Book Club

Before I dropped off the face of the internet, I had an IMO groovy idea to Book Club some of my favorite books on writing. Over the course of a few weeks, I’ll talk about the concepts and insights in each section of the book, adding my own comments and musings, and the occasional advice or link to helpful articles.

It’s groovy, because I pick all the books and I’m the only one who gets to talk, which, honestly, is everything that I’m looking for in a book club.

Previously, I made it through the Introduction and first 2 chapters of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird before getting sidelined. If you’re so inclined, you can catch up here.

Introduction
Getting Started
Now You’ve Done It
Characters
Characters pt. 2

In this post, I’m continuing my thoughts on character. Next week, we’ll (finally) move onto Plot.

Character Agency

If you read a lot of blogs on writing – I do – you’ll frequently hear the concept of “character agency.” In essence, characters need free will and a sense of forward motion. The reader needs to feel that your characters are taking action in your story because they want to, not because the plot requires them to. This requires you to craft strong desire lines and motivations.

You’ll also hear that in addition to having agency on the page, your characters need this freedom in your head. You need to give your characters the chance to make their own choices, to surprise you, to reveal themselves over time as you write.

That’s good advice, oft-repeated, but how? How can we walk the line between knowing a character well enough to see their world through their eyes while simultaneously leaving them the freedom to surprise us?

There’s no easy answer, other than experience will guide you. Inevitably – trust me – you’ll have a moment where an unexpected action or decision pops into your head at an opportune moment. Your protagonist will “want” to take an action you didn’t plan, but still feels exactly right to you.

Unlike other craft elements, you can’t open a book to see how another writer handled it. It all happens upstairs, and remains invisible on the page. You have no idea which parts of a novel the writer planned, which arrived by serendipity, and which caught her completely by surprise. You can’t gain this experience by watching; you have to go through it.

You can develop the mindset, though. First, you don’t need to fill in every jot and tittle before you start to write. That’s one reason I don’t like the questionnaire approach to creating characters. I’ve seen lists of 250+ questions. For my dollar, too many answers create a box that is difficult to break. You leave yourself little room to explore. You may find it impossible to allow your hero to act a certain way, when your questionnaire suggests they wouldn’t.

I prefer a learn-as-you-go approach to character. I usually start with a strong image or gut feeling about my protagonist, but I don’t fill in every blank. Instead, I let the character talk to me as I build their world around them. What do they notice in various settings? How do they interact with their supporting characters? How do they feel about the news of the day? How do they respond to criticism, compliments, obstacles, or difficult questions? Eventually, the evidence of the protagonist’s character rises to the top and their personality becomes clear. From there, it’s easier to predict how new encounters and conflicts will go. That approach won’t work for everyone – and I’m a very slow writer, so I can’t recommend it too strongly – but I do encourage you to give yourself the freedom to play, explore, and discover as you write.

Second, when your protagonist is faced with a choice of action or morality, don’t go with your first thought. Your first instinct may be correct, but it’s also the path of least resistance. At the very least, imagine other choices your hero could make and consider whether any of those would strengthen your story or create more conflict while also remaining true to your character. What is “true” will be different for every character and may even change for each character as your story progresses.

Eliminate the phrase “my hero would never do that” from your creative toolkit. This is fiction; you can do anything. Give your hero moral absolutes, but also imagine scenarios in which your hero would violate whatever ethic you believe they hold dearest. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Elizabeth Proctor never lies, until she does. But she lies for the best reason possible, and only under the worst kind of duress. Your hero can do anything and when pushed to the brink, she will.

Again, I struggle with this, but I’ve learned the importance of beginning with desire. Your plot (next chapter) will thank you for it. As you consider your character’s personality and their moral choices, find their desire first and then build their morality on top of that desire. When your character is faced with a difficult choice – a choice between two bad outcomes, a choice to hurt someone they love, a choice that will violate their beliefs – go with the choice that drives them closer to their desire, regardless of the morality. Develop that skill and you’ll discover characters who make surprising choices that nonetheless feel inevitable.

