Grant Faulkner

A Creative Manifesto

by Leave a Comment

Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” How can we be creative every day? It’s an important question, right?

I know you feel story ideas beckoning you to give them voice. You’ve felt the wondrous, magical rushes of creativity. You know how being creative can change the way you wake up, how you approach your work, how you connect with other people. Approaching the world with a creative mindset is wildly transforming—because suddenly you’re not accepting the world as it’s delivered to you, but living through your vision of life.

That’s the gift I see each November during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I witness thousands of people break down the barricades that prevent them from writing the novel of their dreams and take on the Herculean task of writing a novel of 50,000 words in just 30 days. Writing suddenly leaps up from the cluttered basement of their daily tasks to stand tall on the pedestal of life for an entire month. An audacious goal and deadline serve as creative midwives (and an occasional bullwhip), and writers are propelled by the scintillating rushes of their imagination and the galvanizing force of the huzzahs coming from what can seem like the entire world writing with them.

It seems like such a rollicking novel-writing party is never going to end, but then on December 1, the roars of rapacious novelists start to quiet. Suddenly, people are doing things like shopping for Christmas presents, studying for finals, or cleaning the mayhem their house has become. (Creativity gives the world many things, but it rarely provides a tidy house.)
The thing I hear most often after National Novel Writing Month is “I loved writing during NaNoWriMo, but I have trouble writing the rest of the year.”

It’s challenging to muster such energy each day. The galloping pace of NaNoWriMo is over, and it can be difficult to get up on the proverbial writing horse again. Urgent items on your to-do lists clamor for attention, and tackling those items is important, necessary work—buying groceries, washing dishes, fixing that squeaky door that has bugged you the last three years—so, really, how could you keep doing something so trivial as write? Suddenly, you start to feel creativity falling down on your to-do list. You know the joy it gives you, the life meaning, yet those slithering, pernicious beasts called “the demands of life” loudly yell what you should be doing (and I won’t even mention the siren calls of social media).

No one assigns us to be creative. And, what’s more, society usually doesn’t reward creativity, at least not unless your work makes it to the shelves of a bookstore, the walls of a gallery, or the stage of a theater. You might not think you’re a creative type, but to be human is to be a creative type, so one of the shoulds in your life should be to make sure creativity is not only at the top of your to-do list, but that you put your creativity into action every day. If you put off your dreams today, you create the momentum to put them off all the way to your deathbed.

We yearn to touch life’s mysteries, to step out into the world looking for new solutions to old problems, if not new worlds altogether. We need to tap into our vulnerabilities, seek to understand our fears, look at life through others’ eyes, ask questions, and open up our awareness of the wonders of the universe. Each story is a gift, a door that opens a new way to see and relate with others in this crazy, crazy world. Stories are the oxygen our souls breathe, a way to bring the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable to life. Our creative lives shouldn’t be a hall pass from the stiff and forbidding demands of our lives. Writing our stories takes us beyond the grueling grind that life can unfortunately become, beyond the constraints of the roles we find ourselves in each day, to make the world a bigger place.

Stories remind us that we’re alive, and what being alive means. “Only art penetrates . . . the seeming realities of this world,” said Saul Bellow in his Nobel Prize speech. Leslie Marmon Silko says that stories are “all we have to fight off illness and death.” Jacqueline Woodson says writers are “the ones who are bearing witness to what’s going on in the world.”

For a writer, life hasn’t really been lived until one’s stories find their way onto the page. We exist in the flickers of a rift with the world, searching for words that will sew the fissure, heal it. A rupture, a wound, finds the salve of a story. If you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. If you don’t create, you hurt yourself. The signature of your self is formed by the work you put into your story. Making art tells you who you are. Making art in turn makes you.

So it’s your duty as a writer, as a person, to build a world through your words and believe in your story as a beautiful work of incarnation, to see it as a gift to yourself and others, as something that elevates life with new meaning—your meaning. Writing a story is many things: a quest, a prayer, a hunger, a tantrum, a flight of the imagination, a revolt, a daring escape that ironically leads you back to yourself. As long as we’re creating, we’re cultivating meaning. Our stories are the candles that light up the darkness that life can become, so we must live in the warm hues of our imaginative life.

