Writing process

Obsession roster

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Every time I start a new project, I suddenly have a laundry list of things I need to “research”. I put that in scare quotes because I suspect that it’s actually a subconscious strategy to derail myself. I can’t possibly write! I don’t know enough yet!

Here’s the current list of suspect preoccupations:

  • Bantu knots/cornrows (thanks to everyone who answered my burning questions!)
  • building styles and materials of Savoy/Hautes-Alpes (fortunately, I have a book with good pictures!)
  • lichens (yes, you read that right)
  • types of stone that might typically be found near layers of shale
  • time of year gorse would be in bloom
  • incunabula
  • 15th century riding boots (ok, those last two I tend to look up all the time anyway)

I mean, they’re all useful things to know, right? I’m not just goofing off,  here, am I?

Yeah, I kind of am. I hereby issue myself an official reminder: write first. Look up the precise species of marmot later.

Zen mind, writer’s mind

/ rachelhartman / 4 Comments

Y’know, I was ready for this to be Buddhism Week, Chez Rachel. I had that dog koan, and then the last few mornings I’ve begun meditating again (I do want to talk about that sometime – I highly recommend it for preventing panic in the face of giant to-do lists). But yesterday I also had a good writing day, which reminded me of that thing I always forget until I’m in the throes of a new project:

My writer’s mind is comprised of three parts. Like tripartite Gaul, yes.

Each part has its own personality, and they are old, old friends by this point. Well, maybe “friends” isn’t quite the right word, but I’ve known these characters a long time and they always show up when I’m first-drafting (they disappear later, when I’m editing, because that’s apparently a different process).

When I start writing, the inside of my head turns into a John Hughes movie. There are three characters – the Bully, the Stoner, and Little Miss Perfect – and they have apparently been assigned to do an English project together. The bulk of the work, as you might expect, falls to Little Miss Perfect. She has an excellent command of English, but alas she is a fierce perfectionist who has no imagination. Left to her own devices, she would sit there fiddling with the same three sentences until they were so devastatingly beautiful that… well, right. Sentences that beautiful do no one any good if she never completes the assignment. That’s what the Bully is for. She breathes down Little Miss Perfect’s neck, telling her she needs to keep writing, because if this assignment is late, the Bully will pound her into the ground.

Little Miss Perfect manages to keep writing and moving forward, in utter terror for her life, until she gets to the point where she can’t. Because she has no imagination, see. She gets stuck, and she starts to cry, and the Bully says mean, unhelpful things to her. Then, and only then, does the Stoner (who looks like young Judd Nelson) wake up and utter the craziest, most pyrotechnically brilliant idea anyone ever heard. Little Miss Perfect (who secretly has a crush on the Stoner) gets it down on paper and starts obsessively making it beautiful and perfect.

Then the Stoner laughs his ass off, eats Cheetos, and falls back asleep so that the cycle might begin again.

Every time I begin, this drama surprises me anew. I don’t know why I forget it so completely, but I suspect it has to do with all the parts being necessary, even the frustration. If I remembered right off the bat that the Stoner would eventually wake up, I would either sit around waiting for him to be funny (and getting nothing done in the meantime), or I’d start poking him with a stick.

I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work. He can’t be coerced.

What this process requires, absurdly, is faith. I have to trust that some deep, barely accessible part of my mind is smarter than I am, that it’s working on the answers, and that it will come through for me. I can’t just sit around and wait for it,  though; I have to do my part and work. Even the Bully, mean though she is, is necessary. Nothing would get done without her. I have to trust that too, even while my frustration levels rise. The frustration is good and right. Judd Nelson should be waking up any minute now.

It all works best when I don’t fight it or try to manipulate it, when I let all the parts do what they need to do. Stuff gets written, the project moves forward, and I look down at what I just did and say, “Holy crap, where did THAT come from?”

On art

/ rachelhartman / 3 Comments

A friend recently mentioned my “Epic Fail” post on a Metafilter comment thread. I’ve been checking back periodically to see whether the arguments are still going or if they’ve died down. I am intrigued to note that the discussion seems to have veered away from feminism and toward art (well, some of it has. The part I find most interesting).

I really like talking about art. I am tempted to make myself a Metafilter account and leap right in, but I don’t have the time and besides, if I want to spread my crackpot ideas around the  internets, I have my very own space right here.

I think about art a lot because art is what I do. Honestly, the only reason I write (as opposed to sing) is because I have some native ability there. If I could dance or cook or paint or build gigantic bizarre installations at anything like the same skill level, I might be doing that instead. I’m not fussed about the medium; I just want to get out there and art it up.

I sometimes think art should be a verb: the impulse to art, the tendency to art, quick get me a bucket I’m gonna ART…

I don’t like definitions of art (the noun) because people  insist upon quibbling about the borderlines – X is art, Y is not – and I find that tedious (also, I get silly and end up talking about toilets, and who needs that?). Art has no borders that can’t be redrawn. Some artists spend their entire careers just stretching those borders. That’s what they find exciting, and more power to them. That’s not a question that moves me, particularly.