Helpful Advice

Here are two articles I have found helpful. In a post on Writers Helping Writers, Christina Delay asks whether your fictional characters could pass the test for sentience. This is another angle on the concept of character agency I mentioned above. Her criteria:

• Intelligence. “Does the being possess the ‘ability to learn, to understand, and to cope with new situations?’” Delay asks. Writers should ask if we’re forcing our characters to behave a certain way due to plot needs, or if they develop organically and make logical choices based on their personalities. Have you encountered a scenario where a character rebels or refuses to act in a way you’ve decided? Has your hero ever told you they are acting out of character on the page?
• Self-awareness. “When our characters do something surprising or different than we had planned, our characters become self-aware,” Delay writes. “When our characters speak in a way that is totally foreign to how we, the author, processes the world, they are self-aware.” Is your narrator’s tongue sharper than yours? Or is he a peacekeeper in situations where you’d never back down? Does she take risks you would never consider?
• Consciousness. Consciousness is “the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself.” Can characters achieve that state? How do you describe it? Do your characters have original thoughts or do they merely follow their programming? There’s no clear answer, but a good test is how real your characters feel to you. Have you created a character who merely describes your plot to your readers or have you crafted someone you’d like to spend time with? Do you feel empathy for your hero? Would you choose him as a friend or colleague?

In this article on Writer Unboxed, Barbara Linn Probst suggests an interview-type writing exercise with an interesting twist. Instead of conducting an inventory of your character – appearance, occupation, hobbies – Probst recommends sitting down for a back-and-forth conversation with your protagonist, or any of your characters who remain mysterious. This exercise is most helpful after you’ve compiled the base creation and perhaps when you’ve his the mid-point of your novel, but you could probably use it anytime.

The questions:

• How do you feel about the way I’ve portrayed you?
• What am I getting wrong about you?
• What do you want to do that I’m not letting you do?
• What do you dread seeing yourself do on the page?
• What about the other characters? You know them better than I do. Whom am I not getting? What am I missing?
• What do you want to say to one of the characters in the story that I’m not letting you say?
• What’s this story really about?
• What do you think of me, as a writer?

You might be surprised at the answers. I was, when I tried this exercise with the narrator of my novel-in-progress. She hated scenes where she came across as subservient or wishy-washy. She dreaded them, even when they were necessary, because I didn’t show what she gained by shrinking herself or mollifying an opponent. Her desire was missing, so her choices fell flat.

She also felt I hadn’t done a good job building up her fiancé or shown many of his good points. Their path to the alter was lined with red flags, which made her decision to marry a bit stupid. How did this marriage figure into her goals? What would she gain that would be worth the cost? She also pointed out that she spent too much time observing and reacting to the supporting cast, rather than pursuing her own goals.

The remedy? I had to ramp up my MC’s emotional state, to show that what she desired mattered to her. While she outwardly desired things outside herself, her real concern was existential, becoming someone, while simultaneously not becoming what she fears. This required some more interiority or self-reflection. I tend to rely too much on internal dialogue but I found I had cut out too much. I also stole some scenes from other characters and gave them to my MC. The choreography took some work, but she’s a stronger character for it.

I also had to change my plan for the beginning of the novel. Rather than starting in medias res, with the wedding about to happen, I’m adding some chapters at the beginning to give their relationship some breathing room. I don’t want to portray either my protagonist or her husband as the villain in the piece, but as flawed humans making bad choices. I’m getting closer.

Homework

For a masterclass in character agency, watch the first season of Desperate Housewives. Regardless of whether the show is your cup of tea, watch at least a few episodes and identify the desires of each of the four main characters, as well as what they need to grow and thrive. Write down the surface desire and ask why the character is pursuing that goal. Keep asking and answering why until you create a three-dimensional character in your notes.

Pay careful attention to when one of the women contradicts herself or acts in a way that seems out of character. And they all do it – at some point during the season, each of them makes a decision or takes an action that contradicts their stated values, but in service to their deepest desire. Identify the hidden desire that creates the contradiction that allows that desire to be laid bare. See if this exercise gives you a more intuitive feel for character agency and independence.

Last week, I reviewed the chapter on Characters in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. As an instruction for beginning and developing writers, the chapter focuses on introductory tools for creating new characters: observation, journaling, introspection, and blending. These are important tools for creating the shell of your character, what the reader sees on the outside. However, there are some Writing 201 skills that are needed to create characters who are more fully fleshed out and capable of carrying an entire story.

Desire

It’s not enough to know your character’s appearance, hobbies, job, and family dynamic. She must also have needs, desires, and goals. In short, your hero must want something and must actively pursue it.

It’s easier to craft a story where lots of things happen to your hero, where villains act and tragedy strikes and your protagonist reacts. It’s harder – but exponentially better – to craft a story in which your hero drives the plot, where his choices twist the story, and where surprises may occur.

Your hero has to want something and they have to want it so badly they will take foolish risks, disrupt their relationships, and act in ways contrary to their baseline personality to get it. There are exceptions, but most modern fiction – certainly popular fiction – requires that the protagonist pursue an objective. It’s not enough to allow events to happen to your character; your hero must make conscious choices and take purposeful action. You’ll often hear this defined as agency or as active characterization.