It’s not easy, though. The efforts of creativity carry angst and psychological obstacles that must be overcome. The important thing is to keep your creative life at the forefront of your thoughts and actions.

We become the things we do, and I can promise you, if you excavate your life to make room for your imagination, if you open up time to keep writing, you won’t just finish your novel, pen the poem in your head, or submit a short story you’ve worked so hard on, you’ll change, because once you realize yourself as a creator, you create worlds on and off the page.

If you hear the whispers of a novel coming from the other room, or ideas for other stories caterwauling for their day in the sun, dive in. “The days are long, but the years are short,” some wise person once said. Your story can’t wait. It needs you.

The Ides of March: The Most Dangerous Time for New Year’s Resolutions

by 1 Comment

The dangers of the ides of March

March has carried a dramatic aura since a seer warned Caesar in 44 B.C. to “beware the Ides of March,” and sure enough, Caesar was assassinated.

It’s a time on the Roman Calendar notable for the settling of debts, on the eve of the end of winter and the beginning of spring. On my calendar, it’s a time to reckon with the goals I’ve set for myself for the year, and as with most people, it’s unfortunately a time when I begin to smell the stench of my New Year’s resolutions rotting.

In fact, most people’s resolutions die by February 4. There’s data to back that up. Foursquare and Swarm, two location-based apps, analyzed check-ins at fast food restaurants and gyms over an entire year. They found a 36 percent increase in gym visits during the weeks following New Year’s Day, along with a 13 percent decline in visits to fast food restaurants. But by February 4, the trends had reversed. Gym visits declined, while fast food check-ins started to rise.

when resolutions lapse

I’m assuming this applies to all types of resolutions, whether they concern fitness, creativity, or spirituality. The Ides of March are even more dangerous than the early days of February because I think most people continue to think about their resolutions in February and have at least a faint notion that they’ll re-engage and bring them to life. But by March most have sunk into their recliners and essentially decided that a handful of potato chips or a few hours of social media is more important than their dreams and desires.

We begin to relinquish the notion that we can shape ourselves into the people we want to be. We wait for another time to make changes—such as next year, when our “future self” will surely have the discipline and resolve to change things around (not!).

I made very do-able resolutions this year. I wanted to simply read one mediation a day from my book 365 Tao: Daily Meditations—a book I have owned for 20 years but failed to read on anything close to a daily basis—and then meditate for five minutes each day with my new Headspace app. This requires all of 10 or so minutes a day, and there’s no sweating, no showering, no expenditures—and I can eat whatever I want—yet I’ve only read 38 meditations (I should be at 70) and used Headspace 8 times.

Patterns of behavior are difficult to change. Since I live in a world of time scarcity, since my to-do list expands with alarming promiscuousness, I often rationalize that I need to do “more important things” to accomplish all of the shoulds in this crazy business of life instead of tending to the nourishment of my soul.

Here’s the thing, though: The days I spend 10 minutes reading a meditation and using Headspace are infinitely better than when I don’t. Here’s one more thing: I like to believe that I’m a creature who can shape myself into a better self. I don’t want to wallow in past behavior. I want to be an actor in life, a creator. I want to change.

So … instead of letting March’s maggots feast on the rot of my neglected resolutions, this is the time to actually double down and commit. The most dangerous moment is always pregnant with opportunity. In fact, there’s research that shows that starting—or re-starting—a goal is most effective when you do it on a “milestone day”—the first day of a new year, a new month, a new week. So this Monday, I’m going to start again. And I’ll start again next Monday if my efforts flag. And I’ll start on the Monday after that and after that, etc., if need be. The main thing is to keep starting, keep going.

