revision and choose the bunnies I like.

So here’s to writing more—and doing so with alacrity.

Resilience More Important Than Any Writing Tip

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Writers are always looking for the next great writing tip, the secret to plot, the key to subtext, the way to write compelling dialogue. But perhaps what’s most important to every single work—and especially the long-term life of a writer—is something beyond the craft of writing: resilience.

We’re going to experience a heckuva lot of rejection, after all, whether it’s from agents, editors, readers—or, unfortunately, ourselves. What’s most important is not how you write, but if you show up to write—and that you write in the bravura fashion that gives a story meaning.

I’ve been thinking of this recently in light of Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk, Success, failure and the drive to keep creating.

Gilbert, the author of the blockbuster Eat, Pray, Love, has the enviable problem of trying to write a book that will please anybody after such a wild success.

“I knew well in advance that all of those people who had adored Eat, Pray, Love were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it wasn’t going to be Eat, Pray, Love, and all of those people who had hated Eat, Pray, Love were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it would provide evidence that I still lived,” she says.

I’ll gladly take Gilbert’s problem of riches any time, of course, but I also sympathize. In the end, Gilbert is just another writer waking up in the morning trying to tell her story, and one’s demons don’t necessarily go away after success. They might even get magnified. We’re all susceptible to criticism and expectations. We all can project negative outcomes no matter what past successes we’ve had. Success is nothing more than a temporary, flimsy blanket or shield.

“I had to find some way to gin up the inspiration to write the next book regardless of its inevitable negative outcome,” Gilbert says.

But how does she do this?

She remembers her “home” as a writer, a metaphor I love. She remembers when she was beginning to write as an unpublished waitress who came home to rejections for six years. I was such a waiter myself, and even though I haven’t written Eat, Pray, Love or anything close to it, I remember those early days of writing, and what a strange and blessed sort of home they were, when I received no recognition, yet found the warmth and glow of being alive when my pen touched the page.

I know now that six years of rejection isn’t much for most writers, but then rejection is rejection. Sometimes a single rejection will kill a writer. Sometimes the anticipation of a single rejection will kill a writer. The only way to create in such circumstances is to feel a reckless and unquestioned urgency to create.

Gilbert says, “Writing was my home, because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing, which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego, which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself. And that’s how I pushed through it.”

Who knows how to explain why or how such a creative act can take on such importance, but when it does, it’s a transcendent moment. Like Gilbert, I believe I can tolerate setbacks and even tragedies that go beyond writing simply because I have that home of creativity. When I write in the morning before work, the day beams with a nurturing vibrancy. I can lose my house, my car, my job, all of my money, but I can’t lose writing. It’s so much more important than any of those things. It’s my soul.

As Gilbert says, “I will always be safe from the random hurricanes of outcome as long as I never forget where I rightfully live.”

We all need to ask ourselves each day, “What is my home?” It doesn’t have to be writing—it can be parenting or teaching or baking muffins or selling flowers—but whatever it is, it’s sacred. What is your home?

Watch Gilbert’s video:

Dancing the Tango. Writing the Novel.

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tangoThere’s the famous quote, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” which has always struck me as indisputable. It’s just so difficult for one art form to truly comment on another. That said, I just stumbled on quotes about dancing the tango that perfectly describe the process of writing a novel for me.

Consider this quote:

Imagine telling a beginner man he has to learn to find the rhythm of the music, watch out for navigational hazards on the dance floor, develop a strategy on the spot for dealing with them choosing from a repertoire of movements he has learned, then lead the woman to move in the intended direction with the intended speed while maintaining the connection, and then… He has to follow the woman’s response to his lead to determine the next move (within a millisecond, after all, this is not chess), and take responsibility for whatever goes wrong.

Somebody named Jay Rabe said this. I feel exactly the same about my novel at the moment—that success relies on doing five paradoxical things at once. I’m trying to find the rhythm of the music (that lyrical flow of the storyline) while also  navigating a few steps ahead—i.e., making all of the key plot connections—and thinking maybe I’ll move this way, or maybe I’ll move that way, and I’m leading, yet following, pivoting, yet tripping. I’m all dressed up in other words, trying to look like I’m the real thing, but I’m sweating under my collar. And my partner, the woman in this quote, is my main character, who I have to lead and respond to and feel.

The novel is a game of chess. Except it’s dancing the tango while playing chess.

And then there’s this one on that ever beguiling notion of achieving perfection (italics mine):

Tango is a dance in which it is easy to become obsessed with perfection. The taste of heaven that is found within tango may encourage some to seek perfection. Others may bring their own perfectionism to tango. But we should never confuse heaven and perfection. They are very different. The path of perfectionism often leads away from heaven—as we find ourselves accompanied and driven forward by demons that become all too familiar. If we pursue perfection in our practice, we are likely developing the demons that seek to keep us from effective dancing. In tango, heaven is found through the simple gift of grace. That comes from getting out on the dance floor with the person that happens to be right for the moment, opening one’s heart and falling in love again.

Somebody named Stephen Brown said this. I love the way he articulates the dangers of perfectionism, which can constrict a good story or stifle a good dance. A good novelist and a good dancer have to find that mysterious zone of serving the story like a child—to dance with one’s partner rather than with an aspiration. This is where our quest as creators resides. Not in the striving, but in the release, in the openness—in the falling in love. To dance with the notion of perfection is a dance of separation, isolation, ego. There’s no grace in that.