Genre writers have a leg up on dramatists. While genre heroes can be as complex as any other, they often begin life with a plot-focused desire: to solve a mystery, defeat an evil empire, slay a dragon, or prevent a traumatic event or disaster. Dramatic protagonists need desires that are equally strong, but we have to work harder to show the readers why they matter. A character may wish for independence and self-sufficiency or to see their family thrive. He may want his children to be proud of him or to find love after divorce, open a restaurant or overcome abuse. As humans, we can relate to these struggles, but as writers, we have to show why failure would be as catastrophic as Sauron getting his hands on the One Ring. Failure must have consequences and they should be devastating for your hero.

Creating stakes is one of my challenges in writing, so I pay special attention to other writers who do it well and I’m always on the lookout for good advice and examples. Here is an interesting article about stakes from one of my favorite bloggers, Tiffany Yates Martin.

In the post, she talks about how her neighborhood was dealing with a kerfuffle over the possible development of a small common area. The options – leave it alone or redevelop it – split the community into factions. Throughout the process, the various “teams” experienced victories and setbacks, wooed neighbors to one side or the other, and engaged HOA voters who might have otherwise remained apathetic about the process. An ice storm, technical glitches, and administrative issues threw obstacles in everyone’s path.

Will a small plot of land in a middle class Texas neighborhood remain undeveloped? Not exactly earth-shattering stakes, right? But in her post, Yates Martin imbues the conflict with meaning for both sides. The neighborhood teams aren’t arguing over a small piece of land, but are struggling with two opposing visions for the future. While she provided only the highlights, she alternates between her team’s ups and downs to create an engaging story.

Importantly, while the aren’t exactly Avengers-level, they are important to the people in the story. “This issue is deeply important to the neighbors whose community, quality of life, and pocketbooks will be directly impacted,” Yates Martin writes. “For us, stakes are high—and that is heightened by the continual jeopardizing of our goals as well as the advances that move us closer to them.”

The Power of Why

Sometimes, you’ll have a clear idea of your protagonist’s goal and why they want it and what they will risk to achieve it. Other times, you might have little more than a vibe, and you’ll need to do some digging. At moments like this, ask yourself why. Why does your hero want to pursue this objective? What is their true desire?

For stronger results, ask this question multiple times until you reach the core of your character. If you find it difficult to answer the question, that’s a good sign your character needs more work. Eventually, you’ll find the final answer. When you reach the right level, you’ll feel it. You’ll experience the a-ha! moment as you realize you’ve found the heart of your hero.

Homework

As practice, run through this exercise with one or more of your favorite characters from popular fiction – Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, Randle McMurphy, Victor Frankenstein, Atticus Finch. Start with the plot goal – to win a court case, to survive the Hunger Games, to build an artificial man – and ask why this protagonist has chosen to pursue this specific goal at this time. Keep asking why until you exhaust your supply.

Try it with one of your original characters or with the example above from Tiffany Yates Martin. Why would a homeowner care whether a small plot of land remains bare or is developed into something for community use?

Book Club: Bird by Bird

Introduction

Getting Started

Now You’ve Done It

Characters

In this installment of Book Club: Bird by Bird, we’re leaving the introductory stage of writing and are now ready to delve into the mysteries. We’ve talked about having the desire to write and the fortitude necessary to get to the chair and make it happen. We’ve looked at ways to get started with memory and observational exercises, and how we can travel through our emotional history to find stories.

Most writers go through this process at some point, usually at the very beginning of their journey, when the roadmap is unclear. Once you’ve exercised these creatives muscles, the next logical question is how to turn your memories, observations, and ideas into fiction. Usually, you start with character and that’s our next chapter in Bird by Bird.

Where to Start

To discuss character, Anne Lamott begins with what she calls our “emotional acre.” The emotional acre is an internal plot of land we tend for ourselves, to our own tastes and needs, and into which we invite whomever we wish to share it. The plot may be a well-tended garden or a dirt field, it might be tidy or cluttered with junk. But it’s ours, and your characters each have their own.

There are many ways to envision this acre and how your character maintains it. As we did with journaling, we often start with ourselves. Writers love writing about ourselves or thinly-disguised fictional versions. This can feel like a cliché but you might also view it as a rite of passage. You begin by exploring and writing about and understanding yourself, so that you can move on to observing and interpreting others.

When you hear advice about self-examination and knowing yourself, this is where and how you start. Fictionalize important moments in your life, your grievances, and lessons you learned. Inquire about what you don’t understand and bravely put your ignorance on the page. Hint: Most of us haven’t figured it out yet either, and we’ll respect you for admitting it. Short stories are great for asking questions you can’t or don’t want to answer.

