Category: Practicing

Rowing: a metaphor maybe

Suzanne Biro

This summer has been a difficult one for me. We moved my mum into a long-term care home. She didn’t want to go. Mum has followed a slow cognitive decline over several years but a fall early in the spring of 2020 broke a couple of her ribs. The subsequent pain medications prescribed, coupled with the social isolation of the pandemic, contributed to a rapid decline. When she walked out her front door this past spring, snow still on the ground, wearing slippers and no coat, she was lost before she reached the end of her own driveway.  

With reluctance, I enforced my power of attorney, signing the papers committing her to long-term care.  

It felt—no, it feels—like I’ve served her a terrible injustice.  

There is a heavy pain in my chest, something that feels ancient. Some mornings I wake from dreams with my cheeks wet with tears, my lips contorted to a grimace. I realised ‘ve been grieving mum’s loss—the person she used to be who is no longer—for years, but without the ritualistic significance of a funeral. Corporeally she survives. But mum is gone. 

It’s hard to talk about mum with people who do not know her. She was not the mom you might have conjured between the first paragraph and this one. She was plagued by sorrows and suffered severe self-doubt. She was incredibly funny but also unbelievably cruel. She weathered storms of emotion from the bottom of emptied liquor bottles; on, then off, then on, then off the wagon in the years I was growing up.  

I will write about these complications one day.  How painful this love is. But not today. Composing these lines I feel a tightening round my forehead, my ears feel stuffed, and the call through the dusk from the crickets is muffled, far off. It’s like I’m underwater. There’s a pressure in my body alerting me to stop writing.  

Writing has been incredibly difficult this summer.

This wasn’t what I was going to write here today.  

I have written other posts, one for June, one for July, that, thankfully, I postponed publishing.  Age provides some wisdom, I guess.  And patience.  So, I broke the promise I made to myself to publish here once a month. It’s better this way. 

I was going to write about how I decided to take up recreational rowing this summer.  How I hadn’t been in a rowing shell since I was in high school, over thirty years ago.  How I used to love it. How the opportunity to learn to scull (two oars instead of one, which is called sweep…yeah, I didn’t know that either) summer evenings on the lake sounded like a great idea.  And it has been. In many ways. How the single racing shells are light and fast, only millimeters thick, slicing the water’s surface, skimming above the weeds. 

The hardest part is balancing the boat when you move your body from the top of the stroke, “the catch”, through the stroke, keeping the blades on the oars square when you pull through the water, your bum scooting backwards on a wheeled seat atop runners, then, feathering the blade fast at the end of the stroke when you lift it from the water by pushing down. Repeat, repeat, repeat. 

The boats tip frequently, but I’ve managed to keep mine from flipping so far.  I have had a few close calls, performing truly inelegant air punches and contorting my body into stiff shapes to counterbalance the slippery tipping point.  I was going to write about how I command myself, out loud, out there on the lake, to keep it the fuck together, to keep my wrists even and my stomach tight, to breathe out when I pull the lake water with the force of my oars.   

I was going to write about the spectacular silence of the boat’s glide when the oars clear the water and the boat remains poised, perfectly balanced, and my body moves without my thinking. It happens so infrequently and only improves with practice. 

I was going to write how the coaches, young people, motor up beside me, nod at my technique, say, just keep doing what you’re doing. I was going to write that there’s a metaphor about writing somewhere in here, but I won’t. And yeah, so what if I tip?  But the bay where we practice is shallow and the weeds sub-surface are thick and million fingered and the water snakes nose along among the geese and ducks and, sometimes, a bevy of swans.  

I stay stiff and tight and fucking serious in my rowing scull, muscling myself against tipping.

The youth rowers practice a short distance off.  The sun pools the horizon streaking ribbons of mauve and peach across the sky.  And one young boy removes his feet from the foot stops, unfurls his body from sitting and stands up tall on his seat rails, his toes holding his oars in place while he laughs and wobbles with complete control.  

And I laugh at the stupidity of myself. How I’ve lost my sense of play.  How stiff and tight and fucking serious I’ve been about my mum. And my writing. 

