Exile on Ninth Street

By an overwhelming majority 2-1 vote, loyal readers have elected that I keep up with my writing workshop blog.

Because the people have spoken, I will try to keep that blog running.

As an experiment I have posted two stories of my own — one fiction, one nonfiction — for my loyal readers. Please feel free to drop by the workshop, have a look at the stories and critique them if you’d like (at this point critiques will have to be done through comments, until I can further experiment with the site).

Also, feel free to give me comments about how you might improve the site. I need all the suggestions I can get.

A few days ago I received a comment from writer/blogger Richard Gilbert, and followed  his link (as I usually do unless you’re an obvious spammer) to his blog Narrative. It’s an informative blog on creative nonfiction, and he’s recently published a piece in Brevity and has commented on that piece on the Brevity blog.  Go check it out.

This is a nice quote from The Ethical Exhibitionist, a fine practitioner and defender of creative nonfiction:

Snark is all well and good, but a writer needs to rely on something more than mere cleverness.

Today’s Booking Through Thursday answer is posted as a comment on today’s (Jan. 29, 2009) post at that site. That post refers to this article  in Time.

The article is an interesting read, and I hope to go back to it in a later post, particularly on novels and the current state of publishing.

Writer Lisa Romeo has a nice post on beginnings and endings, and then a nice piece at Tiny Lights on the same subject.

For me, beginnings tend to come easier (by easier I mean pulling less hair out) than endings, especially personal pieces. When I write feature stories,  I’m usually able to find something that either ties back to the beginning, or something to open up the story.

A lot of times, though, I seem to get stuck with a beginning and a lot of middle.

This will be my first attempt at using the polling function, and it’s an idea borrowed from Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness, who writes about going to a seminar on blogging and learning about the importance of subtitles. She put up a poll, asking readers for input about a subtitle. So, I’m going to try a poll as well.

I’ve only come up with two subtitles, so the poll will be small. As you can see, my ideas reference one of my favorite books, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I’m open to suggestions. I’m trying to keep to the theme of exile, or feeling a little out of place and far from literary culture.

And thanks for playing.

One of my favorite books about writing is Richard Rhodes’s How to Write, a resource I recommend any writer: Reassuring like an oasis’ pool, it also readily supplies you for the laden march when the wasteland crunches under your feet.

Of late I’ve been having trouble writing. Not so much writer’s block, but writer’s blah, a Bill-the-Cat-Ack blah (now that’s an obscure reference for some of you). Finding something to write about. A subject. A topic. A sentence. A word. A story.

I’ve written in my journal. But that only sort of feels like writing. I don’t have any freelance articles to write: I haven’t really pursued freelance in some time. (My last published piece was in December. You can read it here.) There’s an essay I want to shape up, or should take a look at again. I started an essay last Monday, but set it aside: a late-week emotional uncoiling and the words kerplunked.

As for fiction … don’t ask. Fiction seems remote at the moment.

And until this moment, blog posts have been sparse.

One of the things I do when I’ve hit the blahs like this is surf my favorite blogs, and hope I can steal an idea and make it my own (we’ll steal from our own grandmother, eh Mr. Faulkner?). At the very least, I’ll comment on a post. (Are comments writing?) Anyhow, today I was reading a new favorite, Sophisticated Dorkiness, and was reminded of Rhodes’s Knickerbocker Rule.

Rhodes, a Pulitzer Prize winner, once wrote for the Hallmark PR department and he relates an anecdote (I almost wrote “little anecdote” but that would be redundant) about approaching his boss, Conrad Knickerbocker, who had begun to have some successes writing, publishing book reviews and fiction. Rhodes asked Knickerbocker how to become a writer. Knickerbocker said, “‘Rhodes, you apply ass to chair.’”

Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness mentions Sunday Salon, which she wants to participate in as an impetus to blog more.

And to blog more means to write more. Which is a good thing. Because I need to write more. I read the Sunday Salon introduction and it sounds like it may very well be worth participating in, if only to get myself writing something on Sunday (especially tough this time of year since football season has started), and thus apply the Knickerbocker Rule.

This is a little game/writing exercise proposed by Helen Ginger of Straight From Hel, one I’m going to expand on:

“So, here’s my task,” Helen writes, “— share your favorite opening TWO sentences of something you’ve written, published or unpublished. In other words, the first two lines in a book or manuscript of yours.”

