Grant Faulkner

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The Art of the Mini Writing Retreat

July 19, 2015 by Grant Faulkner 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.

Filed Under: Blog, The Writing Life Tagged With: Writing Tips

The Key to Whole-Hearted Writing: Embrace Vulnerability

June 14, 2015 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

What’s the key element of any good story?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On overcoming shame

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

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

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

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

On boldly declaring yourself a writer

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

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Creative Process, Writing Tips

Resilience More Important Than Any Writing Tip

May 19, 2014 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But how does she do this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch Gilbert’s video:

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Creative Process, Writing Tips

On Revision

December 13, 2013 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

I wrote this post a year ago, when I was embarking on what I thought was a final grand revision of a novel I’ve been working on (or poking my way through) for an interminably long time. I made progress, good progress, but I’m afraid I’m just now putting the finishing touches on this whale. My commitment to it is deepening fortunately, even as my anticipation of my next project grows.Here are my thoughts on revision…

I’m going on the record with a controversial statement: Your inner editor, despite his or her persnickety reputation, can be fun.

Now I know that we in NaNoLand advise writers to banish their inner editors during NaNoWriMo. No one wants to hear some crank screaming “No!” in the background or get dressed down for a plot hole during the rush of writing a first draft. But with a first draft in hand, you’ve now built a playground for your inner editor to frolic in. Yes, frolic.

I recently opened the door to the dark mental dungeon where my inner editor has been locked up, and it turns out he’s got a nice smile (despite being a little pale). Examining the arc of my novel is like going down a twisting, double-dipper slide for him, and he loves brainstorming stirring details to add to my story’s cauldron. He also possesses a rather refined eye for sentences written in the passive voice, and he likes prodding me to write with “vivid verbs” and to “show don’t tell.”

So I’m primed to rewrite my swirling, chaotic mess of a NaNo novel and see if I can shape it into something readable, if not outright good. “Writing is rewriting,” as the old adage goes, and although revision has a reputation for being daunting and full of drudgery, it also holds the deep satisfaction of shaping the textures and contours of one’s ideas. It’s just a different kind of play than writing a first draft.

Revising with a Plan
That said, I’ve suffered through flawed approaches to past novel revisions. I tend to just start rewriting from the beginning: reading and reworking the first chapters ad nauseum, so much so that I end up essentially neglecting the final two-thirds of the novel. Because I haven’t devised a true game plan, I don’t make the daring and often necessary moves of restructuring the plot or “killing my darlings,” as William Faulkner advised (one of the best revision tips out there).

I end up with essentially the same novel, only with a new coat of paint on the front porch, continuing to fail to see that there’s a huge hole in the roof.

To escape my revision rut this time around, I’m taking some tips from The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself, by Susan Bell. Bell, a former Random House fiction editor, believes that writers can overcome the “panicky flailing” that revision can induce by learning “to calibrate editing’s singular blend of mechanics and magic.” She weaves in self-editing advice from the likes of Michael Ondaatje, Tracy Kidder, and Anne Patchett, and provides a wonderful running case study of the editorial collaboration between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his editor Max Perkins.

The book opens with a quote by Walter Murch that sums up her approach: “We’re grafting these branches onto a tree that already had an organic, balanced structure. Knowing that we’re changing the organism, we’re trying not to do anything toxic to it, and to keep everything in some kind of balance. At this point, I don’t know what the result will be. I have some intuitions, but my mind is completely open.”

While keeping my mind open—perhaps the key way to make revision fun and creative—here’s an outline of my approach:

Set a deadline: Revision can be another word for procrastination. I have a novel I wrote 9 years ago that I’ve puttered through several times, and it still lacks a decent ending. Just as a deadline is important in churning out a first draft, it’s crucial for the second draft. I’m giving myself 6 months to revise this year’s NaNo-novel. Check in with me on July 1, 2013 and hold me to my words.

Gain distance: “The greater the distance,” writes W.G. Sebald in The Rings of Saturn, “the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest details with the utmost clarity.” Time is the best way to distance yourself from your novel and read it as another might. The key is to take enough time away from your first draft so that you can read it with fresh eyes, but not to take too much time so that you lose your momentum. Everyone is different, but December distanced me plenty from my novel.

Beyond the distance of time, I’ve printed out my novel in a different font so that it won’t look like the novel on my computer screen when I read it. I also plan to read it somewhere else than at home because reading in a café or library will provide an extra layer of remove.

Read first with a macro edit: Bell discusses two types of editing: 1) the macro view, editing with a larger view toward the rhythms and connections of structures and themes; and 2) the micro view, editing with attention to such things as images, word choice, and sentence structure.

In my first pass, I’m not going to noodle with sentences. I want to focus on the big picture and evaluate the patterns of my novel, its leitmotifs and plot points. Then I’ll read the novel again—much more slowly—and hone in on the specifics.

Change my writing mode: Since I banged out my NaNo novel on a keyboard with such desperate speed, I want to slow down for the second draft and ruminate on my story, so I plan to write new sections longhand. Writing with a pen and paper changes writing in mysterious ways because it brings on more pauses and leads to fewer of the Facebook distractions that plague me on my computer.

Revise non-chronologically: Who says you have to revise from beginning to end? I specialize in novels with strong beginnings, weak middles, and weaker endings. Maybe I’ll start with the ending this time around and hop around to sections that need the most strengthening.