You can also pull from life. Create composite characters imbued with elements from people you know well or have closely observed. Steal personality traits from celebrities and fictional characters. Snip a bit of tragedy from one person, a sense of humor from another, a favorite hobby, a bad habit, family conflicts, a way of speaking. Stir them together until no one would ever recognize their origin.

Character Interviews

When you feel stuck or worry that your character feels shallow, you can also use the tried and true interview technique. I won’t bother linking to any here – a simple internet search for “fictional character interview” will yield more examples than you can possibly use.

The interview is exactly like what it sounds like: a list of questions that help you define your character. The simplest suggest 20-30 questions involving surface details, including your character’s name, appearance, occupation, and some basic personality traits. Going deeper, you’ll find some expanded lists that ask more probing questions about your character’s greatest fear, joy, failure, or shame. These kinds of questionnaires can help you build out your character in multiple dimensions. I’ve also seen questionnaires running 200+ questions, which strikes me as overkill. Dive into one if you want, but also don’t be concerned about skipping questions if they feel irrelevant.

Let Your Characters Evolve

Characters take time. You may start with an image or a piece of dialogue, a personality type or a job title, or maybe something as vague as a vibe. You might know who they are at the beginning or how they will end, but it’s ok to not have a complete picture when you begin.

Your cast members will emerge as you brainstorm. You’ll drop or merge some when you realize your hero’s family is too large or their workplace is overpopulated. You don’t need multiple characters who either anger or console your MC. One of each is probably enough. You’ll see that your protagonist doesn’t need two best friends and your novel doesn’t need two characters with addiction issues or maybe it needs even more characters with addiction issues. Maybe the point of your novel is that everyone is a junkie about something and you only discover that after you’ve written 40,000 words and now you have to backtrack and figure out everyone’s poison. You might even discover that your protagonist is a supporting character and that a minor character is your hero.

This will make you crazy, but it’s normal.

Your protagonist and your cast will evolve as you write, and that’s ok. This may occur naturally as you work out your plot or as your characters collide and conflict. These revelations will also occur in the quieter moments, as you spend time in your narrator’s thoughts and view their world through their eyes. This is when your characters may seem to take on lives of their own.

Homework

Go online and search for fictional character interviews or questionnaires. Cull through the hundreds of suggestions you’ll find to create a questionnaire that works for you.

Book Club: Bird by Bird

Introduction
Getting Started
Now You’ve Done It

 

In last week’s Book Club post, we talked about getting started, recommending journaling and memory work for writers at the very beginning stages of writing.

Now you’ve done it. You’re off on a creative journey. You’re doomed.

To outsiders, writing seems easy. You make up a story in your head, you type awhile, and boom. Instant fame. If any of these people actually take up writing, they are shocked to learn this is not how it works.

As beginners, we often don’t know how to start the real writing, the part that comes after journaling. If Step 1 is memory work, what is Step 2? We may dream of writing novels, but that seems like a big leap. Short stories or creative non-fiction provide a more natural progression. If you’ve done your homework, digging diligently into your past and your family history, you have likely found some interesting characters or intriguing scenarios that could be used as the basis for a story. You might even have uncovered something with a natural beginning, middle, and end.

Perhaps you remembered how your neighbors kept their dog chained outside, even in the worst of winter, and never let him outside a ten-foot radius, even on a leash. You might have noticed that their daughters were similarly kept reined in. You might remember the woman at church who stood up to confess that her first child had been conceived out of wedlock, prompting two others to make the same admission during the same meeting, and wonder how that knowledge affected their daughters. You remember feeling more like family to your older sister’s friends than you did among your siblings and parents. You remember your brother’s high school friend who years later murdered his father, in the house five doors down. You remember the restaurant with the funny name and how your mom talked about it like it was a biker bar, only to learn as an adult it was just a steakhouse that served alcohol, and you wonder how else she used mistruth to frighten or control you.

You dig up some stuff. You explore. You find stories.

School Lunch

On Saturday, I shared a creative exercise from Lynda Barry, who suggested writing down what you remember about cars. In Bird by Bird, Lamott does something similar with school lunches. She tells her beginning writing students to write down everything they remember about school lunch – what they ate, who made it, how it compared to other kids’ lunches. She suggests there was an acceptable range of content for school lunches, with too much deviation suspect and likely to place a target on the child eating it.

