Grant Faulkner

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?

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

Francesca Woodman: Model Upside Down on the Stairs

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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.

John Cage: The Excitements of Boredom

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I love John Cage for his appreciation of boredom, if not his indulgence in it. Every artist must reckon with the lulls of life in his or her work, but most inject a variety of entertainments into a storyline, smoothing any bit of necessary banality with candy droppings of mindless flow, the promise of action rising. Ta da! Not Cage.

Once, before giving a lecture at Harvard (and a Cage lecture was never just a lecture, but a metaphysical performance), he unapologetically told the audience they were likely to be bored, but that they should view it as an opportunity.

He composed music with such disregard for audience expectations as well, and in so doing became the musical father of everything from punk to techno to minimalism.

In this age of twitches—people reaching for phones to check status updates, tweets, and emails—our lives are quite filled, yet somehow tend to be unfulfilled. Cage would say we need to listen to the emptiness instead of trying to fill it.

I just finished John Cage’s biography, Begin Again, so I’ve been pondering his definitions of sounds and silence and harmony and disharmony, his wonderful embrace of contradictions.

It’s rare that an artist’s work requires the retraining of one’s way of experiencing art itself, but Cage’s compositions not only jarred the public’s sensibilities in his time (the greater part of the 20th century), but still present a challenging dare decades later.

Cage cherished dissonance and happenstance, dramatizing the sounds that fill our lives in all of their random fecundity. His music was a philosophical statement, a confrontation, rather than a frolic or a diversion.

In his most famous piece, 4’33,’’ a pianist walks on stage to play a piece, sits erectly at the piano, adjusts the sheet music, and pauses for four minutes and 33 seconds. In that intense silence—which isn’t truly silence—sound is transformed. Each inhale and exhale, each mysterious scritch and scratch or stray car horn, becomes part of the musical experience. Expectations are flipped as we explore an absence that is also a presence. Mysteries abound.

By focusing on disruptions rather than the connective tissue of a narrative, he obviates the crescendos and diminuendos of music, and his work actually becomes an odd meditation on those spaces of narrative—traditional harmony—not present.

“I didn’t want the mind to be able to analyze rhythmic patterns,” Cage said of one piece. A patterned universe is one with promises of cohesion, a plan, after all.

Instead of the “intention” that drives most artists, Cage created by “non-intention,” relying on the chance guidance found in the I Ching to guide compositions and performances. At one performance, he even handed out programs with different descriptions so that everyone would view the performance through a different lens.

Dissonance held the most interesting beauty to him. With his famous “prepared pianos,” he twisted objects into piano strings so that each note would be a surprise, and the composition would never sound the same twice. To hell with tuning.

Although he conceded in the end that it was impossible not to have harmony, he defined his harmony as “anarchic harmony.”

“One could say that all sounds make love to one another, or at least they accept one another, in any combination,” Cage said.

All we do is music, in other words, but each sound plays off another in a continuing disjointed abeyance, irresolvable, yet beckoning and wondrous. “I want people to be mystified by what’s happening. The reality of our life is mystery,” he said.

I think that deep sense of mystery is what is most important for any artist to honor and revere. Forget the formula, the expectations that can too easily makes work palatable—and suffocate it as a result. In the end, an artist’s dare is what matters.

Some might view Cage’s work as subversive for the sake of subversion, nothing but the high-jinks of a confirmed Dadaist, but Cage religiously and methodically wove a fragmentary, relativist aesthetic with roots in Einstein’s declaration that “there are no fixed points in space.” Cage’s music truly spoke to a plurality of centers, which resonated with him primarily as a Buddhist notion.

Because of such a vast and ever-expanding notion of existence, Cage delved into the question every artist should reckon with: What does it mean to be a person of beginnings? Too many artists find comfort in their endings as they constantly riff on the same theme, which gets so boring to their audience if not themselves. (I heard Carrie Brownstein, formerly of Slater Kinney, say in an interview that the band knew what their next album would sound like before they made it, which is why they broke up—good show).

“I try over and over to begin all over again,” said Cage.

An artist needs no other mantra. Because all of life is finding wonder in the void. Each time I get annoyed by a car’s honking, I’ll now think of how Cage might smile at it, even find it playful.

The Ways Poetry Can Improve Your Prose

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A few years ago, while plodding through a revision of my novel (revisions require the writer’s equivalent of heavy-duty hiking boots), I got bored by my writing. It was too literal, too realistic, too earnest, and too flat.