How I shouldn’t be so afraid of swimming with water snakes. Or crying. 

Be clear: what am I thinking?

Suzanne Biro

It seems ridiculous I am only discovering now, closing in on 50 years of age, that my thoughts—how I am thinking/feeling, what I am thinking/feeling, speculating why I might think/feel this or that way—are not entirely well-defined, even to me, before I render them in words and sentences on the page.  What results are sentences that are unclear, and worse, the sentiments propping up the words are completely elusive for a reader.  

Let’s move from the abstract to the concrete…a place I am wholly uncomfortable in, it seems, given the frequency I dwell and wallow in the abstract.   

Here’s a short paragraph I wrote recently in response to a writing prompt: 

The promise of bread. All the flour and nuts and seeds were dumped in while the cries and thuds of my siblings wrestling for the swing floated from the back yard. The honeyed water splashed my chin. And then we added time. That most crucial ingredient for growth. 

When I wrote these sentences, I let my mind wander freely and captured the thoughts that bubbled up and, loyally, doggedly, transcribed them to the page, moving swiftly from one sentence to the next.  

And I think this is a good way to generate material. But it’s not enough. 

There are too many ideas or emotions crammed into the same space, tangled into the same sentence, instead of a deliberate, focused rendering of singular ideas or emotions, one after the other to guide myself and a reader along a path of discovery through my mind.  

My mistake with that paragraph, well, mistakes, there are a few:

  • that I thought the paragraph was finished 
  • that I imagined the paragraph communicated my thoughts, when really, my words simply list the images and actions, presenting them as some dreamlike sequence without attaching my thoughts and feelings
  • that I didn’t question what I mean by “time being the most crucial ingredient for growth”…that sounds really interesting but I just kind of plop it there on the page as if I’m tossing scraps over my should to a begging dog. What do I really mean when I write that?  Am I so condescending/inconsiderate of my readers that I just leave that hanging there, a completely ambiguous, no, amorphous phrase? Ugh abstraction again.  What I mean is, am I treating readers like a begging dog with these half-assed declarations, expecting them to “get it” and hang on my every word?
  • I haven’t worked through this paragraph to even know what it is I mean, what there is “to get”, let alone communicate that “idea/sentiment/feeling” clearly and effectively to readers  
  • Too often I believe beauty is sufficient in creative writing and understanding only secondary …except, shit, that’s not what I believe at all.  Understanding, a shared understanding between writer and reader is paramount, it’s the whole point. 

This is where revision starts. Re vision. Writing a first draft, I’ve cast out into the ocean of my subconscious, and I’ve hooked something, these sentences, these words, but I can’t land them as they are.  They must be studied, queried, and then, once I have a sense of what it is I am trying to say, I need to craft a sentence that is true and clear, in addition to beautiful, to communicate that thought to a reader.  

I’ve been studying sentences.  Not so much the grammatical construction of sentences, though syntax is definitely part of it, but more the conceptual constructions, how thoughts are layered, one after the other, using the form of a sentence, to communicate ideas or emotions to a reader.  

Take the first part of that second sentence above: 

All the flour and nuts and seeds were dumped in…

Some questions and additions for clarification: 

All the flour?  All the flour for the bread or all the flour in the house, and does it matter? It does, depending on the effect I want to create.  In this writing piece I don’t want to imply it was the last of the flour in the house, this is not a story about want…well, maybe it is, but it is not about hunger in that sense. Be specific:

My mother fisted whole wheat flour into a yellow plastic bowl big enough to bathe a new baby in. She added a small handful of white flour—to make sure the loaves would rise above the status of a brick in the oven—walnut,  sunflower and poppy seeds were dumped in…

Taking the time to add these clarifying details, I’m both delighted and horrified to discover more subconscious imagery bubbling to the surface.  Where did that new baby come from? And what about that riff, obviously related, that riff on “a bun in the oven” with the addition of brick in the oven (a word that won’t make the final cut but has surfaced to provide more here, in the discovery and writing process). And what the hell is the word “status” doing there? 

