Grant Faulkner

Author’s Note: All the Comfort Sin Can Provide

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Book Cover - All the Comfort Sin Can ProvideWhen Pamela Painter read my story “Morphine Drip” from my collection of 100-word stories, Fissures, she fixated on the phrase, “all the comfort sin can provide,” and told me I should use that as a title someday. Right away, I knew she was right. I liked the phrase because it held questions. What comfort does sin provide? Is the comfort of a sin ever enough?

I’m not talking about sin in the religious sense, but sin in the broad sense of transgressing rules, rebelling, subverting, and, in the best sense, being.

That said, it’s also got a religious texture in many cases. If you’ve once been religious, then God looms over your acts with a watchful eye, and several of my characters certainly reckon with the presence of an absent but judging God. The irony is that the God of the Old Testament is a sinner as well (as he should be since we’re made in his image). He’s unstable, needy, brooding, violent, and sometimes desperate. He is an angry lover, worried about being spurned, and then vengefully punishing those who spurn him. God is the ultimate contradictory character, because, like us, he’s in search of becoming and sometimes behaves badly along the way.

And that is what sin tends to mean to me: a necessary part of becoming. I like Emerson’s definition of sin: “That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.” We find ourselves through transgression because sin is a way to push the conventional boundaries of life, whether they’re religious rules, societal conventions, or family expectations. Sin is often a vital expression of self, forming the pulse of life itself, so the worst sin must not be defined as a betrayal of a god, but a betrayal of self.

That’s what my stories in All the Comfort Sin Can Provide are about, people wrestling with who they are, who they want to be, and in this wrestling, they naturally take some missteps. They lunge in pursuit of meaning and grace, and they might hurt themselves or hurt others in those lunges, but to be a saint, you have to have first been a sinner. As Jung said, inside of every alcoholic there’s a seeker who got on the wrong track.

The strange thing about publishing the stories in this collection is that they span a few decades and have been written in far-flung places. I remember beginning “Sleeping and Not Sleeping and Waking,” the earliest of these stories, while sitting hungover in Radio Valencia, a café where I waited tables in San Francisco, in 1991. And then the most recent story, “23 Men,” inspired by Marie Hyld’s photographs on intimacy, was finished as I sat in my living room in the early morning hours as my family slept, just a week before this manuscript was due.

Some of the stories were written during a period I lived in Arizona in the mid 90s, a state I didn’t like living in but liked writing about (“Cooking,” “Heat,” “Theories,” and “The Names of All Things”). A couple came from an interlude when I returned to my home state of Iowa soon afterward (“Mr. American” and “Cold Hard Cash”). “Love Letter No. 23” was written on a plane going to New York, and “Mademoiselle in the Coffee Shop” was written on a bus going to work in downtown San Francisco.

Reading and writing stories is to engage in a lifelong inquiry into sin. I suppose every story is about sin in its own way. If so, then we’ll never run out of stories because if there’s one thing humans are good at, it’s sinning.

And book buying, I hope. Here are a couple of ways to purchase All the Comfort Sin Can Provide:

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.

The Never Ending Journey of One’s Writing Process

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Did I choose my writing process, or did it choose me? This was the question I asked myself after 20+ years of writing fiction. I wondered if I’d stumbled thoughtlessly upon my creative practice, and instead of actively scrutinizing it or consciously constructing an optimal process, I’d just decided to live with the results.

Over the years, I’d read a bevy of writing books, innumerable author interviews, and a trove of hefty biographies about my favorite writers. I’d taken every sort of writing workshop, and even finished a Masters in creative writing. I’d dallied in outlining my stories. I’d written an onerously exhaustive character profile or two.

Despite all of that, I largely wrote the same way as I did when I first started: I opened my laptop and started writing a story sentence by sentence, sometimes going back to revise a paragraph, sometimes moving forward.

In other words, although I’d defined myself as a creator by becoming a writer, I wasn’t taking a particularly creative approach to my writing.

At the urging of a friend, I finally decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month, the challenge of writing 50,000 words in 30 days in November. I figured it was time to shake things up, and as a Kerouac fan, I’d always been interested in his brand of “automatic writing” and wanted to see what crazy storylines I might unearth. I didn’t have anything to lose, and as it turned out, I had only novels to gain.