I discussed overcoming lapses in Pep Talks for Writers:

After a lapse, it’s important to forgive yourself, readjust your goals, and give yourself a fresh start so that a bad week of writing doesn’t lead to a bad month of writing, which then turns into a bad year. It’s all about designing your life around the things you rationally want to achieve instead of sinking into the powerful claws of more impulsive needs.

Life goes by too quickly to wait for next year. We must claim our dreams and create a system to realize them. I don’t want to die with a list of all of the things I wish I would have accomplished. I don’t want to be a person unable to change, unable to improve myself.

Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo

by Leave a Comment

Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” How can we be creative every day? That’s the question Pep Talks for Writers sets out to answer. And it’s an important one, right? I know you feel story ideas beckoning you to give them voice. You’ve felt the wondrous, magical rushes of creativity. You know how being creative can change the way you wake up, how you approach your work, how you connect with other people. Approaching the world with a creative mindset is wildly transforming—because suddenly you’re not accepting the world as it’s delivered to you, but living through your vision of life.

That’s the gift I see each November during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I witness thousands of people break down the barricades that prevent them from writing the novel of their dreams and take on the Herculean task of writing a novel of 50,000 words in just 30 days. Writing suddenly leaps up from the cluttered basement of their daily tasks to stand tall on the pedestal of life for an entire month. An audacious goal and deadline serve as creative midwives (and an occasional bullwhip), and writers are propelled by the scintillating rushes of their imagination and the galvanizing force of the huzzahs coming from what can seem like the entire world writing with them.

It seems like such a rollicking novel-writing party is never going to end, but then on December 1, the roars of rapacious novelists start to quiet. Suddenly, people are doing things like shopping for Christmas presents, studying for finals, or cleaning the mayhem their house has become. (Creativity gives the world many things, but it rarely provides a tidy house.)

The thing I hear most often after National Novel Writing Month is “I loved writing during NaNoWriMo, but I have trouble writing the rest of the year.”

It’s challenging to muster such energy each day. The galloping pace of NaNoWriMo is over, and it can be difficult to get up on the proverbial writing horse again. Urgent items on your to-do lists clamor for attention, and tackling those items is important, necessary work—buying groceries, washing dishes, fixing that squeaky door that has bugged you the last three years—so, really, how could you keep doing something so trivial as write? Suddenly, you start to feel creativity falling down on your to-do list. You know the joy it gives you, the life meaning, yet those slithering, pernicious beasts called “the demands of life” loudly yell what you should be doing (and I won’t even mention the siren calls of social media).

No one assigns us to be creative. And, what’s more, society usually doesn’t reward creativity, at least not unless your work makes it to the shelves of a bookstore, the walls of a gallery, or the stage of a theater. You might not think you’re a creative type, but to be human is to be a creative type, so one of the shoulds in your life should be to make sure creativity is not only at the top of your to-do list, but that you put your creativity into action every day. If you put off your dreams today, you create the momentum to put them off all the way to your deathbed.

We yearn to touch life’s mysteries, to step out into the world looking for new solutions to old problems, if not new worlds altogether. We need to tap into our vulnerabilities, seek to understand our fears, look at life through others’ eyes, ask questions, and open up our awareness of the wonders of the universe.

Each story is a gift, a door that opens a new way to see and relate with others in this crazy, crazy world. Stories are the oxygen our souls breathe, a way to bring the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable to life. Our creative lives shouldn’t be a hall pass from the stiff and forbidding demands of our lives. Writing our stories takes us beyond the grueling grind that life can unfortunately become, beyond the constraints of the roles we find ourselves in each day, to make the world a bigger place.

Stories remind us that we’re alive, and what being alive means. “Only art penetrates . . . the seeming realities of this world,” said Saul Bellow in his Nobel Prize speech. Leslie Marmon Silko says that stories are “all we have to fight off illness and death.” Jacqueline Woodson says writers are “the ones who are bearing witness to what’s going on in the world.”