And that was the easy part of one sentence in that paragraph.    

What do I mean when I state, The promise of bread?  How do bread and promises come together?  Or, why have I put them together here?  Do I mean that baking always holds a promise?  I like how the sentence (or is it a fragment?) sounds, but what the hell do I mean? 

This blog post is too long already, but I hope you get the idea of how I’m working to make my writing…well, my thinking (my sloppy thinking!!!)  better. And my writing too.   

Here are some images of my completed sculpture right before the form was destroyed, the clay pulled from the support and returned to the plastic bag to be used to make something entirely different another day. It was a good lesson and a lot of fun. Thank you and credit to my good friend and colleague, JB, for the photographs.

Ta-da! I can read [to write]!

Suzanne Biro2 Comments

I have always had an incredibly difficult time trying to slow myself down when I read (or even re-read), to try to understand how a writer composes a work. I’m swept up in the magic of narrative, tumbling through the telling with joyful abandon and left feathering metaphors and symbols — those precious darts of meaning making — like I’m playing pin the tail on the donkey instead of aiming for a bull’s eye.  I had sort of given up on trying to teach myself to read as a writer.  I figured I just couldn’t do it…I couldn’t slow myself down enough.  And I told myself if I understood the magic, I wouldn’t be able to create any of my own.   

Over the holiday, I stumbled across Douglas Glover’s (DG) essays and lectures about reading at Numéro Cinq, a discontinued but still available online literary magazine. He applies a systematic approach to reading [to understand writing composition], whereby one suspends meaning making (just parking interpretation for a wee while) and analyzes the text as static data…and only using the text on the page…no lifting off into wonderment (bewilderment?) as to what the author might have thought or meant.  Instead, stick to the words (and most importantly, the order with which they are placed) on the page.  

For example, in his reading rubric, the first step is to “start by simply looking at the physical story, see how long it is” and he means, count the words, the pages and the paragraphs and the line breaks.  “see if it is divided into sections and how that division is accomplished technically (simple line breaks, numbers, chapter heads, etc.)”. In fact, there is a lot of counting in his approach to reading.  There is also a lot of bird’s eye view assessment of a story, whereby one zooms out from the work and tries to understand how much text might be devoted to back story, where aspects of a story command a greater amount of text, at what point—half-way through? A paragraph at the very end?—the climax of the story is revealed.  Do lines of dialogue permeate the piece or are they confined to one section?  How much dialogue in relation to other aspects? Using different coloured pens and highlighters helps me to see how chunks of different parts of text are placed on the page. I started to be able to tease the technical aspects of a story apart.  By analysing them I started to “see” the writer’s choices; the gossamer of the magical whole is pulled away and slowly revealed. 

DG also uses diagrams and graphs…something I do in my day job all the time but had never thought to apply to analyzing stories.  George Saunders also does this for story analysis.   I love drawing diagrams and suddenly I’m able to understand composition from a different perspective.  Here’s a few of my recent messy assessment diagrams: 

A time flow analysis – depiction of the time flow of actual story events along timeline compared with the series of events relayed in the narrative timeline (not the same!). The circled numbers represent the narrative timeline; the line represents the historical timeline.
A little graph to illustrate the energy in the story by scene.
A desire and resistance analysis to understand the dynamics of the story.

I have used DG’s reading rubric to work through three short stories. I have chosen stories just by picking ones I love and by picking ones I think might be very different:

I have started to record examples of things in a technical notebook. I have learned more working through these analyses than through any other craft exercise. It’s fun! I plan to allow myself the joy of working through a few more story analyses and then (gulp) I’m going to try applying different forms in my own writing. Scary, but these learnings have provided new writing confidence…at least, a method I might use to attack my shitty drafts and revise them to be better.   For those of you working with creative nonfiction/essay, there’s a reading rubric for this too.  

Because I am a researcher in my day job, this method…this systematic approach… specifically suspending meaning making to analyze text the same way one approaches research data (quantitative and qualitative), brought the whole thing home for me.  