If I were writing about school lunch, I’d write about the kids who brought room temperature lunch that sat in their lockers all day and the kids whose moms packed a thermos with hot food or Tupperware – usually girls, who presumably could be trusted to bring them home intact – and the kids who carried lunch in paper sacks and those who had lunchboxes and which lunchboxes were acceptable for boys and girls. I’d write about the kids who got to buy hot lunch and how we were eaten up with jealousy on pizza day, and how we felt sad for the children who got free breakfast or lunch. I’d write about how the kids divvied themselves up and which boys had competition for the seat on either side of them and which was surrounded by empty chairs, and about how these unplanned elementary school arrangements became intentional in middle and high school.

Now you may have a character in mind. A child whose parents married under the duress of an unplanned pregnancy, who eats school breakfast alone in the cafeteria and sits by himself at lunch because the other kids worry that poverty is contagious. There’s a dog chained in a yard at a house along his walk home.

But how do you get this down on paper? Once you’ve made a good effort at Step 1, once you’ve primed the pump, what is Step 2?

Short Assignments

The answer is, you start to write. It doesn’t matter where. Rarely will you begin any story by writing the actual first line. Start by describing your main character and their family and friends. Describe the dog and its house and the sound the chain made dragging in the dirt and the odor of shit that was never raked up or buried and his matted fur and how happy he was when anyone came to talk to him and how heartbreaking that was. You don’t have to start at the beginning and you don’t have to write in order. If you know how your story ends, start there and work backwards. Write snippets of dialogue and arrange them in approximate order, given what you know about your story.

Anne Lamott calls these Short Assignments. You cannot write an entire story at once, but you can write the next sentence. You can describe one character or their bedroom, and then move on to the next assignment. If you have difficultly deciding even that, Lamott suggests viewing your story through a one-inch picture frame. Describe what you can see in that frame: the woods, a doghouse, a vegetable garden, a front porch. Pick one element – the aromas, the weather, the accents – and write that down. Did you write a paragraph today? Yay! Go you. Only the rarest of writers – whom we all resent – can write a great story in one or two sittings. The rest of us craft them page by page, paragraph by paragraph, word by word. Get it down and then you can worry about rearranging.

Perfectionism

It’s very important to remember that none of this needs to be perfect, not yet, not ever. It’s ok to jump around and leave big gaping white spaces in your manuscript as you draft. When I’m stuck, I’ll type in what I need to figure out and leave a big blank space between where I left off and where I’m ready to start again.

• Need more conflict.
• Pace this better.
• Set tone, vivid description.

If I need to research something specific – like a car model or a gun small enough to fit into a pocket – I’ll type what I need in context, then bold it and highlight it in yellow so I remember to go back and research it when I need a break from writing.

Many writers say you should never stop writing to start researching, but I frequently do this and that’s ok. It works for me. Once I get past the brainstorming and rough outline phase, I need a strong visual for my characters. If I don’t know what kind of knife someone wields – and if it’s important for character or mood – I will stop and find what I need. Other writers believe this breaks your flow of writing, but my brain gets stuck on these kinds of details and it won’t move forward until I figure it out. It’s probably better if you don’t stop writing to engage in research, but if you do, you do. There are no rules except the rules that work for you.

Shitty First Drafts

When you leave blanks in your story page or have big bold elements that you need to research, the result will be the Shitty First Draft. Even without blank spots, you are usually left with an SFD. A lot of people don’t like Lamott’s theory of the Shitty First Draft, because they interpret her advice as recommending that you knowingly write something terrible that you intend to fix later or that it’s impossible to write a Good First Draft. That’s not the point. You should always write to the best of your ability. Never save the good stuff for later. As with the writing habit, you can train your brain to get to the good stuff faster, to recognize when dialogue is phony or conflict feels forced. When something lyrical or a good observation comes to mind, get it down. Fast. You might even arrive at a GFD.

No, the Shitty First Draft is an acknowledgement that creation is an imperfect process. Few of us get it right the first time. When we feel overwhelmed or when the nag in our thoughts tells us that we and our writing suck, the SFD is a method for powering through. Get it down. Much of what you write will, in fact, not be shitty, even if the draft as a whole needs a lot of work. You will find gold in the sewage.

For beginning writers especially, the SFD is a strong path to starting and finishing a story. A first draft is an accomplishment. It’s further than most people get. You have progressed from wanting to write to having written. You have something to share with trusted friends. You can discuss what you want to do with your story and where you want to take it and ask for comments on how close you’ve come and what’s missing. It’s a good feeling. It’s addictive.