Most writers are all too familiar with this feeling after a red-eyed reading of a draft. I needed a way to literally jar my narrative sensibility. I needed jazz, punk rock, Jackson Pollock, Merce Cunningham, something.

Around this time, I read a quote by Emily Dickinson that remains among my favorite writing advice: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

I started reading poetry avidly and discovered that by focusing on the exquisite “slant” poetry offers, the “truth” I was trying to capture became more piquant, surprising, nuanced, playful, and meaningful to me.

So, in honor of National Poetry Month and Poem In Your Pocket Day, here are my 10 reasons prose writers should read—and hopefully write—poetry.

Mood: Many poems are almost incantations or prayers in the way they use techniques such as repetition and alliteration to establish atmosphere. Of the fiction writers who best use such techniques, I think most immediately of William Faulkner (who started out as a poet, and no, there’s no relation).

Mystery: In general, poetry is more focused on nuance, on the elusive gaps of life rather than on the objective connections that much prose is dedicated to. It’s easy for a prose writer to write toward linkages instead of writing toward the interludes where a different kind of tension resides.

Personification: Poetry gives life to inanimate objects in a way that fiction all too often doesn’t. Animating objects is a good exercise for any writer, but I think the applications for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism are endless.

Detail: Poets delight in specificity—in fact, you might say some poems’ narrative tension is formed around the drama of minutiae, forcing the reader to parse phrases as if reading with a microscope. As a writer who lacks Nabokov’s or Updike’s obsession with detail, poetry helps me pause and notice.

Sensory engagement: Poems are so often awash in sensory details, and details captured by all five senses, not just sight, which so many writers (including me!) can privilege. I cherish a good dose of synesthesia.

Brevity: Poetry is a craft of compression. Poems don’t have many pages to make a point, so their narratives tend to move through fragments rather than exposition. I love reading Kay Ryan’s miniatures or Basho’s haikus. Brevity inspires suspense.

Intensity: I think poems usually hit higher pitches than most prose, so fiction writers can benefit by studying how such intensity is created. I think of Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath. What words, line breaks, rhythms, etc., produced a poem’s steeped moment? How can such intensity be captured in prose?

Exploration: I’ve never heard of a poet who uses an outline. I imagine poets to be more like jazz musicians, who wend their way through riffs to create, taking risks in their word choice and line breaks, and conceiving in the moment (like many Wrimos!). Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara write as if following their pen on a playful romp.

The art of play: Poetry, especially free verse, can be more playful than prose, which finds itself hemmed in by paragraphs and sentence structure. If you want outright surreal wackiness—to the point that every word in a poem surprises—check out Dean Young’s Elegy on a Toy Piano (the title tells it all).

Attention to language: It’s a cliché to say that poets paint with words, but they do. Poets strive to write against cliché—scrutinizing and challenging each word—and perhaps even creating new words, a la E. E. Cummings.

Tebowing: A Found Poem

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Sometimes you don’t know where a poem is going to come from. A poem can be such a mystical matter, after all. The poem below, a “found poem” that uses the text of several different news articles, holds its own mystical matter (if only because it is about the other worldly Tim Tebow), but it was actually written on a lark, an assignment/challenge from the esteemed Times editor Katherine Schulten based on a poetry prompt at the New York Learning Network blog.

I have to say, however, there is something mystical about putting together a found poem. You’re using others’ words, and it can feel like an act of criminal plagiarism, yet other forces guide you. Perhaps that’s the lesson I take away from this: Poetry is an engagement in a life that’s sometimes not yours, an immersion in others’ language and thoughts, and no matter the poem or the subject, it can open up mysteries to ponder.

Here’s the poem:

Tebowing

What does it mean to be Tebowed?
To meet defeat by God’s grace on a clunk of an arm?

Somewhere within all our reptilian hearts
lurks an instinct for trial-by-combat

Tebow flounders, and it looks like the Living Water Bible Church
out on Route 17 is wrong about pretty much everything

Did a receiver drop a pass?
James Dobson just choked on a nacho.

Did Tim throw an interception?
Daniel Dennett just chest-bumped Richard Dawkins.

Tebow’s ability to complete a 15-yard out pattern to Matt Willis
is a referendum on the Book of Deuteronomy

It means something for the blue knight to kill the green knight
only if God is moving the swords.

“Whatever gets more people over to the cross,” Tim says.
One nation under God.

You never know when you’re in your fourth quarter,
when you’re in your two-minute drill

Tebowing
Tebowing

Writing Residencies: A Chance to Write in One’s Best Hours

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One of the worst things about aging is the inevitable accumulation of responsibilities. That’s particularly bad for a writer, who’s inclined to not want any responsibilities at all, other than drifting through the vagaries of a tale that must be told.