Beginning. Again.

Suzanne Biro

Always, when I have taken a break from creative writing, no matter how short, the doubt creeps in and halts my hand.  No, that’s not what I meant to write; it halts my mind.  

The act of putting words to paper is not the challenge.  Rather, it’s the practice of reflection–of asking myself questions as I write, the practice of opening up the writing itself to its umpteen possibilities–that is so difficult to recover. It’s like any other muscle flaccid with underuse…asking questions and allowing the words to appear and be transcribed as they arise from the mind’s eye, must be practiced to make it strong. To make it responsive.

I am learning that to write well is to propel myself on a journey of discovery, to mine my own mind for what I think and why I think this way and how that way of thinking might have come to be.  It is about taking the tangents, following the diversions, trusting, as the cliche goes, a leap into the dark.  

I am learning to query the shimmering in-betweens. 

I am learning to trust that the metaphors that appear are really way finders to what lies buried beneath.  Beneath what?  The usual, the expected, the mundane, or that dreaded and most accurate of descriptions: mediocrity. Too often I’m in a rush…I want to get to the end…but this process of unfolding, engaging, unknowing (yes, this is exactly it), is slow.  

So, onwards with deliberate plodding.  Query.  Expand. 

Feels like the first day at the gym. Again.  

But the music is playing. The sun is shining. I am warm on the heated side of this window. Blue shadows stretch along the snow blanketing the fields. The cardinal’s feathers glow by the feeders.  Juncos press tiny prints into the white.  Sunflower seeds pepper the ground beside a mourning dove and a clutch of hopping chickadees. A nuthatch and a downy headed woodpecker swing from opposite poles of the suet cage. The paper in my notebook is cream, the ink in my pen is teal, and I am ready to begin.  Again.  And again.   

Reading backwards to write forwards

Suzanne Biro

I started to read back through my own notebooks.  I have about twelve or so, plus a few others dedicated to recording specific things: poems that move me; writing project ideas; a do-it-yourself-MFA-in-progress where I synthesise ideas and craft elements gleaned from listening to podcasts and reading essays and books on writing. 

I’ve been practicing writing, solidly, for eight years. But I haven’t read back through my notebooks beyond a superficial flip of a few pages every now and then.  I’ve been afraid to. Until now.

I’ve learned the creation of art exists in a sort of dream space time…it’s malleable and stretches and contracts in unpredictable ways. I’ve learned too that time is only one element of many that shape a work of art. 

I’ve trained myself to allow notebook writing to be completely free…no cross outs, no fixing…and over the years I have been able to (almost) silence the inner editor.  And so, the writing in my notebooks captures my thoughts as they come.  

I’ve trained myself to be patient.  Images and thoughts arrive in fragments…often when I’m not at my writing desk…like a dandelion seed floating on a breeze.  First, I notice and recognise the inspiration and then I make a herculean effort to remember and write it down as soon as I can.  And over the years I’m getting better at not judging the fragments…better at not forcing them to fit writing I already have in place.  This is hard work for me.  Waiting.  Noticing. Not judging. Recording. 

I haven’t read back through my notebooks. I’ve been afraid. Afraid of pages and pages of, “I can’t write” or “I suck at this”, or some variation on that theme. And yes, there’s a lot of that in there.  A lot. 

But reading back I discovered something else:  the fragments have been arriving for years…little tiny bits and pieces that serve different writing projects (I have many projects on the go)…arriving like dust motes drift, to land between my pages. They arrive not in a line, or in sequential order, or one project at a time…they bubble up and splash and explode, bump up against each other, circle, loop back…they are wild, they are of their own energy.  

So, I’m reading backwards to write ahead. And practicing: waiting, noticing, not judging, recording.

