Writers: Let Go of that Can Do Attitude (for a while)

Years ago, I developed allergies. I had all the classic symptoms: occasional runny nose and itchy eyes, sneezing and congestion. My ears often felt plugged up and once in a while, I’d come down with a sinus infection. I became very preoccupied with eliminating this nuisance from my life. I tried different allergy medications and decongestants. I used a Neti pot (when I remembered). Nothing improved; if anything, it got worse. I was constantly assessing my sinus situation, constantly trying to reach a state of normal. Finally, I made an appointment with an allergist, to start having the allergy shots that seemed to help lots of people. She ran a whole panel of tests, made pinpricks on my back to see what type of allergies we were dealing with. And she found out that I was allergic to…nothing. Not pollen or grass, not pet dander or wool. Nothing.

 

Things continued. I waged my war, unconvinced and still suffering. I saw an ear-nose-throat doctor. His conclusion: slightly deviated septum and “sensitive sinuses.” In the same way that just about anybody will sneeze in a dusty attic, my nose tended to flare up in response to certain things. It was overactive, that was all. This doctor gave me a prescription for a very expensive nasal spray, a steroid, and for a while, I tried it. Then something shifted. I decided to quit trying to eradicate the thing and just live with it. And all these years later, my ears still crack when I swallow and I’m usually in some state of congestion. I do use the Neti pot (when I remember), and I occasionally take something if I feel a bad session coming on, or if I’m getting on an airplane. But I don’t think about it, hardly at all, and the symptoms are a mere fraction of what they were when I was attacking and treating them.

 

I wrote most of a short story last week, then immediately hated it. It seemed that my jumping-off point was a bit gimmicky, and I couldn’t remember the point of it, couldn’t figure out, really, what it was about. There were some good bits, but so much of it was insipid and it didn’t have the eerie tone I was hoping for. I beat myself up for it for a few days, then decided to scrap the whole thing.

 

Today, I was listening to a podcast while running. It was about the ways we love and one of the segments featured the author of Mating in Captivity. She was talking about the enigma of modern marriage, the way we have expanded the requirements for a partner from simply societal identity and species continuation to the metaphysical and emotional. We expect our partners to be our best friends, to fulfill all aspects of our desires, to be adventurous and stable, passionate and loyal, basically—to be everything to us. And that’s a tall order. The author talked about this in the context of the American “Can Do” ideology. We tend to be a culture of problem solvers. And sometimes, she said, we need to learn to live with paradoxes rather than trying to solve them.

 

And it occurred to me: this is what I was doing with that story. In my immediate rush to fix it, to solve it, to make it everything at once, I wasn’t being realistic. Maybe it was like my non-existent allergies: I just needed to learn to live with it, accept its imperfections and all of the ways it pains me. Like a partner, I can’t expect it to be all things. This is a constant fear for writers, wondering if you’ll know when something should be salvaged or scrapped, knowing that you’ll never completely cure the ills of any project. But I think only when you stop and let the thing exist, warts and all, can you start to look at it with any sort of calm. If you set aside that “Can Do” mentality and have some patience, then maybe the flaws you’re seeing won’t be as overwhelming as you think, maybe you can find your way to a path you can live with. You’ll still want to fix some things of course, only not all at once. Sometimes it’s good to shut down that problem-solving tendency, to stop looking for cures or complete fixes. Sometimes it’s okay to let a paradox be a paradox for a while.

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Cross-training for Writers

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up this book in a thrift shop while on vacation. This collection of "very short stories" was chosen by staff and students at Wright State University in 1992 and follows three previous collections with some form of "Sudden Fiction" in the title. The introduction touches on this change, explaining the criteria for "Flash Fiction;" basically, it's shorter than sudden fiction. It's interesting to think of the ways short fiction has and hasn't evolved in the past twenty years, with the dawning of Twitter and sound bites, and but then again, Haiku is ancient.

Flash Fiction is a fantastic collection of pieces, really stellar. I kept waiting for the stories to decrease in quality as I went along (this often happens with collections) but they never did. So many searing images and nuanced insights, so much feeling in these short works. There are stories by Carver, Atwood, and Updike, by Mark Strand, Tim O'Brien and Jamaica Kincaid. Lots of authors you may know, and some you probably won't. But all of the stories had something in common: each was a short, vivid experience.

I realized that reading these brief pieces of fiction would be a really great exercise for any writer wishing to think about writing scenes, because that's what many of them were. A writer could do worse than to strive for the immediacy and sensory immersion usually evident in flash fiction. Even in the breadth of a novel, it could be helpful to envision an hourglass when you're writing a scene. Be purposeful, present an experience, create a tension.

Sometimes, I'm asked in interviews to give advice to writers and really, the same thing always comes to mind: READ! Read the type of books you want to write, and read everything else too. Consider yourself an athlete in training. You have to exercise different parts of your brain, like an athlete moves from one muscle group to the next. Read flash fiction to learn about creating impactful scenes. Read poetry to remind yourself of rhythm and beauty, biographies for character insight, non-fiction for cause-and-effect and reason, memoir to experience someone else's feelings. And always, always read fiction because there you will find the most crystallized stories and voices, and grains of sand turned to gem.

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Music in the Creative Process

 

The last three times I went out running, my iPod has served up “Sweet Home Alabama” as part of its shuffle. There’s no rhyme or reason to this, only sheer mathematics, which is certainly no specialty of mine. So I won’t try to analyze anything like probability. But I will say that every time the opening strains of the song start up, the same set of associations runs through my mind. I think about a guest post I did for a blog when my novel, The Qualities of Wood, came out in ebook last year, and I think about one of the final scenes in the book, when my character Vivian is chugging beer and singing along at a small town fair/festival. Because I might just know a thing or two about that.

The blog is called "The Undercover Soundtrack" and its creator, Roz Morris, describes the thought behind it:

“The Undercover Soundtrack is a weekly series by writers who use music as part of their creative process—special pieces that have revealed a character to them, or populated a mysterious place, or enlarged a pivotal moment.”

As I start to gear up for my novel’s print release in June (YAY!), I thought it would be fun to share a few of my favorite interviews, articles and guest posts so far. In case you missed them the first time around. The piece I wrote for Roz would certainly fit the bill. Setting plays a big role in anything I write, and I’m always mining for sensory detail. Sights, smells, sounds. Music surrounds us—in our houses, our cars and now, it’s pumped out in mall parking lots. How does all of this have anything to do with Lynyrd Skynyrd??? You’ll have to read the article to find out:

The Undercover Soundtrack - Mary Vensel White

And by the way, don’t just read mine. If you scroll to the bottom, you’ll find a complete list of authors who have submitted pieces, as well as a list of the musicians mentioned. The posts are quite interesting and may just lead you to a new book or a new song.

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