Art and Craft and Ass in Chair

Stephen King (or Oliver Stone, depending on your source) said writing equals ass-in-chair.

Its been months since my last post. Life has been working its insidious black magic, taking over with work and school and PTA, baseball and laundry and family crises, leaving little time or energy for writing. At long last, this morning, my hindquarters are planted firmly in a chair. And I'm learning, in a way I never have, that writing is not like riding. A bike, that is. Case in point: I just spent thirty minutes doing internet research for this post. Back in the heady days of weekly blog posts, Done Fell Out, and various short stories, I would grab a cup of tea, curl up on the couch, and wax at least somewhat poetic (humor me people) about some relatively engaging topic. And I did it with ease and in short order. I suppose, back then, I fancied myself a writer, an artist.

Laura is an artist. I've always known this. In the way she crafts story, thinks about characters, examines the novel from seventeen scenes ahead. And now she's embarked on a solo writing venture that is original and exciting and brilliant, not only sentence by sentence, but also for its creativity, on both a macro and micro level. Not only does it make me wonder if (a.k.a. feel terrified) she's been carrying the laboring oar on all of our collaborative projects, it has started me thinking about art versus craft. Folks much smarter than I have opined on this subject at length. I just read an essay by Susan Sontag, purportedly examining this topic, but it made my eyes cross and cramped my brain. Suffice to say, I don't expect to add much to the marketplace of ideas on art versus craft, but I do know this: I can craft a sentence with the best of them. I can both persuade a federal court judge and bring you to tears with words that, strung together, sound like song. Sure, I can do that. But that doesn't make me an artist; it makes me - to my mind - a craftsman, craftswoman. And there's pride in that, certainly. But it's not art.

Did I ever have art in me? I tend to think I did. The question is whether there's any left and, if so, where it went. Did it disappear into the seventeen loads of laundry I did last week, did I lose it on my fifth business trip in four weeks, is it caught in the family crises that takes up so much space in my house? I don't know. I guess I'll just have to start by looking for it.

What's in a Name?

Seventh Grade was a good year. I was allowed to wear a little bit of make-up (iridescent blue eye-shadow, naturally), I graduated from a plaid jumper to a plaid skirt (yes, I’m a Catholic school girl), and I had my first kiss (in the school library . . . he tasted like mustard). I also had one of the best teachers ever—Mrs. Light. She wore bright red lipstick, had a dog named Liesl (named after the character in The Sound of Music), and used long, skinny chalk-holders that looked as if they’d been plucked from the manicured fingers of elegant smoking baronesses in black-and-white films. Mrs. Light taught me something about writing I remember to this day—the importance of finding just the right name for a character. Think about it. Would Severus Snape or Lucius Malfoy seem quite as sinister, at first blush, were they named Sanford Smith and Lucas Melfry? What if Mark Twain had switched Tom Sawyer’s and Huckleberry Finn’s names? Could you relate to Bridget Jones if she had an exotic name, like Alexandria DuPont?

Kris and I took this notion regarding the importance of names to its extreme in The Pecking Order, with character monikers like the Pecker and the Blowhard. But we also spent a great deal of time considering the real names in the book. Adam, for example, was chosen as Abby’s husband because we wanted an “everyman,” and what better name than that given the first man?

You only need to attend a little league baseball game to see the significant thought given to name choice in real life. A few of the more unique names from my son’s recent game: Jasten, Cooper, Chase, Atticus, P.J., Jackson, Carson, Colton, and Houston (that’s my son). I also have nephews aptly named Drake (the dragon) and Stryder (ranger, elf-lover, and future king). I believe mothers and fathers pick names they hope will “fit” their children . . . names that sound good rolling off your tongue, maybe have personal meaning, and present well in the world. If we take the time to pick a fitting name for a child whose actions we cannot control and whose destiny we cannot determine, shouldn’t we take care to find the right name for our characters, whose very existence we hold in the tips of our pens?