For a writer, life hasn’t really been lived until one’s stories find their way onto the page. We exist in the flickers of a rift with the world, searching for words that will sew the fissure, heal it. A rupture, a wound, finds the salve of a story. If you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. If you don’t create, you hurt yourself. The signature of your self is formed by the work you put into your story. Making art tells you who you are. Making art in turn makes you.

So it’s your duty as a writer, as a person, to build a world through your words and believe in your story as a beautiful work of incarnation, to see it as a gift to yourself and others, as something that elevates life with new meaning—your meaning. Writing a story is many things: a quest, a prayer, a hunger, a tantrum, a flight of the imagination, a revolt, a daring escape that ironically leads you back to yourself. As long as we’re creating, we’re cultivating meaning. Our stories are the candles that light up the darkness that life can become, so we must live in the warm hues of our imaginative life.

It’s not easy, though. The efforts of creativity carry angst and psychological obstacles that must be overcome. In this book, we’ll explore 52 different approaches to being creative every day. Each pep talk will include ways for you to explore your creative notions and angles, because life and writing are really ongoing creative experiments. Some pep talks may sing out to where you are now, while others might become relevant later in your writing process. The important thing is to keep your creative life at the forefront of your thoughts and actions.

We become the things we do, and I can promise you, if you excavate your life to make room for your imagination, if you open up time to keep writing, you won’t just finish your novel, pen the poem in your head, or submit a short story you’ve worked so hard on, you’ll change, because once you realize yourself as a creator, you create worlds on and off the page.

If you hear the whispers of a novel coming from the other room, or ideas for other stories caterwauling for their day in the sun, dive in. “The days are long, but the years are short,” some wise person once said. Your story can’t wait. It needs you.

Buy Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo.

The Art of the Mini Writing Retreat

by 3 Comments

For years I’ve dreamed of going on one of those perfect, luxurious writing retreats where one can wake early in the morning, take a reflective walk through the woods, write in the meditative peace of a well-furnished cabin, and then dine in the evening with inspiring artists. Day after day, facing down the challenges of my novel, refining its shape like a sculptor, my thoughts deepening to the point where the lines between the real world and my fictional world blur.

I’ve applied to a few writing residencies over the years, and, in fact, I wrote an article about different residencies: everything from a cabin in the Denali wilderness to a retreat in Jack Kerouac’s house to prestigious fellowships at places like Yaddo. Beyond the difficulty of getting accepted for one of these residencies, I realized I didn’t have the time to go to them. Most are for a month, and my life as a working parent just doesn’t allow for that.

Then I came up with the idea of a “mini writing retreat”—to go someplace for just a few days and do some extreme writing, inject my novel with 10-12 hours of writing each day to propel it forward a month in time, in essence.

I just completed such a mini retreat last weekend, and I marvel that I haven’t been doing this at least once or twice a year. I wouldn’t say it was exactly fun, but it was gangbusters productive. In fact, I powered through a second draft of my novel.

Here’s what I found made it a successful writing retreat.

  1. I went to a town (Petaluma) an hour away. Too close, and it wouldn’t have felt like a retreat, and I would have been distracted by home matters. Too far, and I would have wasted precious time getting there.

  2. I found a nice-enough but not too-expensive hotel (the Metro Hotel) which had a room I was comfortable writing in, and a downstairs café with self-serve coffee (I started writing at 4 a.m., so sitting in the café with coffee was crucial). I’d thought about just getting a cheap hotel, but I feared becoming a version of Barton Fink, depressed by a dank room, distracted by hotel noises.

  3. The hotel was just a few blocks from downtown, so good restaurants and coffee shops were nearby (I tend to be a roaming writer, so it’s important to have other places to go to write).

  4. There was a movie theater downtown. When writing 12 hours a day, it’s important to take a break.

  5. There was also a brewpub nearby where I could have a beer at the end of the day to celebrate the day’s work (see the importance of taking a break in no. 4).

  6. The town was nice, but not full of diversions, so I wasn’t tempted to be a tourist.

  7. I had a goal driving me—I wanted to reach the end of my novel revision, no matter what. If I wouldn’t have set this goal, I probably would have settled for writing eight hours a day, or less. I easily could have made it a reading retreat, or a dawdling retreat.