It’s in such a state that I live. I used to structure my life so that I wrote in my best hours, but now I tend to write in my worst hours, after the kids have gone to bed, after I’ve paid bills, after a couple of glasses of wine, when most sane people are reclining on a couch and watching Downton Abbey.

I try to crowd in my writing, but life tends to crowd out the imagination with muscular, pugnacious insistence. Which is why I started to dream about going to a writers residency in order to truly dream.

I just published an article in the March/April 2012 issue of Poets & Writers to guide writers seeking the idylls of simple peace and quiet: Applying to a Writers Residency: An Expert Breakdown of the Requirements.

I’m too busy to attend a residency this year, but I have hopes for next year. At least now I know the in’s and out’s of it all.

On David Milch: Writing with an Oceanic Sense

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“Coincidence is God’s way of staying anonymous.”

If you listen to any interviews with the renowned producer David Milch, you’ll likely hear him say this. I heard it first, however, from Laura Albert (better known as JT LeRoy), who I met quite by coincidence, and have now become writing partners with (perhaps an act of God?). She was a writer on Milch’s Deadwood, so she often sends me links to his interviews or passes on his writerly advice.

One can view coincidence within the prism of mathematical probability, and it certainly has a place in such—in some ways we are just numbers, colliding or not colliding, etc.—but even as a bona fide atheist (with a highly mystical bent), I appreciate Milch’s view of coincidence as an entrée into understanding our lives.

To view coincidences on such holy ground is to elevate acts, to see life as a grand quilt, all of us woven together—“together” being the key word. When coincidence happens, we must pause and reflect on the chain of events. We must interpret actions, size up who we are, what we want.

This isn’t an essay about new age matters, however. It’s an essay about being a writer. Being a writer is the most precise metaphor for being a human being that I know of. We are stories. We are revisions of stories. We are stories in the making. We are a series of coincidences that demand interpretation.

Milch is compelling as a raconteur, one who has the necessary distance to be both charmed and appalled and endlessly intrigued by some of the stories he’s lived. Milch constantly calls upon the cosmic consciousness when he speaks of writing, something not only beyond the self, but something, a truth, that can only be reached by abdicating oneself. In this way, much of his perspective resonates with Buddhism, although he’s more likely to quote the Bible.

When Nietzsche declared that God was dead well over 100 years ago, it began an age of existential isolation, perhaps especially for artists, who burrowed into their modernist cocoons. Milch disagrees with creation in isolation, however. “The modern situation is predicated upon the illusion of the self’s isolation–that business of I’m alone, you’re alone, but we can bullshit each other when we’re fucking or whatever else, but the truth is we are alone. Right? Well, I believe that that is fundamentally an illusion,” he said in a 2005 profile in the New Yorker.

Such a belief puts an interesting frame on Deadwood, a show that places a crew of mostly heartless exiles together in a practically lawless place, all of them tied in one way or another to gold, hardly a substance that brings people together in loving connection. Milch says the show “is about individuals improvising their way to some sort of primitive structure.”

It’s a fascinating narrative premise to portray the wild West in—quite the opposite of a writer like Cormac McCarthy, who writes in the vein of Milch’s beloved William Faulkner, but accentuates how the wrath of violence trumps any civilizing urges.

I’m interested in how Milch comes out of the “primitive structure” of self to develop stories layered through the lenses of so many characters. He hearkens back to William James, not Henry, who said in The Variety of Religious Experiences that “every vision that ever came to anyone is prefaced by a sense of the dissolution of the self.” Milch says, “it’s the fragmentation of ego that allows what he called the oceanic sense to flow in.”

I’ll posit that this is impossible for most writers, who tend to write more and more with their egos, as if their egos are a prized fastball. Milch isn’t always beyond such a state either, but he says that “what writing should be is a going out in spirit.”

Every writer reads about subtext and characterization, tone and point of view, dialogue and plot—but what about “going out in spirit”? I think of Hemingway’s dictum to “write one true sentence.” Such a simple rule on the surface, but one that must be pondered like a zen koan. I’ve found as a writer that it’s easier to write untrue sentences, just as it’s easier to live an untrue life—imitating others rather than genuinely creating—no matter the toll on the soul. One must be highly attuned to the truth and quite brave to represent it and delve into it and live it.

In the case of Deadwood, Milch did the research, then suppressed his self and let the visions come. “Visions come to prepared spirits,” he says.