Puzzle Patience

Suzanne Biro

There is a painting in the office where I work that I have walked by countless times.  It’s pleasant enough, a picture of a water-filled ditch beside a farmer’s field.  Ditch isn’t a romantic word. I suppose it could be a dyke or a channel, but it isn’t.  It’s a ditch. The farmer’s house and barn are painted small, in the upper left-hand corner, to be far away within the painting’s horizon.  Trees with full leafed boughs hang over the brown water in the ditch.  The water and the leaves and the fields of grass are painted to suggest the winking bright light, a pleasing interplay of greens and yellows layered over darker browns.  The brushstrokes are only visible in the width of the lines depicting the grass.  This is not a painterly painting, but a realistic depiction.  I stopped to have a closer look, to decide whether it is one of those paintings that’s actually a photograph printed on a canvas and stretched on a frame.  A discovery that is both disappointing and smugly satisfying when it happens. But this painting isn’t a photograph; it’s a real painting. 

Standing there, scrutinizing the detail…the layering of colour to create the interplays of shadow and light, the hundreds of tiny lines that show the movement of the wind, a thought leapt to my mind: this is why I did not become an artist.  I don’t have the patience to paint those lines, to fill a canvas with so much colour variation and the details in sufficient proportion to convey to a viewer a wide field of grasses, a moving stream, tree branches swaying.  

When I paint, or draw, I work small, in a white space I can manage.  And, I confess, when I start, I’m impatient to be done.  My favourite part of painting is finishing. I feel a keen frustration blocking in colours, I become exasperated by the restricted palette in my box of pastels.  The shade I want is always elusive. The whole of the exercise is moving towards a climax I feel I can’t get to fast enough: adding those last flecks of white to the objects depicted, the highlight that makes the subject come alive.

I don’t have the same impatience with writing. But no, this isn’t true, I lie.  I write with a longing to complete a piece (or pieces).  This must be the subtext readers of this blog intuit when they suggest I’m too hard on myself.   If I’m honest, I write with (through?) continual disappointment that I’m not there yet.  

I agree, not a good place to be working from.  I’m trying to be more open in my daily writings…to let the interplay of thoughts and ideas and exercises run wild on the page.  To let the writing be “organic” …whatever that means.  I guess it means to relinquish control. I’m not good at this either.  

When asked by a writer friend the other day how my writing is going, I gestured with both hands, conducting the air between us, to emphasize that yes, I’m writing every day, “creating content” I said.  I admitted I had no idea how it might all come together.   And silently I worried whether it ever will.  

I also wondered whether the final white glint of light, that flourish of white paint that is so satisfying to lay on the canvas—the painted finish I crave—has a writing equivalent. 

It does. It’s the thousands of choices a writer makes before a story or an essay or a poem “is done”. It is the point at which all those choices – the movement of words in sentences, phrases and paragraphs, descriptions, dialogue, narrative arc, literary devices—fit together like a completed puzzle.   

At the moment, I think I’m working with three or four different puzzles all jumbled together with a few corner pieces laid down but floating.  I suppose the frustration is justified.  But also, it makes me realise there’s only one way through, to work on each unique puzzle piece—like each blade of painted grass in the painting at my office—and find the best place for it.  Also, settle in. Put frustration aside. Instead, think of longing as commitment, dedication, discovery. This could take a while. 

Writing Groove Part 2

Suzanne Biro

{Part 1 may be found here}.

I move through rituals.  The routine movements coaxe the muse from the nether regions and help the lines of words unspool my thoughts, travel the length of my arm, cross my wrist, tickle my fingers and draw along the page of my notebook.    

I light two candles to begin.  This is supposed to symbolise an activation, but really mimic the action of lighting a fire under my bum.  Though I love the glow illuminating the page, I love the sound of the match flaring, the scent of sulfur and smoke most.  I love the sandpaper drag of the match head against the striker, the deep hollow shake of the matchbox with wooden sticks clicking away inside. I love the white magnesium ignition and the brief ripping sound in the air that quickly silences into a steady flame.  I love the way the heat travels closer to my fingers in the long pause before the wick accepts the fire.   

I crave the smell of melting bee’s wax with its hint of meadow flowers and honey. Sometimes I remind myself about the work it takes the bees to make a candle’s worth of wax. This is a comfort.  Also, a reminder that writing a small amount each day will grow and build into something…not necessarily something bigger, but I do hope sweeter. At least, something formed. 