The SFD is also a great weapon against perfectionism. Writers are an insecure lot. Batman would have a field day with us. We may approach writing with the mistaken idea that the stories in our heads will flow out of our fingers the instant we sit down to write. Beginning writers might not realize how many drafts a story may need before it’s finished, when the answer is unknowable, but somewhere between two and 745. We may stew and fret over finding the exact right word or the perfect phrasing, to the extent that we’re lucky to finish even a sentence or two. And when the first draft doesn’t make fast friends at our writing group, we may feel like we’d rather curl up and die than go back to our laptops.

It’s ok to write badly, either as a beginning writer or in the first draft of your 100^th story. Too many of us think of our first drafts as meticulous oil paintings indistinguishable from photographs, when instead we should aim for a finger painting. As you learn your craft, your first drafts will fall somewhere in the middle – messy but recognizable portraits. Until then, get busy and don’t aim for perfection.

Polaroids

If fingerpainting sounds a bit condescending to you, Lamott also refers to first drafts as Polaroids. For those not old enough to remember, Polaroid cameras printed photos instantaneously from the camera itself, on film that slowly developed when exposed to air. The picture clarified somewhat uniformly, but slowly. After a minute or two you might see the broad strokes of your image, whether it would become a group of people or a house or a mountain range. A bit longer, and you could make out some details. You might be able to tell whose photo was taken, but not the details of their clothing. Colors weren’t yet correct and the backgrounds weren’t clear. A few minutes more, and you knew what you had. You could see whose eyes had been closed or if you accidentally cut off the rear of the car or if the sun had come from behind the clouds at the exact wrong moment and ruined your shot.

Drafts are like that. Your first draft may be unclear. You might have an idea of your characters or their setting and the broader theme you want to reach, but lack sufficient detail. But as you work, your theme may deepen, as the colors on the Polaroid film get richer as time passes. As you continue writing and revising, your story clarifies and you know what you have. It might not be the exact portrait you envisioned, but it is what you created. In your second draft, you make sure everyone’s eyes are open for the picture and that you’ve correctly framed the car.

Book Club: Bird by Bird
Introduction
Getting Started

After introducing herself, Anne Lamott begins her writing memoir, appropriately enough, with advice on getting started.

The “getting started” encompasses many elements. Most importantly, you have to want it. You must have the desire to tell a story or write a poem, to document your history or your family’s, to share advice or information. A lot of people say they’d love to write a book, but they don’t really. Being a published author looks like fun from the outside, but it’s not a job most people are willing do to.

You must want it and you must want it more than you want to watch television tonight or get an extra hour’s sleep or hang out with your friends. That’s where a lot of would-be writers give up. They insist they haven’t the time and they decline the opportunity to find it. Bird by Bird is filled with good advice, and the first and best agrees with Will’s Writing Rule #1 – You have to write.

You have to sit down or at least sit still. You need paper and a writing instrument, or laptop or phone. And you have to think until something happens. You make a promise to yourself and keep it.

You don’t have to write every single day or at the same time every day, but it helps to have a routine of some kind. This isn’t a rule, but something that has worked for many of us. After a few days or a week or two, your body starts to remember this appointment even when you don’t. Your brain will nudge you towards your writing spot. Your feet might even walk you there at the appointed hour. For months after my dog died, I stood up every day at 4:00 p.m. and headed for the front door. I often caught myself standing in the middle of the living room wondering what I was after. Some days I remembered that it would have been time to walk her, but not always. Some days, I couldn’t lose the idea that I’d forgotten to do something.

If you give yourself a time to write, your brain will do this for you as well, and your mindset will shift. It won’t happen immediately, but you will begin to think creatively, without having to force it. Some days, it’s difficult to turn the dial down when you need to stop, but don’t worry about that now. When you’re getting started, allow yourself to turn the dial up.

Do you believe in the power of positive thinking? Some people believe – and some science supports – the concept that thinking positively can improve your health and mental outlook. In the same way that challenging mental activities can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s, positive thinking improves your ability to pay attention, focus, and solve problems faster. I’m still skeptical about the science, because we know so little about our own bodies, but the idea that we can rewire our brains to be more productive and healthy is attractive. Maybe we merely trick ourselves into feeling happier, but if the end result is the same, who cares?

Think of your writing habit as fostering your power of creative thinking. When you tap into the part of your psyche that wants to tell stories or write poems, you will start to experience the world differently. You will start to notice more details: colors, shapes, smells, connections. You’ll start to hear stories in overheard snippets of conversation. More and more memories from your childhood will surface and they’ll feel more important than you might have previously imagined.

But you have to start. For the most beginning of beginners, memory work is often the best entryway to creative writing. If you want to tell the stories of other people, start by telling your own.