  8. I made sure I was well equipped in all matters, whether it was books I needed for research, Moleskine notebooks, or my favorite writing foods (or a cigar for non-caffeinated stimulation).

  9. I was well rested to start. Extreme writing takes the kind of energy and endurance a challenging sporting activity does. I knew I couldn’t muscle my way through 12 hours of writing a day if I started at a deficit.

  10. I got buy-in from my significant other. It’s important to get support from your partner, and maybe even your friends and family. You want a clear head, not a guilty or distracted head.

My life probably only allows a couple such writing retreats each year, but it was nice to move a creative project forward not in dribs and drabs, but with speed and force and resolution. I’m going to consciously plan these retreats every year, and hopefully jumpstart several more creative projects.

The Author as Hero

by 4 Comments

This is a brief summary of my speech at this year’s Night of Writing Dangerously (also known as the best writing party on the planet).

I spoke at the Frankfurt Book Fair earlier this year. The theme of the event was “The Heroes of Storytelling.” Naturally my heroes of storytelling are authors, but I began to think about how authors are portrayed in books and films, and, well, they don’t fare too well. They certainly aren’t heroic, or at least not in the terms of the transcendent heroism of characters in many stories.

Here are some images I collected of different writer stereotypes from films.

Barton Fink

The joy of creativity glimmers in this author’s eyes, right? This image of John Turturro from Barton Fink is a portrait of the three “A’s” of a writer’s life: alienation, anxiousness, and awkwardness. I’d like to invite this man to NaNoWriMo write-in and give him a big hug. I’d like to tell him, “There’s no need to be afraid. You are a creator.”

Emma Thompson

No, this is not a NaNo writer anguishing in the swampland of week two. It’s Emma Thompson in Stranger than Fiction, demonstrating ye olde writer’s block. I want to tell Emma to practice a little “writing with abandon.” Empty your ashtray, change out of your pajamas, and have some fun.

Nicholas Cage

This is Nicholas Cage from the film Adaptation. What I like about this scene is how it looks like he’s been in a wrestling match with the book Story—a how-to write book—and the book won. It pinned him. Many a how-to-write book has pinned me. I recommend a good dose of “exuberant imperfection” to this writer.

Ray Milland

And then, oh my, there’s Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. The alcoholic writer staring into the darkest of dark nights. The bottle as forgotten inspiration, found desperation. Portrait of an author as a drunk.

It’s not that these images are inaccurate. Authors themselves wrote these characters, after all. Writing holds struggle, persistence against the forces of critics, internal and external. If you come over to my house on any weekend, you’ll probably see a variation of these authorial states (although hopefully not the one from The Lost Weekend, or if so, at least with more moderation).

But I think of the author as a heroic figure–a figure of verve, moxie, derring-do. So I sought a different image of the author, and here’s what I came up with.

Philip Petit

This is Philip Petit, who walked on a high wire across the Twin Towers in 1974. The documentary about him, Man on a Wire, won an Oscar a while back, and he just wrote Creativity: The Perfect Crime.

So why is this my image of the writer as hero? I’ve got ten, but I’ll give you three:

No. 1: This was an act he had to do. He was sitting in a waiting room at the dentist’s in 1968 and read about the Twin Towers being built, and he obsessed about walking on a high wire between the towers. The urge was so overpowering that if he didn’t do this, he would have felt a hole in his life forever. When asked why he did it, Petit said, “There is no why. Isn’t the joy, the beauty, the sheer magnificence enough of a reason?” I feel the same urgent need to write. There is no why other than my life would suffer tremendously without writing, and I know many NaNo writers feel the same.