I’m modifying this exercise: I am going to present three sets of two lead sentences, all published, all nonfiction, but none from a book or manuscript. All are from features I wrote at the paper.

Often the men passing by wear tuxedos — some with tails, some with flashy ties — the women passing by wear full ball gowns — some are sequined and glitter under the spangle of lights emanating from the mirrored ball hanging from the ceiling; occasionally eccentricities such as feather boas float into the scene. The image is that of a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film, or even the set of the Lawrence Welk Show (who incidentally visited Temple once and supposedly had to borrow money to leave).

Those two sentences are from a feature on ballroom dancing. At the moment they fill me with sadness and regret; I don’t, however, have a sentimental attachment to ballroom dance. Instead, that feature was written at the beginning of  2006, the year I left the paper. I regret leaving the paper, though when I left I didn’t regret it; in fact, I was happy to get out of a place that was increasingly becoming a difficult hell for me (I don’t miss the hellish parts of the experience. What I miss is writing, and trying to challenge myself continually as a writer. Leaving the paper seems to be a big mistake these days, especially since I didn’t leave to go to a bigger paper, or better writing experience; I changed careers: I went into teaching, and later publishing. That switch of careers seems to have put an insurmountable wall between me and the newspaper world, and journalism in general. I long to get back in, but the wall won’t budge.)

Imogene Newman’s house stands on a lot surrounded by pasture land thriving with dandelions. The gray brick house dispels any image of Appalachian shacks where pompadoured preachers might wander, and for a price, might lay hands on a sick child.

He likes to get his motor running, but Larry Northmore isn’t seeking adventure when he heads out on the highway. When he saddles up on his 1997 Honda Ace, he has only one purpose: to try to bring people to the Lord Jesus Christ.

These two sets of sentences are from religion features. Though I’m a devout unbudging agnostic, covering religion, in particular the varieties of personal religious experience, was fascinating. These leads, though, have an almost religious significance to me: both increased my faith in my writing, especially after both went across the wire. It was the first time my writing went beyond the local audience.

Anyhow, these are some favorite sentences.

So I acknowledge death, accept the possibility that I could end at any time with little to show for as a writer. But I’m not sure my confrontation with death, or grief, can be awarded the status of Hemingway-esque heroism. I hurt. I went to the hospital. I had surgery.

Nothing could have delighted me more when I came out of surgery than through the scrim of morphine and anesthesia seeing the blur of pink shirt that was my wife. A craving had settled. She knew I was well — and alive. We had only known each other four full months before we were married the last week of December and surgery wasn’t going to leave our relationship behind. I had never expected to meet the woman I would marry in Waco, Texas. When I moved to Waco it was with a sense that I was leaving much of my old life behind. I wanted something new — I even threw out my high school annuals; they were part of something old, worn, stripped of life; they meant nothing to me, as high school meant nothing to me. As much as I was willing to purge of my old single life in Temple, Texas, I wasn’t prepared for a similar cathartic experience by leaving behind the new life, the new beginning I had with with my wife and stepdaughters.

“Life itself involves a continual leaving behind — of stages, of parts of self,” McMurtry writes.

We step across Heraclitus’ river, look back and see fresh water, our footsteps washed away, only the present before us.

Surgery had altered my life, I just hadn’t realized it. A whole new aspect, and sense of self. It is a common post-op alteration, the sense of detachment, McMurtry writes. In November 2007, I stopped reading a blog that had been a favorite and regular read, the novelist Patry Francis’ Simply Wait. She hadn’t offended me; I just couldn’t read what she was telling me — the story of the triumph of having her first novel published suddenly dimished by revelations that she had cancer. I wasn’t ready to read about cancer because the disease — my father succumbing to leukemia — still haunted me, and here cancer was serving out its democratic injustice at a moment of success. But, a few days ago surfing my blogroll, I decided to check her site again. There were new posts. She had been in the hospital, several times, a long series of stays, and she was writing about her most recent stay after a surgery. Her surgery had altered her sense of self, too. “I’m not the same person I was when I entered the hospital for the first time on November 28th,” she writes, “and I don’t think I will be her again. Her preoccupations are not mine. Her sense of time and priorities are different, too.”

A writer’s life had altered.