Nineteen Cents

A man sat next to me at church on Sunday. I’d had a hard week, and I begrudgingly made room for him, rearranging the emotional baggage I’d carried in. He had baggage, too: a worn, heavy coat smelling of asphalt and nicotine; a filthy backpack; a bedroll. His hands, clasped in his lap, were cracked and caked with dirt. Every line in his face etched a tale of heartbreak and bad luck. He needed a haircut, a shave, and a good scrub. When he reached into his pocket, the air shifted and I struggled not to wince or wrinkle my nose. He pulled out a coarse, brown napkin—the thin kind used at establishments specializing in fried potato products—and dabbed tears from his eyes while the choir sang. His hand plunged into that pocket again when the collection plate came around. He dropped a dime, a nickel, and four pennies into the golden dish before passing it to me. I tucked my check on the side, hoping to bury with it the mild resentment I’d felt when filling it out.

He fell asleep in the middle of the sermon. I watched his chin fall to his chest and his shoulders melt away from his ears; I prayed he felt safe and secure enough to rest well. When the service ended, we filed out and I lost sight of him. I have no canned conclusions for you, no literary tie-in or moral imperative. I simply wanted to share that a man sat next to me at church on Sunday.

Word.

You know what word I like? (And no, it' s not "published." I mean a real word.) Eclectic. It sounds like a bunch of spare parts crashing against one another in a burlap bag. Say it with me. See what I mean? Another one of my favorites? Supine. I feel the need to yawn and stretch at the mere sight of the word. I suspect we all have favorite words. My son is currently partial to "idiot" and "crud." (Yes, in case you're wondering, I am mother of the year.) I recently attended a legal training seminar where we engaged in that groan-inducing ice-breaker where you interview someone you don't know and then introduce them to the group. We had to find out something about our interviewees that most people don't know. (I thought about telling my interviewer I had buried my family under the Magnolia tree, but chickened out.) Guess what I found out? Lawyers really like the word "aficionado." You could say they are aficionados of the word aficionado. Not one person was a lover of art or a collector of wine or a horseback rider. They were all aficionados. Either the group didn't notice the blatant overuse of the word, or didn't care, because they kept using it. To the point where I was giggling to myself.

As writers, we need to be aware of this potential problem, especially when we craft an elegant sentence using one of our favorite words. In Pat Conroy's latest book, South of Broad, he used the word "repose" so beautifully that I reread the passage and then marked the page. Of course, then I noticed when he pulled out the same word in the next few pages. And again later in the book. The overuse not only lent a sense of commonality to a luminously crafted sentence, but it also took me out of the story. I doubt he even knew he'd done that. (Though, what do I know? He might have done it on purpose and I totally missed the point. I am the person who didn't realize The Story of Edgar Sawtelle was a retelling of Hamlet, so you should probably take my literary observations with a boulder of salt. That said, I'm sad to admit I didn't love South of Broad--a first for me, with respect to Conroy.) I doubt most of us know we use certain words more than we should. Not me, though. Nope. I have an eclectic vocabulary.

Excavating the Ancient and Discovering Gold a.k.a Listening to the Genius in the Corner

Laura and I have been busy (although not busy enough, which is why I will adopt and reincorporate by reference Perfect Games and Perfect Prose re: self flagellation. It will save us all another post on the topic of writing and discipline) with a new writing endeavor; one that's not quite flushed out, but does indeed, we assure you, have a plot. The devil and those details.

We've written often about our challenges writing The Pecking Order-the numerous iterations, the amazingly inconspicuous absence of a plot, the obscene overuse of introductory phrases, 90,000 words that were eventually whittled down to something just short of 60,000. And while we are both tremendously proud of The Pecking Order it its final iteration, we loved those 90,000 words - every last one of them. More than once we likened writing a paragraph to giving birth. We cried, sweat, and laughed over every last syllable. And well we should have. There was beauty and brilliance in those words - the 30,000 words that, at the end of the editing process, lay undignified, inert, debilitated in some forgotten word document for discarded prose. Scenes we cut, phrases we red-lined, characters we killed, all relegated to this document entitled "Ancient Pecking Order". And we let go of those things in the interest of marketing, following our heads, not our hearts, so even though it hurt, and even though our collective writing soul, the genius in the corner, that internal voice that makes Jayne Lynne, Jayne Lynne, told us differently (even screamed at us at times), we let go because we considered it necessary. As our agent told us, the minute we knocked on the publisher's door, The Pecking Order became not about us, but about the publishers, not about art, but about money. And who doesn't like a little money?