Full disclosure: I’m now executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), so you can take my words as biased, but what I really want to get across is that as creators we should always be playing with our creative process as a living, evolving thing. A creative process that has dug a rut in your mind will likely produce rut-like stories.

Since my ticket to constructing a new and ever-changing writing process was NaNoWriMo, I want to share the five things I got out of “writing with abandon” with NaNoWriMo and later in Camp NaNoWriMo, a version of NaNoWriMo that happens in April and July.

1) Writing with abandon allowed me to test ideas. I have a long list of novel ideas backed up like cars in a traffic jam (they’ve been blocked by the semi truck of a novel I’ve been revising for, well, ages). NaNoWriMo gave me permission to dive in and test an idea in just a month instead of waiting until God knows when to write it. It’s easy, and even creatively beneficial to take a break from a long project to let one of those stalled novel ideas open its throttle for a while. Now I have a draft of a novel burning to be revised after I get that semi truck out of the way.

2) Writing with abandon allowed me to generate more ideas. To write good ideas, every writer has to try his or her hand at plenty of bad ones, but the more active your brain is, the more likely bad ideas will beget good ideas. Because I’d banished my internal editor, that censoring snob, I started following dangerous and even ridiculous story lines because of the urgency to forge ahead and keep my tale going. Sure, some of those narrative escapades turned into dead ends, but others opened up the tightly wound confines of my story into glorious vistas.

3) Writing with abandon allowed me to achieve “flow.” Flow is a concept of single-minded immersion proposed by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who describes such states as egoless and timeless. “Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost,” wrote Csíkszentmihályi. Because I had to write with such crystallized concentration to hit my daily word count of 1,700 words, my brain seemed to enter an almost athletically saturated endorphin state. My inner world eclipsed my outer world in a way it never had.

Later, I read Charles Limb’s neuroscience research about how when jazz musicians improvise, their brains actually turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition and turn on those that let self-expression flow. Their brain regions also showed a heightened state of awareness—tasting, smelling, feeling the air around them.

Yeah Daddy-o. Play it!

4) Writing with abandon opened me up to a community of others. I was the worst kind of solitary writer. Years passed before anything I was working on was polished enough to show someone else, largely because I wanted to impress more than I wanted to receive feedback or simply share.

Because NaNo takes the cavalier approach of valuing “quantity over quality,” I let my hair down with my prose and reveled with others over the occasional atrocious phrase. Since we were all involved in a cauldron of a creative mess, we opened up to one another, and before I knew it, my friends and others I met in the NaNoWriMo forums were brainstorming ideas with me. Solitude, as much as I love it, can be over rated.

5) Writing with abandon is fun. Unfortunately, I’d made writing into work over the years. I thought of the Picasso quote: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” As I watched my kids finger-paint, I decided I should do the equivalent with my words. NaNoWriMo helped me shake off the shackles of writerly aspiration and rekindle the sparks of creative joy and discovery that made me want to do it in the first place.

My new promise to myself is to try something different in each NaNoWriMo event. What writing promises have you made recently? What are you doing to ensure that you keep them?

First Self-Publishing Project: The Names of All Things

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The Names of All Things CoverOne of the toughest questions a writer faces is, “What is your story about?” I’ve awkwardly stumbled through so many answers to this question—with loved ones, with fellow writers, with strangers—until I instituted the policy of not answering it. The answer the question is to diminish the story itself. To say that Moby Dick is about a man obsessed with catching a whale is to reduce it (not that I’m claiming to have written Moby Dick).

Still, it’s a question every author must ask himself or herself. I’ve noticed that most of my stories follow certain motifs: transience, desuetude, drifting states of abeyance. As one who grew up in a small rural town and saw so many putting on Norman Rockwell smiles of good citizenry to cover up any deviant behavior or thoughts, I’ve always been interested in, and sympathetic to, those drastic lunges of what I’ll call selfhood—the daring jail breaks from social norms, whether misguided, doomed, or embarrassing, that are often so necessary for a person to feel alive.