I listen to music while I write. (Though, through these summer months I prefer the bird’s morning chorus, the subtle intensification of song that follows the waking dawn).    Listening, a part of my brain becomes occupied – a cognitive necessity—and the muse tip toes out less fearfully.   

Here’s a small selection of recent artist favourites:

  • Garth Stevenson albums Flying and Voyage (the deep and haunting sounds of his double bass are so beautiful)
  • Nils Frahm – albums Music For The Motion Picture Victoria, Empty, All Encores, Trance Frendz…others
  • Hilary Woods – album Colt 

Over the years, I’ve collected writing tricks. Writing is trial and error.  Trial and error.  Trial and Error.  Process. 

It’s the magic I doggedly pursue.  The magic = words and phrases that drop together on the page…that work together perfectly…that surprise me so much I don’t believe I wrote them, instead, some creative spirit breathed through me for a moment I was lucky enough to have a pen in my hand and paper before me to catch them.   

The magic happens rarely. Like a gambling addict, I show up each day and try not to lose more than I have to spend. Of my self.  

Writing tricks get to the magic reliably…sometimes faster. 

Recent tricks:

I write questions on little squares of paper. I use red paper because it’s my favourite colour.  The questions relate to the piece or project I’m working on.  Some of them could be a prompt to dig into sensorial aspects of the piece e.g., what does a bed sheet smell like?  Some questions are meant to dive deeper into character: why would my character believe in an afterlife? Some questions are conceptually abstract or even philosophical: Is education culture?

All the squares are tumbled into a small cloth bag and shaken vigorously.

Each morning I pull one out at random—it’s important I don’t know what’s coming—and set a timer for 30 minutes and write.  The rule is to write without second guessing, without cross-outs, for the full 30 minutes.  A writing sprint. I am often surprised by what’s uncovered using this technique.

If I’m disciplined, I’ll transcribe the handwriting into a digital file on the computer Often, I’m not disciplined. The writings pile up. Sigh. Process.  But 30 minutes of writing regularly generate 700-1000 words. And usually one phrase or word or sentence that is magic, that I’ll use when the pruning happens later.  

Practice what it is to be Other

Suzanne Biro

One of my many challenges practicing creative writing has been writing character…writing a character who is not me.  One who does not sound like me, does not think like me, and bounces gracefully against a protagonist who seems more like me, but also isn’t me.   I’m trying to figure it out…how to write character better.  

I have thought the difficulty has related to my own imaginative ability, or rather, my inability.  Can I “play” someone else on the page?  Many writing days I conclude with a definitive no.  But the heart of it is, writing character requires a lot of work…a lot of writing about a character to get to know them…writing that will never make it into a story, but nevertheless will inform the story by letting me know how my character is likely to behave in a given situation….and more importantly, understanding the reasons for that behaviour.  It requires I move through exercises of questioning, reflecting, understanding, and entertaining possibilities beyond my comfort zone to learn what that space is like.  And it’s work.  Hard mental work.  And often research…a rabbit hole of distraction I’m far more comfortable tumbling down. 

And I can’t help but see a connection.  

The current uprising against police brutality and systemic racism has made me think a lot about the work I need to do myself, to question my own beliefs, to check myself, my thinking. It’s slowly dawning… it takes a great deal of intention and sustained commitment to stop and consider other points of view, other experiences, other histories, other cultures, the destructive effects of violence, war, poverty, injustice. It requires I enter a space of discomfort and enter into active dialogue to work and question and sit cross legged with sorrow and hate and greed and anger and welcome these conversations.  

I fall too easily into a position of defense. I want to write here: I’m compassionate! I’m empathetic!  I want to explain how I read avidly, across genres and authors, to actively participate in a process of broadening my mind, challenging how I think about sex, identity, ethnicity, gender, culture, poverty, and yes, race. In my professional life, I work to change policy to promote health and wellness in our community; I work to promote equality and equity. So why do I use the word “defense”, I ask myself?  Unpacking this makes my skin prickle, makes me admit my privilege: I have choice; I have freedom…I have time to read! And therefore, I am in a position of power over others who do not.  