I wish I had accepted this when I was younger, or had a better understanding of it. When I was a kid, adults everywhere urged us to keep a journal. I tried, multiple times, but I believed my own life was too boring to document. Nothing changed from day to day. I went to school, came home, watched tv, ate dinner. It didn’t occur to me to write down what we did in class or how my teachers looked or sounded, or who I liked or didn’t and why. If I was bored, who else would be interested? I never thought about remembering my parents’ dinner conversations, to the extent I even listened to them.

Too, there was the fear that someone might read what I’d written. In retrospect, this was highly unlikely. Our parents barely paid attention to us in physical form; I doubt it would have occurred to them to snoop. But I couldn’t bear to think that anyone would read about times I’d gotten angry or lied or bragged to one of my friends that I got a hard-on during class.

I could have written about the girl in middle school – a girl! – who followed me between classes one day, loudly and repeatedly slamming me into walls and lockers. I recognized her, but didn’t know her. We had no classes together. I’d never spoken to her. I have no idea why I caught her attention, but she was built like a linebacker and had no trouble pinning me between her shoulders and the wall, as she and her friend laughed. The harder I tried to get away, the more doggedly she kept on my heels. She didn’t really hurt me, but when she finally went her own way, I cried in shame, embarrassing my one friend who had witnessed but did nothing to help. I don’t remember ever encountering her again, other than seeing her in crowds. What had I done? What had happened to her that day? I guess someone pissed in her cereal and she needed a way to vent, and the short, quiet, four-eyed nerd with the bad haircut and ill-fitting poor-kid clothes provided an acceptable outlet.

I can write that now, but at 11, 12? Experiencing it was bad enough. I wanted to pretend it never happened, not relive it. If I could barely admit it to myself, how could I reveal my shame in writing? What if somebody read it? I could only imagine how mortified my parents would have been and the lectures I’d have heard.

And that’s the key to getting started. You work with memories. You start small, with lists or descriptions of people and places. Make a list of the cars your parents owned and what you had for dinner most often, what was packed in your school lunch and who sat with you, if anyone. Create a family tree and add in every neighbor, family friend, teacher, and school kid you recall. Write about the parents of other kids and how they compared to yours. Describe every place you remember going – homes, churches, schools, groceries, libraries, malls, theaters. Write down the tv shows and movies you watched.

As you write, these lists will easily sort themselves into good and bad people and places and experiences. Write about what you loved or hated and why. Who made you uncomfortable? Who made you feel special?

Don’t fuss about what’s “important” or making stories out of these memories, not yet. Focus on putting something – anything – down. Get started.

This year, I intend to explore more writing topics on the blog, whether that’s reposting articles, sharing my own questions and observations, analyzing good books, or recommending books I like.

One regular feature will combine a couple of those interests. Periodically through the year, I’ll be re-reading some of my favorite books on the craft of writing, posting my thoughts, and occasionally adding my own two bits. This will be a chapter-by-chapter deep dive into books I consider essential for any writer.

It’s a book club, but I pick all the books and I’m the only one who gets to talk. Which, honestly, is my ideal book club.

There will be some personal asides or journaling involved, if the book triggers something. I might ask you to join along, if you’d like. Each book will take a few weeks to read, digest, and blog, so there won’t be more than 2 or 3 this year, unless I read and write really quickly.

My first book is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, A – because I’ve read it at least a half dozen times and B – it’s well-organized and eminently quotable. Chances are pretty good that you are familiar with it.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott brings her snarky, down-to-earth, barebones honesty and kindness to the craft of writing and the creative life. Though sprinkled with some concrete craft advice, the book is as much memoir as instruction manual, focusing on the process of becoming a writer and forging a fulfilling creative life. From starting small to turning down the volume on your inner critic, from memory exercises to shitty first drafts, Lamott provides a funny and warm on-ramp for writers at all stages of their practice.

Introduction

Funnily enough, one of the longest sections in the book is the introduction, in which Lamott relates some stories of her childhood, including her father’s writing career and how she caught the writing bug. She writes about her journey to publication, starting with a terrible short story she submitted multiple times to her father’s agent and continuing through her first several books. If the phrase “my father’s agent” doesn’t make you fling the book across the room, you’ve made it through the roughest part.

This is as good an excuse as any to introduce myself.

My father did not have an agent. Neither of my parents were particularly creative, though my dad excelled at puttering. I don’t recall either of them reading much, despite the numerous packed bookshelves in our home. Unfortunately, most of those were books about our religion. It’s both ironic and telling that my mom bought literally hundreds of books on faith-based topics, but never cracked one. For reasons I can’t explain, we had a boxed set of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and a leatherbound edition of The Hobbit, which I appropriated after my dad passed. Someone must have convinced mom they were classics, without mentioning the orcs.