I guess that’s where “The Names of All Things” started. I had moved to Tucson, Arizona, with Heather Mackey, who is now my wife, while she got her MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona. The Southwest was a new and arresting place for me. I worked all sorts of jobs in a place that didn’t offer many good ways to make a living. One of them was as a substitute teacher at a somewhat sketchy private school for rich, wayward youth. I was struck by how transient and uncommitted the other teachers were, and how the kids, despite regular drug tests, seemed to have been abandoned, let loose upon the world in their privilege or loss of privilege. Let’s just say that these ingredients made it a very dramatic, if not combustible, place in my mind. I wanted to follow one of those combustions in a story.

The other impulse of the story was simply a desire to write about the Southwest in all of it vast craziness and sweeping beauty, to capture its ragged, desultory rhythms, inhabit the burns of its textures, lose myself in what I’ll call its sacred godlessness. This is a spiritual story in its way.

The story underwent many outright revisions and many more tweaks, largely because of the number of times it was rejected. Perhaps those rejections were a good thing. I wish I had an accurate count of the number of lit journals that rejected it, but it’s safe to say 30 or 40 of them. It finally received second place in the Southwest Review’s David Nathan Meyerson Prize for Fiction, and then the Southwest Review blessedly decided to publish it.

The path of most creations has to wend through a dark forest of rejections. I like to think each rejection made the story a little better. Each rejection helped me better answer what this story is about.

And now, since the story has been available only in print, I’ve decided to self-publish it as an ebook. It was a goal of mine this year to learn about self-publishing, and the only way to learn about these things is to do it. Fortunately, I discussed the project with Brooke Warner at She Writes Press, and she guided me to Patti Capaldi, a masterful cover designer, who then found a ragged, moody photo by Alice Grossman, which adorns the cover. I felt as if publishing this piece was an extension of the original creative act, except with the help of others.

Also, kudos to Jim Brown for formatting this as an ebook.

I don’t really expect to make a dime, even though it sells for $0.99. It’s always just nice to have a story in the world, and to work with good people to make it so.

Stretch Goals. Telling, Not Showing. Lit Crawl 2013. Trepidation.

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LCsfbannerConfession: I haven’t read my stories in public since 1999. But I’m reading at tonight’s Lit Crawl. So I’m a bit nervous. And I can’t figure out what to read.

The 1999 reading was hosted by the Berkeley Fiction Review at a Barnes & Noble. There was a healthy crowd of erudite folks, most of them wearing stylish intellectual eye wear. I brought two stories: one was a lyrical flash fiction piece (“Heat,” which was later published in Word Riot), and the other was a chapter from a novel I was working on at the time, a gritty urban tale involving lots of sordid activities which befell my hapless, lost protagonist.

I decided to read the more daring piece, the chapter from my novel. I read into a microphone, but I didn’t really think of the sound traveling through the entire store. Afterward some of the folks in fine spectacles came up to me to tell me how much they liked the piece, and all seemed good. But then as I was walking out, a woman tugged my elbow. “Don’t you know there are kids in here,” she said.

She was right. My piece wasn’t the best for those in the kids’ section. It didn’t exactly rhyme with anything  in Dr. Seuss, and Babar was long forgotten by my main character. It was a good lesson: always read a story that’s appropriate for the setting.

So I’m sitting here at Philz in an over-caffeinated state trying to decide to read what to read at tonight’s Lit Crawl event. I’m so damn honored to be reading with the likes of Pamela Painter, Meg Pokrass, Frances Lefkowitz, and Jane Ciabarti. I admire their writing so much that, well, it’s hard to imagine reading alongside them.

Since 100 Word Story is hosting the event, I’m not considering reading any novel chapters or longish short stories. The thing is that I’ve written about 150 100-word stories, so reading through them to decide which one to read is one daunting “Sophie’s Choice” moment. It’s hard to get rid of my darlings.

The one bit of advice I received was to read something funny because Lit Crawl can be raucous. Good advice, except I don’t really have anything that’s funny. (Note to self: start writing some light, humorous pieces).

I’m deciding whether to read a sampling of 100-word pieces so folks get an idea of the form or to read The Filmmaker: Eight Takes, a series of eight 100-word pieces that appeared in eclectica a while back.