Fast forward a year - give or take - and Laura and I found ourselves on one of our lovely and too infrequent writing retreats. If you're thinking Walden Pond or the English countryside circa Jane Austen, try a roadside Ramada a stone's throw from I-5. (Did I mention the money for art thing hasn't quite yet come to fruition?) Still, there was WiFi in the room, Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Sea Salt and Turbinado Sugar almonds (do yourself a favor and buy them), and perfect company. And in pursuit of this new project, we returned to what we knew, back when we were baby authors, full of hope and promise and high class problems like thinking we needed a nome de plume to hide our identity from the firm. We opened "Ancient Pecking Order" and, over the course of the evening, fell back in love with those deleted scenes, lost characters, and quirky turns of phrase. We remembered their humor, their beauty, their divine flaws. We remembered how and why we wrote them in the first place. So much so they have found their way - quite easily and fittingly - into our new work. And, this time, writing soul or genius in the corner or creative fairy or whoever you are, this time, we promise, we're listening.

Art and the Divine

One of the pastors at my church has this running joke about how he can't make it through a sermon without mentioning C.S. Lewis. One of the other pastors has the same running joke, but about Bono. (Yea, in case you were wondering, my church is kind of really totally awesome. A few weeks ago, we thanked God for beer. ) Here's my bit--I have a hard time writing a blog post without gushing about Elizabeth Gilbert. She's just so . . . present and real and self-deprecating and witty and brilliant and radiant and whole. And she's a damn good speaker, too. If you haven't seen her speech about the role of the divine in the creative process, I implore you to take a break and watch this. It's not just for writers, but for anyone engaged in any act of creativity, be it modeling or singing or sewing or lunch packing or lego building. So, yes, it's for all of us.
Happy Weekend! May the genius find you (watch the clip . . . you'll get it)!

Perfect Games and Perfect Prose

Back in the day (oh yeah, we're going there) I played collegiate softball. Several times a week, for four of the best months of the year, I would walk into that chalk-rendered circle, pick up the ball and represent my school for seven innings - 90 pitches, give or take, depending how the drop ball was breaking. My stats were solid (an ERA that hovered around 1), but inevitably there were times when the girl at the plate would connect. And sometimes she would really connect. And I'd curse myself for not getting the pitch far enough off the plate, or for trying, for the zillionth time, to finish the at-bat with a rise ball, which I refused to acknowledge was a misnomer in my pitching repertoire. But, ultimately, it didn't matter if it was a home run or a dribbler down the line that my third baseman booted or even a passed ball on a strike out. I always blamed myself. I could have done better. I could have chosen a better pitch, I could have placed it better, I could have thrown more pitches in practice, I could have, I should have, I could have, I should have.

I'll speak collectively now about me and Laura and how we put a good deal of pressure on ourselves. As writers, as mothers, as wives, as lawyers. Pressure is a little generous, in fact. It might be more accurate here to invoke the DaVinci Code and its charming monk, Silas. And while I can't give you anecdotes from Laura's college days to prove my point (although I'm sure there's a college theatre story in there somewhere), I can say that the woman graduated with the grades and LSAT scores to land her at the best law school in the country.

So now here we are, time on the stage and time on the mound a mere speck in the rear view mirror of our lives, trying to make our way as writers. And old habits die hard. At least once a day, one of us self-flagellates about how much we've written, or not written, or how poorly we've written it, or how terrible our ideas have been, or how we're too metaphor happy, or that we don't so much have a plot. (That, as it turns out was true, and a good thing to note.) And the last time I saw my dear friend and writing partner, she noted something she'd read declaring that people who don't write everyday, can't call themselves writers. So, of course, we started imposing daily word counts and time lines and generally agreed that if we didn't meet them that, well, we sucked. And, more importantly, we weren't writers.

Several days later, I was writing Laura a 7 paragraph e-mail about, among other things, how much we sucked. And while I was writing, I realized that we didn't. That we are writers. We do write everyday. To one another. My day almost always begins with writing or receiving an electronic missive that's full of raw feeling, insightful observations, and humor, always humor. And its these missives that have now become our muse. Our inspiration. Sure, it might not be flowing prose with precisely crafted plot turns, but its writing. And every good ball player knows, you can't throw a perfect game every time.