Find beta readers: I don’t want anyone to read my first draft; it’s just too messy for another to critique. But after a solid second draft, I’ll crave feedback. Finding readers is tough, though. I’ve made a list of friends who read in the genre I’m writing in, and they know how to deliver feedback without raining on my parade (I hope). My wife is a great reader, but I find that novel critiques and a happy household don’t usually go hand-in-hand.

Fortify myself with resilience magic: Revision can be a battlefield of self-doubt and torture, where writing turns into a swamp of masochism rather than a font of creativity. I’ve done enough revision to know that I’ll have a day or a week or a month when I lose faith in my work, if not my entire worth as a human being.

I’m steeling myself for such moments. As much as I believe in the urgent necessity of letting loose the pure flow of creativity, I also believe in the powers of resilience, the necessity to just keep plodding. Most things are accomplished not in grand gushing sweeps, but through daily incremental resolve.

It’s that resolve that matters most in revision, and I don’t think any “how to” book can give you that. But if you participated in NaNo, you have it. You had the fortitude to accomplish the audacious task of writing a novel in just a month. Revision might even be easier because you already have a story to work with, and hopefully a constructive inner editor to play with.

If you’re ready to revise one of your NaNo novels, please tell me your next steps. I’m constantly refining my approach, so I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Revision, Writing Tips

The Never Ending Journey of One’s Writing Process

November 3, 2013 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

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?

Filed Under: Blog, Featured Tagged With: Creative Process, NaNoWriMo, Writing Tips

Thinking About My Daily Writing Rituals

September 28, 2013 by Grant Faulkner 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

Filed Under: Blog, Featured, The Writing Life Tagged With: Creative Process, Writing Tips

The Ways Poetry Can Improve Your Prose

April 27, 2012 by Grant Faulkner 1 Comment

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.

Filed Under: Blog, The Writing Life Tagged With: Creative Process, Poetry, Writing Tips

On David Milch: Writing with an Oceanic Sense

January 20, 2012 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

“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.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Creative Process, Writing Tips

Writing in Fragments

December 21, 2011 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Creative Process, Flash Fiction, Writing Tips

Revision Tip No. 2,043: The Art of Dancing to Guy Lombardo while Drumming to Mingus

November 22, 2011 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

I’ve often heard it said that writing is revising, and that’s true in the sense that you’re adding layers and nuances and telling details in revision that often aren’t possible in the bustle or turmoil or excitement of a first draft. You’re making a fine wine in revision, in other words, which takes time, finesse, and sagacity.

Because of this, revision is an art that requires constant scrutiny. You can’t just muscle through a revision like you might a first draft. It needs to be a process of challenge, counterpoint, and exploration—all within the malleable structure you’ve put forth—yet I’ve found that revision can be the opposite of this. It can tend to become lazy, an exercise in reading more than an exercise in active change.

Here’s what often happens to me when I revise a piece (and I’ve heard similar tales from other writers). Author writes first draft of story. Author sits down to write second draft of story. Author reads story start to finish making editorial scritch-scratches in the margins. Author types in changes. Rinse. Repeat. Reload.

Hmmm…it’s a little bit like dancing a waltz, following the same steps over and over again, feeling the nice rhythms of the music, but unable to add the sorts of flourishes, startling details, absurd moments, etc., that make a story special.

There are a good 2,042 tips about how to revise a piece so that you’re not just pushing a plow through an already plowed row, but I’ve come to like no. 2,043.

Here it is: Instead of reading your story start to finish, don’t read it. Don’t even have the story in the room with you. Don’t have your laptop either. Your dog or cat can stay along with your preferred beverage, but that’s it.

The thing is to revise as if you’re still creating, not just refining (as important as refining is). My best moments of creativity happen when I’m not writing within a structure, but meandering—caught in a drift with only the faintest sense of purpose.

So here’s one way of doing that: I grab a few books of poetry, an art book or two, my describer’s dictionary, and I page through them randomly, with some Mingus or Sonic Youth or Calexico or Arvo Part on in the background, and think about my story through all of these influences. I drop in and out of poems, riff on a phrase or a word or whatever comes to mind.

I’m not really thinking of my story, yet I am. I’m tracing moods, dreaming, conjuring, whatever. I write little scenes, character descriptions, single words that I like. It’s all a collage, which for me is the word that defines the best sort of creativity. It’s playful. One thing layers upon another. It’s impossible to make a mistake.

And that’s the crux of a second or third draft—the tendency to want to preserve instead of explore. The curves of a creation are in place, after all, so it’s difficult to want to give them a different shape, which means that a story can tend more toward the rigidity of ossification.

I find when I work outside of the story in this manner, and especially in the slow ease of  longhand, that nothing I write has to make it into the story. Still, I usually create a piquant scene or two, a more lyrical description here and there, and even figure out how to cut some of the bad stuff out.

It’s like a new, exciting kid has just moved next door and I’ve got a fun playmate. We run through the neighborhood without supervision. We feel the sweat on our bodies as if for the first time. We lose our breath from running.

I know that there will be revisions and more revisions, of course—and that sometimes it’s necessary to stay in the rut of the story for refinement’s sake, just to smooth those uneven surfaces. But this is one fun way to challenge a story, hopefully bring it to life in a way that a more workmanlike effort can’t.

On to revision tip no. 2,044, “Taking an Exotic Foreign Vacation to Revise Your Story.” I have to admit that this one is my favorite. Although 2,045 has its place: “Marrying Rich to Revise Your Story.”

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Creative Process, Revision, Writing Tips

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Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month, co-founder of 100 Word Story, writer, tap dancer, alchemist, contortionist, numbskull, preacher. Read More…

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