My life has been altered by surgery. But no more than it has been altered by marriage. I shed part of my life Dec. 29 — I am now a husband, a stepfather. This alteration, though, has not diminished me. With my wife and her children I feel new. I never stop craving her. I had not stopped craving her when I was in the hospital. And, I suspect I had not stopped desiring to write then either, or I had come to desire to write again while there. Helixing up through the solar plexus of every writer is desire, or desire should be almost genetic, part of our DNA, according to novelist and writing teacher Dan Barden in the recent issue of Poets & Writers. “[De]sire is what makes a poet like Yeats,” he writes. “What’s important is the struggle — the struggle that desire creates in both writers and writing . . . . Desire is important to creative writing because it’s the only thing that causes conflict. Conflict is important to writers because it’s the only evidence of desire.”

In the hospital, once my mind was less fuzzy, I read. Only for about a week post-op, the week when it seem as if I were completely dimished, had the desire to read vanished. Reading, McMurtry realized, was a “form of looking outward, beyond the self, and that, for a long time, I couldn’t do — the protest from inside was too powerful.” My experience was different. I had no trouble looking outward, connecting with someone else’s words. Why is writing so intimate with desire? It’s as much part of personality as it is some teachable skill, and most of personality, of the self, seems motivated by desires, simple and complex. It’s why style is so individual. We can only imitate another writer’s style so long in the process of learning to write before we have to develop our own. The other writer’s desires and struggles and conflicts are not ours.

And yet the difficulty to expose ourselves, must lead to our difficulties when writing. Surgery had altered me, or I was afraid it had altered me. I was afraid that not only had my body been changed, but that somehow the surgery had unvealed all my fears, particularly that I was just fooling myself. I wasn’t a writer. I was just a failure — that’s why it was so easy for me to leave a full time writing job — for weeks, days, months, a year or more before the surgery, I didn’t want to expose myself in such an intimate way. Even when I wrote in third person, as I did as a journalist, as I most often did with fiction — my unpublished novel is in third person — I revealed my self to me first, and then to readers, real and imagined, and that, in itself can be terrifying.

My body is knitted together now, as evidenced by the still long red scar on the right lower quarter of my abdomen. My sense of self, as I write each day, seems mended, too. I’m no longer detached from the desire to write, any more than I was ever detached from my wife because of my surgery. I have new desires, new conflicts, and they share a space with the old desires, old conflicts, everything that made me a writer in the first place. I have come back to myself, and perhaps I have a surgery to thank for that.

Earlier I was reading Elizabeth at Fluent and she had mentioned how she had recently left her full-time reporting job so she could write freelance and have more time to write creatively. A year ago I felt as she did: “I put my whole self into it . . . The problem with my job was that I could not put my whole self into it. A part of me was . . . always wanting to spend more time writing creatively. I have been frustrated by my lack of time, and specifically by my lack of writing time.”

After nine years of daily journalism, I had become just as frustrated as she was; I was writing — sometimes relatively creatively — regularly for my job, and trying to write my own stuff at home. The job had other stresses and frustrations, details of which I won’t go over here. Largely, though, I was frustrated by the lack of time I had to write creatively; it was Catch-22 for me — I had to work full time to support any creative writing I did on my own. Then came an opportunity to teach writing at a local community college here in Central Texas. It was an adjunct position, so also theoretically gave me time to write freelance. But, the time wasn’t there. On days I wasn’t teaching, I was grading three sections’ worth of papers. Hunting freelance work dropped low on my list of things to do.

Then came the surprise — my classes for the spring semester didn’t make, and I was out what was essentially serving as a full time salary. At the same time, I began to pick up freelance gigs, one of which was fairly steady, at least until the editor moved on. None were lucrative enough to make it worthwhile to try to write freelance full time, not without substantial savings, and I had to spend time between writing assignments looking for full time work.

Now I have a full time job as an editor in textbook publishing, and while I’m working with words, editing is never the same as writing (except I do write an awful lot of copyright permission requests, keep track of freelancers by e-mail, and write an occasional business blog post). I’ve been missing writing regularly — I have this blog, and I’m beginning revisions of the final draft of my novel. But writing for pay — writing as a journalist, I’ve missed that. I’ll be getting to do that part time again as a freelancer; I’ve picked up a column for a new arts paper, The City Review, in Waco, Texas, where I live. I’m looking forward to my first story — I’m planning to write about the Texas Book Festival in Austin the first weekend in November. It’s exciting to get the opportunity to write more, and I hope to begin picking up more assignments with the Review as well as trying to get assignments and pitch stories to any publication that will have me.

And if anyone has any suggestions for future stories, or freelance resources, let me know — I’m ready to write, and I need the extra money.

Todd