Posts tagged with writing as a craft

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March 18, 2010

Simon Moth Critiques My Essay And Still I Live To Tell The Tale, Or This Is How My Writer’s Workshop Is Going, Part II

I decide to go balls out, because, really? That’s the only way this can go.

It’s Sunday night, 5 p.m.—week six submissions are due and I’m on the hot seat. Five weeks earlier—my creative confidence flagging–I almost quit the writer’s workshop, but tonight, tremulous and excited, I flip open my MacBook and ready my first essay for review. With one last check for glaring errors, I bless my piece for scrutiny by 12 people who were perfect strangers just weeks before. I hope their analysis is constructive and fair. I worry though, that the dissection of my work—like a careless slice job on a high-school science class’ formaldehyde frog—will leave me splayed out catawampus, my guts a grayish gumbo all over the tabletop. I do not like gumbo, and my guts, those that I’m mustering right now to steel myself against the cold winds of critique—I’m kind of fond of them—I pray they remain intact.


(Photo credit: Bascom Hogue@Flickr)

—-

Simon Moth hates my essay.

It’s Wednesday, workshop night, and of my submission, “Mother Fixer”—an essay about my step mom, over which I have agonized, scrutinized, and poured buckets and buckets of heart and soul and time and love and loss and neurosis and heartstrings and everything else into—Simon says, “I think its flat.”

“The beginning of the essay is no more compelling than the end,” Simon, a furrow-browed octogenarian intones. The first of the group to speak, he is dismissive, resolute, not at all concerned with starting the critique on a positive note. To punctuate his point, Simon scrawls tangled black letters, echoing his sentiment—that my essay royally sucks—into the margins of a printed copy of my piece, which he will give me at the end of class. When sufficiently finished scribbling, Simon cups his hands around a porcelain coffee mug; phantom wisps of white steam, fine as translucent vellum, float up and then evaporate into the tension-filled room.

“What I wouldn’t give,” I think, “to disappear right now, just like those fine white wisps.”

… But then, bright spots.

Irene, our instructor, her hair piled high in a haphazard bun, her large, gold earrings hanging like chandeliers from earlobes exposed, says she likes it; she thinks the essay works. “It’s a portrait,” she explains, “it’s not supposed to be revelatory. It’s a conjuring of a mother—and the literary world is full of mothers.”

“I loved the main character. She is larger than life!” Jen, the schoolteacher at the end of the table exclaims.

Miriam, the soulful Belizeer with the infectious smile, says that the work is great, beginning to end. “I wouldn’t change a thing,” she emphatically says. “I would not change one thing.”

—-

Later that night, back at the apartment, Andrew—languishing on our green tufted couch, his jewel-eyed Siamese stretched out alongside—asks how the critique went.

“It went well,” I say. I am pleased that my work, good or bad, resonated with a real-world audience. And then because the impulse strikes me, I corset my arms in an “x” across my stomach. I feel side ribs, soft flesh.

What do you know? I think. My insides are still intact.

Simon Moth be damned, it looks like I’ll live to write another day.

The jewel-eyed cat looks in my direction, purrs her approval.

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March 11, 2010

Killing Simon Moth, Or This Is How The Writer’s Workshop Is Going, Part I

SIMON MOTH ATE 15 COOKIES.

I record this fact in my Barbie pink, Mead Five Star notebook. It is 8:30pm on a Wednesday and week 1 of the writer’s workshop in which I’m enrolled in as part of a New Year’s Resolution. I am sitting at a long, black Parson’s table with 11 other Personal Essay workshop participants, and I have been watching—discreetly through squinty-eyed side glances—the white-haired, bespectacled physicist to my right, quietly devour a formidable mound of delicate wafers. Deftly, steadily, Simon’s liver-spotted fingers hopscotch through the Pepperidge Farm sampler provided by our instructor for snacking; lacy rounds, buttery bars, twin crisps with velvet ribbons of decadent chocolate sandwiched between—none are safe from Simon’s eager maw.


(Photo credit: mconnors@MorgueFile)

And I’m a little worried. Should someone his age (what is he, 75, 80, 89?) be eating sweets with reckless abandon? What if he has diabetes like my grandma? What if those delicious little cookies that Simon’s fixedly putting to his papery lips are nothing but delectable death rockets primed to explode his blood glucose levels to atmospheric heights? What if all that sugar sends Simon flying, on one last trip through the strawberry fields of sweet crystalline bliss, only to plunge him into the perilous depths of a cookie-induced coma? What then? I can all but see the tombstone:

–Here lies Simon. He tasted of death; it smacked strongly of store-bought Milanos. R.I.P.

I unlock my tractor-beam gaze from Simon’s impressive confetti of crumbs long enough to jot in my notebook–it’s spiral wire curling through the perforated spine of 100 wide-ruled pages—a thought for further consideration:

“Is it wrong to kill your classmate,” I write, “before he’s even critiqued your work?”

…

I hold that thought. Something’s going on at the head of the table.

—-

She’s smiling as she speaks. Our instructor, Irene, her hair, a milk chocolate drape, is worn straight and long and frames her smallish porcelain face. Her cardigan is steely gray, her jewelry dramatic. From behind metal frames, brown eyes blink and sparkle. She is artsy, and young (probably my age), and already so accomplished. She’s finishing up her novel, she tells us. A literary journal is going to publish her essay in the spring, she says.

Because someone asks, Irene is telling us about the difference between memoir and personal essay. “Personal essay,” Irene informs us, “is a slice of life, usually exploring a question of what interests or troubles you.” The story length is relatively short, she says, so the audience should know why time’s spent on details. When someone asks about essay length, how long our pieces for class should be, Irene says thoughtfully, “I don’t know … I think 15 pages, double-spaced is the sweet spot.”

