Parlour Tricks

[fivecats]

1925
February 2006 Raleigh, NC
____________________________________

When I sit down to type out an entry, say, like this one, I simply sit and I type.  The words flow fairly easily, with few hesitations or concerns.  I think, I type.  Pretty simple, really.  People I used to write letters to told that my writing reads much the way I talk (to me this means "full of grandeous self-importance, occasional humor and overly long complex sentences that make me really glad I never learned how to diagram a sentence because I might feel bad about how overly long and awkward they really were.") which I regarded as a compliment.

So then why is "real" writing so dangedably difficult?

I'll spare you the whining,
After putting a lot of time and effort into long, long blog entries that would take days to write and re-write, I stopped blogging completely to devote my time to writing my Victorian-era kids novel.  That was the theory, at any rate.  I got a rough draft of a part of the first chapter written down (now lost) and then found myself seeking out all sorts of other distractions to keep me from writing.

Writing letters and blog entries is just so much easier.

And then, last August a good LJ friend (who I hope doesn't mind me anonymously quoting him) wrote to me, praising my writing in my blog entries and posed a question to me that stopped me in my tracks.

"I'll ask you the same question someone asked me a decade ago: With all your magical talents, do you you really want to spend your time doing nothing but simple parlor tricks?"

Man, I just hate it when someone nails me like that.

No.  Of course not.  Hasn't that been the goal all along?  Getting published?

Still, I find that I'm very comfortable with one style of writing (self-obsessed ranting and raving, turning Real Life into personal narratives) and original fiction is like, well, worse than pulling teeth.

The other night I sat down to write out the first chapter of the Victorian-era book.  It's a scene I've played over and over in my head for well over a  year.  It's a good scene, a good start to the book, with action and more than enough confusion to keep the reader interested and wanting to read more.  When I started writing all that was coming out was stilted, dry, boring prose.  No, actually, it was worse.  It was dismal, pathetic and dreadful.  Horrid.

However, I resisted the tempation to CTRL + A, Delete everything.  Instead, I dutifully saved what I had written and walked away from it, trying to figure out what had gone so horribly wrong.

A couple of years ago I had a job interview with RIT for a teaching position.  As part of the day-long interview I had to give a 45-minute lecture on a subject of my (their) choosing.  XML was the topic of choice and I frantically learned everything I could about the relatively new markup language.  I then learned PowerPoint, created my lecture slides and started rehearsing.  I rehearsed in front of friends at work, at the airport, on the airplane, in the hotel room the night before.  Just before the lecture was supposed to start I took a few minutes to review the slides... and it was if I'd never seen this material before.  All of  my clever, witty insights?  Gone.  Any semblance of understanding the information, much less being able to communicate it?  Wa-a-a-a-ay gone.

I fumbled through the first few slides, committing the PowerPoint sin of reading exactly what was written on the slides.  Then, after a few minutes, I hit a stride and, managing to shut my conscious mind off, I was able to get through the rest of the lecture about as cleanly as possible.

Performance anxiety, pure and simple.  Big crowd of college professors sitting in judgement of me, sitting between me and my dream of becomming a college professor.

I can stand in front of a large audience and be comfortable -- heck, I taught for enough years to not have that bother me much anymore.  Still, when it counts, at least in my mind, I panic and freeze up. 

I've decided that the "you have got to be kidding" bit of writing that I did for the first chapter needs to be viewed as the barest of frameworks for the house I'm eventually going to be building.  I just need to get the ideas down there and then start idenitifying and filling in the holes.  Those large, cavernous holes.

I've also backtracked and started sketching out those first scenes, identifying what's missing (any sense of place, time, the smells, lighting, dress, etc) and begun making notes on where to insert these all-important items.

I know I can do this.  It's just being far harder than I thought it was going to be.


...

Comments

[smileyfish.livejournal.com]

YOu're a brave, brave man. I can't see myself writing anything longer than short stories, and even that is a stretch. A decade ago I challenged myself to write something more than my usual one-page peice. I wrote 4 pages. Good, but stiff stiubbornly short.

Since falling in love with Alex my inner muse has been unusually quiet, and LJ constitutes almost all my writing since then. It's a bit depressing and I ofetn find myself wondering where my imagination has run off to...