Milch writes his visions in a writing process that most writers can’t do, in a roomful of a various people he’s brought in for inspiration (a motley crew of rodeo cowboys and yahoos in the case of Deadwood) and he channels characters, dictating the story as he lies on the floor. The act of writing is literally a “going out in spirit,” for him.

“All I want to understand is the mind of God,” said Milch, quoting Einstein. “Now, I don’t want to understand it; I want to testify to it. I believe that we are all literally part of the mind of God and that our sense of ourselves as separate is an illusion. And therefore when we communicate with each other as a function of and exchange of energy we understand not because of the inherent content of the words but because of how that energy flows.”

My best writing happens with such a sensibility—when I feel connected with others, when I am writing to and for others, with a sense of touching them, whether real or imagined, it doesn’t matter. But it’s more than the concept of audience—it is about the relinquishment of self. Like Milch, I believe that the self clouds or blinds vision, so becoming a good writer and becoming enlightened essentially go hand-in-hand. It’s the ultimate feeling of opening up, giving oneself away, an act of generosity rather than the stinginess of ego.

That’s what is key in writing for a muse—the acts of generosity and connection guide one’s words. The writing isn’t about the self so much as it is about a mystical spiritual connection, which has to be honored and revered as much as any God, for it is, in the end, a pathway to the sacred.

Writing in Fragments

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Sometimes you can shape your life to the cadences of your creativity. Sometimes you have to shape the cadences of your creativity to your life.

When I first decided to become a writer, at the recklessly young age of 20, I embraced Hemingway’s preferred writing rhythm: to wake early, write for two or three hours, until the writing juices were spent, and then not think about what you’ve written the rest of the day–a strategy to replenish those precious creative juices, to let thoughts percolate in the unconscious.

I constructed my life so that I could write in such a manner for several years (waiting tables at night so that my mornings were perfectly pristine for writing), and I loved that life. I’d love to live that life now, in fact, but I have children now, and I have to work 9-5 jobs, the kind with health insurance, so my time to write becomes ever more narrow and unpredictable, a matter of fragments, or even fragments within fragments.

Instead of writing in my best moments, I write mostly in my worst moments, late at night or during the intermission of a child’s performance or in the five minutes I have before booting up the computer in the morning (I probably spend a little bit more time with my kids than Hemingway did).

This is all to say that I’m constantly scheming and rethinking my writing process, if not the actual products of writing itself.

I recently flipped through Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer in search of random writerly guidance and she commented how the best writers create their minor characters in just a few deft strokes. As an example, she showed how Jane Austen “speedily and almost offhandedly dispatches” Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood.

“He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather coldhearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed: but he was, in general, well respected; for he conducted himself with propriety in the discharge of his ordinary duties. Had he married a more amiable woman, he might have been made still more respectable than he was: he might even have been made amiable himself; for he was very young when he married, and very fond of his wife. Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself;–more narrow minded and selfish.”

Capturing a character in just a few lines is a difficult thing to do, but it plays into a writing project I just started. In tandem with the literary journal I began earlier this year, 100 Word Story, I’ve been trying to write one 100-word story each day. It relieves the tension and frustration of not being able to truly delve into the writing life, but it also does a number of things:

  • Makes me pause and notice things in a way that I ordinarily wouldn’t because I have to conjure a new story each day;
  • Makes me focus on a condensed, succinct piece of writing–no fluff, no extra words, no padding;
  • Helps me keep the writing momentum going–and even develop future longer pieces (I look to some character sketches as the foundation for future NaNoWriMo novels);
  • Allows me to have a number of prose poems and short shorts to be able to submit to magazines–so I can submit more frequently, instead of waiting months to finish a 20 or 25 page story (literary journals are more likely to publish shorter pieces anyway) or years to complete my novel.

I’ve been applying the Francine Prose quote to characters from stories I’ve written over the years to see how I can distill their characteristics into such a short space. I’m also occasionally taking characters from current longer pieces and writing miniature stories about them. Even if I never do anything with these pieces, they are a way to enrichen my longer stories and extend them in different directions.

It’s safe to say that I will probably never again experience my “ideal writing life”–life is rarely so kind–but circumstances often unexpectedly lead one to a better place. I think of Lydia Davis, who decided that she couldn’t possibly write a novel as a single mother, so she wrote all of the intriguing short shorts that made her name. Likewise, Toni Morrison, another single mother, finished her first novel by writing for 15 minutes each day after putting her children to bed.

Progress happens in the accumulation of increments. That’s where I find my writing faith at the moment. I bow to small things and hope they lead to larger things.