No. 2: He didn’t do this alone. It looks like he’s on the wire alone, but he actually had a whole support team. They helped him plan this for years, mulling over blueprints and even taking field trips to New York City. They helped him practice. When he walked on the tight rope strung up in a French prairie, they’d yank it back and forth to replicate gusty conditions at that height. And then they helped him sneak in all of this heavy equipment and actually string the wire between the towers (not an easy thing to do). But most of all they were there when he took that first step, 1,350 feet above the ground. That’s the third reason he’s a hero.

No. 3: He embraced vulnerability. He said, “If I die, what a beautiful death!–To die in the exercise of your passion.” To be a writer doesn’t risk death in quite the same way, but to decide to be a writer is a clinch with vulnerability. To tell the world you’re a writer magnifies that vulnerability because you invite naysayers in. And then to do something crazy like write a novel in a month, you’re testing your grit, your time management, your resilience, your resolve to do something big. You might fail, but that’s the definition of vulnerability, risking failure.

To be vulnerable is important. Only by embracing vulnerability do we connect with others. Being vulnerable makes life meaningful because by being vulnerable, we’re giving our souls, our challenges, our imperfections to others. We’re giving the truth of who we are. That’s what we need to aspire to as writers. Being vulnerable in our prose helps forge connections with readers; being vulnerable opens up new worlds.

I used to make New Year’s resolutions, but I could stand seeing “Do yoga” on my list only for so many years. I decided to change my approach. For the last three years, I’ve just focused on an invitation: “Invite more opportunities for embarrassment into my life.” In other words, I decided to risk vulnerability.

I’ve always wanted to tap dance. But I’ve never taken a lesson, never watched a how-to video. I thought it would be transformative to tap dance in front of 250 people at the Night of Writing Dangerously. I couldn’t do it alone, though, so I invited volunteers up on stage. People filled the stage–with gusto! And we tap danced, very appropriately, to Fatboy Slim’s “Because We Can” from Moulin Rouge.

“You are untying yourself from the tangible and becoming half a bird,” Petit said of his venture on the tight rope. I felt the same way when I became a tap dancer last Sunday night.

I now want the world to tap dance with me over and over again. I want to tap dance for infinity.

 

The Power of Getting More Ideas Faster

by Leave a Comment

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.

Paul Bowles by His Friends

by 1 Comment

Paul-Bowles-001I page through Paul Bowles by His Friends. In some ways it’s an insignificant book. It’s one those books only a true fan would read for the most fetishistic of biographical pleasure. I bought it at the Harvard Book Store on a recent vacation, just to have a souvenir, and also because I knew it would fill those haphazard spaces of life when I needed to touch something reassuring.

A favorite author reassures when nothing else can. I love reading about Bowles ensconced in his strange little apartment in Tangiers, his isolation paradoxically full of social life. He turned into an artistic magnet, even as he sought the solitude of a desert monk, with visits from many of the notable artists of the second half of the 20th century, including William Burroughs, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and John Cage. They dropped by to experience the allure of “the invisible spectator” and breathe in the wafts of his kief.

Bowles is interesting in so many respects, but one thing that fascinates me is that he never seemed to doubt his life much. Not his chaotic marriage to Jane Bowles, not his decision to live in Tangiers. He’s always at ease, smoking a cigarette, elegantly dressed. As Gregory Corso put it, “he carried lightly the whole Romantic age in his graceful stroll.”

Or, as Charles Henri Ford said:

Surprising himself
Is half the satisfaction
He derives from art

For reasons which he
Cannot fathom he opens
Poetry’s locked door

Bowles practiced viewing his life as an observer rather than participating in it as a child. He was always a bit absent, even sexually. Neither his homosexual loves nor his marriage to Jane Bowles were driven by any overwhelming carnal desire. He preferred to watch the chaos of others’ lives.

Philip Ramey described Bowles as a passive spectator, watching Morocco’s “continuous peep show of the chaotic.” On his initial visit to Morocco, Bowles wrote of his love for its theatricality, “the impression of confusion of insanity.” “I knew I would never tire of watching Moroccans play their parts,” Bowles concludes.