Here’s what does move me: subjective experience. That’s what I look for in art. The artist is a lens held up to the face of the world, showing everything from an unaccustomed angle, revealing what is hidden, making the old look new. Art (to me) is a burning need to share the subjective, to say, “Here’s what I’ve seen, what I’ve felt and thought and tasted, loved and wondered and fought. This is what it was to be me.”

That may sound like egotism, and I admit it’s a fine line. But egotism says, “Look at me!” whereas art, I believe, says, “Look through me, because the world is fascinating (or other adjective of choice) and I want to show it to you.”

The things we often take for art – virtuosity and technical skill – I would call craft. Good craft can make the lens less obvious (and poor craft can do quite the opposite), but it’s always there, and you can always see it if you know how to look. Sometimes you have to deduce its dimensions from the negative spaces around it. Me, I like seeing the lens. I tend to think the lens is the entire point, rather than what is shown on the other side.

My favourite authors tend to be the ones I recognize as kindred minds, as my people – Terry Pratchett, Lois McMaster Bujold, George Eliot. I read their work and see a person who has suffered what I’ve suffered, loved where I’ve loved, been through the same fires and come out the other side. But they are not me. They come to different conclusions, try different solutions, broaden my conceptions of what’s possible, and give me a new angle on my own challenges. They don’t have answers; they have experiences.

And this, I think, is what art is for. It’s a signpost on the road, saying, “Humans have been here before. It’s a rough road ahead, but you do not walk it alone.”

The Heroine’s Journey

/ rachelhartman / 2 Comments

On Tuesday I was talking with a friend of mine who is a doula and a writer, among other things (I’m linking to her, because you never know! One of you might need a doula). She has recently been training to teach Birthing From Within classes.

At this point you’re probably saying to yourself, “Did I click the wrong link and end up at someone’s baby blog? What does childbirth preparation have to do with writing?” Read and learn, darlings!

There are lots of different kinds of birthing classes, with varying philosophies behind them. The philosophy behind this one (or the part my friend thought would interest me) is that giving birth is a kind of Hero’s Journey, as surely as Frodo going to the Crack of Doom, and that an understanding of its stages would be tremendously helpful to mothers-to-be.

You’ve heard of the Hero’s Journey (or monomyth), surely. Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces laid it out clearly, though the idea goes back to Jung and the idea of archetypes. It became very popular when Bill Moyers did a documentary about Campbell, revealing that he was good friends with George Lucas, who had deliberately structured Star Wars as a hero story. The “men’s movement” of the 90s – which was all about men getting in touch with their feelings and learning to forgive their fathers via drum circles (or some such) – was also rooted in Campbell’s ideas.

In other words, I knew about it, but it was all very masculine to my mind. Hearing my friend describe childbirth in those terms was… well, it was surprising and exactly RIGHT. You are called to perform this task that is surely to big for you to handle. There is no turning back. You undergo an ordeal (and must surrender to it, or it hurts even more). There are times you really think you might die – or that death would be a wondrous relief. You come back with a great gift. The ordinary world looks completely different to you afterwards.

And you can’t stop telling your story. Ye gods, I remember that. I could not shut up about it: the great flood, the wild broncos bucking, my husband an island in the stormy sea. I was desperate to hear other women’s stories. We were like veterans. Nobody could understand (or wanted to hear the gory details) but us.

I’m working on the plot outline for my second book. You don’t have to scratch the internet very hard to find a dozen sites with the Hero’s Journey laid out tidily for authors (esp. screenwriters). Just plug in your ideas, and presto! You’ve got an instantly compelling story!

It was interesting to read the steps of the journey, certainly, and a little relief to see that I  had already instinctively created some things that corresponded.  And I’m sure it’s possible to make a story that way, from the prototype up, but it  could end up being The Phantom Menace as easily as Star Wars. The steps are not for my story, but for myself.

Because this, too, came clear in talking to my friend: the journey is compelling as a story because it’s a journey we all take. Being a writer is not so different from giving birth, after all. What’s interesting is not how my written work conforms (or doesn’t) to some preexisting template, but how I am learning to walk the path myself, to be the hero of my own life. I went through an ordeal indeed with Seraphina; I’m still on the Return part of that journey, but already called to begin another. How do I do this? How am I changed? What have I learned?

I’m trying to plan, of course, with this plot outline, but there are unanticipated monsters ahead, and unanticipated help. And in the end, there is nothing for it but to set my feet upon the path and go.

Symphony

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I have always written to music.

It started when I was eleven or twelve. I’d curl up on the old brown couch with a spiral notebook across my knees, put on the huge, archaic headphones, and shut out the world. I sometimes suspect the “writing*” was just an excuse to wrap myself in music and ignore everything else.

* Not that I wasn’t writing. My fantasy and SF novels comprised many spiral notebooks of vibrantly dreadful prose. Let it never be said I didn’t produce.