I was also the only kid at school with two sets of encyclopedias as home. Probably the only kid with even one set. I’m not sure how much the nation’s backstory changed between 1964 and 1976, but mom wanted us to be prepared. Apparently, she was a sucker for door-to-door salesmen, which is also how we obtained our religion.

Mom talked about reading way more than she did it, but this did create my own love of books. I have a clear memory of reading my first – Go, Dog, Go! – and though “dog” and “go” together account for about 80 percent of the words, it still counts. I was probably about 5 and I remember being both surprised and pleased when I reached the last page. I hadn’t been certain I could do it. Something magical occurred, like I’d unlocked a secret. I felt adult. Not long after, I experienced the downside of learning to read independently. One weekend afternoon, when I asked my dad to sit and read to me, he replied, “I thought you could read.” I lied, as children do, and said I could not, but after an extremely rushed and uncomfortable recitation of The Dragon Who Could Spit Fire, I never asked again. One does hate to be a nuisance.

It did not take long before I knew I also wanted to write. I don’t recall the exact moment it happened, but one day it clicked that someone had drawn the cartoons in those Dr. Suess books and the Flash Gordon comics strip and the Batman comics I loved, and had written words to go along with them. I could do that. By the second grade, I had a ready answer to the question of what I wanted to be when I grow up. Compared to the firefighters, race car drivers, and nurses in the room, I felt both unique and mature. I loved the look of surprise and delight that would cross a teacher’s face when I said it. My vocation was a conscious choice, not something I’d seen on television. No one else ever said writer. I don’t remember any other kid mentioning any creative job at all.

And I started writing. I wrote an encyclopedia of all the superheroes I could name, Batman comics, numerous Flash Gordon pastiches. I cut out Peanuts cartoons and rearranged them into new stories with different dialogue. In the fourth grade, I was put into a weekly creative writing club. I don’t remember what class we were pulled out of – probably English – but leaving regular lessons to go to a special club was some hot shit. I won the award for best story and the club illustrated it and they made a slide show presentation. To date, this is the only time I’ve won a writing award. In junior high, I graduated to writing fantasy and horror stories, mostly horror, and mostly on the dramatic elements of boobs and erections.

By the time I went to college, I was serious about my writing, even if no one else was. All through my teens, I’d dreamed of the ivy-covered dorm experience, with tweedy professors invested in my education and peers who didn’t try to shove me into lockers or down the stairs. Unfortunately, my private school dreams didn’t survive the encounter with my community college budget, and it turns out I was lucky to have that (spoiler alert: I didn’t get my first year’s money from my parents). But, while I didn’t get my poetry readings in smoke-filled bars or hallway folk concerts or all night gab fests about artsy topics or even frisbee in the quad, I did find bits of nourishment for my soul.

I had several wonderful professors, all of whom recognized and encouraged my talent. I got involved in student activities – newspaper and literary magazine, naturally – and like Anne Lamott, became the acknowledged storyteller of our group, often pressed into service to relate stories I’d experienced only secondhand, when actual witnesses proved unworthy. College was also the first place anyone bragged about me and specifically about my writing. Will’s smart. He’s talented. He’s going places. If you want help with your term paper, you need to ask Will. Get Will to write that. I’d never heard such things. I never even considered the possibility. My identity as a writer was set.

Probably the dumbest thing I’ve done in life was losing touch with many of those friends and my professors after I graduated. Blame a combination of restlessness and coming out and a need to change my scenery. But in California, I found other nourishment. There, I did get my poetry readings and late night gabfests with people who loved good writing, unconventional music, and offbeat movies and theater. I wrote some short stories and poetry, had a few near misses at publication and some encouraging rejections. I started a zine with a few friends, wrote for some small newspapers, and got involved in theater work, but only on the management side, never creative. Kinda lost my way after that – another relocation put me out of reach of my encouragers – but I never stopped writing.

It was the one thing I could always come back to, the part of me that won’t give up. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood writes about holding onto that last inch, the part of you that you won’t surrender, no matter how tired you are or how badly you’re beaten down. I’ve always been lucky that I could hold on to that last inch. No matter what life threw at me, no matter how far away I drifted from the person I knew I could be, I had that last inch that I refused to shed, and writing is what always led me back. I am myself when I’m writing and when I’m lost, I can always find me there.

Your turn

When did you start to write or engage in your other creative work? What was your a-ha moment? Who encouraged you?