Anyway, aside from all that, I think it's antastic that you're even attempting a novel. If you ever want someone to read through and split the hairs, then I'll offer my services. I'll even attempt to restrain myself from 'correcting' American spellings. =op

[ruralrob.livejournal.com]

Tom, you are a natural writer, with far more talent than many of those who call themselves "writers" here. It comes easy to you, it's clear, except when you want to sit down and write the great american novel. Or variations therof.

I'm no writer so I can offer you very little in the way of advice - except perhaps not to try too hard. I'm scared that by doing so you'll destroy what is innately yours - the ability to string words together entirely naturally, unforced and with wit and passion.

And I'll be the first to buy the book!

[basefinder.livejournal.com]

Well of course it's hard. If it was easy then everyone would be doing it. :-)

So write the book already. Don't let the fun part of the writing get away from you.

You'll edit it later, anyway (and so will your ultimate publisher). But the first draft is for you.

Scott

[zhenzhi.livejournal.com]

it is difficult yes! and then on top of that you ghave to schedule writing time. lol!
a big encouraging hug from me. :-)

[keirf.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you still have dreams and aspirations.

[new-brunette.livejournal.com]

I've never been moved to even try. How sad is that?

What's the story behind the map of London?

[drood.livejournal.com]

I panic every time I sit down to my laptop. Every single time. It's like trying to get water out of a rusted pump. The stuff that comes out first, slowly and painfully, is a nasty brown color.

But then, after an hour or so, the clearer water flows a little more easily.

[velvetslide.livejournal.com]

I can barely put together two or three paragraphs about my day anymore, forget about spelling and punctuation, even though I used to proofread and help produce a magazine at one time. YOU write so well, and I think
have the muse's on your side, so I think the plan to block it out and fill in is a sound one, just don't think about the anxiety, follow the plan.((((((hugs))))))

[vavaverity.livejournal.com]

Ain't that the truth?

I have had many of those same "wow you're a really good writer" type comments, insomuch as I write the way I speak.

I am not nearly creative enough to come up with fiction. This I know, and so I salute you.

[myrhiann.livejournal.com]

My brother, who tried to write a 'factional' book about a co-op established by our father and other soldier-settler farmers described it as like 'eating an elephant' and realised that it could only be done one mouthful at a time.

Like you, I write great letters, but have no ambition to push myself any further than that. I admire your tenacity, and I'm sure that in the fullness of time you will achieve your goal. Perhaps you are trying too hard. After all, when you are blogging you feel totally relaxed and the words flow freely. I'm sure it is somehow a matter of making a 'mind switch' and it will happen

"Yum, yum, pass the ketchup."

[sakkijarvi.livejournal.com]

Do you remember writing that line? It was back in Ms, Nemecek's class when she had us do a "write one line and pass it around" story-writing exercise.

And have you read Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast? It his memoir, in smallish essentially blog-sized sections, of his life as a 20 something getting starteda sa writer while living in Paris. My sister recommended it to me and while reading it last year (and this) I kept thinking it provided a model for a way for you to create two books using your blog entries as starting points (one on reflections from the 1970s and 1980s (check the sub-title to A Moveable Feast) and the other of your observations on your life today (defining "today" as beginning when you and Bonnie got together). It struck me that this might be a transitional way for you to work on your book creating skills without having to start from scratch (plus I think these would be great books).

On your novel I can scatter-shoot a few ideas (as time grows short): I would suggest that doing research to make the book "real" is unnecessary: there's no one alive who can say "that's not the way I remember it" and, more importantly, your story needs to be believable more than it needs to be "real" . . . (painful as it is for someone who reveres history to say) . . . I would also suggest that a perfect or even near perfect opening chapter is not necessarily the only way to start writing a novel, it seems to me that the first chapter you write doesn't even necessarily need to end up in your final draft of the book; maybe it's more of a launch pad and you need it down on paper (which it is) so that your writing can get to the real stuff: the craft that is being launched (in other words, Neil Armstrong didn't say his little piece by stepping off a launch pad onto the lunar surface) . . . I'd guess that you're writing is and will be at its best when it flows rather than when you intellectually construct it . . . finally, here's a site I heard about that offers some mid-19th century British magazines on-line www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/

You do have the knack.