I’ll posit that learning to tango holds lessons for learning to write a novel. It’s a dance that is rife with narrative tension and drama. Tango steps vary in timing, speed, and character, and follow no single specific rhythm, allowing dancers to vary the dance from moment to moment to match the elements of the music and their mood. Movements are sometimes slow and slithery, and other times sharp, a quick foot flick or a sharp head snap to promenade position. You might say the dance if full of plot points.

The next time I sit down to write, I’ll think of the tango, and try to listen to the music of my story, my various partners, and chant to myself to not confuse heaven with perfection.

The Art of Stealing: Creativity Redefined

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As someone who likes to pick up words and phrases from others and then riff on them in my writing, I’ve always struggled with the notion of originality. That’s what artists are supposed to be, after all. Original. Unto themselves. Independent visionaries. Pure.

So sometimes I’ve felt like a fraud. Fortunately, as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that taking from others and building it into something of my own is the way creativity works. It’s not plagiarism, but more akin to playing in a jazz band, picking up others’ melodies, motifs, aesthetics, etc., and playing along with them, then breaking out into my own solo.

This is how I construct many of my stories. Now I’m unabashedly comfortable with such a process. That’s why I want to share this TED talk, “Embracing the Remix,” by Kirby Ferguson.

Pablo Picasso said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Ferguson breaks down this idea even further to explain that the three key elements of creativity—copy, transform, and combine—are the building blocks of all original ideas.

On Creative Momentum

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Life might be described in a single word: momentum. We’re always moving—forward, sideways, backward, upward, or even spinning hopelessly in circles. Like a protagonist in a novel, we try to determine our momentum, and we often succeed, but we’re also at the mercy of external forces. A benevolent force might enter the picture and sweep us forward, as if we’re catching a wave. But then there are those malevolent forces that always lurk about, flexing their muscles like bullies, ready to push us down, tease us, chase us away (or just hand us bills to pay). We have to figure out a way to get up, move on, and find another wave to ride.

Each December 1, I wake up jazzed with the excitement of having a novel in hand (and perhaps just a wee bit exhausted). Misty swirls of my story world seep through my mind, and my heart beats with plot points and possibilities—because now that I have a rough draft, I can hear the second draft calling me. NaNo has given me more than the gift of a new novel; it’s given me creative momentum.

I don’t take that momentum for granted, though. Even though NaNo’s good momentum sends me gliding forward effortlessly, I know about bad momentum, which can be a snaggletooth trap you don’t even see.

Several years ago, I found myself in such a trap. More accurately, I constructed such a trap (that’s the worst thing about negative momentum: you can be your own bully). I’d just finished a couple drafts of my first novel, and I’d sent it to agents and editors with grand dreams of publishing. I got some nibbles here and there, but in the end, there were no takers. If I could go back in time, I’d whisper in the ear of my younger self to revise the novel again—to focus on the encouragement I received, get some good beta readers, and revise with their feedback in mind—but I decided the novel wasn’t good enough, so I gave up.

I’d been trying to make it as a writer for a while at this point, and I’d watched as other friends became successful, either as writers or in their chosen careers. I started to doubt my abilities as a writer, if not all of my life choices. Confusion plus self-doubt and envy is a three-headed hydra that breathes the most noxious and poisonous vapors. I started to creatively shut down. I took a job I didn’t like, just to earn money. The job gave me a bad case of carpal tunnel, so bad that writing became painful, then practically prohibitive. Instead of turning to my community of writers, I turned away from them. I didn’t know it, but I was miserable. And I wasn’t creating much of anything, except perhaps excuses.

Looking back, I’m not sure why I didn’t approach writing differently, but that’s the thing about these invisible self-set traps. I could have written just 150 words a day and incrementally written another novel (150 words per day equals about 54,000 words a year, after all). I could have written short stories, or even haikus. I could have volunteered at a literary magazine to become part of a creative community, or tutored kids in an after-school writing program.

I’m still confused by my actions and attitudes during that time and don’t quite know how to explain them, but I must have focused so much on the “can’t” that I didn’t allow much room for the “can.” But NaNoWriMo is a wave of “can.”

I just read through the “Life After NaNoWriMo” forum, and several people told stories of the obstacles that held them back in November—tales of foreclosed houses, children who corrupted their novel file, back injuries, sick dogs. Some hadn’t hit their word count, but they pledged to keep writing. “I love my characters too much to quit,” one said. Another asked for a “little tiny baby NaNo” in December.  “I want to keep up the daily writing habit, so I will be plodding on with my own NaNo in the months to come,” said another.

Reading these comments made me think that we should rename the “Thank God It’s Over” party to “Thank God It’s Just Beginning.”

The spirit and momentum of NaNo don’t have to stop just because it’s December. To build on this year’s NaNo momentum, I’m making a list of the things I learned (or relearned). Most importantly, I discovered ways to find time to write in my daily life. Yes, even when you work at a creative nonprofit, creativity can slink downward on your to-do list. I realized I can wake up an hour early every day to write. I can give up a few TV shows and spend a little less time on Facebook. I also realized how energizing it is to discuss the highs and lows of writing with a community of writers. And each year, I get better at getting in my NaNo zone and writing my novel in the most unfettered way. Such a thing takes daily practice.

Last Saturday, in the early morning hours of the last day of NaNo, I sat on the couch with my son and daughter, and we quietly sprinted and stretched and strained toward the NaNo finish line together. Later, we took a short hike and regaled each other with our novels’ dramatic scenes. I hope we’ll do the same thing next Saturday and the Saturday after that. Telling stories forms the essence of our connections to others.

Life is momentum. Life is stories. Let’s keep our stories going.