And with power comes responsibly. Responsibility to be an active witness, an active listener to the stories of others, and use my imagination and my position to create a different way of doing things. 

And instead of being strong, I think it’s important to be soft, tender, and vulnerable…the true way to remain open. 

Writing Groove

Suzanne Biro1 Comment

I’ve finally found a groove of writing that fits me.  It’s taken years to settle into it.  I feel silly posting it here, except it seems that so many people who write are obsessed with knowing how other people write.  Me too.  It’s as if, by knowing the steps Writers take, the magic will dust its sparkles across my body and I’ll produce sentences that are equally sublime.  Turns out that’s a fairy tale. I’ve always loved fairy tales; I won’t easily let them go, but the stark truth is that each writer must find what works best for them…and it takes a lot of trial and error.  Well, continual trial and error.  Like, forever.  That’s part of it. 

The steps that work for me, and why.  Part 1.  

It’s essential I wake early in the morning and write for an hour and half. Sometimes I can squeeze two hours in, seldom three, before my job-job demands begin for the day.  I can’t manage the 5 am wake up seven days a week because I need to catch up on sleep one or two mornings, but I do manage it five days a week. I think this is pretty good.  

There are two reasons (am I so obsessed with numbers?  It appears I am.) the early waking helps me write.  The obvious first is that I write knowing no one in my family will interrupt me.  I write undisturbed and focused for the brief time allotted.  This may seem trivial, but for a mother and wife, the waking hours that fill the rest of the day are always “on call”.  I am able to defend my morning space if someone wakes early and ventures to start a conversation…they will retreat and let me alone most of the time. But any other time, my defense of writing time is ignored, even if—ha ha, when—I become a spitting bitch  With an iron will and gritted teeth (and it appears, a heady list of clichés) I tell myself I chose these paths in my life too: wife, mother.  I do want it all.  And a lonely cabin in the woods, by a lake, with decent wifi, where “someone” delivers breakfast in a basket and a gin and tonic at 4 in the afternoon. In fairy tales one can dream.  

This segues nicely into my second, more important, reason for rising before dawn to begin writing.  My brain remains asleep, closer to a dream state than a waking one.  It is easier for me to access my subconscious this way…the place where imagery is strangest, and the juxtaposition of disparate words move to the page unquestioned.   My inner critic sleeps on while my inner dancer prances.  It is not unusual for me to re-read in the afternoon what I wrote in the morning and not recognise a word or thought that is there.  Often, it’s a discovery.  “Later day” writing always sees me tinkering a perfectionism that dulls the shine, completely rubs the magic away.  Stories rise out of our subconscious…our bodies are trying to communicate something to us.  There is a deeper knowledge there that requires patient practice to fish it out.  

I write by hand, in a notebook.  I used to write stories and prose directly on the computer and use my notebook for journaling by hand…but I discovered my thoughts are freer when I write by hand.  I also discovered that when I type on the keyboard and watch the text laid down on the page, I read and re-read and re-read the sentences and paragraphs and I can’t help myself correcting them and forcing patterns prematurely (I’ll return to this idea shortly). In contrast, when I write by hand, I never stop my progress on the page to read what I have written.  Instead, I keep my pen moving and the ideas and images in my brain rise out of the murk steadily and easily.  I think there is something to this, the fine motor skill associated with forming letters with one’s fingers, the drawing of squiggleys, and some association with cognition.  Steiner, the founder of Waldorf schools, used to have his students knit while learning lessons as he believed the small movement of fingers aided memory. I’m looking into it…subject for a different post. For me, the reading and correcting on the computer is a disruption to the creative writing process. It’s taken me a long time to understand this.   