15 pages?! I scream silently in italics. Is she insane?

As a blogger, my goal is to condense and compress, to never exceed two pages per post. For me, 15 feels impossible, insurmountable, like climbing Mount Everest via Microsoft Word.

My stomach plunges and I feel nauseous. Pinpricks of sweat explode in my armpits. My panic is white hot.

Taking a page from Simon Moth’s book, I crabwalk my fingers toward the cookie platter. I am an emotional eater and right now that buttery square can’t make it into my grip fast enough. The middle of my confection of choice? It’s loaded with raspberry jam. When I bite in, I notice the filling quivers a little; it’s shaky inside, just like me.

On the drive home, I keep one hand on the wheel, the other wipes cookie dust from my blouse. Well that was an experience, I think. As the InPrint house—and Simon and Irene and 12 strangers and 15 nerve-wracking pages and one very strange night—fades behind the glare of my red taillights, I wonder if I’ll ever go back.

Because right now? I’m highly uncertain.


(Photo credit: Robert S. Donovan@Flickr)

15 comments

January 6, 2010

My Resolution This Year Is 1440 X 1024 Pixels. And Also, To Write! Write! Write! (Which Kind Of Sounds Like The Start To A Word Nerd Anthem)


(Photo credit: jppi@morguefile)

“Why did you start blogging again?” she asks.

I am tempted to answer that I’m obviously a masochist. “I enjoy the time suck,” I imagine saying, all cavalier-like. “Really, it’s fun to spend my free hours agonizing over word choice, stressing over subjects and predicates.” Imaginary me continues to explain that, You know the dream where you’re in a public place and everyone is gawking cause all you’re wearing—save for the birthday suit Mom gave you when you were born—is a pair of hideous, holey, girdle-style underpants? Well, I intone, arms thrown up on either side of my head in a flesh-colored, ligamental field goal, blogging makes that dream a reality!

“Just press PUBLISH,” I say, “and your life’s stories—the shameful stuff about your adulterous ex, the bloodlust for babies, the troublesome bout with writer’s block that’s flavored with a homoerotic tinge—it’s all laid bare, metaphorical stretch marks and all, for the Internet to judge. And the Internet,” I say, lips pulled back to expose an oily reptilian smile, “will judge … either by clapping with comments when the content is deemed funny or touching, or by reacting—a stifling winter blast blowing through the strawberry fields of assumed literary awesomeness—with cold, ego-crushing indifference.”

I want to say these things, but instead I answer my inquisitive friend in the way I do with all impossible questions. And that is: by tilting my head, shrugging my shoulders, raising an eyebrow, and crinkling my nose; so many small movements just to say one simple thing, which is, honestly, I have no earthly idea.

I’m not sure why 2009 marked my return blogging, except one Wednesday last September I woke up—my organic cotton pintuck comforter stretched tight around my shoulders—with a story inside me. That morning, sitting bolt upright in bed, I exclaimed (of the creative monster stirring in my bones), It’s alive! This outburst startled the slumbering cat curled up in a fluffy gray pouf on my pillow. And when the felicitous story willed itself from my rapidly firing brain onto a page in my pristine white macbook, I too was startled!

And then I did a funny thing. I continued to write.

And suddenly it’s like I have flowers popping up in my footsteps. I am ablaze, abloom. I am positively effervescent!

But I am also: afraid, aghast, ripe for a tizzy.

Confession time. This blog is not my literary endgame. It is my dream to write a novel, but I’ve never pursued it because I am a cowardly lion. The fear of rejection, the opportunity for failure, these things—because so much of my self worth is tied up in what I, as a creative person, produce—petrify me, like I’m a piece of ancient wood.

And so, in 2010 I’m going to actively work on my craft.

*Gulp*

I am resolved to read great writing. I was gifted a subscription to, and am going to study cover-to-cover, The Atlantic Monthly, whose contributors have included American writer royalty; storytellers like Mark Twain, Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, Martin Luther King Jr., Helen Keller, and Garrison Keillor.

I was also given Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft. The cover says it’s “part memoir, part master class by one of the best selling authors of all time … a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have.” Sounds tasty.

I am resolved to seek critique in a classroom setting. Though I have studied grant writing, business writing, science writing, and essay composition, I have never taken a creative writing course. That changes this year. Starting January 27, I will participate in a 10-week personal essay workshop at Inprint!, Houston’s leading literary arts organization. Registration is limited to 12 people, and rumor is that each student will have a dedicated hour where their work is picked apart by classmates—like the tender flesh of a succulent roast chicken stripped clean from its carcass—to be critiqued for what was done well and what needs revision. I won’t lie. I don’t “do” rejection. This constructive criticism thing terrifies me.

I am resolved to persevere. A few weeks back I read a post that resonated with my struggle as an artist. The message was that for some, art comes easy. There are people who are born burbling poetry, who can write music before they know how to read, who can draw amazing landscapes without any lessons. These people exist, but they are freakishly rare. “Why then is there so much amazing art in the world?” the author posed.

The answer? Perseverance.

I am not a fast writer. I am slow. Like slow as molasses. Like slow as a stubborn bottle of ketchup.

Sometimes it takes hours to spit out a paragraph, so when I tell you that I’m committed to delivering a new post every week of 2010, that’s a big deal.

52 posts this year, yo.  (Plus an additional 100 or so at Yummery). I hope you’re stoked … cause I’m kind of freaking out.

—-

… AND because this has now officially become the LONGEST POST IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD, I’m resolving to end this thing. Like right now. (You’re welcome.)

Oh and one more thing …

HAPPY NEW YEAR LOVELIES! May 2010 bring you all the love, hope, peace and prosperity your little hearts can handle, for better or worse, in sickness and health, forever and ever, amen.


(Photo credit: Nicmcphee@flickr.com)