I listened to records in those days. My parents had an idiosyncratic collection — lots of classical mixed in with a few strange relics from the sixties (Smothers Brothers, Tijuana Brass), some kids’ stuff (Muppet Show Album, disco Star Wars), and a shocking amount of Barry Manilow. In a fit of uncharacteristic good taste, I went for the classical.

Romantic symphonies fit my needs best. They were bursting with drama and passion, alternately epic and intimate in scope, just like I hoped my writing might be. My favourites were Brahms’s 4th and Shostakovitch’s 5th, which was written in a later era but has a very Romantic feel to it, so I think it counts. Certainly my twelve-year-old self found a lot of commonality between the two works.

The first movement of the Brahms was unquestionably the ocean, restless and mighty; the beginning of the Shostakovitch was a storm gathering above waves of nodding prairie grasses. My head was already full of wilderness; I’d spent my childhood vacations staring out the car window at the moving landscapes. Those were the scenes these symphonies conjured up for me: red canyons, impenetrable forests, sand hills, clouds making high drama out of of sunlight. And always moving, traveling, questing. I had just read Tolkien at that age, and I think that got mashed together with the music also.

I still love that Brahms. In high school, our youth symphony performed it and I got to experience it from the cello section. Performing a piece almost always solidifies it in my esteem. The Shostakovitch I haven’t listened to in years, but writing this is making me nostalgic for it. In the first movement, if I recall, there was a call-and-response between solo flute and French horn, which struck me (at twelve) as the single most beautiful moment in all of music ever. I wonder how it would sound to me now.

One reason I wonder is that I was reading up on Shostakovitch’s 5th  in preparation for writing this (because that’s how I roll, baby: nerdy), and it turns out the piece has an interesting and complicated history. In 1936, Shostakovitch was in hot water with Soviet leadership because his music didn’t conform to ideals of “socialist realism”. He came back with the 5th symphony, to great acclaim from the Party and the people. But one can’t escape the impression that parts of the piece are slyly subversive, that he’s thumbing his nose even as he appears to be capitulating. The extent of this slyness is still a matter for debate.

I’ve moved away from symphonic music over the years. One reason is that my tastes have broadened a lot; it turns out there’s a lot more music in the world than classical and disco Star Wars. Who knew? Another is that symphonies are complex and deep enough that they require a lot of attention. I’m not good at simply letting a symphony be background noise; I want to stop what I’m doing and let myself be carried off into the ever-shifting landscape of my mind.

You’d think that would still be useful for writing, but it’s not. My writing needs have evolved over time; it’s not just an elaborate escape into daydream anymore. It’s work.

Only you, Mary Sue

/ rachelhartman / 7 Comments

I was looking at Ellen Kushner’s blog, as I sometimes do, and I followed a link to another interesting blog post (by Holly Black) about Mary Sues. Not about identifying Mary Sues in literature – which has become quite the sport lately – but about the sport of identification itself. About the fact that “Mary Sue” is coming to mean “that female character I dislike”.

Dilution of a useful term? Maybe. I’m not that convinced it was a useful term, with any meaning beyond the world of fanfiction and self-insertion fantasies. Not that I’ve never used it in a review. I believe I once called the protagonist of Twilight a Mary Sue, which was probably mean of me. But what Black points out is that some of the “Mary Sue” qualities people rail about in reviews are merely features of being the protagonist. Yes, she’s smart and resourceful and able to save the day: she’s the protagonist. It’s what they do.

Anyway, interesting discussion.

Here’s how it’s gonna be

/ rachelhartman / 4 Comments

I always like to write myself a little mission statement at the beginning of a new blog, so that I can look back years later and say, “Whaa? I said I would do THAT?” It’s like getting a surprise present from myself!

I have a few aspirations for this blog. I often find myself pontificating in my own head whilst walking the dog, explaining to some invisible audience all the myriad odd inspirations for my work – and there are a lot of them. There’s music, of course; the book is deeply concerned with music. There’s neurology, psychology, and philosophy. There’s my Grand Tedious Theories of ART. There’s that feeling I get when I’m walking under the plum trees in March, and I look up and see the first buds, bright as stars, opening against the grey sky.

Inspirations are everywhere, and ideas are not far behind. As I always say, “Ideas are like cockroaches: there’s always more behind the fridge!”

Books are an antique map of the mind, curlicued and elegant, with Zephyrs and grotesquerie all around the margins. Here be the author’s dragons! Here the Mountains of Madness and the Swampland of Piss and Vinegar! Such a map is beautiful, if baroque, but not always an infallible guide to “What was she thinking?”

Sometimes what you want is a GPS. That’s the blog. A crisp, sure voice saying, “In 100 meters, turn right onto Music Theory Road.”

I’m looking back over what I just wrote and trying to decide whether it sounds grand or silly. I’m gonna have to go with silly. Also: nerdy. That sounds like an excellent (and accurate!) start to me.