When the streets of Tangiers flooded, the frogs became vocal under his window, so he recorded them. He seems very much like John Cage in this respect. He recorded 60 children in Tangiers praying for rain. He recorded people’s stories, the music of Morocco. Sounds led him throughout life

I tend to like artists who value the irrational over the rational. The outsider can never truly trust logic. I envy the reckless disregard of Bowles’s friends, one who aimed to start a literary journal whose contributors would be limited to dipsomaniacs, dope fiends, schizophrenics, and Hindu mystics.

Bowles lived as a transient, an expat, a traveler, all of which was determined by chance. When he was a student at the University of Virginia, he flipped a coin to decide whether he should commit suicide or leave for Europe. Such travel isn’t an affirmation of life, but in leaving home, he found his home in the vast elsewhere of other somewheres.

There will never be such an outsider to American literature as Paul Bowles. Theodore Soltafoff described his work with the apt phrase, “the algebra of nihilism.” He was always in pursuit of the furies of the abyss.

On Creative Momentum

by 1 Comment

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.

Thinking About My Daily Writing Rituals

by Leave a Comment

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

Francesca Woodman: Model Upside Down on the Stairs

by Leave a Comment

I’d never written a story to a photo before a friend and I swapped photos for a 100-word story exercise a couple years ago. She gave me a photo by Francesca Woodman. I didn’t know who Francesca Woodman was. The photo was about as arresting and disturbing as a photo can be: a beautiful nude woman, blurry and abandoned, sprawled upside down on a stairway that has a cracked mirror at the bottom.

My story was very literally titled “Model Upside Down on the Stairs.” The photo overwhelmed the story, of course, although I managed to recently publish it in PANK, which just published an interview with me about the story as well.

The model in the photo is elegant and poised, yet doomed and falling, and contorted in a way that begs the question of what has happened to her, how has she lost herself. It’s a photo that demanded a story, simply because of its irreconcilable contradictions, which was why I was surprised when I went to the Francesca Woodman exhibit at SF MOMA last December and read on a placard that Woodman wasn’t a narrative photographer.

I jotted down my rebuttal to that notion as I studied her haunting excavations of self. She took most of her photos in a rundown apartment house while at the Rhode Island School of Design, posing nude with broken mirrors and crumbling walls in a style reminiscent of 19th century spirit photography, her photos playful but taunting, erotic but not quite erotic, a self blurred but wanting to be seen. Unfortunately, I lost that notebook, but my conclusion was that her photos told a quite courageous and troubling narrative. She’s the type of artist brave enough to empty her innards yet remain inscrutable at the same time.

She killed herself at the age of 22 in 1981. A friend of mine posited that she was sexually abused. Many photos certainly hint at that, perhaps especially the one of the black, muddy handprints on her breasts and her crotch. And then there is a series called “Charlie the Model,” one of few that includes a man. In one picture he kneels naked next to a mirror while Woodman stands, also nude, behind him. She is blurred, as if she’s violently recoiling from him, affronted and afraid of his sexuality.

Some photos appear innocent by contrast, however. She revels in the play of self, embracing the angelic and the demonic, the naïf and the seductress. I’ve read critics who disparage her work as sentimental and melodramatic, but that’s part of the reason I like it; her photos possess the daring verve of youth, the ability to scream while not wanting anyone to respond. In fact, her family and professors didn’t know about the wide body of her work until after she’d died.

The question with photographers like Woodman is how much they truly want to be known, how much they even want to know themselves. In so many photos her body blurs into a wall. She wants to appear even as she disappears. Dematerialization is one of her themes. It seems as if she’s exploring the poses one has to travel through to discover or create the final pose of self, as if there is a final pose, but she’s dodging herself all the time, even in her states of nakedness, making sure no one can truly know her.

Thank God for the Francesca Woodmans of the world, although I wish she would have lived longer, discovered the restful state that sometimes can only come with age, and come out from her wispy smudges of self to be seen. Her fervency would have surely faded, but perhaps she would have slowed down, finally told her story. Inscrutability comes with a price, and screams usually want to be heard.