While reading through my pieces, though, I had an intriguing epiphany: I tell more than I show in these pieces. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad—I don’t necessarily adhere to the “show, don’t tell” school of writing—but it’s something to be more conscious of when I write, as in does telling serve the story or would a little more showing behoove me.

The nice thing about doing an event like this is that the pressure of preparing for them forces this type of scrutiny and observation. I have to think about how I’m going to read each piece, so I notice things I didn’t notice when writing. I wonder if I’ll notice other things while reading tonight.

It’s hard not to be nervous. But the only way to learn is to put yourself out there and risk embarrassment. At least there will be plenty of wine to drink. I know because I’m bringing it.

Thinking About My Daily Writing Rituals

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There are many metaphors for NaNoWriMo: NaNoWriMo is a creative explosion, an endurance test, a writing party, a voyage to fantastical lands, an excuse to drink too much coffee.

I like all of those metaphors, but the one that speaks most to me is that NaNoWriMo is a creative experiment. NaNo’s very genesis was a creative experiment, after all. How do you write a novel? Try writing 50,000 words in 30 days.

There are always grounds to experiment within an experiment, though, so my question each year is what can I tweak, or downright alter, about my creative process? That’s why I read Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. The book tells the story of how 161 creators—everyone from Stephen King to Maya Angelou to Charles Darwin—approach the act of creativity each day.

“I wanted to show how grand creative visions translate to small daily increments; how one’s working habits influence the work itself and vice versa,” writes the editor Mason Currey.

Obsessiveness, Late Nights, and Hats

Some people’s rituals are obsessive. Beethoven counted exactly 60 coffee beans each day for his perfect cup of coffee. Others are fraught with self-destructiveness. The painter Francis Bacon ate and drank with wild abandon late into the night, but still managed to work each morning until noon in his paint-splattered studio.

I particularly enjoyed reading about authors who wrote NaNo-style before NaNo was around. William Faulkner averaged 3,000 words per day during his most fertile period, and often wrote as many as 10,000. Stephen King writes 2,000 words every day of the year—including his birthday and holidays. He believes in a strict ritual of writing in order “to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go.”

I envied such artists who had the luxury of adhering to a routine that supported their optimal imaginative time. Anne Beattie religiously writes from midnight to 3 AM. Conversely, Haruki Murakami wakes at 4 AM. and writes six hours straight.

Since I have children and work, however, I related more to Toni Morrison’s experience: “I am not able to write regularly. I have never been able to do that—mostly because I have always had a nine-to-five job. I had to write either in between those hours, hurriedly, or spend a lot of weekend and predawn time.”

The art of writing “in between”: predawn (if possible) + weekends (betwixt soccer games) = my writing time. Not optimal, but the main thing is to do it because a little writing each day eventually adds up to a lot, right?

I was particularly inspired by Nicholson Baker, who sticks to a strict routine of writing, yet does something new with each novel. “It can be almost arbitrary,” he says. “You know, you could say to yourself, ‘From now on, I’m only going to write on the back porch in flip flops starting at four o’clock in the afternoon.’ And if that feels novel and fresh, it will have a placebo effect and it will help you work.” Baker wrote his last novel in a car—like Raymond Carver, who often did so to escape the ruckus of his household.

A fresh approach changes the whole endeavor, like adding spices to a stew. So here’s my plan: in lieu of writing in a car (which could get cold), I’m going to buy a special writing hat. Seriously. A hat invites in a new persona like nothing else (and I’m always looking for an excuse to buy a hat).

Beyond that, my friend Rachael Herron just told me she wrote 10,000 words in the last two days, so I might schedule a couple of super NaNo days in November and see how many words I can write. I’m also toying with the idea of writing with an outline this year (or at least my version of an outline)—a wildly aberrant act for a pantser like me, but then it’s in such deviations that new ideas are often discovered.

I’m sure I’ll join Murakami at 4 a.m. or thereabouts as well. The one constant of my noveling is many, many cups of coffee, after all.

Are you going to experiment with your approach to NaNoWriMo this year? If so, how?

— Grant Faulkner