I write with a pen instead of a pencil.  Unless it’s poetry. Poetry generation is always done with a pencil and never stays within the lines…it just doesn’t.  I allow myself the use of an eraser with poetry.  For prose and reflection, I write with a pen…a pen that feels good in my hand and doesn’t drag too much on the page…this helps relieve finger and hand fatigue…very real if you haven’t practiced handwriting.  And I have a rule that I’m not to cross things out, if I can help it. All words count.  And this permits a complete freedom in the generation of material. Handwriting speed seems to match my thinking speed.  Or, maybe it slows my thinking speed so that my attention is improved.  Most people prefer to type on a computer because it is fastest for getting their thoughts down.  But I need to slow my thoughts.  A pen helps. I’ll stop here for now.  I hadn’t realised writing about my writing would take up so much space.  I’ll post part 2 in the weeks to come. 

Exhuming Plot: Just Ask

Suzanne Biro

I used to sit down and write a short story in an evening, tinker with it through the week, prepare it for submission and send it out to literary magazines.  Only one of the week-longs has been published; the rest are sticky with rejections. Some encouraging personal rejections from editors lets me know there’s possibility on the horizon. 

So, these last years (yes, years), I’ve dedicated myself to the study of creative writing craft and practice.  I’m better at the studying part. I continue to write every day, but the complexity of understanding and applying the layers of what goes into the making of a great story is daunting: word precision; grammatical sentence variation; paragraphing; elucidating the wonderful complexities of human beings through character development; the importance of setting as metaphor; tension and movement (that winding thread of impossible-not-to-follow suspense we writers gift our readers in its many guises of plot).  

So far, I suck at writing plot. Funny thing: I can tell a story verbally, stringing along my listeners through crescendos to a climactic punchline and raucous laughter, but I can’t do it on the page.  It’s not the same thing.  It reads like a limerick: I know an old man from Nantucket…

Another aspect of writing practice I’ve learned…no, I am learning: I should suspend working on craft aspects of my story until all the generative writing (read: stream of consciousness, letting it all flow out, write to explore, write to open up) is complete.  I make the mistake of thinking I am done my “first story draft”—my “generative writing”—over and over and over and over and over again.  An absence of plot is a good indication more generative writing is to be done.  Even I get bored by my characters not doing much of anything, you know, looking out the window and sighing deeply.  

Two fantastic resources (shining guiding lights) for how to exhume plot from the heavy toil soil of drafts:Alexander Chee and Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew’s book, Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice.  

I’ve been working through Andrew’s Living Revision exercises on a short story I rewrote [again] in July. I was actually sailing through the exercises, exhuming some pretty interesting discoveries (like, my own memories and emotions—yes, I cried several times through these exercises—that are driving this story). Kudos to Andrew’s methods for helping me get that far. But I got stuck, petrified (in the stone sense), on page 101 (of 288) when tasked to write an “expansion draft”.  

I found myself rewriting the same paragraphs of the story, and I did this without any copy and paste…it seemed I couldn’t expand anything, couldn’t go any deeper.  I wondered whether I should just quit the project for a while and try something new (which feels like admitting defeat).

Then, last week, I listened to a podcast, Between The Covers and a craft talk with Alexander Chee and Tin House called, “From First Draft to Plot”.  Chee explained his own experiences, through twenty years of teaching creative writing, how emerging writers (yes, after 6 years, more?, of part-time-squeeze-writing-into-my-busy-life I am only just deserving of the title, “emerging writer”) have not developed the skills (yet) to query the scenes they have written.  

Chee explains there are many implications in student’s draft scenes that have not been dealt with…unmet implications the writer is ignoring.  His advice: ask questions of your scenes, such as, how did the character end up there? Why? Where is this character from?  What was their schooling like?  Chee says, “to build a story and a plot is the process of interrogating the scene, again and again with questions and each time you get answers, push back further and further into the story as far as you can go.”

Of course, most of this additional writing never makes it into the story, but instead becomes the skeleton, the subtext, the backstory the writer must know, know on instinct, know on a sub-conscious level, in order to puppet master their story to life.  

So….I’m writing questions.  I’m writing answers.  I’m going deeper.  Write On.